Anathemas and Admirations Read online

  Existence is legitimate and valuable only if we are capable of discerning, at whatever level, even that of the infinitesimal, the presence of the irreplaceable. If we fail, we reduce the spectacle of process to a series of equivalences and simulacra, to a play of appearances against a background of identity. We imagine ourselves clear-sighted, and doubtless we are, but our perspicacity, by dint of making us waver between the futile and the funereal, ends by plunging us into fruitless ruminations, in the abuse of irony and the complacencies of denial. Despairing of ever being able to confer upon our imprecise animosities the density of venom, and, moreover, weary of laboring over the invalidation of Being, we turn to those who, engaged in the enterprise of praise, superior to the shadows, exempt from the superstition of negation, dare consent to everything, because for them everything counts, everything is irreparably unique. The Poem will celebrate, precisely, uniqueness — not that of the passing moment, an inconsequence, but the uniqueness in which the eternal exception of each thing is deployed. In that epoch of celebration, there is only one dimension: the present — limitless duration that enfolds the ages, a moment at once immemorial and actual Are we in this age? Or at the dawn of Greece or China? Nothing more illegitimate than to bring chronological scruples to a work and an author blessedly unscathed by them. Like the Poem, Perse is a contemporary — a timeless one.

  “I shall be there among the very first for the irruption of the new god.”

  We feel, ourselves, that he has already witnessed both advent and twilight of the old gods, and that if he anticipates others, he does so not as a prophet but as a mind in which reminiscence and presentiment, far from taking opposite paths, unite and coincide. Closer to oracle than to dogma (an initiate by energy and attitude, by what we might call his Delphic aspect), he espouses no specific cult: how condescend to the god of others, how share him with them? For all that he idolizes words, converting their fiction into essence, the poet creates a private mythology, his own Olympus, which he populates and depopulates at will, a privilege he is granted by language, whose proper role and final function is to engender and destroy the gods.

  No more than he affects any specific period, the Stranger of the Poem takes root in no country. He seems to traverse some empire celebrating an inexhaustible festivity. The human beings he encounters there and their customs doubtless attract him, though less than the elements. Even in books he will seek the wind and the “thought of the wind,” and more than the wind, the sea, invested with the attributes and advantages ordinarily enjoyed by divinity: “unity restored,” “light made substance for us,” “Being surprised in its essence,” “luminous instance,” . . . In its infinite productivity (in many respects, does it not evoke the Night of the romantics?), the sea will be an Absolute arrayed, a fathomless wonder yet a visible one, revelation of a bottomless appearance. The Poem will have as its mission to imitate the sea’s undulation and brilliance, to suggest its perfection in incompletion, to be or to seem a swirling eternity, coexistence of the past and the possible within a Becoming without succession, a duration that endlessly falls back upon itself.

  Neither historical nor tragic, Perse’s vision, emancipated from both terror and nostalgia, partakes of the Tremor, of that tonic shudder of a mind that has “built upon the abyss” instead of falling into it and cultivating its pangs. No predilection here for panic, but the ecstasy that triumphs over vacuity, the sensuality of awe. From his universe (in which the flesh acquires a metaphysical status), evil is banished, and good as well, for here existence finds its justification in itself. Truly? When the poet has doubts, when he cannot sound Being-as he might the sea, then he turns to language in order to study its “great erosions,” to explore its depths, the “old layers.” Immersion complete, he surfaces again to utter, like the waves, “one long unstopped sentence forever unintelligible.”

  Were a single meaning to be attached to work, it would be condemned without appeal; stripped of that halo of indeterminacy and ambiguity which flatters and multiplies its commentators, it collapses in the woes of clarity and, ceasing to dismay, suffers the dishonor reserved for the obvious. If the work would avoid the humiliation of being understood, it must, by a certain dosage of the unimpeachable and the obscure, by attention to the equivocal, provoke divergent interpretations and perplexed fervors, those symptoms of vitality, those guarantees of lasting. It is lost once it permits the commentator to know at what level of reality it is located and of what world it is the reflection. The author, no less than the work, must dissimulate his identity, yield everything of himself except the essential, persevere in his enchantment and his solitude, a sovereign subservient to his words, their dazzled slave. Even so evident a master of words as Perse, we cannot help feeling, suffers their despotism, which in his fascination he identifies with the elements, even with the elemental — with the caprices and commands from which he can never escape.

  This impression may be corrected by another, contrary one, every bit as legitimate: the more we read him, the more we discern in Perse the dimension of a legislator impatient to codify the vague and the impalpable, to call words to order . . . , to wrest them from their anarchy or rouse them from their torpor, in order to send them to our aid, charged with salubrious and vivifying truths. Antithetical to a Valéry or an Eliot (“Ash Wednesday” is the exact antipodes of the world of Perse), he avoids insisting on the “purity of Nonbeing” or on the “infirm glory of the positive hour,” and when he invokes death, it is to denounce its “immense pomps,” not to exploit its magic A poet in his complicity, his affinity, with beings and with things, he neither regrets nor condemns that original rupture which swept them out of unity, into a procession — anything but funereal, according to him, actually blessed, since it provoked that parade of the multiple, of the patent and the strange, whose exhaustive accounting he undertakes. Everything one sees deserves to be seen, whatever exists is incurably existent, he seems to be telling us, while, in a trance, in the vertigo of plenitude, in an orgiastic appetite for reality, he labors to fill, to cram, the void, without inflicting upon it that scourge of opacity and gravitation which discredits matter.

  There are poets whose help we seek in our will-to-wane; we want them to encourage our gainsaying, to aggravate our stupor, our vice. They are irresistible, marvelously debilitating. . . . There are other poets, more difficult of access because they do not espouse our rancors and our obsessions. Mediators in the conflict that sets us against the world, they invite us to acceptance, to an effort over the ego. . . . When we are overcome by ourselves, and still more by our cries, when that eminently modern craving to protest and to assert our rights assumes the gravity of a sin, what a comfort to encounter a mind that never falls into such ways, that retreats from the vulgarity of revolt, like a man of antiquity, of both heroic antiquity and waning antiquity, like Pindar or even like Marcus Aurelius, who exclaimed, “Whatever the hours bring me is a flavorsome fruit, O Nature.” In Perse there is a note of lyric sagesse, a superb litany of contentment, an apotheosis of necessity and expression, of fate and of the word, just as there is, without the slightest Christian accent, a visionary side. “And the star of no nation climbs into the heights of the green age”: do we not seem to be reading some verses of a serene variant of the Apocalypse? Were the universe to vanish, nothing would be lost, since language would immediately take its place. If just one word, a simple word, were to survive the general engulfment, it would in itself defy nothingness. Such is the conclusion the Poem implies and demands.

  1960

  9

  Exasperations

  AT TWO in the afternoon, rowing on the Étang de Soustons, I was suddenly thunderstruck by the recollection of a phrase: All is of no avail. Had I been alone, I should have flung myself into the water then and there. Never have I felt with such violence the necessity of putting an end to it all

  Devouring biographies one after the next to be convinced of the futility of any undertaking, of any destiny.

  I run into
X. I would have given anything in the world never to encounter him again. To have to endure such specimens! While he talked, I was inconsolable not to possess a supernatural power that could annihilate both of us on the spot

  This body — what use is it, if not to make us understand the meaning of the word torturer?

  An acute sense of absurdity makes the merest action unlikely, indeed impossible. Lucky those who lack such a thing! Providence has looked out for them.

  At an exhibit of Oriental art, a many-headed Brahma, irritated, sullen, besotted to the last degree. It is in this attitude that I enjoy seeing representations of the god of gods.

  Out of patience with them all. But I like to laugh. And I cannot laugh alone.

  Never having known what I was after in this world, I am still waiting for someone to tell me what he himself pursues.

  Asked why the monks who followed him were so . . . radiant, Buddha answered that it was because they thought neither of the past nor of the future. We turn gloomy, in fact, whenever we contemplate either one, and worse than gloomy whenever we contemplate both.

  Counterirritant to desolation: close your eyes for a long while in order to forget light and all that it reveals.

  When a writer passes himself off as a philosopher, you can be sure he does so in order to camouflage any number of deficiencies. Ideas: a screen that hides nothing.

  In admiration as in envy, the eyes suddenly light up. How to distinguish one from the other in those we are uncertain about?

  He calls me in the middle of the night to tell me he can’t sleep. I give him a good lecture on this variety of disaster which is, in reality, disaster itself. At the end I am so pleased with my performance that I go back to bed feeling like a hero, proud to confront the hours separating me from daylight.

  The publication of a book involves the same kinds of problems as a marriage or a funeral

  Never write about anyone. I am so convinced of this that each time I am inclined to do so, my first thought is to attach even if I admire him, the person of whom I am to speak.

  “And God saw that the light was good”: such is the opinion of mortals, with the exception of the sleepless, for whom it is an aggression, a new inferno more pitiless than the night’s.

  There comes a moment when negation itself loses its luster and, much deteriorated, goes down the drain with appearances.

  According to Louis de Broglie, there is a relation between “faire de l’esprit” and making scientific discoveries, esprit here signifying the capacity “spontaneously to establish unexpected comparisons.” If this were so, the Germans would be incapable of innovating with regard to the sciences. Swift himself was amazed that a nation of dullards should have so great a number of inventions to its credit; but invention does not suppose agility so much as perseverance — the capacity to explore, to penetrate, to persist. . . . The spark is struck by obstinacy.

  Nothing is tiresome for a man swept on by the craving for investigation. Proof against boredom, he will expatiate endlessly about anything, without sparing, if he is a writer, his readers; without even deigning, if he is a philosopher, to take them into consideration.

  I tell an American psychoanalyst that while on a friend’s property, I happened to take a bad fall while I was doing some of my inveterate pruning, struggling with the dry branches of a sequoia. “You were ‘struggling’ with that tree not to prune it, but to punish it for outliving you.. Your secret desire was to take revenge by stripping it of its branches.” Enough to disgust one forever with any deep explanation.

  Another Yankee, this time a professor, was complaining that he didn’t know what he would discuss in his next year’s lectures,

  “Why not chaos and its charms?”

  “I don’t know about that — I’ve never been subject to that kind of spell,” he replied. Easier to reach an understanding with a monster than with the contrary of a monster.

  I was reading Rimbaud — Le Bateau ivre — to someone who didn’t know the poem and who, moreover, was a stranger to poetry itself. “It sounds as if it came from the tertiary age” was his comment, once I had finished reading. As judgments go, not bad.

  P. Tz.: a genius if ever there was one. Oral frenzy, out of a horror or an impossibility of writing. Scattered through the Balkans, thousands and thousands of quips, lost forever. How to give a notion of his verve, his passion, his madness? “You’re a mixture of God and Quixote.” I told him once. At the time he was flattered, but the next morning, very early, he came to tell me, “I don’t like that business about Don Quixote.”

  From the age of ten to the age of fourteen, I lived in a boarding house. Every morning on my way to school, passing a bookstore, I would glance at the books, which were changed relatively often, even in this provincial Rumanian town. Only one, in the corner of the shop window, seemed to have been forgotten for months: Bestia umana (Zola’s Human Beast). Of those four years, the only memory that haunts me is that title.

  My books, my work: the grotesquerie of such possessives. Everything was spoiled once literature stopped being anonymous. Decadence dates from the first author.

  I had decided never again to shake hands with anyone healthy. Yet I have had to compromise, for I soon discovered that many of those I suspected of well-being were less subject to it than I had supposed. What was the use of making enemies on the basis of mere suspicions?

  Nothing so hampers continuity of thought as to feel the mind’s insistent pressure. Perhaps this is why the mad think only in flashes.

  That man in the street — what does he want? Why is he alive? And that child and its mother, and that old man? No one finds favor in my eyes during this accursed promenade. At last I went into a butcher shop, where something like half a calf’s carcass was hanging. At the sight I was quite ready to burst into tears.

  In my fits of rage I feel vexatiously close to Saint Paul. My affinities with the frantic — with all whom I detest . . . who has ever so resembled his antipodes?

  Looming up out of a sort of primordial Ineffectually. . . . Just now, trying to contend with a serious subject and failing altogether, I went to bed. How frequently have my plans led me to this predestined term of all my ambitions!

  There is always someone above you: beyond God Himself rises Nothingness.

  To perish! — that verb which is my favorite and which, oddly enough, suggests nothing irreparable.

  Whenever I have to meet someone, I am overcome with such a craving for isolation that when I am about to speak". I lose all control over my words, and their somersaulting is taken for . . . verve!

  This universe, so magisterially miscarried — as one keeps telling onself when one happens to be in a concessive mood.

  Braggadocio and physical pain do not go together. As soon as our carcass makes itself known, we are brought back to our normal dimensions, to the most mortifying", the most devastating certitude.

  What an incitation to hilarity, hearing the word goal while following a funeral procession!

  We have always been dying, and yet death has lost none of its freshness, its originality. Herein lies the secret of secrets.

  To read is to let someone else work for you — the most delicate form of exploitation.

  Anyone who quotes us from memory — and incorrectly— is a saboteur who should be taken to court. A garbled quotation is equivalent to a betrayal, an insult, a prejudice all the more serious in that the intention was to do us a favor.

  The tormented — who are they, if not martyrs embittered by not knowing for whose sake to immolate themselves?

  To think is to submit to the whims and commands of an uncertain health.

  Having begun my day with Meister Eckhart, I then turned to Epicurus. And the day is not yet over; with whom shall I end it?

  Once I emerge from the “I,” I put myself to sleep.

  Who does not believe in Fate proves he has not lived.

  If I should ever happen to die one of these days . . .

  A middle-aged woman, pass
ing me on the street, took it into her head to announce, without looking at me, “Today I see nothing but walking corpses wherever I look.” Then, still without looking at me, she added, “I’m crazy, aren’t I, Monsieur?”

  “Not all that crazy,” I replied, with a glance of complicity.

  To see in every baby a future Richard III . . .

  At every age of our life, we discover that life is a mistake. Only at fifteen is this a revelation that combines a shudder of fear and a touch of enchantment. With time this revelation, degenerating, turns into to a truism, and thus we come to regret the period when it was a source of the unforeseen.