Argýris Hiónis
From: Esotic Landscapes (1991)
Stories of the Time Past that Never Came
I LIVE IN A CURIOUS SPACE where the past is the future of
today. An enclosed world, asphyxiating. I lack any prospects, I lack
the unknown. Sometimes, I send my thought outside to hunt. It
returns to bring me pictures of a world where the future is today's
past. Disgusted, I sit to write stories of a time past that never came.
A JAPANESE MINIATURE PAINTER writes a poem on a
grain of rice, while another Japanese miniature painter paints the
scene on the tiniest barnacle surface, where it is naturally
impossible to distinguish the poem from the rice. But if you pay
attention to how perfectly the writer's ecstasy and agony is
retraced on the barnacle, you will be certain that someone is
writing a poem on a grain of rice.
HAPPINESS IS A BIRD, said a Chinese wise man once, and
the greater the happiness the farther it flies. Grief is a tree and the
greater the grief the deeper its roots. Man is the soil. Inside him
grief grows the deepest roots, while he sees happiness fly the
farthest away.
THE LARGE WOODEN BEDS, where my ancestors first
opened their eyes or closed them many times in order to sleep and
only once closed them forever, exist no more. Long ago they became
firewood. The ravenous fire devoured them, its final crackle em-
bracing their final moan and all the moans of love, pain, pleasure.
I do not weep for the lost large wooden beds. The sparks flying
off their immolation have reached the sky and become stars.
WHEN THE UNDERTAKER DIES, he is buried by other
undertakers. But I like to imagine him driven to his last residence
by all the dead he buried in his lifetime, as an instance of
appreciation for his services, or even that he alone, with his slow
official step, carries his own self to the tomb, to lie down and pull
the soil over him like a blanket.
THE FLY TRAPPED in honey discovers suddenly and
irreversibly that even the sweetest death is very bitter.
Translated by Stathis Gourgouris
Page(s) 21-22
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