The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

by Matei Calinescu

  ON LYING

  “ONE WAY or another, all philosophical insight derives from an awareness of the mendacious nature of language”—Zacharias Lichter affirms. “In fact, in language, truth is always relative, partial, circumscribed—a fragment of a fragment, an echo of an echo, a mere shadow (hence the mind’s tendency to create the most delicate and complex tools to capture and measure truth. What ingenuity in the elaboration of minor geometries! What squandering of thought!)

  “That is why, in the world of words we inhabit (which the vampiric powers of language puncture and empty of reality), the supreme form of knowledge is silence. How profound is the Taoist meditation: ‘The one who knows does not speak; the one who speaks does not know.’ One and indivisible, truth is silent. It in-forms silence.

  “But our fate is to talk, talk, talk without end—silence itself becomes a word like any other. We are left only with the clear recognition that we lie ceaselessly, that when we say something, ‘we say what is not.’ It is not just that we lie, but that saying lies to us, deforms us, denudes us of our being; that our emptiness ends in devastation and nonbeing; that we become a shelter for the void; that we die with every word we utter (and this death is a mockery of life, an absolute and icy irony against life).

  “All we can do is be aware of this objective irony, whose arctic coldness we cannot escape; to give this irony a dramatic sense; to ascend, not to knowledge but to philosophical insight, which is equivalent to participation in the drama of language.

  “All that I say is a lie. Yes is a lie and no is a lie. Everything that can be said about anything is a lie. Ontologically speaking, there is no difference between calling God infinitely good and calling him a trash bin, a toothpick, or a rag; there is no difference even between saying God is and God is not.

  “And, if we admit a hierarchy of lies, I, Zacharias Lichter, am the greatest lie of all: for my maxim is: I lie, therefore I do not exist. In that sense I draw near the devil. At times I even merge with him. What saves me, in the end, is the nostalgia for truth, a metaphysical nostalgia that fills my being with something divine, with timeless peace and ineffable joy.

  “I cannot cast off the devil unless I pay the price of sharing his lying nature, of taking on his nonexistence . . .”

  EULOGY OF THE QUESTION

  “ANY QUESTION,”—Zacharias Lichter says—“no matter how innocent at first sight, probes the obscure density of language and is ultimately an indirect manifestation of the spirit’s fundamental nostalgia for perplexity. Whoever asks a question truly, with his entire being, battles unknowingly for the triumph of the interrogative, striving to reach the point where no further answers are possible (or all are possible), where the mind floats, as in some natural medium, in the dark waters of perplexity. Viewed from this perspective, the stubborn and, to some, annoying manner in which children ask questions carries far more serious philosophical import than the way in which professional metaphysicians formulate their queries (technically refined so as to actually put us at our ease). After all, for professional thinkers, asking questions is merely a game, and one with fairly elementary rules at that (compared to which, for example, the rules of chess seem marvelously complex)—a game those trained to examine such matters with analytical rigor consider—to use a euphemism—quite puerile.

  “Philosophers should accustom themselves to thinking in the presence of children. They should even try to become children again, to regain the lost vocation of asking. What they would learn first is that there are no objective criteria for establishing a hierarchy or taxonomy of questions: all questions, no matter how absurd, are equally justified; no distinction of value or nature among them is possible. A second important lesson philosophers would learn in proximity to children is that any question is part of an endless interrogative chain. In the dialectics of interrogation, the answer is only a means: its function is exclusively to generate a further question. The purpose of the interrogative process, irrespective of its practical content (with which, from the perspective of the infinite, it merges), is to facilitate the enactment of perplexity. . .

  “Whoever asks himself or others a question in earnest”—Zacharias Lichter explains—“is not seeking an answer, but wishes to discover instead how that question might be inserted into the infinite interrogative chain. The answer is death, the question is life—in a purely spiritual sense, of course, and thus essentially dramatic. That is why, in spite of appearances, skeptics are thoroughly alien to the nature of the interrogative. They are dangerous corruptors, because they degrade questions by bestowing on them the function of answers, and definitive ones at that.

  “I am always moved when revisiting a certain passage of the New Testament, in the Gospel according to John. When Jesus tells Pilate: ‘Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice,’ Pilate, the skeptic par excellence, replies with a question-answer (as if this single question were self-sufficient): ‘What is truth?’ And the chapter ends with Christ’s silence. Because of Christ’s silence, Pilate’s aesthetic-skeptical question becomes endless, reverberating forever through time: a trivial question that harbors the secret conceit of being the answer suddenly acquires a sublime resonance. Christ’s silence at that moment is the deepest eulogy of questions ever given, because one can enter into perplexity only through the Gate of the Question.

  “Likewise, we must learn from children”—Zacharias Lichter explains—“that silence is the supreme form of questioning: the moment at which the question questions itself and becomes perplexity.

  “The mental evolution of humanity—which is nothing but the extension of the Realm of Stupidity—has led to a basic fear of questions. People have always tried to domesticate the question, to circumscribe it, to make it more sociable and even useful. The miracle of language has turned into a technique of ‘pragmatic’ answers. The most tenuous hypotheses have been invested with the prestige of realities (which can be replaced at any time with other ‘more useful’ realities); and, everywhere, so-called laws of progress have been put in motion by an increasingly perfidious betrayal of the original meaning of words.

  “Words have grown rich, have gained weight, multiplied and settled, layer by layer, over the entire world, darkening it. From words arise the abscesses of all the demagogueries that render the air of time unbreathable, and truth itself has become just one more word among others.

  “The spiritual fate of the word is solely to embody the question, so that the question, which is its being, may reveal itself. The word is fuel for the question’s flame.

  “Let us ask the world what children ask their parents: why? why? why?—endlessly, to exhaustion, and then causality will seem absurd.

  “Let us ask the world: how? how? how?—endlessly, until modality becomes meaningless.

  “Let us ask the world: when? when? when?—until time unveils its essential unreality.

  “Let us ask the world: where? where? where?—and enter the paradox of spatiality.

  “To be saved, we must follow to the end (an endless end) all the questions we can think of, from the most naive to the most complex and abstract, without favoring one over another, with equal humility before all, because all roads that open under the aegis of the interrogative, if persistently followed, lead to one and the same place, a place where there are no words, a place filled with truth.”

  ON IMAGINATION

  FOR A WHILE, like a night butterfly, an aging apprentice of sorts revolved around the incandescent being of Zacharias Lichter. In fact, he had graduated in the Humanities but continued to register for classes in one or two other departments, firmly determined not to repeat his earlier error of seeing all his courses through to the end: for his true vocation was that of the “eternal student.” He was in fact an adult who tried by all possible means to prolong a rather artificial adolescence consisting of ecstatic exclamations, vague flowing gestures, a seraphic frankness, and a sweet, harmless, and persistently silly air of distraction. He walked with a light skipping motion vaguely re
miniscent of ballet steps but in an imperfect rhythm, with sudden ungainly movements. At times he would stumble deliberately, for no apparent reason, as if he had bumped into some invisible object, and then peer in vain on all sides, ahead, behind, to the right, to the left, his eyes wide in amazement.

  He enjoyed, especially during evening hours, roaming through the busiest streets while whistling airs from Mozart, arias from the Zauberflöte, from Don Giovanni, from Cosí fan tutte, and also, at times, themes more difficult to memorize, from symphonies or sonatas—and always only by Mozart, whose name he could not say or hear without some word of enthusiasm uttered in a squeal that rendered it barely decipherable. As a matter of fact, Anselmus—that’s what everyone called him, for he declared himself, openly and with utmost gravity, to be an avatar of Hoffmann’s character of that name in Der goldne Topf—expressed his appreciation of everything in this way, whenever the occasion arose. And not only his appreciation. His scale of values could be reconstructed with sufficient precision from the intensity and types of sounds he emitted, to the surprise, embarrassment, and even alarm of those not forewarned: from an elevated squeal that was almost intolerable to delicate ears (reserved for immortal works) to a more moderate one (for works of primarily historical merit), to low yet no less suggestive tones of loathing and abhorrence that, bypassing his strong vocal cords, emerged as muffled puffs, snorts and similar guttural rumbles, the main expressive role having now been assigned to scowls and grimaces.

  Just as with his real name, which he never used and only a handful knew, few had knowledge of even the skimpiest biographical details about Anselmus (at least any that were plausible). This despite his readiness to talk about himself in a confessional tone with anyone willing to listen. Anselmus’s confessions were so obviously the fabulations of a mytho-maniac ruled by fantasy that it was impossible to discern, within the texture of their steadily shifting waters, even the slightest fact or detail worthy of credence. The whole had an air of endless babble. You could easily believe you were being made fun of had not Anselmus instilled his confessions with a strange, obscure, and oddly thrilling persuasiveness. Imperceptibly, a sort of a game would be instituted in which he pretended to believe in the follies he poured forth, forcing you to pretend, in turn, that you were taking them seriously. But only pretend, nothing more. At first the situation seemed comical, and you might even start to enjoy it; but soon the humor faded and the game—since you had already agreed to play it—gripped you more forcefully. Not that you actually believed what he said, but you realized with increasing clarity that adopting the normal criteria of credibility would be pointless, misguided even, since this would compromise the normal course of the game: its charm lay in the pretense itself. In the end you no longer played the game, strictly speaking, but only played at it.

  The more absurd and incredible Anselmus’s tales became the more you were impelled by some hidden force to look increasingly convinced, to provide a more intense, though consciously mimed, participation. Thus, if you made friends with Anselmus, you might easily end up pretending to take all he said at face value, as indisputably true as daylight is for those who can see. Heartened, looking you straight in the eye and speaking in a voice that ranged up and down the scale, changing musical keys as in a recitative, Anselmus would evoke for hours on end nostalgic recollections of his childhood years, spent in a gigantic tree inhabited by 1,217 birds, whose species he could describe in detail, including both their appearance and their strange behavior. He had been left in this tree, not yet a year old, by some wretched relative who did not wish to be burdened with an orphan child. But an orphan only briefly, since Anselmus would also discourse at length on the subject of his father, a former navigator and explorer, who was living out the final years of his stormy life in some unknown locale. From this father (he had others as well, who had passed on various other character traits and habits) he had inherited a taste for travel and adventure. (Among the tales he told was one that constantly reappeared with only small variants, about a Robinsonian shipwreck and the ingenious way he had escaped the deserted island by taming a giant eagle—benefitting from his childhood years among the birds—which carried him to the balcony of his upper-floor studio in an apartment building on Sapienza Street.) From other accounts it seems he had been reared by an uncle who was a salamander (an obvious Hoffmannian echo) toward the end of the eighteenth century and could not imagine how he had landed in the present epoch, towards which he felt nothing but hostility. Unfolding and whirling his romantic imaginary cloak about him from morn to night, Anselmus never tired of playing this bizarre character, incompetent and hilarious, in whom many people found a peculiar charm.

  In fact, what Anselmus sought was to seem: to seem for the sake of seeming, with no practical aim in mind. Willfully farfetched and bewildering, his stories nonetheless aspired toward credibility of a special nature, perched at the very edge of the imaginary. A credibility which, once its rules were accepted, might produce a fissure, a tiny crack in the banal and uniform surface of reality through which one could glimpse the mirages of the imagination, the pure games of make-believe seeking only to be make-believe.

  One of his friends claimed Anselmus had confessed, some years ago, his desire to develop a “pedagogy of beguilement.” Seen in this light, the behavior of this “eternal student,” which at first sight might appear confused, gains a certain inner logic. Beguilement—Anselmus appears to believe—attains its consummate form only when it recognizes openly that it is only beguilement. In other words, it no longer deceives anyone, in the practical sense (and no longer risks becoming, even involuntarily, imposture). At that stage, that-which-beguiles no longer seems to be but, purely and simply, seems. (To seem becomes, in the strictest sense, a category.)

  We can see that Anselmus—consistent to the end—was driven by the secret desire not to seem to be one thing or the other (as one might mistakenly suspect) but to-be-in-order-to-seem. Thus seeming became for him the goal and supreme value of existence.

  In the beginning, Zacharias Lichter had been amazed and to some extent (if ever so slightly) captivated by the charm of the fluttering apparition of this “butterfly man,” whose large and delicate wings were forever changing hues and nuances. This time, the prophet had allowed himself, humanly—all too humanly, to be duped by appearances. Not long after, however, when he heard that Anselmus had developed a great admiration for him (he always accompanied Lichter’s name with his well-known superlatives, those exalted cries reserved exclusively for immortal personages and works), Zacharias Lichter was seized by an indignation he could barely curb. For him, Anselmus had become the embodiment (in a picturesque, degraded form) of the irresponsibility and misery of imagination.

  “The ‘freer’ and ‘purer’ the imagination is”—Zacharias Lichter declared—“the dirtier, the filthier, the more imbued with the debris and refuse of resentment it becomes. To the clear-sighted, its soaring flight cannot mask, beneath the unstable brilliance of false glamour, a repugnant, hideous wretchedness.

  “Up to a point, so long as it subordinates itself naturally and humbly to moral imperatives, we must admit that imagination is one of the means by which our fundamental nostalgia for being expresses itself. One might say it is even creative, but only within the confines of this nostalgia, which it can amplify and intensify, which it can ‘dramatize.’ As a mimetic force, imagination can also play a compensatory role, tending to balance the functions of the psychological mechanisms of desire and to instill a certain harmony in the interplay of their contradictory aims.

  “But imagination can also be used—hence its danger—beyond its natural borders; it can be, and often is, used to serve resentment, both in its elementary and in its more complex and highly developed forms. It is here that it finds deployment (a most noxious one) in its subtle capacity to falsify and to counterfeit, not in order to fulfill a need but to undermine and destroy reality itself in one or another of its aspects. With all its protean powers, imagination i
s apt to turn—and this can happen at any time—into an instrument of resentment against being, into an instrument of vengeance. True, the terrible resentment of which I am speaking”—and one could read sheer horror and fear in Lichter’s face—“most often chooses to manifest itself by way of possession, the slow yet sure progression into the sphere of having. (Thus was born the Realm of Stupidity, where imagination is forced to content itself with a rather humiliating ancillary position, its role confined to that of mere amusement.) But if aided by an out-of-the-ordinary imagination, resentment against being may also achieve full satisfaction in the sphere of seeming. Having achieved the status of a category, seeming may appropriate the ineffable attributes of being and place the latter under its total dominion.

  “Imagination thus seems to us, in its essence, a possible means of dematerializing, of devastating being—albeit a means illustrated at the level of caricature and buffoonery in the abject figure of Anselmus. Yes, abject, in the deepest meaning of the word”—Zacharias Lichter became heated—“for although his imagination remains mediocre (and fortunately so), his resentment against being is as deep as that of the worst monsters of having . . . In a sense, difficult as it is to believe, the dangers of seeming are potentially greater than even those of having. Who knows what would happen to us, large and small alike, enraptured by the spirit and burnt by the divine flame, if an Anselmus or someone of his ilk, just one, possessed a truly rich imagination? Because, freed from the fetters of responsibility, imagination knows no measure or bounds, filled as it is by overweening pride in its own ability to craft anything it wishes to and, above all, at being able to invent itself as pure seeming, as both the being and nonbeing of seeming.