You are with all the men and all the women too. In the hollows in the earth, on the shores of the seas, across all the little trickling streams, there are all these beautiful cities. Timbuktu, Nineveh, Byzantium. Memphis, Lexington, Los Angeles. Addis Ababa. Zoppot, Tallin, Mukkula. You are there somewhere, now, through all times, through all ages. Inside the lamp-posts, for instance, or in the sharp angle of the pavement. You echo dully beneath the millions of footsteps, you tremble under all those wheels with their tyres marked with x’s and z’s. You stand at the deafening crossroads with your three lights going regularly on and off: red, orange, green, red, orange, green, red, orange, green, red, orange … You walk along all these streets with the same names, you live in all these boxes with square windows, lowered blinds, buzzing air-conditioners, and walls painted fawn and grey and blue. Caught in the china wash-basins, ensconced in the sprinklers of showers, shut in the ballcocks of cisterns. What else is there? Where, how, why? What is it? The cities are eternal, they will never end. They too speak their total language, and what they say is the truth. Their signals of stone and concrete are installed on the ground, they seek no more conquests. Floor! Gutter! Road! Pavement! Roof! Car! Aerial! Tar! Traffic-light! Car-park! Garden! Factory! The cries of cigarette-ends on the pavement, the cries of rusty ashbins, of lumps of paint, of glowing windows. Hard cries, armed cries, cries put together like blocks of cement. They don’t rise up to the sky, they don’t creep along the sloping ground; they remain intact, the terrible cries of ageless matter.
And every human body also carries you along with it, for a moment or for life. You are there in the right lens of this girl’s dark glasses, full of moving reflections. You are in that blue-and-red-striped silk tie, and the stiff collar of that nylon shirt. You are in the fastener of the black brassière, the hairpin, the 777th square of the tartan dress. The bodies carry you within them like an invisible child. You are in that mole under the blonde woman’s left breast, in the iris of the old man’s eye, in the chapped thumb of the woman on her way home from the shops. Sometimes you are in the wart on the little boy’s knee, in a hunchback’s hump, in a goitre, or in the black lump of the woman who’s going to die of cancer.
Human society seethes and swarms, perhaps for ever; the cities are also rooms, with thousands of walls, ceilings, and linoleum-covered floors. There is nothing else but this lump of matter, without thought, without acts, without words. It is hell and heaven joined together in the same place, and you can’t inhabit one without inhabiting the other. Passions frozen, passions set out on placards and posters, for nobody to see and judge. So you must suffer, then, and love, love until death, and even after. You must have your name written up with all the other names and offer it in the enormous perpetual market. True, all these names are also the names of all the men and all the women. Their infinite identity is written there, along with many other things. They are called Bar, Beach Restaurant, Drugstore, Tobacconist, Rialto Cinema, Ricord’s Wineshop, Rhônelec, Pax Cinema, Butcher’s, Philips, Interflora, Barclays Bank, Forum Cinema, H. Thomas, Dental Surgeon, Casino, B.P., Mercedes, Toyota, Evinrude. Telephone. Station. Airport. George’s Hair Salon. Waterman. Pepsi-Cola. Whisky. Cinzano. Kodak. Motorway. Krung Thong. Chesterfield. Perugina. Caution, icy surface! Danger, lorry exit. Silence, hospital. All the voices speak at once, with their neon letters, their hooters and sirens, their blood-red paint. But what they say is beyond comprehension, and beyond despair; it is simply evident. Pure evidence. Compact matter, deaf, dumb, from which nothing can be taken away and which therefore nothing can destroy. Death has disappeared from this realm. Or rather, it is still there, but neither more terrible nor more absolute than the movement of the ants over the earth, or the crater of the ant-lion.
It has taken a long time to enter into the game. It has taken all those tiny chances during century after century. But now the thing is done. You can’t forget the world any more. You’ll just go forward gently, or perhaps faster than the speed of light, across the issueless design.
Quiet, now. Peace, now. War that will last a long time, murders infinite. There are all names, all shapes. The world is true from one horizon to the other. In the depths of the black sky the void is full, the stars are near. The sun burns, then goes out. Balls of fire pursue their unknown courses, explosions explode, births are born, deaths die. Everything that happens happens in that very instant, without a millionth of a second’s delay. There is nothing figurative anywhere, because everything is self-sufficient. There is no imagination. Nothing is isolated, and nothing communicates.
In the neat little garden with unreal bounds the crouching plants live unstirring. The dwarf cactuses have their spines ready, but it’s for a war that nobody will win. In the mirror-lake surrounded with green sand, the tin bird still stands on one leg, and its truth will not emerge from its image.
Perhaps it’s there that one ought to look for it. Perhaps one ought to slip inside the little tin man with the Chinese hat, so as one day to be able to write, if that’s what one ought to write, on the streamer of paper that he holds out in front of him:
EPILOGUE
There. That’s more or less what I wanted to say. In a few minutes now you’ll shut the book and go away. First you’ll go hastily through the last lines. That’s where novels end, the moment when the murderer’s face is suddenly revealed in detective stories. When it’s finished you’ll close the cover over the wad of pages and put the book down on the table; or else somewhere on the bookshelves among others of the same kind. It you’re on a train or a boat or a plane you’ll put it in your travelling bag along with the papers and magazines. If you’re on the beach you’ll put it under the heap you’ve made of your clothes, and not look at it any more. You’ll do this quite naturally, without thinking, as if it were a box that had had new shoes in. And the book will go on existing without you, as long as the paper and cardboard last. Nor will the printed letters wear out; they’ll stay there marked on each white page, childish little twirls, little numbers, little capitals; and they’ll go on living their imaginary life, clinging to the world, like colonies of silkworms or beds of mussels.
There’ll be this world shut up, hidden, inside the black and white parallelepiped, this sort of tyrannical paradise of language which will really have been the truth at least once in the universe. Perhaps this separate world is odious, or terrible. The programme of a few hours in a life, of a few spasms of a civilization. Everywhere, all over the world, other books have been opened, then shut. The agitation of the life contained in them will not have overflowed its frontiers. Thought and deed remain. What fades is the communicating link that existed for a moment with the reader. And it is you who by turning the last fatal page have unwittingly killed the adventure. Homer is dead, Dante and Dostoievsky and Pirandello are dead, and it’s you who wiped them out each time; who thrust them a little deeper each time into the inexorable mud, trampled and crushed with every speck of dust under your leaden soles. Every time you’ve said law, happiness, space, year, love, it was so many knife-thrusts into the flesh of man. Every time you’ve moved, every time you’ve swallowed an aspirin with a glass of cold water, every time you’ve bought a piece of meat at the butcher’s, you’ve taken something away from that abolished world. All the novels and poems and films and pictures that you created without thinking, simply by being alive, only served to efface those other works that were their real flesh and blood.
But books are not eternal. A mere trifle, a few flames, a bit of quicklime, an open dustbin, or just being forgotten, and a book is dead. The ragmen go through the streets every evening, their singsong cry always asking for paper and yet more paper. Here the book props up the leg of a wardrobe, there it stops up a broken window. It hangs from a nail in the bogs of bug-ridden hotels, and everyone tears off a handful of pages full of strange life. Take your revenge while there’s still time. Learn to hate the words of others, culture, and the faceted mirror of intelligence; otherwise there is no peace. My eyes are at war with y
ours, my bones and organs have no worse enemies than those other bodies that resemble them. Exercise your muscles and learn to tear books apart with your bare hands, first two, then three or four or five at a time. Don’t stop until the ground’s strewn with confetti with a mutilated letter on each piece. Then scatter the little bits of coloured paper in the wind, and see how the novel flutters back to the matter it betrayed!
You’re in a fast train, and each echoing jolt of the steel wheels jerks out a new thought. In the hot stifling air, or in the buzz of the aircraft cabin, thought flies, and the earth moves slowly, crushed by the thousands of yards of distance; they are words, sentences, ideas. In the dusty street a dog sleeps in the sun with its mouth open, amid a forest of human legs. That is a poem. The rain drips down on the roofs, windscreen-wipers moan back and forth. A curved poem, based on the earth, a poem with a living womb. Starving children look up with bloodshot eyes like stupid jewels in their great dwarfs’ heads. A poem transparent and immediate, deep as the wind, airy as light, huge as the great dirty lake. Or a toothless old woman leans against the wall and stares uncomprehendingly. A soldier kneels in the mud, and the blood runs slowly from his mouth. It is always the same unwritten poem, the story that is hummed under the breath, or dreamed. Everywhere around me, and around you too, everyone reads these strange yet close words, they write them with their gestures, and mark them down with their bodies and their desires.
On the closed book, closed or almost closed, the tide of the world breaks and pounds unceasingly. What is inside it matters less, after all, than what is outside. What is one day’s reading in a lifetime? What is one line of writing among all the endless scribbling that fills the world? There is not just one word, one sun, one civilization. There are millions of things everywhere. Isn’t the poem there, or there, or in your eye, the eye of the beholder?
I didn’t really write what you’ve just read. How can one bear witness? I am only an actor who doesn’t know the play he’s acting in. What I’ve done I’ve done by chance, like a gnat in a strong wind. I’ve said first one thing, then another. I’ve written pins, tobacco, passions, suffer, nylon, seed. You’ve read zip-fastener, top, beauty, woman, cigarette, cloud. And accurate chance is now in motion, each speck descending into the machine along its own individual path. But I’ve said enough. Now it’s your turn.
Terra Amata Page 21