A poet is sitting down. In Holland. He's thinking about tradition. He says to himself: "I'm nourished by the centuries, I live immersed in the history of other people." And the primordial breeze wafts through his soul. But his soul is lost: he's an innocent playing with the fires of hell. In the depths of his Dutch meditation a huge lake opens up: solitude, surrounding by grazing cows. Holland is now this: cows, and in the midst of the cows hell, the revolutionary innocence of a poet sitting down.
"Who do you take me for?" he might ask. "What I want is love."
It's always, always like this: inexplicable cities in the middle of nowhere, or sprawling pastures which induce anxiety. Pastures for cows, not for a poet di-la-ce-ra-ted by a tormenting innocence.
He no longer writes poems nor asks people their name. He himself, destined to utter perdition, is losing his name as he delves deeper into the country. Now he observes the devouring peace of the animals, the things, the stillness. I'm going to leave, he imagines. The cities are burning, the fields are going insane. A poet has to leave, go away, depart, disappear. A poet must be one. Hell won't let him. Sometimes he laments: I feel as if I'd criss-crossed the desert; I know nothing.
At night he spoke softly, aware that he lacked the protection of things and that his life was being eaten away by a vocation not only humble but degrading. It served for nothing: it was his most implacable vocation. He would sit and watch the Dutch men tending their animals and the land and keeping their eye on the sky. The Dutch men invoked the higher powers that leaned--a bit like the Dutch themselves--over the human enterprise.
In Holland the Demon is negative. The poet was aware of the Demon's unremitting solitude and requested on his behalf: Pity on the Demon, pity on demonic solitude.
In Holland the Demon is in the midst of the cows: he doesn't write poems, he cannot use his gifts. He thinks, and he loses his name. Who would expect him to work the land or protect the beasts?
Throughout the night the poet would lie as flat as possible, with his talent directed toward the air, listening to the world's soft sounds. And he wondered: How can the earth be so unabashedly placid? Or is it that I'm afflicted by some inscrutable guilt? Where do I descend from, that I'm not loved by the Dutch and am unable to calm down or to join in their tasks?
But one night he received the visitation. His spirit was illuminated: You are a man. "Yes, I'm a man," he said, "but I'm not a Dutchman." And he wasn't even very clear about what it meant to be a man.
"Where do you imagine I'm coming from or going to?" he would ask. "What I seek is love."
Do you understand? Holland, Holland, the country conquered from the sea! (Isn't that what they say?) Holland, slowly raised into concrete existence. Meanwhile the poet sinks into the demoniac spirit and invokes an obscure protection--pity--for the Demon.
He reflects furiously on tradition, and his entire memory is corrupted by an ardent and chaotic sadness. Blood is black down to its tiniest cell. For no one knows where corruption begins its task of completing innocence.
His room is above a shop that sells milk, cheeses, butter, cream--all fat and white. He goes down the stairs and stops in front of the dairy shop. "What's this?" he wonders. He means God, the devourer of cream. "There must be some confusion," he supposes. "I'm an innocent--take God away. Besides, I'm damned."
His heart can't take any more. Among the animals and the plants it occurs to him to say: "What fertility!" And life is corrupted to its very marrow. He feels like an apostle without faith. He'd like to die, to burn in the apocalyptic fire of the cities. Or to be devoured by lucidity, to wither from overintelligence in the heart of that rural madness. He can grasp but one tradition: he loves it. He's lost his name, that wisdom. Beauty's not enough, and truth's too much to ask for. What's at issue is a subtle term that has elements of both and has become useless, senseless.
"I don't think about my soul or body," he would say. "I don't worry about whether I'll gain salvation. I need love. I need to learn." But it would seem that in the community everything had already been learned, everything had been taught and known since time immemorial. The people thought only of preserving themselves from suffering. They wanted language to remain intact, without blemish.
He looked at the green sun between the haunches of the cows and imagined poisoning himself and bequeathing his corpse to the Dutch confusion. How that would nourish the Dutch confusion! How that would animate the tiny Dutch scene! "What happened to him, Lord? Save his soul, if you can. He was a foreigner: he poisoned himself. That's all we know. What did Holland do to you to deserve this?"
Slowly his love began to grow. It was a self-taught love, fraught with fear and doubt.
"Can our love accomplish everything?" he would ask. Or else: "How far do the rights of a man extend? And of a poet?"
There are no open-air fires in Holland: the Dutch don't understand fire. Holland is a country that's always getting bigger. The sea robs a half meter of land, and the Dutch rob back two meters from the waters' fervent heart.
"I don't understand cosmic justice."
And he murmurs to himself: They know nothing of the things of fire. The most profound gifts of man wither inside them. Should I love them?
"Love what, love who?" asks the visitor. "Are you referring to the Dutch or to the gifts they've forgotten?"
And he doesn't really know what it was he wanted to refer to, what it was that inspired his despair. Sitting in Holland, he thinks: Pity.
For him? For the Dutch?
In what complex webs an innocence gets tangled!

(Translated by Richard Zenith)