The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  Yet, like those astonishingly perforated artificial rockeries which one finds in many Chinese gardens and whose form is defined by the holes that are drilled in them even more than by the contours of their surfaces, my dream is riddled with gaps which, I must assume, have their own importance. If I examine them in their turn instead of considering only the full parts, will these gaps possibly become the eloquent silences starting from which I will be able to comprehend the whole truth of the dream?

  The most striking of these lacunae, the one that would lead me to believe I dreamed two dreams in the course of a single night, if not for the fact that when I woke up I did not doubt for an instant that there had been only one dream, is the emptiness that separates the episode in the mountains from the one whose setting is a country house. What connection is there between the leap made by my bitch in a more or less deserted place and the whole political and social sequence whose protagonist is Césaire, toward whom a crowd of visitors is flocking? I would see none if, looking at it more closely, I did not notice that in the full parts of the dream, the theme of travel appears at various times and in various forms: it is in the course of a ramble in the mountains that the bitch Dine escapes me to go for her own ramble, and it is an excursion—this time by country bus—that Césaire and I are supposed to make; the crowd that spreads through my house in order to meet my guest is a crowd of people of color such as I came in contact with during my visits to the Antilles; lastly, the only things that were specifically identified, among the vestimentary or other objects that I rather ridiculously strained my ingenuity to tidy away, were the laced boots from my first contact with Africa, too martial an accessory for me to be able to think of them now without irony. Viewed thus, it appears that the disconnectedness of the dream, if it is due in part to deficiencies of memory, also reflects the disconnectedness—the sudden breaks, changes of view, dizzying slippages of things and feelings to their opposites—in other words, the sudden shifts of wind and changes in mood inherent in any true voyage: using a broad range of means of transport, now private and now collective; knowing, even when you are settled somewhere, that you are there only temporarily; collecting, for your imminent departure, effects and implements you have only just taken from your suitcases or other containers; passing from a wild spot to a place that is overpopulated; contemplating nature in all its isolation and then melting into the midst of great rivers of humanity; being irked by those specimens of mankind who originally charmed you or, on the contrary, being won over by those whose manners had at first irritated you; in motion even if you are sitting still, experiencing with them and with what surrounds you something analogous to the emptinesses and fullnesses of passion, as when, your heart calm, you wake up saying to yourself that you’re not in love anymore and feel, then, prey to such sadness and regret that you fall in love again; asking yourself, as you arrive somewhere, what in the world you came here to do, and deriving from this acknowledgment a masochistic joy, as though the trip does not reveal its true essence until the moment when its reasonableness is called into question, that is, when homesickness shows its cloven hoof; but, lastly, feeling dispossessed when you are back inside the walls of your own house.

  It would be easy, of course, to give a semblance of unity to many of the dreams that present themselves as made up of bits and pieces, if we supposed that their mad succession of adventures, lacking any visible links or continuity of setting, were framed by a journey we were taking in our imaginations. Should I then yield to this sort of facility by regarding the dream which began with the maddened race of an animal to the foot of a sort of cliff, and whose conclusion (purely virtual, since the dream stopped short of it) was an excursion in a rural bus, as, in fact, the dream of a trip I was taking? This is a question I would have to ask myself, if there did not exist, in the case of this dream, which is also in bits and pieces that I can join together through the idea of a voyage, a prior difference: from the moment this idea comes into play, not only a logical armature, but a whole emotional background, is revealed.

  I spoke of uneasiness when, with a single word, I wanted to indicate the dominant note of the whole dream. But, attending to the most urgent things first, I did not try either to define the exact nature of that uneasiness or to locate precisely where and when it manifests itself.

  Toward the beginning, I do indeed feel a certain anxiety concerning the dog: will she survive her plunge, and then, when I see she has survived, how will she manage to climb back up to me? However, the prompt return of the dog does not give this anxiety time to assert itself or to be more than a small flaw in the euphoria that I feel at finding myself in a high place, from which I can see a vast panorama. Since my fears remain groundless, I can even say that this curtain-raiser has less to do with anguish than with victory: to the somewhat lifeless majesty of the mountainous site, the sight of the familiar animal running across the stony desert adds, with its flurry of everyday intimacy, something like a gust of wind arising to animate the pure air of the summits rather than to trouble it. If the dream deteriorates, it is in the country house that this occurs and it is, assuredly, with the scene of the bedroom invaded by strangers that the uneasiness culminates.

  Aimé Césaire lives in my house, in a room situated at the end of the veranda that is filled by the crowd of his visitors and at the other extremity of which opens the cubicle where I have temporarily installed myself. While knowing he is there, I scarcely glimpse him at all, and during that sequence of which he, though almost always hidden from view, is the central figure, I know, with the same diffuse knowledge, that the house possesses a large garden, so neglected that it has returned almost to wilderness. When the dream, long over as an action one thinks one is experiencing, becomes merely an imaginary adventure that must above all be accurately reconstructed, I will ask myself if the sight of this garden or even the mere sense of its existence was positively given to me in the dream, or if that enclosure half submerged in vegetation did not enter simply as a memory, a vague image that the I around which the present dream was organized had dragged after him like a fragment of a past that was not mine but his own, as would have been the case if that I had recollected the content, real for him, of earlier dreams of which my own memory had lost all trace. It seemed to me, however, while I labored at capturing in writing this dream of which I had been able to gather scarcely a few scraps, that that garden, very different from the one at the authentic Saint-Hilaire house, probably derived most of its mystery from the actual recollections on which it was based: the abandoned appearance of the garden of the villa “Les Gaules” at Saint-Pierre-lès-Nemours, and, perhaps, the photo my sister had just sent me which showed me my mother’s tomb disappearing under a mass of sheaves and bouquets. Thus, in contrast to the distant tropics evoked by the radiant figure of my friend Césaire, there was probably, in my dream, an allusion to what represents the most stable and the most literally homebody element in my life: that childhood house now illuminated, as though by a black sun, by the effigy of my deceased mother.

  To find the source of the suffering by which the dream’s country episode is gradually infected, in which direction should I turn: toward that mossy pole, intuited rather than shown, that is the intimacy of a garden too close to everything of which I am woven to be clearly separated from it? Or toward the torrid pole represented by Aimé Césaire, himself almost implied too, since he remains in the wings and his existence is scarcely attested except by the people crowding onto the veranda and by my preparations for our shared outing? If the lacunae in my dream are as important as I think they are, it is not by happenstance that Césaire appears only, at the very most, in the chink of a door, and that the garden, when I tried to give an account of what happened under the roof of the country house, whose surroundings could logically include that garden, proved to be so confused that I don’t even know whether it was only a memory or a thing actually seen with my own eyes, closed by sleep but open on the dream.

  Though he is central to this who
le episode, Aimé Césaire nevertheless seems to me cleared of any implication: if in these days anyone gives me courage it is certainly he, for I believe I can regard him as the only one of my living friends in whom art and politics—in other words the superabundance of imagination and the crude hardware of socially useful maneuvers—succeed in merging instead of excluding each other or merely coexisting after a fashion. He is neither a poet who has emasculated his art by subordinating it to the directives of a party, nor someone whose original revolt has been deflected or stopped in midcourse by excessively aesthetic concerns. Far from conducting himself like an intellectual who has become a militant as well in order to escape his own mirages, he is only a Black who, with all his genius as a writer, with all his knowledge as a teacher, and with all his farsightedness as a leader, is working for the liberation of all people by making it his primary duty to improve the fate of his countrymen. If because of the play of genealogies he belongs to the race that was flogged by the mechanized arm of the commanders, there is no doubt that morally he is of the race that—as Rimbaud says—sang under torture.

  Césaire thus cleansed of all suspicion, what should I now say about the garden within whose tangle my mother’s tomb is hidden and which tries so hard to conceal itself that its presence in the dream is only half certain? As I attempt to extract from it a secret that it perhaps does not contain, I can’t help evoking the image of another garden that at a much earlier time I really visited: near the village of Ermenonville, whose château was apparently (if one believes Nerval) a meeting place for the illuminés before the Revolution, the marvelous English-style park, not very well tended nowadays but still orderly, that contains, along with a Temple of Philosophy dedicated to Michel de Montaigne and the remains of an archery range, the empty tomb of Rousseau, at the center of the Isle of the Poplars. As I pass, because of the dreamed garden, through a series of alternate certainties and doubts—I saw it, or rather no, I remembered it; it was a memory, but no, in writing about my dream I innocently invented it; even though it was invented, it was formed of real vestiges of my past; thus created from the truth, it is as though I had actually seen or remembered it—I think of the succession of enclosures that left me so thoughtful after my outing to Ermenonville: in the leafy fullness of the park, the emptiness of an expanse of water; in the emptiness of that lake, the fullness of the earth of an island; in the more or less round fullness of that terra firma, a smaller circle delineated by the poplars; in the middle of the emptiness created by the ring thus formed, the fullness of the stone of the tomb and, under the fullness of the stone, the hollow from which—as Nerval said—Rousseau’s ashes are missing. Like the triple ring of fire protecting the sleep of a virgin warrior, barriers seem to have been symbolically raised around that tomb, which no longer is one since its occupant now lies in the Pantheon, where he was transferred, as though an increase in prudence required one to confuse things by removing him from his original resting place.

  Arising in the course of the dream, or while I was in the midst of telling it to myself, in which case it arrived after a certain delay, but so spontaneously that the detail thus added could not have been the product of an artificial reflection, this garden with its configuration doubly indecisive (since its natural undergrowth is complicated by the muddle of my perplexity regarding it) appears to me tangled from the outset in the stems and stalks of a mystery that is part of its texture, under whatever flag its image has been navigating and even if I would no longer have, as regards that, even the slightest hesitation.

  It is, theoretically, the garden of the house at Saint-Hilaire, but it is, in fact, the garden of my sister’s home at Saint-Pierre-lès-Nemours. Wherever it is situated, it is the garden attached to the family house, and, being the patch of ground in which are rooted the most irreproachable references of our position in space and time, necessarily includes a tomb in the background. It is a garden that, to give a somber color to the dream, simply needs to be there and does not intervene otherwise than as a mute reminder of realities that one could not elude except by donning another skin. In contrast to everything Césaire’s form contains that is warm and invigorating for the future there is, heavy with all its past burden, this rectangle of earth which the half-obliteration of its interior layout occupies without animating it.

  An almost literal expression of a rootedness that seems to prefigure the last immobility toward which the seasons in their inevitable sequence are leading us, this garden would thus be the cradle, whose shadows are too dark, from which I have distanced myself each time that, separating, for a time, from those who touch me most closely, I have gone off on a trip.

  That gardens should have a special place in the childhood memories of the middle-class boy from Paris or any other sizable urban center is not in the least abnormal. It was to the municipal garden that he was taken for at least some of his outings, and it was quite often there (among other open-air places contrasting strongly with the streets and their heavy edifices) that, after having run like an escaped horse, he would come back bathed in sweat to his mother or his sister, who would scold him for having gotten so warm that he was now completely soaked. The setting for great exploits and especially for mad fits of excitement, the public garden (like the one that in my house we called the “Town Garden”) is, for the child playing in it, a place where, even if a guard imposes the observance of a certain discipline, space is not begrudged him. However lively his pleasure may be at feeling physically free, however, it is the private garden—less vast but subject to less strict prohibitions—that will sometimes be the plantation in one corner of which he tries his hand at horticulture by sowing sweet peas or china-asters, sometimes his Money Island or his Republic of Bears, if it is not the biblical enclosure where in the company of the animals he learns to taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Wasn’t it in a garden that has lost for me all measurable surface, the one belonging to the villa “Les Gaules,” now a pool of memories rather than solid earth, that one day my friend, the dog Black, standing on his hind legs and embracing my leg with his front legs, abandoned himself on my person to a piece of behavior that, without understanding the point of it, I guessed was obscene? And wasn’t it in another family garden that, a few years later, finding myself alone with the bitch of the house—a sort of mongrel white-and-red spaniel—I allowed my hand, which was caressing her, to venture some improper touches that were endured without flinching by the peaceable Flora? With or without animals subjected to our whims or submitting us to theirs, it is in the tranquility of the garden, open to the skies, that one has all the latitude to believe one is a “savage,” as during those days of our vacation at Viroflay when my brothers and I would play at being Redskins, and the oldest, assuming the role of the great chief, would utter the war cry he had invented—Baoukta!—a term that impressed me by its barbarous violence and intrigued me also because it was like a password or magic spell taken from a language of Martians or belonging to a secret vocabulary, pregnant with meaning, the key to which was possessed only by my older brother, principal officiant.

  For the young city dweller, habitually confined as he is, the garden of the house one occupies in the summer, or of that which some member of the family circle permanently inhabits, is not only a place with less strict policing, but—however familiar it may be—a territory with numerous hollows always to be explored and favoring the manifestation of many singular things. Topographically, it is thus in part an unknown enclave inserted into the known world, and only later will it lose all exotic coloration in order to represent, on the contrary, the oldest and most stable intimacy, when one will recall, through the group photographs that were taken there, those gardens from which one derived the material for handicrafts as rustic as carving sticks or fashioning necklaces of chestnuts. It is remarkable in this regard that the garden in my dream, whereas its context made it the one at Saint-Hilaire, resembled more the one at Saint-Pierre with its older foundation and its history, going back to the time when, among t
he things that occupied me, there was a choice spot for “the garden,” even if it was modest, like the one my parents rented one year near our house, so that my brothers and I could enjoy the fresh air, a meager bit of land situated in the rue Jasmin that, despite the propitious street name, never flowered very profusely. That the more recent example of garden should be replaced in my dream by an example that plunges back into that distant period gives an idea of what is so heavily equivocal about the apparition: the fatal seal of my membership in a group circumscribed and limited in time, that place, cultivated but half reverting to wilderness, is also the home port I would like to return to, not in order to put myself in dry-dock like Rimbaud’s fierce invalids home from hot countries, but endowed with the extreme youth that allows one—because of the enticing projects that one foments there—to enlarge the frontiers of a place that is in fact cramped, and to bring infinity into its small space.

  By noting, without explaining, this profound ambiguity, I have most likely exhausted what I could say about the enclosure attached to the house where I was lodging Césaire, and I am quite prepared to believe that my incapacity to go farther is due to the fact that with this theme I am touching upon something so fundamental in me that it is actually inexpressible. Will I approach a little closer to the truth, or will I simply be covering over what cannot be said with a deceptive veil of chatter, if I describe what tenderness as well as what agony has been aroused in me by other gardens I have dreamed of: the poorly lit groves where (after a macabre sequence beginning in an attic) I encountered, her heart bared as in a butcher’s stall, the friend who had revealed to me that the female body is a garden of Armida, but without teaching me that in less than four years we would have exhausted the joys of the body or the soul in which we melted; the walkway, perhaps flanked by thickets and covered in gravel, where I was overcome, a few years ago, by an inexpressible pity whose nature, and, even more, that of the creature that was its object in my imagination, led me to compare it to that emotion which, when I was very young and found myself probably in our quite real garden at Viroflay, I experienced seeing a few steps from me a small bird that had fallen from its nest. In this ordinary stretch of walkway, which no specifics in the dream allow me to locate even approximately (there being only a suggestion that we are close to Paris), someone in my group has beaten a bird. “Beaten” meaning that (without intending to be cruel, but hard enough to wound it fatally) he has struck it several times with a leafy twig, in such a way that it will fall to the ground and we will be able to catch it. Leaning down to pick it up, I pass my right hand under the belly of the bird, which is a nightingale even though it does not actually show any of the characteristic traits of that species. This movement scarcely completed, I feel that the greater part of my right hand has become damp, for the bird is bleeding. Someone who is near me and who, no doubt, is in fact my wife says to me then: “They’ve beaten it, beaten it. Its eyes have been cut!” That the little creature should have been so unfairly mutilated, and that this should have occurred in those delicate organs of sight in which the spark of consciousness and life seems to reside, fills me with an emotion close to those inspired by love and poetry. There is no relation (I see this, now that I am going back over this dream) between such an emotion, profound at the same time as nuanced, and the horror, more intense but also more exterior, that would be aroused by the tortured humans displayed in a Garden of Torments. Is this difference—which is not a matter of degree, but has to do with the very quality of the sentiment—due solely to the fact that an emotion experienced within the terms of a dream belongs to the domain of art, since it is connected (either as the initial trigger or as repercussion) to an imaginary world that we create? Or should I rather recognize in this the proof that a certain ardent pity by which we cling to the creature whose object it is, is not the same as simple commiseration, so that we do not weigh our words carefully enough when we designate by a single term the love that we may feel for a person or a limited number of persons because of affinities that defy all arithmetic, and the love that we may pride ourselves on feeling for great indiscriminate masses: a nation, for instance, if not the whole of humanity?