All Gall Is Divided_The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast

by Richard Howard

  Like every iconoclast, I have broken my idols in order to offer sacrifices to their debris.

  What is the source of our obsession with the Reptile? — Might it not be our terror of a last temptation, of an imminent and, this time, irreparable Fall, which would make us lose even the memory of Paradise?

  Those days when, getting out of bed, my ears filled with a funeral march, I would hum all day long until, by evening, it vanished, quite spent, into an anthem …

  How great is Christianity’s guilt for having corrupted skepticism! A Greek would never have associated lamentation with doubt. He would recoil horror-struck before a Pascal, and even more before that inflation of the soul which, ever since the cross, has demonized the mind.

  To be more unserviceable than a saint…

  In our nostalgia for death, so great a flaccidity descends upon us, such a modification occurs in our veins, that we forget about death and ponder nothing but the chemistry of the blood.

  The Creation was the first act of sabotage.

  The unbeliever debauched by the Abyss and enraged at being unable to wrest himself from it deploys a mystical zeal in constructing a world as devoid of depth as a ballet by Rameau.

  The Old Testament knew how to intimidate Heaven, how to shake a fist at whatever was on high: prayer was a quarrel between the creature and its creator. Came the Gospels to make nice: Christianity’s unforgivable error.

  That which lives without memory has not left Paradise: the plants still delight in it. They were not doomed to Sin, to that impossibility of forgetting; but we, cases of walking remorse, etc., etc.

  (To regret Paradise! — One could scarcely be more out of it nor take further the passion for desuetude or provincialism.)

  “Lord, without Thee I am mad, yet with Thee madder still!” — Such would be, in the best of cases, the result of a resumption of contact between the failure here below and the failure on high.

  The great mistake of suffering is to have organized Chaos, to have reduced it to a universe.

  What a temptation the churches, if there were no faithful in them but only those tensions of God the organ tells us of!

  When I graze the Mystery without being able to mock it, I wonder what is the use of lucidity, that vaccine against the Absolute.

  What a fuss over setting oneself up in the desert! More cunning than those first hermits, we have learned to seek it in ourselves.

  It is as an informer that I have prowled around God; incapable of imploring Him, I have spied on Him.

  For two thousand years, Jesus has revenged himself on us for not having died on a sofa.

  Dilettantes take no notice of God; madmen and drunkards, those great specialists, make Him the object of their ruminations.

  It is to a saving remnant of judgment that we owe the privilege of being still superficial.

  To eliminate from oneself the toxins of time in order to retain those of eternity — such is the mystic’s child’s play.

  The possibility of self-renewal by heresy confers upon the believer a distinct superiority over the atheist.

  One is never lower than when one regrets the angels … unless it is when one longs to pray to the point of cerebral liquefaction.

  Even more than religion, cynicism commits the error of granting man too much attention.

  Between God and the French, guile intervenes.

  As is only fair, I itemized the arguments favorable to God; His inexistence seemed to me to emerge intact. He has the genius of calling Himself into question by all His works; His defenders render Him odious; His worshipers, suspect. If you fear loving Him, you need merely open your Aquinas …

  And I think of that Central European theology professor questioning one of his students about the proofs of the existence of God: she goes through the historical argument, the ontological, etc. But she is careful to add: “All the same I don’t believe in Him.” The professor is annoyed, takes up the proofs again, one by one; she shrugs and persists in her incredulity. Then the master draws himself up to his full height, scarlet with faith: “Young lady, I give you my word of honor that He exists!”

  … An argument in itself worth all the theological Summae.

  What are we to say about Immortality? To seek to elucidate it, or simply to approach it, is either aberration or fraud. Treatises nonetheless reveal its impossible fascination. If we are to believe them, we have only to entrust ourselves to a few deductions hostile to Time… And there we are, furnished with eternity, indemnified against the dust, exempt from agony.

  It is not these trifles which have made me doubt my fragility. How much, on the other hand, I’ve been troubled by the meditations of an old friend, a somewhat unhinged itinerant musician! Like all lunatics, he is beset with the problems he puts to himself: he has “solved” any number. That day, after he had made his rounds of the cafe terraces, he came to question me about… immortality. “It’s unthinkable,” I told him, at once seduced and repelled by his timeless eyes, his wrinkles, his rags. A certainty inspired him: “You’re mistaken not to believe in it; if you don’t believe in it, you won’t survive. I’m sure that death will have no power over me. Moreover, whatever you say, everything has a soul. There! did you see the birds flying about in the streets, then suddenly rising above the houses to look at Paris? There’s a soul there, such things cannot die!”

  In order to regain its ascendancy over men’s minds, Catholicism requires a raging pope, gnawed by contradictions, a dispenser of hysteria, dominated by heretic frenzy, a barbarian unembarrassed by two thousand years of theology. — In Rome and in the rest of Christendom have demential resources utterly dried up? Since the end of the sixteenth century, the church, humanized, has produced no more than second-rate schisms, mediocre saints, laughable excommunications. And if a madman did not manage to save her, at least he would cast her into a superior abyss.

  Of all that theologians have conceived, the only readable pages and the only true utterances are those devoted to the Adversary. How greatly their tone alters, their verve quickens when they turn their back on the Light in order to attend to the Darkness! As if they were climbing back down into their element, which they are rediscovering. At last they can hate, they are authorized to do so: no more sublime purring, no more edifying repetitions. Hatred can be vile; yet to rid oneself of hatred is more dangerous than to abuse it. The Church, in its high wisdom, has spared its own such risks; in order to satisfy their instincts, it excites them against the Evil One; they cling to him, nibble him: fortunately, an inexhaustible bone … If we were to take it from them, they would succumb to vice or to apathy.

  Even when we believe we have dislodged God from our soul, He still lingers: we realize that He finds it tedious there, but we no longer have sufficient faith to entertain Him …

  Why should I lay down my arms? — I have not experienced all the contradictions, I still have the hope of a new impasse.

  How many years now that I’ve been dechristianizing myself as far as the eye can see!

  All belief makes us insolent; newly acquired, it inspires the worst instincts; people who do not share it appear either impotent or vanquished, deserving only pity and scorn. Consider the neophytes in politics and especially in religion, all those who have managed to interest God in their arrangements, the converts, the nouveaux riches of the Absolute. Compare their impertinence with the modesty and the good manners of those who are in the process of losing their faith and their convictions …

  On the frontiers of the self: “What I have suffered, what I am suffering, no one will ever know, not even I.”

  When, out of the appetite for solitude, we have sundered our bonds, the Void seizes us: nothing, no one … Whom to liquidate now? Where to unearth a durable victim? — Such perplexities open us to God: at least with Him we’re sure of being able to break indefinitely…

  Love’s Vitality

  Only erotic natures sacrifice to boredom, disappointed in advance by love.

  Losing love is so rich a
philosophical ordeal that it makes a hairdresser into a rival of Socrates.

  The art of love? Being able to unite the discretion of an anemone with the temperament of a vampire.

  In the pursuit of torment, the search for suffering, only a jealous man can rival a martyr. Yet we canonize the latter and ridicule the former.

  Why the marriage hearse? Why not the hearse of love? — So regrettable, Blake’s restriction.

  Onan, Sade, Masoch — what luck they had! Their names, like their exploits, will never date.

  Love’s Vitality: one can hardly disparage a sentiment which has survived both romanticism and the bidet.

  The lover who kills himself for a girl has an experience which is more complete and much more profound than the hero who overturns the world.

  Who would wear himself out in the grip of sexuality unless he hoped to lose his reason for a little over a second, for the rest of his days?

  Sometimes I dream of a remote and vaporous love like the schizophrenia of a perfume.

  To feel one’s brain: a phenomenon equally deadly to thought and to virility.

  He buries his forehead between her breasts, between two continents of Death …

  A monk and a butcher fight it out within each desire.

  Only simulated passions, the fake ecstasies have some relation to the mind, to our self respect; sincere feelings presuppose a lack of consideration … for oneself.

  Happy in love, Adam would have spared us History.

  I’ve always thought Diogenes must have suffered some misfortune in love when he was young: one does not take the path of derision without the help of a venereal disease or an intractable chambermaid.

  Some performances one pardons only when they are one’s own: if we envisaged others at the climax of a certain spasm, it would be impossible to shake their hands again.

  The flesh is incompatible with charity: orgasm transforms the saint into a wolf.

  After metaphors, the drugstore. — Which is how the grandest sentiments disintegrate.

  To begin as a poet and to end as a gynecologist! Surely being a lover is the least enviable of all conditions.

  One declares war on the glands and prostrates oneself at the first whiff of the first mistress … What use is pride against the liturgy of odors, against a zoological incense?

  To conceive a love chaster than a spring-time, a love which — depressed by the fornication of flowers — would weep at their roots.

  I can understand and justify all the anomalies, in love and elsewhere; but that among fools some should be impotent — that is beyond me.

  Sexuality: surgery and ashes, Balkanization of bodies, bestiality of a back-number saint, racket of a risible and unforgettable collapse …

  In pleasure, as in panic, we reinstate our origins; the ape, unfairly relegated, at last achieves glory — for the space of a cry.

  A breath of irony in sex perverts its function and changes its practitioner into a Species fraud.

  Two needy victims, amazed at their torment, at their noisy sudation. To what ritual are we compelled by the gravity of the senses and the body’s solemnity.

  To burst out laughing in the spasm itself— sole means of defying the prescriptions of the blood, the body’s grim rites.

  Hasn’t everyone endured the confessions of some poor wretch, compared to whom Tristan would sound like a pimp?

  Love’s dignity resides in the disabused affection surviving a moment’s slobber.

  If the impotent only knew how considerate of them nature had been, they would bless their glands’ somnolence and boast of it on every street corner.

  Ever since Schopenhauer had the preposterous inspiration of introducing sexuality into metaphysics, and Freud that of supplanting licentiousness by a pseudoscience of our confusions, it is only to be expected that the first-comer should beguile us with the “meaning” of his exploits, his timidities, and his successes. All confidences begin here; here all conversations end. Soon our relations with others will come down to the record of their effective or invented orgasms … It is the fate of our race, devastated by introspection and anemia, to reproduce itself in words, to flaunt its nights and puff their triumphs and tribulations.

  The more disabused a man’s mind, the more he risks, stricken by love, reacting like a schoolgirl.

  Two paths lie open to man and to woman: ferocity or indifference. Everything suggests that they will take the second, that there will be, between them, neither explanation nor rupture but that they will continue to move further and further apart; that pederasty and onanism, suggested by the schools and the churches, will win over the masses; that any number of abolished vices will be restored to power; and that scientific procedures will compensate for the inefficiency of the spasm and the malediction of the couple.

  A mixture of anatomy and ecstasy, apotheosis of the insoluble, ideal nourishment for the bulimia of disappointment, Love leads us toward the lower depths of glory…

  We always love … despite; and that “despite” covers an infinity.

  On Music

  Born with an habitual soul, I sought one of another sort from music: this was the start of unhoped-for misfortunes …

  Suppose that music, lacking the imperialism of the Concept, had taken the place of philosophy: the paradise of inexpressible evidence, an epidemic of ecstasies.

  Beethoven vitiated music: introducing fits of temper, granting admission to anger.

  Without Bach, Theology would be devoid of an object, Creation would be fictive, and Nothingness peremptory.

  If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

  What’s the use of frequenting Plato, when a saxophone can just as well offer a glimpse of another world?

  Defenseless against music, I must submit to its despotism and, depending on its whim, be god or garbage.

  There was a time when, unable to conceive of an eternity which would have separated me from Mozart, I no longer feared death. This happened with each musician, with all music …

  Chopin elevated the piano to the status of phthisis.

  The universe of sound: onomatopoeia of the inexpressible, enigma displayed, infinity perceived, and ineffable … Upon experiencing its seduction, one’s only plan is to be embalmed within a sigh.

  Music is the refuge of souls wounded by happiness.

  The only true music is the music which makes us palpate time.

  Immediate infinity, a meaningless expression for philosophy, is the reality, the very essence of music.

  Had I yielded to music’s lures and flatteries, to all the worlds it has created and destroyed within me, I should long since, out of pride, have lost my reason.

  The North’s aspiration toward a different sky has engendered German music — geometry of autumns, alcohol of concepts, metaphysical intoxication.

  Nineteenth-century Italy — that bazaar of sounds — lacked the dimension of night, the art of crushing shadows to extract their essence.

  One must side with Brahms or with the sun.

  Music, a system of farewells, evokes a physics whose point of departure is not atoms but tears.

  Perhaps I have staked too much on music, perhaps I have not taken all my precautions against the acrobatics of the sublime, against the charlatanism of the Ineffable …

  Certain of Mozart’s andantes give off an ethereal desolation, a sort of dream funeral in another life.

  When music itself is helpless to save us, a dagger gleams before our eyes; nothing sustains us except perhaps the fascination of crime.

  How gladly I’d die by music, as punishment for having occasionally doubted the sovereignty of its bedevilments!

  Vertigo of History

  When it first experimented with disaster, no one would have believed an undeveloped humanity capable of mass-producing a day.

  Had Noah possessed the gift of foreseeing the future, there is not a doubt in the world he would have scuttled the ark.

  History’s trepidation belongs
to psychiatry, as indeed do all the motives of action: to move is to defect from reason, is to risk the strait jacket.

  Events — tumors of Time.

  Evolution: Prometheus, nowadays, would be an elected member of the opposition party.

  The hour of crime does not sound at the same time for all peoples. Hence, the permanence of history.

  Each man’s ambition is to plumb the Worst, to be the perfect prophet. Alas! there are so many catastrophes which have never crossed our minds!