The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

by Matei Calinescu

  Zacharias Lichter seemed frightened, his eyes glassy with uncharacteristic bewilderment.

  “By persevering, full of resentment, in his own nonbeing”—he added—“the devil has chanced upon a terrifying discovery: the power of lying.”

  DE AMICITIA

  ZACHARIAS Lichter’s only true friend is Leopold Nacht, a tall, gaunt man with a hobbling gait, whose head, albeit small, seems an overly heavy burden for the narrow, oddly flexible neck supporting it. Nacht can hold his head upright only by a constant effort of the will, and whenever he’s thinking deeply about something, or falls into a state of absentmindedness, his head suddenly droops and his leaden chin hits his chest. To lift it back up he must gather all his strength, an effort that brings a florid bloom to his pale cheeks and imparts to his aged face those infantile features typical of the feebleminded.

  Leopold Nacht—Poldy, as his closest friends call him—is an alcoholic. Like a diurnal ghost, his lanky figure haunts the downtown taverns from early dawn to dusk. But in spite of the etymology of his name, he is never seen in public at night: totally drunk, he stumbles off to sleep wherever he can.

  Unlike most alcoholics, who, when they reach a certain level of intoxication, are prone to fall into a rage and begin rambling, Poldy remains grandly taciturn. When he enters one of his usual haunts and sees an acquaintance, he slowly directs his tottering steps towards him and collapses (literally) at his table. As a rule in such circumstances, his head suddenly rolls and freezes for a moment suspended upon his soft, unusually long neck. After drawing his head up, Poldy gazes at the other man with questioning, cloudy-blue eyes but does not say a word. His face remains impassive regardless of the response to this mute solicitation. If he gets a nod (obviously he never has money) Poldy emits a short, cavernous and disgusted command: Vodka! He drinks in silence; if someone addresses him, he answers with a simple, stock grimace or a mute gesture. It is a rare event to hear him utter a single word. When he does, it is only as a sign of particular respect for his interlocutor (for him, language seems to have a sacred character). After downing his glass of vodka, Poldy reassumes his interrogative gaze. Let us suppose that at this point his acquaintance has to leave, or is pressed for time, or out of money, or purely and simply, politely or brusquely, refuses him. Careful this time to hold his head erect, Poldy rises and departs, shuffling out in shoes covered with dust or mud, depending on the season. He never says goodbye, nor does he offer thanks.

  In spite of appearances—which would justify the opinion that Leopold Nacht is a poverty-stricken degenerate with a mind darkened by alcoholism—Zacharias Lichter (in fact the only man with whom Poldy condescends to talk at greater length) considers him one of the great philosophers of contemporary Europe and, moreover, one of the very few that come near the experience of true perplexity. To enjoy Nacht’s company, Zacharias Lichter often goes with Poldy on his pub rounds, although he himself never drinks, since his incandescent personality risks sudden and complete disintegration under the slightest ethylic assault.

  “A blurry infinity of primordial waters rocks in Nacht’s eyes”—Lichter was once telling a few friends in an excited tone of voice moved by rare reverence. “Those able to rise high enough to comprehend him see in the fractured, tense motion of his deformed hands—but oh how light, like the bones of a bird, of wings!—the gesture of a demiurge that brings forth burning comets to trace the dizzying depths of the spirit. His most trivial gestures—no matter how awkward or grotesque the practical world of stupidity may deem them—suspend all notion of weight. They are a breaking away, a tearing off, a painful disengagement from gravity. They are, at the same time, the initiation of an order where perplexity is Knowledge . . .

  “God struck Nacht with the lightning bolt of purity; God chose him, maiming his body and giving him the cretinous countenance that he now bears with such holiness. In a corrupt world whose essence consists of degradation and decay, the fragility of the spiritual must be protected by ugliness, deformity, and disfigurement. Nacht has received the secret knowledge of self-protection through illness, through self-destruction. One by one, Nacht has lost almost all basic human instincts: hunger (like most alcoholics), the urge to reproduce, fear of death, and all social instincts in their various guises. This allows his sublime moments of collapse into perplexity, his aptitude to become a miniscule infinity within God and to encompass God within a greater infinity. This also engenders his exceptional aptitude for philosophy. His entire existence is a meditation, a meditation whose ultimate conclusion is absolute muteness, beyond speech or refusal of speech. Nacht’s philosophy is a philosophy of de-signification: the world (inasmuch as it is a product of language) must be emptied of sense, and only then it will become one with Being. Being has no sense, it does not signify.

  “Oh, how sick the world is with signifying! How I would like to learn from Nacht the art of remaining mute even while speaking (for the rare words he utters—a simple concession, a concession I am the first to enjoy—never mean anything). I am there, I listen to him, I look at him, and his thinking, free of all signification, attracts me like a divine void. Oh, how I wish to become the mute prophet of the great Nacht! But will I ever rise to that height? Or am I doomed to remain forever what I have always been: a pitiful gabbler of abstractions.”

  . . . And Lichter’s shining eyes darkened.

  FROM THE POEMS OF ZACHARIAS LICHTER

  PSALM

  God punished me for my innocence

  (perhaps unwittingly I had been proud of it):

  God covered me with mud and ashes,

  for I was too clean,

  He shattered my teeth and tore my tongue,

  for I had praised him with words too sweet and beautiful

  He maimed me,

  for I was wending my way towards His land

  with a stride too straight and strong.

  God listened only to my mute prayers

  showed me only what I could see without eyes,

  sang to me only what I could hear without ears,

  caressed me with a touch I could not feel,

  filled my mouth with what I could not taste.

  Blessed be the flame that is ravaging my being,

  the flame that ignites my dry words,

  the flame that ignites even my perishable shadow,

  the flame of anguish and joy,

  the terrible flame of God.

  ON WOMEN

  “WHILE the eternal masculine consists essentially of what I would call the genius of giving”—Zacharias Lichter once explained to a young man who was parading misogynist opinions—“I identify the eternal feminine with the genius of receptivity. Only thus can I explain, for instance, this apparently curious fact: I experience a sense of being totally understood—a stimulating understanding that gives me wings and spurs me toward ever purer spaces—more often with women than men, even with the simplest of women. I have sometimes conversed for hours with a charwoman or some illiterate peasant selling her vegetables at market, and you know how forbidding and complicated my talk can be. Without making the slightest concession or condescending, hypocritically, to a more familiar and common level of language—and barring the initial reaction (startled confusion or stifled giggling)—I have always felt the joy of deeply fertile communication and found my spirit suffused with a rarely attained power.

  “Undoubtedly, this complicity, this infectious communication, takes place on a metaverbal plane. Words no longer mean anything. They become bearers of an ineffable energy quite separate from any meaning: the presence of angels hovers above. Devoid of all semantic essence, words are mere vehicles of a reality beyond signifiers. Due to their extraordinary receptivity, women easily transcend typical masculine ‘conventions’—the prejudice that communication can take place only within the codified limits of ‘language.’ They participate directly and intuitively in the essential flow of the spirit, in its fluxes and refluxes, which speech can sometimes convey, but never by signifying. Men who compl
ain that women can’t understand them, misogynists of all types, expect women to share their masculine conventions and stereotypes and to understand—with mechanical precision—their explicit language. In most cases, however, explicit language has no living substance; it is cold and dead.”

  THE REVELATIONS OF BEGGING

  BASED on his long experience as a beggar, Zacharias Lichter was able to analyze the inner structural tensions of those who gave him alms, even of those who gave nothing and passed by in total indifference, or tried to humiliate him with a scornful glance or dismissive word. He could do so in a fraction of a second, as if by a sudden illumination or flash of intellect, aided by a keen intuition equivalent in the moral order to sight in the spatial world. No one among those upon whom the prophet focused his piercing gaze (even had they realized what was happening and armed themselves against it) could have shielded even their most thickly veiled secrets from him.

  At times, still under the impression of an unexpected discovery, or simply feeling the need to convey something he felt strongly about, whether positively or negatively, Zacharias Lichter would share with those nearest to him the observations, thoughts, and opinions formed during one or another of those humble days of begging. He would speak with emotion and respectful admiration about some passerby who had not even noticed him, or perhaps had only pretended not to, some stranger he had never seen before and would probably never see again. He would describe his particular characteristics in precise detail, as if he had spent years in close intimacy with him. At other times, conversely, he could not repress his violent revulsion at some lout who had insulted him in passing, or even someone who had given him alms.

  “Nothing is more disgusting”—he would say—“than the charity of some beast with a human face, whose soul is filthier than a dirty nail. It’s easy enough to see that particularly delicate natures may deny alms to a beggar out of embarrassment or shyness—both quite natural reactions. My experience, often bitterly painful, but infinitely precious for that very reason, has taught me that the act of giving, as well as its opposite, signifies absolutely nothing in itself.

  “If some do not give, as I was saying, because they are reticent, out of an ineffable sense of delicacy (a delicacy fearful of the often overly brutal world of seeming), others refuse to give from a sense of pride and the false spirit of rigor that pride generates. Many don’t give because they are in a hurry, or too lazy to make the effort, or simply short of change. (One cannot ask a beggar for cash back: only once, acting with the obvious cynicism of an aesthete, a fellow asked me to give him change. He had handed me a large banknote, accompanying his gesture with a questioning look as if facing a porter or a waiter; then, with an elegant and scornful gesture, he gave up. After all, his provocation, or more accurately, the spectacle of his provocation, had attained its goal, and had lent to alms the degrading sense of baksheesh, turning the beggar into a lowly servant by willfully and criminally degrading his spiritual prerogatives.) Some refuse to give out of inertia, others from miserliness, resentment, absentmindedness, or any of a thousand other reasons of which they prefer to remain unaware.

  “Those who give are just as varied. Some give out of kindness, of course, but others, petty souls, do it merely to demonstrate to themselves how generous they are (a demonstration costing so little that the beggar, the poor beggar, often receives alms from the most tight-fisted of men). One person gives to show off in front of company, another from a vague superstition (a hope that the beggar’s ‘God bless you’ might bring him good fortune through some sort of verbal magic).

  “Just as some people don’t give because they feel begging should not be allowed, others give almost exclusively out of an unconscious respect for the institution. Giving alms to a beggar may take on, for some, the significance of a participatory act, an empathetic gesture that enlarges the world’s pool of sympathy. For others the same act means just the opposite, representing instead a proud, icy dissociation.

  “Generally speaking”—Zacharias Lichter continued—“these days people pay little attention to begging itself or to their own practical attitude towards this ever-diminishing social category with all its paradoxes. Their level of attention has fallen so low as to be nearly nonexistent, and many give or don’t give to beggars (the only beings to whom one can give) without even thinking. Some sudden urge may or may not impel them—and if asked, they would be hard-pressed to explain why. It is precisely this ‘attenuation’ of attention that provides the beggar, more than ever now, with a perspective that privileges moral observation. Knowing himself, he can gain a sudden yet deep insight into others. It is rare indeed that anyone reveals himself more clearly and unconsciously than before the outstretched hand of a wretched beggar on a street corner. The entire inner beauty or ugliness of the passerby may be concentrated in a simple look, an involuntary movement of the hand, the slightest frown, or some equally insignificant, casual gesture. Beneath the seemingly kind compassion of someone who drops a coin in the beggar’s open hand, the keen-eyed recipient may suddenly discern, hideous and frightening, the cruel grimace of a monster, while barely a moment later he may be touched by a painful glow of candor and genuine courtesy hidden behind some banal, anonymous, and indifferent gaze.

  “With this in mind, it’s not too difficult to figure out why—especially for someone like me—the profession of begging is infinitely dangerous. Reacting to such violent shocks can be more debilitating than you’d think. Day after day I am obliged to witness what might be called ‘a parade of monsters,’ constantly interrupted—fortunately—by ineffable gleams of purity, yet inevitably recommencing beneath the same sign of dread, the same convulsion of the heart. For what could be, my God, more terrible than seeing the face of mercy among thousands of faces in which mercy is disfigured and soiled?

  “Sometimes I receive alms from hands that seem to have moist tentacles or worms for fingers—I would throw the money away and spit with disgust were I not bound by one of the strictest and most inflexible laws of begging: accept everything, from everyone, with infinite humility. . . At other times, a slimy, imbecilic smirk pains and paralyzes me like venom spurting from a snake’s fangs. Thereafter the image of Beauty itself leaves me inert, indifferent. When I beg”—Zacharias Lichter confessed—“I am prey to terrors and obsessions, to aversions and despair that no one would ever suspect. I don’t know what would happen to me if the parade of monsters were not constantly interrupted by unseen yet blinding faces that shed a divine grace over the ugly world’s ugliness. I owe my endurance, my strength to exist, repeatedly regained, to this constant alternation. It’s true that for the most part I am unable to sense the effects, at once mysterious and manifest, of Mercy at the time. Only afterwards, in solitude, do I feel its dense illumination, its heavy, beneficial honey flowing into me.”

  ON CHILDREN

  WHEN THE weather is beautiful, Zacharias Lichter likes to take his lunch outdoors. His acquaintances know that he can be found around noontime in one of the parks or squares located in the city’s center. After begging on one of the grand boulevards, Zacharias Lichter buys himself half a loaf of black bread and a jar of yogurt. He eats these slowly, on a bench, amongst nannies and old people, under the curious gaze of children of all ages who have come to play beneath the shade of the few melancholic and dusty trees growing in the heart of the city, amid asphalt and concrete.

  Lichter’s lunch seems to unfold according to some secret ritual: he takes from his pocket a small spoon wrapped in a scrap of newspaper, polishes it at length with the corner of his handkerchief, and examines its gleam for a while in the sunlight. Then he tears off a morsel of bread and holds the first bite in his mouth without chewing, as if in silent prayer. He does the same with the first spoonful of yogurt, holding it in his mouth until it dissolves completely. After a period in which he eats normally (although just as slowly), similar pauses follow, during which he is so withdrawn that if someone asks a question or addresses him, he not only does not answer bu
t acts as if he hasn’t heard a thing. Zacharias Lichter’s behavior during his frugal meal is so strange that soon after he arrives, the bench on which he is seated is emptied, very discreetly, of other occupants. Although the regulars know him as a fellow who comes there on occasion to eat his yogurt and black bread in peace, the vague notion that he might be a madman makes them avoid him.

  Children, however, have no such fear. In fact madmen seem to exert a special attraction for them. A few who happen to be about, and beyond their nannies’ eyes, gather round Zacharias Lichter, who seems ready to talk with them and answer their most naive or impertinent questions. For him, childhood partakes of the eternal feminine: even boys, until they reach puberty (in spite of mimicking, often cartoonishly, “male” behavior), have feminine souls, hidden beneath an armor that is as much a warrior’s as it is touchingly fragile. Like women, children also display the “genius of receptivity.” Little by little and with exemplary patience Zacharias Lichter was able to make a few friends among them who were glad to listen to his long metaphysical monologues with a tense and grave attention, filled with almost religious respect.

  “What draws me to children”—says Zacharias Lichter—“is their capacity to live naturally in the absurd and, conversely, to grasp the absurd aspects of the natural. Children have a vocation for paradise and only forcing them to adapt to social norms over time prevents them from following it. This is why God loves children. This is why His terrible and devastating flame softens as it touches them. The purity of children is one of the world’s great mysteries. Children are pure not because they are ‘good’ (on the contrary, we know that many are quite cruel) or because they are ‘innocent,’ lacking an awareness of sin (which is a comfortable Jesuitical concept, since basic sins are almost always unconscious, and only minor ones at times involve free will), but perhaps because their spontaneous aptitude for life in paradise is stronger than the inertness of sin. This is, however, a mystery. . . In the great majority of cases maturity means the loss of a vocation for paradise. To lose paradise is to be expelled from childhood.”