by E. M. Cioran
I have often wondered whether, in the case of Caillois, the refusal of reassessment (what he calls his “fundamental dispersion”) would not make difficult and even impossible any attempt to identify his “true self.” He is the contrary of an obsessive, yet only obsessives yield their “true self,” for they alone perhaps are sufficiently limited to have such a thing. Without attributing to him obsessions that he would reject, I have nonetheless been led to seek where he is supremely himself, and which of his books, had he written only that one, would reveal him best and testify that he has pursued and overtaken his own essence. It has seemed to me that Caillois, subject to so many enthusiasms, has encountered only one passion, and that in the work where he describes it, he has divulged the best part of his secret.
When one undertakes a quest in any realm, the sign of finding is a change of tone, those outbursts of lyricism that are not a priori indispensable. Stones begins with a preface-hymn and continues, for page after page, on a note of enthusiasm tempered by meticulousness. I leave aside the secondary reasons for this fervor in order to indicate only the principal one, which seems to me to reside in the search and the nostalgia for the primordial, in the obsession with beginnings, with the worlds before man, with a mystery “slower, vaster, and graver than the fate of that transitory species.” To hark back not only beyond the human but beyond life itself, to attain to the principle of the ages, to make oneself a contemporary of the immemorial: such is the enterprise of this exalted mineralogist who rejoices when he detects, in a nodule of agate that is abnormally light, the sound of a liquid, water hidden there since the dawn of the planet, “anterior” water, “water of origins,” “incorruptible fluid” that gives the sensation to the living man contemplating it that he is but a “dumbfounded intruder” in the universe.
The quest for beginnings is the most important of all those we can undertake. Each of us makes it, if only in brief moments, as if performing this return presented the unique means of recovering and transcending ourselves, of triumphing over ourselves and over everything. It is also the only mode of escape that is not a desertion or a deception. But we have got in the habit of attaching ourselves to the future, of putting apocalypse above cosmogony, of idolizing the explosion and the end, of banking to an absurd degree on the Revolution or the Last Judgment. Would it not be wiser to turn back, toward a chaos much richer than the one we anticipate? It is toward the moment when this initial chaos, gradually subsiding, experimented with form that Caillois chooses to turn, toward that phase where stones, after the “glowing moment of their genesis.” became “algebra, vertigo, order.” But whether he invokes them burning, melting, or incurably cold, he exhibits, in his description of them, an ardor that is not habitual in him. I am thinking particularly of his almost visionary way of presenting a specimen of native copper taken from Lake Michigan, whose brittle meshes, “at once fragile and hard, offer the imagination the paradox of a hyperbolic sclerosis. They inexplicably transcend the Inert; they add the rigor of death to what never was alive. They inscribe upon the metal’s surface the folds of a superfluous, ostentatious, pleonastic shroud.”
Reading Stones, I found myself wondering more than once if this was not a language sealed inside its own significations, with no reality other than its particular glamour. Under these conditions, why not go see for myself? After all, I have never looked at a stone, and as for the ones called “precious,” that epithet alone suffices to make me detest them. So I paid a visit to the Hall of Mineralogy and, to my great surprise, discovered that the book had merely told the truth, that it was the work not of a virtuoso but of a guide, determined to grasp from within certain solidified marvels, in order to reconstitute, by a scarcely conceivable regression, their state of original indeterminacy. I had just initiated myself into the mineral, during a crucial hour that brought home to me the inanity of being a sculptor or a painter. Having haunted, a few years earlier, the paleontology section of the museum, I felt then that the skeletons on display were so clean as to disgust one with the scandalous precariousness of flesh, that they could by contrast suggest a certain serenity. Yet compared to stones, skeletons are pitiful. But do stones themselves actually afford, as Caillois observes, “several serenities,” and will they wield their spellbinding power over him to the end? Will they resist his need for change, his craving for the new, the disease of “dispersion”? In thinking back to the moment of their genesis, he approached an illumination an unexpected kind of mystical state, an abyss in which to dissolve. This illumination was to be short-lived: once the abyss has been escaped, we are informed very clearly that it contains nothing divine that is not matter, lava, fusion, cosmic tumult. I cannot insist sufficiently on the originality of this failure. We are all, of course, failures in some mystic aspiration; we have all recorded our limits and our impossibilities at the heart of some extreme experience. But if we have tried to explode our temporal shackles, it is because we have frequented the Desert Fathers, Meister Eckhart, or the later Buddhists — whereas it was by brooding over dendrites and pyrites, or by following in reverse the career of a certain quartz, of a certain agate, that Caillois felt himself slide out of time and made contact, beyond the great “technical ordeals,” with the “motionless matter of the longest quietude,” where he could not continue because his mind, tempted and disappointed by trance, found it impossible to accede to deliverance by Nothing, not even the mineral. He would say it himself in his book, and better still in the conclusion of the Récit du Délogé, a revealing text recently published in Commerce: “I have attained the ultimate reality, which is not nothingness but the blur that I have become.” Hence not nothingness, and we realize why: nothingness is ultimately merely a purer version of God, which is why the mystics have plunged into it with such frenzy, as have, moreover the unbelievers with a certain religious capital. Caillois does not envy the former and would probably shrink from being classed with the latter. He acknowledges himself unsuited for the “illuminating annihilation”; he admits his defeat, his lassitudes, and his resignations; he proclaims and savors his collapse. After the enfeeblement of a fascination, after the orgy and ecstasy of origins — the superbia of disarray, the journey into . . . blur.
13
Michaux
The Passion of the Exhaustive
FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, Michaux would take me regularly to the Grand Palais, where all sorts of scientific films were shown — some curious, others technical, impenetrable. To tell the truth, I was intrigued less by the projections than by the interest my friend took in them. I could not understand the motive behind so obstinate an attention. How, I kept wondering, did a mind so vehement, so oriented toward itself, in perpetual fervor or frenzy, manage to be attracted by demonstrations so meticulous, so scandalously impersonal? It was only later, brooding over his explorations of drugs, that I understood what excesses of objectivity and rigor Michaux could achieve. His scruples were to lead him to a fetishism of the infinitesimal, of the imperceptible nuance, as much psychological as verbal, endlessly recapitulated with a breathless insistence. To reach vertigo by investigation, that seemed to me the secret of his enterprise. Read, in L’Infini turbulent, the page where he describes himself as “pierced by white,” where everything is white, where “hesitation itself is white,” and “horripilation” no less. After that there is no more white: he has exhausted white, he has killed white. His obsession with the bottom of things makes him brutal: he liquidates appearance after appearance, not sparing one; he exterminates them by engulfing himself in them, by pursuing them precisely to their bottom — that bottom which is nonexistent, radically insignificant. . . . One English critic has found these soundings “terrifying.” For me, on the contrary, they are positive and exalting in their impatience to disintegrate and to pulverize — by which I mean to discover and to know, truth in anything being merely the consummation of a sapping operation.
Though he classified himself among those who are “born tired,” what has he ever done but flee delusion, ex
cavate, search? Nothing, it is true, is so tiring as the effort toward lucidity, toward the vision without mercy. Apropos of a famous contemporary fascinated by that universal gangrene, History, he one day used a revealing expression: “spiritual blindness,” Michaux himself, on the contrary, is someone who has abused the imperative to see within and around himself, to get to the bottom not only of an idea (which is easier than one thinks) but of the merest experience or impression: has he not subjected each of his sensations to a scrutiny that includes everything — torture, jubilation, will-to-conquest? This passion to apprehend himself, this exhaustive coming-to-consciousness, leads to an ultimatum he ceaselessly addresses, a devastating incursion into the darkest zones of his being.
It is from such a given that we must envision his revolt against his dreams, and the need he feels, despite the hegemony of psychoanalysis, to minimize them, to denounce them, to lay them open to ridicule. Disappointed by them, he delights in punishing them and in proclaiming their emptiness. But the real reason for his fury is perhaps less their nullity than their total independence of him, the’ privilege they enjoy of escaping his censorship, of hiding, of mocking and humiliating him by their mediocrity. Mediocre, yes, but autonomous, sovereign. It is in the name of consciousness, of becoming conscious as an exigence and a duty, and also out of wounded pride, that Michaux inculpates and calumnies them, that he lodges an indictment against them, a veritable challenge to the enthusiasms of the period. By discrediting the performances of the unconscious, he rids himself of the most precious illusion in circulation for over half a century.
All interior violence is contagious; his more than any other. One never leaves his presence demoralized. And it is of little consequence after all whether one frequents him assiduously or only on occasion, from the moment when, in all essential circumstances, one tries to imagine his reaction or his remarks: solitary, omnipresent, he is always there . . . , forever inseparable from what counts in an existence. This long-distance intimacy is possible only with an obsessive who is capable of impartiality, an introvert who is open to everything and disposed to speak of everything (even of current affairs). His views on the international situation, his diagnoses of political matters, are remarkably just and often prophetic. To have so exact a perception of the external world and at the same time manage to apprehend delirium from within, to traverse its many forms, to appropriate them, so to speak — one can accept this anomaly, so captivating, so enviable, as just that, without seeking to understand it. Yet I am going to suggest a necessarily approximate explanation. Nothing is more agreeable, at least for me, than a conversation with Michaux about sickness. It is as if he had anticipated and feared all diseases, expected and fled them. . . . Any one of his books is a procession of symptoms, of threats glimpsed and in part made actual, infirmities pondered again and again. His sensibility to the diverse modalities of disequilibrium is prodigious. But politics, that sub-Promethean temptation, what is politics but a permanent and exasperated disequilibrium, the curse par excellence of a megalomaniac monkey? The least neutral mind, the least passive I know, could not help but be interested in politics, if only to wield his sagacity or his disgust. Writers in general, when they comment upon current events, display a laughable naïveté. It is important, it seems to me, to cite an exception. I believe I caught Michaux only once in flagrante delieto, not of naïveté (he is psychologically unfit for it) but of “good feelings,” of confidence, of abandon, of something I translated at the time into terms it may be useful to give here:
“I admired him for his aggressive clear-sightedness, for his denials and his phobias, for the sum of his aversions. Last night, in the little street where we had been talking for hours, he told me, with quite an unexpected touch of emotion, that the idea of man’s ultimate disappearance moved him. . . . Whereupon I left him, convinced I should never forgive him for that commiseration and that weakness.”
If I extract this unspeakably naive note from an undated diary, it is to show that at the time what I especially prized in him was his incisive, tense, “inhuman” aspect, his explosions and his sneers, his flaying humor, his vocation as a convulsionary and a gentleman. Indeed, it seemed secondary that he was a poet. One day he confessed, I remember, that he sometimes wondered whether he was one. That he is a poet is obvious, but it is conceivable that he might not have been one.
What he is, much more obviously, I understood when I realized that as a young man, contemplating entering the priesthood, he devoured the mystics, I assert as fact that had he not been one himself, he would never have launched himself so methodically, so desperately, in pursuit of extreme states. Extreme, this side of the absolute. His works on drugs proceeded from the dialogue with the mystic he originally was, a repressed and sabotaged mystic waiting to take his revenge. If we were to collect all the passages in which Michaux deals with ecstasy, and if we were to suppress all references in them to mescaline or any other hallucinogen, would we not have the impression of reading explicitly religious experiences, inspired and not provoked, and deserving to figure in a breviary of unique moments and dazzling heresies? The mystics aspire not to subside into God but to exceed Him, swept on as they are by something remote, by a delirium of the ultimate, which we encounter among all those who have been visited and submerged by trance states. Michaux joins the mystics through his “inner gusts,” his longing to attack the inconceivable, to force it, to break it open, to go beyond, without ever stopping, without retreating before any danger. Having neither the luck nor the misfortune to weigh anchor in the absolute, he creates his own abysses, provoking ever new ones, plunges into them and describes them. These abysses, it may be objected, are only states. No doubt. But for us everything is a state, and nothing but a state, consigned as we are to psychology ever since we were forbidden to wander in the Supreme. . . .
A true mystic, yet an unrealized one. We understand Michaux insofar as he has undertaken everything in order not to conclude, keeping his irony at the very extremities to which his researches have led him. When he has reached some limit-experience, an “impure absolute” where he vacillates, where he no longer knows where he has come out, he never fails to resort to a familiar or comical turn of phrase, in order to make it clear that he is still himself, that he remembers that he is experimenting, that he will never completely identify himself with any of the moments of his quest. In all of these simultaneous excesses cohabit the ecstatic outbursts of an Angela di Foligno and the sarcasms of a Swift.
It is admirable that a man so constituted to destroy himself should have lived for many years in full possession of his vitality. “I take out the old man . . . , his damn body that breaks down, to which he clings so, our one body for the two of us,” he writes in 1952, in Vents et Poussières. Always that interval between sensation and consciousness, always that superiority over what he is and over what he knows. . . . Thus he has managed, in his metaphysical perturbations — in his perturbations tout court — to remain, by the obsession of knowledge, external to himself. Whereas our contradictions and incompatibilities eventually subjugate and paralyze us, Michaux has succeeded in making himself the master of his, without slipping toward sagesse, without being swallowed up by it. All his life he has been tempted by India — merely tempted, fortunately, for if by some fatal metamorphosis he had ended by yielding to such enchantments, beclouded, he would have abdicated his prerogative of possessing more than one flaw that leads to wisdom and yet at the same time being fundamentally refractory to it. What a catastrophe had he taken to Vedanta, or to Buddhism! He would have left his gifts there, his faculty for excess. Deliverance would have annihilated him as a writer: no more “gusts/” no more torments, no more exploits. It is because he has not lowered himself to any formula of salvation, to any simulacrum of illumination, that frequenting him is so stimulating. He offers one nothing, he is-what he is, he has no recipe for serenity, he continues, he feels his way, as if he were beginning. And he accepts one, on condition that one offers him nothing, either. On
ce again, a non-sage, a non-sage on his own. It astonishes me that he has not succumbed to so much intensity. It is true that his intensity is not of that accidental, fluctuating kind which is manifested in fits and starts: constant, lawless, it resides in itself and relies upon itself, it is inexhaustible precariousness, “intensity of being,” an expression I borrow from the language of the theologians, the only one suitable to designate a success.
1973
14
Benjamin Fondane
6 Rue Rollin
THE MOST CREASED and furrowed face one could imagine, a face with millennial wrinkles never still, animated as they were by the most contagious and the most explosive torment: I could not contemplate that countenance enough. Never before had I seen such harmony between appearance and utterance, between physiognomy and speech. Impossible for me to think of Fondane’s slightest remark without immediately perceiving the imperious presence of his features.