My Gods - Eden Saga

My former gods are the poets that I read and reread often, who rocked my sleepless nights, who spun the wool of my first emotions, who spoke to me in the hollow of my ear and heart. Have they mattered to me as much as my loves? They have merged, fused, amalgamated so that one can no longer look at my corpse to differentiate what comes from them and what is only mine.

Are they not our masters?
Our teachers of letters
and our guardians of the Being?

After having written litany about the heroes who shaped us in clay and alchemy, I can no longer distinguish them from the supermen who populated my childhood dedicated to love. These gods of beauty, these superhumans whose rhythmic paths have welcomed my first steps, my first rhymed, scribbled, smudged in a reluctant patois that smelled Bledina.

These gods taught me everything

I pushed vigorously in their shadow and laughter
these gods have taught me everything, everything of value
righteousness and love, anger and spirit
the strength to be silent and the rage to write.

These gods were in a circle around me, I was not ten years old. In turn, they told me words that my emotion took for slanders. I have no recollection of it. As soon as they spoke, all their words faded away.

It took me patience and time. I had to go to school, high school, middle school. It took me the verses of Lagarde and Michard to discover Verlaine, Aragon, René Char, Ferré, Brel, Brassens, Prévert, Rimbaud, Gainsbourg, Rabelais, Victor Hugo, Molière — before such a ballet my mind was excited.

Is that the way people live? And their kisses are following them as revolved suns.
Louis Aragon

He who comes into the world to disturb nothing deserves neither consideration nor patience.
René Char

And if God really existed – as said Bakhounine, this vitamin comrade – we should get rid of him.
Léo Ferré

An artist is someone who suffers for the other.
Jacques Brel

The gods are always hungry, never get enough / And this is death and death ever renewed.
Georges Brassens

Hurry up, picnic on the grass, as one day the grass will picnic on you.
Jacques Prévert

I wrote silences, nights, I noted the inexpressible. I noted dizziness.
Arthur Rimbaud

I wish the earth stops to go down.
Serge Gainsbourg

Science without conscience is a soul’s decay.
François Rabelais

My friends, remember this: there is no bad weed or bad men. There are only bad farmers.
Victor Hugo

I flew, I swear

My childhood is over
It was the adolescence
And the wall of silence
One morning broke

This was the first flower
And the first girl
The first kind
And the first fear

I was flying, I swear,
I swear I flew
My heart opened its arms,
I was no longer barbarian.
And the war came,
Here we are tonight

Louis and Elsa

My dark love of bitter orange
My windy song along the range
My shady place where comes dreamy
To die the sea

My sweet month of August where rain
Some stars on the quiet mountain
My moving dream with walls of palm
Blue air is calm

Nobody knows know what is coming
It may well be this evening
That the linen will be trace
Over my face*

*Louis Aragon (1897-1982) is a French poet and novelist. With André Breton he founded the surrealist movement. He translated Lewis Caroll. He fought as a journalist for the French Communist Party, of which he was a member. Anti-franquist, he wrote about the Spanish War and composed countless love poems for Elsa Triolet.

Leo and Louis

But none of this mattered to me. What touched me were the music that Léo Ferré put on his poems.

Jean Ferrat has tried too, except for his “What would I be without you?” he doesn’t like me. His music sounds like an exercise. He sings with tremolos, yes, but where is the emotion?

And on Aragon the wonderful, others have also done what they could. Nothing is better than Leo, as I think goes back to childhood. Leo the immortal anarchist to whom Aragon dared prefer Ferrat the communist. Support required between members of the party.

All tricks aside, from the strict point of view of art, I like Leo l’anar a hundred times better. Brassens also sang it, it passes, he is almost anar. A little homey, certainly, but what a poet!

My first master is poetry. She has consoled me with many sorrows, and still sticks to it when nostalgia grieves me at the throat or when love torments me.

What do you think? I love my whole life. Mine is far from over. I’ll take another ten years. I like twenty or thirty just as much.

Louis and I

Aragon often launched
His choruses to the wind
I want to sing like he did
When he wrote
At the Café de Saint-Germain
The words took me by the hand.

Before the hearth of the past
Yesterday ended
To blacken to burn
And you were sleeping
Let the next day come
The words took me by the hand.

Arthur and I

I was fifteen years old, the age of all folies. Channeled through writing. To drawing. To painting. To music. To my many loves. I drew them. I painted their sweet faces. I made poems for them. I was also crazy about Rimbaud. To think that he wrote these immortal rhymes, he was not sixteen:

She was very undressed
And tall prying trees
To the windows threw their leafy
Malinement, close, close.

Sitting on my big chair,
Half-naked, she joined hands.
On the floor shivered with ease
Her little feet so thin, so thin.

– I looked, color of wax
A small bush ray
Fluttering in her smile
And on her breast, – fly to the rose. (…)

The little feet under the shirt
Ran away: “Will you finish!”
– The first boldness permitted,
Laughter pretended to punish!

Naked

I can get dressed again. How do I compete?
Our masters crush us, is that how they teach?

I’m ready to settle
The best of my heart
in the hope of matching
the gift of my conquerors

down here I am naked
when I think of our kings
how did they come
I think about it and then I’m cold

I am alone and I’m cold
it’s late and I believe
that I just have to throw myself away
under the train to forget

Are the gods poets?
They had to be
to leave us these beauties.
So many wonders to behold!
Poets, in any case,
are revered gods.
Their song will not die.
Their name may die
we will always sing
their melodies of love.

My former gods

Thus
Sadly
Here
Disarming

To the winds
Scented
Smoke
From before

The dead gods
Who have not seen
Our mistakes
Remorseless

They are going in the same steps
Of the three sons of Adam
Grinding teeth
On the threshold of death

They are ten great gods
Oliphant Bells
Ten hateful tyrants
Child abusers

Old gods from the heavens
Commuters
In axle-less trolleys
Human Eaters

Having lived so long
They have never won
In a deep sleep
The value of years

So many old times have left them
Those of the old gods who are still
That at the bottom of the world they are recluse
The weight of blood nailing their bodies

Do they still have in their hands of gold
Having an impossible deal
Between their soul and their old body
That last impulse that falls asleep?

The memory of the good old days
So cruel is the destiny
Hiding their fate
Of the almighty murdered

No longer performing wonders
In the spring of their icy hearts
Eyes half closed they watch
Envious of their past exploits

May such happiness be their delight
From the bottom of their being
At the end of the banquet of life
At least trying to appear

Having built the foundation
Did they not deserve better
That a paradise by their actions
Where are they sentenced to death?

When the goddesses
From before
Who leave them
Often

Will come back
Down here
Towards the future
Gaping

Will they trace
A blessing or a curse
Fine lace
Or sad curlers

Will they have odds
To forgive sins
On the knees
of the old, drunk gods

Or will they throw
Strong lightning bolts
Just to allow
God save the old

Gods of heaven they’ll be
Who will make shame on me
When compared to their song
All mine are silly wrong

Visions, Myths, Legends

Hi Xavier

I pay attention to your remarks, and curb the desire to write you “hello sorcerer”, as before, because I have always perceived you as a spell cutterFrench sorcier = sort scié (spell cutter), beautiful adoubement that can occur between awakened. No doubt I have written to you less recently, occupied by unexpected but not unpredictable physical turpitudes.

But do I need to write you to tell you that I think about you every day?
No.

Do I need to remind you how important you are in our modest (but beautiful) family saga?
No.

Do I need to tell you that your writings, your thoughts, your thinking are my companions?
No.

Then why write it to you like a letter to the sea, a tenuous message among the hundreds that you receive? Not to flatter your ego, certainly not. Not to wait for any feedback (even if hearing from you live will please me). Not to maintain some illusion of closeness with a great author (fuck I’m stupid).

Just to (re)say that your productions (of which I don’t share all the ideas, fortunately) are simply essential. Eden-Saga is a jewel, a UFO. In 247 years, for example, when we find ourselves in an ethereal sweat lodge, I will say to you “look what you have done” as long as I think your work will survive.

Modernity pays the price of ignorance among its contemporaries. I hope you do not see the jubilant aspect of reading your articles. It’s getting late in our earthly lives. The rest is going to be terribly rock. That’s just what I think. The earthly experience (which is not so easy for me) is a blessing. The astral is not unknown to me. I am keen on eternity. The Living does things well, he has time for himself.

I entrust myself to the Source, whom we think (I mean you and I) different but not antinomian, with true confidence. Because in the end, “I” live “my” life. It remains to accommodate all this… See you soon, Xavier.

(s) Alain Aillet

… Even sooner, Alain!