And I’m keeping myself under observation.
I’m the testing ground in a completely new, rather extreme, and fatiguing situation. I’m experimental material of a certain interest. I’m not entirely devoid of competence here; I’ve got some experience, have done some scribbling about psychology, if only as provocation. What I don’t have is an appetite for myself. I’ve been flirting with solipsism for a very long time, but I’m neither introverted nor introspective. If you think about it, solipsism and introversion really have nothing in common. Nietzsche, an unconfessed but furious solipsist, did not even keep a diary. The tremulous Marcel Proust and the bleating Henri-Frédéric Amiel, heavyweights (and tedious heroes) of introversion, knew nothing of solipsism, they had no idea what “wanting to have the world to oneself alone” means.
My self-analysis would best take off from a specific datum, my social weightlessness. That’s how I would define it. A total absence of interpersonal ties. For example, I am no longer the passive subject, the receptor, of that (apparently) essential item, the “news.” No newspapers, no radio, no conversation. Nothing. An abysmal privation. Or a privilege. As I prefer.
But what a jackpot, for psychology, sociology, sociopsychology, this extreme case of mine. The experts would have unearthed:
Psychic disorders, breakdowns, dysfunctions
Instability, regression
Atrophy, excesses
Degeneration, prostration
Slump, collapse
Rambling, disorientation, disconnection
Clouded, absent responses
Seizures (neurotic)
Defoliation (emotional)
not to speak of the anxiety department (or if you will, tension and stress) with its vast typology and complex semiotics.
As the foregoing Rabelaisian abundance of terminology confirms, psychology or psychodiagnostics (and associated disciplines) is (was) not just a hard-working clinical-cultural industry. Beyond that or above all, it was a dense linguistic-literary agglutination, a great edifice of tropes and metaphors (not at all cheerful), and in that sense one of the legitimate heirs of rhetoric.
As for the “extreme case” of myself, I observe it, not very diligently or enthusiastically, in two restricted compartments: ideation and behavior. (Incidentally, as far as the purely vegetative side goes, there’s nothing to report; my health hasn’t deteriorated, on the contrary.)
Ideation: I’m amazed to note that I make no predictions, but live hour by hour. And given that any predictions I made could only be highly fanciful, I conclude that my imagination, never a high flier, has further withered. The absolutely exceptional nature of the Event is no incentive, as it would be for anyone less bankrupt than I.
Behavior: as the solitary do—or more precisely, the marooned, the castaways—I neglect my personal grooming. Soap use is at a minimum. Nails long and dirty. Augmented sweet tooth for chocolate, pastries, ice cream, biscotti, cakes, candied fruit, nougat, bonbons, etc. Diminished sexual desire, certainly due to a want of the physical stimulant, the woman. Unlike other singular (marooned) subjects I don’t think aloud.
One reaction that surprises me: a new mode of thinking about them, together, as a collectivity. An unexpected disposition to understand and feel for them. Sympathy, empathy. A shipwrecked human solidarity bobs up, a surprise last-ditch response.
I have decided to raise a cenotaph in their memory, in the Widmad market square. A cenotaph, I believe that’s what it’s called. I’ve been working on it for a couple of days; a tradesman’s van and a Mercedes coupe form the base of the monument; some twenty television sets removed from the Grand Emporium make up the body. On top of the TVs, some cameras and film cameras, crates of Coca-Cola bottles. At the top, about three meters from the ground, a huge poster taken from a travel agent’s window. A three-by-two-meter Kodachrome poster of a beach furnished with the celebrated white sand of the Bahamas, and the invitation: “Come to us, where life is better.” A bit like the refrain of that Tahitian song, “Native Gods are calling. To them we belong.”25
The sparse raindrops falling on the Widmad market do not dull the brilliant blue tropical sky, the green sea, white sand. The idea and the execution please me. No sarcasm intended: although they adored those things, they have valiantly given them up. And it’s not certain they were forced to. Do we know they’re unhappy to live in a world without soft drinks, automobiles, without “the box” to watch? My monument records their lifestyle, without irony. It’s a fitting homage, just slightly rhetorical.
There’s only one man who didn’t inspire that monument and to whom it’s not dedicated. My young Jewish doctor. Paradoxically the sole person whose death I know to be certain—historically, in the public records—is the only one who doesn’t seem dead to me. He’s living, or re-living. Although I should say—if it didn’t sound pathetic—that he’s come back to life in me. A sort of posthumous engouement, an infatuation. Or else, to the greater glory of psychoanalysis, the classic transference has taken place. In Karpinsky, I believe, the medical mind-set was reduced in favor of an incisive, well-defined personality, within the bounds of his modesty. This was one of the rare encounters in my life, perhaps the only one, worth abandoning worldly standards for. Certainly, he treated my condition with discreet and subtle intuition. But the relation he established with me was outside the professional sphere. The way he’d fix his gentle, vigilant eyes on my face. Positive, generously so, even when the words were more negative. Once I asked him whether for someone like myself, remaining unmarried was a vow (a choice), or an obligation? “Neither one nor the other,” he said. “You’re joking, doctor.” “Oh, no,” he replied. And shook his head: no, no.
In a drawer in my chalet, I find a notebook I started a week or so ago, with a title at the top: “Me, and a bizarre circumstance.”
The bizarre circumstance, obviously, was my situation after June 2. I did well not to continue beyond that title. Not because “writing inevitably falsifies” as I myself was known to remark when I was younger. But because I’d have written without having anything to write.
Anything, whether good or bad, is acceptable if it makes sense. If it’s rational, one would have said in 1830; if it belongs to a system of values, in 1930. It’s true even today. What’s happening to me now would make some sense to a moral person. Perhaps to a religious man, with Providence to rely on. Would it make sense to a believer in an ideology? Sure, he’d dredge up something. Socio-political ideology, like the smell of cabbage soup, can get in anywhere.
But I’m in the dark. I can’t see what’s happening, and what to attribute it to (what’s the purpose?). I can’t situate it, I can’t find a place for it. I must endure it.
I endure it: what’s happening happens to me, I’m an essential part of this. Even if I were just a pure spectator, I could say that what’s happening happens for me. The performance is for my benefit alone, a sort of itinerarium mentis in Mortem,26 an anticipation, a “first principles” of death for my edification. Except that the beneficiary cannot benefit, because he finds no sense in it. Pointless to dedicate notebooks. Someone (was it the Italian, Pasolini?) said of one of his works: Its purpose is to have no meaning, not even a formal one. I could say the same of my situation. I must convince myself that facts, when they go so far as to be inexplicable, may go so far as to have no meaning, not even the most esoteric.
As for my behavior, the notebook points to my need for remastication, for the intellectual précis. It’s a symptom of adaption, acceptance. Fear is a dictator: it takes power, then tries to get us to condone the putsch by installing die Normalisierung. The illusion that everything is normal again.
Another reaction is quite odd, though: I feel no need to hear their voices again. I own a historical souvenir, a recording of De Gaulle giving a speech (“Aidez-moi! 7. . .”).27 A fossilized individual, an unpleasant voice, but still a human voice. I’m not attracted. I would
n’t find Henriette’s acidulous falsetto attractive either, if I’d recorded it, or Frederica’s mellow, slightly virile contralto, heard muttering verses from the Lutheran prayer book as she tidied up the house. I have a recording of Alban Berg, which I listened to again. The violin concerto, a musical structure held together by a series of perfect alternating fifths. What’s special is that Berg here made his peace with the ancien régime, something that doesn’t displease a conservative like myself. Three notes in succession make a major triad, three more, a minor triad, and a breach is opened back to the tonal scale. The last four notes belong to the tonal scale, and in his final movement Berg stresses those notes to introduce the chorale “Es ist genug” (“It is enough”), its original harmonies almost intact, from the sorrowful Bach cantata O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort.
“O Eternity, Word of Thunder.” With some apprehension, I wondered if that bizarre circumstance I mentioned in my notebook was not some occult relative of the caprices of Bach–Berg.
Notebook aside, I continue pondering, observing, grasping at ideas and impressions. For whom? Karpinsky?
No, I don’t think so. I believe that if I ponder, observe, etc., I do it, and am very happy to do it, for myself alone. I am the intended recipient, not the go-between, the emissary.
Here’s another precept proven wrong: We think only as a function of others. Good old Durkheim, one of the theoretical fathers of “extreme sociologism” went so far as to say that an idea represents the individual submitting to the social—which is more or less as if someone proclaimed that wild strawberries had been nationalized.
Wrong. I may no longer have ideas or views for the simple reason that “the others” aren’t there to enjoy them?
I am, therefore I think. The electronic computers continue to function, or anyway could function, whether or not the operators and the users still exist; indeed they are so untouched that should I wish, I could talk to them, if that in turn didn’t sound like a theory (cybernetic) to me. Or science fiction. Their memory is still capable of recording data, analyzing it, processing it. I may be immodest but I don’t see why, even in the absence of operators and users, I shouldn’t be capable of doing the same.
At levels above my own, thought has almost always been a solitary process, asocial, its own end. Monads hidden away without windows, or who didn’t present themselves at windows. The idolatry of communication is a recent vice.
And society, after all, simply a bad habit.
10
NEWS FROM Arcadia. I’ve been chasing one of the goats kept by my shepherds over the wet pastures and through the woods, and finally I catch her, mostly by chance. I drag her (literally) back home, tether her in the empty barn fending off her head butts, not all of them. I milk her to exhaustion, mine and hers. The milk—dense, salty, rich, with a flavor of the wild—is the milk of the origins, as young and ancient as a legend handed down, and delicious. I also had an unpleasant surprise, up at the cabin on the plain of Monte Castello, at about 1,800 meters. The big enameled crest of the city of Chrysopolis suddenly loomed out of the fog before me, a large plaque that the members of a Choral Society had tacked up at the entrance to the cabin when they chose this as their summer base. No one had informed me, and I was upset about it; it was an affront. Other intrusions in my kingdom? To be honest, the intrusion didn’t bother me much, what offended me was where the intruders came from.
The truth is, I just can’t bear our little metropolis. The name alone, even just the emblem, irks me.
It’s been a while since I stopped trying to understand why, reluctant as I am to probe even the slightest bit under the surface. At best, I proceed by exclusion. A thing is not this or not that. For example, mine is not a furious rejection, based on deeply pondered socio-political impulses. I have no political impulses. (A critic could peg me with just three coordinates: intellectual tendency to isolationism, vague anarchism, petty bourgeois conservatism—that petty bourgeois animus that Lenin identified as the number one enemy.) Chrysopolis is one of the main engines of the monopoly, one of the nerve centers of the system (capitalist), and perhaps its most powerful “stomach.” But these are not the reasons I dislike it. Nor is the problem ambivalence, love-hate, rancor toward the city because some of us hoped to gain (and were denied) gratifications, outlets, success from it. It’s something else. An organic incompatibility, a mountaineer’s genes, underlying moralistic objections? I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. It’s just something I must accept, live and let live. I do know I threw stones at the Chrysopolis shield. I have good aim and at twenty meters I battered away at it until it was no longer recognizable. And enjoyed myself like a child.
•
Mylius (former paranoid) had a bleak and irrefutable hypothesis, funereally reassuring.
Human beings were half-dead even while they were alive, he held. My talk with Mylius comes back to me only now, dug up by my discussion with myself on the presentiment, the itinerarium mentis.
It was an April morning. We were having coffee on the terrace at the Hôtel Zemmi; the view was festive (snow and sun), and we were feasting our eyes on a Sachertorte layered with whipped cream. Why the old man chose that moment to expound his philosophy, I have no idea. A portent?
Mylius: Let us begin with a realistic notion of what “being dead” means to us. Impassive so far as the outside world goes, insensible, indifferent. If we agree that this is death, then life is similar, the difference between the two merely quantitative. Ideally, life ought to be learning, experience, interests, but you know very well that measured against that ideal of life (in any case never fully realized), measured against a theoretically possible multiplicity of experiences or relations, each of us is not much more than a dead man. Death signifies impassibility, yet ignorance and forgetfulness or the tendency to forget, reduce the living—in terms of nearly all the possible experiences and relations—to a similar impassibility. We are dead to everything that doesn’t touch us or doesn’t interest us. I don’t mean what’s happening on the Moon, but what’s happening in the house just across the road. Of the myriad events taking place every day in our own human sphere, we know of only a few, a few dozen, shall we say, and most of them indirectly, via the news. We speak, badly, one language of the 3,000 spoken on Earth. Biological death, then, is the perfecting of a state we already occupy.
Me: My biological death makes me impassible to myself, the private individual, but while I live whatever affects me, the private individual, is something I suffer or enjoy. Greatly!
Mylius: There’s no reason the private individual should be the privileged object of experience. Everything that is real can be experienced, but we’re incapable of achieving that, and if as seems right, that is how life should be measured, we don’t have very much of it. It’s understandable that we console ourselves with the thought that not very much, however little, is precious and important to us, but it doesn’t make things better.
Me: Perhaps. But that “not very much” will suffice for me.
Mylius: Consider the blindness of a dead man and that of a living person. What is the difference? Our ignorance, and thus indifference, impassibility, confronted with almost all the possible “data” or even with the sum of others’ experiences, those of our own kind—that ignorance amounts to a genuine blindfold. That data, those experiences don’t exist for us, and we don’t for them. No matter that for other individuals, they are the very plot of daily life; we, here, are dead, and it’s pointless to call that death metaphorical. It’s a partial death, but real.
Me: Life is motion; death, torpor.
Mylius: There’s no denying the distinction between the two states. Certainly, life is movement. But it is a circular motion (around that tiny nucleus called the self), motion so circumscribed that it’s like a piétiner sur place: a tapping of your heels in place while surrounded by a large circle of shade28 of all that escapes our cognition, and of which we desire no cognition. And
I’m not referring to the knowable, and even less to the mystery of the universe, I’m referring to petty reality, and as I said, that closest to us.
We may talk of the individual’s life dynamism, of his nearly infinite multiplicity of relationships, or experiences. But we must face the fact that this is rhetoric. Each of us is limited to his own tiny fragment of reality, and in fact, cannot escape it. The contrasting rhetoric, about incommunicability, is true only in this sense. Acting, learning, observing: these functions lead us around in circles. And, please note, we are individuals, coherent, stable (even physically), thanks to this. Surrounded by the possible, which almost never materializes, but closed to and distant from that immensity—lucky for us or we would fritter ourselves away. Determination is negation; as individuals we must have these strict confines, we must exclude, close off. And thus life, anyway our life, is awfully similar to what we call its opposite.
Me: Not a happy tale.
Mylius: Not happy? Actually it’s comforting, considering that we all have to die. You, too, even though you are still young. Or do you think you’ll be an exception?
Me: Certainly not. (As you can see I was anything but prescient just then.)
Mylius: Think about ataraxia, or utter equanimity, the supreme form of spiritual life for the Stoics, the Buddhists, the ascetic Christians. Such detachment before moral and physical ills is a taste of the dead man’s impassability. In any case, secular man strives to be imperturbable, impassive, before death; it’s the extreme toward which the hero, the man gifted with courage, the real man, aims. It’s spelled out explicitly in the famous expression perinde ac cadaver, in the manner of a corpse. You know the one about the soldier, observing his dead companion out in front of the trench, who says: “Look at that, he’s the bravest, lying there under the machine-gun fire calmly looking up at the heavens.” There’s nothing offensive about that remark, it’s profound.
Dissipatio H.G. Page 7
