Mute Objects of Expression by Francis Ponge Page A

yours,
    F.P.
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    END OF APPENDIX
TO
“THE PINE WOODS NOTEBOOK”

LA MOUNINE OR NOTE STRUCK IN AFTERTHOUGHT ON A PROVENCE SKY
    For Gabriel Audisio

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    Notebook opened in Roanne, May 3, 1941
    True daylight didn’t appear until Martigues.
    In Port-de-Bouc not a trace of odor.
    The man from Saint-Dié sitting across from me was annoyed by the locomotive’s plume of smoke. So I was too.
    Enormous graffiti in Marseille and throughout its suburbs.

    Around nine in the morning across the countryside near Aix, a threatening authority in the skies. Very deep hues. Less azure than petals of blue violets. Ashen azure. Tragic impression, almost funereal. Urns, statues of cherubs in certain gardens; fountains with masks and scrolls at some of the street corners deepens this impression, adding to its pathos. There are mute appeals to the sky to appear less closed, to release a few drops of rain into the urns for instance. No response. Magnificent.

    In Aix, three mossy fountains glisten. The moss is scorched. The water sprays up only feebly. Glimmers there in gentle moving tresses.
    Entire streets are lined with fine old houses of the judiciary. A stage setting for The Litigants . Resemblance between Aix and Caen. Almost like being in an annex of the Mazarine Library. The total absence of cars naturally enhances this illusion.

    Night of May 10th to 11th
    Decidedly, the most important thing on this trip was the fleeting vision of the Provence countryside at the place known as “The Three Pigeons” or “La Mounine” during the bus ride up from Marseille to Aix, between eight-thirty and nine in the morning (seven-thirty to eight, by the sun).
    A countryside of gray vegetation, with a brilliant yellow-green forcing its way through nonetheless, beneath a sky of leaden blue (between periwinkle and pencil lead), with a threatening immobility, a threatening authority, with the urns, the statues of cherubs, the scrolled fountains on street corners, constituting the works,
signs, traces, proof, evidence, testaments, legacies, inheritance, the marks of man – and supplications to the sky.
    In the background the distant sight of Berre and Martigues, with no sea view but a view of the large viaduct.
    I must preserve this landscape, must dip it in lime-water (that is, isolate it not from the air of this place but from time).
    I mustn’t let it spoil. I must keep it in broad daylight. To keep it I must first grasp it, collect all its hale and truly essential elements and tie them in a bouquet that can be held in hand – I must comprehend it.

    (The painter Chabaud.) What struck me is the lavender-blue, the atmosphere’s great “heaviness” (that’s not the right word), so closed in on the landscape, grey and budding yellow-green. (More nitrogen than H or O?) So ashen, leaden: such a good foil for the delicate colors, like the painters’ black mirror.
    That already was impressive. But at the first apparition of statuary along the bus route (urn, cherub, or fountain), it became arresting, beautiful to the point of tears, tragic. So two stages: 1st: the landscape, 2nd: the statues.

    Nothing more closely resembles night than this ashen-blue daylight. It’s the daylight of death, the daylight of eternity. (Compare with my emotional response in Biot in 1924.) There is silence, but less a silence than stopped-up ears (eardrum suddenly convex? from change of pressure?). Drums muffled, trumpets muted, all of this naturally as in funeral marches. A veiled effulgence, a veiled splendor, a veiled glimmer, a veiled radiance.
    What’s strange is that this effulgence itself would be veiled by the excess of its own luster.

    There’s nothing more closely resembling night . . . That’s going too far. Let’s simply say: there’s something of night in this sky, it evokes night, it’s not all that different from night, it has an undertone of night, it has