The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter

by Matei Calinescu

  ON POETRY

  THE POET (while Zacharias Lichter is gazing at some distant point, rapidly blinking his swollen eyelids with their burnt lashes): What do you think of the verses I’ve just read to you?

  ZACHARIAS LICHTER: They have a certain smooth sophistication and an awkwardness that may serve as a good path to the infinite. I can discern in those areas, but weakly, mind you, the rhythmic breathing of angels. Or, to put it in another way, I see large drunken butterflies slowly revolving in luminous dust. Your poems, at least some of them, undoubtedly have an incantatory power in which I hear an echo of the spiritual: an echo, however, coming from a very great distance. I think you’ve got too much talent . . .

  THE POET: And you think talent is a liability?

  ZACHARIAS LICHTER: In a way, yes. Because talent in poetry is simply giving the impression that you are saying something without actually saying anything. From this vantage point, poetry becomes just a preparation for saying, its aim is to create a focused attention in the ideal reader or listener, a state of receptivity towards a possible revelation, which, however, is never provided. This seems to me the very essence of the aesthetic: a game of preliminaries, the expectation, ever frustrated and ever renewed, of a revelation. Homo aestheticus (defined by the equation of talent with taste) delights in this incipience, where he can experience the voluptuousness of learned ambiguity, flirt verbally with silence, and make the means themselves—not without a tinge of “tragic” euphoria—seem their own end. The truth is that very few poets—only the great ones—manage to avoid this temptation: for talent is a temptation of the most dangerous kind.

  THE POET: I find it impossible to counter your abstract accusations except by a “praise of poetry.” Every poet worthy of the name invents freedom, thus affirming the infinite plasticity of the real in his own way: freedom which, in order to exist, must never resemble its own self. For the poet everything flows into everything else, the body becomes a flying tree, the star a stone, thought a trumpet of flames; grass turns blue and flows into the sky, the eyes are alpine lakes filled with God’s tears. Ultimately, the poet swims through the universe as through an ever-changing sea of reflections.

  ZACHARIAS LICHTER: Alas, this is so! Reflections flowing into reflections, words into words, games into games (without children). If only poetry were a reverse pedagogy that would teach us how to become children again! But no, the poetic game is one of cunning and deceit, imbued with death . . . If poetry were at least—as it was for centuries—not an anticipation but a transcendence of saying, an opening beyond, an ekstasis—one of the means of ecstatic knowledge (as are all forms of love, no matter how humble). But no, poetry does not even say anymore. It pretends to say, it only pretends to be ...

  And now let me confess something: I am afraid of poetry; I often feel that my religious vocation threatens to express itself only in the domain of religious poetry—which makes poetry itself seem a curse. After all—I wonder and shudder—am I myself anything other than a poet?

  RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM

  “AT EVERY moment”—Zacharias Lichter often repeats—“I feel infinitely responsible for the fate of every individual included—alas, here too I bear responsibility—in the old, corrupt word humanity. From the most savage crime to the fleeting smile of sadness on the lips of a child, nothing happens in the world for which I am not responsible, for which I have not taken on—openly, before God, seized by shame, fear, and disgust—responsibility.

  “I am contemporary with our entire history: I am guilty of all the wars that have bloodied the earth; I am the one who ordered all massacres, who carried out all injustices. I am, repeatedly, by virtue of the huge palingenetic force of evil, the torturer, the inquisitor, the signatory of all death sentences: death by decapitation, death by hanging, immolation, and on the wheel, death by flaying, drowning, poisoning, death by starvation. I am the inventor of all psychological torture, the harvester of suspicion, the analytic organizer of all obsessions and terrors, collective and individual. I am all these and many more. I, Zacharias Lichter; I, the prophet-clown; I, the beggar . . .

  “I know my guilt, I proclaim it and wish to be punished; but the certitude that no one will ever punish me, that I will be denied the sweet pain of retribution for all eternity, weighs heavily upon me.

  “Hell is the absence of punishment, the yearning for chastisement; and responsibility is the hell of conscience. I have no right to choose; I myself have been chosen—God chose me—to answer for all the mistakes, past, present, and future, of my fellow creatures.

  “My freedom is a paradox, an irony, a paroxysmal form of irony, a question open to any answer. So then, I feel bound to answer: it’s me.

  “Ah! Even forgiveness would be a punishment. But who will forgive me? I am denied even the right to punish myself. I have no right other than to accuse myself to the very end, without any consequences.

  “Yes, I am the one guilty of all crimes, rapes, incest; I unleashed all misfortunes, caused all misdeeds, trampled on all laws. I, Zacharias Lichter.”

  ON ONE FORM OF DIVINE WRATH

  BESIDES Leopold Nacht, and certainly not on equal footing with him, we count among Zacharias Lichter’s friends one of the most picturesque exemplars of the fauna that populates the city’s taverns. At first sight, no link, even accidental, seems possible between Lichter and this man, who displays all the features of an aggressive thug mired in the attitudes of slum violence, a walking incarnation of resentment and low-life promiscuity. A drunk, ever ready for scandal or a scuffle, glib with slang, spewing endless obscenities (he speaks fast, words pouring from his lips in short bursts, with intermittent pauses during which he turns his head to spit a thin jet of saliva through his green teeth), slovenly dressed and filthy, with the air of a man who sleeps under bridges at night, giving off the smell of the canal, yet in spite of all, pleasant to look at, with a strong, well-proportioned body and an incredible smile that lights up his face—he is known in the world of taverns by the sobriquet the Poet.

  And indeed he writes verses, generally of a pornographic nature, which he recites drunkenly, in a falsely pathetic tone, like sweet, soulful ballads, to anyone who will listen. Of course people laugh (his favorite dish, a hymn of praise to the phallus, does not lack a certain strength, grandeur, and obvious talent, a rough talent for brutal spontaneity, which Zacharias Lichter metaphorically describes as a “superb Fury smashing the boudoir mirrors of self-indulgence”).

  A curious fact in the relationship between Zacharias Lichter and the Poet-Thug is that the latter sympathizes and is even fond, in his way, of the prophet, yet shows no respect for his ideas. On the contrary, he subjects them to unwarranted and trivial jokes, which he spews forth with frenetic glee. Yet Zacharias Lichter continues telling him about God’s flame and the abysses of perplexity with true fervor, as if speaking to someone receptive to his words, or at least potentially so: glowing and radiant, he patiently explains the principles of the Dialectics of Purity and the Discipline of Ecstatics. Then he listens with gentle surprise and even—curiously—an air of acquiescence, to the other’s replies, which are drowned in roars of laughter. Asked once by some young disciples how he accounted for such passivity, Zacharias Lichter replied:

  “From God’s point of view, vulgarity does not exist, so there is no reason to be shocked. The hyperbolic delirium of the slum, which casts its garbage in the face of the stupid, bespattering their cotton-wool souls with its slops, spreading its stench over the dainty fainting spells of well-bred prostitutes—this delirium is imbued with the essence of divine wrath.

  “I might say”—Lichter went on—“that I delight in the cruel mockery, in the pestilential climate into which my words and ideas are dragged. At such moments I feel a highly spiritual voluptuousness . . . Angels sometimes like to soar among cracked and dirty mirrors glazed by greenish vapors, fly-specked, and soiled by the grease of narrow brows that once pressed against them. Without knowing it, this hoodlum, brawling and obscene
, prepared to spit on anything, is closer to the metaphysical condition than some subtle intellectual whose high-pitched arguments justify outworn commonplaces long defunct and therefore particularly comfortable . . . In his vast and confused revolt, he unknowingly delivers a divine message. His feet soil the downy pillows on which the complacent sleep, his fists shatter the windows of the brothels of decency, his words dynamite the inert calm of all prejudice. He is the annihilator of myths.”

  ON TRAVEL

  FOR YEARS now, since the moment he first discovered his spiritual calling, Zacharias Lichter has not left the city. He is indifferent to the beauties of nature; what attracts him to city parks is the peace and quiet cherished by urban dwellers sick of the mechanical rumblings of modern life. Zacharias Lichter visited the seaside a few times as a student, during vacations, but the scorching sun, the salt-laden wind from the open sea, heavy with the odor of algae and rotting shells, the entire climate of the beach, produced in him such a state of organic imbalance mixed with an unpleasant giddiness that he gave up. At about that same time he took his only trip to the mountains but returned, prey to a strange anxiety, after a few hours in an alpine railway station. The rocky cliffs of the riverbed along which the railroad serenely wound its way seemed to him of such dizzying heights that they might topple at any moment. He feared the first whistle of the locomotive would release a catastrophic avalanche. At the station where he got off and spent a few hours waiting for the return train, the distant shouts coming now and then from the mountain filled him with terror. But beyond these innocent idiosyncrasies, Zacharias Lichter also came to condemn the modern taste for travel from the elevated perspective of his prophetic mission.

  “The pleasure of travel”—Lichter says—“is one of the most pernicious forms of self-indulgence. The universal dissolves to the picturesque, the essential crumbles to the accidental and kaleidoscopic. The revelations that the leisurely traveler pretends to experience do not go beyond the low order of surprise.

  “In our epoch, with rare exceptions, travel has become a subjective need, a desire that, if unsatisfied, drives some people into pathetic states of self-delusion—a desire to live in the sweet deception of appearances, in soothing availability. Undoubtedly, the modern traveler’s entire psychology is ruled by availability and lack of responsibility, converted into an effervescent eagerness, the excited tipsiness of curiosity. The tourist keeps turning the world into a variety show meant to provide for and stimulate his digestion—on a moral plane. For indeed his spirit functions in perfect analogy to a digestive system that feeds on impressions. We should not be at all surprised that in the grand and ever-growing Realm of Stupidity, the taste for travel is highly evolved. Periodically, all practical and sustained effort needs a relaxing dose of tourism and entertainment to stimulate and enhance the ‘joy of work.’

  “The true nature of pleasure is to aspire to intensities capable of annihilating pleasure itself at any moment. I cannot imagine great gluttons other than as padded in thick layers of fat, elevating the pleasure of taste until it reaches an altitude of anguish. I envision striking exemplars of sloth increasing their passivity to a point of such ambiguity that it begins to resemble asceticism, metaphorically attaining a purely vegetative state. True, the pleasure of idiots involves much more ordinary modes, taking the form of the minor thrills of tourism and other vague and illusory satisfactions, subject to availability.”

  FROM THE POEMS OF ZACHARIAS LICHTER

  MOUTH FULL OF FLOWERS

  Beggars, lunatics, old friends,

  It’s been raining so long and we have no shelter,

  It rains of winter, of spring, and of other seasons,

  It rains of thought and of death, and without purpose, it rains

  Of fright and of cold words, of words, words,

  Beggars, lunatics, putrid nights

  Illuminated solely by the eyes of the wandering Prophet,

  Nights of wet ash and dimmed signs,

  And of drowned things, oh, of long wakes,

  Years of water, hours of wind, unending Sundays (words

  Cold, ancient, troubled, laden with fate),

  Nights of fierce rain, with beggars and lunatics,

  Friends traversing the desert of memories

  Mouth full of flowers.

  THE CRIME OF “ANALYSIS”

  THE ACQUISITION of authentic knowledge always ends in paradox and mystery. Only those mired in the presumption of the known can possibly believe that in the realm of authenticity and thus that of the spiritual, to know is to analyze, for to analyze means to destroy. Zacharias Lichter never tires of repeating: “The desire to analyze someone, anyone at all, is a wish to kill that person. In the moral order, the analyst is a vampire, a genius of crime.”

  The vampirism of analysis is embodied, Zacharias Lichter believes, in a certain man of dull appearance, correctly dressed, and sober in demeanor, who enjoys a solid reputation as a psychiatrist: we are talking about Doctor S., in whose presence Lichter is overcome by nervousness and even fear, which he is of course at pains to conceal. As a consequence, although Doctor S. shows an interest in all that Lichter says and does, and makes every effort to demonstrate his sympathy and even friendship (which given the doctor’s social standing would flatter anyone), Lichter systematically avoids him. If the unavoidable happens and the two find themselves face to face, Zacharias Lichter loses his composure, is brushed by the soft wing of timidity, stammers when he has to reply to a question, and withdraws into long periods of disoriented silence . . .

  “I feel his analytical mind stalking me aggressively”—Lichter confesses to those close to him—“I can feel it preparing to fascinate me, to paralyze me. Doctor S. is not interested (although he pretends to be) in knowing me (the act of knowing presupposes an infinitely discreet communication in mystery) but wants instead, with incredible cruelty, to define me, to ensnare me in the rigid geometrical traps of his definitions, to catch me in the poisonous spiderwebs of the known. He wants to commit moral assassination . . . And he shows no concern that I have thus far eluded him. To the genius of crime he adds the genius of patience.

  “I must admit that of all the people I’ve been fated to encounter, Doctor S. alone arouses in me an almost pathological fear. It is sheer fright, with no physical component. It is the spirit afraid to plunge into a mirage, yet unable to escape, frozen in the clear and rigid ice of that mirage, eternally, like the damned in the last circle of Dante’s Inferno. Using his vast and lifeless science, slowly and methodically, Doctor S. has started to construct an image of me that is absolutely false yet at the same time refined and subtle; an image that, once completed (I hope this will never happen), threatens to absorb me in the perfection of its unreality.

  “The mechanism of his stupidity—you will have guessed that Doctor S. is one of the most illustrious citizens of the Realm of Stupidity—functions with such amazing precision, so flawlessly, that I am hard put not to feel a kind of terrified admiration for him. I am convinced that if he managed to define me (and I avoid him to keep that from happening), my sublime spiritual madness, detached from all that is objectively mysterious in it, would suddenly become in effect some rare type of mystical mania. And my entire spiritual adventure—diminished to an ‘interesting case’—would end with my deplorable but seemingly just incarceration in a lunatic asylum.

  “Many are guilty of the crime of analysis (or at least of its intent, since most people lack the means to carry it out). All that is indecipherable, unique and mysterious in a human being, all that pertains to the essence of the great existential paradoxes, has become the target of a hidden aggression, of a glacial ferocity consisting of analysis and reduction to the already known: tools made more efficient by the greater abundance of the elements of the known, allowing for a larger number of possible combinations. Thus the case of Doctor S., whose extremely penetrating stupidity represents for me—and clearly not just for me alone—a perpetual threat and a mortal danger.”

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sp; ON SUICIDE

  TO A YOUNG man who once confessed he harbored thoughts of suicide, Zacharias Lichter explained: “Some think—or, even more strongly—are convinced that freedom is possible only as refusal or negation. Consequently, suicide appears to them as the supreme manifestation of individual freedom, the only voluntary means of extricating oneself from all determinism. From that vantage point, suicide acquires a clear theoretical seductiveness and becomes a philosophical problem.

  “Let us not deceive ourselves: the actual act of self-negation is not the result of a thought process that ends in a value judgment (‘life is not worth living’). On the contrary, the decision to commit such an act seeks to find a wider justification and to define itself as an attribute of the ‘human condition.’ In the final analysis, the suicide’s despair (regardless of its theoretical clothing) remains an individual case, a paroxysmal form of psychological resentment. After all, no one commits suicide because life is absurd, but only because, consciously or unconsciously, life does not appear absurd enough. The suicide believes that his act increases the absurdity of existence. Committing suicide is therefore not a way of refusing life (as it may seem) but the ultimate expression of resentment on the part of those who think life is refusing them. Life appears beautiful to them, and because this beauty seems inaccessible, they wish to soil it. Life seems to make sense and they wish (a vain and childish hope) to render it absurd . . .