Scraps

by Michel Leiris

  Cleopatra’s nose. Cromwell’s urethra. To say nothing of technical inventions like the cooking of foods, assuming the soup pot is indissolubly linked to family life as we understand it!

  Of these obsessive lacunae—lesions that worry us and that must be repaired if we are to have the euphoric feeling of wholly possessing ourselves—there is one, perhaps, that makes me feel its emptiness in a slightly more troubling manner than the others and I would give a great deal to be able to fill it. Quite probably, however, what is in question here is not a lacuna or one of those cavities with whimsical trajectories such as one finds in pieces of old wood drilled by insects, but an absolute lack (an original deficiency, not a disappearance after the fact), so that, logically, one would be wasting one’s time over a false problem to attempt, at any cost, to reconstitute the absent part the way one would mend a piece of moth-eaten clothing or an old sock. Yet it is not easy to resist the attraction exerted by this lacuna, just as when one finds oneself two steps from an abyss, one must force oneself to turn one’s eyes away from it, even though one knows that by prolonging this useless contemplation one may expect to feel only nausea, not to mention a certain risk of falling should one’s head begin to spin. However questionable, where good taste is concerned, may be the use of a word that drags behind it such a sulfurous wake, in the case described here, “abyss” does not seem to me excessive as a term of comparison. The paramount event that I have always been incapable of recapturing (for the simple reason that it must never have occurred, either because there isn’t even the possibility of such a discovery, otherwise than in a purely formal manner, as long as one is not up against the wall, or because it acts only by degrees and in a surreptitious way as the end approaches) is in fact that which would have been constituted, for me, by my sudden awareness of death, or, more precisely, of the fact that my own life—that life which I cannot believe is subject to the same laws as the lives of others—would inevitably end, abruptly, in a complete collapse.

  Difficult to imagine death as the three dots indicating suspension (a break, after which there is nothing more except, as it happens, the physical process of progressive disintegration) rather than as a fermata (indicating that not everything has been said after the emission of the note, which is followed by a pause of unlimited duration in which fioriture, a species of other life still traversed by a resonance, are possible). If the decisive break that is the fact of dying remains so inconceivable that the imagination furnishes only the poorest symbols of it (the idea of falling, leaping, or changing place, the last image being the basis of the word trépas [passage; poet., death, decease]), death as a state—even though in truth just as hard to conceive since what is nothing cannot, by definition, be the substance of any representation unless it is an illusory one—the state of death, of which all religions, including Buddhism with its ambiguous nirvana, are the stubborn negation, seems to offer a field less unpromising for our minds’ constructions. It is possible that on this matter (as on others, in fact, once I start generalizing) I’m sticking my neck out. Yet it is certain that where I personally am concerned, when I try to picture to myself what death is, I think, not at all of death seen as a razors-edge limit separating a state from the absence of state, but of a sort of other mode of existence (the furious lust for survival coming into play here, naturally, and against all reason). Thus, what data I was able to glean when I searched again (with the naive hope of recalling some actual experience) for how what I called my “sudden awareness of death” could have come about, amounted essentially to situations in which it seems I had, not the sort of impression of slipping into nothingness given one by, for example, an indisposition such as a fainting fit, but the impression either of finding myself situated on the frontier of the other world, of receiving a message from it, even of having entered it without disintegrating there, or of embracing the course of life and death with eyes that looked out from beyond the grave. The attitude betrayed by such a statement is a religious attitude, an irrational one in any case, I won’t deny it.

  At Viroflay once again (and no doubt my age when I was taken there on vacation, four and then five, explains why that locality was the scene of so many of the experiences I am describing) I hear a high-pitched, apparently distant noise. A noise I am afraid of, because it is evening and dark on the road where we are walking. I don’t think there were any of those trees there that were always so frightening when we turned at nightfall into an avenue or any sort of path bordered by them. No memory of foliage over my head or of one of those strange King of the Alder silhouettes so often traced by branches and trunks; rather, the open sky and perhaps even some stars. The noise that makes such a deep impression on me is a sort of rapid and continuous rattling, surely an insect’s buzzing (but at that time I am incapable of such an identification). Do I look as though I am going to cry or do I seem “tout chose” [upset], my throat a little tight as I ask what sort of thing I’m hearing? My father says, to reassure me: “It’s a carriage that is very far away, very far away,” which makes me even more afraid.

  Why not have said it was an insect? I think about it now and it awakens in me a little suspicion as to the veracity of the story. Perhaps I am distorting the quality of that noise when I describe a rasping comparable to the song of the cicada or the cricket, for it is doubtful that my father wouldn’t have recognized this rasping, and the hypothesis of a misapprehension on his part being thus ruled out, what motive could have impelled him to talk to me about a carriage instead of quite simply ascribing to its real source a noise that, in order not to worry me, only had to be explained and would not have signified anything more alarming if caused by an insect’s wing sheaths rather than a vehicle? Or have I taken this answer which my father is supposed to have given me and either changed it or coupled it with circumstances different from those in which he could actually have said something of that sort? Yet it seems to me that if my fear increased, it was in fact because of that explanatory phrase and its inadequacy, as though I had detected its falseness and thought it was only a white lie meant to hide from me something that I might have feared with good reason.

  Whether or not this is a serious reason for rejecting my suspicion, it is still true that I have retained a very vivid memory of that fear. An imprecise, even fantastic memory of how my father might have been involved. A real memory of the fear provoked by that slight buzzing heard in the night, a noise the anguish of which resulted perhaps exclusively from the fact that it manifested the state of wakefulness of something infinitesimal or distant, the only sound present in the silence of a more or less country place where I imagined that at such an hour everything had to be asleep or beginning to fall asleep.

  Fear of the night. Fear of the dark. But it is not only the impossibility of seeing or of seeing more than a compact mass of blackness that is involved. There is the idea of that opaque portion of time over which sleep reigns. A mysterious world, this, whose strangeness is felt when, awake oneself, one feels that others only live, now, with a reduced life, which in the adult can give rise to a certain euphoria but will be unpleasantly disturbing to the wakeful one if he is a child, ordinarily the first to bed and already unconscious while the grownups are still busy with their occupations. To take a walk on a summer evening, at the hour known as entre chien et loup [dusk; lit., between dog and wolf] (the border of day and night and also the frontier zone between the world of waking and the world of sleep) in a suburb still fairly rural some forty-five years ago was, of course, to a child as quick to feel uneasy as I always was, not a very reassuring thing. First of all, the twilight, a time of day that inclines one to dread (I noted this even when I was a grown man, when I came back from my first trip to Africa and had a certain difficulty reaccustoming myself to the Parisian twilights which, unlike the almost nonexistant twilight of the tropical regions, were intolerable to me, so long and sad did I find them). Then, the exoticism assumed, in the eyes of the young city-dweller I was, by a landscape which, though only a suburban
one, was nevertheless more pastoral in appearance than the city setting I was used to. Lastly, the fact that as night approached even the immediate vicinity of a parish like Viroflay was deserted enough to create an impression of isolation in a child used to a certain life in the streets, even in the neighborhood, extremely quiet at that time, where his parents lived. There was reason to suppose, consequently, that before hearing the noise that intrigued me so strongly, I felt ill at ease, already prey to a vague fear that only required the slightest pretext to become concrete. What exactly, then, did that noise contribute?

  I must answer this question if I want to reveal why such a story, more than any other I could call upon to illustrate the uneasiness with which the night inspired me, seems to me to sustain a particular relationship with the idea I have of death. But as I answer, I cannot avoid some constructing, since I will have to substitute reasoning and conjecture for what has been denied me by a memory too often defective, in my opinion. If, then, I fill a lacuna with this after-the-fact analysis and if, apparently reducing the excessively large portion of unknown that yawns in me, it seems to me I am at the same time diminishing the lion’s share that the emptiness has carved out for itself there in anticipation, the portion of myself thus recaptured from nothingness will have been recaptured in a completely artificial and provisional way, without my being able to flatter myself that I have successfully concluded an enterprise that I would like to be able to compare to other filling operations like the great drainage labors performed in the seventeenth century by the Dutch to win habitable territories from the sea—labors I sometimes contemplate as images illustrating what art is, in the case of the works one can regard as its most important manifestations: an attempt to organize or colonize parcels of land that it is vitally important to protect from the nameless thing in us whose flood threatens us.

  There is no sea—or Zuider Zee—around us, but only the country, or rather, what is to me country. Definitely, the noise of our footsteps on the road. A few lights, perhaps, scattered as the houses are scattered. It is likely that we are talking, that, father to mother, brother to brother (or sister), and parents to children we are exchanging desultory remarks about certain events of the day or small details along our path. A short after-dinner walk to help us digest our food and “take the air,” since temporarily removing ourselves from the miasmas of Paris is the great aim of this summer sojourn. We must be, at the very most, a quarter of an hour from our house. My father must have arrived, as usual, by an evening train which, his work finished, he took from Saint Lazare Station. Suddenly, the noise.

  If I hear cicadas in a sunny landscape these days, it only carries to an extreme the pleasure I feel in finding myself bathed in light and heat: a festive din that would seem to have issued from a quantity of voices that are themselves only the expression, in another register, of an ardor and a luminosity too fierce to remain echoless. When, more than a year ago now, I heard the incredible racket produced in Martinique, as soon as darkness came, by the grasshoppers they call cabrit bois [wood goat] and the frogs—among other very diverse creatures customarily classified, all and sundry, as belonging to the animal kingdom—this too seemed comforting to me: no harmonic correspondence between this clamor and the moistness of a night in the rainy season in the tropics but, as in the case of the cicadas, a manifold jubilation and its musical result. In two different climates and at very different hours, a jumble of sounds, exuberance, a sonorous burgeoning signaling an incalculable number of presences, too infinitesimal to cause fear (as might an outburst from a human crowd) and, quite the contrary, reassuring since their number conjures up an intense life capable of proliferating to infinity.

  Within the silence almost unbroken by our words and steps on the Viroflay road, what, then, did this noise—an insect’s rasping or the thin rattle of a carriage whose axles and spokes might be no more than frail dry limbs—what did this noise, in its uniqueness, come murmuring to me?

  After careful consideration, I think the noise said one single thing and the unique thing that it said was that it was unique.

  World of waking, world of sleep: quite distinct entities which, like two parallels, are meant to go along side by side but without ever meeting. We chatted and we walked, a family awake, in a place relatively deserted and wrapped in darkness. Only a few lights affirmed that not everything was absolutely asleep in this sea where we were a little island of wakefulness. A timid affirmation, without strength against the silence that testified all around to our isolation in the middle of an empty space, where no image of any living body loomed up and where no creature seemed even to attain a sufficient degree of reality for that reality, involving at least one instance of active functions (breath, pulse, whatever?), to give birth to the least sound.

  Because the motion of the day and the inertia of the night come together in him, a sleepwalker is always frightening. As was true of Jeannot, who, also in Viroflay, came one night to the foot of the bed of my cousin (the one who had such a marvelous railway in his garden) and said to him: “Come and play?” The noise I heard intruded, perhaps, into our little island in the manner of a sleepwalker slipping, all white in his nightshirt, through the shadows of a bedroom: an apparition proving that among all the things in sleep there is one—completely proximate to us though very distant from our world (for its gaze evokes nothing of what we find in the catalog of human sentiments)—there is one that persists in carrying on its life, all alone and all closed in on itself. Quite as strange as a diver, prisoner of a costume that turns him into an amphibian, or as a Martian severed from his planet, is the advent of this upright stature before us, who thought all the others were lying down, motionless between their sheets, and did not expect the coming of a specter as alone among us as he would be in a cemetery. The same is the case with the intrusion of the isolated, unexpected voice (which is not even a voice). A weak song flung forth only for itself alone and which one divines to be the accompaniment or the direct product of some occupation that will not let itself be divined: a fragile sound that will not have carried any message through the labyrinth formed by the internal parts of the organ of hearing except to designate itself, too, an ambassador from the world of sleep (so neighbor to the world of death) since its high-pitched clinking introduced itself into our sphere of wakeful creatures as the unique sign of a unique obstinacy too solitary to be situated otherwise than beyond.

  I am performing a series of shifts: from darkness to sleep, from suburb to desert, from oblivion to the Zuider Zee, from insect to sleepwalker, from solitude to death. With truly close associations of images or notions there mingles, here, a certain enthusiasm of the pen, always so quick to skip from one subject to another as soon as a severe censorship (a weighing of all the words) ceases to be exercised; and I hardly see why, at the pace I am going, I would restrain myself from calling upon mandibules [mandibles], for instance, to justify, with the help of the new link that arrives by the tortuous way of rhyme, my passage from the insect to the somnambule [sleepwalker]—himself associated with that deep-sea worker, the diver, and then with the monster fallen from another planet—and thus strengthen the connection, a little too slack, that has already been established between the tardily susurrating little beast and the waking sleeper based on the idea of a solitary from a strange world (or peculiar isolate [isolé insolite]) in nocturnal intrusion. Doesn’t mandibules [mandibles], more than gueule [mouth of an animal] or mâchoire [jaw of a person or animal] (so firmly situated in everyday life), harbor a singular danger, like the anthrax-carrying fly I thought I recognized in each of the fat buzzing flies whose brilliant, bluish black bodies were the color of anthracite?

  If I return to the very banal anecdote I have been mining this way, shaking it a bit to make it cough up and not resigning myself to setting it aside despite all that is dubious about it, I notice an omission: following the trail of the insect heard in the night, I ignored the carriage. Even if I am off the track when I attribute to my father the explanation of
the noise by the distant presence of a vehicle (a vehicle drawn by an animal, and not an automobile, for voiture rolls along in me outfitted with that meaning, in this real memory or memory already in part mendacious and warped once again by the point of view of the here and now, which is that of a memory of a memory—a surprising false bottom! somewhat as there exists a theater of theater: the pantomime staged by Hamlet to unmask a guilty man who is himself only a king with a tinsel crown, or the silent scene unfolding in the background, watched by a few of the actors placed on the proscenium and themselves watched by the public, so that those in the silent scene, second-degree actors set in a distance accentuated by their muteness, pass almost to the rank of apparitions, as is the case for my memory, elevated to the second power by the written recollection I make of it quite aside from the fact that in itself it is already an unwarrantable interference of a noise faint enough and little enough localized so that one may believe it has risen from the background of memory), even if such an attribution is only an error that thrusts me into the unreality of fiction, it remains true that at a certain moment of the time according to which my life is made and unmade—a moment no doubt remote since it was most likely earlier than the period when, in common language, voiture began to be used to mean automobile (which, if the moment in question had been later, would inevitably have produced in my thinking at least a little uncertainty about exactly how the vehicle was moving along)—this carriage which could only be pulled by a horse advanced toward me like one of those stage props contributing to produce an effect of fear, whether it may have been physically part of the real scenario, or whether through some indiscernible affinity it may have added itself, one day, to the vague recollection that was the more or less distorted reflection of that scenario.