‘Mysticism?’
‘Yes, mysticism as the only possible form of religion. Naturally I soon came up against Pascal. And, retrospectively, I thus found myself purely and simply a heretic, in relation to St. Augustine or to Thomism. It was then, if you like, that I went through something resembling a crisis. But it was still within the faith, and there was nothing in the nature of doubt involved. For me, Descartes and Malebranche had always represented alien worlds, those of reasoning and dialectics. I read them, I understood them, but if doubt had to be cast on anything it was on them, with their amazing claim to be putting everything in order, to be constructing a world on the basis of human speech, poverty-stricken, clumsy speech. You know, thought divided into two parts because the sentence falls into two parts, because cause leads to consequence, the theme to the predicate, the principal to the subordinate. Si deus est bonus est. It all struck me as puerile, petty, blind. Something else was needed. Something that overflowed, poured itself out, an utter calm, a total innocence in the face of reality.’
‘And Ruysbroek brought you that?’
‘Not at all! Ruysbroek went in for dialectics, too. But he was a theologian, and in his day, in the fourteenth century, no one would have accepted pure mystical experience as the basis of spiritual elevation. It was even dangerous to be a mystic, in his day. Trances were rather disapproved of. So there had to be a frame of reference, exegesis, serious, conclusive arguments. Besides, the language wasn’t the same, it didn’t enable him to express himself freely. Come to think of it, it seems to me that our period is perfect for ecstasy. We can even try to write it down!’
‘But you find in Ruysbroek, and in mysticism in general, the essence of religious virtue? Why is that?’
‘There is no real reason. I prefer to posit an a priori: that faith is a trance, and that everything approximating to that trance partakes of faith.’
‘But that’s a dangerous thing to say, that any and every trance—’
‘I’m not interested in any and every trance.’
‘A particular category of trance, then?’
‘Absolutely not. The state of trance comes almost naturally to a human being; very little is needed to induce it. A trifle, a little alcohol in the blood-stream, a small dose of a drug, an excess of oxygen, anger, fatigue. But the state is interesting only in so far as it can be guided. It’s a loss of balance, but an unbalance that brings unknown regions of the mind into play. In actual fact there is no fundamental difference between a man intoxicated with alcohol and a saint gathered up into ecstasy. And yet there is a difference; the difference of interpretation. The moment of madness is preceded by a phase during which the subject’s consciousness is tottering, as it were; he is undergoing a violent cerebral stimulus. That is the phase that really manufactures the ecstasy and gives it meaning. Whereas ecstasy in itself is blind. It is a total vacuum, with no ascent and no fall. A flat calm. So one might argue that the saint will never know God. He approaches Him, and then draws away from Him. And these two stages are the ones that exist. Between them is nothingness. The void, total amnesia. At the moment X of ecstasy, the saint and the drunkard are alike, they are at the same point. They dwell in the same empty, terrifying paradise.’
‘Is it important that God doesn’t exist?’
‘What is your religion?’
‘I have no real religion. I’m not against the principle of religion, because it is the only means of organizing religious sentiment. But I think that in the majority of cases the religious spirit has priority over religious organization. I mean that the spirit of the pure, veritable ascent towards God is essential, whereas the federation, I mean the set of rules that constitutes a religion such as Catholicism, is merely contingent. And my objection to the different religions, and I mean Christianity just as much as Buddhism, is that this body of ritual prevents the individual from developing to the full in a God personal to himself. It directs, it manufactures prohibitions, it sets up as ethics, whereas it’s quite obvious that God is beyond all ethical considerations.’
‘Isn’t God good?’
‘No, properly speaking, God is not good: he is. Good and bad are paltry words that apply to a set of rules governing a few details of our practical lives. Why should God concern himself with our paltry words and our paltry values? No, God is not good. He is more than that. He is the richest, the most perfect, the most powerful form of being, as it were. He makes even the abstraction of being into something concrete. And I don’t think it would even be possible to conceive of being if God had not first conferred his state upon it. God is creation. So he is inextinguishable, undirected principle, life itself. Remember the words: “I Am That I Am.” No other human words have better grasped and described the divine form. Timeless, no, not even timeless and infinite. The principle. The fact that there is something in place of nothing.’
‘But then, God has no need—’
‘And far beyond all expression, even. If you like, I am God. There is no doubt to maintain, no question to put. You are. Therefore you are God. You cannot be otherwise. If you were not God, you would not exist.’
‘A kind of pantheism?’
‘No, because it isn’t a question of worshipping God in all things. God is external, and when I told you you were God and I was God, it was not in order to give you the idea that in my opinion God is a sort of body within which we are living. No, I only wanted to suggest a kind of analogy between the two words of the phrase, to act upon being by determining it in terms of God. Since Being is in some sort a separate dimension, just as relative as time and space, but just as real. And God being the absolute form of that dimension, just as infinity is the absolute form of space, and eternity the absolute form of time. In actual fact, the absolute form of Being is also the absolute form of space and the absolute form of time. That is why God is so utterly unimaginable to men’s poor minds.’
‘But then, God lays no commands upon men? Men are free?’
‘Yes, they are free. But the saint’s life sets little store upon such freedom. What matters is the most perfect possible knowledge of the divine dimension. Men are conditioned by this divine nature they bear within them owing to the fact that they are alive. Good and evil are only wretched human contingencies. The police are there to enforce those contingencies. But what every man has to do, and what nobody forces him to do, is to ascend towards God. To rise higher, to set his will and his desire on his own state of existence, and to grasp, yes, in a sense, to grasp, to embrace, to be closer and closer to the centre, the nucleus, to multiply, by worship and saintliness, the unique power of life, to develop it, like that, without seeing, blindly, with faith and concentration, with a determination to become greater and greater, and thus without pause, the most directly, the most carefully in the world, until we draw close to the first truth, the initial will, the centre from which light and warmth emanate, to concrete thought, which resembles action, total existence.’
Here Martin hesitated a little, for the first time, and slightly lowering his voice, only for the tape recorder, he let slip the words:
‘And that point having been reached, yes, is it important that God doesn’t exist? I ask you, is it important, is it really important?’
Next day, because of the heat and the noise of music from all the transistors, Martin went down into the courtyard of the building. It was about half past three in the afternoon. There was no one there. In the square box up on the ninth floor, his father and mother were swarming like insects. The sky was excruciatingly blue, and the sun was swimming where it stood, making a white hole above the earth, seeming to draw back and sink into the depths of space, indefinitely. Martin walked round the courtyard, keeping close to the garage doors. In the middle of the yard there was a patch of sand, for the children. Martin began circling round this patch, circling closer and closer. In the end he found himself obliged to climb up on the concrete rim, and then to walk inside the round patch, on the sand. He made his circles still narrower, floundering
through the fine gravel, sinking up to the ankles at every step. When he came to the centre he stood there for a moment, quite still. Then he tilted his head towards the sky and looked at the populated walls all round him. There was nobody at the windows. The yawning holes were empty, blackish, innumerable. Here and there were scraps of shirt, belt or bra, hanging from lines and flapping in the breeze. The music was almost inaudible from this point of the courtyard. In fact a kind of silence reigned there, weighing on one; something comparable to the death-like murmur of deep water, to the tuneless hum of several atmospheres in process of bursting various eardrums.
Then the sky seemed to come down on to his forehead, crushing him in the manner of a gigantic hammer. Everything capsized simultaneously, and he, bewildered, found himself a falling stone, he had become pure velocity. He was floating in space, the prisoner of gravity, and something wide and flat was coming up to meet him, something menacing, swelling to a tremendous size, covered with towns and trees, streaked with roads and railways, with funny shadows advancing crookedly, and the whole thing was coming closer every second, placing him, himself, on a straight line, indefinitely taut, perfectly vertical, swept by a tearing wind that took his breath away. He was falling towards the sky, as though towards a sort of earth. When the shock came, Martin rolled right over on the sand-heap and lay there on his face, crushed.
Half an hour went by like this, while he was incapable of movement. Then the heat of the sun, the noise of the cars rushing past on either side of the house, the sandy dust faintly stirred by the breeze, all combined to work on him little by little and bring him back to life. Martin began crawling over the heap of grit. He advanced imperceptibly, wriggling on his stomach, his face thrust into the shifting, dirty mass. His hands plunged into the sand, burrowing, swimming, crushing, dragging the rest of his body behind them as best they could, like the flippers of a tortoise. Sometimes, as they groped, they encountered unexpected objects that had been lying there for weeks—orange peel, old, half-sucked sweets, broken combs, things like twisted rakes and buckets with holes in them, matchboxes full of sand, greasy papers, the sticks from lollies or ice-cream cones, and even a baby’s sandal, completely worn through by the friction of the gritty particles.
As he advanced through the sand in this way, Martin was breathing deeply, panting in little grunts, ‘a-ha,’ ‘a-ha.’ It had all got inside his clothes, filled his hair and his nose, and turned him into a queer, crawling animal, a sort of earthworm or snail, a mole, toiling to get away, dragging its puny body millimetre by millimetre out of the sticky terrain. The sand had covered the lenses of his spectacles with a sort of greyish mist, and he was having to move more or less at random. Only his hands really knew where they were going; they were feeling the ground in all directions, the fingers sometimes stuck out like antennae; they were movement itself, and a frantic joy came trembling to birth in the middle of their palms, simply from their contact with the living layers of grit, an electric, crumbly joy that spread through the wrists, elbows, shoulders, until it filled his whole body. These hands had become independent beings, agile five-footed animals, dragging after them the weight of a whole bundle of inert flesh.
When he touched the rim of the sand-pit, Martin drew himself up. First he struggled to his knees, with his shoulders hunched and his head bent. Then he sat down in the sand, leant back on his hands, and stayed there motionless, vacant-eyed.
Raising his head to look up the building, he noticed his father and mother leaning over the balcony, looking tiny, hardly as big as flies, watching him. His mother waved to him, and he could guess the words that were forming on her lips, the words that were dropping down on him, precise and insensible, like the overflow from a pot of geraniums.
‘I tell you he’s playing! Look at Martin, I tell you he’s playing! There he is, on the sand-heap, having fun. Enjoying himself like a child. Our boy’s playing in the sand!’
In the courtyard the violet shadow was slowly advancing in the opposite direction from the sun.
Martin forgot the little wire silhouettes leaning over the high balcony, and gazed at the moving shadow. It was crawling slowly across the courtyard, like a kind of delicate cloud. Little by little, in separate series of tiny leaps, it was occupying the entire space, seeping into furrows, climbing up obstacles and going down the other side at one stride, one didn’t really know how; it was sliding by magic to the bottom of holes, writhing like a snake into air-shafts and drains, crossing the lines drawn on the ground, melting everything round it. The pebbles, the gravel, the hard scraps of flint, were all mixing together, becoming porous. It was like water, like the bluish flood of a queer rising tide, which was breaking its bounds, suddenly shattering the rings round objects, with a blow from an iron-grey millimetre-measure. The sun and the light had made this courtyard white, immaculate, full of things and creatures sparkling in their independence: and now the shadow was passing over them, destroying them each in turn, not sparing a single one. The contents of the broken circles ran out and spread over the ground, filling the basin of the courtyard with a strange, glaucous liquid that had refuse swimming in it.
On his pedestal of sand, Martin had been turned into a shipwrecked mariner, into the inhabitant of a desert island. He had as it were found refuge there, where he was still preserved from liquefaction by a ray of sun that slanted gently down to him through the gap on the west side of the building. But the shadow was still advancing, and the sun itself was declining. Soon it would have got back to the lowest point of its fall; meanwhile, for a few minutes, it would continue to slide down the vertical corridor between the two blocks of flats. Birds would be flying across its electric face, big, black birds which would hover in the air from left to right, from right to left. Then, without a jolt, indeed quite naturally, the sky would become empty of it. Nothing would remain but the earth, covered with stone and metal, the earth still vibrating with heat, flat as a long mirror, and the mercury-coloured sea, and the light would go on moving among the particles, moving through the invisible atmosphere like a swarm of bees, with elusive wreaths of pale lightnings vanishing lethargically into their hiding-places, like retinal impressions. When everything was finished one would feel very much alone in the world, one would have nothing to do but to hide oneself, perhaps even trembling, face to the ground, and to breathe in very quietly, with one’s mouth pressed into a hole between two roots, the last whiffs of life, the last puffs of the delicious warmth.
The shadow of the house was still advancing towards Martin. He, with his eyes wide open behind his spectacles, was still watching the shadow as it advanced. The lower the sun sank in the vertical corridor, the quicker the shadow moved. Every leap it made, now, was practically over before it had been noticed. The liquid decomposition was gaining ground by tens of centimetres, by whole metres at a time. And the remarkable thing was that each of its advances, however rapid, completely effaced the one before. It was exactly as though this change from light to shadow were not a passage but a sort of absolute, incomprehensible metamorphosis. There, the concrete surface was white. Here, it was black. Like a game. Exactly like a game, a giant chess-board whose squares had turned over of their own accord, one by one, mechanically, so that now only their blackish, identical under-sides could be seen.
But where night and emptiness reigned supreme, what richness there was, what powerful scents and structures, what a swarming of blurred things, what a wave of intermingled visions, of splendours! One was lulled, carried away, embarked on an invisible ship, and currents, set hard, held you tight, served as your limbs. That was how it was. One was suddenly plunged into a marvellous show, one penetrated into a deep, dazzling, nocturnal picture, like diving head first into a glass jar, and one discovered the lairs, the secrets of life degraded into action, a positive culture medium, a zone of fermentation where the evaporating, indistinct elements were rising slowly in the form of heavy streamers of cloud, ceaselessly passing and re-passing one another. It was something like a night, not a ca
lm night, not a silent night, but one in which everything was stamped at the bottom of its soul with the sign of ferocity; a wild beast’s rage, looming out of the past, no doubt, and rising up slowly, dangerously, through periods of time. This was the domain of total absence, a kind of sunset with no sun and no horizon, and the calm and destruction were perpetrating themselves mechanically, beginning their action in the depths of Martin’s brain and then encroaching further and further, spreading through his skin and his organs, encroaching still more, flowing over the ground like human blood, but like blood intermingled with the venom of some sand-dwelling viper, frozen, saburral, paralysing blood.
Martin was in the shadow by now. As though turned back into himself, his head shrinking down into his neck and peering into the depths of his body, into the strange darkness that billowed in his entrails. That had been his secret longing, for all these years; to live within his own body, to live only on himself, inside himself, to turn himself into a cavern and live in it. Sitting on his pedestal of sand, his arms stretched backwards and buried to above the wrists like posts, he had been slowly covered by a sort of fine grey dust, a thin sandy film showered over him by the light breeze. The shadow, as it went by, had dulled it still further. Nothing was shining any more; everything was grey—his clothes, his hair, his skin, his eyes, his spectacles, his shirt-buttons, even the gold chain he wore round his neck. And yet he could see. He was still thinking of something, he was pretending that long, very straight roads were drawn on the flat concrete floor of the yard. It was as though awareness of the total deliquescence of that shrunken universe, death, had become possible only because of the presence behind him, around him, beyond the ramparts of the building, of an extraordinary explosion of life and light. Not the memory of the sun and the heat, but a species of last, desperate battle that was still being fought on the earth. Boundaries were tirelessly reconstructing themselves, walls were rebuilding themselves as fast as they were destroyed, lines were marked out, then they were effaced, then they reappeared. The flayed world was growing new scales, and the shadow, as it passed over rough surfaces and sharp points, over the signs carved in the hard substance, was washing, perpetually washing, flooding everything with its gentle ebb and flow, like an invisible hand — or rather, no, like an imperishable erosion rocking the whole surface of the ground, turning it into a long, soft beach, an almost imperceptibly shiny stretch of mud-banks where the infinite skies were reflected.
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