The swans, I have been watching them closely. They are floating toward each other, necks extended, then twining together like rope. The black ones have multiplied, the white have all but disappeared. Perhaps they strangled themselves and drowned. Do swans still dream? They come so near now, and the still, reflective pool in which they float this way and that only distantly resembles water. It is pure reflection, unrippled, like a pale sky, a white wall, or a blank sheet of paper. When the sun comes out over the pond, the swans seem more like specks of dust on a light table, or particles viewed under a microscope. And as I move my eyes to get a clearer picture, they evade my gaze. Their gliding accompanies me everywhere.
‘These are no swans,’ I hear Chevauchet say.
What are they, then? But whenever my mind starts to drift, someone can be counted on to grab me by the shoulder with their ‘Hey you!’ ‘Wake up, citizen!’ ‘No sleeping!’ – by which they mean no dreaming, of any kind. They are just ordinary passersby, citizens doing their duty to the state.
I look up and see the birds floating now across the sky – or is it my eyes? And I put in a few drops of snow for relief.
‘They’re not birds; they’re mouches,’ whispers Chevauchet, ‘flying flies.’
I look out at the lake, which has frozen over. In permanent winter, nothing floats, nothing grows, nothing shades (not one willow weeping). It is the same with the rest of the world when the centre has a lock on the sun. The world is an eyeball in space, which nothing protects.
Upon lidless eyes flies soon come to rest. But the corpse in whose orbits they will lay their eggs has seen happiness.
The most private and unknowing wishful thinking is to be preferred to unconscious walking in Indian file; because it can be informed.
– Ernst Bloch
Drunken with realism, the psychologists insist too heavily on the escape element of our reveries. They do not always recognize that reverie weaves soft bonds around the dreamer, that reverie is a ‘binding,’ and, in short, that in the strictest sense of the term, it ‘poetizes’ the dreamer.
– Gaston Bachelard
That violence is not the result of conditions only, but also largely depends upon man’s inner nature, is best proven by the fact that while thousands loath tyranny, but one will strike down a tyrant. What is it that drives him to commit the act, while others pass quietly by? It is because the one is of such a sensitive nature that he will feel a wrong more keenly and with greater intensity than others.… The cause for such an act lies deeper, far too deep for the shallow multitude to comprehend. It lies in the fact that the world within the individual, and the world around him, are two antagonistic forces, and, therefore, must clash.
– Emma Goldman
About the Author
S. D. Chrostowska teaches in the Department of Humanities and in the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto. She is the author of the collection of fragments Matches: A Light Book (punctum, 2015; second expanded ed., 2019), of the epistolary novel Permission (Dalkey Archive, 2013), and of a history of literary criticism, Literature on Trial (University of Toronto Press, 2012). She has also co-edited a volume of essays, Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives (Columbia University Press, 2017). A French translation of Matches, with a foreword by the German film-maker and writer Alexander Kluge, was published by Belles Lettres-Klincksieck in 2019. Prof. Chrostowska’s essays and fiction have appeared in BOMB, The Believer, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The Hedgehog Review, and elsewhere. She has contributed scholarly articles to such journals as diacritics, New German Critique, Public Culture, New Literary History, SubStance, and boundary 2. She is currently finishing a modern history of German and French critical social theory.
Typeset in Arno.
Printed at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited by Tamara Faith Berger and Alana Wilcox
Designed by Crystal Sikma
Cover art ‘Le jour est un grand ours’ by Jean-Pierre Paraggio
Cover and interior design by Crystal Sikma
Coach House Books
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