MY TOWN IS ill-famed: all along the seafront promenades, and in the streets where the night is lighting its lamps, hordes of pensive De Sades jostle and stare uncomprehendingly.
When these hordes surge from the glittering pane of the sun’s downfall, passing through the tobacco smoke that moves like a footstep, all the shopkeepers are there, standing in front of their doors, and the eyes and mouths in their hard faces know only how to shout out the price of flesh, how to flash orders and angry words . . .
They can be seen choosing cattle while dusk flickers like an eyelid.
Farther away, and nearer the sea, in the forests of curves and rounded forms, I have bought countless temptations!
I have allowed my harem to climb up around me; happier and randier than a lion, at last, I have been able to hear those soft, shuffling steps of theirs which carried me, which carried me away.
They can be seen choosing strange cattle while dusk trembles like a million flies.
Somewhere, a flight is under way; it has now reached cold climates, their own native lands in which I am a stranger. Their grave faces select and pay: I wince, jealous of their power – and yet, how this slave market reeks of sensual pleasure!
Emptiness of the sparkling stores with great red carpets trodden by women’s stiletto heels. The music with its heavy beat revolves between the glass walls. I am in an empty place peopled by light. The women’s naked legs move continually over the red carpet. Guitar music scratches the silence. Everything is beautiful. Everything is at peace. Everything is cunningly devised. Too bad that the owner of the store happens to be a gangster.
ANIMALS POSSESS SOMETHING known as the flight reflex. It is a question of permanently maintaining sufficient distance between themselves and the world to permit escape. If you approach, you encroach upon this protective gap. The animal feels threatened, and automatically retreats slightly, to restore the necessary distance. It is the same with sleep. Sleep obliterates distance. The sleeper is so close that anyone may touch him. That is why animals never sleep.
But man? His legs are not made for running. He has no wings with which to soar away. His ears are not made for hearing sounds approach, his nose is not made for detecting odours. When he sleeps, he is stretched out on his back, offering his flabby belly to any foul blow. Set him down in a forest, alongside some famished tiger. He will not even see the claw that darts forward and rips him apart so easily.
Flies are a thousand times more agile than man. If flies were as adept at thinking as they are at avoiding man’s slapping palm, they would reinvent all the scientific theories from Pythagoras to Einstein in just a few minutes.
Butterflies settle on flowers, and behold they too are flowers. Man does not know how to imitate anything, not even other men. Would he ever have thought of being striped among bamboos, or ocellate in foliage? Would he have been capable of becoming grey in sand, white in snow, black in the night? Would he even have had the idea of carrying on his back some owl’s face with painted eyes, designed to frighten his enemies?
I flee, but my track is exposed, does not go right to the end, will never reach the destination. When danger swoops or springs up, it is already too late. I have known danger, lived through it. When I should have been thousands of miles away I am still stuck here, without having even lifted a finger.
The desperate slowness of man’s flight! Flies, mosquitos, teach me to gather myself for the great leap that will outstrip the wind! Hares, teach me to twitch my ears! And you, leopards, jaguars, cougars, show me how you prowl in silence, placing your paws so that they do not even bruise a blade of grass!
I know, now, what I am fleeing from: emptiness.
I pass from one territory to another, I go from town to town, and I meet nothing.
Immense metropolises, immense highways. How is it that I never hear anything? Am I myself transporting emptiness wherever I go, like a deaf man for whom all other men are mutes? Sometimes I grow weary of so many images. If only the Plexiglass shell that holds me prisoner would open up. But there is no hope of that. Autonomy, cursed autonomy. I tell you, I am weary of being myself. To be someone, to be the one in relation to the others, could never suffice. I repudiate my name. Call me by your own first name.
Facial appearance of men and women, gestures, habits, occupations: all played out. The world is peopled by puppets, inhabited by robots. They laugh, they talk. But I see their eyes, and I know that there is nothing on the other side.
It is all that, perhaps, that I have now left behind. Hatred has enticed me into the very depths of space. I have taken all the paths: those which by-pass thought itself, those which lead to negative words.
I have stripped myself of my clothing. Walking, one day, with the sun in my eyes, along a street, East 37th, N. Y., for example, or Sherbrooke, Montreal, or Eglington W., Toronto, I have suddenly found that I was transparent. The warmthless light has pierced me, and I have glided along its rays, blinded, invisible, light-footed, my head floating far ahead of me, to be one, again, with the forty-four-rayed star.
I flee emptiness; in other words, I am attracted by it. The light has sunk its pit right at my feet, desiring me to fall, to fall! Yonder, at the very end of the tunnel, perhaps, lies paradise. Try to believe that: another earth, another town with parallel streets, another highway, other trees, other sparkling rivers. It is in that brand-new world that light resides. And is never extinguished. There, the plants have flowers that never wither. In that town without a name, whose streets have no numbers, great black automobiles glide along; their engines never stop, they keep running, day after day, with a soft throbbing noise. In the cafés, people are sitting in the sun, at spotless tables, eternally sipping the same water from the same glass. The music emerging from the loudspeakers is beautiful, stringing out its notes, one after the other, never forsaking mankind. In the movie houses, at the far end of dark halls as vast as cathedrals, the motion picture goes on and on. The faces appear and reappear upon the screen, their eyes open, their mouths uttering words, and everyone can decide for himself where the ending comes. It is a love story, perhaps, but one in which they never stop loving each other. For months on end, a man looks at a woman, then for months on end it is the woman looking at the man. They never sleep. They never leave each other. They continue to thrill with joy whenever their skins touch, and the man caresses the woman’s right shoulder for a great deal longer than twenty-five years. They speak words, they say:
‘Ah . . .’
‘Hm-hm . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Come . . .’
‘You’ve got a couple of blackheads there.’
‘Do you like my hair like this?’
‘Hm, yes, yes . . .’
There are novels, too, on the frontages of business premises, novels that light up their words, from right to left, on the screen of electric light bulbs. These novels have no ending. They are not tragic novels. They are stories that are as simple as postcards, stories no sooner told than forgotten, stories that have nothing to do with death, war, victims of obsessions and suicide.
And perhaps there will be a woman waiting, over there, at the end of that road which stretches as far as the sun. And when, some day in the future, one is in that town and chances to pass her in the street, perhaps she will realize immediately that it is you for whom she has been waiting. She will come to a halt, there, on the edge of the sidewalk, and she will smile as she looks at you, and there will be this terrible word, this secret word which shatters cockpit windows and makes the casemate’s old walls crumble into dust:
WELCOME!
That is what there is, in that far country which one may perhaps reach, one day. Meanwhile, I wander. Since I cannot grow as big as the world, as deep as the Pacific ocean, since I cannot think like Socrates or Lao-Tsü, since I cannot change men’s lives as did Jesus Christ or Engels, since I shall never even know how to be myself, absolutely myself, myself to a pitch of ecstasy, there remains one course open to me: to slap the groun
d with my footsteps, to expand, to devour space, to absorb sights and entertainments, to watch names parade across the façades of stations, to get to know all sorts of extraordinary women, all sorts of men, all sorts of dogs.
The 1956-model Chevrolet speeds along the endless roads. The wind whistles past its windows. A sandstorm swirls across the road. The milestones arrive in a flash, one after the other, and wire fences wobble up and down.
The frontier towns are frozen in the middle of space. From time to time, their gates swing open to let caravans file out. In the waiting-rooms of bus stations, ragged Negroes are sleeping on benches. Workmen in dirty overalls are smoking, and watching television.
At MacAllen (Texas), the heat is so dry that the haze has the appearance of sand. Among the streets of dust, nothing but wooden shacks, tin huts, beer cans.
I pass by, I cross through. Towns are ever-growing refuse dumps; time no longer exists for them. When one travels the highways on foot one is more alone than the captain of a cargo vessel in mid-ocean. I am going farther, still farther. I am making for places that are new to me. I take trains that fritter away their time on their twin rails of solitude. I am seated in the buses of isolation, and the jolting of the wheels carries me away. Movement across the surface of the earth is not easy: it scrapes, it grates, it is an incurable disease. Everything that I have seen, I have forgotten immediately. I have not taken to the road so as to draw maps or write books. I am not forging ahead so as to know who I am, or where I am. No, I am on the move quite simply so as not to be there, any longer, so as not to be in your company any longer. If I really find out anything, I will let you know.
Signed:
Juanito Holgazán
As the other fellow puts it:
I AM SO RESTLESS
THE EARTH IS filled with many noises, so many noises. People, everywhere, talk endlessly, and I can hear sounds rising from every cleft and gully: peculiar sorts of snarling, snuffling and yelping, followed by little twitterings, sighs, sniffs, belches, clicking of tongues and clacking of teeth. It is an immense aviary, chattering and shrieking away tirelessly, inflating the dome of the heavens with its gas. The echoes of vain words roll from one end of the world to the other, through the sky, in the wind, over the water. The noise rises, drops, breaks into waves, scrapes, crawls, bursts in billions of explosions that follow each other at intervals of a millionth of a second. There is no concord. There will never be harmony. Clocks never strike the same hour. Letters melting together, fierce swelling of the floods of words, adjectives, names, prepositions, numerals. Floods of slaver, of blood, of body-fluids, of gas tumbling through the breached barrage. I do not want to say anything. Rather, I cannot say anything. I am seated at my table, my hands resting on its surface, in front of me, and the waterspout sweeps past repeatedly, sucking up my tatters and my hair, tearing the branches off the trees. Water falls from the sky, the water of words, each drop shooting through the sky’s space with the speed of light, then disappearing. Explosions, explosions, continual murmuring, cataract creating its wall of terror between myself and the others. The room is as vast as the earth, perhaps it is the earth, the so-called universe. There are so many people on the earth; this room alone is crammed with a dense, hideously noisy crowd. I am faced with an ocean of unattached words, a grey plain of language advancing, retreating, advancing, dancing up and down. My bubble is surrounded by a mountain of violet gelatine that trembles all over its nerveless flesh. And I am inside that mountain.
I have no respite. I do not want to pause. I do not want to dig my own grave. That is why I slip and slide away into the distance. The most detestable of all truths is the truth that confronts one when one pauses. That huge monstrosity scrabbling up the earth under its feet, puffing itself up: feeding on solitude. Hideous sheep urinating between its feet! I do not want to recognize myself. In recognizing myself I would have lost my reality. Danger. Danger of railroad stations, danger of peaceful gardens, danger of ports and airports. Everywhere, there is this face that lies in wait for me, plotting to become my own face. I shall tear out these eyes! Yes, I shall hack off this mouth, this nose, these ears! Yes, I shall smash in this skull with hammer blows! Who dared say that the others were myself? It is not true, the others are not myself. There are so many of the others, they are so powerful and so real that it is as though I were looking up at the night sky, at that half of its blackness where the stars are clustered. If the others were myself, knowing would be pointless. Even I am not myself! Where am I? What mirror will at last allow me to know my image, my true image? Narcissus was a liar, a dirty liar. It was not himself that he loved; it was his brother.
Intelligence never comes full circle. It is a line that goes forward, that goes through. Incapable of coming to a decision, because to do that it would have to stop emanating from itself, if only for a single second. And it never does stop. It sweats continually by way of its thinking-gland, and so achieves a pure freedom: continually free perspiration.
The earth is filled with many noises. Each emerging thought makes its distinctive noise. Everything, without exception, speaks, from the sea-slug to the leaves of water-lilies. Those who want to know themselves are either mad or just weak-minded. Those who want to watch themselves watching others are complaisant. They do not know what a real stare involves. They do not even suspect that their self-awareness is a terrible harpoon rending the air. I look at their round faces, with their eyes surmounted by eyelids, and nose pierced by two holes, and I see this: tiny lines spurting from their body, tails of comets, rays. These are their thoughts. I think, therefore the match’s flame is. I think, therefore the antelope is. I think, therefore the great emperor-moth is.
I am always lagging behind my thoughts. I believed that I was here and they were with me, but they are already beyond the horizon. I believed that I recognized the glass ashtray, or else the sun’s small disc, but I had already passed through. To be, is no longer to be there. When death comes, then perhaps . . . Perhaps I will know at last what an ashtray is, or the moon, or the smell of grass. Meanwhile, I can only admit defeat. Do not expect me to grind out books full of definitions. I am not a good hunter. I will never bag any game. But if you enjoy wild chases, falls to the bottom of wells, railroad cars thundering along at eighty miles an hour, the agitations of armies of Argentinian ants around a sliver of cheese, then you will understand what I am trying to say.
Knowledge is never static. Even algebra is based upon infinity: is open, that is to say, in the direction of the unknown. No science is exact. Biology, etymology, aetiology and geology would give huge amusement to a dung-beetle, if their principles were explained to it. There are no systems: just imagine Confucius reading Pascal, imagine Pascal reading Marx. What a joke! Imagine Empedocles reading the Popol Vuh! What a face he would pull! There is no such thing as self-awareness. Imagine thought retreating into itself to think about itself. It would surely be easier to imagine a revolver bullet extracting itself from its victim’s wound and re-entering the barrel. Yes, it would be easier to imagine the universe’s explosion suddenly halting its outflow of energy, so that the galaxies congeal once more, and the millions of light-years of their flight through space are immediately annulled.
Now it is there, in the very depths of me. Not a certainty, but a desire, an appeal. I shall never know who I am. I shall never know anything. I shall do nothing but make my way, day in day out, toward the great masses of light, I shall dance toward everything that shines, I shall be the moth that dies searching for darkness.
The one who looked at himself was looking at nothingness. The one who wanted to love himself, to exhaust himself with love, was intoxicated. The one who talked to himself, or wanted to say something to the others, was a tongueless mute. Today, I realize this very well. It is the consequence of flight. I have at last opened reality’s door and walked out. Its rooms are merely obscure spots that are too vast to contain knowledge and too small to contain the world. Nothing entered, there. The walls were heavy, sealed
tight, hiding secrets rather than keeping them. The naked light bulb dangling from a cord was not a sun. The pieces of wooden furniture infested by larvae were not mountains. The glass ashtray, in which the cigarette butts live, had no truth other than its own. Hovering over him, hovering over the one whom I wanted to be myself, I saw nothing but glass, paper, ash. Look outside, now, just one good look, and tell me what you see. Do you see nothing more than an ashtray?
No, there is so much to see that one pair of eyes is not enough. Even if one had ten thousand eyes, it would still not be enough. One would have to be as quick as flies, as slow as trees, as big as whales, soar as high as vultures. And it would still not be enough. One would have to be as multiple as microbes, as heavy as osmium, as soft as earth, as cold as snow. One would have to be water like true water, fire like true fire. And I am just one single entity!
Multitudes of the earth, come to me! Lions, gnus, termites, snakes! And then, at my signal, off with you! Flee into the forests, the savanna, the mountain valleys. Sharks of the sea, troglodytes, parasites, explore your domains. Be my scouts. Find out all you can about this country. Tell me what is the night temperature there; tell me if the water there is good to drink, if there is salt to be mined there, or gold. Fleas, tell me which is better, the blood of the infant at its mother’s breast, or the blood of the man making war. Black frogs of Darién, tell me how you distil poison from your skins. You, slow-worms, why have you chosen to imitate snakes? And you, white scorpions, tell me who has the power to frighten you.
The Book of Flights Page 19