Mute Objects of Expression by Francis Ponge Page B

undertones of night, it has the same tones as night, it amounts to night. This daylight amounts to night, this ashen-blue daylight.
    Just as a bursting sound deafens you, veils your eardrum and from that moment you don’t hear it except as through layers of veils, of cork, of cotton – can it not be that an overly resplendent sun in an overly dry atmosphere might veil your eyes, whence an intervention of funerary veils? – No, not so. (I remember a dawn with my father at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon near King René’s castle, a day when we had earlier taken my mother to the train station. I wasn’t
yet ten. – That daylight amounts to night, that King René daylight. Perhaps it was the first time I had seen dawn. No, it was no longer dawn, but mid-morning. – But it didn’t have this same overwhelming quality – overwhelming is too strong.)
    (I’m also reminded of: “The blue shutter closed with a bang, there’s daylight inside.”)

    The sky is nothing but an immense blue-violet petal.
    And everything beneath it, houses, roads, olive groves, green trees, varied enamel-yellow fields, all of it is like varicolored embers on the verge of dying out, on the verge of rekindling, like an ashy brazier if you blow on it: a few glimmers, almost phosphorescent, as though from an inner (secret) fire that sheds no light.
    In some places ash, in others glowing coals (that’s not quite it). We mustn’t give these features of the landscape too much luster, lend them too much luster. No, the thing that was above-all, almost incomparably remarkable, was the ponderousness of lavender upon all this, through the branches particularly, etc.
    Actually the landscape is gray, generally unremarkable, nobly notarized (?). It is the place, it is the land of Roman law, abstract, individual and social (??). (Lavender is the scent that best suits clean linen.)

    May 11th to 12th
    Over the countryside of Provence
reigns a periwinkle petal.
This ashen-blue daylight amounts to night
And weighs down on Provence.
    Â 
    On the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence
Petal of blue violets
Periwinkle or pencil lead
There’s some pink beneath the blue
All things otherwise being equal
Perfectly Monsieur Chabaud saw this
Better than Monsieur Cézanne
    Rose periwinkle touched with pencil lead
Holds its shadow diffused in its own effulgence
Its shadow diffused by its own effulgence
Shadow diffused within bodies
As death within the purest joy

    Petals of blue violets
Azure touched with pencil lead
skims the gardens of Provence
This ashen-blue daylight amounts to night
Chabaud the painter saw it well
The shadow in its luster
holds fast, diffused
    Â 
    The daylight gleaming over Provence
is an azure touched with pencil lead
This ashen-blue daylight amounts to night
Chabaud the painter saw it well
Its shadow in its luster
holds fast, diffused
    Scattered wide.
    Drums muffled, trumpets muted
    This ashen-blue daylight amounts to night
Its shadow in its luster holds fast all diffused
Above Provence it gleams by day
an azure touched with pencil lead
Ashes in place of drops are scattered there
In place of imperceptible vapor imperceptible smoke
(but stable, unmoving)

    Â 
    In finest lattice the shades of darkness are suspended
A beautiful day is also a meteor
It holds all nature under the spell (the terror)
of its authority.
It holds all nature mute under its authority.
Every heart stops beating. (Only stupid June bugs and busses keep
on snorting and jostling.)
    Who fails to see here that the sky is closed; the interstellar immensity is seen here in transparency, and it is grandiose (perceived against infinity). It’s no more than gas, unfit for breathing. As fish through clear water can perceive the atmosphere above them (or imagine it), so we perceive the ethereal medium.
    To be sure, we had no need for this (to see the closed sky so clearly) in order to determine that God is an unworthy invention, a detestable