Do I look incredulous? Parker pursues.
“Another example. The Earth rotates once per day, and the heart beats at seventy-five pulses per minute. That comes to 108,000 pulses per terrestrial rotation. Are you following me? Global time is resorbed into a series of specific measures placed in relation. We can thus summarize the workings of the universe by physical laws that act in an entity called ‘Time’ and connect everything to it without being concerned with the relations between those phenomena themselves—the heart and the Earth, the coffee and the shoes … We’re not interested in their affairs.”
The handsome Bill can certainly intoxicate! I’m willing to accept that there is no global time in the universe, but if you decompose it, can’t certain of its elements serve as a clock for others? Time then emerges in atemporality. We are that part of a time structured by experience, where the correlation among elements of a fundamentally static world is elaborated. The silence of those infinite spaces no longer frightens us, Pascal! We measure, we calculate, we relate. Infinitely!
Lucky Bill! He sows to every wind, then settles down as a consummate expert on virtual worlds. He wins on all counts.
I forget nothing, neither his explanations nor Justine, the others, Stan, Theo. My vertical time crumbles. I do sense that a depressed person suspends his time: Claude-Siméon Passemant recovers from his father’s death only by ejecting himself into Newton’s global time, which he shuts up in his astronomical clock. The orphan Louis XV is haunted by grief for his assassinated parents; he denies it through sexual exploits, hunts, and feverish conquests. Global time is replaced by proper, singular times, memories, traumas. How many? Numerous.
Take the Inferno, its name is legion. The damned, the outlaws in the time-out-of-time of the unconscious. The Purgatorio follows. It is established when one strives to compress a mass of incommensurable existences; it’s the recomposed family, the chimerical wager on cohabitation, it’s the “living-together” of breakups and solitudes, jealousies to the death and toxic cultural diversions. Paradiso, finally: the loving ultratime of Astro and Nivi …
What else?
24
IN PRAISE OF ILLUSIONS
Nothing takes me farther from my patients than my scrupulous clockmaker Passemant, though the fiery Émilie is overtaking him. The inventor’s “internal coups d’état” tear him away from the automaton spectacle, whereas the translator of Newton and Leibniz doesn’t ask God for an order she can reproduce. She wants passion, even if it’s destructive. However, the divine Émilie is not making me neglect my moony engineer. I’m just taking a side trip with her while keeping tabs on the somnambulistic pains of the hurried technician. In this era of triumphant technology, in which Passemant excels, I stake a claim to the incalculable and the useless, and I thrive on the illusion of happiness. Since there is happiness in divine purpose, it is not forbidden to be happy, says Émilie, the mathematician who is consumed by love.
But watch out: do not be satisfied with insipid contentments. Think about your health, Passemant, anticipate the malaise. You have my approval. Your family is a seatbelt. Your wife Louise is master of the ship. They attenuate the cephalalgia and often serve as an antidepressant, but not enough, not always. And yet, the principal matter is elsewhere, do you understand? Are you hot-blooded, Monsieur? You don’t know? I, Nivi, am going to tell you. Listen carefully: it is vital not to reject a fiery temperament like Émilie’s. And you have to get rid of the crippled souls—for they do exist, just as there are corrupted bodies. Bodies of men and bodies of women, obviously.
I take God, nature, and society into account, Mr. Engineer, just like you, but less than you. I believe I have the means, even if I am a woman. But whatever their ambitions, women are excluded from glory. My ambition is pretty healthy: I’m not ashamed of it, but the fact is, only study remains for us (as for you, right?) to console a somewhat lofty soul for all the exclusions to which it finds itself condemned. (I’m speaking to you with Émilie’s words, no less.)
I do not dispatch happiness into the void, oh no! You expel it from yourself, and that’s a mistake. Do you know why? To be happy, you have to be able to have illusions. You of course know all about it, since you fabricate music boxes that imitate flutes and harpsichords and even clocks that harness time for ten thousand years to come. But you don’t have the courage to praise illusions. Either you think of yourself as all-powerful, and find that repugnant, or full of illusions, and that depresses you. In both cases you get headaches. Relax, Passemant!
Illusions are not mistakes. You who are an expert on optical illusions, you amuse the lords and ladies of Versailles by offering them the sky itself. It falls just as it is into their plates and floods the Hall of Mirrors. In this way you construct an illusion that does not make us see objects as they are but as we need to see them for our utility or our pleasure.
Now, in Versailles, utility is pleasure. Let me reassure you: there’s no connection with deception. Watching puppet shows, I laugh too, maybe more than anyone else; I like to think it’s Pulcinella who is speaking. What a joy also to see literary illusions make historical personalities—Greeks, Egyptians, Moors, gods—speak in alexandrine verses! And I adore opera. You don’t go very often, but you adored it during your youth under the Regency. Such a spectacle of enchantment unifying everything, much greater than the pleasure that music or dance bring, you surely agree. Opera, yet another effective antidepressant. I advise you to try it!
I think I know what’s holding you back, clockmaker. It’s because you fabricate the illusion that you’ve lost the desire to enjoy it. You would have had to embody illusion, shelter it; it would have had to be your spouse, your alter ego. Believe me, my friend, you cannot instill an illusion any more than you can instill taste or passion; you just have to not attempt to neutralize them. Stop thinking about those gears your brain and your hands constructed, which will make music and time resonate for centuries. Producing the illusion is not enough: to enjoy it is an art, and this art is neither frivolous nor Machiavellian. I’m telling you because I know what I’m talking about. Differently from you, but no less.
As Émilie confided to Voltaire, it is imperative to convince yourself that happiness is not impossible in this life. How? By love, of course, my good man! Don’t tell me you don’t know love! Your mother, Marie-Madeleine, your Louise who protects you, your daughters: that’s love. Don’t look away, it’s you I’m talking to. Love first! Especially! It’s up to you to … begin again. And I promise you, you will no longer have that pain in your skull. Love is a commerce the illusion of which is never destroyed and whose ardor is equal in the enjoyment and the deprivation of it. Only in love will God, the gods, women, society itself, men too, appear to you as inevitable and necessary illusions. To be constructed for our utility and our pleasure. It’s happiness, the happiness of illusion.
I know what you’re going to say. Didn’t Voltaire himself flee from that big old Love when he left Émilie so he would no longer be dependent on her? Or so he would be dependent on another woman instead—temporarily and relatively—or another man, and so on until death ensues? Okay. And so what? The passion of love places happiness in the dependency of others. In the plural.
Ah, shared tastes, that sixth sense, the most delicate, the most precious of all, for two people equally sensitive to happiness! One is happy only because of vivid and pleasant sentiments: why forbid oneself the most vivid and the most pleasant of all? Émilie will suffer from love, no doubt, die in any case from the fruit of her entrails left to her by the love of Saint-Lambert. She knows that was an illusion, but her desire for it remains. That’s the price of the fire; you have to keep it going. She maintained it.
She obeyed her will, you know what that is. But this will in which she found her happiness wanted both the fire in the body, which Voltaire wasn’t giving her anymore, and the fire of the mind, which she stoked until the end. Both together. It’s the task of reason to engender happiness, and hers placed the fire above the ri
sks incurred by the uterus of a woman of forty-three.
What can you do, clockmaker, death inheres in fire. The marquise-mathematician sensed it, was afraid of it, but didn’t want to avoid it. It was an illusion, this new love. She knew it and, just like Voltaire, maintained her desire for it. But she was not duped, since she wrote: there is no passion one cannot surmount when one has truly convinced oneself that it can only serve for our misfortune.
The flame with its dark forces. Believe me, Newton and Leibniz and Saint-Lambert were her happiness, and they go together, my friend, I’ll never stop saying it.
I’m talking to you about happiness, and you would be quite right to ask me what I think about unhappiness. The only true unhappiness is the presence of an object that makes us lose the fruit of our reflections. You might say the same, except that you reflect as a worker does, and the fruits of your reflections are machines. Misfortune for me, I say it without pretention, is being prevented from thinking.
And Émilie, all her life, avoided that misfortune. Did she kill herself for the fire that’s called “love,” “illusion,” “happiness”? Or simply thought? As long as we support our existence in this matter that constitutes us, we have to try hard to make pleasure penetrate through all the gates of the soul. Illusion? Fire? Thought is included in them. Émilie’s thought, in any case. Perhaps one can live a fire, that fire, only in a fiction, as Voltaire did, by writing a sort of total novel. Émilie the scientist did not push the Word to that point; she let herself be consumed by the illusion. Not too bad for a woman in a society regulated like an automaton—but what society isn’t? Ah, the utility of fictions, Passemant, and pleasures too! Try it: you will not despair.
25
MARIANNE’S SILHOUETTE
Marianne’s silhouette has thickened, unless I’m mistaken. We don’t see each other enough: she’s right to reproach me for it; we’re growing apart. My friend is aging, like everyone else—like me, even if I pretend not to care about it. Did she give up on the Pilates? The tango marathon did not last, but it did serve to keep her physically fit … Or is Marianne pregnant?
“At last you’ve landed among humans! It’s true that with her Astro, Nivi is happy only in the sky … Oh yes, darling, you should have guessed … I thought that madam analyst wasn’t mentioning it out of delicacy, waiting for me to bring up the subject … Besides, you’re always blowing in and out at Levallois-Perret, and you’re so quick to get off the phone, when you’re soaring among the supernovae, that I didn’t know how to go about announcing it …”
Her eyes go misty, tears stream down her cheeks, lodge in the corners of her mouth. Marianne swallows them, makes excuses with a pinched smile; I clasp her in my arms. Her yellowish complexion, the vomiting, the fatigue.
“It’s hard, you know, after all I’m past the age, well past …”
“Don’t worry, nothing is simpler, maternity is right up my alley … Fabulous, you’ll see! I’m with you. Not as far away as you think …”
I kiss her, I reassure her. I don’t tell her stories. Each woman her own. When I was pregnant with Stan, Ugo and I were the happiest in the world. We would listen to Haydn and Stan would respond by dancing in my belly. I was bathing him while swimming at La Conche on the island; I talked to him about the herons and the swallows. I would gather pink seafoam salt and give it to the horses on the swamps at dawn or sunset. I would tell my son everything. I never had nausea. It was paradise. Afterward, with the daily worries, the three-person friction, the constraints that put a brake on desire and then extinguished it, we lost Ugo. Before leaving us for good, he took his distance, with that Italian cheeriness, innocent and cruel, that left Stan and me with a lot of bitterness. And with the certainty that everything is for the good in the best of all possible worlds as long as we love each other. Neither pathos nor tragedy. “My father lives in Italy.” “He writes me.” “He sometimes stops in Paris.” “He travels a lot.” “My mother’s a shrink.” “I have problems.” “Life is difficult.” “I’m different. Aren’t you?”
For a long time, I thought Stan was reciting ready-made sentences echoing mine—well-learned lessons. People think so, unhappily; Marianne also, I presume. Now I know that Stan says only what he feels, what he lives, what he believes and thinks. Because for him, they go together: he looks for the exact word, the sound that makes sense. He and I have navigated under a good star thanks to Dr. Freud, and now Astro has joined our planet. Marianne can lean on me, as she well knows.
“Ulf helped me a lot. He’s supporting me.” That’s all she’ll say.
Was our CEO Ulf Larson the father? Or did he steer her toward the artificial paradises in Belgium, Spain, Norway? Marianne had written a long article about these new forms of motherhood for the special issue of PsychMag.
“Yes, with Loïc Sean, Ulf has been … He still is … They’re really good friends.” She forces herself to smile with her teeth unclenched. I think I’ll believe her. I embrace her.
“We’ll be with you too, Stan, Astro, and I. Girl or boy?”
“I don’t want to know yet … It’s so … surprising … I’m not saying abnormal … A sort of miracle … I hardly dare think about it … I’m waiting.”
“We’ll dare together, okay? Come on, I’m taking you to Café Marly … Shall we take in an exhibit?”
26
THE DREAM OF THE PRIMORDIAL UNIVERSE
Two Journalists Without Borders savagely murdered in Africa. Like the whole nation, the profession shares in the families’ grief. PsychMag joins in the emotion. The items run one after another on the TV, on the smartphone screens. Finally, hostages are liberated. Now all that remains are the tears, the barbarity. Several hundred high-school girls have just been kidnapped, valued at eight euros each by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Just now jihadists have cut off the head of the first Frenchman, after the American and English heads. But where are our ministers, our military, our drones, the UN, the IMF, and the rest?
The “red caps” destroy the “ecotax” portals and burn pyramids of cabbages to avenge the poverty of the Breton farmers. The gloom is affecting agro-alimentation, household appliances; the press is no longer taking in money, catalogue sales are dropping, the chicken, salmon, auto, and textiles industries are all distressed … The unemployment curve is not inverting, but at Saint-Germain-des-Prés they’re putting up buffet tables with champagne and vermillion plates for this year’s grand literary prizes … An airplane is about to take off using solar energy, tomorrow it will be Icarus … A beautiful Chinese woman, speaking for her government, mildly protests American espionage, whereas China has banked enough billions of dollars to topple the still leading world power …
“Lima is humid but without rain, and there are too few trees in bloom to bring light to this melancholy.”
Astro has called me via Skype to describe the “City of the Kings” in the Andes, where he has observed, in a NASA lab, “enormous concentrations of galaxies separated by unimaginable voids, massive agglomerations witness to the birth of the seeds present in the primordial universe.”
My ILY is now in the plane bringing him back from Peru. There is no longer any place on earth or in the sky where we cannot connect. Yet another security precaution that falls by the wayside. Like me, like you, Theo glances at the latest news, rarely mentions it, no longer comments. “We’re not going to interpret the news, it’s already old.” On the other hand, every item of news becomes political for him “as long as we envisage it from the point of view of our strong interaction,” he says—the interaction that keeps us from disintegrating and allows us to accede to an accretion of matter imbued with expanding energy called love. Why that word?
He insists on it. My Astro can’t keep from going against the grain, and he reveals his new anarchist version: “There is no idea that love cannot eclipse.
“It’s simple, Nivi. Love liberates information and energy, connects events, creates correlations among the elements of a perpetually evolving foam. Love, however dif
ferent it may be—for Émilie, Claude-Siméon, Stan, also la Pompadour and even Louis XV, for the despairing unemployed, for those whose throats are cut by the jihadists and those who resist them, not forgetting the feeling you have for me—love makes singular times emerge from the depths of depression’s atemporality. Oh yes, more and better than thought, love bears witness to the course of the world, this world that exists only because a bend occurred, a swerve that gave birth to visible matter, while our very experience ceaselessly appropriates the invisible. Only after this swerve do singular times emerge from ultratimes—rebeginnings, from these fictions that hold us in thrall. Everything lies in that swerve, remember it!”
How could I forget it? Your plane has landed; our hands, our eyes embrace for a long time. My time is not an unfurling of instants. My time is neither stopped nor present. It is an extreme time in which tension unfolds into a plural now. There everything holds together; all hold together. You also hold, yourself. Until everything is eclipsed in the reflections of emerging times, and new choices emerge in which I am reborn into infinite reliances.
Hand in hand. Bodies in proximity. Hand that holds and holds me upright. Touch, gift, contact, tact. Now states this reciprocal agreement, this strong interaction, better. Better than “love,” too vague, too demanding, already condemned; better than “presence,” which signals the approach but evokes neither the duality of the gift and the word nor the vital tenacity of now.
The Enchanted Clock Page 14
