Rags, twigs, patches of oil,
A split shoe, and fat flies
Humming in the spume that surrounds
      Something brown and spool-shaped,
Glinting like a lost statuette…
Bobbing about is the dustbin of progress.
      Lying on the landing, out on the river,
            My fist clenched beneath my neck,
I survey the driftwood from an ailing Arcadia.
      Shouts and blows echo from the camp
      – Steel on bamboo, bamboo into soil.
                  One by one, the stakes are driven in.
      Before morning has passed
They will wear knobs, small and shrunken,
      Filled with wildest sleep.
This I know, though naught I see.
Already the sun cloaks the beach with its sickly haze,
                  And the sounds reach me, delayed,
      Like the protracted pulsations in my arm.
Heat descends. The world grows numb.
Now anything can happen.
      Who is speaking?
This snub-nosed creature dressed in tatters,
            Beardless and pale?
                  This gray figure
So like a drooping puppet?
I ask myself such things at times
— As where I have been and where I am heading.
      The truth is: I don’t know!
            My existence is but wavering.
                  The Russian priest’s son
            You will see in your telescope,
Long and probing like an insect’s antenna,
Deserted the righteous path
And signed on under a foreign flag.
      He wanted to get away, away only,
            To find breathing space
And a wildness all his own,
       Tottering into the world,
Into ravages of his making,
      So thoughtlessly alive
That he knew less about creation
Than a newborn child. Such an existence
            May be frightful to some,
      Incredible to others
— Does it matter? Life is but flutter and dread.
“Man is no masterpiece,”
      Mister K. announced,
As he looked the adventurer up and down,
His eyes warm with restrained laughter.
      Alone and in tatters,
Stuttering after so much silence,
The newcomer knew at once: his journey was over.
Since then, generations have come and gone,
Although I’m no more than twenty and some.
Would the being that you’ll soon see
      Be the same person, then?
            I beg to doubt it!
What are head and arms, body and legs,
      Compared to the sumptuous chaos
Installed in my heart?
“We are born without barriers,” K. explained,
      “Then we agonize at large.
Existence is form, and form: limitation.
But life is like water, a flowing substance.
                  All it bears is ballast.
Only by shedding the goods of self,
                  Like night does,
May forms be shifted and perspectives gained.
Such is the route from Never to Rarely.
— Consider these knobs,” he added,
                  As he noticed my disbelief,
His arm sweeping over a field of stakes:
            “Now they blossom in limitless obscurity,
                  When they could have been a sea of light.”
      And then, calm and detached:
“Those who don’t seek the boundless
Deserve neither to marvel nor to choose.”
Oh, he was unyielding, he was fabulous,
      Anything but guarded,
            As he pressed his palm
To my heart, welcoming me:
“Time is inhibited, my friend,
            A frenzied game,
      Yet life is your trump.
You may be all or nothing!
      Listen to your pulse and you shall see:
      In a geometry without limits
            All dread will be delight.”
      “And delight?” I queried.
“Is the industry of night.”
Since then I’ve stayed at this station,
      Counting the days, counting the beats,
Listening to water cluck under the landing,
            So silky and obscene
      That I’ve nearly broken the pledge:
Could life be not what it is, but what it bears?
      I shall know soon, now,
For I can hear your boat coming up the river,
Heaving like a pregnant woman.
Will it bring terror or deliverance?
            One more bend, a cliff to round,
Then you’ll lift the telescope to your eye
And see my arms flailing
            Like a corrupt elegy.

(For Jan Håfström)

Toward the end of Jospeh Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Marlow encounters a young Russian at the “station” where he hopes to meet Mr. Kurtz. Dressed as a harlequin, covered with varicolored patches of cloth, the boy seems “improbable, inexplicable, and altogether bewildering. He was an insoluble problem.” Marlow continues: “If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, impractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth.” — In the Swedish parlour game “kille,” the so-called “harlequin” functions as a joker, having the same value as either the highest or lowest card in the deck. — In Homo sacer (1995), Giorgio Agamben discusses what he terms “life-as-form” and how it distinguishes itself from “naked life.”