Etel Adnan

Io cannot die. Prometheus cannot rest. The oceans are helpless. As for us, we can neither live, nor disappear. The stars, at night, emit sparks with the rhythm of our breath. My window is blessed. It opens in daylight on the fields of Greece, that’s what I’m trying to believe.

To sit on a beach and rest our aged bones, that’s already a privilege. And to stop the car by a curve and throw an eye on a blazing horizon, that’s a victory, but not to sleep at night because of some memories’ sheer weight means what?

I was trying, very regularly, to convince myself that I was alive, and that was still another game, and the world fell apart.

Today is yesterday’s tomorrow. That’s how it goes.

Can we keep that strange sense of sacredness that we knew, as if by inheritance, in our old days? I think we sometimes do, as in this evening, when in a lost corner of Brittany, us the strangers, are united not by hazard but by affinities, even if those are light like air, like clouds passing over our heads.

We’re on a planet sustained by nothing, carried through pure space by a willful star made of fire and in constant ebullition. We’re travelers covering traveling grounds. Going, always going.

And the killing goes on, and has reached the point where it becomes a matter of personal survival to accept it, and we see morality as a luxury we can do without. The bloody feast goes on, and we stare at it with total hopelessness.

The conducting line in my soul’s deepest layer is reddition, not in the sense of the surrender of a defeated general, but like in the Homeric narration of the Trojan War. It means that I followed lines I never saw, went on unchartered roads, didn’t emerge from any confusion. The present was forever blowing.

I’m swimming in a zone where cold water would meet a hot stream, and not mix. I would have preferred to burn entirely rather than…

Today is another day. The speed at which the universe is moving is illimited, so we don’t need to bother, an ultimate battle being impossible from the start. We’re in the universe, but don’t really know where we are. Everything that is is on a scale of its own.