The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

by Matei Calinescu

  “Obviously, I’m not thinking of active, energetic, well-preserved old people, whose age, though advanced, is still abstract and somehow theoretical. Those can be, and often are, true monsters of resentment and hate. (Classical characterology teaches us that we can winnow from among them the misers; and also some of the cruelest agents of power: inflexible tormentors, inquisitors and gray eminences who lurk in shadows, and many others, petty and insignificant, who turn, violently and cold-heartedly, against those closest to them or even against themselves.) Not of those am I thinking, but of the ones with bodies broken by the years; apoplectics with impotence deeply embedded in their flesh; decrepit beings with foggy minds and tear-filled eyes brimming with infinite kindness and placid stupor; the weak and the deaf, stammering with soft, viscous speech, forgetting everything a moment later, crippled by every affliction of old age, parading shy and imbecilic smiles; those who, drained by years of sleep deprivation, can no longer fall asleep or even dare to hope to—their life swathed in murkiness, sanctified by the lack of all desire, ashamed even at the thought that they might still desire, unless the very memory of desire itself has left them . . .

  “Of these grand old people I am thinking, those crushed by the world’s weariness; of the shallow fountain of their conscience, so clear that invisible angels are mirrored in it.”

  A while back an old woman passed away in a narrow and damp shack located in the courtyard facing Zacharias Lichter’s crumbling garage. She was of such advanced age that she could no longer keep track of her years, nor did her relatives, who had abandoned her in the hope that neglect would hasten her demise. She had shrunk, curled over, and could barely drag herself along in a world crammed with shadows and strange, muffled, unreal sounds, heard as if from afar. Sleep had long since deserted her: she was spending her nights lying on her fir-wood bed and straw mattress, often mumbling indistinctly with her eyes open. It was perhaps her way of dreaming, of relieving herself of the unknown burdens that dreams usually disperse. Frail as a bird, helpless, she would have dwindled away sooner—to the satisfaction of her relatives, who for all that must have felt some remorse—had she not been cared for by a few good-hearted neighbors, and especially by Zacharias Lichter, who owed her a debt of gratitude. For it was she who had presented him with the Bible.

  Her sight was so weakened that, no longer able to discern letters, she had asked him to read to her from the holy book whenever he had the time. And this Lichter did, accompanying his reading with passionate comments, really quite unsuitable for the pious, simpleminded crone’s trivially superstitious comprehension. But this did not matter in the least. Even less so as shortly afterwards the old woman also lost her hearing: she knew she was being read to but was unable to distinguish any words in that distant flow. Even so, perhaps more than ever, she was happy someone was talking to her—even if more and more hazily, more dimly and more vaguely; and just as on other occasions, Lichter immersed himself totally in what he was saying, with that expansive passion and persuasive force which, while not moving the other, kept seeking out new, mysterious, and inexhaustible resources.

  Other than that, the old woman got by on almost nothing. When it came to food, she ate like a sparrow; a mug of water, brought by someone from the pump in the yard, sufficed her for an entire day. A few drops quenched her thirst and the rest she used to wash herself as best she could, poor soul, in the rusty basin she kept in her tiny room with its warped walls. Every other day, Lichter or someone else would sweep the floor and tidy up her things. Those who entered were struck by the simplicity and cleanliness of the interior (in spite of the pungent, apparently sourceless odor of mold; for mold is not a sign of filth but of the abandoned, the outmoded, of oblivion, its odor almost abstract). The old woman usually sat all day long in a chair. In winter it was drawn up near the cast-iron stove on which a tin plate filled with sand had been placed to keep the room warm; from spring to fall, in fine weather, she sat outside the low door in the heat of the sun. She sat quietly, without seeming to expect or want anything. Her eyes stared ahead blankly, with the tinge of a lifeless smile imprinted on her furrowed visage, whose dry wrinkles, when seen up close, recalled geological strata frozen in time.

  Her hours appeared to pass in unperturbed, mysterious, unspoken joy. It was hard to say if she recognized anyone (who knows, though, perhaps in the wraith-like beings who approached her and now and then addressed her in garbled words, she may have recognized dear old faces, because tears would sometimes come to her eyes). It was equally hard to decide if she knew who she was anymore—she may well have forgotten her own name, for she had long since ceased to use it, and those who cared for her in her old age never did: they called her Măicuţă or “Little Mother” (some, I think, still recalled her name, but Lichter, at any rate, never knew it).

  “What use is it to live in such a state of imbecility”—someone said, interrupting Zacharias Lichter’s poignant discourse on the meaning of old age just at the point where he was evoking his rapport with the poor old woman, who had recently passed away—“when you’re no longer of use to anyone and have no idea what a burden you are to others or the predicament you pose? What sense is there in a life like that?”

  “What use? What sense?”—Zacharias Lichter flared up—“. . . never have I felt more deeply imbued with pure existence than when I faced that woman. God, how much I learned from her nearly sightless eyes. Old people, and old people alone, can teach us, in our ignorance—without words, beyond words—what it means to be. Only they can unveil, if only for a moment, the divine miracle of being, that being we all experience unconsciously in childhood and which we may never experience again. In itself, in its mysterious essence, old age is a blessing.

  “A blessing bearing the wisdom of existence, lifted not only beyond possessions—in the ordinary sense of the word—but also beyond our inner possessions, the accumulations of our personal memories, our own past (because we have our past, because what we were turns into having, into a paradoxical possession, whose present nonbeing we cherish so dearly) . . . Old age is Rising just as birth is Falling. Rising and shedding all that clung to our being as it rolled in the dirt of the world: so many endless false entanglements. Extreme old age is a natural and universal catharsis, a purification . . .

  “How rare true old age is, however! How fiercely we fight against its wisdom! And thus, instead of standing speechless with awe and love in its presence, instead of worshiping it on our knees, we even ask ourselves: ‘What use is it to live in such a state of imbecility?’ No use, of course, not the slightest: for wisdom is beyond use, useless in its pure silence! What sense could it have? Of course, no sense whatever: for old age truly begins where all sense ends, where nothing has significance, where everything is . . . Pure transcendence and pure overflowing into the nothingness of language. The sacred power of making the word face its void, of filling it with that void.

  “Talking to that old woman, to Măicuţă”—Zacharias Lichter was saying—“I felt that my mission was being fulfilled: as if I had talked to a child or to Leopold Nacht . . . But no, Leopold Nacht humbles me with his silence, makes me feel ashamed of my need to talk. My ‘Little Mother,’ on the other hand, gave me the feeling that talking is not totally a curse, that a gleam of holiness can spring from language and that language can find its deeper meaning in its very lack of significance...”

  ON SAYING AND WRITING

  ZACHARIAS Lichter wrote rarely: a poem he’d been carrying about in his head for a long time or a stray, stubborn thought that threatened to become a poem. Perhaps he wrote to “free” himself, to dispel those words that, against his will, kept repeating themselves obsessively in identical, nagging succession. Writing for him was not so much an act of expression as a desire to sweep away some prior, overly crystallized form of expression, to dissolve and wash it from his memory in order to return to what, in Lichterian terms, one might call creative forgetting.

  Jotted down hastily in an irregular, almost illegib
le hand on the margin of a newspaper or some scrap of paper picked up who knows where, Zacharias Lichter’s poems or poetic fragments were usually thrown away instantly or abandoned on the very spot where they were created. This habit, aided by happenstance, enabled his biographer to come into possession of a few. Clearly their author cared nothing for them, and one supposes (at least one familiar with his way of thinking) that the simple act of writing them down filled Lichter with unavowed shame. To go so far as to gather and keep them, to assume their paternity, would have been in his eyes the epitome of self-abasement. And so indeed it would have been, had not the prophet—as we know him—serenely ignored even the possibility of doing so.

  “The fiery truth”—Zacharias Lichter would say—“can only be transmitted orally. There is no doubt, at any rate, that in each of its hypostases, saying is superior to writing. The one-who-speaks requires a spiritual energy and a continuity of creative tension that may be lacking, and often is, in the one-who-writes.

  “The one-who-speaks (leaving aside the vulgar, low specimen endowed or overendowed with that ‘verve’ through which the instinct of sociability manifests itself) imparts to saying his own inner lights, infusing and nurturing the painful flame of the ineffable with his own being. What one says is imbued with the sense of what cannot be said.

  “Only when spoken can the word fulfill its profound use as a vehicle of revelation. Only speech can soar to the threshold beyond which alienation no longer holds sway. Writing is condemned to be a prisoner in the world of having. It is indeed fateful that we cannot preserve ourselves unless we accept estrangement: even our own selves are preserved only through self-estrangement. No doubt spoken language—insofar as it is a social act and presupposes, like any social act, a system of conventions—is not completely independent from the dialectics of estrangement. But there are moments—and it is to those, and only those, that I am now referring—when speech regains, as if by miracle, something of its original force of emanation, when it manages to recapture the vocation of sharing in the emanatory essence of the primordial Logos through which absolute being pronounced itself, revealed itself as Word. Any human language is impure, but the one-who-speaks places himself—in a virtual sense—much closer to the pure inaccessibility of being than the one-who-writes (no matter what he writes).

  “Entrapped in the meshes of having, man managed to intervene in the game of memory and forgetting by altering its natural balance. Writing appeared as a means of conservation (hence followed the entire vertiginous historical evolution, the geometrical progression of the ability to conserve, at all levels and in all fields, the diversification and refinement of individual or collective possessiveness). Initially conceived as a means of lengthening memory, writing brought about the tyranny of memory—but of an objectified, dehumanized memory that is drawn from the living rivers of forgetting and hardened into sign. Spoken words fly forth and are made to fly; written words remain and accumulate.

  “The invention of writing marks the start of a process of corrupting human memory. In time, it is the sheet of paper covered with dead letters that must remember, must know, and must even think! Yes, as strange as it may seem, there are some who cannot even form thoughts without holding a pencil in hand before a blank sheet of paper. There are authors, slaves of the letter, who remain silent when asked what their books are about, remain mute and unruffled. After all, it suffices to read those books to discover what the books remember, what the books know, what the books think. In a way, one can say that writing writes itself while its author (a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice) is simply a medium for conveying the boundless and unforeseeable complexity of its intentions.

  “We can identify the seed of evil that writing offers such fertile soil”—Zacharias Lichter would say—“in memory itself. This happens even when memory has not yet alienated itself from the fluxes and refluxes of the primeval ocean of life-begetting forgetfulness. For memory is always animated by a secret will towards order and domination. It is endowed with the ability to fragment the whole and classify fragments according to their affinities, from contiguity to analogy and contrast. Thus, memory must be considered the archetype of any power. Here is not the place to talk about sacred powers or about the blessings of Remembering. But in social terms, it is not hard to see that a main characteristic of the development of humanity’s political and economic organization was its effort to specialize and perfect (from the perspective of the known) all the processes and functions of memory. Writing and then printing were turning points on this road.

  “All prejudice aside, how could one fail to see that the origins of writing are directly linked with the imperatives of power? The invention of writing—and this was in fact its primary aim—massively deepened the resources of oppression and exploitation. It facilitated or, better said, made possible the creation of large and stable empires and the tyrannical exercise of power in ever-larger social realms. Initially (and later in more hidden, subtler, and at the same time more efficient forms), writing was a weapon in the hands of power, a means of subjection and repression; a weapon and an instrument of torture of an invisible (and thus more savage, more monstrous) cruelty. From this perspective, writing meant a great victory for having and should be seen as a tragic event in the history of mankind, as the inauguration of an epoch in which human suffering (brought about by oppression) has recorded an unprecedented rise. If writing appears to us as a way of socializing memory—with the implications I have mentioned in passing—it is clear that freedom, on the social plane of course, can only be defined as an exit from history and as forgetting.

  “One cannot say that people have ceased to forget. On the contrary, they forget more and more easily and lightheartedly, entrusting all they know, or imagine they know, to the sterile memory of the written word. Having lived for several millennia under the increasingly exclusive domination of the mechanisms of memory, constantly obsessed by an unnatural need for history and historicity, people seem to have forgotten even Forgetting itself. How many can still discern, behind the false axiology of dehumanized memory, the profound values of forgetting? How many can still partake of them?

  “The one-who-speaks tends to reach, perhaps unawares, toward the sphere of these values. Indeed, when spoken language manages to rise above the practical, speech is inspired with being, shares in Being’s eternal recurrence and loses itself in Being’s eternal self-forgetting. The one-who-writes—and I have in mind here a structure that may be revealed even in those who are foreign to the various writing professions—also has access to forgetting: but to another kind of forgetting, which one indulges in as a ‘reward,’ in which one settles down and sprawls as in something owned, something soiled and debased by a sense of possession. The one-who-writes ‘functionalizes’ forgetting.

  “Our world”—Zacharias Lichter went on—“can be compared to a huge book. We all wander willy-nilly through its pages, and our miserable beings are bloodied—to carry the metaphor further—by the endless brambles of the letters we are passing through. Even when we speak, it is as if we were reading aloud. On the other hand, it cannot be that what we say has not already been written. Everything has been written; everything has been turned into letter. We should not fool ourselves, but neither should we lose sight of our duty to try to rekindle, at all cost, the sacred flame of the primeval word. And when I say ‘at all cost’ I am thinking primarily of the painful cost of lying: a lying that (even when consubstantial with speaking) can only hope to find salvation in forgetting, in the all-begetting power of Forgetting. This forgetting—a fruit of perplexity—is our final purpose. In the spiritual order, stripped of the evils that accompanied its birth and multiplied in the course of its evolution, writing can only aspire, in the best of cases, to the accomplishment of various minor tasks. Spoken language may draw near to perplexity and—ideally—even partake in it. As far as I know, however, only the silence of Leopold Nacht is in it.”

  ON THE MEANING OF LOVE

  LEOPOLD Nacht ha
d a younger sister, and through her he met an ugly and very modest young blond woman with whom he fell in love. His natural predisposition to silence was increased by the unknown and seemingly threatening new mood that was ravaging his being. Head drooping forward, chin hitting chest, with a fixed and empty gaze, Poldy would sit at a table—forgetting even his half-filled vodka glass—doing nothing for hours on end except grinding his teeth with a somber and dumbfounded air. He had not spoken a word in weeks—not even to Zacharias Lichter—and anyone who met him for the first time at this period would have been convinced they were dealing with an aphasiac.

  The truth is that Leopold Nacht did not need to speak. Zacharias Lichter seemed to have become Leopold Nacht’s spokesman. He would speak exclusively in his friend’s name, devoting all his force of persuasion and resources of verbal incandescence to his service. Thus, in the end, he managed to dispel the blond girl’s natural revulsion and fear of Nacht and convinced her that she was loved more than anyone ever had been loved or ever would be—loved more than anyone could dream. After a while the threesome—Nacht, Lichter, and the blond girl—were always seen together: the first, collapsed in his silent stupor; the girl, with a disoriented and sad air, silent herself; and between the two, the prophet, lips parched by the divine flame, eyes lit as if by an inner sun, speaking uninterruptedly and gesticulating wildly.

  “Never was there a purer miracle of love”—Zacharias Lichter was saying. “For only the great Helpless One is granted the power of true love; and only the love of the great Barren One—which is constantly reborn yet ever the same—fulfills itself in pure fruition; and only the mouth of the great Silent One, from which even the memory of words has vanished, forms the Whole . . . We should prostrate ourselves at the feet of the divine Nacht and kiss the traces of his crooked and lame legs! Let us pray to the helpless, barren, silent Nacht! For he is the meaning of love.”