Aseroë

by François Dominique

  The old man kept heading toward the market. I followed him as far as the wholesalers’ stalls; a woman, all smiles, hurried toward him to put some vegetables in his basket. The old man just stood there shuffling, without turning his head or uttering a word of thanks. He frowned, all the while casting his eyes down at the ground and up to the sky. Then he was off again. At a butcher’s stall, he shouted the same sentence out aloud—“SHEETOLDMEESOO”—and again farther along—“SHEETOLDMEESOO”—clearly enunciated, with the same vehemence.

  The man moved on at a steady pace, his basket now filled, his shoulders sagging. As he moved along, his feet dragging in their oversize slippers, every twenty or thirty yards he would repeat the same refrain—“SHEETOLDMEESOO.” The passersby watched and grinned. A girl pointed him out to her mother: “Look, Ma, it’s the prophet!” Other people turned around, shot him a glance, and just shrugged. A shopkeeper said to her daughter, “Go give something to the loony!” Again the old man stopped, shuffled in place, frowned, and looked at the ground and into the distance. Then he was off again, shouting out:

  “SHEETOLDMEESOO …”

  An idiotic refrain: the reprise of an unknown disaster, the echo of a broken promise, of a grief too grievous to be shared? A caesura? You have nowhere to go and yet here you are shouting, claiming that a woman had said something to you, but what? Admit it, forget it, fill the gap with a random tic, a random gesture, a cry in the night—and transform it into this pathetic, magnificent outburst addressed to nobody in particular in broad daylight. Some children were laughing. I couldn’t blame them. Their easy laughter and his wounded words were two parts of the same poem.

  It’s hard to kill yourself, and it’s almost impossible to do so when the time is no longer right. You let yourself be carried along by the painful slippage of days, your memory in disarray—the loss of a wife, the absence of a lover, the disappearance of friends. You get up, you go to bed, you get up again, you put one foot after the other. The litany of pain.

  The old man was leaning against a wall, having put his basket down. I approached him and whispered into his ear, “Aseroë.” Without so much as looking at me, he replied, “Exactly!” He picked up his basket and went on his way. Farther on, before crossing the street, he again shouted out, “SHEETOLDMEESOO.” Then he shuffled past a school and disappeared, still in search of some ancient promise, now cruelly consigned to oblivion.

  8

  Aseroë

  IT WAS IN APRIL THAT I MET the Japanese choreographer Hideyuki Yano for the first time. I had admired his At the Hawk’s Well, inspired by Yeats. Yano had succeeded in seamlessly blending the mythologies of Japan, Africa, and Europe. This had enchanted me. I loved the balletic duet, River Sumida Madness, that he had composed with the African dancer Elsa Wolliaston.

  Yano had come to Dijon for a dance workshop and that spring, engaged as I was in editing a certain book, I found myself at a very low ebb, unable to establish the most simple relationships between words and feelings. I sensed that my language was betraying me. The very act of writing seemed like some nasty ordeal I had to undergo before gaining access to a single clear thought. I had just devoted several days and several nights to the perception of blackness, engaged in what I called my séances noires. Since the eyes tend to become accustomed to darkness, gradually adjusting to all the tiny gleamings it contains, I had prepared several darkrooms, which I had carefully sealed against any intrusions of light. I needed to mislead my sight, to remove it from any known object, to devote it strictly to the apprehension of absolute blackness.

  By keeping my eyes open as long as possible, by not allowing my vision to seize on any single point of reference, by losing all notion of time and space in a completely darkened room, I thought that these “black sessions” might allow me to discover thought in its purest—and most perceptible—form. I had no delusions: I didn’t expect to achieve absolute lucidity at the end of each of these voluntary seclusions. To achieve a healthy state of stupefaction would be sufficient. I was fully ready to embrace idiocy, provided it might help me to discover an unknown connection between writing and feeling. I hoped that out of these séances of darkness, words would emerge—vivid words, innocent of any lie, words devoted to the simplest of perceptions, virgin words.

  At several points, I tried my hand at writing in total darkness, hoping to seize the moment—which would then immediately disappear, like dreams at the moment of waking. Each time, I had to overcome my body’s stubborn resistance. In the end, I had to recognize that I had failed; in fact, I had even (predictably) regressed, tormented by the amnesia and the anxiety traditionally referred to as la petite mort.

  Far from having diminished the separation between perception and writing, I had only increased it. But the fact that I had failed only reinforced my absurd conviction that it was my duty to persevere, to proceed onward without any determined goal in mind. I would solicit the powers of innocence at some other time, and in a different fashion. The pitiful result of this series of self-mortifications was a manuscript about fifty pages in length, which I was cruel enough to submit to several friends. I knew I was putting them in an awkward position: they were, after all, aware that I wasn’t doing very well and therefore wouldn’t dare tell me how they really felt, afraid as they were of hurting my feelings.

  When Yano came to Dijon that April, a month had passed since I had finished writing up the sessions of my séances noires and I was ready to forget those pages. However, after lunch, Yano asked me what I was writing, and since he had just mentioned that in his work as a dancer he had always wanted to prolong words into the silence of gestures—to invent, as it were, a danceword—I described to him—without concealing my difficulties nor my ultimate embarrassment—the paltry little adventure to which I had sacrificed so much time. As I was describing my obstinate path to failure, I saw that he was raptly listening. In my retelling of my adventure, a drama was clearly taking shape in his mind—one in which I played no part. I fell silent. The silence lasted a long time; then I heard him softly pronounce the following sentence, as though he were protecting an invalid:

  “Night is indeed our house, but not one I could ever enter while talking.”

  Yano begged me to lend him my text and advised me to read two works by the Japanese novelist Kõbõ Abe: The Woman of the Dunes and The Wall. A few months later, I met J.-M. in Paris; he asked me if I would agree to allow Yano to use my Séances noires for a dance piece. I asked J.-M. to convey my sincerest regrets. I wanted nothing more to do with this text.

  I saw Yano again in Besançon in December, for the second and last time. He was presenting a piece produced by his dance workshop. At the end of the performance, we spoke briefly. He interrupted himself in the midst of a conversation having to do with contemporary dance, and turned toward me. The sentence he spoke hovered between an affirmation and a question.

  “What beauty in the art of falling.”

  I learned of Yano’s death through friends two years later. It was only then that I opened The Woman of the Dunes and The Wall. At the end of the first short story in The Wall, this passage seemed addressed to me:

  How was it possible that there was a blank everywhere my name should have been signed? Or was it that there were only things that refused to call out my name, or else refused to have it mentioned?

  Further on, another sentence alarmed me, for I thought I was hearing the voice of the deceased dancer, at a slight remove:

  Yes, I do indeed possess a house, but where at the moment find the “I” capable of entering it?

  How to sleep after that? But the night was not alarming: I saw names, processions of names, parading along like living beings. Some of the names were speaking themselves out loud; others were joined together into a cascade of phrases. The names were peaceful, at once light and self-assured. It was enough for me to hear these names to feel absolutely happy. The absence of this dancer, who was almost a stranger and who had understood me so well, was shining like a star.
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  Among the names, I hear HANA—Crystal Flower of the Dance.

  I also hear AS T AR T E, goddess of air and of water, white and black, fecund-fecundating.

  ASARÉ, ÉVOHÉ

  ASÉROÉ, ÉVAHÉ

  CHOROS, CHARA

  To impart at least a bit of meaning to this madness: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. The dance is not finished; the thread drawn by the Fates cannot be broken. It weaves the invisible fabric of language, its scattered consonants and vowels intertwined, then snipped apart again, then reknotted. Yano-Hana-Crystal Flower has left his gestures, his words behind. To others, he lends the names he no longer owns.

  Night—a thickness, an excess, a vanishing of light. For those who look at night and utter its name aloud, the obscurity that ensues constitutes a kind of monstrous OUTSIDE, without entry. But obscurity—at least the vision one gains of it on a clear night at the end of July—can provoke a troubling sensation. A night that bathes you in its absent rays.

  In the night, all possible space gathers into itself, and dissolves. The void suddenly calls out to you, freighted with meaning. Behold me here, absorbed into the very thing that had eluded my grasp. In order to look upon the night, I need to forget its name—and this forgeting becomes the extreme form of memory, the very vigil of its origin.

  9

  Aseroë

  IT WAS SPRINGTIME in Lausanne and I was looking for a book. I was offered the opportunity of consulting it on the condition that I wouldn’t name its owner, who was worried about greedy book dealers or crazed collectors. The book lay before me in the half-light, shielded from the jealous illumination of an overhead lamp. It was the original edition of La Cena de le Ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), published in London by Giordano Bruno in 1584. I’m not speaking of the octavo edition—the only one mentioned by bibliographers—but of the unique quarto edition, cited by the Polish mathematician Jósef-Maria Wronski in a letter to the banker Arson.

  My host removed the book from its blue casing, put it down before me, caressing its vellum binding (which was without any ornament or title). Slowly, he turned the flyleaf and read aloud its full title, emphasizing each word: The Ash Wednesday Supper, Described in Five Dialogues by Four Interlocutors, with Three Reflections on Two Subjects.

  I first had to listen to the story behind this unique book, written down by my host on a strip of grimy cardboard. Before being arrested by the Inquisition and burned alive in Rome on the Campo dei Fiori, Bruno had offered this book to Gaspar Schoppe. Later, this unique text came into the possession of the astronomer Kepler, then made its way to the Vatican Library, from which it was stolen in 1722. It resurfaced around 1800 in a shop in the Hague, which belonged to a bookseller named Jakopus Krüger. According to a chronicler of the Court of Nassau, this bookseller lost his sight from having pored over Bruno’s black plates at too great length, hoping to discover in them the traces of a celestial body that the author had neglected to indicate. In 1813, Wronski saw this same work at a bookseller’s in Berlin and praised its “unheard-of splendor, which approaches the Absolute of Numbers.”

  If an alert hand had not saved it, this precious book might well have disappeared at the end of the last century in the fire that consumed the Altenburg Castle. The man who showed it to me that April claimed he had received it from an Italian collector who had, in turn, procured it in London from the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was as much a devotee of esotericism as he was of algebra. My host had saved a strange letter of Ramanujan’s, slipped into the pages of the book, which he translated for me. In it he discussed “the dance of numbers whose enigmas, always followed by temporary solutions, in turn engender new enigmas and further solutions—each one disappearing into the other without entirely erasing them, each one observing a whirling, spiraling movement comparable to the escape of the Universe beyond the limits that the mind assigns to it….” It was at this point that I heard the following sentence which my host was kind enough to copy down for me: “The darkness of night is the index of an infinity that never ceases to expand and whose color is that of a future without origin.”

  I let my eyes rest on the eight black plates of The Ash Wednesday Supper. The engraver, no doubt guided by Giordano Bruno himself, therein represents night by broad, flattened surfaces on which the pattern of the stars and the geometrical tracing of their relative distances stand out in white on a black background. The plates of the unique Lausanne edition—in contrast to those of the octavo edition (which I later consulted in the library of Chantilly)—are printed across the entire page, with no margins. The black is so dense and so velvety that I thought I was seeing—thanks to an ingenious trompe l’oeil effect—the actual night sky in the book. Its blackness might have been obtained by soot, but I doubted that a printer could have fixed soot in his ink without staining the other pages. I thought of the heliogravure prints of the end of the nineteenth century, which impart a matte quality to the tones—a depth that subsequent photography hasn’t been able to duplicate. “Burnt bone and horse-hoof glue! Burnt bone and horse-hoof glue!” exclaimed my host with a satisfied air. I shuddered as I thought of the sad end of Bruno, roasted alive for a book—this one, precisely.

  I was asked to leaf through all the pages, without skipping a single one. I admired the typography of the text, each chapter head individually composed for each Dialogue—and of course the black plates. I stopped at the last page, which was immaculate. “Keep turning, keep going to the very end!” On the verso of the last page, my friend pointed out a form that was scarcely visible, a tiny figure of Vanity embossed into the white tissue of the page: a crowned skull, and these mottoes, which I read at an angle beneath the dim beam of the lamp:

  MORS SCEPTRA LIGONIBUS AEQUAT

  OMNE SUBLIME VIDET

  Giordano Bruno was clearly connecting Death (which “levels kingdoms,” posing the funereal violence of the spade against the pride of scepters) and the eminent Eye, which sees “all high things.” The second phrase, borrowed from the Bible (Job 41:34) primarily designates the invisible gaze of the Most High, but in another (and far more disturbing) reading, DEATH becomes the subject of the infinitive TO SEE. If Death allows access to the sight of the Sublime, or indeed if Death itself constitutes this sovereign gaze, the final motto (almost lost in the fibrous white of the page) suggests to the attentive reader a meditation on the Hidden Book of Averroës.

  My host affirmed that Bruno, motivated by his quest for the alchemical Great Work (for which the scepter and the holly are the emblems, as well), wanted to place the reader on the path toward the Great Secret…. This made me quite uneasy, for it seemed I suddenly was losing my ability to read and that the embossed mottoes themselves were staring at me, drawing me toward the abyss.

  When I was about to close the book, my host placed his hand on mine. “François, you haven’t finished reading.” He gently withdrew from the vellum volume a sheet the size of a quarter of a page, a black plate even more admirable than the others. I noticed that its delicate white lettering was arranged like the stars of Sagittarius: NOX NOS INTUERIT—night observes us.

  Rue Lucinge. That April night in Lausanne pursued me beyond my actual encounter with the book, or indeed with the plates with no margins whose black fiber opened out onto the very night sky itself. I searched out the starred letters, which might reveal Bruno’s secret to me. A disturbing sentence came to me: “Death’s gaze is swifter than Light.” If someone had such a gaze at his disposal, wouldn’t he therefore have sped back to the beginning of Time? After which, deprived of Light, wouldn’t he be then returned to the Night from whence he had emerged? He wouldn’t exist, or at least not yet….

  Each time we are presented with someone whom we can love, it seems to me that the raptness of our attention snatches her away from her mortality: we are seeing her for the first time, her face smothered in kisses. Isn’t this what the onset of Time really involves? There in Lausanne, on rue Lucinge, I dismissed all these worrisome t
houghts. The darkened windows, the frigid houses, the Swiss tameness of the place all struck me as fake. I had found myself there by mistake, pursuing a false illusion. But then I saw a woman passing by. She turned to me and smiled.

  I remember she was very beautiful. Within myself I was singing: Let’s follow this angel, let’s finish the night.

  What does the woman Lena have to do with this story? Is she here to disprove me? To cast a spell on some obscure book? To give way to dawn? On rue Lucinge, smiling and weeping at the same time, Lena led me to her home. Once there, she had me go upstairs, to no purpose. I spoke to her of Bruno and of the Ash Wednesday Supper. “The poor man,” she said, oblivious to his fiery end. She told me the sad, uneventful story of her life. I listened to her as she spoke and whimpered like a child. As I got up, she asked me, “So do you want to?” “No,” I said, “it’s not worth our while.” “Too bad,” she replied. As I left her home, she uttered the following sentence, which might have been prompted by her state of fatigue or intoxication: “Night is the graveyard of names.”

  Two days later in a Lausanne bookstore, I came across a volume devoted to the Orphics. I read the following words, which are rather different from those of Hesiod, which I have never forgotten:

  Black-winged Night was seduced by the Wind and in the Darkness she produced a silver egg. From this egg sprang Eros—whom some call Phanes—who set the Universe in motion.

  10

  Aseroë

  THERE WAS THIS MAN—the simple truth of the matter is that I was in his way and he wished me no harm. I had bumped into him, and he swore at me and shoved me against the wall of the Jardin de l’Arquebuse in Dijon. That’s the way it was; I would have done the same if he had been the one blocking my way. He shouldn’t have stared at me. Stared at me is perhaps too strong a phrase, since he was looking at the wall. As far as he was concerned, I didn’t exist. The look he cast at me was without any concern or disdain for me; it was simply indifferent, and for the first time in my life I found this intolerable. In fact, it felt like torture. It’s not that I’m oversensitive: had he thrown himself in my arms, I would not have tolerated it; even too insistent a look on his part would have annoyed me. But I felt my privacy had been violated by the very mindlessness of his gaze.