Summary
Tomica Bajsić: BLAISE CENDRARS - Poetry, life, work
Writing... is a descent into the depths, like a miner descending into the bowels of the earth, protected by a wire cage, with a lamp attached to a helmet, a lamp whose dim, uncertain light distorts everything, whose flame contains the constant risk of explosion and whose flickering glow, thickened with coal dust, disturbs and so cruelly it bites his eyes so that, when he emerges once more from the darkness, the great light of day hurts him, and the blinded man rubs his inflamed and bloodshot eyes, stumbles, loses himself, and howls like a lost soul about the ghosts he has seen among the blocks of anthracite, though he will never say a word about the print of a woman's hand or a man's foot pressed into the back of the coal, tracks that are far more disturbing than human tracks in the sand of the marvelous guano beach on the shores of Robinson Island Crusoe, the unexpected discoveries that leave the laborer, the hard man, startled, more than a man might feel who, having just escaped a gas explosion in a mine and recovered from unconsciousness, thinks about it again and again, on Sundays, while he smokes his pipe in silence among the sunflowers in his little garden...
Blaise Cendrars
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