“At the end of a long journey, I can still see that corridor, that moleskin, that warm shadow crossed by breezes pure as small children sent by the sea foam, I can still see the room where I came to break the bread of our desires with you, I can still see the pallor of your nakedness that merges in the morning with the disappearing stars. I know that I am going to close my eyes again and recover the conventional shapes and colors that let me approach you. When I open them, it will be to seek in a corner of the corruptible sunshade with its pick-axe handle that makes me dread fair weather, sunshine, life, because I no longer love you in broad daylight, because I am sorry for the time when I went off to find you and for the time when I was blind and dumb in the face of the incomprehensible universe and the incoherent system of understanding you were proposing to me.
“Haven’t you borne enough responsibility for this candor that made me forever turn your wishes against you?”
—from Eluard: Shared Nights, translated by Lydia Davis
Art Credit Trevor Paglen, Untitled (Reaper Drone), 2010. C-Print, 48 x60 inches
