Mute Objects of Expression Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Perhaps what makes my work so difficult is that the name of the mimosa is already perfect. Knowing both the shrub and the name of mimosa makes it more difficult to find a better way to define the thing than the name itself.
    It seems as though it has been perfectly applied to it, that this thing has already been pinned down . . .
    Why no, the very idea! And then, is it really so much a question of defining it?

    Isn’t it much more urgent to emphasize, for instance, the mimosa’s proud but also gentle, caressing, affectionate, sensitive side? It shows solicitude in its gestures and its breath. Both alike are effusions, in the sense that the Littré gives: communication of intimate feelings and thoughts.
    And deference: condescension mingled with consideration and motivated by respect.
    Such is the sensitive greeting of its frond. Thereby hoping, perhaps, to have its vainglory excused.

    A thicket of gray feathers on the rumps of ostriches. Golden chicks hiding there (poorly hidden) but with no air of subterfuge.

    Carnival trinkets, props for the commedia. Pantomime, mimosa.
    Fans of pantomime disclose a
Plan to undermine mimosa
    (As an ex-martyr of language, by now I must surely be allowed some time off from taking it seriously day in day out! Those are the only rights I demand, in my capacity of former combatant – in the holy war. No, really! There must be a middle ground between a tone of earnest conviction and this rag-tag doggerel.)

    Perfume this page, shade my reader, weightless bough of drooping feathers, of golden chicks!
    Weightless bough, gratuitous, of multiple flowerings.
    Downcast plumes, golden chicks.

    Full-blown, the little mimosa balls give off a prodigious scent then contract, fall silent: they have lived.
    I’ll say that they are flowers of the rostrum (or, yet again: of the stage).
    That they have good chest tones, a high C from the chest. That their scent carries far. They are unanimously heeded and applauded, by throngs with nostrils wide.
    Mimosa speaks in a clear and intelligent voice; it speaks of gold.
    It is a good deed cast wide, a gift that’s gratuitous and pleasant to receive.
    Mimosa and its particular good deed.
    Yet it’s not a speech that it is giving, it’s one prestigious note, always the same but quite capable of persuasion.

    Mimosa (prose poem). – A single spray of the hypersensitive golden chick plumes, seen through binoculars two kilometers down the lane, pervades the house. Full blown, the little mimosa balls give off a prodigious fragrance and then contract; they have lived. Are they flowers of the rostrum? Their speech, unanimously heeded and applauded by the throng with nostrils wide, carries far:
    â€œMIraculous
MOmentary
SAtisfaction!
    Â 
    MInute
MOssy
SAffroned!”
    â€œCombs discouraged by the beauty of the golden lice born of their teeth! Lower yard upper yard of rooted ostriches, erupting with golden chicks. Brief fortune, young millionairess with dress fanned-out, tied at the base, fluttered in bouquets. New pufflet, frail cygnets, soft to the touch and pungently perfumed! Geyser of chicking feathers! Panaches, bearable constellated suns! . . . And decked in bearable polka dots! Pride – supple, bowing in deference to itself and spectators alike.
    â€“ Flowering is a paroxysm. Fruition is already on the returning path.
    â€“ Enthusiasm (beautiful in itself) bears its fruit (good or bad).
    â€“ Flowering is an aesthetic value, fruition a moral value: one precedes the other.
    â€“ Good is the consequence of the beautiful. The useful (the seed) is the consequence of the good.
    â€“ The good can be just as beautiful as the beautiful (oranges, lemons). The useful is generally aesthetically modest.
    â€“ The flower is the paroxysm of the individual’s ecstasy.
    â€“ The fruit is but the envelope, the protector, the refrigerator, the humidor of the seed.
    â€“ The seed is the specific jewel, it is the