A frank indifference seems to me the best policy when encountering a passerby, but something had changed on that December evening. It had nothing to do with either of us; it was a product of the changing times, of which I was only dimly aware. A major event had taken place without my so much as noticing it—unless the nature of this event was such that the horror of its occurrence had insidiously disappeared, once one’s attention had been diverted from it.
I’ve sometimes run into a friend after a long absence and not recognized him. The passage of time tends to erase people’s earlier features, but this is not what frightens me. What I am attempting to describe is perhaps so heinous and so harmful that I would be better off not mentioning it at all. The delivery of certain looks and certain words that involves intricate acts that are sucked up by the cold or buried by the grave. Are such acts a way of carrying death within oneself, before it actually arrives? Are they based on ignorance of the fact that death will occur come what may and in its own good time? What does it mean “to carry death within oneself”? Have all distinctions collapsed? Do death and life no longer differ? Have they become interchangeable?
That December evening, near the Jardin de l’Arquebuse, the following sentence had taken shape in my head. I repeated it over and over without understanding it: it was neither a proverb nor a sudden insight, nor was it one of those arresting thoughts that come to mind while one is just strolling around:
Many are those who give life without an ounce of tenderness.
And then nothing more. I was talking to myself. I saw a man running and he shoved me against the wall, swearing aloud. I wouldn’t mention this insignificant fact if the man hadn’t turned, if I hadn’t noticed his face near mine, if I hadn’t immediately feared that the worst was being called down upon me. Death is less frightening than the ill will of some ordinary man, but here I was finding myself face-to-face—in the course of a single interminable moment—not with death or with a random stranger, but with a creature who struck me as absolutely inhuman.
Why this sudden aversion? His manner, his features seemed amiable enough, and on some other occasion I might have found this passerby pleasant enough. His face was almost handsome, and seemed unmarked by any trace of suffering or illness. I like most faces, as long as they are not looking at me askance. I have, of course, had occasion to encounter faces burned out by lies or by the lust for power; and I have met with other faces corrupted by hatred. But this was not the face presented by this stranger. He cast me a look that was foreign to this world. In fact, he cast me the absence of any look—and it is the memory of this that turns my blood cold. And yet this look seemed almost familiar to me. It was as if over a period of many years I had become inured to this level of horror.
It was difficult to admit, but I had just bumped into someone utterly repulsive, a creature lacking any humanity. This idea disturbs me, for when I was young I used to clip newspaper photos of murderers, of torturers, or of notorious tyrants, which I then mixed with photos of scholars and artists. I noticed then that, when taken out of context, the names attached to these various faces could be interchanged without their features thereby needing to be modified. Having just written that this man was “a creature lacking any humanity,” let me admit that I am sure of nothing of the sort. He could have just as well been an angel as a devil.
It is both the fear of the unknown and the sway of common prejudices that causes us to abandon our curiosity and to see only grimacing ghosts instead of human beings possessed of no other magic than their strange appearance. Would this account for our hallucinated visions of the war-painted faces of rival tribes, of the maws of carnivores, or of the plague-stricken unfortunates who wander from one town to the next with their walking sticks, their bells, and their masks of crows? Organic transformations can prove to be just as fearsome: serpents sloughing off their skins, the mating rituals of insects, or scenes of birth whenever witnessed at close hand—the infant with his eyes glued shut, his hair stuck to his deformed forehead, his mouth contorted and then shrieking out at life, more grotesque than a death mask.
The bestiaries of old and the chronicles of the first explorers communicate to us the panic experienced when one is confronted by some unknown species. Pliny the Elder says that the catoblepas, located at the sources of the Nile, is a midsize beast whose gait is lazy and whose head is so heavy that it cannot carry it on high—the head simply droops earthward and drags in the sand. The author adds that this particular infirmity is a boon for humans; otherwise, they would succumb to its murderous gaze. It’s possible Pliny was libeling a mere South African gnu, but what am I doing with my poor stranger? Am I treating him like another catoblepas? Or like some humanoid or mutant? How does the repulsion he inspires in me differ from the most common garden variety of xenophobia?
Over the course of my life, I have seen faces ravaged by fire, others by the butterfly rash of lupus. I shall never forget the pocked faces of the lepers I saw in northern Bamako, near the river Niger. I wouldn’t use the word repulsive to describe a single one of them. If my stranger were to cross my path again, I would not dub him “a creature lacking any humanity.” This spiteful observation, which haunted me that December evening and in the months that followed, now makes me feel ashamed. Because I know that this face could have been my own.
During the whole day that followed this encounter, I was ill, incapable of doing anything. My passionate negation of a person about whom I knew absolutely nothing caused me to throw my own well-being into question. By trying to cast this encounter into words, by trying to somehow name it, wasn’t I getting off on the wrong track? I’m not saying this out of any pretense toward artistic sensibility: I mean what I say. I am overwhelmed when I think of the final madness of Friedrich Nietzsche. I can see him throwing himself in tears upon the neck of that beaten horse in Turin. I hear these words; they stagger me:
Parched
By the truth,
Do you still remember,
Do you still remember,
O burning heart,
The thirst you felt back then?
That December evening, I sensed that the train of thought that had been opened by the Anthurus archeri—that is, by the “devil’s fingers” in the form of Aseroë—needed to be brought to a close or else to change in such a way that the words at my disposal—designating not only a very ancient form of life but also an originary lightning strike—would have to undergo a violent crisis. This time, I feared I was confronting a trial beyond my capacities. The frank indifference of the stranger, which was equal to my indifference to the hurrying crowd, did not lie at the source of my disarray. I know that our laziness causes us to simplify the faces we see. Wasn’t it I who, jostled by a passing stranger, neglected to register the details of an ordinary face, reducing it to a few summary odious features that served my purpose? I was imparting a false appearance to it—a convenient mask of Otherness.
The late afternoon of July 21 (my birthday) found me sprawled out on an armchair in front of the television. There was a very cheerful master of ceremonies hosting a strange game: the television audience, men and women alike, had been invited to create on live TV the stylized portrait of their ideal man and woman. While the women described over the telephone (you could hear their live voices) the features of their dream man, a computer recorded their votes as to some detail or another, and from this collection of desires the machine averaged out the features, which were then gradually projected onto a giant screen. The technique of the “robot portrait” (or “Identi-Kit”), invented by the police to profile potential suspects, here found its televised application. In my mind, I saw the rather handsome creature who was being here suggested: he could have been a reporter or a young CEO or the master of ceremonies himself—who did not fail to point out, in jest, his close resemblance to the media meme of the ideal man that had just been computer-generated.
Suddenly, as the eyes were finally being drawn in on the computerized portrait, I saw my passerby of D
ecember emerge from the intense light. His inhuman face, his stylized features were henceforth more than probable. I imagined the proliferation of these clones. Statistical indifference having become the norm, there was only one step left to be taken in these times of crisis and generalized panic. Only racist violence could resolve this nightmare into broad daylight. Any statistical deviation from the norm, as slight as it might be, becomes a handicap for the victim. This process of “othering” is propagated slowly and insidiously—every day a little more—and generates its own crop of wops, coons, wogs, or gooks in every city, in every district, in every family. The desire to eradicate the half-breed, the métis, to eliminate the Other from the circle of the living—an absurd but entirely realizable proposition—will express itself more distinctly over the media. How modern: to smile at the very strangers you want to eliminate.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I’ve been affected; my appearance has changed. Words, having lost their individuality, fail to express my disarray. I thought enviously of that Australian tribe that created a new word each time one of its members disappeared. Whereas with us, language under the impress of the various media undergoes an opposite fate: at each birth, another sentence disappears. Language will disappear by attrition. Already, during the night, personal pronouns suffer from anemia: the penury of nouns and verbs forces them to slash each other to ribbons. Every morning, in front of the mirror, the faces tormented by this nightly combat remake a mask for themselves. It’s vitally important to remove, as much as humanly possible, any personal emotion. Gone are distant gazes, the tentative inquiries. Competitions, stereotypes, knee-jerk reactions, sound bites, blogs, tweets, tabloids, sports, video games, and, from time to time—like the attacks of malaria every four days—hooligans from rival soccer teams going at one another, or attacks against immigrants. CAUTION: KEEP YOUR DISTANCE.
The nameless arcanum is not attached to the number it announces. Unbeknownst to me, it lurks within the twelve chapters of this book. Coming from without, where books are humiliated by being deliberately ignored, it already stalks a child I once loved and indirectly attacks what I hold most dear. This morning, July 21, I’m waiting for the boy in the yellow sweater, holding a bouquet of daffodils in honor of my birthday.
11
Aseroë
IF, UNBEKNOWNST TO ME, any attentive reader were to venture to gaze intently at the white page I wish to offer, if any reader were to make an effort to probe its apparent emptiness with all the passion required by an undertaking on which this reader’s life would suddenly depend, would I at last be satisfied? If my project—come to maturity some time ago—at last found its completion in the adherence of this ideal reader, then a path leading to the Other Language might finally open, a path paved with desire and longing, capable of carrying both of us into the land of the marvelous, into a never-ending story.
For some time, I have been envisaging some space to come that would be devoid of all inscription, a space where only the gaze of the other would manage to embody my thoughts, where the precise meaning of everything I had wished to say would depend on the other’s discerning eye. Such a work—immaculate, but certainly not innocent—would be empty enough and sufficiently generous to satisfy every expectation and to exceed anything I myself might have been capable of imagining while inventing this series of ineffectual little tales.
From the very outset, the project I had in mind involved the writing of a LIBER MUTUS—that “silent book” whose mysterious and vacant meaning was the only grail that ever seemed worthy of my pursuit, that unknown book that offers its pages wide open to whomever might want to approach them without losing courage, without averting their eyes from the dizzying surface where nothing lies written prior to the moment of its reading. A foolhardy project, of course, based as it is on the dream of a virgin book whose inviolate text would be released only by the act of reading and whose resultant lines and paragraphs would follow the movements of a thought process until then held captive, its pages animated only by the generous gaze of a reader prepared to see in them what no one before had suspected.
This book is very ancient—and very modern. As it makes its way ashore, it creates flecks of black-and-white foam (distant cries from the past, veiled allusions to archaic practices of kissing, of killing, of saying farewell). It advances with the whole wave swell of this past bearing it forward, its breakers rolling in with the collective crash of forgotten lives, resounding with all that is alive and joyous, all that is tragic or inopportune—the roar of the hosts of the dead, their persistent customs, their frivolous ways, their abandoned rituals, their deposed sovereigns, their trails of tears, their words of love echoing on long after their bodies have disappeared.
The author-reader-witness-hero of this book invests its words with the power to speak for all time, unwilling to shy away from what the future promises or from the eventual circumstances of their own death. This absolute knowledge lies beyond reach, for the presumptuous reader would have to agree to read the same blank pages over and over without exhausting their emptiness; the reader would have to submit to the risk of a reading that was different on each occasion, until the reader’s existence became one with the vanity of the book, which, ceasing at that point to provide satisfaction, would precipitate the reader’s fall.
The reader’s eyes will grow weary; the reader will dread this book that is without end and that bears no title. The tale, thought out and unfolded in the mind of the ideal reader, now slips away. The reader’s eyes henceforth find themselves facing blank pages, empty except for the occasional bits of crabbed handwriting in the margins—tiny tracks, filled with gaps, like cutoff sentences. ASER … wou … ang … liv … Thus translated by the reader:
ASEROË wounded angel lives.
Before the book apparently comes to a close—and it’s a big book, judging by the thickness of the volume, made up as it is of so many blank pages (or “beauties,” as the typographers call them)—a torn sheet emerges from its depths, of which only a lateral fragment remains, featuring an inner margin on which the words ang … and liv … are inscribed, as well as further phrases that nobody has signed.
We see this tear sheet, far older than the book that contains it. We hear laughter, cries, weeping, all these noises then sucked up by silence and scattered this way and that, like seeds strewn on the cold, desolate ground. There, in the night of the dead, lie models without portraits, the folly of forgotten promises, and the errant words that now and then remind us of the early sorrows of little children.
12
Aseroë
WHAT IS THE VOCATION of the dead? This crazy, answerless question would be the fruit of the ordeal that I first imposed on myself upon discovering this fragment from The Testament of Orpheus:
THOU SHALT FIND A SPRING TO THE LEFT AND A WHITE CYPRESS. TAKE CARE NOT TO APPROACH THIS SPRING. THOU SHALT FIND ANOTHER FROM WHENCE FLOW THE COOL WATERS OF THE LAKE OF MEMORY. BEFORE IT STAND THE GUARDIANS. AND THOU SHALT SAY UNTO THEM …
From the first time I read this, I vowed to explore the path toward the Other Language, to discover the instructions, the passwords without which Orpheus could not have spoken to the guardians of the forbidden threshold. To bestow life upon the ellipses following the words SAY UNTO THEM, to pass through the portal without loss of life or voice—such, from the very outset, was my dearest wish. In short, to become as Orpheus, to obtain that special dispensation that would allow me to pass through life into death, singing. And what’s more, I nurtured the insane hope that upon my return journey, I would not yield to the blackmail of the lament that trailed behind me. I would not turn around before I had reached broad daylight. I would carry the Unknown Language back with me.
However mad my ambitions, I wasn’t oblivious to the dire consequences of such a project—to whose repeated failures the bemused disdain of my contemporaries could certainly be added. But what did it matter? I was not dealing with maenads. To experience failure and disdain was a small price to pay for the a
dventure that awaited me.
But there was a more serious objection that came to mind: “The gods are unfamiliar to you; you wouldn’t even know how to begin to invoke their favor.” And what about the inevitable likelihood that I would entirely forget everything I had seen beyond the forbidden threshold, once I returned safe and sound? And the nagging question: “Why hurl yourself into the abyss? There will be ample occasion for that when it comes to be your turn.”
Every day I would examine my blank sheet of paper, then gaze at the horizon. I scanned the faces I knew; I spied on others unknown to me. I awaited messages that might be arriving from elsewhere; I awaited a special herald bearing a sign that might arise from daily events; I awaited a lover’s secret. There was nothing: I could discover no special indication that my expectations might be fulfilled. The words that followed the THOU SHALT SAY in The Testament of Orpheus refused to appear. The ellipses remained: THE COOL WATERS OF THE LAKE OF MEMORY…. THE GUARDIANS…. THOU SHALT SAY … To say, to sing, to scream out—yes—but for whom or what? Innocence is no longer permitted once memory is involved: to refuse forgetfulness is, by the same token, to restore the stifled cries of all those millions of senseless lives whose names are now gone. Is their list on file somewhere? If so, what echo can reach back through all this irreparable distress? At most it might produce the whisper of numberless victims, a murmur of all those legions who lie discarded. And who was I to imagine myself frolicking about in happy song, playing at being inspired by logos and lyre? Once I had passed over the threshold, the song I would discover would not be divine: it would merely be the song of unheard screams, of silence.
Aseroë Page 7