Night is my life, it grows late, the happy night is my sad life—steal, steal the horse from me because from theft to theft I have stolen even the dawn and made it a foreboding: quickly steal the horse while it's time, while it's not too late, if there is in fact still time, for to steal the horse I had to kill the king and in killing him I have stolen the king's death. And the happiness of the murder consumes me with pleasure.
I was consuming myself, for I too am living matter of the Sabbath.
I was consuming myself, for I too am living matter of the Sabbath.
Could this not be the temptation that the saints went through, albeit much greater? And from which he who would be a saint or not, emerges sanctified or not. Of this temptation on the desert, I, dilettante, unholy, would succumb, or I would emerge from it as for the first time a living being.
"Listen, there exists something that is called human sanctity, and which is not the saints' sanctity. I fear that not even God comprehends that human sanctity is more perilous than divine sanctity, that the sanctity of the dilettante is more painful. Even Christ himself may have known that if they were to do to him what they did, they would do much more to us, for he had said: If they have done this to the green bough, what will they do with the dry ones?' "
Proof. Now I understand what proof is. Proof: it means that life is testing me. But proof: it means that I too am proving. And proving can be transformed into an ever more insatiable thirst.
Wait for me: I am going to get you out of the Hell into which I have descended. Listen, listen:
For from my delight without remission there was now being born in me a sobbing that seemed to be one of happiness. They were not sobs of pain, I had never heard them before: they were the sobs of my life dividing to procreate me. On those desert sands I was beginning to be delicate like a first, timid offering, the offering of a flower. What did I offer? what could I offer of myself—I who was the desert, I who had sought and held it?
I offered a sob. I was finally crying within my Hell. The very wings of blackness I use and sweat, and I used and sweated them for myself, for me—for me are You, you, splendor of silence. I am not You; me are You. For that reason alone will I be able to sense You directly: because You are me.
Oh, God, I was beginning to understand with enormous surprise: my Hellish orgy was human martyrdom itself.
How could I have guessed? if I hadn't known that one laughs when suffering. I just didn't know that one could suffer so. It was then that I called my profoundest suffering happiness.
And God came to me in the sob, God now occupied me through. I offered God my Hell. The first sob had made—of my terrible pleasure and of my celebration—a new pain, which was now as light and helpless as the flower of my own desert. The tears that were now running were like those for a love. God, who could never be understood by me except as I understood Him: breaking me like a flower that on birth can barely raise itself and seems to break on its own.
But now that I knew that suffering had been my happiness, I asked myself if I wasn't fleeing toward a God because I couldn't bear my humanity. For I needed someone who would not be as insignificant as I, someone who would be so much greater than I that he could admit my disgrace without even using pity, and consolation—someone who would be, who would be! and not, like myself, an accuser of nature, and not, like myself, someone frightened by the power of my own hates and loves.
At this moment, now, a doubt overtakes me. God, or whatever You are called: I now ask only one bit of help: but it is that you help me, not in the obscure way in which you are me but now openly, in plain sight.
For I need to know precisely this one thing: am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I wanted to feel? or am I feeling what I would need to feel?
Because I no longer want even the concretization of an ideal what I want is to be merely a seed. Even if, after that seed, ideals are born again—be they true ideals, which are births of a path, or false ones, which are mere accretions. Could I be sensing what I would like to sense? For a millimeter's difference is huge, and that millimeter of space can save me in truth or make me again lose everything I have seen. It is perilous. Humankind praises highly what it senses. Which is as perilous as execrating what you sense.
I had offered God my Hell. And my cruelty, love of mine, my cruelty had suddenly stopped. And suddenly that very desert was the still-vague outline of what was called paradise. The moistness of a paradise. Not something else, but rather that very same desert. And I was surprised just as one is surprised by a light that comes out of nowhere.
Did I understand that what I had experienced, that nucleus of Hellish rapacity, was what is called love? But— neutral love?
Neutral love. The neutral was whispering. I was reaching what I had sought after for my whole life: something that is the most ultimate identity and that I had called inexpressive. It was that that had always been in my eyes in the pictures: an inexpressive happiness, a pleasure that does not know that it is pleasure—a pleasure too delicate for my coarse humanity that had always been made of coarse concepts.
"I had made so great an effort to talk to myself of a Hell without words. Now how can I speak of a love that contains only what is felt and before which the word "love" is just a dusty object?"
The Hell I have gone through—how can I explain it to you?—has been the Hell that comes from love. Oh, people attach the idea of sin to sex. But how innocent and infantile a sin that is. The real Hell is the Hell of love. Love is the experiencing of a greater danger in sin—it is the experiencing of the dirt and degradation and the worst of happiness. Sex is the startling of a child. But how can I speak to myself of the love that I now knew?
It's almost impossible. For in the neutrality of love there is a continuous happiness, like a rustling of leaves in the wind. And I fitted within the neutral nakedness of the woman on the wall. The same neutrality, the neutrality that had consumed me in pernicious, avid happiness, it was in that same neutrality that I was now hearing another kind of continuous happiness of love. What God is lay more in the neutral rustling of leaves in the wind than in my old human prayer.
Unless I could make my prayer true and it would seem to others and to me to be the cabala of a black magic, a neutral murmuring.
That murmuring without any human sense would be my identity touching the identity of things. I know that, in relation to the human, that neutral prayer would be a monstrosity. But in relation to him who is God, it would be: being.
I had been forced to go into the desert to find out with horror that the desert is alive, to find out that a cockroach is life. I had gone back until I found out that, in me, the most profound life is before human life—and to do that I had had the diabolical courage to let go of my feelings. I had had to avoid giving human value to life in order to understand the largeness, the much-more-than-human magnitude, of God. Had I asked for the most dangerous and forbidden of things? would I, risking my soul, have daringly demanded to see God?
And now it was as though I was before Him and did not understand—I was uselessly on my feet before Him, and it was once more a nothingness that I was before. For me, as for all of us, everything had been given, but I wanted more: I wanted to know about that everything. And I had sold my soul to know. But I now understood that I had not sold it to the devil but much more dangerously: to God. That He had let me see. For He knew that I wouldn't know how to see whatever I saw: the explanation of an enigma is the mere repetition of the enigma. What are You? and the answer is: You are. What do you exist? and the answer is: what you exist. I had the ability to question but not the ability to hear the answer.
No, I hadn't even been able to formulate the question. Nevertheless, the answer had continually posed itself to me since I was born. It had been because of that insistent answer that, in a reverse path, I had been forced to look for the question to which it corresponded. Then I had lost myself in a labyrinth of questions, and I asked questions at random, hoping that one of them migh
t occasionally correspond to the question for my answer, and then I might be able to understand the answer.
But I was like a person who, having been born blind and having no sighted person at her side, that person couldn't even formulate a question about vision: she couldn't know that seeing existed. But, since vision did truly exist, even if that person didn't know it within herself and had never heard of it, that person would be still, anxious, alert, without being able to ask questions about what she didn't know existed . . . she would miss what should have been hers.
She would miss what should have been hers.
"No. I haven't told you all of it. I still wanted to see if I could escape relying on myself just a little. But my liberation will be realized only if I have the openness of my own lack of understanding."
Because, sitting there on the bed, I then said to myself:
"I have been given everything, and just look at what that everything is! it's a cockroach that is living and is close to death. And then I looked at the door latch. After that, I looked at the wood on the wardrobe. I looked at the window glass. Just look at what that all is: it's pieces of something, a piece of iron, of sand, of glass. I told myself: look what I have struggled for, to have exactly what I had before, I crawled until the doors opened for me, the doors of the treasure-room I was looking for: and look at what that treasure was!
The treasure was a piece of metal, it was a piece of whitewash on a wall, it was a piece of matter made into a cockroach.
In prehistory I had begun my march through the desert, and without a star to guide me, only perdition guiding me, only error guiding me—until, almost dead from the ecstasy of fatigue, lighted by passion, I finally found the strongbox. And in the strongbox, the sparkle of glory, the hidden secret. The most remote secret in the world, opaque, but blinding me with the radiation of its simple existence, sparkling there in a glory that hurt my eyes. Inside the strongbox, the secret:
Pieces of something.
A piece of iron, a cockroach antenna, a chunk of mortar from the wall.
My exhaustion prostrated itself at the feet of the piece of something, in Hellish adoration. The secret of power was power, the secret of love was love—and the jewel of the world is an opaque piece of something.
The opacity reverberated in my eyes. The secret of my millenary trajectory of orgy and death and glory and thirst until I finally found what I always had, and for that I first had to die. Oh, I am being so direct that I am starting to seem symbolic.
A piece of something? the secret of the pharoahs. And because of that secret I had almost given my life . . .
More, much more: to have that secret that I still couldn't understand, I would again give my life. I had risked the world in search of the question that comes after the answer. An answer that remained a secret, even after what question it corresponded to had been revealed. I hadn't found a human answer to the enigma. But much more, oh much more: I had found the enigma itself. Too much had been given me. What could I do with what had been given me? "Let the holy thing not be given to dogs."
And I was not even touching the thing. I was just touching the space that goes from me to the vital core—I was within the cohesive, controlled area of the vital core's resonance. The vital core resonates at the resonance of my approach.
My closest possible approach stops a pace away. What keeps the step forward from being taken? It is the opaque irradiation simultaneously of the thing and of myself. We repel each other through similarity; through similarity we do not enter each other. And if the step were to be taken?
I don't know, I don't know. For the thing can never be really touched. The vital core is a finger pointing to it— and what is pointed to enlivens like a milligram of radium in the tranquil darkness. Then the wet crickets start to be heard. The milligram's light does not change the dark. For the dark is not lightable, the dark is a way of being: the dark is the dark's vital core, and something's vital core is never reached.
For me, will the thing have to be reduced to being just what surrounds the thing's untouchability? My God, give me what you have done. Or have you already given it to me? and am I the one who cannot take the step that will give me what you have done? Am I what you have done? and I can't take the step toward myself, me whom You are, Thing and Yourself. Give me what you are in me. Give me what you are in the others, You are the he, I know, I know because when I touch, I see the he. But the he, man, takes care of what you have given him and wraps himself in a husk made especially for me to touch and see. And I want more than the shell that I also love. I want what I love You.
But beyond the shell I had found only the enigma itself. And I trembled all over for fear of God.
I tremble with fear and adoration for what exists.
What exists and is just a piece of something, still I have to put my hand over my eyes against the opacity of that thing. Oh, the violent amorous unconsciousness of what exists surpasses the possibility of my consciousness. I am afraid of so much matter—matter resonates with attention, resonates with process, resonates with inherent nowness. What exists beats with strong waves against the unbreakable grain that is I, and that grain tumbles among the abysses of tranquil billows of existence, tumbles and does not dissolve, that seed-grain.
What am I the seed of? Seed of thing, seed of existence, seed of those very billows of neutral love. I, a person, am a germ. The germ is merely sensitive—that is its only particular quality. The germ suffers pain. The germ is eager and cunning. My eagerness is my most initial hunger: I am pure because I am eager.
Of the germ that I am, this happy matter, the thing, is also made. Which is an existence satisfied with its own process, profoundly occupied in just its own process, and the process resonates through all of it. That piece of thing inside the strongbox is the casket's secret. And the casket is itself made of the same secret, the strongbox in which the world's jewel is found, it too is made of the same secret.
Oh, and I don't want all of that! I hate what I have come to see. I don't want that world made of thing!
I don't want it. But I can't keep from feeling myself all filled out inside by the poverty of opacity and neutrality: the thing is alive like weeds. And if that is Hell, it is paradise itself: the choice is mine. It is I who shall be demonic or an angel; if I am demonic, this is Hell; if I am an angel, this is paradise. Oh, I shall send my angel on ahead to prepare the path before me. No, not my angel: but my humanity and its compassion.
I sent my angel on ahead to prepare the path before me and to tell the stones that I was coming so they could be softened for my lack of comprehension.
And it was my softest angel that found the piece of thing. It could find only what it was. For even when something falls from the sky it is a meteorite, that is, a piece of thing. My angel allows me to adore a piece of iron or glass.
But it is I who should keep myself from giving the things a name. A name is an accretion, and it inhibits contact with the thing. The name of the thing is an interval for the thing. The will to accretion is great . . . because bare things are so wearing.
Because bare things are so wearing.
Oh, then that was the reason I had always had a sort of love for tedium. And a continual hatred of it.
Because tedium is bland and so resembles the thing. And I had not been big enough: only big people love monotony. Contact with the supersound of the atonal has an inexpressive happiness about it that only the flesh tolerates, in love. Big people have the vital quality of the flesh, and they not only tolerate the atonal but aspire to it.
My old constructs had consisted in continually trying to transform the atonal into tone, in dividing the infinite into a series of finites, and in not comprehending that the finite is not a quantity, it is a quality. And my great discomfort in all of that had been feeling that, no matter how large the set of finites might be, it would not exhaust the residual quality of the infinite.
But tedium—tedium had been the only way I had been able to sense the atonal.
And I hadn't known that I liked tedium only because I suffered from it. But in regard to living, suffering is not the measure of life: suffering is but a fateful subproduct, and, because it is sharper, it is negligible.
Oh, and I should have understood all that before! I who considered the inexpressive to be my secret concern. An inexpressive face fascinated me; the moment that was not climactic attracted me. Nature, what I liked in nature, was its vibrant inexpressiveness.
"Oh, I don't know how to explain it to you, since I am eloquent only when I err, error makes me deliberate and think. But how can I talk to you if there is a silence when I say the right thing? How can I tell you about the inexpressible?"
Even in tragedy, for real tragedy resides in the inexorability of its inexpressiveness, which is its bare identity.
At times—at times we manifest inexpressiveness ourselves—in art that is done, in bodily love too—to manifest the inexpressive is to create. At bottom we are so, so happy! for there is not just one way to enter into contact with life, there are also the negative ways! also the painful ways, even the all-but-impossible ones—and all that, all that before we die, all that even while we are awake! And there is also at times the exasperation of the atonal, which is a profound happiness: exasperated atonality is flight rising—nature is exasperated atonality, thus it was that worlds were formed: atonality became exasperated.
And let us look to the leaves, being heavy and green as they are, they have exasperated into things, for blind are the leaves and green they are. And let us feel in our hands how everything has weight, weight does not escape the inexpressive hand. Let the person who is completely absent not be awakened, whoever is absorbed is feeling the weight of things. One of the proofs of the thing is weight: only something with weight can fly. And the only thing that can fall—celestial meteorite—is something that has weight.
The Passion According to GH Page 11
