Mute Objects of Expression by Francis Ponge Page B

perhaps, I said to myself (it was hardly) infused drop by drop
Could this be the poison whose dreaded name
Strangely close to its color
Begins like ciel and ends like azure

    If I say “veiled by its own luster” I won’t be much further along.
    Perhaps the sky is so dark only in comparison to other things: trees, houses, etc., which are so brightly lit, storehouses of light!

    As when on leaving a brilliantly lit room, the outdoors seems dark . . .
    . . .
    Comparison with the Northern skies.
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    July 25, 1941, 1:30 in the morning
    Something new.
    Just as a blotter or a rag moistened with water is darker than when dry – (Why? Does optic science supply the answer?) When dry, they are 1) more brittle, 2) paler – so similarly the blue sky is a blotter saturated with interstellar night.
    More or less moistened, it is more or less dark: in Aix-en-Provence it is thoroughly saturated (because there’s not much of anything between itself and the interstellar spaces).
    In the Midi, there’s a lot of sun, of course, but there’s also the (concomitant) interstellar night.
    They struggle against one another (in the sense that Verlaine says, “the high heels were struggling with the long skirts”).
    One could say that in the Midi the sun triumphs less than in the North: to be sure, it triumphs more over the clouds, the fog, etc., but it triumphs less over its principal adversary: the interstellar night.
    Why? Because it dries the water vapor, which in the atmosphere constituted the best triumphant screen for it. A screen whose
absence makes itself felt, resulting in a greater transparency and capacity for saturation on the part of the interstellar ether.
    It is the interstellar night which on beautiful days one sees by transparency, and which makes the blue of the meridional sky so dark.
    Explain this through analogy to the marine milieu (or aquatic rather).
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    July 29 to August 5
    At the place known as “La Mounine” not far from Aix-en-Provence
On an April morning around eight o’clock
The sky though limpid through foliage
Appeared to me mingled with shadow
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    I gathered for the first time that rancorous night . . .

    La Mounine
    a. Verse I
    b. then:
    For the moment I was struck dumb
A beautiful day is also a meteor, I thought,
Not one expression came to mind

I was succumbing in to the effects of that meteor
Like an overwhelming wave, like a damnation
I felt a sense of the tragic
Of the implacable.
At the same time – perhaps through conventional eyes –
I found it beautiful.
Overwhelmed by the intensity of the phenomenon
Each time I looked up
I noticed that shadow again
mingled with daylight
that reproach
    c. then:
    that was the moment when the statues appeared and I was seized by a sob,
    the human element introduced by the statues
    struck me as wrenching
    d. I sat stunned, then distracted by other impressions: our arrival at Aix, the subsequent events, etc.
    e. But clearly I was to remember my strong emotional reaction. That is surely the poetic subject, what impels me to write: either the desire to recast the picture, preserving forever its apparent joy, or the desire to comprehend the cause of my emotion, to analyze it.
    f. Getting down to work, I met with great difficulties and drew up
several coherent images: an octopus, cyanide, the explosion of petals,
    g. knowing full well that I had to get past them, be done with them in order to reach the true (?) explanation, the one about the clearing that opens onto the interstellar night.

    The upper abyss (zenithal). The sun is made to blind us, it transforms the sky into a frosted glass pane through which one can no longer see reality: the one that appears at night, the inter-stellar one.
    But in some regions the transparency (serenity) of the atmosphere, is such that the presence of this abyss is perceptible even in broad daylight. That is the case in Provence. The sky above Provence constantly offers a clearing,