The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  I have penetrated some sort of wall of sound. I am the only one who heard the explosion. Under the imprecise date of November 1959, these lines, written shortly after a second and last cure at Montecatini, appear in my notebook bound in red boards. I proposed not to note down a discovery, but to express—in view of the present account—what I had been feeling for a long time already and whose most manifest aspect was a certain indifference toward my work as a writer, as though, having pushed too far my effort at lucidity, I had crossed a threshold after which, all my ardor having been stifled, nothing was left for me but the dry industry of a good pupil. The idea of having gone beyond the limit and of being punished for it certainly made me rather proud (or at least it was thus that, in order to avoid a state of prostration, I tried to represent the thing to myself). But what I experienced, in truth, was the equivalent—in a very different domain—of an impression noted earlier and connected to the reflections inspired in me by that country so distant and at the same time so close where so many women had moved me by their seriousness, their tranquil grace, and their affectionate and exquisite manners, forming an image that toppled from its throne, in me, the image of the African woman conceived as an emanation of nature, a sort of satyress or dryad: A day comes when there is no longer any magic in being naked; no longer a means of converting oneself imaginatively into something like the young sorceress who, her robe removed, awaits her flight toward the demoniacal ball after rubbing her whole body with ointment. Perhaps it is at that moment that one is ripe for tasting the sweet austerity of the girls of new China in masculine-looking dress? And from that note I go back to another, much older, which seems to express by anticipation—before I really believed it and, consequently, with enough detachment to talk about it without evasions—the state whose essence is named when one uses in this connection the word “state” (one of the most neutral and down-to-earth in the whole dictionary), the state of languor and withdrawal in which some will perhaps see a kind of wisdom but which I recognize for that of old age: Incapacity to become excited, once old age has come, because one has measured one’s limits. The ceiling now solid, there is no longer any way of staving it in. When it has become necessary to make some reductions in the idea that one was forming of oneself, poetry’s time is over. This is therefore not new, and it was well before old age that I suffered these sorts of assault. The difference is that the bad patches of earlier times, which corresponded to periods of depression, are what I am now, it seems to me, living permanently.

  Crisis in Laos. Attempt at a counterrevolutionary landing in Cuba. Military putsch in Algeria, fortunately aborted after the threat that it would extend to France. These events, which shook me as they did millions of other people, will have accompanied, with their noise of church organs, the recording of a sinister finding, prepared long in advance but today sanctioned by chronology, since the one who had so prematurely formulated it has just turned sixty. My disgust at the feverishness with which a certain gang which is willing to doom the West, under the guise of maintaining it in the first place, to material disasters and to the negation of its own slogans of liberty, has thus been joined by discouragement at feeling I have been caught unprepared and excluded by the workings of time, which leaves me, now, a very narrow margin, some better days from which one may hope, without being foolish, for a final blossoming. “The East Is Red” was one of the songs I heard most often during the national festival at Peking. But even if I believed blindly in what such a dawn proclaims, the chances would remain nil that it would ever come to shed light on me, and when, in the eyes of the living, I am over on the other side—on the verso of a page that for me will not even have been visibly turned—I will have taken (at best) a few indecisive steps toward the opening of these “new ways,” the Vie Nuove of which, at Palermo, I had wondered what exactly they were, not knowing then that it was by this name that a large Italian communist weekly chose to call itself. If I grow old, however, and if I die, this is as much as, but not more than, anyone else; I know it perhaps a little better, I am less apt than many others to distract myself from it, but there is no other difference. Despite my strong propensity to take events (large or small) for the vicissitudes of a kingdom that is my own, I cannot ignore the fact that every thinking being is, like me, the center of the world. Now, since such royalty turns out to be shared in this way, it follows that even though a drama or any other sort of adventure may never be experienced except in the first person, it would be clownish to act as though one were the only attraction on the program. Enough, therefore, of imitating those drunks who stroll about expatiating into empty space and beating the air with their arms. Two of the visits that, for medical procedures, I made to the Hôpital Claude-Bernard after leaving it allowed me to perceive with a troubling precision what a small thing it is, even beyond its vulnerability to the blade of death—that first person so fully ours and on which the universe appears to us to rest.

  I had been back at home barely twenty days when I returned there, as had been agreed during an earlier visit, to submit to an X-ray inspection of the state of my throat. It was a woman who did it, and once the photos had been taken, she congratulated me, saying in a friendly way that it was a pleasure to see me as I was now. I was surprised at this, for I did not know her at all. But it turned out that I was known to her without my ever having seen her, for it was she who had X-rayed me when I was in the coma. As logical and simple as the explanation was, to be known in such a way by someone who was completely unknown to me appeared to me very strange, and it was not without uneasiness that I realized that, for a certain time, I had been literally a body without a soul, a mannequin whose form alone, almost, is all that differentiates him from a piece of furniture. In the same sense, I recalled a little later the cordial signs addressed to me by male and female nurses when they passed in front of the open door of the room I lived in with a creature who persisted, in his case, in living only in the third person: these men and women, who said hello to me as to an old acquaintance, had seen me—perhaps even handled me—while the poisoning had reduced me to no more than a thing, and it was to this latter, now capable in its turn of looking at them, that were addressed the marks of a friendship the beginnings of which, even though I had been the one most directly affected, I had not witnessed.

  A year later, or nearly, I went to the Pavillon Lassen one more time, summoned by one of the doctors who was anxious to make sure I was not suffering from any aftereffects of the tracheotomy. When I saw this doctor, I realized with a certain vexation that he was not the one I was expecting: confusing the two names, I had thought that person who had sent the letter was one of his colleagues, whom I remembered much better and with whom I would no doubt have felt to a lesser degree that I was the practically anonymous subject of an observation. The head duty nurse, for her part, recognized me perfectly and, to a question I asked her, told me that the man who had once been my roommate had simply stopped living, without ever having been brought out of the condition of object into which a brain tumor (as they discovered) had precipitated him. “Such a nice man!” a nurse had once said to me, adding: “You can see it in his face . . .” when I asked her how, in the absence of the slightest word or sign she might have received from him, she could know that. In the hallways I met various members of the subordinate staff whose faces were still familiar to me; but I was the one who had to go to those of them I wanted to greet, for—was it forgetfulness or discretion?—they did not pay me any more attention than if I had been a complete stranger. Finding myself face to face with these people, whom I recognized without its being reciprocal, and who, after having lavished attention or encouragement on the rag I was a year earlier, did not even appear to notice my presence, it seemed to me I had returned to this hospital like a ghost, so insubstantial that I offered nothing for the light to rest on, and, a star in bygone days, I experienced the disappointing impression of having become less alive in the eyes of all these people than when I was half dead.

  IIIr />
  I must have been fourteen or fifteen years old when I saw, at the Alhambra in Paris, the following act.

  Dressed in a dark suit of very correct cut, a man in the prime of life—announced as a magician and having, it seems to me, a Dutch name—came onto the stage with a hurried step. Speaking volubly and moving incessantly from opposite-prompter to prompt-side and vice versa, he unfurled handkerchiefs or other pieces of material, manipulated utensils picked up from occasional tables or taken out of suitcases. Then he invited one, and soon many, spectators to come up onto the boards, volunteer collaborators or colleagues such as often take part in conjuring acts. Once there, in a sarabande punctuated by numerous incidents and even by a pistol shot, he had them spin like teetotums, assigned them duties that one could think were useful, encumbered them with a quantity of props, and put into the arms of some of them the most unexpected burdens (giving one, for example, an enormous block of ice brought from the wings). After a good quarter of an hour of this game, the stage being now crowded with people and strewn with heteroclite objects, he would break off in the middle. The curtain would drop, and one would realize then—confirming a suspicion that had only just dawned—that from beginning to end of his performance he had done absolutely nothing, not even the most innocent sleight of hand.

  With this book, into which I have thrown, almost unsorted, descriptions, evocations of people, accounts of dreams and real events, notations of the condition of my soul, and very diverse perceptions, the whole accumulating without great profit in a baroque profusion, haven’t I done to some extent what that professional hustler did, or rather what, humorously, he contrived not to do? Since my own goal is not to keep the company amused and to mystify by creating a pointless imbroglio, it is time for me to get to the end of it . . .

  One or two kilometers, as the crow flies, from my house in Saint Hilaire, on a wooded eminence which one can climb effortlessly along paths scarcely cleared, for (unlike the cliff of which I have dreamed so many times) it is neither very high nor very steep, there is a small ruined tower that one can see, to the left, from the road that leads from Châlo-Saint-Mars to Boutervilliers and that, after a level crossing, runs alongside, for a time, a single-track railroad to the right, on which, on weekdays, a short freight train with an electric engine passes going in one direction in the morning and coming back in the other in the evening. A little farther along on the road, and also on the left hand, before passing under a bridge whose only purpose seems to be to connect two sections of the same vast property dominated by a building that one takes, from a distance, to be a château (a massive structure with walls striped horizontally white and red, in faded and dirtied tones, on the edge of a terrace perceptibly more elevated than the top of the tower), one finds a curious monument composed of an obviously imitation dolmen and a great wooden cross. At the foot of this assemblage, on a tablet wedged between the crude blocks of a small stone wall, is engraved the following text, the end of which, worn away, is unfortunately not decipherable: Man succeeds in conquering the earth. Humanity is approaching its great end. This country was once Gaul, with druidism, and is now France, with Catholicism.

  Closed by a door with a large latch that has now fallen down, probably under the blows of some adult or childish depredator, the tower is covered with graffiti on the inside—dates, first names, and other inscriptions—left there by visitors a good number of whom, at least, Sunday walkers, must have been couples in love. “Chocolat from Bevoie,” “Mémé from Belleville,” “Mimile” (from where, I don’t remember) are a trio of names that I have read on the wood of the door, now that, laid almost horizontal, it covers a good part of the small round space circumscribed by the stone wall, itself clothed in an underbrush of letters and numbers from which, as far as I know, the inquisitive can sift out nothing that is not perfectly decent or, at the very most, banally romantic. If this small-scale donjon, with perhaps quite a brief past (for nothing attests to its medieval authenticity), was the setting for love affairs that took place in the open air at the same time as behind closed doors, there remains, certainly, no other trace of it than this abstract tangle of signs that are not, after all, the formal proof of any embrace. If some have used it, alone or not, as a secluded spot where the organism can free itself of its more or less nauseating products, each time I have gone there I have not found the least mark of that, either. A few shards of bottles, a weekly ticket for trips on the bus, several pieces of crumpled paper, that is all the detritus my last visit allowed me to observe.

  To this ruin with its romantic look, slightly gallowslike to anyone who makes his way inside, I went in the company of my dog Dine three or four times, in the course of walks that had another goal than this one, which is too close to home and admissible only as the pretext for a brief detour from a longer circuit. The last time, the dog needed a great deal of coaxing to enter. I always keep her on a leash, because otherwise she would go off hunting, would risk getting caught in a trap, and would in any case come back only the devil knows when. Thus, pulling stoutly on her studded collar through the interposition of the leather strap, I managed to drag her in after me. But it was as though she were restrained by a frank repugnance, which could hardly be explained by the sordid state of the place, since a boxer dog, and a rustic one like her, is not so fastidious. Capable, by nature, of indulging in romantic constructions, I did not fail to notice that in returning to the tower I was making a pilgrimage to the very spot that I had thought of choosing as the last receptacle of my living body, at the time when I was cherishing a plan to commit suicide. Going off, as I do fairly regularly, to take a walk with the animal, I would have carried along in my pocket my provision of phenobarbital, and it would be there that I would go to withdraw for the fatal picnic, at once far from all help and in a place such that the eventual discovery of my remains would be (it seemed to me) less macabre there than elsewhere, given the hooky-playing sort of aspect that—thus conceived—the whole scenario would assume. Tempting as such an explanation may be (the mysterious antennae supposedly possessed by my friend Dine that would keep her away from a spot which her master had thought of as the most desirable setting for his death), common sense keeps me from subscribing to it: this recent walk was not the first time I had made the pilgrimage, and the dog’s refusal would therefore already have had an occasion to manifest itself, if it had been motivated by the funereal signification that the tower has retained for me. Yet the fact is that when—two years after my recovery—I had been taken by the desire to go back to the scene (no more than symbolic) of a crime that, even if successful, would not have been really criminal since it would have stricken only its author, my black-muzzled companion had entered along with me, without resisting by trying to anchor herself in the ground with her four large, strong paws. Pulling the door (then still in place) after me and trying vainly to close it by pushing the inner latch, I noted simply that the tip of the latter met the wall a little lower than the cavity intended to receive it and that consequently I could not make it work. The idea came to me then that if, when I dreamed of it, I had wanted to carry out my sinister plan, the fact of not being able to close myself in—an unexpected circumstance, a grain of sand that stopped the functioning of the mechanism—would probably have dissuaded me from it.

  A body perhaps half rotted that would have been discovered in that ruin, had I actually chosen it as my final ivory tower. A body cut to bits that we could imagine, my companions and I, at the foot of the Mountain of the West, when, as we were visiting its Taoist temple, we were told about the suicide of the man who had sculpted its most precious and most loftily situated chapel, habitation of two seated, bearded figures framing a gilded god who, with his right foot, is standing on a water dragon and, on the sole of his left foot, apparently lifted in running position, bears a fruit tree. According to our guide—the president of the local section of the Association of the Chinese People’s Cultural Relations with Foreigners—the conch or horn of plenty that the statue holds in his
left hand is a piece of money, and a paintbrush the object that it holds in its right. The gilded personage is not a god but a man, who, after the illness and death of the woman he loved, felt that life no longer had any meaning for him and decided to devote himself exclusively to artistic work. This was why he executed the figures and other ornaments in the chapel, then threw himself from the top of the escarpment, not finding in his work sufficient consolation. Afterward, a paintbrush had been put in the right hand of the statue leaping so curiously, an emblem recalling the very man who had fashioned it and whom (they told us) it represented.

  However confused may have been the overall effect of the explanations that were given us (uncertain in the mind of our guide, imperfectly translated by our interpreter, or ill understood by ourselves, whence some oddnesses if not improbabilities, such as the identification as self-portrait assigned to one obviously divine figuration), what I retain from this account, which was at least imprecise, and perhaps altered by the translation, is the idea that love, art, and death appear in it intimately mingled.

  The splendor of the golden personage (surprised, one would have said, as he was dashing forward simply in order to dash forward, and not in order to overcome some prey), the peace that reigned supreme inside the chapel (animated, not by a host of things upon each of which in succession the eye would have been able to alight, but by the sole and extraordinary presence of the three figures), the harshness of the mountainside chosen by the devotees of Tao as a place in which to nest their vertiginous constructions, compensated for the poverty of a narrative produced by a man who, here making use of an obvious commonplace, had first said that this chapel—scarcely more than a century old, but belonging to the old China—attested to the “high cultural level” of those who had built it. If that astonishing setting had not made me sensitive to it, surely the three key words of the story (those words not uttered, but paraphrased, by the anecdote) would not have presented themselves, in my memory, with such prominence: “love,” “art,” and “death,” which designate realities that I believe are closely conjoined, since between art and love there is the link of beauty and since both—the first in that it goes beyond what is given by nature and creates a simulacrum of eternity, the second in that it explodes the self by precipitating it into the other—take us into a boundless terrain that can no more be charted than the immense plain of death.