Maldoror and Poems

by Comte de Lautreamont

  3

  The intermittent annihilation of human faculties. Whatever you might be inclined to suppose, these are no mere words. Or at least these are not words just like any others. let him who thought that, by asking an executioner to flay him alive, he was doing an act of justice, raise his hand. Let him who would expose his breast to the bullets of death hold up his head with a smile of delight. My eyes will seek out the mark of the scar; my ten fingers will concentrate the totality of their attention on carefully feeling this eccentric's flesh; I will check to see if the spatterings of his brain have spurted on to the satin of my brow. The man who would love such martyrdom is not to be found in their entire universe, is he? I do not know what laughter is, never having experienced it myself. And yet how imprudent it would be to maintain that my lips would not widen if it were granted to me to see him who claimed that, somewhere, that man exists. What no one would wish for himself has fallen to my share by an unfair stroke of fate. Not that my body is swimming in the lake of sorrow. Let us pass on then. But the mind dries up with the strain of continual and concentrated reflection; it croaks like the frogs on the marsh when a flight of ravenous flamingoes and starving herons swoops down to the rushes' edge. Happy is he who sleeps peacefully in his bead of feathers plucked from the eider's breast, without noticing that he is giving himself away. I have not slept for more than thirty years now. Since the unutterable day of my birth, I have sworn implacable hatred to the somniferous bedplanks. It was my own wish; let no one else be blamed. Quickly, abandon the abortive suspicion. Can you make out the pale garland on my brow? She who wreathed it, with her thin fingers, was tenacity. As long as any trace of searing sap flows in my bones like a torrent of molten metal, I shall not sleep. Every night I force my livid eyes to stare at the stars through the panes of my windows. To be surer of myself, a splinter of wood holds my two swollen eyelids apart. When dawn appears she finds me in the same position, my body upright against the cold plaster of the wall. However, I do sometimes happen to dream, but without for a moment losing the unshakeable consciousness of my personality and my capacity for freedom of movement; you must know that the nightmare which lurks in the phosphoric corners of the shadow, the fever which feels my face with its stump, each impure animal which raises its bleeding claw; well, it is my own will which makes them whirl around, to give a staple food to its perpetual activity. In fact free will, a mere atom avenging itself for its weakness, does not fear to affirm with powerful authority that it does not count brutishness among its sons: he who sleeps is less than an animal castrated the night before. Although insomnia drags these muscles, which already give off a scent of cypress, down into the pit, never will the white catacomb of my intellect open its sanctuaries to the eyes of the Creator. A secret and noble justice, into the arms of which I instinctively fling myself, commands me to track down this ignoble punishment remorselessly. Dreadful enemy of my imprudent soul, at the hour when the lantern is lit on the coast, I forbid my wretched back to lie on the dew of the sward. Victoriously I repel the ambushes of the hypocritical poppy. Consequently, it is clear that in this strange struggle my heart has checked his plans, starving man who eats himself. Impenetrable as the giants, I have lived incessantly with my eyes staring wide open. It is obvious that, at least during the day, anyone can offer useful resistance to the Great Exterior Object (who does not know his name?); for then the will guards its defences with remarkable ferocity. But as soon as the veil of night mists comes down, even over condemned men about to be hanged, oh, to see one's intellect in the sacrilegious hands of a stranger! A pitiless scalpel probes among its undergrowth. Conscience utters a long rattle of curses; the veil of modesty is cruelly torn away. Humiliation! Our door is open to the wild curiosity of the Celestial Bandit. I have not deserved this ignominious punishment, hideous spy of my causality! If I exist, I am not another. I do not acknowledge this ambiguous plurality in myself. I wish to reside alone in my inner deliberations. Autonomy...or let me be changed into a hippopotamus. Engulf yourself beneath the earth, anonymous stigma, and do not reappear before my haggard indignation. My subjectivity and the Creator, that is too much for one brain. When night spreads darkness over the passage of hours, who has not fought against the onset of sleep, in his bed soaking with glacial sweat? This bed, luring the dying faculties to her breast, is nothing but a tomb made of planks of squared fir. The will gradually gives way, as if in the presence of an invisible force. A viscous was forms a thick layer over the crystalline lens. The eyelids seek each other like two friends. The body is now no more than a breathing corpse. Finally, four huge stakes nail all the limbs on to the mattress. And observe, I beg of you, that the sheets are but shrouds. Here is the cresset in which the incense of religion burns. Eternity roars like a distant sea and approaches with large strides. The room has disappeared! Sometimes, vainly trying to overcome the imperfections of the organism in the midst of the deepest sleep, the hypnotized senses perceive with astonishment that it is now only a block of sepulchre-stone, and reason admirably, with incomparable subtlety: 'To get up from this bed is a more difficult problem than one might think. Sitting in a cart, I am being taken off towards the binarity of the guillotine posts. Strange to say, my inert arm has knowingly taken on the stiffness of a chimney stack. It is not at all good to dream that one is going towards the scaffold.' Blood flows in wide waves over the face. The breast repeatedly gives violent starts, heaves, and wheezes. The weight of an obelisk suppresses the free expression of rage. The real has destroyed the dreams of drowsiness! Who does not know that when the struggle continues between the ego, full of pride, and the terrible encroachment of catalepsy, the deluded mind loses its judgment? Gnawed by despair, it revels in its sickness, till it has conquered nature, and sleep, seeing its prey escape it, retreats, angry and ashamed, far away, never to return. Throw a few ashes on my flaming eyeballs. Do not stare at my never-ending eyes. Do you understand the sufferings I endure? (However, pride is gratified.) As soon as night exhorts humans to rest, a man, whom I know, strides over the countryside. I fear my resolved will succumb to the onset of old age. Let it come, that fatal day when I fall asleep! When I awake, my razor, making its way across my neck, will prove that, in fact, nothing was more real.

  4

  'But who can it be?...but who is it who dares like a conspirator to trail the rings of his body towards my black breast? Whoever you are, eccentric python, by what pretext do you excuse you ridiculous presence? Are you tormented by vast remorse? For you see, boa, your wild majesty does not, I suppose, make any exorbitant claim to exemption from the comparison I am going to make between it and the features of the criminal. This foaming whitish slime is for me the sign of rage. Listen to me: do you know that you eye is far from absorbing a ray of heavenly light? Do not forget that if your presumptuous brain thought me capable of offering you a few words of consolation, then the only motive for your mistake must be an abysmal ignorance of physiognomic science. For as long, of course, as is necessary, direct the light of your eyes towards that which I, as much as the next man, have the right to call my face! Can you not see how it is weeping? You were wrong, basilisk. you will have to seek elsewhere the miserable ration of comfort which my radical incapacity denies you, despite the numerous protestations of my good will. Oh, what force which can be expressed in sentences fatally brought you to your downfall? It is almost impossible for me to get used to the argument that you do not realize that, by flattening the fleeting curves of your triangular head with a click of my heels, I could knead an unmentionable putty with the grass of the savannah and the crushed victim's flesh.

  'Out of my sight immediately, pallid criminal! The fallacious mirage of utter dread has shown you your own spectre! Dispel these insulting suspicions, unless you want me in turn to charge you and bring a counter-accusation against you which would certainly meet with the approval of the reptilivorous serpent. What monstrous aberration of the imagination prevents you from recognizing me? Don you not recall the important services I did for
you, as a favour to an existence which I had brought out of chaos, and, on your part, the forever unforgettable vow that you would not desert my flag, that you would remain true to me till death? When you were a child (your intellect was then in its finest phase), you would be the first to climb the hill with the speed of the lizard to salute the multicoloured rays of the rising dawn with a motion of your little hand. The notes of your voice gushed forth from your sweet-sounding larynx like diamantine pearls resolving their collective personalities into the vibrant aggregation of a long hymn of adoration. Now you fling to your feet the forbearance which I have shown for too long. Gratitude has seen its roots dry up like the bed of a pond; but in its place ambition has grown to proportions which it would be painful to describe. Who is he who is listening to me, that he should have so much confidence in his own excessive weakness?

  'And who are you, audacious substance? No!...no!...I am not mistaken; and despite the multiple metamorphoses you have recourse to, your snake's head will always gleam before my eyes like a lighthouse of eternal injustice and cruel domination! He wanted to take the reins of command, but he cannot reign! He wanted to become an abomination to all the beings of creation, and in this he succeeded. He wanted to prove that he alone is monarch of the universe, and there it is that he is mistaken. Oh wretch! have you waited till this hour to hear the mutterings and the plots which, rising simultaneously from the surface of the spheres, come with wildly beating wings to graze the papillaceous sides of your destructible eardrum? The day is not far off when my hand will strike you down into the dust which you have infected with your breath, and, tearing the noxious life from your entrails, will leave your body writhing and contorted to teach the appalled traveler that this palpitating flesh which strikes his sight with astonishment and nails his dumb tongue to his palate, must not be compared, if one keeps one's composure, with the rotten trunk of an old tree which has decayed and fallen! What thought of pity can it be which makes me stay here, in your presence? You should rather retreat before me, I tell you, and go wash your immeasurable shame in the blood of a newborn baby: such are your practices. They are worthy of you. So on...keep walking straight ahead. I condemn you to become a wanderer. I condemn you to remain alone and without a family. Wander forever on your way, so that your feet can no longer hold you. Cross the sands of the desert till the end of the world engulfs the stars in nothingness. When you pass near the tiger's lair, he will rush to escape so as to avoid seeing, as in a mirror, his character mounted on the pedestal of ideal perversity. But when overmastering weariness commands you to halt before the flagstones of my palace covered with brambles and thistles, be careful with your tattered sandals and pass through the elegant vestibule on tiptoe. It is not a futile injunction. You could wake my young wife and my infant son, sleeping in the leaden vaults which run along by the foundations of the ancient castle. If you did not take these preliminary precautions, they could make you turn pale with their subterranean howling. When your inscrutable will deprived them of life, they knew how dreadful your power was, and were in no doubt at all on that point; but they did not expect (and their last adieux to me confirmed their belief) that your Providence would prove so merciless! Be that as it may, cross rapidly these abandoned and silent rooms with their emerald paneling, but tarnished armorial bearings, in which the glorious statues of my ancestors are kept. These marble bodies are incensed with you; avoid their glassy looks. It is a word of advice from the tongue of their one and only descendant. See how their arms are raised in a provocative attitude of defence, their heads thrust back proudly. Surely they have guessed the wrong you have done me; and, if you pass within range of the chill pedestals which support these sculpted blocks, vengeance awaits you there. If there is anything you need to say in your own defence, speak. It is too late for weeping now. You ought to have wept earlier, on more fitting occasions, when you had the opportunity. If your eyes have at last been opened, judge for yourself the consequences of your action. Adieu! I am going to breathe the sea-breeze on the cliffs; for my half-suffocated lungs are crying out for a sight more peaceful and more virtuous than the sight of you!