Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was trapped there in the caved-in mine and that by then the room had taken on an unexpressible familiarity, like the familiar honesty of dreams. And, just as in dreams, what I can't recount for you is the atmosphere's essential color. Like in dreams, the "logic" was other, was one that makes no sense when you wake up, for the dream's greater truth is lost.
But remember that all this took place while I was awake and immobilized by the daylight, and the dream truth was taking place without the anesthesia of night. Sleep awake along with me, and only then will you be able to know of my great sleep and know what the living desert is like.
Suddenly, as I was sitting there, a fatigue completely rigid, with no lassitude in it, came over me. Any more and it would have petrified me.
Then, carefully, as though some parts of me were paralyzed, I lay down on the rough mattress and there, burned through and through, I went to sleep as immediately as a cockroach goes to sleep on a vertical wall. There was no human stability in my sleep: it was the kind of balance a cockroach has when it sleeps on the whitewashed surface of a wall.
When I awoke, there was an even whiter and more fervidly fixed sun in the room. After that sleep, to the dimensionless surface of which my feet had clung, I was now trembling with cold.
But then the numbness passed, and again, fully in the sun's heat, I suffocated in confinement.
It must be past noon. I got up before I had really decided to and, even though it was useless, tried to throw open even wider the already fully opened window, and I tried to breathe, even though it might be breathing from a visual vastness, I sought a vastness.
I sought a vastness.
From that room dug out of the rock of a building, from the window of my minaret, I saw all the way to the horizon the enormous expanse of roof after roof calmly parching in the sun. The apartment buildings, like villages, crouched on their haunches. In size, it was larger than Spain.
Beyond the rocky defiles, between the concrete of the buildings, I saw the favela on the hilltop, and I saw a goat slowly walking up the hill. Beyond, there extended the plains of Asia Minor. From there I contemplated the empire of the present. The strait of the Dardanelles was farther over there; beyond it the craggy peaks. Your majestic monotony. Your imperial expanse, there in the sun.
And beyond, the sands began. The naked, burning desert. When darkness fell, cold would consume the desert, and one would shiver there like on desert nights. But in the distance the salty blue lake shimmered. That, then, must be the region of the great salt lakes.
Under the tremulous waves of sultry heat, monotony. Through the other apartment windows and on the concrete balconies, I saw the activity of shadows and people, like the comings and goings of the first Assyrian merchants. They were fighting for control of Asia Minor.
Perhaps I had excavated the future—or had got through to ancient profundities coming from so far away that my hands that had unearthed them could not even suspect. There I was, on foot, like a child dressed in a habit, a sleepy child. But an inquisitive child. From the height of this building, the present contemplates the present. Just as in the second millennium before Christ.
And I, now I was no longer an inquisitive child. I had grown, and I had become as simple as a queen. Kings, sphinxes, and lions, behold the city where I live—and all extinct! I am left over, pinned down by one of the stones that fell. And, since silence has judged my motionlessness to be that of a dead person, they all forgot me, left without getting me out, and, considered dead, I have stayed here, watching. And I have seen, while the silence of those who had really died kept invading me like ivy grows into the mouths of stone lions.
And because I was sure that I would end up starving to death under the fallen stone that pinned down my limbs ... I saw like someone who is never going to tell. I saw with the lack of commitment of someone who is not even going to tell herself. I saw very like someone who will never need to understand what she saw. Just as a lizard's nature sees: without ever having to remember. The lizard sees—like a loose eye sees.
I may have been the first person to set foot in that castle in the air. Five million years ago, perhaps the last caveman looked out from this very place, where there could then have been a mountain here. And which, after it had worn down, later became an empty place where, still later, cities were built that had worn away in their turn. Today the ground is fully populated by diverse races.
Standing at the window, sometimes my eyes rested on the blue lake that may have been nothing more than a piece of sky. But it soon wore me out, for the blue was made of a great intensity of light. My bleary eyes then shifted to rest on the naked, burning desert, which at least did not have the hardness of a color. Three millennia from now, hidden oil would gush from those sands: the present was opening gigantic perspectives on a new present.
In the meantime, today, I lived in the silence of what three millennia from now, after it had worn away and had been raised again, would again be stairs, cranes, men, and buildings. I was living the prehistory of a future. Like a woman who never had children but would have them three millennia from now, I was living today on the oil that would gush forth in those three millennia.
If at least I had come into the room at sundown— tonight would still be a full moon, I remembered that when I recalled the party on the balcony last night—I would see the full moon being born over the desert.
"Oh, I want to go back to my home," I suddenly entreated myself, for the moist moon had made me yearn for my life. But from that platform I got no moment of darkness and moon. Only hot coals, only the errant wind. And for me no canteen of water, no pipe of food.
But, who knows, less than a year later I might make such a find as no one, not even myself, would have dared predict. A golden chalice?
For I was looking for my city's treasure.
A city of gold and stone, Rio de Janeiro, whose inhabitants in the sun were six hundred thousand beggars. The city's treasure might be in one of the breaches in the rubble. But which one? That city was in need of a map-maker.
As I lifted my gaze to ever more distant points, to even steeper heights, there arose before me gigantic blocks of buildings that formed a heavy design, one not yet shown on any maps. I continued with that gaze, sought on the hill the remains of some fortified wall. After they reached the top of the hill I let my eyes run over the panorama. I mentally traced a circle around the semiruins of the favelas, and I realized that a city as large and limpid as Athens at its zenith could once have lived there, with children running through merchandise set out along the streets.
My way of seeing was entirely impartial: I worked directly with the evidence of my sight, without letting suggestions other than visual ones predetermine my conclusions; I was wholly prepared to surprise myself. Even if the evidence should contradict what I had decided on in my most tranquil delirium.
I know—through my own personal witness—that at the outset of this search of mine I hadn't the slightest idea what kind of language would slowly be revealed to me until I could one day reach Constantinople. But now I was totally prepared to bear in this room the hot, humid season of our climate, and with it, cobras, scorpions, tarantulas, and hordes of mosquitoes that come out when a city is demolished. And I knew that often, in my work in the open air, I would have to share my bed with the animals.
Meanwhile the sun was scorching me through the window. Only today had the sun hit me full on. But it was also true that only when the sun hit me could I myself, by standing up, be a source of shade—in which I would keep fresh skins of my water.
I was going to need a drill twelve meters long, camels, goats, and sheep, an electric cable; and I was going to need direct use of the vastness itself, for it would be impossible to reproduce, for example, in a simple aquarium, the richness of the oxygen found on ocean surfaces.
To keep my work spirit from flagging, I would try not to forget that geologists now know that in the Sahara's subsoil there is a huge lake
of potable water, I remember reading that; and that in the Sahara itself archaeologists have already excavated remnants of household utensils and the remains of ancient settlements: seven thousand years ago, I had read, a prosperous agriculture had developed in that "region of fear." The desert has a humidity that must be found again.
How should I proceed? to hold down the sand dunes, I would have to plant two million green trees, especially eucalyptus trees—I have always had the habit of reading something before going to sleep, and I had read a lot about the properties of eucalyptus trees.
And I must not forget, at the start of the work, to be prepared to make mistakes. Not forget that mistakes had often proved to be my path. Every time what I thought or felt didn't work out ... a space would somehow open up, and if I had had the courage before I would have gone in through it. But I had always been afraid of delirium and error. My error, however, had to be the path of truth: for only when I err do I get away from what I know and what I understand. If "truth" were what I can understand ... it would end up being but a small truth, my-sized.
Truth must reside precisely in what I shall never understand. And would I then be able to understand myself afterward? I don't know. Will the man of the future understand us as we are today? He, with distracted tenderness, will distractedly pat our heads like we do with a dog who comes up to us and looks at us from within its darkness, with silent, stricken eyes. He, the future man, would pat us, remotely comprehending us, just as I would remotely understand myself afterward, with the memory of the memory of the long-lost memory of a time of pain, but knowing that our time of pain would pass, just as a child is not a static child but a growing being.
All right, after holding the sand dunes down with eucalyptus trees, I couldn't forget, if it came up, that rice prospers in brackish soil, the high salt content of which it helps to cut down; that too I remembered from the bedtime reading that I tried to keep impersonal so it would help me fall asleep.
And what other tools would I need to dig with? picks, a hundred and fifty shovels, winches, even though I didn't know exactly what a winch was, heavy carts with steel axles, a portable forge, as well as nails and cord. As for my hunger, for my hunger I would make use of the dates of ten million palm trees, as well as peanuts and olives. And I had to know beforehand that, at prayer time in my minaret, I could only pray for the sands.
But for the sands I had probably been ready since I was born: I would know how to pray them, for that I wouldn't need to train myself ahead of time, like the witch doctors who do not pray for things but pray things. Prepared I had always been, so trained had I been by fear.
I remembered what was engraved in my memory, and up to that moment, uselessly: that Arabs and nomads call the Sahara El Khela, nothing, call it Tanesruft, the country of fear, call it Tiniri, land beyond the pasture regions. To pray the sands, I, like they, had already been prepared by fear.
Once again too scorched, I sought the great blue lakes, where I submerged my dried-out eyes. Lakes or luminous spots of sky. The lakes were neither ugly nor pretty. And it was only that that still terrorized my humanity. I tried to think about the Black Sea, I tried to think about the Persians coming down through the passes . . . but in all this too I found neither beauty nor ugliness, just the infinite successions of centuries of the world.
Which, suddenly, I could no longer tolerate.
And I suddenly turned back to the inside of the room, which, in its oppressiveness, at least was unpopulated.
I suddenly turned back to the inside of the room, which, in its oppressiveness, at least was unpopulated.
No, in all of this I had not been crazy or out of control. It was just a visual meditation. The danger of meditation is the danger of starting to think without wanting to, and thinking is no longer meditating, thinking leads toward an objective. Less dangerous is to "see" in meditation, which bypasses words of thought. I know that there now exists an electron microscope that gives the image of an object a hundred and sixty thousand times greater than actual size . . . but I wouldn't call the sight that one gets through that microscope hallucinatory, even though the small object that it has so monstrously magnified is no longer identifiable.
Had I deluded myself in my visual meditation?
Absolutely probable. But also in my purely optical visions, of a chair or a pitcher, I am the victim of error: my visual witness of a pitcher or of a chair is faulty at various points. The error is the error of my unalterable work methods.
I sat down on the bed again. But now, looking at the cockroach, I knew much more.
Looking at it, I saw the vastness of the Libyan desert, in the area of Elschele. The cockroach that had preceded me there by millennia, and also preceded the dinosaurs. In the presence of the cockroach, I was now able to see to far-off Damascus, the oldest city on earth. On the Libyan desert, cockroaches and crocodiles? All the time I had been wanting not to think about what I was really thinking now: that the cockroach is edible like a lobster, the cockroach was a crustacean.
And I have only loathing for crocodiles' crawling since I am not a crocodile. I have a horror of the crocodile's silence, full of rows of scales.
But the loathing is necessary for me just as water pollution is necessary for what is in the water to reproduce. Loathing directs me and makes me fertile. Through loathing I see a night in Galilee. The night in Galilee is as if the vastness of the desert walked in the darkness. The cockroach is a dark vastness walking.
I was now living the Hell through which I was still to pass, but I did not know if it would be passage through or if I would remain there. I knew now that that Hell is horrible and is good, perhaps I would want to stay in it. For I was seeing the profound, ancient life of the cockroach. I was seeing a silence that has the depth of an embrace. The sun is as much in the Libyan desert as it is hot in itself. And the earth is the sun, how is it that I never saw before that the earth is the sun?
And then there will take place—on a naked, dry rock in the Libyan desert—there will take place the love of two cockroaches. And now I know what it is like. One cockroach waits. I see its brown-thing silence. And now—now I see another cockroach advancing slowly and with difficulty through the sands toward the rock. Upon the rock, which had had its body of water dry up millennia ago, two dry cockroaches. One is the silence of the other. The killers who face each other: the world is utterly reciprocal. An entirely mute stridulation vibrating atop the rock; and we, we who have come down to today, still resonate with it.
"I promise myself for one day this same silence, I promise us what I have now learned. Only for us it will have to be by night, for we are moist, salty beings, we are beings of sea water and of tears. It will also be with cockroaches' wholly open eyes, except that it will be in the night, for I am a creature of great, moist depths, I do not know the dust of dry cisterns, and the surface of a rock is not my hearth."
We are creatures who need to dive to the depths in order there to breathe, like fish dive in the water to breathe, only for me the depths are in the night air. The night is our latent state. And it is so moist that plants are born there. In houses the lights are put out so the crickets can be heard more clearly and so that the grasshoppers may move across the leaves almost without touching them, the leaves, the leaves, the leaves—in the night soft anxiousness is transmitted through the air's hollowness, emptiness is a medium of transport.
Yes indeed, for us love will not be on the daytime desert: we are those who swim, the night air is humid and is sweetened, and we are salty since our breathing-out is sweat. A long time ago I was drawn, along with you, on a cave wall, and with you I have swum from its dark depths down to today, I have swum with my countless cilia—I was the oil that just today gushed forth, when a black African drew me in my own house, making me come forth from a wall. Sleepwalking, like the oil that finally gushes forth.
"I swear that love is like that. I know, only because I was sitting there and I found out. Only because of the cockroach do I know that al
l that the two of us had before was already love. What had to happen was for the cockroach to hurt me like someone pulling out my fingernails— and then I couldn't stand the torture any longer and I confessed, and now I am telling it all. I could stand no more and I confess that I already knew of a truth that never had use and application, and that I would be afraid to apply, for I am not adult enough to be able to use a truth without destroying myself."
If you can find out through me, without having to be tortured first, without first having to be cut in half by a wardrobe door, without first having your shells broken, shells of fear that through time had been hardening into shells of stone, just as mine had to be broken under a pincers' force until I reached the tender neutrality of myself— if you can find out through me . . . then learn from this one who has had to be laid completely bare and lose all her suitcases with the engraved initials.
"Plumb me, plumb me, for it is cold, it is cold to lose your lobstershells. Warm me with your plumbing, comprehend me, for I do not comprehend myself. I am just in love with the cockroach. And it is a Hellish love."
But you are afraid, I know that you were always afraid of rituals. But when one is tortured until she becomes a nucleus, then one changes demonically to wanting to serve ritual, even if the ritual is the act of self-consumption—just as for there to be incense one must burn incense. Listen, because I am as serious as a cockroach with cilia. Listen:
When a person is her own nucleus, she can have no more disparities. Then she is her own solemnity and no longer fears self-consumption in the service of consuming ritual—ritual is the very life of the nucleus carrying itself out, the ritual is not outside it: the ritual is inherent. The cockroach has its ritual within its cell. Ritual—believe in me because I think I understand now—ritual is the mark of God. And every child is born with the same ritual already there.
"I know: the two of us were always afraid of my solemnity and of your solemnity. We thought it was a solemnity of form. And we always hid what we knew: that living is always a question of life and death, hence the solemnity. We knew too, albeit without the gift of the grace of knowing it, that we are the life that is inside us, and that we do for ourselves. The only destiny with which we are born is the destiny of ritual. I have been calling "mask" a lie, and it isn't: it is the essential mask of solemnity. We would have to put on ritual masks to love each other. Beetles are born with the mask with which they will fulfill themselves. Through original sin we have lost our mask."
The Passion According to GH Page 9
