The Rules of the Game Series, Volume 3

by Michel Leiris

  One disturbing thing is that perhaps especially when—out of private embarrassment, an incapacity to explain, or repugnance at involving myself in a long analysis—I note something, without claiming to give the key to it, that, although I myself am blind, I show myself truly openly. It may therefore be that others, more detached, immediately see the signification of this trait, one of those that would be all the more eloquent if I said nothing about them: my insistence on describing—like a Don Juan cataloguing his conquests—the forms of women or girls who, most of them, were to me only figures and who all, in their equal imponderability now, appear to me as nymphs who arose at various moments of that twofold odyssey, the wandering of my life, though it was not very adventurous, and that of its projection on paper in a succession of overlapping insights. In New York, a beautiful, armorless Valkyrie had piloted me, holding me by the hand each time, at least, that we had to cross a street or an avenue, and, in China (where the studious Cloud-the-color-of-pearl had been our hostess and the most attentive of our guides and interpreters), the hand of a schoolgirl had never left mine during the entire walk we took through the rooms of a social center for children. In a dream, a pleasant Antillean woman, whose fingers became active at the same time as mine, helped me to gather in a drawer my scattered belongings and to suspend the whole thing from a sort of beam of a scales. At the Claude-Bernard Hospital, a friend whom I falsely recognized—an angel who appeared suddenly and quickly disappeared—kept watch one morning standing by my bedside, then a charming physical therapist (brown-haired and as chubby as the girl who, on the boulevard Beaumarchais, talked to me about Taormina) taught me the motion appropriate for relieving a certain discomfort caused by my wounded throat and, shortly afterward, pointed out to me which way I ought to go if I wanted to take advantage of the airy tranquility of the garden. In this same hospital, the memory of my Aunt Claire began to haunt me in the guise of other phantasms, before appearing expressly as a muse whose immaterial presence encourages one or (a comparison less strained) like a figurehead presiding over a difficult return to the life of which my resuscitation was merely the preliminary phase. In the parenthesis in which she was situated, not only by exoticism and social distances, but by the particular circumstances of the “phony war,” hadn’t Khadidja, too, been an image, with whom I had chanced to have an ephemeral but close love relationship and a relationship of simple physical familiarity, like the afternoon on which that girl whose dark look later made me regard her as an angel of death had washed me as a nanny or a nurse might have done? Lastly, for some three years now, isn’t it still a female guide descended from some planet or other to whom I turn now and then, when I dream of the other Algerian (this one a “pied noir,” a native of Sidi-bel-Abbès), an expert caretaker, pretty, gay, and comforting, who, in the clinic where I was staying, was the main one to occupy herself with me when I underwent the operation that, for many men of our climates, marks the definitive entry into old age, just as in Black Africa circumcision marks the passage from the state of little boy to that of young man?

  Aging tends to incline one to religiosity . . . And what, after all, are these nymphs, these Venuses or diorama saints if not pious images with which, confronting a future more and more constricted, I surround myself for reassurance? Not that I—a Louis XI with wrinkled face under his hat superstitiously garnished with a circle of blessed medals—expect from this a guard or some help in my salvation, but because it is always consoling to think (even if it is not at all useful) that at several points in our life we have encountered something that resembled a miracle. It is religiosity nevertheless, for to seek support from these images which are merely memories, and of which one, even, is the image of an image, since the original appeared to me only in a dream, is to call, not upon living beings but upon beings as unreal as the gods invented by men because they lacked the daring to recognize that they were entirely dependent upon themselves. No more alive than these gods, and, after all, absolutely safe: icons on my walls, portraits amassed little by little in a family album, or flowers commemoratively slipped between two pages, whereas there are gods of commerce no less difficult than the god of the harshest and most demanding human creatures. If I reject easy solutions, how can I fail to mistrust these images, objects of soft daydreams that probably humor what is least avowable in me and distance me from naked reality without leading me to the diamond of poetic reality!

  Without leading me to the diamond . . . A complaint I make against my egerias, as though, even when I want to begin prospecting the virgin lands of poetry again, I wish to be held by the hand and guided like a child. This child that persists in me despite chronology and which, today as yesterday, invents fairy godmothers for itself in lieu of the other, inexorably terrestrial fairies with which a man must come face to face; this perpetually anachronistic child, who has occasionally believed he was behaving like an adult but has always needed someone to show him the way: those trips, especially, from which I would have retreated if I had had to make them under my own direction (Egypt, where I knew a friend would pilot me, and where, using as a pretext in my own eyes a completely surrealist repugnance for touristic activities, I refrained from visiting the glorious Valley of the Kings because I would have had to go there alone; Black Africa, which I traversed profiting from that sort of organized trip which is a mission of which one is not the leader; China, which was served up as though on a platter but for which the wait, all the more enervating because I did not know if everything would not be ruined by the presence of a spoilsport in our delegation, had put me into such a fine state that one day I made as though to break my head against the walls, so unlikely did my imminent departure seem); those great decisions under the aegises of people or countries considered to be models (Nerval, for example, or, now, China, about which I have trouble accepting the fact that it may not be above all reproach); lastly, this very quest itself, over which preside—faceless mothers, such as were shown not long ago in so-called metaphysical Italian painting—those notions in which I put my trust, almost blindly, for reasons less of the mind than of the heart: authenticity, communication.

  “Authenticity,” which is my great watchword but has no meaning except when contrasting a true object with an unmistakable forgery, so that one can make it a touchstone neither for approving or condemning works which there are no grounds to reject as apocrypha, plagiarisms, or mendacious accounts, nor for distinguishing in ourselves what we ought to treat as our most precious possession.

  “Communication,” less imbued with religiosity than “communion,” but just as nebulous as soon as one uses it in a loftier sense than that of the communicating door, telephone communication, or communication to a scholarly society. Recalling me to undisguised reality, my crisis of several years ago and its aftereffects, now cleared up, have led me, finally, to mistrust this term, which, usable on the level of strictly verbal communication as well as on the level of channels and communications more subtle than roads and railways, communicates too easily to the least precise idea its appearance of dry precision. Whether misapprehension or dishonest simplification, I embraced under its heading two things in truth most unclear, and which cannot be reduced to their merely social aspect, as that heading slyly invited me to do: aesthetic communication (to move the other by causing him to share what one has thought or felt) and amorous communication (to be moved by each other). Not only did I think thus to possess the idea that, when the time came, would help me to put clearly into perspective the essential part of what I had defined, but, playing the saint, I gave a moral turn to my two great aspirations, since, in both cases, what was involved was, when taken to an extreme, merging with others. However, naïve or not, the operation was especially inconclusive because love and poetry—I neglected this point—are far from representing the whole of human communication, the latter being capable of occurring, beyond all effusion, in a piece of work or any other act undertaken together with another person. What is more, it was defective in that I would not be abl
e to claim, without deceit as to my deeper motives, that in life as in art my great aim is to “communicate” with another: can I, in effect, posit that to achieve a tacit agreement is what matters most to me, whereas through poetry—that poetry which I would like to seize hold of again and which makes this book a search for the lost ring or an indirect attempt at a return to the fold—I want to contrive to enter into close contact with the world, in the same way that I expect the act of love to bring me into close contact with nature itself and not just with another person? What is more, if love and poetry were merely particular instances of commerce with our fellow human beings, how could they so madly elate us and transport us so far outside ourselves?

  However, the fact that love and poetry both present themselves as marvelous excesses is only an analogy, which in no way authorizes one to mingle literary life and sentimental life in the foolish way I did (to the point of making a complete mess), when, driven in theory by my thirst for a full and entire communication, I embarked upon what were in practice only the commonplace affairs of a pen-pusher in seventh heaven because he had met some female admirers. One of these, the most knowledgeable and perhaps the most sincere, was for me not physically attractive, but so powerful was my longing for a woman’s approval that something nevertheless was initiated between us. As for the other, who captivated me enough so that despite the more than seven years that have elapsed I can recall, not without some rancor, that—a bad lover, without any doubt—I never managed to elicit from her throat the word tu, which would have been the sign that between her and me, even if momentarily, all distance had been abolished, certainly in every respect we communicated so little that I had wept, one day, even less over the quarrel that was separating us than over the philistinism evinced by her remarks. With one as with the other, I had at first played the role of the man in high office to whom novices come to ask advice, and my weakness had been, in both cases, to throw myself, a dog seizing a bone, on what was offered to me: the attention of a woman who had appeared from outside and, theoretically, was avid, as I still am, to discover, in literary terms, her formula. To carry on a dialogue with one, and to try, with the other, to experience what would be for me the last avatar of love (in the manner in which China had appeared to me as the incarnation of the distant voyage that would be followed by no other) was quite natural. But I am ashamed of having yielded to the ridiculous author vanity that was slumbering in me, and of having allowed it to bite the bait so voraciously. Not to mention the fact that to indulge in this double affair, not even cynically but out of an incapacity to control events, and to conduct myself (a schoolboy with muddled emotions) toward each of my two accomplices as if the virtues of the other had perfected her own, was to put up with a strange vaudeville in order to satisfy my appetite for total illumination through one flesh and one mind.

  Further specifics that are, in the end, necessary: what I retain especially about communication is the moment when it seems to establish itself, an instant that is dazzling but limited, like all those moments in which one could believe time had been shattered but which do not cause it to fly asunder except illusorily, since they are followed by an indeterminate series of other, similar instants. To communicate, to merge with the other—is this what one so often seeks, in love or in poetry, through those vertiginous instants for which one feels prepared to sacrifice either a solid understanding between two beings between whom everything is transparent, or the intimacy which crystal-clear words spoken without passion or agitation may establish between us and the things (or the people) who surround us? Isn’t it rather because we love this vertigo in itself, as it is, beyond all reason, and are simply anxious that, shared, it be true not merely for us alone, as are both the dream and the sort of provoked hallucination framing what is euphemistically called solitary pleasure? If even in vertigo I demand this sharing, it is not for itself: in almost all that I do, even if I do it on a whim, I need someone to play opposite me, for otherwise it would seem to me that it is only half-done, whence the high value I attach not only to a reciprocal love, but to friendship, to a common passion, to a certain kind of literary recognition, and hence, equally, despite my penchant, repressed only with difficulty, for bouts of drunkenness, the repugnance that I have always had to becoming intoxicated all by myself.

  “Communication,” “authenticity,” what rotten planks such words are! As though they spoke volumes, I rarely use them without a slight inner tremor, although the indecisiveness of their boundaries could fairly draw down upon me, from my interlocutor, the following remark, accompanied by a grimace of scorn: You don’t know what you’re saying! It was by thus attributing to me an incoherence close to the mental chaos in which a baby is plunged that in the old days my brothers would tease me, and I was frightfully vexed to hear my older brothers intimate to me that my talk, like everything that I had in my head, was merely infantile verbiage. To know, to say: to have knowledge, to express through speech. In fact, isn’t it common that, even in maturity, one does not know what one is saying, since, as one uses words one often distends them or causes them to slide from one acceptation to another, to the point of making impossible, for oneself as for anyone else, any valid knowledge of what it was their mission to express in the moment in which one used them? This is the case for these terms, loaded, for me, with the magic of key words, whereas it is because of their elasticity, their very uncertainty, that they can be endowed with a content so rich.

  But also, what is the matter with me, that I have chosen to theorize instead of attempting, if I wanted to justify myself and convince others, to do it in an exclusively practical way: speaking my own language and stopping up my ears with wax in order not to be seduced by the accents of some siren (including the joy of awakening echoes), as I follow my own sinuous trajectory, obeying only my own inclinations and leaving to the reader the burden of determining where my journey was leading, if in fact it was leading to some definable place. Age, besides, augments the confusion, not only because the senses and faculties become dull, but because one often tends (with a seriousness that is comic if it is not hypocritical) to treat as questions that are still being asked those which, one forgets, have long since resolved themselves on their own: love, for example, even though I would not be able to respond to it except more poorly than ever, if I happened to inspire it, and even though, on the other hand, I know I am joined to a companion by bonds such that life without her seems inconceivable to me (for I can say, without bragging, but in full awareness of the lost-child side of me that has always prevented me from doing without a firm support, that only my cowardice before the imminence of the mortal act could induce me to survive her if the future were to sever, by her death, an undivided couple like the one I incarnated, by myself alone and for myself alone, before changing into the old actress fêted so long ago); poetry, which has become a necessity for me because it is my only recourse, now that the die has been cast and I cannot dream of transfiguring my life either by love or by a great journey (which today I envisage from the perspective of a diversion or my professional occupation, nothing more), nor by revolutionary activity (knowing too well the limits of my dedication and what a distance there is between approving of the goals of the revolution and acting as a revolutionary).

  When obliteration by death or senility is no longer seen as a fate but expected as an evil that is preparing to strike one, it happens—and this is my case—that one loses even the desire to undertake anything at all: one evaluates the little time one has available still, a time that is constricted, with no relation to that of the periods of one’s life when it was out of the question to think that an enterprise might lack the time it needed to develop freely, and this cuts short all motivation. In the same way, even if one has long been accustomed to it, as I have, it is a hard thing to be aware, each day, that the night—henceforth obstructed by fatigue or sleep—will no longer be that infinitely open period during which a man whom nothing has weakened can love and spend himself without counting. Whether
I am more lucid, more vulnerable than another man, or more greedily occupied with my own person, it seems to me that someone whose existence has thus gone from unlimited to limited lives in a sort of asphyxia. How can this be remedied except through an expedient by means of which, in a place where on all sides I run up against implacable limits, a breath of the limitless could still flow? As last resources, art and poetry offer themselves as means of loosening the grip . . . But isn’t it a pity to diminish them to the point of treating them as replacement products allowing one to palliate the distressing penury of old age! An ignoble role, I will not deny it . . . However, this poor function—tempering final defeat with a shred of victory—is not the only wretchedness that art and poetry conceal under their mantle of grandeur, and, pursuing this farther, oughtn’t one to regard it as the least fragile of their justifications?