Mali Haddad

Chaos

2020

The landscape is dusty; a crowd of dust, of men? Of shadows of men, perhaps also shadows of women? Or shadows of dead people, of ghosts? Can I cross that rampart of dust? Or will I run up against a compact wall of curdled shadows or of shadows of curdled dust? The wasteland of compressed shadows turned to stone. Heavy mist one can cut through. Do I want to go towards it, to reunite with “mes morts les plus chers,” as Charles Baudelaire put it in Les Fleurs du Mal? Will it be like Orpheus with Eurydice, that when I look at them, they’ll disappear? Borges says that the soul without the body plays, delighting in its liberty.

I don’t know if that is what is behind those im- passable doors, that darkness, that nightmare, that chaos.

There is no light without darkness, nor creation without destruction. The terrible goddess of the Mexicas, Coatlicue, dressed in skulls and serpents, promotes fertility, a new life, on the basis of death.