Il vole sur l’étendue de la neige
et le voilà perle blanche . . .
It flies over the expanse of snow
and look, it is white as pearl . . .
In the dream that preceded by six months my trip to Yunnan and that visit to the temples, one of which included a building devoted to Marxist-Leninist propaganda, I noticed—far below the mountainous site where I found myself, and almost straight down—a horse of indeterminate color, the only living creature my eyes could clearly apprehend in the uniformity of the plain or plateau within my view. The horse’s mane, also colorless, seemed to represent the whole life of the animal, to which I attached some sort of private and distant signification, as though an obscure but exact connection had bound it to what escapes me the most about my own person. In this dream which, waking me in the middle of the night, I noted was “beautiful and melancholy,” as I described it to the person who had also woken up, as though just at the right moment to listen to me tell it, no other event occurred but this: at a certain moment, the horse moved. A completely rectilinear movement of constant speed that, without perceptibly diminishing the distance between us, which was measured most of all by our difference in levels, brought it closer to the point where my gaze would have plunged had it followed the direction of a plumb line. The displacement happened silently and without any part of the horse moving, except perhaps its undulating mane. I then uttered the words that identified the color of the horse and of the whole panorama—that snowy white with the softness of pearl which my eyes had not observed—at the same time that, representing the culmination and in some sense the moral lesson of the dream, they seemed to reveal to me its essence in a manner such that the reflection I would apply to it in the light of day, once I was back on the other shore, would only express in discursive terms what, at the time of the dream, had been given to me poetically. An image of destiny to some extent mastered if one succeeds in considering (as though from very high up) its imperturbable course—this is what was in that moment suggested to me by the horse, displaced by its motionless gallop over a flat surface. A guarantee of an everlasting existence gained through the projection of oneself onto an object (a work of art) whose history continues independently of your own and which is both something else and you yourself—this is what it became when I returned, the next day, to this dream and to the phrase that concluded it, and forced myself to derive the whole lesson from it.
At the beginning of my dream of the other night (“other night” and already no longer “last night,” as I now approach this second account), there is also an abrupt cliff, which I reach after an excursion into the mountains. But the animal I will see running across the sort of rocky wasteland one sees down below does not have much in common with the fairy-horse that, a few months before I left for China, had appeared to me as I was sleeping in the country house at Saint-Hilaire where my family and I would go spend each weekend, before a pernicious series of events introduced a rather long break in the periodic accomplishment of this ritual: the death of my mother (occurring at Saint-Pierre-lès-Nemours, at a time when she was so old that one would almost have believed she had been victorious in a stage of life fatal for most people but over which some would be capable of triumphing forever); an accident of which my wife was the victim at the very time when the physical condition of my mother was beginning to worry us seriously (a false step she took on a tread of the stairs leading up to our bedroom in the house at Saint-Hilaire, and a fall from which we lifted her with a sprain, a dislocated knee, and even a fracture of the small bone called the “tibial spine”), a private grief and a personal inconvenience which were accompanied, on the level of public violence—as though everything had to come apart at the same time—by the sinister Hungarian affair (which hasn’t yet ended) and the pitiful affair of the Suez Canal, of which one result that is evident right now—without prejudging the probable gravity of its more distant consequences—is, with respect to life in France, a shortage of petroleum products which affects many industries and which—an obviously minor repercussion, but annoying nevertheless—complicates things a great deal for those who were in the habit of spending weekends in the country.
The animal that I saw running after a bird in my recent Paris dream was neither the same size nor the same color as the horse from the other dream and had in common with it only the fact that it was a quadruped. A prosaic animal, specifically rustic, for its prototype in waking life lives in the house at Saint-Hilaire (where, to my greatest vexation, some dull French country people have replaced the Guadeloupeans who were its caretakers before their refusal to comply with the most minimal rules led them to leave us, not at all peacefully, as we would have liked, but in an atmosphere almost of passionate drama, which included an appeal for supernatural vindication, when the mulatto housekeeper called down a solemn curse against my wife, who was compared to a slaveowner worthy of feudal times, and against our house), this animal of a completely rural robustness, and of a good breed, though without a registered pedigree, is none other than my bitch Dine, whom I hadn’t seen for a month and whose society I was beginning to miss when that night came, on which, toward the beginning of a dream, she escaped from me (as is customary with her on our real excursions), plunging down to the bottom of the cliff—as only a cat could have done without breaking its bones—and hurling herself in hot pursuit of a bird. When that gallant animal, as good-hearted as members of her breed, the boxers, generally are, but impetuous, and whom I have never succeeded in inducing to obey me, escapes like this—like a maddened huntress—during one of the walks we often take across the fields, when she ends by losing herself in the distance after having swum through the tall grasses of the Beauce—like a small terrestrial dolphin clothed in fake fur, now diving, now emerging with the help of her two large brownish ears, whose beating lofted her in long flights—even though it is well known that a dog always finds her way back again, I ask myself each time if I will ever see her again. And in my dream I experienced this same perplexity, not knowing how far the fugitive would allow herself to be borne away, and not seeing, moreover, how she could rejoin me on the top of that cliff at whose edge I found myself. However, this fear did not last long (as is the case with the pranks of the same sort which the ebullient Dine plays in everyday life) for I saw her, after a few minutes, appear at another point on the cliff and come back toward me at a gallop.
The scene then changed completely, its new setting a place very different from that cliff overlooking a barren plain, that cliff which had already appeared in the oldest of the three dreams, but in such a form that I never could have made the comparison if, near Kunming, I had not also gone to a rocky escarpment and gazed out at certain things: besides the Taoist temple with its series of structures perched there like eagles’ nests (chapels set at intervals one above another, each abundantly decorated and embellished with statues, with other sculpture here and there in niches exposed to the open air of the extraordinarily steep site); besides that astonishing chaplet of constructions vertiginously suspended at various heights, I had looked—with a more peaceful gaze—at the lake that extended below with its sandy or muddy bottom breaching the surface and which, toward the opposite bank, appeared, on that day of almost uninterrupted rain, covered with a sheen as though from the saliva of snails, glints of silver close to the golds laid down on the terra firma by rays of sunlight passing through breaks in the clouds, a lake not very deep, yet navigable, since I saw a string of junks pass, reduced by the distance to the proportions of a toy. If it had not been for the sculptures in human form and the other sculptures (a tortoise with a coiled snake, a young buffalo, a phoenix) with which that real escarpment was ornamented, either in the interiors of the chapels, or on the outside, on one or another of the platforms on which the wayside altars were set one above another along the zigzagging itinerary the visitor had to follow (toiling over a succession of very steep slopes, sometimes paths and sometimes steps, and even following a narrow passage in the f
orm of a ledge under natural arcades); if it had not been for the presence of these sacred sculptures, no precise analogy would have connected the wall of rock that loomed up in a dream more than thirteen years old to a section of mountain breathtaking in its composition as well as in the view revealed as one ascended it; and if the section of mountain thus doubly endowed had not made the connection, I would probably not have noticed how close the old wall is to the two cliffs, no less unreal, of which I have just spoken. For that first wall is clearly distinguished from the other three—that of the Mountain of the West so amply loaded with figures, and those of the two dreams, each animated by the gallop of a quadruped—in that I saw it before me like a wall instead of being perched on it. Of course what was involved, there, was also an excursion into the mountains, in that case motivated by a visit to a church; but the only spectacle there was the church itself, its back against the mountain in a spot with an extreme declivity. On the wide and lofty façade, conjoined so tightly with the mass of rock that it more or less merged with it, were sculpted enormous colored figures having something in common with the kings and other wax figures that are one of the curiosities of Westminster Abbey, and with the giant angels with long trumpets surmounting the high altar of the cathedral at San Juan de Compostela, as well as with the mannequins of musicians with which the organs of merry-go-rounds were adorned when I was younger. Figures so beautiful and so grand (in both senses of the word [grand: “grand” and “large”]) that seeing them at a distance I was overcome with vertigo, and filled with anguish, imagining what that vertigo would be when I saw from closer up—and, then, of a truly extreme grandeur—those sculptures carved directly from the exterior walls of the church and, perhaps, standing out from the very mass of rock itself.
China, where the red spot of hope is growing larger, my great friend the poet Aimé Césaire said a few years ago in a speech addressed to the people of Fort-de-France, when he was a strictly observant communist and the horror aroused in him by the full revelation—in Russia itself—of Stalin’s despotic methods, as well as the inertia of the French leaders after that official proclamation, in addition to his desire to direct the workers of his country toward strictly Antillean goals and to remove their action from the oppressive weight of Soviet centralism, had not yet led him to separate from the French Communist Party. Now, Aimé Césaire (one of whose children has been entrusted to us, my wife and me, while his father is conveying the good word over there) is central to the second episode of the dream I had during one of these past nights.
The setting, now not at all picturesque, is simply the country. The country, in the very imprecise meaning that this term assumes for the person listening to me if I say, today, that next Sunday I will be “in the country,” as others speak of the visit they will make “to the seaside” or “to the mountains.” Like this monotonous setting (a house that is the one at Saint-Hilaire but does not resemble it, a very thickly wooded garden that is perhaps based—with certain vague memories of the villa “Les Gaules” where my mother lived, near Nemours, and that I feel I have always known—on a photo received that same day that showed me my mother’s tomb entirely covered with flowers concealing its stony angles and giving it the rustic aspect of a tumulus), the last episode of the dream is only a confused accumulation in which old memories mingle with my current preoccupations. In this house where I am hosting Aimé Césaire—a detail probably derived from the fact that for the moment I am lodging one of his sons—a crowd of people of color who have come to see my guest are pressing into a sort of long corridor-veranda that leads from the bedroom he is occupying to the little room where I am temporarily encamped, a sort of cubicle without a door and missing one side. Césaire and I are supposed to go out together and, perhaps, take a country bus with a few of our family as a sort of excursion (since “country” for city dwellers evokes “vacation”). Entering my cubicle to get ready, I note that a part of the crowd from Martinique has invaded the room, which is open to the elements anyway, and has thought fit to shift all my belongings (among them the pair of laced boots that I wore riding a mule during the trip, at once so remote and so present, that I took to Ethiopia more than twenty years ago). To these people, who have set up a refreshment bar on my table, where soft drinks and syrups are being sold (more or less as in the ajoupa, or temporary shelters, of the patronal festivals that number, along with the funeral vigils, among the great moments of the life of the communities of Martinique), I explain that they must leave me so that I can get dressed, and that they shouldn’t have upset everything like this. Pleasantly, they help me put things back in order, and together with a young woman of color I suspend from the arm of a sort of tall scales, by means of poor-quality iron wires curved into hooks at one of their extremities, the drawer or other container in which my belongings are put away. Passing through the crowd as I left Césaire’s room, I have spoken for a moment to one or two Antilleans, prudently, for I wondered whether they were partisans of the one I support or bourgeois curious to find out what has become of the dissident deputy.
Nobly begun in the aridity of a mountain landscape, and pursued in the hubbub of an overpopulated house, the dream, soon an election festivity, after the vertiginous leap of an animal intoxicated by air and freedom, culminates in a crude repair job for which we shamelessly employ a delicate object at the risk of ruining what gave it its dignity: its balance, because of which the scale is a symbol of rectitude and justice. Thus summarized, the intermittent succession of phantasms acquires the logic of a fable, to which I would be tempted to assign the following meaning if I ignored the uneasiness of the atmosphere in which these events took place: our completely pure, and in some sense animal, aspiration to a life that is not closely confined is relegated to the background by political action; but this antinomy between natural demands and the rigor of an idea can be resolved practically—in a manner that, true, verges on acrobatics—with a little determination and ingenuity.
If this representation were to be oriented differently (retaining not so much the apparent success as what is laborious and problematic about the crude repair job at the end), it would still be quite poor, and by definition misleading, like anything that, being oversimplified, has been stripped of details that were hastily judged superfluous, or like what plain prejudice has induced us to extract, at whatever cost, from its radical incoherence. There is no reason, certainly, to consider that representation more suspect a priori than that which I would apparently have had to adopt if, starting from the episode of the beam of the scale (that eminently mobile shaft from the two ends of which I suspend a drawer as best I can), I had set off down the troubled path for which that bizarre object may be taken as the signpost and had interpreted the whole in sexual terms: the bitch and her breakneck plunge as image of irrepressible amorous desire, my celebrated friend as substitute for the father or older brother whose virility I have always envied, the tinkering work I accomplished, not without difficulty, with the help of a kind female assistant as expression of the tour de force that will one day be represented by the proper use of the scale with its two fibrous globes that is the engine of procreation. But there is no reason, either, to consider this representation more valid than that which I would obtain if I emphasized data of a linguistic order: isn’t the bitch who runs after the bird a bitch “en chasse” [hunting; in heat] in the proper sense of the word? Isn’t the countryside in which the subsequent scene is set automatically called an electoral “campaigne” [countryside; campaign]? Isn’t it true that the table which I ask others to clear of its bottles, and the quadrilateral of which the beam of the scale and the drawer constitute, precariously, the two horizontal edges, have issued from the word “trapèze” [trapezoid; trapeze], which physically evokes an apparatus to which gymnasts cling in a certain insecurity and which I know is etymologically related to the ancient Greek τραπεξα, ancestor of the word for “banks” in modern Greek—something I learned during my first trip to Greece, when I also learned to use an eq
uivalent of “logarithm” to ask for the check at a restaurant—and a word that, if it is actually based on the table or the counter, since the original word means “four feet,” at the same time thrusts out antennae toward the balancing of accounts, the balancing of the budget, etc.? Even if I were able to show that these various analyses complement rather than exclude one another and, in the end, that they support, by confirming, one another on many points, I would find them too mechanical to come anywhere near touching what is most important, and I would accord only a small value to insights of which almost at will I can extend the series, discovering, for instance (without great effort), a fourth Ariadne’s thread in astral mythology: the course of the bitch like the course of the hours set in motion by the solar bird at the dawn of the dream; the radiance of the friend, at once poet and popular speaker, who in life is not exactly an Osiris (despite what is African about him), but well and truly the incarnation of that black Orpheus around which an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre has caused some intelligent minds to gravitate; the dead-leaf complexion of Isis or the Queen of the Night, who, as the dream is coming to its end, tries to put back in order what has been scattered, then joins her efforts with mine to hang something in the sky of that scale whose pans (if I could see them) would obviously be two identical copper moons. This last explication is a caricature, of course, but also a magnifying mirror reflecting the insufficiency and slightness of the interpretations I sketched out before. It is a demonstratio ad absurdum, after which there would apparently be no point in trying any further . . .
The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3 Page 7
