“Blue-Eyed Architect, I Defy You.”

Léopold Lambert – Paris on October 31, 2016
If you enjoy articles of the blog, have a look at The Funambulist Magazine!

I apologize for not having written many articles for the blog in the recent past. I’ll have some new one soon but, in the meantime, here are the first stanzas of a powerful and inspiring poem/play by Aimé Césaire defying the “blue-eyed architect.” The verse “…each of your steps is a conquest and a spoliation and a misconception and an assassination” could well be used as frontispiece for The Funambulist — as a banner of course, but also as a continuous reminder for its editor, who happens to be a blue-eyed architect!

Aimé Césaire, And the Dogs Were Silent (1958, trans. Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith) ///

ECHO: For sure the Rebel is going to Die. Oh, there will be no flags, not even black ones, no gun salutes, no ceremony. It will be very simple, something which in appearance will not change anything, but which will cause coral in the depths of the sea, birds in the depths of the sky, stars in the depths of women’s eyes to crackle for the instant of a tear or the bat of an eyelash.

For sure the Rebel is going to die, the best reason being that there is nothing more to do in this crippled world: upheld and a prisoner of itself… he is going to die as it is written implicitly in wind and in sand by the hooves of wild horses and the loopings of rivers…

Fair game for the morgue, it is not tears which befit you, but the hawks of my fists and my flintlike thoughts, my silent invocation to the gods of disaster

Blue-eyed architect
I defy you

beware architect, for if the Rebel dies it will not be without making everyone aware that you are the constructor of a pestilential world
architect beware

who crowned you? During what night did you exchange compass for dagger?

architect deaf to things, as distinct as a tree but as closed as armor, each of your steps is a conquest and a spoliation and a misconception and an assassination.

For sure the Rebel’s going to leave the world, your world of rape in which the victim, thanks to you, is an unbaptized brute

architect gateless and starless Orcus without source without orient
architect with a peacock tail a crab scuttle words the blue of mushrooms and steel, beware.