It is true that all roads lead to the stone garden. And yet that is, fatally, the garden of madness, not of wisdom. Its microcosms and schemata do not liberate human thought: they spin it round until it sinks in giddy exhaustion, they drive it crazy with the blatant presence of their boundary walls. The thirteen rocks are floating among the evenly-patterned ripples of the ocean of sand. Shut up in the cage whose walls are mirrors, self-awareness does not cease to roam space; but what it encounters out there is precisely this shutting up, this human will, this language. It is impossible for self-awareness to get out of its cage, to escape into the boundless plains, despite its yearning to be free. Organization is not soothing, it is, on the contrary, a war against the rival organization, that of chaos, swarming, hatred. The moon is the symbol of hell, because it shows us just what the world is, in relation to the universe. The stars are deep pits of vengeance, being signals of impotence. I no longer want to see the earth. I no longer want to learn the pattern of history. I no longer want to find myself looking into my own eyes, I no longer want to acknowledge the existence of the old sphere of thought crammed with its prisoners. I no longer even want to imagine any longer this tiny desert suspended between its four walls; if I did think about it, it would be in the manner of a snail or a beetle. I want to crawl, to run over the featureless ground, to bump up against obstacles, to bleed over sharp pebbles, to disappear into deep valleys, to scale incomprehensible peaks. I refuse to be shown, ever again, this silence, this frozen light, this adventure cut off in mid-flight. Damnable garden of self-awareness! How could I possibly still face it, when I am incapable of looking at an apple, or a table, without immediately seeing the void’s steep cliff? Garden that I know too well, I love it, and its gentleness and goodness enter me through my host of wounds. No, no, journeys do not end there. Impossible. Journeys go farther, still farther. They are swallowed up in the mist, and vanish, and there are more women’s faces than there are grains of sand! I hate the absolute. I hate meditation I hate the monks of self-awareness. I hate all truths conquered from hell. I hate wisdom. Listen, I’ll tell you what I’d really like: to be at the controls of a powerful bike, burning up the roads at 140 miles an hour.
Life of a tree
(1914–1966)
1914 The tree (umbrella pine) is born.
1919 The tree grows rapidly. Abundance of rain and sun during the spring and summer. The tree’s rings are wide and regular.
1924 When it is ten years old, something has given the tree a jolt and made it lean (landslip? fall of a neighbouring tree?). The rings are now wider on the lower side, resulting from a reaction by the wood to help the tree support the extra weight.
1934 The tree grows straight upward, once more; but its neighbours are also growing, and their foliage and roots deprive the tree of part of its sun and water. The rings are narrower.
1937 The surrounding trees are pruned. The largest ones are cut down altogether, and there is once again plenty of food and sunshine. The tree grows rapidly.
1940 A fire sweeps the forest. Luckily, the tree is only lightly scorched. Each year, a new layer covers the burn scar.
1957 A new series of narrow rings, due perhaps to an insect such as the larva of the sawfly, which feed on the leaves and buds of many conifers.
1966 Death of the tree, at the age of 52, cut down by an electric saw.
Enough of this ‘I’! The person I want to talk about is him, is myself after becoming his friend. He is there. He has fled. He has moved forward against a background of crimes, hostile looks, wars. He has lived in all those places that people hurry through, in airport concourses, dance halls, hotels, ships, rafts, plastic-and-chrome bars. He has visited every derelict site. He has lugged bags and suitcases. He has burned up a lot of cigarette paper. He has drunk every kind of water, beer, rice wine. Why has he done all that? What was the point?
There wasn’t any. No point at all.
The white-painted ship steams out of Yokohama. BAIKAL is written, in Cyrillic characters, along the bows, a word that floats upon the sea, that glides from one land mass to another. Why does it carry this name? There are all these names that are making weighty crossings, over a surface that is sometimes grey, sometimes blue, stirred by waves. ORSOVA, LILY OF LAGUNA, KISTNA, VIETNAM, EL NAVIGANTE, PROVIDENCE, CATAMARAN. The stems are tall, cleaving the waves, slicing through the drift ice. There is never enough sea for the ships’ sharp faces. Mountains of water come from the end of the horizon, shrouded in mist, and are shattered against the stems. Sometimes the prow is extended by the figure of a woman carved out of wood and staring straight ahead. This means that there is a struggle going on and that its issue is in doubt. The hulls of rusting metal, covered with seaweed and parasites, follow the path beaten by the stems, plunge into the rows of troughs, rise to the top of the rows of slopes. The water is pure and full of bubbles. It squeezes the iron walls tightly, relaxes its grip, explodes, slides along with a creaking noise. It wants to enter, devour and digest, with its great open gullet. The wind is blowing sixty miles an hour, ripping the mist apart. And as for him, he is in the watertight box, the wooden deck is carrying him above the surface of the sea. Isn’t that incredible? Isn’t that an adventure, a true adventure involving a machine and a yawning chasm?
The sea stretches on and on. For days now, it has been breaking against the stem. Leaning over the railings at the stern, he can see the eddies spurting from the propeller, the black holes, the oil slicks, the dirty foam, the choppy wash. The horizon is curved, the universe is nothing more, now, than an immense drop of swollen water under the sky. In the airless cabins, women are sleeping, wrapped up in blankets. Inside the swaying saloons, men are talking, drinking, playing chess. Three men are seated near a porthole, smoking cigars.
‘No, not communism, but . . .’
‘Comfort is not absolutely necessary, you know.’
‘Our government wants to tackle the urgent tasks first, but after that, sure, we’ll start thinking about cars, and individual luxuries.’
‘Perhaps it would be a mistake . . .’
‘Why?’
‘Well, because, I mean. You really don’t appreciate just what the idea of revolution represents. I mean, yours is an absolute miracle for us, so now, if your country started behaving like all the others, you know, like, the educated minority working for the sake of a small house, a small car, a small holiday . . .’
‘You’re looking at it from an intellectual point of view.’
‘Yes, sure, but isn’t that unavoidable? It’s the idea of possessing things that has to be eliminated, first of all. The really extraordinary thing about any revolution is its capacity to make people want to live for something more than just earning money, to make them conceive of life in terms that go beyond the old mathematics of earning and spending.’
‘But perhaps at the expense of freedom?’
‘It’s always the same. The freedom the West boasts about is based essentially on private property: smallholdings, at that. To have a small car, to have a small idea: it amounts to the same thing.’
‘Would you say that about art, too?’
‘Sure. You may not be aware of it, but what you are living through is perhaps the only true adventure, the only modern adventure. Freedom. But always for a minority. In the West, people imagine they are free because they can construct statues from melted ballpoint pens, or write novels full of incestuous relationships. But how can one be free so long as there are people dying of hunger at the gates of palaces, so long as there are people who are factory slaves, peeling chestnuts twelve hours a day for the price of a glass of beer, people who are ignorant, and sick, people who make war? To balance things, it’s true that I have the right to shout long live the king or down with the reds, but what difference does it make?’
‘You know, there are still a lot of mistakes being made in my country . . .’
‘Yes, perhaps, but it’s still an adventure.’
‘If only one could eliminate the who
le concept of politics . . .’
‘The concept of possessing things . . .’
Etc.
There would be many similar conversations going on in this iron coffin floating on the sea.
Then, the storm would rise. It would begin slowly, with the squeak of a violin and a few strokes on a gong. The high-pitched voice of a woman or a child would begin singing in the foreward saloon. That’s exactly how it happens: the wind lifts up the heavy masses of the waves and crushes them against the ship’s prow. The waves obliterate words as they are spoken, thrust ideas back into the darkness. The ground swoops upward and something faints away inside the body. The strident music rises, falls, and the drums groan. The metal walls crack, glasses roll around on the tables, and break. The sea is a herd of elephants trampling across the plain. By this time one has lost one’s balance. One has been rolled along, ground to dust, pushed, struck, stamped on. One has had no more time to speak, or hope. One has thrown oneself on one’s hard couch which does its best to rid itself of its burden. One has staggered along gangways that have gone insane, one has grabbed hold of everything that protruded and was made of iron. Violence has launched its wind in an assault on the ship, its wind that tears everything apart. The billows have scooped out their funnels of fury, have raised their walls high. The propellor thrashes in space, shuddering violently. There is so much anger here that ten million wars would be needed to expend it all. So much despair, so much beauty, and one simply floats upon them. Sea! Sea! Genius in action. Himalaya of water! . . . Everything is sea: sky, water, wind, as well as the kind of can which contains human beings instead of luncheon meat. Everything has been transformed into long, dark whirlpools, into hard dunes that advance, roaring and sighing. The shrill music plays for hours, days, nights on end. It does not want earth, it never wants any kind of dry land. What the music yearns for is this liquid vastness, this relentless animal that stretches out of sight in all directions, that darts its countless tentacles, attempting to digest everything within reach. Sea, tank of boiling blood, sea that covers everything! The earth’s true skin, its true face. Hammered, tormented, with great shivering wrinkles, with countless mouths and eyes. It is no longer a question of self-awareness but of rage, sheer rage! Their snouts emerging from the very depths of time, the cliffs of water slide forward on their bases, stiff, invincible, with a thunderous din; and vanish toward time’s other end, out there where the sky is always black. They rear up higher than the bridge and, as they sweep by, strike the locked portholes with terrible blows. The sea is the earth afraid. It is space that has melted, a nasty diarrhoea. It is the coldness of empty space that has filled the chasms to the brim with its bubbling liquid. He who has seen that will never know peace again. He knows where his flight must end, and that of all other men, and that of the trees and birds. He knows only too well where time ends up, and who swallows it.
A few moments later, at about three in the afternoon, he would go up on to the bridge, and he would see in the offing, over to the right, a broad, open bay. The smooth sea is the colour of turquoise, and naked mountains are reflected in it, conical mountains thrusting up out of the transparent water, pointing straight at the blue sky. An icy wind is blowing out of the north, the air is as sharp as a diamond. The sun is sparkling in the west, but gives off no warmth. This is the end of the world, as they say, one of the possible destinations of the journey. Nakhodka Bay lies open to the blue sea, with islands in the form of volcanoes, and hook-shaped promontories covered with reddish soil. One swims in a landscape drawn by a pen with fine strokes, a landscape of vast silence. The ship’s hull glides over the water, enters the calm zone; in the offing, the islands’ cones slowly shift position. Everything is congealed in the cold, in the frigid light. The air is so pure that one can make out the smallest details along the coast, the striations of the rocks, the caves in which waves are boiling, the fishermen’s homes, the boats moored by ropes. There is no smoke. The headlands advance, very black, across the open water. The mountains are blocks of sulphur, spines of sharp metal, the strange edge of a razor blade that has sliced through life. Thirty miles beyond the peninsula lies a taciturn city called Vladivostock. That is the place where everyone should really end up, sooner or later. People have so often posed the question to all the other people they have met on boats, in trains, in hotel lobbies:
‘Have you ever been to Vladivostock?’
The deserted coast looms larger. It pricks up its sharp peaks. The islands drift along in water so blue as to be almost colourless. The mountains’ crevasses appear, the landslides, the paths of trodden earth. The sun can rise and set a thousand times. Death can come, death with its silent pattern. There will always be this pageant of steel thread, these pure, clear lines, this wordless transparency, this truth transmuted into landscape.
After this, the train wheezes its way up as far as a brick-clad town called Khabarovsk. As far as a town called Irkutsk where there is a kind of lake. The giant airplane full of military personnel and their womenfolk flies for hours above regions of frost and ice. Nameless rivers flow along, their surfaces streaked with tiny needles of hoarfrost. But what possible difference can that make?
SELF-CRITICISM
I MUST MAKE up my mind to adopt the following principles, at long last:
Say everything I think
Stop using words that are merely agreeable
Do not try to do everything at the same time1
Stop being scared of names
Change the brand of ballpoint pen I use
* * *
1Unless it is a question, on the contrary, of saying everything simultaneously. In that case, may not literature (and, in particular, fiction) be considered a desperate and permanently thwarted effort to produce a unique form of expression? Something like a cry, perhaps, a cry that, somehow, inexplicably contains all the millions of words that have ever existed, anywhere, in any age. In contrast with the spoken word and its classifying function, the purpose of writing seems, rather, to be a quest for the egg, the seed, nothing more.
A LITTLE LATER on, Y. M. Hogan was in a town called New York. It was night-time. He was walking at a brisk pace down a very straight street full of traffic. The automobiles were long and wide. They sped along with headlamps blazing, and one could see them coming from far away, at the end of the horizon. They moved softly, their bodies skimming the road surface, their splayed tyres gripping the asphalt with a sucking noise. They sped past one, almost brushing against the sidewalk, twinkling and gleaming; through the smoked glass of the windows a seated silhouette could just be glimpsed.
Occasionally they came to a halt at a street crossing, and their hot engines throbbed slowly in the cold air. When the correct signal appeared in the air, a few horns were sounded and the vehicles shot off again into the distance. It was odd, walking around New York, as Y. M. Hogan was doing, watching it all happening. It was strange and yet familiar, a spectacle one had known and then forgotten, a dream, a flight in reverse. Perhaps one had always been there, in this town, perhaps one had been born there, had grown up there. Difficult to tell. So many things had happened since then.
Y. M. Hogan was surrounded, on the sidewalk, by a whole crowd of people walking in all directions. Men wearing raincoats, women swaying along on high heels. They sprang up from all sides, from the mouths of subway entrances, from out of movie houses, from doorways of apartment buildings, from the front doors of cars. They arrived, crossing the patches of darkness, surging up in the squares of red light; it was rather like a nervous, monotonous ballet, everyone stepping out with right foot and left hand forward. The walls were high, so high, sometimes, that their tops disappeared from view. Thousands of little windows were dotted about the walls, some lit, others dark. Iron stairways descended as far as the second floor and stayed there, uncompleted.
Y. M. Hogan studied the faces of the passers-by, the windows, and, from time to time, the cars’ great shining headlamps.
Perhaps he really had been a child
here, once upon a time. He had been born in a house in East 42nd Street, and his name had not been Young Man Hogan, then, but Daniel E. Langlois, Daniel Earl Langlois.
Daniel Earl Langlois was eleven and a half. One day, during the winter, he and his friend Tower went out of school together. They walked quite a long way down Fifth Avenue, watching the parade of black cars go by. Night was beginning to fall, and in the east the sky was already black. Everything glittered, the shop windows, the billboards, the red and white stripes of the neon signs. Daniel Earl Langlois and his friend Tower stopped for a moment at the entrance to a movie house, to look at the photos. It was a thriller, 55 Days at Peking, or A Fistful of Dollars, or something like that. Then, since it was beginning to rain, they went into a café which sold sodas and ice-creams. Daniel Earl Langlois ordered a coke, and his friend Tower ordered an ice-cream soda which arrived in a tall glass. They took their drinks over to a table moulded from plastic, near the window, and sat there sipping them through straws and watching the street outside. When they had finished, Daniel Earl Langlois lit a cigarette. The waitress, a pretty redhead dressed in white, came over and stared down at them.
‘Playing at being grown-up, eh?’ she said, laughing derisively.
‘OK, OK,’ muttered Daniel Earl Langlois. He dropped the cigarette on the floor and crushed it under his foot. Then, feeling annoyed, he demanded the bill, paid it and left.
The Book of Flights Page 17