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Parody and delierium. One must be born in Husi to smell the poison of melencholy that eats into mind and soul. One must be born in Husi, where even the crows turn back, to grasp this dream of glory of the native land, to understand this nightmare. Madness is left, becuase only in madness can one overturn, if for a moment, the order of the world that gives not a damn for Husi. - Andrzej Stasiuk -(On the Road to Babadag)

It is almost too beautiful

this morning. The world

has begun again.

How long has it been

since I heard the sound

of the wind or saw, dizzied

the tallest heads of grass

scuttled all at once in the sun?

I almost fainted.

It is almost as if

I have come to this place unaware

of what will happen to me.

As if someone had ushered me

through a dark doorway, and now,

having placed before me this sea

of images, turns to leave,

saying, you will lose everything.

Midnight

It is another year gone by

the last rain still clinging

to the leaves, cicadas

all of a sudden

overpowering the evening.

Entering the church you

pass the white glimpse of a priest

and a man holding, alarmingly

for a moment, the life-sized body

of a toy child. Wet your head.

Sit beside someone else –

so timid and what? young enough?

With her practical shoes, her

bare, blemished legs beneath a blue skirt.

Shake hands when it is time.

Look her in the eye. Forget

her face almost instantly.

You are dying of thirst and drunker

than you wanted to be. Before you,

in the glow of candles and weak neon

the Priest speaks like a man

drowning in air.

What he wants he cannot quite say.

What we all want we cannot say.

Leave early. Go out into the dark.

Drive home. The revolving light.

There are madmen on the streets and

police and they speak

without making any sound

on the other side of the glass.

Summer

The rain dizzies us and at night

forgives even us and trembles

at the edge of the world.

A sheath of water thrown over

the darkness.

Somewhere

a rough sliding door opens

or thunder.

On the Nature of Beauty

Monado. Kupang. Ambon. Kungim. What were these strange names hanging ambiguously above the ocean on the televised map on the seat in front of me? Had such places ever existed?

Out the window the sunset lasted for hours - a slow orange burn along the rim of the horizon and a corrugated sea of endless purple clouds that I mistook for the sea itself and which gradually darkened to an ashy blue, to slate. It seemed incredible that we weren’t transfixed by it, that we preferred to look ahead, to read or watch television or sleep uncomfortably rather than press our faces to the cold, shaking plastic. Beauty it seems, like anything, is unendurable in large enough doses.

On the Nature of Ugliness

The Dutch are not necessarily an unattractive race, but when it does happen, theirs is a distinctive type of ugliness, which can be divided into three categories: firstly, those who look like they have been pickled; secondly, those who look like they have been boiled; thirdly, those who look like they have been first pickled, and then boiled. The old maxim about eating and being seems to apply.

On the Nature of the Ridiculous or the Sublime

By train toward a black horizon, rain ricocheting off the window. Beyond the glass, huge lime-green fields suddenly stretch, in which a crisp white goose stands alone. Later, the stumpy black bodies of Shetland ponies wait, motionless, bedraggled, slightly ridiculous.

On the Nature of Chance or Destiny

Somewhere in the Netherlands, by chance, he makes eye contact through a window, with a woman: short grey hair, her head tilted back, her mouth slightly agape, as if, he supposes, she is in some way disabled. It strikes him as poignant that they have each lived their own lives up until this point and will continue to live on opposite sides of the world, with this one brief glance to unite them. Strange, this woman, and not any other.

On the Nature of Circumstance

What is an afternoon in Amsterdam? As these men with their scarves walk their matching Labradors and the late afternoon sun dwindles between the leaves, ordinary people go home slowly along the canal and a man kisses and re-kisses the head of his baby and whistles. The sound of bells twinkle as one million bicycles go back and forth – a man with a cigarette in his mouth glides past, a box of fresh lettuce overflowing at either end of his bike, everyone dodging miraculously at the last minute, without blinking. Nearby, groups of men prowl the narrow streets around the church, and women look out from behind little glass doorways and beckon to strangers, as if they recognise them from somewhere, as if they have something to tell them.