My tension suddenly broke, like a noise cut off.
And the first real silence began to blow. That tranquil, vast, strange something that I had seen in my dim, smiling, photographs—that something was outside of me for the first time and entirely within my reach, incomprehensible but within my reach.
What assuaged me, like slaking a thirst, assuaged me as though all my life I had been waiting for a water as vital for the bristling body as cocaine is for someone crying out for it. At last, the body, imbued with silence, found peace. Relief came from my fitting into the silent design of that cavern.
Up to that moment I had not fully seen my struggle, so immersed had I been in it. But now, because of the silence into which I had finally fallen, I knew that I had been struggling, that I had succumbed, and that I had given in.
And that, as of right now, I was really in the room.
As much a part of it as a drawing made three million years ago in a cave. And that is how I fit within myself, and how within my very self I was etched on that wall.
The narrow passage had been the daunting cockroach, and I had slipped with disgust through that body of scales and ooze. And I had ended up, all impure myself, embarking, through it, upon my past, which was my continuous present and my continuous future—and which, today and ever, is on the wall, and my fifteen million daughters, from that time down to myself, were also there. My life had been as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages and call one of them death. I had always been in life, it mattered little that it was not I properly speaking, not that thing that I customarily call "I." I had always been in life.
I, neutral cockroach body, I with a life that at last is not eluding me because I finally see it outside myself—I am the cockroach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of brightest light on the wall plaster—I am every Hellish piece of myself—life is so pervasive in me that if they divide me in pieces like a lizard, the pieces will keep on shaking and writhing. I am the silence etched on a wall, and the most ancient butterfly flutters in and looks at me: just the same as always. From birth to death is what I call human in myself, and I shall never actually die.
But this is not eternity, it is condemnation.
How opulent this silence is. It is the accumulation of centuries. It is the silence of a cockroach looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything experiences the other; in this desert things know things. Things know things as much as this . . . this something that I shall call pardon, if I wish to save myself within the human plan. It is pardon in itself. Pardon is one of the attributes of living matter.
Pardon is one of the attributes of living matter.
"See here, my precious, see how I am organizing for fear, see how I still cannot touch those primary laboratory elements without immediately trying to put a hope together. So as of yet my inner metamorphosis makes no sense. In such a metamorphosis, I lose everything I have had, and what I have had has been myself—all that I have is what I am. And what am I now? I am: a standing in the presence of fear. I am: what I have seen. I don't understand and I am afraid to understand, the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and its cockroaches."
I, who before lived on words of charity, or pride— or something. But what an abyss between the word and what it sought to do, what an abyss between the word love and the love that does not even have a human sense—because—because love is living matter. Is love living matter?
What was it that happened to me yesterday? and now? I'm confused, I have crossed desert after desert, but have I remained trapped under some detail? like under a rock.
No, wait, wait: I must remember with relief that since yesterday I have left that room, I have got out, I'm free! and I still have a chance to get it all back. If I want to.
But do I want to?
What I have seen is unorganizable. But if I really want to, right now, I can still translate it into terms that would be more like ours, into human terms, and I can still put aside those hours of yesterday. If I still want to, I can ask myself in another way, a way that is within our language, what happened to me.
And, if I question myself that way, I can still have an answer that will get it all back. That recovery would be to acknowledge that G. H. was a woman who lived well, well, well, who lived in the top layer of the world's sands, and the sands had never given way beneath her feet; the harmony was such that when the sands moved her feet moved in concert with them, so everything stayed firm and compacted. G. H. lived on the top floor of a superstructure, and, even though it was built in the air, it was a solid building, she herself too in the air, like bees weave their life in the air. And the same thing had been happening for centuries, with the necessary or incidental variations, and it worked. It worked—at least nothing spoke, and no one spoke, no one said "no": so, it worked.
But precisely the slow accumulation of centuries automatically piling up was what was making that building in the air very heavy, without anyone noticing, that building was becoming saturated with itself: it was becoming more and more compacted instead of more and more fragile. The accumulation of living in a superstructure was becoming ever closer to too heavy to stay in the air.
Like a building with all its occupants sleeping securely at night not knowing that its foundations are sagging and, at one instant unannounced by their tranquility, the beams will give way because the building's cohesion is slowly being pulled apart, a millimeter per century. And then, when it's least expected—in an instant as repetitiously habitual as the instant of raising a drinking glass to your smiling lips while at a dance—then, yesterday, a day as sun-filled as these days at the height of summer usually are, with men working and kitchens giving off smoke and the jackhammer breaking the stones and the children laughing and a priest trying to prevent, but to prevent what?— yesterday, without warning, there was the crash of solidness suddenly become crumbly in demolition.
In the collapse, tons fell upon tons. When I, G. H. even on my luggage, I, one of the people, opened my eyes, I was—not on top of the rubble, for even the rubble had been swallowed up by the sands—I was on a quiet plain, kilometers and kilometers below what had been a great city. Things had gone back to being what they had been.
The world had reclaimed its own reality, and, just like after a catastrophe, my culture had ended: I was merely a historical fact. Everything in me had been reclaimed by the beginning of time and by my own beginning. I had passed on to a first, primary plane, I was in the silence of the winds and in the age of tin and copper—at the first age of life.
Listen, in the presence of the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.
No, don't be afraid! What had saved me up to that moment in the sentimentalized life that I had lived on was doubtless that the inhuman is our better part, is the thing, the thing part of people. It was only because of that that I, like a false person, had not by then sunk under my sentimentalistic and utilitarian constitution: my human sentiments were utilitarian, but I had not foundered because the thing part, God-matter, was too strong and was waiting to reclaim me. The great neutral punishment of life in general is that it can suddenly undermine a specific life; if it is not given strength of its own, then it bursts like a dike bursts—and becomes pure, with no admixture: purely neutral. That was the great danger: when that neutral thing part does not filter through a personal life, all that life can become pure neutrality.
But exactly why had the first silence come suddenly to be remade in me? As if one quiet woman had simply been called and had quietly stood up, left her embroidery on her chair, and, without a word—leaving her life, abandoning embroidery, love, and priorly constituted soul—without a word that woman had calmly got down on all fours and begun to go about that way, and to crawl with calm, glaring eyes: that prior life had reclaimed her and she had gone.
But why me? But why not me. If it hadn't been me, I wouldn't have known, an
d since it was me, I found out— that's all there is to it, nothing more. What was it that had called me: madness or reality?
Life was taking its vengeance on me, and that vengeance consisted merely in coming back, nothing more. Every case of madness involves something coming back. People who are possessed are not possessed by something that just comes but instead by something that comes back. Sometimes life comes back. If in me everything crumbled before that power, it is not because that power was in itself necessarily an overwhelming one: it in fact had only to come, since it had already become too full-flowing a force to be controlled or contained—when it appeared it overran everything. And then, like after a flood, there floated a wardrobe, a person, a loose window, three suitcases. And that seemed like Hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archaeology.
Hell, because the world held no more human sense for me, and man held no more human sense for me. And in the absence of that humanization and in the absence of that sentimentalization of the world—I become terrified.
Without a scream, I looked at the cockroach.
Looked at up close, the cockroach is an object of great opulence. A bride with black jewelry. It is completely unique, it seems one of a kind. By pinching the middle of its body in the wardrobe door, I had isolated the only specimen. All that showed was half its body. The rest that was not in view could have been huge and been in thousands of homes, behind things and wardrobes. I, however, did not want the part that had come to be mine. Behind the surfaces of buildings —those dusky jewels scraping along the ground?
I felt impure, as the Bible speaks of the impure. Why did the Bible spend so much time on the impure, even to making a list of impure and forbidden animals? Why, if, like all the rest, they too had been created? And why was the impure forbidden? I had committed the forbidden act of touching something impure.
I had committed the forbidden act of touching something impure.
And so impure was I, in my sudden, indirect moment of self-knowledge, that I opened my mouth to call for help. They proclaim; the Bible does, they proclaim, but if I understand what they proclaim, it will be they who call me crazy. People like me had proclaimed, but understanding them would be my destruction.
"But you shall not eat of the impure: which are the eagle, the griffin, and the hawk." Nor the owl, nor the swan, nor the bat, nor the stork, nor the entire tribe of crows.
I knew that the Bible's impure animals were forbidden because the impure is the root—for there are things created that have never made themselves beautiful and have stayed just as they were when created, and only they still continue to be the entirely complete root. And because they are the entirely complete root, they are not to be eaten, the fruit of good and of evil—eating of living matter would expel me from a paradise of adornments and lead me to walk forever through the desert with a shepherd's staff. Many have been those who have walked in the desert with a staff.
Or even worse—it would lead me to see that the desert too is alive and has moisture, and to see that everything is alive and is made of the same thing.
To build a possible soul—a soul whose head will not devour its own tail—the law commands that one use only what is patently alive. And the law commands that whoever partakes of the impure must do so without knowing. For he who partakes of the impure knowing that it is impure . . . must also come to know that the impure is not impure. Is that it?
"And everything that crawls on the ground and has wings shall be impure and shall not be eaten."
I opened my mouth in fright: to ask for help. Why? because I did not want to become impure like the cockroach? what ideal held me to the sensing of an idea? why should I not make myself impure, exactly as I was revealing my whole self? What was I afraid of? being impure with what?
Being impure with joy.
For now I understand that what I had begun to feel was joy, which I still had not yet recognized or understood. In my silent call for help, what I was struggling against was a vague first joy that I did not want to sense in myself because, albeit vague, it was already horrible: it was a joy without redemption, I don't know how to make it clear for you, but it was a joy without hope.
"Oh, don't pull your hand away from me, I've promised myself that maybe by the end of this impossible narrative I shall understand, oh maybe it will be on Hell's road that I shall be able to find what we need—but don't pull your hand away, even though I now know that the finding has to come on the road of what we are, if I can succeed in not sinking completely into what we are."
See, my love, I am losing the courage to find whatever it is I shall have to find, I am losing the courage to give myself over to the road itself, and I am now promising us that in that Hell I shall find hope.
"Perhaps it is not the ancient hope. Perhaps it cannot even be called hope."
I was struggling because I did not want an unknown joy. It would be as forbidden by my future salvation as the forbidden beast that was called impure—and I was opening and closing my mouth in torture to call for help, but then it still hadn't occurred to me to invent this hand that I have now invented to hold mine. In my fear yesterday I was alone, and I wanted to ask for help against my first dehumanization.
Dehumanization is as painful as losing everything, as losing everything, my love. I was opening and closing my mouth to call for help but I neither could nor knew how to enunciate.
The problem was that I no longer had anything to say. My agony was like the agony of trying to talk before dying. I knew that I was leaving something forever, something was going to die, and I wanted to pronounce the word that would at least capture that thing that was dying.
Finally I at least succeeded in articulating a thought: "I am asking for help."
Then it occurred to me that I had nothing to ask for help against. I had nothing to ask.
Suddenly, this was it. I was understanding that "ask" was a leftover from an entreatable world, which was becoming more and more remote. And if I continued trying to ask, it was to cling to the remainders of my old culture, to cling so tight that I wouldn't be pulled along by what was now reclaiming me. And to which—in a pleasure without hope—I was now giving in, oh I now wanted to give in—to have experienced it was now the beginning of a Hell of wanting, wanting, wanting . . . Was my will to want stronger than my will to salvation?
Every time I tried, I had nothing to ask for. And I saw, in fascination and horror, the pieces of my rotten mummy clothes fall dry to the floor; I witnessed my own metamorphosis from chrysalis to moist larva, my wings slowly drying and opening out. And a completely new belly made for the ground, a new belly was being reborn.
Without turning my eyes away from the cockroach, I lowered myself until I felt my body meet the bed and, without turning my eyes away from the cockroach, I sat down.
Now it was with eyes raised that I looked at it. Now, bent over on top of its own middle, it looked me end to end. I had trapped in front of myself the impure of the world— and I had disenchanted the living thing. I had lost my ideas.
Then, again, another full millimeter of white matter spurted out.
Then, again, another full millimeter of white matter spurted out.
Holy Mary, mother of God, I offer you my life in exchange for that moment yesterday's being untrue. The cockroach covered with the white matter was looking at me. I don't know if it saw me, I don't know what a cockroach sees. But the two of us were looking at each other, and I also don't know what a woman sees. But if its eyes didn't see me, its existence existed me: in the primary world that I had entered, beings exist other beings as a way of seeing one another. And in that world that I was coming to know, there are various modes that mean to see: one being looking at the other without seeing it, one possessing the other, one eating the other, one simply being in a corner and the other being there too: all that also means to see. The cockroach didn't see me directly, it was with me. The cockroach saw me not with its eyes but with its body.
And I ... I saw. Ther
e was no way not to see it. There was no way to deny it: my convictions and my wings were drying out quickly: that was all they were there for. There was no way to deny it any longer. I don't know what it was that I could no longer deny, but I could no longer.
Nor could I any longer save myself, like before, with a whole culture that would help me to deny what I was seeing.
I was seeing all of it, the cockroach.
A cockroach is an ugly, shiny being. The cockroach is inside out. No, no, I don't mean that it has an inside and an outside; I mean that is what it is. What it had on the outside is what I hide inside myself: I have made my outside into a hidden inside. It was looking at me. And it wasn't a face. It was a mask. A deep sea diver's mask. That precious, rusty-colored gem. The two eyes were alive like two ovaries. It looked at me with the blind fertility of its look. It was making my dead fertility fertile. Could its eyes be salty? If I touched them—since I was slowly becoming more and more impure anyway—if I touched them with my mouth, would I taste salt in them?
I had tasted a man's eyes with my mouth and could tell that he was crying by the saltiness.
But, as I thought about the salt in the cockroach's black eyes, I suddenly recoiled again, and my dry lips curled back all the way to my teeth: the reptiles that move across the earth! In the stationary reverberation of light in the room, the cockroach was a small, slow crocodile. The dry, resonating room. I and the cockroach poised in that dryness, like on the dry crust of an extinct volcano. That desert I had gone into, and there I had also discovered life and its salt.
Again the white part of the cockroach squirted out, probably less than a millimeter.
This time, I barely, barely noticed the tiny outward movement that the matter made. I looked on, absorbed, silent.
"Never, before that time, had life happened to me during the daytime. Never in sunlight. Only, at night had the world slowly turned for me. Only, what would happen in the blackness of night itself also simultaneously happened in my own innards, and my blackness became undifferentiated from the outside blackness, and, in the morning when I opened my eyes, the world kept right on being a surface: the secret night life soon receded in my mouth to being the taste of a disappearing nightmare. But now life was happening in the daytime. Undeniable, there to see. Unless I turned my eyes away."
The Passion According to GH Page 6
