"I have a little bit of a stomachache," I said, breathing with some satiety. "What shall we do tonight?"
"Nothing," you answered, so much wiser than I. "Nothing, it's a holiday," said the man who was delicate with things and with time.
The profound tedium —like a great love—bound us together. And the next morning, early in the morning, the world was opening itself to me. Things' wings were open, it was going to be a hot afternoon, you could feel it in the cool sweat of the things that had passed the tepid night, like in a hospital where the patients awake still alive.
But all that was too fine for my human foot. And I, I sought beauty.
But now I have a morality that dispenses with beauty. I shall have to bid a nostalgic good-bye to beauty. Beauty was a soft enticement to me, it was the way I, weak and respectful, adorned the thing to be able to bear its core.
But now my world is the world of the thing that before I would have called ugly or monotonous—and is neither ugly nor monstrous to me anymore. I have gone through gnawing the earth, through eating the ground, and I have gone through having that kind of an orgy, and through feeling with moral horror that the earth I gnawed also felt pleasure. My orgy in fact came from my puritanism: pleasure offended me, and from the offense I created greater pleasure. Nevertheless, this present world of mine, I would have called it violent before.
For water's tastelessness is violent, the colorless-ness of a piece of glass is violent. A violence is all the more violent because it is neutral.
My present world is raw, it is a world of a great vital difficulty. For, more than a star, I now wish the thick, black root of the stars, I wish the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and is always incomprehensible.
It is with pain that I bid good-bye to the beauty of a child—I want the adult, who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who has become a seed-child that can't be broken between the teeth.
Oh, and I want to see too if I can now dispense with horses drinking water, which are so pretty. I also do not want my sensibility because it makes beauty; and could I dispense with the sky moving in clouds? and with flowers? I don't want pretty love. I don't want half-light, I don't want a well-made face, I don't want the expressive. I want the inexpressive. I want the inhuman within the person; no, it isn't dangerous, for a person is human anyway, it isn't necessary to struggle for that: wanting to be human sounds too pretty to me.
I want the materiality of things. Humanity is steeped in humanization, as though it were necessary; and that false humanization impedes man and impedes his humanity. There exists a thing that is broader, deafer, and deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Even though that thing too runs the risk of becoming transformed into "purity" in our gross hands, our hands that are gross and full of words.
Our hands that are gross and full of words.
"You'll have to bear my telling you that God isn't pretty. I say that because He is neither a result nor a conclusion, and everything that people find pretty is often only because it is already brought to a close. But what is ugly today will be seen as beauty centuries from now, because it will have completed one of its movements."
I don't want any longer the completed movement that in reality is never completed but that we complete in our desire; I don't want any longer to enjoy the ease of liking something simply because, since it is apparently complete, it no longer frightens me, and then is falsely mine—I, devourer of beauty that I was.
I don't want beauty, I want identity. Beauty would be an accretion, and I am going to dispense with it. The world has no intention of beauty, and that would have shocked me before: in the world there exists no aesthetic plane, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness, and that would have shocked me before. The thing is much more than that. God is greater than goodness and its beauty.
Oh, getting rid of all that means so great a disillusionment. But it is in disillusionment that the promise is fulfilled, through disillusionment, through pain that the promise is fulfilled, and it is for that reason that one must first pass through Hell: until one sees that there is a much deeper way of loving and that way does away with the accretion of beauty. God is what exists, and all the contradictions are within God, and therefore they don't contradict Him.
Oh, everything in me is aching to leave what was the world for me. Leaving is so harsh and aggressive an attitude that a person who opens her mouth to talk of leaving should be arrested and held incommunicado—I prefer to consider myself temporarily out of my own control rather than have the courage to think that all that is true.
"Give me your hand, don't leave me, I swear that I too didn't want it: I too lived well, I was a woman to whom you could refer with the phrase 'the life and loves of G. H.' I can't put the system into words, but I lived in a system. It was as though I organized myself around the fact of having a stomachache because, if I no longer had it, I would also lose the marvelous hope of one day getting rid of the stomachache: my old life was necessary to me because it was precisely its error that made me take up imagining a hope that, without the life that I led, I wouldn't have known."
And now I am risking an entire entrenched hope, in favor of a reality so much greater that I cover my eyes with my arm because I can't face head-on a hope so immediately fulfillable—even before I die! So much before I die. I also scorch myself in that discovery: the discovery that there exists a morality in which beauty is a huge, timid superficiality. Now what invokes me and calls me is neutrality. I have no words to express it, and I therefore speak of neutrality. I have only that ecstasy that too is no longer what we have been calling ecstasy, for it isn't culmination. But that culminationless ecstasy expresses the neutrality of which I speak.
Oh, to speak to myself and to you is being mute. To speak to God is what exists that is even more mute. To speak to things is mute. I know that that sounds sad to you, and to me as well, for I am still corrupted by the condiment of the word. And that is the reason that silence hurts me like an abandonment.
But I know that I must abandon myself: contact with the thing must be a murmur, and to speak to God I must put together unconnected syllables. My lacking came from the fact that I had lost my inhuman side—I had been expelled from paradise when I became human. And true prayer is the silent oratorio of inhumanity.
No, I don't have to rise through prayer: I must, ingurgitated, make myself a resonant nothingness. What I speak to God about has to make no sense! If it makes sense, it is because I err.
Oh, don't misunderstand me: I am taking nothing away from you. What I am doing is demanding of you. I know that it seems like I am taking away your and my humanity. But it's exactly the opposite: what I want is to live of that initial and primordial something that was what made some things reach the point of aspiring to be human. What I want for myself is to live of the most difficult part of humanity: to live of the germ of neutral love, for it was from that source that there began to sprout what later became distorted into sentimentations to the extent that the core became suffocated by the accretion of richness and squashed inside us by the human foot. It is a much greater love that I am demanding of myself—it is so much greater a life that it doesn't even contain beauty.
I now have that hard courage that hurts me like the flesh transformed in childbirth.
But no, I still haven't told all.
Not that what I'm going to tell now is all that's left. Much more has been left out of this account that I am giving to myself; father and mother are missing, for example; I still haven't had the courage to honor them; many of the humiliations I have gone through are missing, and I omit them because the only people who are humiliated are those who aren't humble, and instead of humiliation I should talk about my lack of humility; and humility is much more than a feeling, it is reality seen through minimal good sense.
Much yet remains to tell. But there is one thing that it will be imperative to say.
(One thing I know: if I reach the end of this account, I'll go, not tom
orrow but yet today, to eat and dance at the Top-Bambino, I mightily need to have a good time and distract myself. I'll be sure to wear my new blue dress that makes me look a little thinner and gives me color, I'll phone Carlos, Josefina, Antonio, I don't remember clearly which one of the two men I thought might be in love with me or if both were, I'll eat crevettes and not worry about how many, and I know why I'll eat crevettes tonight, tonight my regular life will be starting again, the life of my common happiness, I'll need for the rest of my days my slight, sweet, good-humored commonness, I, like everybody, need to forget.)
But I haven't told everything.
But I haven't told everything.
I haven't said how, sitting there motionless, I still hadn't stopped looking with deep disgust, yes, still with disgust, at the yellowed white mass on top of the cockroach's grayness. And I knew that as long as I had that disgust the world would evade me and I would evade myself. I knew that the basic error in living was finding cockroaches disgusting. Finding disgust in the thought of kissing a leper was my missing the primary life inside me ... for disgust contradicts me, contradicts my matter in me.
Then what, in pity for myself, I didn't want to think, then, I thought. I couldn't hold myself back anymore, and I thought that I was now truly thinking.
Now, in pity of the anonymous hand that I hold in mine, in pity for what that hand is not going to comprehend, I don't wish to take it with me to the horror that yesterday I went to alone.
For I suddenly knew not only that the moment had arrived to understand I could no longer transcend but also that the instant had arrived when I really could no longer transcend. And to have now what I always before thought should be for tomorrow. I am trying to save you, but I cannot.
For redemption must be in the thing itself. And redemption in the thing itself would be my putting into my own mouth the white paste from the cockroach.
At just the idea I closed my eyes with the force of someone locking her jaws, and I clenched my teeth so tight that any more and they would break right inside my mouth. My insides said no, my mass rejected the cockroach's mass.
I had stopped sweating; I had dried completely out again. I tried to reason with my disgust. Why should I be disgusted by the mass that came out of the cockroach? had I not drunk of the white milk that is the liquid maternal mass? and when I drank the stuff that my mother was made of, hadn't I, wordlessly, called it love? But reason didn't get me anywhere, except to keep my teeth clenched together as though they were made of flesh that was ashiver.
I couldn't.
There was only one way I could: if I gave myself a hypnotic command, and then I could in effect go to sleep and act as though I were in a sleepwalking trance—and when I opened my eyes from that sleep the thing would be "done," and it would be like a bad dream you wake up feeling free from because you were dreaming that your life was so much worse.
But I knew that I couldn't do it that way. I knew that I would really have to eat the cockroach mass, and all of me eat it, even my very fear eat it. Only then would I have what suddenly seemed to me to be the anti-sin: to eat the cockroach mass is the anti-sin, sin that would kill myself.
The anti-sin. But at what a price.
At the price of my going through the sensation of death.
I arose and took a step forward, with the determination not of someone who is bent on suicide but of someone who is going to kill herself.
The sweat had begun again, I was now dripping from head to toe, the honeyed toes of my feet ran inside my slippers, and the roots of my hair softened before that viscous thing that was my new sweat, a sweat that I didn't recognize and that had a smell like the smell that comes up from parched ground when it gets the first rain. That profound sweat was, however, what gave me life, I was slowly swimming in the oldest broth of my culture, the sweat was plankton and pneuma and pabulum vitae, I was being, I was being me.
No, my darling, it wasn't good in the sense that we use the word good. It was what we call awful. In fact, very, very awful. For the root of me, that I was only now experiencing, had the taste of a potato tuber, mixed with the earth it had been pulled out of. Nevertheless, that bad taste had a strange grace of living that I can understand only if I sense it again and can explain only while I do.
I took another step forward. But instead of going on ahead, I suddenly threw up the bread and the milk I had eaten at breakfast that morning.
Shaken through and through by the violent vomiting, which had come without any warning nausea, disappointed with myself, frightened by my lack of strength to carry out an act that seemed to me to be the only thing that would bring my soul and body together again.
Despite myself, after vomiting I had become serene, my head relieved, physically calm.
What was worse: I still had to eat the cockroach, but without the aid of my prior exaltation, the exaltation that would have acted within me like hypnosis; I had thrown up my exaltation. And unexpectedly, after the revolution that is vomiting, I felt physically simple like a child. It would have to be in that state, like a child carelessly happy, that I would eat the cockroach mass.
Then I stepped forward.
My happiness and my shame came when I awoke from my faint. No, it hadn't been a faint. It had been more like a dizzy spell, for I was still on my feet, my hand propped against the wardrobe. A dizzy spell that had made me lose track of the moments, of time. But I knew, even before thinking, that, while I had been gone in the dizzy spell, "something had happened."
I didn't want to think about it, but I knew. I was afraid to taste in my mouth what I was tasting, I was afraid to run my hand over my lips and feel any remains. I was afraid to look toward the cockroach—which must now have less of a white mass on its opaque back . . .
I was ashamed that I had had to become dizzy and unconscious to do something that now I would never afterward know how I did ... for I had taken away all my participation before I did it. I hadn't really wanted to "know."
Was that, then, the way we do things? "Not knowing"—was that the way the most profound things happened? would something always, always have to be apparently dead for the really living to happen? had I had not to know that it was living? Was the secret of never escaping from the greater life the secret of living like a sleepwalker?
Or was living like a sleepwalker the greatest act of confidence? the act of closing your eyes in dizziness and never knowing what took place.
Like a transcendence. Transcendence, which is the remembrance of the past or of the present or of the future. In me was transcendence the only way I could reach the thing? For even in eating of the cockroach, I had acted by transcending the very act of eating. And now all I was left with was the vague recollection of a horror, I was left with only the idea.
Until the recollection was so strong that my body shouted all in itself.
I dug my fingernails into the wall: now I tasted the bad taste in my mouth, and then I began to spit, to spit out furiously that taste of nothing at all, taste of a nothingness that nonetheless seemed to me almost sweetened with the taste of certain flower petals, taste of myself—I spit myself out, never reaching the point of feeling that I had finally spit out my whole soul. "Because you are neither hot nor cold, because you are tepid, I will vomit you out from my mouth," was the Revelation according to St. John, and the phrase, which must refer to other things that I now no longer remembered, the phrase came to me from the depths of my memory, serving as the insipidity of which I had eaten— and I was spitting.
Which was difficult: because the neutral thing is extremely energetic, I spat and spat and it kept on being me.
I only stopped in my fury when I realized with surprise that I was undoing everything I had laboriously done, when I realized that I was betraying myself. And that, poor me, I couldn't get beyond my own life.
I stopped, shocked, and my eyes filled with tears that just burned and didn't run. I think I didn't feel that I was even worthy of having tears run, I lacked the basic pity for m
yself that lets one cry, and I retained in my burning pupils the tears that spread salt on me and that I didn't deserve to have run.
But even though they didn't run, the tears were such companions to me and bathed me with such compassion that I lowered a head that had been consoled. And, like one who returns from a trip, I sat down again quietly on the bed.
I who had thought that the best proof of my internal metamorphosis would be to put the cockroach's white mass into my mouth. And that in that way I would approach . . . the divine? the real? For me the divine is the real.
For me the divine is the real.
But kissing a leper isn't even goodness. It is reality in itself, it is life in itself—even if that also means the leper's salvation. But it is first one's own salvation. The saint's greatest benefit is to himself, which is unimportant: for when he reaches the great vastness itself, thousands of people are enlarged by his vastness and live on it, and he loves others just as much as he loves his own terrible vastness, he loves his opening-out with lack of pity for himself. Does the saint wish to purify himself because he feels the need to love the neutral? to love what is not an accretion, and to dispense with the good and the attractive. The saint's great goodness ... is that for him everything is the same. The saint scorches himself until he reaches love of the neutral. He needs it for himself.
I then understood that, no matter the situation, living is a great good in relation to others. All one has to do is live, and that in itself brings about that great good. He who lives totally is living for others, he who lives his own vastness is giving a gift, even if his life takes place in the cloister of a cell. Living is so great a gift that thousands of people benefit from every lived day.
"Does it pain you that God's goodness is neutrally continuous and continuously neutral? But what I had wanted as a miracle, what I called "miracle," was in fact a desire for discontinuity and interruption, the desire for anomaly: what I called "miracle" was the precise moment when the true, continuous miracle of process was interrupted. But God's neutral goodness is still more entreatable than it would be if it weren't neutral: it is just going and having, just asking and having."
The Passion According to GH Page 13