Hsüan-Tsang was moving forward over the surface of an unknown planet. It was always the same wall that he had to batter down with his body, with his arms, with his flayed feet, the same vertical rampart that closed the world and made it impermeable. On the other side there was nothing, an abyss, a hole of black shadow, perhaps, which would swallow him up. Or perhaps there was no other side.
The desert was endless, a trap of dry stone which never released from its grip those who ventured into it. Hsüan-Tsang advanced westward, and the sun sank slowly in front of him, throwing his wavering shadow behind him. When he fell for the first time, Hsüan-Tsang was filled with astonishment. With the help of his stick, he got to his feet immediately and set off again.
Then he fell a second time, a third and fourth time, again and again. Until he understood at last that his legs could no longer carry him: then he felt an icy weight moving down towards his heart. He looked at the ivory-coloured sky and the earth’s crust. The wall was no longer receding; now it stretched from one end of the desert to the other, calm, gigantic. Hsüan-Tsang no longer battered it down. He only managed to make part of it crumble away, opening up an ever narrower breach in the mud bricks, dislodging little bits of rubble with increasing difficulty. Finally, Hsüan-Tsang fell more heavily than before. His chest thudded against the hard ground, and his bones cracked. For long minutes he struggled vainly to get to his feet. There was a terrible weight on his shoulders, on the back of his neck, a weight that was crushing him against the sand. The rosy mist thickened over the desert and turned grey, then black.
Hsüan-Tsang, blind by now, groped for his stick, got hold of it and hoisted himself to his knees. Since he could no longer walk, he started crawling on his hands and knees, watching the black gulf that covered the desert. He longed to speak aloud, to beseech the Buddha’s help, or else to let out a cry so loud that it would reach the lands of the West. But his throat was like a thousand-year-old tree, and words could no longer travel through it. He longed to concentrate his thoughts on something, on water, on wind, on the sound of the wind in the filaos, on the singing of birds. But his brain was like a ten-thousand-year-old stone, and nothing came. There were only these bright images that flashed across it and then flickered out: images of frantic running, of streams of lava, or of blood, images which swept him away with them across the sand’s swell. Flights of birds of prey scattered shreds of his skin through space, long-maned chestnut horses dragged his bones in the dust along an unknown road. There were sounds, too, muffled sounds of a subterranean music vibrating through the air. It was the wind, no doubt, making the dunes sing, or perhaps it was the army of the desert’s women with their long piercing sobs. And these supernatural voices drew him towards them, forced his bleeding body to continue wriggling across the sand, westward, always westward. Thanks to them, thanks to the wild horses galloping towards the horizon, Hsüan-Tsang advanced. He crawled, day and night, anchored to his stick, his eyes closed by congealed tears, scarcely breathing, his legs transformed into bleeding stumps. Hsüan-Tsang had become the colour of the sand, cruel and hard as the sand, empty as the sky and the sun.
Hsüan-Tsang was a patch of the desert, nothing but a tiny patch of the desert slithering forward along the path of the wind, stretched thin and taut in the song of the subterranean women, westward, westward, toward water.
When the truck passed close to him he did not even hear it. When the fat red-haired man forced the neck of the bottle between his teeth he drank for minutes, hours, years on end, maybe. Then he retched. The truck lurched along in a cloud of dust, and his head banged against the metal floor, but he felt nothing.
All this happened in Libya, or else in the Gobi desert, in the year 630, 1966, something like that.
I WANT TO flee in time and in space. I want to flee in the depths of my consciousness, flee in thought and in word. I want to map out my route, then erase it, like this, time and time again. I want to break what I have created, so as to create other things, so as to break them in their turn. It is this movement which is the true movement of my life: creating, and breaking. I want to imagine, so as to obliterate the image immediately. I want to desire, the better to scatter my desire to the four winds. When I am one, I am all. And my system, my counter-system, consists also in breaking each rupture as soon as it has been achieved. No possible truth exists, but nor does any doubt either. Everything open closes again suddenly, and this stoppage is the source of thousands of resurrections. Revolution without profit, anarchy without satisfaction, unhappiness without promised happiness. I want to glide on other people’s rails, I want to be movement, movement that goes, that makes no progress, that simply counts the milestones.
When a frontier opens up, it is a new frontier that appears. When a word is pronounced it becomes a different word. I say woman, that is to say statue, that is to say octopus, that is to say wheel. I say Transvaal, that is to say Jupiter. Yin, that is to say Yang. I say nothing. I say that, this, that. I want to take a leap forward. Who has spread out these fields? Who has raised these mountains? Who has sculpted this sea? Surfaces that are always solid, surfaces enjoyed, then forsaken, inexhaustible surfaces.
One day, movement possessed me, and its exaltation shows no signs of abating yet. My motor pulls me along, and there are always new miles ahead of me. My voice has stretched me over my reasonable route, and there are always new languages ahead of me. I batter down doors. I break windows. I thrust back walls, like someone dying in bed. And I can never forget.
THE WORLD IS MODERN RAPTURE OF MECHANISMS
OF ELECTRICITY
OF AUTOMATONS
Modern world: rapture of metals and glass walls.
Pale are the walls
Pale
the broad concrete brows
facing the ocean of sound and light.
It is war, calm war
being fought with wielded lines and curves.
War between plastics and linoleum
between neon nylon and dralon®
The war of savage mouths.
Today
the armies have burrowed inside the walls
beneath their hard boots the ground shakes
and the air quivers.
They are modern
They are called
SUBSIDIZED BUILDING PROJECT, AUTOROUTE DU SUD
TURNPIKE, TORRE DE AMERICA LATINA
HIKARÍ TRAIN
KODAMÁ TRAIN
MAFEKING SEMENT MAATSKAPPIJ BEPERCK
Those really are their names.
They boast these extraordinary retractile names
They have fingernails, hooks, knives and fists
They have silver breastplates
Wide white blocks and black bars against the sky
From their throats emerge the mysterious cries
FISSURE FISSURE
LIGHTNING FLASH
(Prrfuitt-clack!
BOM! BODOM!)
Highways bridges parking lots
Snowy buildings
Deserts, o deserts!
They strike, and their staggering blows
arouse a sweet rapture.
They tear asunder
opening wounds that do not bleed but smile with pleasure.
They crush beneath their four black tyres
and trace on the skin the path’s secret
the spirit of the war against death
all the zigzags of the century unconscious of its identity.
I am fleeing. I am scurrying off like a rat. I am hurrying down the steep slopes, toiling up the hills, stumbling over the pebbles, scratching myself on the brambles. I am fleeing. I am trickling away mechanically, and each particle that detaches itself follows the same route through space. The sparkling drop of liquid falls like molten lead, splashes on to the ground, explodes into powder, bubbles, droplets. Noiselessly. Effortlessly. Without cries, words, gestures. My flight is the sliding of an avalanche, my flight is a slow flow of lava, or else the lightning’s white fracture, so ra
pid that it remains a black crack on an immense chalk-coloured wall surface, an imperishable photograph.
I am fleeing forward, backward, upward, downward, inward. I am abandoning tons of memories, just like that, leaving them behind me without the least regret. I am passing through whole series of settings, high cardboard walls on which are painted life’s falsehoods as seen by mankind:
fields of green grass swept by the wind
houses with closed shutters
white towns under the sun
coils of magical lights
deserted streets
parks, gardens, jungles, swamps over which a thin vapour hovers, cafés filled with legs and hands, temples, iron towers, twenty-storey hotels padded with felt, expressways along which blind vehicles hurtle, hospitals, rivers, pebble beaches, black cliffs where birds are perched, etcetera.
I am floating. I am swimming backward. I am the propeller-driven boat, and the helicopter with the blades that can decapitate. I am the fierce bird descending the staircase of the air, I am the fish with transparent wings. I am the flight of flies, the zigzag of nervous mosquitoes. I am the succulent plant, imprisoned in its red vase, which will never burst into flower. I am idiotic movement, heavy vibration, the gesticulation of desire, the moment of thirst, of copulation, of speech. I am the unfurling, then the contraction. The muscle, and at the end of the arm with its bulging veins there is the fist tightened round the pistol spitting a bullet that pierces the throat. I am the heat of the sun, the slow progress of sweat-drops over the curve of the loins. The young woman’s back arches, while her hand touches the tips of her toes and paints the nails a pearly hue. The drowned girl’s hair floats in the ever-flowing water, coils of seaweed, herbs of forgetfulness.
I am he who strides forward without knowing where he is going. The earth is small, all paths are short, one always arrives somewhere. The boundless sea is scarcely as wide as a lake, one can see shores, shores everywhere. In the far horizon, lost in the mist, languishes the thin black strip shaped like a fish’s back. That is where I come from, that is where I am going. There are trees, there, giant grasses, thickets inhabited by insects. There are rivers that wind gently down, eating away their bends. There are hollows of shadow, splashes of mud, dances of rain, rocks, plains of snow. As for me, I pass over all these things, arduously, clumsily. I recognize each fold of the ground, now, I can make out the tracks of my own footsteps preceding me.
I have no thirst for what is new, remain impervious to virgin lands. No, I am not obsessed by novelty. I have a hankering for this place that I shall recognize as having always been mine although I did not know it. To choose a territory with care and passion: I would like nothing better than that the voyage should serve to find, to inherit. I would so much like the movement to stop, so that I might become involved in a different movement, that movement, resembling the unfolding of a beautiful story, which carries me happily onward from one point in my life to the next.
Signed:
John Traveller
THIS IS WHAT Ben said to me one day, as he sat in front of a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce, in a garden where the company also included his mother and an army of ants: ‘You know, I’d do absolutely anything to achieve self-expression. If someone said to me, go on, make some jam, I’d try to achieve self-expression through jam-making.’
While drinking tea, in the stifling heat, Locke Rush was speaking of Zen. The Master of Ryutaku-ji had taught him this: to create silence in oneself, to empty oneself totally, to be no longer anything at all. Then I showed him the garden, all those things, the millions of little leaves that look at you all the time, that are impossible to forget. Locke Rush was displeased: he did not like thinking about little leaves.
SELF-CRITICISM
IT IS TRUE: there are no limits any longer. Everything breaks free, splits into parts, speeds off in all directions. After starting to open doors of flight, after liberating one’s mind, or one’s hands . . . Just how far can one let oneself be carried away? When I lie on my bed, in the dark, my head resting on a pillow, ideas surge up endlessly, explode, trail a fiery wake. I want to stop. I want to grasp. But it is impossible. Perhaps I have not come far enough, then? No alternative but to begin again, try to capture the sense of an idea, a half-idea. Where will that idea carry me? Toward what knowledge of the future, toward what revolt, toward what resolve? Can anything be more wretched than writing for one’s own pleasure? Writing so as to re-read oneself in a glow of self-satisfaction, playing tricks with words, playing tricks with memory, allusions: eyes, that is what must be liquidated, once and for all! Who cares about my mother, my life, my birth, my gastric troubles! Acting so sincere! What nonsense! Discussing contemporary problems, sneering alongside the hyenas, showing off in front of a row of happily grinning mouths! What a life! Or else, lying: lying by concealing one’s faults, volunteering ten slight failings so as to conceal a single shameful defect . . . And style, that stupidity called style. The mechanism that immediately allays any twinge of doubt as one turns the dog-eared page. Ah yes, that’s him, that’s him all right, that’s just his touch. We were expecting him to turn up there, he hasn’t let us down. Ha! I can see a guideline, I can perceive a deeper purpose in the work. What is that musty odour? Philosophy, no doubt. Quick now, the label: Gothic novel, propaganda movie, Western, surrealism, theatre of the absurd. And when, by chance, a small door, no, not even that, a fanlight is opened, allowing a little substance to leak out: why, what’s that? Oh no, that’s not his at all, that’s terrible, that’s not a bit like him! What’s that supposed to be about?
Books, caverns of resounding echoes. And you, iron collars that strangle me, straitjackets that make me gasp for breath. Decorations everywhere: flourishes, clusters, baroque foliage, all disguising the rock at the centre. The real action is taking place in the background, very far away. The one who plays, the one who refuses, the one who betrays. The one who hopes, who lives on thin air, on purity, on distance: eager eyes can never have too many magnifying glasses through which to view him.
Everything that I write, I cross out. Everything that I seize brutally and smear on to paper, with ink uglier than glue, the whole lot is repudiated, simultaneously, by someone other than myself: a hidden phantom who shakes his head and makes endless denials. Confess! Confess! I switch on the third-degree lamp and shine it straight into the face of the accused. I shake him by the shoulders, punch him in the mouth, whisper to him what he is required to say, and give him another punch for good measure. The world would rejoice if he said yes. But he shakes his head, refusing silently.
Do you know what? Books should never again have names.
Everyone should work, with ant-like concentration, on a single great tome which would be the dictionary of the world, and should contain nothing but songs. Alternatively, everything should be burned at regular intervals, on fixed dates. Every twentieth year would be proclaimed extermination year. Paintings, movies, museums, cathedrals, houses, temples, barracks, archives, bibles, clothes, prisons, hospitals, airplanes, factories, farm crops, everything would end up as pulp, ashes, muddy liquids. No more statues, no more medals, no more telephone directories, no more war memorials, no more exegeses.
How to go in every direction? How to obliterate one’s tracks as one advances? What mask to assume, what false nose, what base thought, what spurious existence? To deceive others is to get to know oneself, and vice versa.
It is not sufficient to hurl abuse at literature. That must be done with something other than words. Abandon one’s conscious self, disappear into the world. Become a Martian. Reappear on earth one day and enter a big restaurant, watch the people moving about between the tables, and say:
*zkpptqlnph!
Which would mean, roughly:
‘How comical to see all these erect creatures suddenly fold themselves in two and sit down on their backsides!’
But how to become a Martian?
I must forget myself. I must lose my name. I must become small
er, even smaller, so small that no one will ever notice me. I must learn to walk along the flagstones, surrounded by scurrying ants, toward the reeking mountain where a full garbage can points its peak at the sun. I must learn to make marks and notches. I must halt the theory-machine, the beautiful, clinking, chrome-pistoned machine that turns out an endless stream of theorems. There are so many figures of rhetoric, systems, postulates, Q.E.D.s, machines:
machines for living
machines for walking
anti-war machines
love-making machines
machines for forgetting death.
Everyone has his own kind of machine, so what’s the use? There are those who think Cadillac and those who think Volkswagen.
The Book of Flights Page 10