Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky

Remarks

The Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky is generally attributed to Infernus Ioannes, the collective signature of our first generation, and it is part of the cycle that established once and for all the essential poetics of the Shaggå, as well as its basic structures. This is considered one of the classic examples of the genre, and references to it, as homage to Infernus Ioannes and their companions in captivity, appear in a number of significant works; among them, one would be remiss to omit The Melody of Happiness (Aram Petrokian), Proof by Nave (Irina Kobayashi), and Before the Dunes (Ellen Dawkes).

Like any Shaggå appearing during this period, the Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky constitutes a homogeneous ensemble, marked by stylistic unity and an apparent absence of dramatic progression. A narrator seems to revisit the devastated place that was the scene, centuries before, of their own martyrdom, or suicide, or execution. This narrator may, as it happens, be feminine; the ambiguity arises in the way certain phrases are turned, following a gendered adjective or participle. The obscured sex of the narratorial voice has little significance, seeing as it has no consequences: it does not modify the perception of the internal world described in the text, nor is it projected onto the landscape, nor does it influence the neutral musicality of the speech. With exhausted melancholy, this surviving form (whether masculine or feminine) looks, does not look, dreams of a present of immobility, and struggles to follow that which surfaces in their memory or upon their retinas, beyond eyelids that we may construe as purely ghostly. The narrator relives, in part, their own death, set against a backdrop that has also, in its turn, evolved towards degradation, becoming a gray, hesitant light, and silence; they ponder persistence; they wonder how to hold on to what remains and how to extinguish it; they pose the question of an eternal wait, mired within a static image; they no longer possess the strength to leave and their suffering is like the sky: painfully infinite.

In a brief analysis of this text, one might stop there. No new perspectives emerge from this thematic, which reflects the traditional preoccupations of Infernus Ioannes and carceral literature: the abnormally elongated duration, the painful duration, creating pain whether before, during, or after death. Two elements, however, may still catch our attention and merit interpretation and, at the very least, examination from a slightly different perspective than very simple and very classic poems generally demand.

When we revisit the titles of the sequences, a series appears, presented as follows:

The passage / To see no more / Before the present / The total number of birds / The question of departure / In the sludge of an underdream / The only secret.

The titles reflect the text’s poetic atmosphere; as fragments selected from the body of the text itself, there is nothing extraordinary about them. But if we combine them and add a plausible punctuation, we find the following phrase:

The passage to see no more before the present the total number of birds; the question of departure in the sludge of an underdream: the only secret.

This is a message that evokes a hidden truth, one that seems obvious at first glance; it is a sort of programmatic affirmation, as we know was customary among the first generation of imprisoned writers, who ruminated in their cells over insurrectional images, pondering them endlessly just as we do today. This is a program in code, referring back to lived experiences and knowledge that the text broaches, if at all, only in an allusive fashion, but which were certainly decipherable to those being addressed in the Shaggå, those co-captives who were present, in the first generation, and the detainees to come in the second and even third generation. A secret is named, its dual foundation is suggested, and for the initiated, this is enough to define it or call it to mind.

Based on this, one might construct a number of hypotheses: one could seek out a date to define more concretely “before the present”; or one could ponder the possible connotations of expressions such as “the total number of birds” or “departure in the sludge of an underdream.” Any study of such questions would be fruitless. The answer will not take shape, will not come forth. The answer is not meant to appear to a reader who might capture the Shaggå’s secret and harm those who hold it; the Shaggå was conceived to evoke, yet simultaneously to deceive, to protect, and to resist all intrusion. It contains an element of indecipherable mystery, and, beneath its benign exterior, it proclaims peacefully that its reason for being exists elsewhere: the Shaggå draws its power from its aesthetic of evasion, and it is precisely because the Shaggå (like other post-exotic creations) “speaks of something else,” that the reader is invited to savor it, to feel its resonance within.

Once again, then, we find ourselves faced with an example of post-exotic insolence, as asserted since its literary beginnings: writers telling stories amongst themselves, murmuring or muttering violent visions, living in parallel worlds, transmitting images and atmospheres, provoking exile and trance—but constantly leaving the enemy outside, irritated and powerless, to prowl somewhere among those listening, to rattle swords against an impenetrable armor behind which nothing very important is hidden—constructing for each other novelistic worlds, lyrical prose with several levels and ways of reading, one of which, at least, traverses the locked unconscious of prisoners who speak, whisper, scream, fall silent. Militant insolence, camouflage, caution, and skill all come together and, for those who sympathize, they form the image.

The second noteworthy element for discussion here is less clearly linked to the characteristic aesthetics of post-exotic messengers. Rather, it relates to the thought of those who have spoken, transmitted, and repeated this body of work.

The Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky responds to the philosophical questions that are the focus of this genre: with deliberate recourse to a method connected to photographic techniques, it exposes a reflection on the time and conditions of its perception, conditions that generate suffering or anguish. In this respect, it resembles some uncontroversial and much more famous examples, such as the Shaggå of the Return of Abdallah, Captain of the Roaring Sword. Yet the ideological and metaphysical background is not the same; it is distinct from the network underlying those poems attributed to first generation writers. In these works, any despair that manifests does so, most often, as a tone evoking a pessimism that remains raging and dynamic. The Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky does not draw its force from any such anger, nor even a chilled and repressed anger; it is not situated in a dynamic series of events. Rather, it is spoken as if from a place beyond such events.It bears a consciousness of a historically degenerate era, in which physical and psychic exhaustion have followed an active, oneiric rumination on defeat and the past. The revolutionary embers have ceased smoldering; a sterile mud covers the earth; no one is listening; barbarism has triumphed even at the innermost reaches of the spirit. This is what the seven sequences of the Shaggå depict as reigning beyond the walls.

Yet this desolate mood is not at all what presides over the elaboration of the first post-exotic texts, romånces, narracts, lessons, incantations and shaggås. Those foundational texts systematically stage an external audience: the audience dances in friendly rounds, listens, moves in a non-carceral elsewhere. They include sympathizers, accomplices, representatives. And they repeat and share that which is contained, in germinal form, within the texts of imprisoned speakers: a reverie that may yet, here and there, break through the real, the inexorable real of commodities and war; a territory of exile; a shamanic speech. The outer world, that nearby, connected community, is in ruins and misery, but a great many lights glimmer through. The landscape where we wander as we whisper or read the Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky is much less positive. Regardless of the direction taken, whether beyond the walls or toward the interior of the poetic voice, we run up against an absence of clarity. The dream is no longer anything more than an underdream; the escape boat is unreachable and surrounded in mud. Modifications of the past through the intervention of the imagination now open up nothing more than a useless fumbling; the future has disappeared; the present has lost all consistency. Speech has become nothing more than a vague residue, accompanying a gray slumber. Speech is dead and does not lead toward rebirth. “There was once a time,” we read in the Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky, “when men and women disavowed the idea of defeat.” What the narrator perceives here is that, one day, these times will be no more. From that future time, they pronounce the seven sequences.

In one of the first manifestations of its existence, Infernus Iohannes declared: “Life is just the appearance of a shadow against a glimmer of soot”—a phrase of cheeky excess, whose excessive snickering diffused its power, its destructive action, its constructive action, a politics for hard times. The humor of disaster was prominent. The Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky takes no inspiration, draws no energy, from such snickering. In this respect, it is situated at a great distance from all other texts of this period, a distance that renders its symbolic and literary value all the greater. It is almost as if Infernus Iohannes had been struck by a sudden, terrible premonition—as if, several decades in advance, they had discerned the unthinkable catastrophe of times to come. In the first generation’s collective voice, in these seven short sequences, suddenly the humor of disaster seems to reach its limit. All irony has vanished; physical exhaustion, psychic exhaustion, and ideological exhaustion have taken the place of the dream that attempted to transform the real. From this point on, desire remains hidden behind a feigned, bitter smile, and lacks the flesh and skin of lips.

I. The Passage

A quarter hour past the shore, if all goes well, the sea will bring forth a sky. You will become unable to move forward, you will have to hide in the remnants of waves, from within the clouds you will reach the remnants of waves. You will have to build the passage, within the ruin of the glimmer is where you will uncover it, in the ruin of waters already unfit to carry the idea of ships, in the ruins of the day without transport and without sun. In the ruin of the glimmer is where you will conceal the final beacon. In the final beacon is where you will pretend to float, for you must continue to pretend, faced with the extinguished wind, already stripped of its memory of albatross and laughing gulls. In the face of this surrendering wind, you will adopt the doctrine of the wreck, the strategy of the wreck, which you have always favored. In the space of the wreck you will take refuge, you will pretend to bob along just as before, there with no listener to believe it you will say you have found the three precious refuges: the refuge of crumbling steel, in the process of dying; the refuge of foamless faraway quivering, of morning or evening; the refuge of brilliance coming up from the depths, for so long swirled by the sea. You’ll remain humble as you wait, as if walking on water and yet like a treasure the water does not accept, as if supported on silt and yet like an offering the earth rejects. There you’ll count the hours, all the oscillations that will separate you from immobility and separate you from a memory of a first shore. You will wait, stubbornly trying not to sink, rocked in the roar of empty holds, nourished by flashes stolen from the light outside and imagining, to hold on and keep holding on, the idea of a twilight where you will always have your place. And in that light, that unnavigable, fictive light, you will build the passage, in that stolen light, in the prideful misery of that stolen light.

II. To See No More

In the pits full of night we had learned to close our eyes, we closed our eyes and the image came, the day came, and once again we spread our wings above the docks for repair and dismantling where, one thousand nine hundred and seventy-five years before, we had let out our final screams, and once again we were gliding into a mess of transparent sheets, surrounded by the half-cold silence of our sleep, having forever lost all sense of gravity and verticality, nothing now inscribed within us but the fear of no longer seeing the image, and we did not beat our wings, we soared, we wandered in subterfuge above swamps where we had dug, one thousand nine hundred and seventy-five years before, and which had not immortalized the slightest trace of our adventure, of our brutal decimation, and we flew over the tortured mud beds, over shadows traced by the tide in shallow arteries of its blood, and once again we sought the figure of a man or woman, someone we might give our greeting or goodbye, but, as in times fallen away, there was no one, and we could barely recognize the ladders, the stairs, the gratings, confused as we were in the absence of gravity, and once again we closed our eyes and yet again the image came, the day came, and the girder hung across the image as awful as before, settled as before between our long, slow slide and the liquefied soil at the end of our trajectory, and we struggled against numb resignation, we waved the tips of our defeated wings to avoid the memory of cruel dripping nails and to avoid brushing against the nails bristling on the girder, and, to slow our already extremely static flight, we tried to blind our dead eyes, to see no more, to see no more of anything, to yield no longer to the memory of the final cracks, but endlessly the image returned and, despite everything, it remained.

III. Before the Present

Even if no one says a word to you for one thousand nine hundred years, you will stand up out of the pond and try to imagine what took place before the present, you’ll try to imagine how, long ago, you possessed a personal relationship with things. You’ll emerge long after dawn, but still during the geological era of daybreak, and you will be weary, miserably weary and tilted. For you, on that morning, they’ll have lit up the sky with stones, for you alone they’ll have plowed the darkness from the gravel pits, so at least the imprint of your escape will be visible; your memory will not be completely void. Otherwise and elsewhere, nothing will bear witness to your existence, no voice will remark on your amnesia, your solitude, your eternity and your mute silence. For you, on that morning, they’ll have set out a light in the drizzling rain, asthey often do when trying to emphasize the vanity of presence or absence. Inspired by this disappearance of night and color, you must then understand what secrets govern birth and death. I cannot tell you anything about this, you will have to go on waiting another one thousand and nine hundred years, give or take a few. Farther on, a stone will stand like a vain, superfluous sign, a squared off block before and after its assassination, a testament to the persistence, otherwise and elsewhere, of a collective history, a collective hurt, a black waste populated with animals and humans, and you’ll want to communicate with this ostentatiously scarred stone, you’ll imagine the possibility of a dialogue, but nothing of the sort will happen. So you’ll remain bent over the wee hours, the place of the day, the twilight, you’ll restart your ruminations for an answer regarding yourself, once again you’ll revive the sterile silence, exhaustion on the edge of knowledge, the slowness of disaggregation, once again you’ll hope to learn the reason for being of the present, and, as if you were already poised before the truth, without love you will wish for the end of things, with love you will wish for the beginning of memory: the beginning of pain.

IV. The Total Number of Birds

When you have finally lain yourself to sleep in an appropriate place, on a field of garbage, pecked full of holes like a thimble, perhaps once or twice a day the illusion of consciousness will come over you, and every time your eyelids part, that unexpected noise will startle birds into flight, flying from left to right, always in the same direction, which may perhaps be explained by planetary rotation or perhaps something else that escapes us and will always escape us; the birds will take flight inside your silence, as if using their wings to provoke a more deafening, a more complicated racket than your membranes can bring forth. But all their beating and blustering will remain separate from your perceptions, their wings and feathers will stir ideas of noise but without the noise settling concretely within you, and, in reality, you will perceive nothing of their great agitation, except perhaps the perfect shadows and smells of suspended bodies, dark against the light. Every time you open your eyes the multitude will explode in flight before the surface of your memory without ever penetrating, a fixed image stopped as if forever on the fabric of your retinas. You’ll have established the rules of a sad game, out of idleness or as a result of melancholy, you’ll have imagined a wager between you and chance. To win you must capture in one single image exactly three hundred and forty-three sea gulls, not one more and not one less: you like the number’s musicality, though it won’t have brought you luck in your previous existence, but no bad luck either, it’s a number that won’t have brought you anything, when you think about it. You yourself will have mutilated your own gaze until you can count three hundred and forty-three slashes there, a useful grid for evaluating the results of each play at a glance. As soon as you unseal your eyelids, you’ll know that once again you have lost against chance. Perhaps the total number of birds will approach an ideal, harmonious value, but you will have lost.

V. The Question of Departure

Whether during some sleepless night, or a dark day, or afterward, the question of departure will arise, and for a long time you will remain dumbstruck before the choice: By the road or through the mud? To get the decision over with, you’ll play heads or tails for your future, and land on the quagmire path. You will not fail to swiftly emphasize all its advantages, or rather to remark first on the inconvenience of road travel: the risk that you won’t be able to brake at curves, the insidious dampness of tar, the risk of spies even more derelict than yourself watching from dirty shacks along the shoulder, the risk of the wrong itinerary. Then you’ll go prowling around the boat with no idea how to get in, how to steer and get it moving. You’ll see the hull as a spare shell, helpful when you’re going barefoot and without strength, with nothing but your skin to protect you from the world. You’ll speak effusively about the boat in every possible respect, you will describe the sludge where someone will have almost completely submerged it, maybe to make fun of you, or maybe due to some unfortunate negligence in which your person was not taken into any consideration at all, or maybe simply because, everyone in the region being dead, no one will be in charge of boat maintenance anymore. You will sing without cease the charms of boat travel, and in your monologues you will cite precedents in which a boat, apparently stuck in mud, will have ascended the rotten salt sands and the oily morasses that clag the estuary bottoms. And you will keep on turning and tacking around the boat this way, hoping someone will offer you some means to get aboard without having to perish first, to drown within the shifting dregs. But no voice will rise to help you, and if the question arises again, a week or a year later, you will speak of something else, or you will fall silent.

VI. In the Sludge of an Underdream

On the walls standing before the still-living houses, it will be strictly forbidden for you to paint hostile slogans about that which governs the world or to put up posters proclaiming your indignation. Instead, on the walls built in front of the already-dead houses, you’ll be encouraged to draw a clear cloudless sky, and then to brush in smudges that resemble clouds. In the street that will hold the sad absence of any exit, before the houses where the remnants of men and women survive, you will not be authorized to run, you’ll feel no urge to yell or move. Instead, as you walk past ruins inhabited by guests even less respectable than humans, populated by rats and inactive ghosts, you’ll be accorded the right to contemplate a facsimile of the sky lowered to eye level, and you’ll be made to repeat the obligatory comment, you’ll be advised to say that nothing gets in the way of poetry, even when it accompanies giving up all hope, and you’ll be pressed to declare the sky magnificent, no matter its location in the landscape, no matter who the painter may be. You’ll be planted there, in the sludge of an underdream, repeating the rote lines, mumbling the righteous lines, and your soul will be bloodless, your will as if after a cataclysm, and the rescuers making their flourishes around the corpses. You will try to disobey, though, you will not claim that the ruins have been prettily camouflaged, you will whisper criticism of that which governs the world, you will avoid enjoying picturesque angles in the sky, the street, the desert, your memories. There was once a time when white paintings on the brick surfaces worked to construct a history, to call for help or for revolt, there was once a time when men and women disavowed the idea of defeat, there was once a time when even the animals could tell the difference between the front and the back of the set.

VII. The Only Secret

Against the wall where the sea struggles at equinox, you’ll settle yourself in expectation of being shot, you’ll stand close to an open sewer drain, handy for swallowing your blood after the salvo, but, after a day or two with no soldier having come to execute you, you’ll hide your disappointment by walking once again along the iron tangle of disfigured streets, then you’ll go as far as the jumble that still subsists far from the cities after a bacteriological or economic war, and there, embittered by the extreme pointlessness of your wandering, you’ll mutter your final speech before the masses. To whoever wants to listen, which probably means no one, you’ll confide the only industrial secret you ever learned in the course of your previous life, you will reveal the principle of the wheel. In order to reinforce the wonder of your words, you will claim that this extraordinary invention appeared to you in a dream. You will explain all the purposes the wheel might serve for people in the countries still existing on non-submerged surfaces. In emotional tones, you’ll imagine what the wheel might bring to civilization, both present and future, you’ll choose examples from the landscape, you’ll depict gigantic wooden bobbins, you’ll tell how, long ago, there were construction sites where the workers stretched out kilometer after kilometer of black-sheathed electrical cables, or instead you will apply your invention to automotive vehicles or carts carrying miners, suspended between earth and coal by outrageous mechanical pulleys. But, since your speech will meet with little success, you will let it die out, and bite your lips. Your thoughts, in any case, will be too muddled to express in sentences. They’ll drift in spirals above the muds and waters that hide access to great depths. At one moment, everything will tilt, and you will crumple, dead-winged, at the foot of the tombs others will have abandoned before leaving. Behind the tombs, the sky will be infinite, as always. Behind the tombs, the sky is painfully infinite, and then, then there is nothing.

“Shaggå of the Painfully Infinite Sky” is from Nos animaux préférés, published Éditions du Seuil (Paris), 2006.