Aseroë
Page 2
Hence, this uncanny power of attraction that exists between the word and this thing, this fungus among us, both situated at the two extremes of evolution, whenever they happen to meet.
On October 13, I resolved to test this hypothesis by taking on the Phallaceae whose resemblance to the reproductive organs of the human race can escape only the most nearsighted or the most benighted of creatures.
The mycological classification system provides an “analytical key” permitting specialists to identify an elusive species more rigorously than by the comparative use of a photograph or a drawing. Thus, all known mushrooms can be described in accordance with their perceptible characteristics (odor, texture, appearance, color, spore shape, reaction to certain chemicals) that pertain to a genus or to a more restricted class, to a family, a species, a subspecies, down to the precise identification, by successive eliminations, of the elusive specimen in question.
If I consider Anthurus archeri, the “octopus stinkhorn” or the “devil’s fingers,” I can identify it by noting, in turn, the characteristics of its division (Basidiomycota), of its class (Agaricomycetes), of its order (Phallales), of its family (Phallaceae), of its genus (Clathrus), and then of its species.
The Phallaceae include a small number of genuses and species: Phallus impudicus (that nauseating cone sometimes called “devil’s egg”), Mutinus caninus (or “dog stinkhorn”), Clathrus ruber (or “basket stinkhorn,” a kind of latticed sphere, partially open, like an enigma), Colus hirudinosis (another absolutely repulsive stinkhorn fungus), and Anthurus archeri.
Not much is known about the propagation of Phallaceae; they disappear here, appear elsewhere, thousands of kilometers away, and clearly adapt to the local climate.
I decided to sleuth out Anthurus, watching for the slightest mutation, and, if possible, the appearance of a new species, as yet unnamed. If my experiment were to succeed, I would find myself faced with the following alternatives: either the discovery of a new Phallaceae and the invention of an appropriate name or the naming of an unknown species, which, ipso facto, would cause it to materialize.
The first procedure is the one used by the researcher. It was recommended by Jehovah in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:19), even though the creation story never breathed a word about mushrooms.
The second procedure is a matter for jackasses, obscurantists, Jehovah Himself, poets, or misunderstood experts. I was tempted by this second one, without having the presumptuousness of including myself in any of the categories cited above. I had to proceed as I saw fit, in order to throw light on the strange relationship that mushrooms maintain with the world of thought.
I returned to the same place several days in a row, in the forest of Cîteaux, after having noted, between the arbor and a group of dogwood trees, lodged on a dark, broken surface, a form of Anthurus archeri. On the preceding night, its eggs had ripped through the layer of dead leaves. The soil was lukewarm. In spite of the abundance of very common species such as the peppery Lactarius, the Anthurus was growing alone, isolated from every living creature around it.
Despite the mushrooms’ obnoxious odor, I bent over the soil and cried out to several large specimens that had reached maturity: Anthurus archeri! Anthurus aseroë! I couldn’t stay long in that bent-over position—not because of the smell, but because I felt ridiculous. I looked around; then I returned to the same spot, but without bending over or uttering a word. Nothing happened.
All week long, I made my way to the site of the experiment in the dawn light. I saw the Anthurus droop, its pseudopetals (more and more ravaged and pustulant) detaching themselves from the bulb, drying up, and rotting. At the point where the most hardy specimens seemed on the verge of disappearance, already mingled with the mulch of dead leaves, I caught myself mechanically pronouncing “Anthurus archeri sensu Dominici.” I immediately tried to get hold of myself and to supply the correct name: Anthurus archeri. I wouldn’t have had the right to add sensu Dominici unless I had myself discovered a subspecies of Anthurus or even a new characteristic of the old species, a simple detail that might have escaped the experts until then. Meanwhile, I repeated “sensu Dominici.” I think I’m alert enough to avoid any error in observation; I am leery of the hermeneutic delirium that leads certain learned scholars to devote hundreds of pages to a bagatelle. No, I had to admit it: my faculties were not deceiving me. I was witness, in my innermost being and against my will, to a proliferation of names provoked by the mere presence of Anthurus archeri. Its precarious life, at the point of vanishing, was clinging to my tongue, to my bumbling thought. I could hear myself reciting a stream of terms including French, Latin, and Greek words, as well as words pouring in from other languages unknown to me.
I made my escape, and the pentecostal phenomenon of which I was the victim ceased. I stopped going to this wood until the end of autumn. But this flight wasn’t enough to protect me from a serious infection. During the week following my experiment in involuntary verbigeration, I caught myself, early one morning, copying down into a notebook lists of names that seemed to be the names of Phallaceae. In less than three days, I had written down more than 120 species, in addition to the five species recognized by Romagnesi’s analytical key. At that rate, I could have had more than six hundred new species to my credit before mid-November.
This period was a nightmare. To blacken page after page with newly coined words could only be a meaningless exercise, whether in the service of poetry or the natural sciences. But I persevered, despite myself, in this distressing task. That’s when I considered putting an end to my days, be it out of cowardice or out of the fear of the unknown.
On November 11, I got up painfully, my mind worn out by this uncontrollable proliferation of newly named mushrooms. The fungi kept coming and coming.… I had covered endless notepads and notebooks with my crabbed handwriting.
I had been avoiding going out for a week. Even the sight of my garden through my window had become unbearable; I feared that nature would answer my summons in some insane way.
If the proliferation of new genuses rendered Romagnesi’s classification system useless, I could see the time coming when entire genuses that were universally loved, such as the Boletus or the Tricholoma, would be driven out of existence by this invasion of names without things.
Early that November morning, there I was in the woods, ready to do whatever it took to put an end to this torture. I approached, empty-handed, the location of the experiment. I bit my lips so hard that I drew blood, trying not to say a thing. The ground was bare. Where the Anthurus archeri had stood, the rotted leaves had broken down into a black mulch. A few straws, swept by the wind, were scattered here and there. I bent over the soil and, without waiting for the parasitic words to spill in chaotic fashion from my mouth, shouted out at the top of my lungs, then called out softly, “Come here … close to me…. Don’t be afraid…. I won’t hurt you.”
Then, seeing the earth stirred by a slight breeze, I bent forward and, gluing my lips to the cold surface of the ground, vomited up the whole list of names.
As evening approached, I returned to my home, exhausted. I felt a great tenderness for the garden and the house. New forms of Aseroë were growing along my walls, like common dandelions. The weather was beautiful; the sun wavered in the dusk.
I wasn’t sure if night would fall.
2
Aseroë
I CAN’T GET OUT OF MY MIND what this simple word, Aseroë, has cost me in terms of risk and peril, of danger and exhaustion.
On September 20, somebody, thinking to please me, sent me a few sentences copied from a book:
For sale, bodies and voices, for sale, enormous and unquestionable riches, for sale, that which will never be sold … The salesmen have not run out of their stock! It will be some time before travelers have to submit their invoices.
Before approaching—I can already feel it—this forbidden zone, I hand over to the idolaters of little Arthur, to the zealots of the Grand Seer, to the Rimbaud Maniacs, to the
street-corner Illuminati, to the worshippers of holes without rims and underlined silences, these random reflections of a purely inventorial nature:
Names
Number of Camels
Saïd Massa
5
Abd el-Kader Daoud
12
Moussa and Sanzogoda
19½
Hassan Abou Boku
1½
Djabem
1
Ali Abey
10½
Assorted People of Tadoujna
12½
Saddik Hoummedan
5
Omar Bouda
3½
Mohammed Kassem and Abou Beker Balla
4½
Boguis
1½
Bouha
1
Hoummedou and the Adaïels
13
Total: 90½
While some well-meaning friends were agitating, unbeknownst to the young Rimbaud, for the publication of his Illuminations, the poet was busying himself with the Labatut caravan account books, finally set up in the fall of 1887. Despite appearances, the difference between these would-be friends and the Labatut caravan poses a significant question, as important as the distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates, between governors and the governed, between believers and nonbelievers.
Thinking about the Labatut caravan, the thought crossed my mind to set up another ledger, which might clarify my position on language—that is, the balance sheet of the net profits realized by corporations and individuals on the work of Arthur Rimbaud since his death. Here’s my estimate, with a margin of error of plus or minus 10 percent:
1.
Successive editions in 43 languages
10.1 million
2.
Public and private sales of manuscripts and original editions
3.5 million
3.
Publication of critical and biographical essays by researchers who owe their careers, whether in France or abroad, solely to the accumulation of Rimbaud factoids (minus the cost of theses, travel, and secretarial help)
40.5 million
4.
Radio, TV, and movie adaptations dedicated to the life and works of the same author
54.5 million
5.
The traffic in booklore realized on the products mentioned in categories 1 and 3
4.2 million
6.
Photos, posters, badges, medallions, and handbills
1.0 million
Total: 113.8 million
Something on the order of the annual salary of a senior executive at the Google Alphabet Holding Company. So you’ve turned a profit on young Rimbaud’s death. But has it really paid off big? Nothing, compared to the new social media and financial sectors.
That’s why Yves Bonnefoy is right to see in the above-quoted Rimbaud poem entitled “Sale” (from Illuminations) a cynical commercial metaphor signifying “the corruption of the initial aspirations of the poet into shabby, finite and inert objects.” He’s absolutely right, provided you include the royalties collected by Yves Bonnefoy in the total 113.8 million of the Rimbaud enterprise account, not to mention the one-thirteenth of royalties that some courageous publisher will have to refund me for publishing this book. (Since Rimbaud isn’t cited in the other chapters, I’ll keep this pittance for myself.)
In a very different world, I would be happy to see an end to the posthumous sale of sacred and profane relics, and to the neglect of the precious remains, in favor of the often trivial but deeply stirring forms of life—such as an actual face, an actual encounter, or a true handshake.
If it takes too long for that to happen, I’d rather breathe my last than witness the throng of flunkies jostling one another on the slopes of profane Golgothas, fighting over the corpses of people they wouldn’t really want to associate with anyway—phony admirers of the dead.
But as for death itself, so sweet, so calm, so eternally betrothed, why avoid it? I certainly wouldn’t.
It doesn’t matter much to me whether the poet (Rimbaud himself) swallowed or spit out the holy wafer during his last rites. Instead, I’d rather find out for what amazing reason nobody has said anything about his words, the dying last words of the Living Man, whispered into a confessor’s ear. Is it out of respect for a secret considered untouchable? That would surprise me on the part of those who are partial to silence and lacunae. Or is it, rather, because of the belief, academic and hagiographic in nature, that nothing remains of great men except their written traces? In any case, nobody has bothered to find out what the much-vaunted troubled priest actually heard from the mouth of Rimbaud.
In this significant oversight I sense the visceral fear of imagining, through others’ examples, the frightening spectacle of one’s own death rattle and, at the same time, the embarrassed indifference—mingled with a genuine pity—that one is supposed to feel for that deplorable state: the unhealthy delirium of any ordinary dying soul or the discreet disgust that one also feels for any stricken brain, now rendered commonplace by so much suffering.
Finally, if the Rimbaud cultists had taken seriously their own lyrical flights with regard to the Illuminations, they would have shown more interest in his last words, fallen upon the ears of a priest.
I’m afraid the moment has come to describe another experiment. The method, the procedures that I’m here deploying might seem, at first, to resemble those of the hagiographers whose ill-fated effects I have just criticized, but what I have found, what I am in a position to offer, cannot be enclosed within the circle of chance or power.
Arthur Rimbaud entered the Hôpital de la Conception in Marseille on May 20, 1891. He informed his mother and his sister of this in a telegram dated the next morning, which spoke of the extreme gravity of his condition:
Monday morning, amputation of my leg. Near death.
In a word, our life is an unending misery! So why do we exist? (Letter written to his sister Isabelle, June 23)
I shall go to my grave, while you shall walk in the sun. (Isabelle’s notes, Sunday, October 4)
Next, the business with the chaplains—the last communion and confession. I paused over this passage of Isabelle’s letter to her mother, dated Wednesday, October 28, 1891:
He’s saying strange things, very softly, in a voice that would cast a spell over me if it weren’t so heartrending. What he’s saying are dreams—yet it’s not at all the same as when he’s delirious with fever. It’s almost as though, and I really believe this, he’s doing it on purpose. [My emphasis.]
As he was murmuring these things, the nun said to me in a low voice: “So he’s lost consciousness again?” But he heard everything and he blushed deeply; he didn’t say anything more, but, once she was gone, he said this to me: “They think I’m crazy. Do you agree?”—“No, I don’t think so….”
You can’t accuse Isabelle Rimbaud of inventing myths at this particular conjuncture. Still reeling under the effects of her emotions, she hadn’t distanced herself sufficiently to begin elaborating the posthumous legend of her brother. On the other hand, it’s possible to compare the preceding letter to her recent reading of the Illuminations, whose “supernatural visions” she evoked in a letter sent on October 12 to Paterne Berrichon. As for visions, the very last message from the poet—in a letter that he dictated to Isabelle on November 9 to the director of Messageries Maritimes (a shipping company)—resembles the invoice of the Labatut caravan more than it does the Illuminations:
one lot: a single tusk
one lot: two tusks
one lot: three tusks
one lot: four tusks
one lot: two tusks.
Tell me when I’m to be carried on board.
All this is well known, all this has been glossed by voluminous scholarly commentary, but nobody has looked into the confession itself. In the letter to her mother of Wednesday, October 28, 1891, Isabelle wrote:
When the priest left, he said to me, lo
oking at me with a strange, troubled look, “Your brother has faith, my child, what in the world were you telling me! He has faith, and what’s more, I’ve never seen such faith.”
A December 30 letter to Paterne Berrichon speaks of two confessions. The Rimbaud zealots have run on endlessly about faith—which wasn’t the real issue. That question’s only real purport was to shore up two legendary sagas: the religious one, fostered by Paul Claudel, and the profane one, fostered by the Surrealists. Both sides based their interpretation on the Seer, the Alchemy of the Word. If the worshippers had for one moment believed in the power of words in any sense other than posthumously, they would have pondered the effects of Rimbaud’s final confession.
In early December, I went to Marseille to visit the official archives in order to consult the registers of the former Hôpital de la Conception. During one brief hour of research, I found the names of the chaplains assigned to ministering to the patients during the fall and winter of 1892. There were three of them: Abbés Claude Girard, Louis Servin, and Anselme Coulemas of the secular order in the Marseille diocese.
In the archives of the diocese, I found no trace of Abbé Coulemas. I saw that Abbé Servin had remained assigned to the Hôpital de la Conception until his death, in 1912. As for Abbé Girard, his case merits full attention: the pastoral register mentions his withdrawal from the hospital in December 1891 for a “nervous ailment” and his being sent to the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Ylie, in Dôle, in the Jura region, where he had relatives.
At Saint-Ylie, in the medical archives, I found the following among the notes of a certain Dr. Kruger (folder E.H. 12 through 22):