The Passion According to GH
Page 10
I looked; the cockroach was a beetle. It was merely its own mask. In the cockroach's lack of glee I perceived its warrior ferocity. It was meek but its functioning was fierce.
I am meek but my life-function is fierce. Oh, prehuman love invades me. I understand, I understand! The form of living is so secret a secret that it is the silent tracking of a secret. It is a secret in the desert. I knew for certain now. For in the light of two cockroaches' love there came to me the memory of a true love that I once had and didn't know that I had—for love was then what I understood from a word. But there is something that must be said, that must be said.
But there is something that must be said, that must be said.
"I am going to tell you what I have never told you before, maybe that's what's missing: to have told. If I didn't tell, it wasn't because I begrudged telling or because of my cockroach silence with more eyes than mouth. If I didn't tell, it was because I didn't know that I knew—but I know now. I am going to tell you that I love you. I know that I have said that to you before and that it was true when I said it then as well, but only now am I really saying it. I need to say it before I . . . . Oh, but it is the cockroach that is going to die, not me! I don't need this condemned person's letter from a cell ..."
"No, I don't want to frighten you with my love. If you become frightened of me, I'll become frightened of myself. Don't be afraid of the pain. I am now as sure as I am sure that in that room I was alive and the cockroach was alive: I am sure of this: that everything happens above or below pain. Pain isn't the true name of what people call pain. Listen: I'm sure of this."
For, now that I was not struggling with myself any longer, I quietly knew that that's what a cockroach was like, that pain wasn't pain.
Oh, if I had known what was going to happen in the room I'd have picked up more cigarettes before I came in: I was consuming myself in the need to smoke.
"Oh, if only I could transmit to you the memory, just now brought to life, of what we two have experienced without knowing it. Do you want to remember along with me? Oh, I know that it's hard: but let's reach out for ourselves. Instead of going beyond ourselves. Don't be afraid now, you're safe because at least it has already happened— unless you see some danger in knowing that it happened."
The fact is that when we were in love I didn't know that love happened much more precisely when there was no what we then called love. The neuter of love, that is what we were experiencing, and what we rejected.
What I am talking about is when nothing was happening, and we called that nothing an interval. How could it have been an interval?
It was the huge flower opening up, all full of itself, my vision all huge and tremulous. What I saw then came together to my sight and became mine—but not a permanent coming-together: if I had compressed it between my hands like a piece of coagulated blood, its solidity would have turned back into liquid blood again between my fingers.
And time wasn't totally liquid only because, for me to be able to pick things up with my hands, the things had to coagulate, the way fruits hold together. In the intervals that we called empty and tranquil, and when we thought that the love had ended . . .
I remember my throat pains back then: with my swollen tonsils, I had quick coagulation. And it melted easily: my throat pain had gone away, I used to find myself telling you. Like iceflows in the summer and the rivers running liquid. Every word of ours—in that time that we called empty—every word was as light and empty as a butterfly: the inner word fluttered against the mouth, the words were said but we didn't hear them because the melted iceflows made a great deal of noise when they ran. In the midst of the roar of liquid, our mouths moved, speaking, and we really only saw the mouths moving but we didn't hear them—we looked into each other's mouth, seeing it speak, and it mattered little that we didn't hear, oh, in God's name, it mattered little.
And in our own name, it was enough just to see the mouth speaking, and we laughed because we paid little attention. And we nevertheless called that not-hearing disinterest and lack of love.
But, really, how we did speak! we spoke nothingness. Yet everything shimmered like when heavy tears cling to eyes; therefore, everything shimmered.
In those intervals we used to think that we were relaxing from one being the other. In fact, it was the great pleasure of not being the other: for in that case we each were two. Everything would end when what we called our interval in love ended; and, because it was going to end, it weighed tremulously with the very weight of its end already in itself. I remember all that as though through a trembling in water.
Oh, could it be that we were not originally human? and that we became human through practical necessity? that terrifies me, just as it does you. For the cockroach looked at me with her beetle shell, with her burst body all made of tubes and antennae and soft cement—and that was undeniably a truth prior to our words, it was undeniably the life that up to then I hadn't wanted.
"Then—then, through the door of condemnation, I ate life and was eaten by life. I understood that my kingdom is of this world. And I understood it through the Hellish side of me. For within myself I saw what Hell is like."
For within myself I saw what Hell is like.
Hell is the mouth that bites and eats living flesh that has blood, and the one eaten howls with delight in his eye: Hell is the pain like pleasure of matter, and with the laughter of delight tears run in pain. And the tear that comes from pain's laughter is the opposite of redemption. I could see the cockroach's inexorability with her ritual mask. I saw that Hell was just that: cruel acceptance of pain, solemn lack of pity for one's own destiny, love of the ritual of life more than oneself—that was Hell, where the one who ate the living flesh of the other wallowed about in the happiness of pain.
For the first time I felt with Hellish greed the wish to have borne the children I never had: I wanted my organic Hellishness full of pleasure to have reproduced itself not in three or four offspring but in twenty thousand. My future survival in offspring would be my true nowness, which is not only myself but my pleasureful species not losing its continuity. Not having borne offspring left me spasmodic, as though I were confronting a vice I had rejected.
That cockroach had had children and I had not: the cockroach could die squashed, but I was condemned never to die, for if I died, albeit only once, I would die. And I wanted not to die but to keep perpetually dying like a supreme pleasure in pain. I was in the Hell traversed by pleasure like a very low nerve-buzz of pleasure.
And all that—oh, my horror—all that took place in the immense refuge of indifference. ... All that losing itself in a spiraling destiny, and that destiny not losing itself. In that infinite destiny made only of cruel nowness, I, like a larva—in my deepest inhumanity, for what had up to now escaped me had been my real inhumanity—I and we as larvae devour each other in soft flesh.
And there is no punishment! Hell is that; there is no punishment. For in Hell we make what could be punishment into supreme delight, in this desert we make punishment into one more ecstasy of laughter with tears, in Hell we make punishment into an expectation of pleasure.
Was this, then, the other side of humanization and of hope?
In Hell that demonic faith for which I am not responsible. And which is faith in orgiastic life. Hell's orgy is the apotheosis of the neutral. Black Sabbath joy is the joy of losing oneself in the atonal.
What still frightened me was that even that very unpunishable horror would be benignly reabsorbed into the abyss of endless time, into the abyss of unending heights, into the profound abyss of God: absorbed into the core of an indifference.
So different from human indifference. For it was an interested indifference, an attainable indifference. It was an extremely energetic indifference. And all is silence in that Hell of mine. For the laughter forms part of the volume of the silence, indifferent pleasure gleamed only in the eye, but laughter was in the very blood and can't be heard.
And all this is in this very instant
, is in the now. But at the same time the present instant is completely removed because of the immense magnitude of God. Because of that enormous perpetual magnitude, even what exists at the present moment is remote: in the very instant when the cockroach is crushed in the wardrobe, it too is remote in relation to the core of great interested indifference that will reabsorb it with impunity.
Grandiose indifference—was that what existed inside me?
The Hellish immensity of life: for even my body doesn't delimit me, compassion doesn't allow my body to delimit me. In Hell, my body doesn't delimit me, should I call that "soul"? To live a life that is no longer the life of my body . . . should I call that impersonal "soul"?
And my impersonal soul scorches me. A star's grandiose indifference is the cockroach's soul, the star is the very exorbitance of the cockroach's body. The cockroach and I aspire to a peace that cannot be ours—it is a peace beyond her scope and destiny, and mine. And because my soul is so unlimited that it is no longer me, and because it is so beyond me ... I am always remote from myself, I am unreachable to myself just as a star is unreachable for me. I contort myself to be able to touch the present time that surrounds me, but I remain remote in relation to this very instant itself. The future, God help me, is closer to me than the present instant.
The cockroach and I are Hellishly free because our living matter is greater than we are, we are Hellishly free because my own life is so little containable within my body that I can't even use it. My life is used more by the earth than it is by me, I am so much greater than what I have called "me" that just by having a life of the world I would have myself. It would take a horde of cockroaches to make a minimally perceivable point in the world—however, one lone cockroach, merely because of its life-attention, that lone cockroach is the world.
The most unreachable part of my soul, the one not belonging to me, is the part that touches on my border with what is not me and the part to which I give myself over. My whole anxiety has been this untranscendable and excessively close proximity. I am more what is not within me.
And that is why the hand that I was holding has abandoned me. No, no. It was I who let go of the hand, because I now have to go on alone.
If I succeed in returning to the realm of life I shall pick up your hand again, and I shall kiss it in gratitude for its waiting for me, waiting for my sojourn to pass, for me to return, thin, starved, humbled: hungry just for what is little, hungry just for what is less.
Because, sitting here quietly, I have come to want to experience my own remoteness as the only way of experiencing my nowness. And that, which is apparently innocent, that was again an enjoyment that resembled a horrendous, cosmic pleasure.
To relive it, I am letting go of your hand.
Because in that enjoyment there was no pity. Pity is being the offspring of someone or something—but the world's being is cruelty. Cockroaches gnaw each other and kill each other and penetrate each other in procreation and eat each other in an eternal summer that falls into night— Hell is a summer that boils and almost becomes night. Nowness doesn't see the cockroach, present time looks at her from so great a distance that it doesn't make her out from so far away and only sees a silent desert—present time doesn't even suspect the orgiastic gypsy celebration on the naked desert.
Where, reduced to tiny jackals, we eat each other in laughter. In the laughter of pain—and free. The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray, because they make no choices. But my freely becoming what I fate-fully am depends on me. I am the mistress of my own fatedness, and, if I decide not to complete it, I shall stay outside my specifically living nature. But if I fulfill my neutral, living core, then, within my species, I shall be being specifically human.
"But the fact is that becoming human can become transformed into an ideal, and can suffocate itself through slow accretions .... Being human should not be an ideal for humankind, which is human by fate, being human has to be the way I as a living thing obeying through freedom the path of living things, am human. And I don't even need to take care of my soul, it will fatefully take care of me, and I don't need to make a soul for myself: I just have to choose to live. We are free, and this is Hell. But there are so many cockroaches that it seems like a prayer."
My kingdom is of this world . . . my kingdom was not merely human. I knew. But knowing that would spread death-life, and a child in my womb would be threatened with being eaten by that very death-life, and without a Christian word even having meaning . . . But there are so many children in the womb that it seems like a prayer.
At that moment I still had not understood that the first outline of what would be a prayer was already being born from the happy Hell I had gone into and wanted never to leave again.
Never leave that country of rats and tarantulas and cockroaches, my darling, where delight drops in thick drops of blood.
Only God's compassion could pull me away from the terrible, indifferent happiness in which I was bathing, bathing through and through.
For I was exulting. I knew the violence of happy darkness —I was as happy as the Devil, Hell is my maximum.
Hell is my maximum.
I was fully in the harbor of an indifference that is quiet and alert. And in the harbor of an indifferent love, of an indifferent waking sleep, of an indifferent pain. Of a God whom, if I loved, I did not understand what He wanted of me. I know, He wanted me to be His equal, and for me to equal Him through a love I was not capable of.
Through a love so great that it would be love by a person so indifferent . . . as if I were not a human person. He wanted me to be the world with Him. He wanted my human divinity, and that had to start with an initial despoliation of the constructed human being.
And I had taken the first step: for at least I now knew that being human is a sensitizing, an orgasm of nature. And that it is only through an anomaly of nature that, instead of our being God like other beings are, instead of our being Him, we wanted to see Him. It wouldn't be bad to see Him if we were as large as He is. A cockroach is larger than I am because its life is so given over to Him that it comes from the infinite and moves toward the infinite unperceivingly, it never becomes discontinuous.
I had taken the first huge step. But what had happened to me?
I had fallen into the temptation of seeing, into the temptation of knowing and feeling. My grandeur, in search of God's grandeur, had taken me to the grandeur of Hell. I had not been able to understand His organization except through the spasm of a demonic exultation. Curiosity had expelled me from snugness—and I found the indifferent God who is all good because He is neither bad nor good, I was in the harbor of a matter that is the indifferent explosion of itself. Life had the force of a titanic indifference. A titanic indifference that is interested in moving. And I, who wanted to move along with it, I had remained caught by the pleasure that made me merely Hellish.
The temptation of pleasure. The temptation is to partake directly of the source. The temptation is to partake directly of the law. And the punishment is to want never to stop eating, and to eat oneself, for I am likewise edible matter. And I would seek condemnation like a joy. I would seek the most orgiastic part of myself. I would never rest again. I had stolen the hunting horse from a king of joy. I was now worse than my very self!
I would never rest again: I had stolen the hunting horse from the Sabbath king. If I drowse for an instant, the echo of a whinny awakens me. It is useless not to go. In the darkness of night, taking in a deep draught of air gives me the shivers. I pretend to sleep, but in the silence the horse breathes. It says nothing, but it breathes, it waits and breathes. Every day it will be the same thing: right at nightfall I begin to turn melancholy and pensive. I know that the first drum on the mountain will make the night; I know that the third will have already incorporated me in its thunder.
Tired from what? What have we done who ride in the Hell of joy? I have not gone out for two centuries. The last time I came down from the enchanted saddle, my human sadness was so great that I swore never to again. The ride, however, continues on in me. I converse, I clean the house, I smile, but I know that the ride is within me. I feel lack, like one who is dying. I can no longer keep from going out.
And I know that at night, when it calls me, I shall go out. I want the horse to lead my thoughts once again. It was from it that I learned. If this hour amid barking is thought. The dogs bark, I begin to grow sad because I know, with my eye now gleaming, that I shall go. When at night it calls me to Hell, I shall go. I go down like a cat upon the roofs. No one knows, no one sees. I offer myself up in the darkness, mute and splendorous. Fifty-three flutes run after us. A clarinet lights our way in front. And nothing more is given me to know.
At dawn I shall see us exhausted near the stream, without knowing what crimes we have committed before the dawn's arrival. In my mouth and on its feet the mark of blood. What have we burned? At dawn I shall be afoot beside the silent horse, with the first bells of a Church running down the stream, with the rest of the flutes still running from my hair.