And I could still turn my eyes away.
"But Hell already had hold of me, my sweet, the Hell of a morbid curiosity. I was already disposing of my human soul, because seeing had begun to consume me with pleasure, I was selling my future, selling my salvation, selling us."
"I am calling for help," I suddenly shouted to myself, with the silence of those who have their mouths slowly drifted full of shifting sand, "I am calling for help," I thought, quiet and calm. But never once did it occur to me that I might get up and leave, as though that would be impossible. The cockroach and I had been buried in a mine cave-in."
The scale suddenly had only one plate. On that side was my deep rejection of cockroaches. But "rejection of cockroaches" was merely a set of words, and I also knew that at the time when I myself died I too would be untranslatable into words.
Of my own death, yes, I was indeed aware, for death was the future and is imaginable, and I had always had time to imagine. But the instant, the very instant—the right now—that is unimaginable, between the right now and the I there is no space: it is just now, inside me.
"Understand me, I had death down pat and death was no longer demanding of me. But what I had never experienced before was this running up against the moment called 'right now.' Today places demands on me today. I had never before realized that the moment of living too has no words. The moment of living, my love, was becoming so 'now' that I was putting my mouth into the matter of life. The moment of living is a ceaseless, slow creaking of doors continually opening wide open. Two gates were opening and had never stopped opening. But they continually opened out on ... on nothingness?"
The moment of living is so Hellishly inexpressive that it is nothingness. What I called "nothingness," however, was so plastered to me that was it. . . me, to me? and therefore became invisible, like I was invisible to myself, and became nothingness. The doors kept on opening, as always.
Finally, my love, I fell. And it became a "now."
Finally, my love, I fell. And it became a now.
It was finally now. It was simply now. It was like this: the country was at 11:00 A.M. Superficially like a green yard, of the most delicate superficiality. Green, green—green is a yard. Between myself and that green, the water of the air. The green water of the air. I see everything through a full glass. And nothing is to be heard. In the rest of the house, shadows are all swollen. Ripe superficiality. It is 11:0.0 A.M. in Brazil. It is now. That means exactly now. Now is time swollen as far as it can be swollen. 11:00 has no depth. 11:00 is full of eleven hours up to the brim of the green glass. Time quivers like a stationary balloon. The air, fertile and panting. Until, with a national anthem, the tolling of 11:30 cuts the balloon's restraining ropes. And suddenly we'll all reach noon. Which will be green like now.
I suddenly awoke from the unexpected green oasis where I had for a moment completely hidden myself.
But I was on the desert. And now is not only at the heart of an oasis; now is also on the desert, and fully. It was right now. For the first time in my life there was a full now. This was the greatest brutality that I had ever come up against.
For nowness brings no hope, and nowness brings no future: the future will be precisely a now again.
I was so frightened that I became even quieter inside. For it seemed to me that I was finally going to have to feel.
It seems that I shall have to give up everything I leave on the other side of the gates. And I know, I knew, that if I went through the always-open gates, I would go into the heart of nature.
I knew that going in is no sin. But it is perilous, like dying. Just as we die without knowing where we go, and that is a body's greatest courage. To go in was a sin only because it was the condemnation of my life, and I might never after be able to return to it. Perhaps I already knew that, from those gates onward, there would be no difference between me and the cockroach. Either in my eyes or in the eyes of him who is God.
That was how I was taking my first steps into nothingness. My first hesitant steps in the direction of Life, and abandoning my own life. My foot stepped out into the air, and I went into paradise, or Hell: into the heart.
I ran my hand over my forehead: I noticed with relief that I had finally started to sweat. Up to a little bit earlier there had been only that hot dryness that dessicated us both. Now I started to become wet.
Oh, how exhausted I am! What I would really like now would be to cut all this off and put into this most difficult of stories, for pure diversion and relaxation, a positive tale that I heard one day—one of those tales about why some couple separated. Oh, I know so many interesting tales. And too, for a break, I could talk about tragedy. I know tragedies.
My sweat gave me relief. I looked up, to the ceiling. The ceiling had rounded out with the play of shafts of light and changed into something that reminded me of a vaulted ceiling. The heat's vibration was like the resonance of an oratorio being sung. Only my hearing apparatus sensed. A canticle with closed mouth, sound deafly resonating like something held fast and contained, amen, amen. A canticle of thanksgiving for the murder of one being by another being.
The most profound of murders: one that is a mode of relating, a way of one being existing the other being, a way of our seeing each other and being each other and having each other, a murder where there is neither victim nor executioner but instead a link of mutual ferocity. My primary struggle for life. "Lost in the Fiery Hell of a Canyon a Woman Struggles Desperately for Life."
I waited for that silent, trapped sound to go away. But the vastness grew within the small room, the mute oratorio opened it out in vibrations that reached the crack in the ceiling. The oratorio wasn't a prayer: it didn't ask for anything. Passions in the form of an oratorio.
The cockroach suddenly vomited another white, soft spurt through its crack.
"Oh, but whom could I go to for help, if you too," I then thought, in the direction of a man who once was mine, "if you too won't be able to help me now. For, like me, you tried to transcend life, and thus you got beyond it. But I'm not going to be able to do that anymore, I'm going to have to know, and I'll have to go on without you, even though I have tried to ask you for help. Pray for me, my mother, for not transcending is a sacrifice, and transcendence used to be my human effort at salvation, there was an immediate utility in transcendence. Transcendence is a transgression. But staying within what there is, that forces me not to be afraid!"
And I am going to have to stay within what there is.
Something must be said, don't you feel that something must be understood? oh, even if later on I have to go beyond it, even if later I transcend it, let it be fatefully born from me like the breath of a living person.
But, after what I know, shall I consider it the exhalation of breathing, or a miasma? no, not a miasma, I have pity on myself! I want, if transcendence comes fatefully upon me, for it to be like the breath born from my own mouth, the mouth that exists, and not from a false mouth opened up in an arm or in a head.
It was with Hellish joy that I was almost on the verge of dying. I started to feel that my ghostly step would be irreversible, and that I was leaving my human salvation behind little by little. I felt that my inside, despite being soft, white matter, nonetheless had the strength to burst my face of silver and of beauty, good-bye worldly beauty! Beauty that is now far from me and that I no longer want—I am unable to want beauty anymore—maybe I really never wanted it, but it was so nice! I recall how the game of beauty was nice, beauty was a continual transmutation.
But I give it up with Hellish relief. What has come out of the cockroach's belly is not something that can be transcended—oh, I don't mean that it is the opposite of beauty, "opposite to beauty" doesn't even make sense— what has come out of the cockroach is: "today," blessed be the fruit of your womb—I want nowness without decorating it with a future that will redeem it or with a hope—up to now what hope wanted in me was merely to sidestep nowness.
But I want much more than that: I wan
t to find redemption in today, in right now, in the reality that is happening, and not in promise, I want to find joy in this instant—I want God in that stuff that is coming out of the cockroach's belly—even if, in my aged, human terms, that means the worst and, in human terms, Hell.
Yes, I wanted that. But at the same time, I held the stomach's mouth with my two hands: "I can't!" I implored another man who also never could and never would himself. "I can't! I don't want to know what that something that up to now I would call nothingness is made of!" I don't want to feel directly in my so delicate mouth the salt of the cockroach's eyes, because, Mother mine, I had accustomed myself to the saturation of the layers and not to the thing's simple moistness..
It was thinking about the salt in the cockroach's eyes, which, with the sigh of one who is going to be forced to give in yet again, I realized was still using the old human beauty: salt.
I would have to abandon the beauty of salt and the beauty of tears as well. That too, for what I was seeing was back before the human.
For what I was seeing was back before the human.
No, there was no salt in those eyes. I was absolutely sure that the cockroach's eyes were completely without taste. I had always cultivated salt, salt was the transcendence that I used to sense a taste and to run from what I called "nothingness." I cultivated salt, I had construed myself around salt. But what my mouth couldn't take in . . . was insipidity. What I was completely unprepared for . . . was the neutral.
And that neutral was the life I had been calling "nothingness." The neutral was Hell.
The sun had moved a bit and fixed itself on my back. The halved cockroach was also in the sun. I can't do anything for you, roach. I don't want to do anything for you.
But it was no longer a matter of doing anything: the cockroach's neutral look told me that that wasn't the question, and I knew it. It was just that I couldn't tolerate just staying seated there, just being, and so I wanted to do something. Doing something would be transcending, transcending is a way out.
But the moment had arrived for that not to be the question any longer. For the cockroach knew nothing of hope or of pity. If it wasn't pinned there and was bigger than I was, it would kill me with a busy, neutral pleasure. Just like the violent neutrality of its life allowed me, because I wasn't trapped and was bigger, to kill it. That was the kind of tranquil, neutral ferocity there was on the desert where we were.
And its eyes were insipid; not salty as I would have preferred: salt would be sentiment, and word, and taste. I knew that the cockroach's neutrality has the same tastelessness as its white matter. Sitting there, I was being formed. Sitting there, being formed, I knew that when I didn't call things salty or sweet, sad or happy or painful, or use even subtler shadings—only then would I not be transcending anymore and would I be staying within the thing itself.
That thing whose name I know not was what, as I sat there looking at the cockroach, I was now becoming able to call without a name. Contact with that thing with no qualities and no attributes was repugnant to me, the living thing without name or taste or smell was disgusting. Insipidity: taste was no longer anything more than an aftertaste: my own aftertaste. For one instant, then, I felt a kind of shocked happiness throughout my body, a horrible, happy indisposition in which my legs seemed to disappear, just as always happened when the roots of my unknown identity were touched.
Oh, at least I had now come to the point in the nature of the cockroach where I no longer wanted to do anything for it. I was freeing myself from my morality, and that was a catastrophe without uproar and without tragedy.
Morality. Wouldn't it be simpleminded to think that the moral problem in relation to others consists of acting as you ought to act and that the moral problem in relation to yourself is to try to feel as you ought to feel? Am I moral to the extent that I do what I should and feel what I should?
Suddenly, the moral question seemed to me not so much overwhelming as extremely insignificant. The moral problem, if we are to relate to it, ought to be both less demanding and greater. For as an ideal it is at one and the same time insignificant and unattainable. Insignificant should it be reached; unattainable because it cannot be reached. "Scandal still is necessary, but woe unto him through whom the scandal cometh"—was it the Old Testament that said that? The solution had to be a secret one. The ethics of morality are to keep it a secret. Freedom is a secret.
Although I know that, even in secret, freedom does not absolve guilt. But one must be greater than guilt. My least divine part is greater than my human guilt. God is greater than my essential guilt. I therefore prefer God to my guilt. Not to excuse myself and get away but because guilt lessens me.
I now wanted to do nothing for the cockroach. I was freeing myself from my morality—even though that caused fear, curiosity, and fascination in me, and a great deal of fear. I'm not going to do anything for you, I too scrape along the ground. I'm not going to do anything for you because I no longer know the meaning of love like I thought I did before. And too, what I thought I knew about love, that too I am leaving behind, I almost no longer know what it is, I no longer remember.
Maybe I'll find another name, so much crueler right from the outset, so much more the thing itself. Or maybe I won't find one. Is love when you don't give a name to things identity?
But I now know something horrible: I know what it's like to need, need, need. And it's a new need, on a level that I can only call neutral and terrible. It's a need with no pity for my needing and no pity for the cockroach's needing. I was sitting there, quiet, sweating, precisely like now—and I see that there is something more serious, more fateful, and more central than everything that I have been in the habit of calling by names. I who called my hopes for love "love."
But now, it is within this neutral nowness of nature, and of the cockroach, and of my body's living sleep, that I want to know love. And I want to know if hope was a temporization with the impossible. Or if it was a putting-off of what is possible right now—and I haven't reached only for fear. I want a present moment that is not something with a promise but that is, that is being. That is the heart of what I want and I fear. That is the heart that I never sought.
The cockroach was touching me through with its black, faceted, shiny, neutral look.
And now I began to let it touch me. In fact, I had struggled all my life against the deep desire to let myself be touched—and I had struggled because I wasn't able to allow the death of what I called my goodness; the death of human goodness. But now I didn't want to fight against it anymore. There had to be a goodness so other that it wouldn't resemble goodness. I didn't want to fight anymore.
With disgust, with despair, with courage, I gave in. I had waited too long, and now I wanted to.
Did I want to only at that very moment? No, or else I would have left the room long ago, or simply would have scarcely noticed the cockroach—how many times before had I come across cockroaches and turned in another direction? I gave in, but with a fear and a sundering.
I thought that if the telephone should ring, I would have to answer it and could still be saved! But, like recalling a bygone world, I remembered that I had taken the receiver off the hook. If it hadn't been for that, it might ring, I could run out of the room to answer it, and never, oh never again would I come back in.
"I remember you, when I kissed your man-face, slowly, slowly kissed it, and when the moment came to kiss your eyes—I remember that then I tasted the salt in my mouth and that the tear salt in your eyes was my love for you. But what had even more wrapped me in a fright of love had been, in the depths of the depths of the salt, your bland, innocent, childish substance: in exchange for my kiss your more deeply insipid life was given me, and kissing your face was bland, busy, patient love-work, it was a woman weaving a man, just as you had woven me, the neutral artisanry of life."
Neutral artisanry of life.
My having kissed, for a whole day, the tasteless residue in tear salt made the room's unfamiliarity rec
ognizable, like already-experienced matter. If I had not recognized it till then, it was because it had been only blandly experienced by my deepest bland blood. I recognized everything's familiarity. The figures on the wall I recognized with a new way of looking. And I also recognized the cockroach's vigil. The cockroach's vigil was life living, my own vigilant life living itself out.
I felt in my robe pockets, found a cigarette and matches, lit it.
In the sun the white mass on the cockroach was becoming dryer and slightly yellowed. That told me that more time had passed than I had imagined. A cloud covered the sun for an instant, and I suddenly saw the same room sunless.
Not dark, just lightless. I then perceived that the room existed in itself, that it wasn't just the sun's heat, it could also be cold and calm like the moon. Imagining what its moonlit night might be like, I breathed in deeply, as though I had entered a calm backwater. Even though I also knew that the cold moon wasn't the room either. The room was a thing in itself. It was the high monotony of a breathing eternity. That intimidated me. The world would not intimidate me only if I became the world. If I am the world I won't be afraid. If one is the world, one is directed by a delicate, guiding radar.
When the cloud passed, the sun became clearer and whiter in the room.
Once in a while, in the flick of a second, the cockroach would flutter its antennae. Its eyes kept looking at me monotonously, the two neutral, fertile ovaries. In them I recognized my own two anonymous neutral ovaries. And I didn't want to, oh how I didn't want to!
The Passion According to GH Page 7