Mute Objects of Expression Read Online Free PDF

roots?
    Two reasons might have existed behind this choice, either of them valid depending on whether you look at it as an aerial root or rather as a rampant stem.
    Perhaps if it is taken as an atrophied shrub, a weary, limp shrub without enough faith to raise itself vertically off the ground, then perhaps some millennial experience taught it the value of reserving its altitude for the flower.
    Or is it perhaps that this plant must cover a vast terrain in search of scarce principles suited to the particular urgency that culminates in its flower?
    The sheer length of these paragraphs devoted purely to the root of my subject must correspond to an analogous concern . . . but here we’ve gone the limit.
    Let’s come out of the ground at this chosen place . . .

    So there we’ve found the tone, upon reaching indifference.
    That was certainly what mattered most. Everything will flow from that . . . some other time.
    And I may just as well remain silent.
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    Roanne, 1941 – Paris, 1944

MIMOSA
    Quite often, genius and gaiety produce sudden little enthusiams.
    FONTENELLE

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    Here, against a backdrop of azure sky, like a character in the Italian commedia , with a pinch of absurd histrionics, powdered as a Pierrot in his costume of yellow polka dots – mimosa.
    But it’s not a lunar shrub: rather a solar one, multisolar . . .
    A character of naive vainglory, easily discouraged.
    Anything but smooth, each seed, made up of silky hairs, is a heavenly body if you will, infinitely starred.
    The leaves seem like great feathers, very light and yet bowed under their own weight; therefore more touching than other palms, and for the same reason very distinguished as well. Yet nowadays there’s something vulgar about the idea of the mimosa; it’s a flower that has recently been vulgarized.
    . . . Just as in tamarisk there is tamis, or sieve, in mimosa there is mima, mimed.

    I never choose the easiest subjects; that’s why I choose the mimosa. And since it’s a very difficult subject, I must open a notebook.
    First of all, I have to say that the mimosa doesn’t inspire me in the least. It’s simply that I have some idea about it deep inside that I must bring out because I want to take advantage of it. Why is it that the mimosa fails to inspire me, while it was one of my childhood infatuations, one of my predilections? Much more than any other flower, it would arouse my emotions. Alone among them, they enthralled me. I believe it might have been through the mimosa that my sensuality was awakened, that it awoke to the sun of mimosas. I floated in ecstasy on the potent billows of its scent. So that even now each time mimosa appears within me, near me, it reminds me of all that, and then instantly fades.
    So I must thank the mimosa. And since I write, it would be unthinkable for me not to have a piece of writing about mimosas.
    But the truth is that the more I circle around this shrub, the more I seem to have chosen a difficult subject. That’s because I hold it in very high regard, wouldn’t want to treat it offhandedly (particularly given its extreme sensitivity). I want to approach it only with great delicacy...
    . . . This entire preamble, which could be pursued further still, should be called “Mimosa and I.” But it is to the mimosa itself – sweet illusion! – that we should turn now; to the mimosa without me, if you will . . .

    Rather than a flower, we should say a branch, a bough, perhaps even a feather of mimosa.
    No frond is more like a feather, a young feather, what lies between down and feather.
    Sessile, directly adhering to its branches, countless little balls, golden pompons, powder puffs of chick down.
    Mimosa’s minute golden pullets, we might say, gallinaceous seeds, the mimosa’s chicks as seen from two kilometers away.
    The hypersensitive palmery-plumery and its chicks two kilometers away.
    All this, seen through field glasses, scents the