The Loop [antikvár]

Chapter 1 Inverse Flower 1 During the night, the mist on the window During the night, the mist on the window had turned to ice. I see that it was still night, six-thirty, seven o'clock; wintertime then, and dark outside; no details, only darkness; the windowpane covered with the patterns of the frozen mist; on the lowest pane, on the left-hand side of the window, at eye level, in the light; this light from an electric bulb, yellow against the intense darkness outside, opaque and wintry, clouded by the mist; not a uniform mist, as when it rains, but an almost transparent frost, forming patterns; a web of translucent patterns, with a certain thickness, the slight thickness of frost, but with variations in this thickness, and, because of these miniscule variations, forming patterns on the glass, like a vegetal network, an entire system of veins, a surface vegetation, a cluster of flat ferns; or a flower. I scratched a fingernail against this snow, this false snow: neither white nor powdery; not melting but fading, the dirty snow of springtime lingering on the sidewalks under the boxwood trees; or crushed snow, rather: worn down, dusty and colorless, ephemeral; with my fingernail I traced a path on the glass, and the crystallized mist accumulated against my finger, turning to water because of the warmth of my finger, quickly disappearing in tiny rivulets and evaporating into a damp coldness on my numb finger; or else I held my palm flat against the glass, and under its pressure the clump of frost became a sheet of glassy ice, so that the night suddenly showed through, almost watchful in its proximity; all the vegetation of the frozen traces erased, with its imaginary petals, stamens, and I § 51* corollas; now it was smooth, like glass on glass: the map of my hand, the sensitive network of its lines, left no imprint. Still using my fingernail, very carefully, I was able to slide these blades of ice over the surface of the glass, toward the bottom, placing them next to one another in polygonal figures, fractured rectangles; the upper half of *Such cross-references direct the reader to the interpolations (I) and bifurcations (B) in the second half of the book, beginning on page 199. 11