The Book of Disquiet (64 page)

Heralds, sound your horns! Attention!

Your love for things dreamed was your contempt for things lived.

Virgin King who disdained love,

Shadow King who despised light,

Dream King who denied life!

Amid the muffled racket of cymbals and drums, Darkness acclaims you Emperor!

I
MPERIAL
L
EGEND

My Imagination is a city in the Orient. The entire substance of its spatial reality has the surface sensuality of a plush and luxurious rug. The tents and stalls that brightly colour the streets stand out against a strange background that doesn’t match, like red or yellow embroidery on light-blue satin. The entire history of this city circles around the light bulb of my dream like a scarcely audible moth in the penumbra of my room. My fantasy once lived amid splendours and received time-tarnished jewels from the hands of queens. Intimate velvets carpeted the beaches of my non-existence, and seaweeds like shadowy puffs floated in plain view on my rivers. And so I was porticos from lost civilizations, feverish arabesques in dead friezes, the blackening of eternity in the twists of broken columns, lonely masts of remote shipwrecks, the stone steps of toppled thrones, veils veiling nothing but seeming to veil shadows, phantoms risen up from the ground like smoke from dashed censers. My reign was gloomy, and constant wars in the border regions tainted the imperial peace of my palace. Always the vague sound of parties in the distance, always a procession that
was supposed to pass beneath my windows, but no golden red fish in my pools, and no apples in the green stillness of my orchard; and not even the smoke from beyond the trees, rising from the chimneys of poor huts with happy people, ever lulled to sleep with their ballads of simplicity the restless mystery* of my self-awareness.*

I
N THE
F
OREST OF
E
STRANGEMENT

I know I have woken up and still sleep. My ancient body, exhausted from living, tells me it is still very early… I feel distantly feverish. I weigh on myself, without knowing why…

Half awake and half asleep, I stagnate in a lucid, heavily immaterial torpor, in a dream that is a shadow of dreaming. My attention floats between two worlds, blindly seeing the depths of an ocean and the depths of a sky; and these depths blend, they interpenetrate, and I don’t know where I am or what I’m dreaming.

A gust of shadows blows ashes of dead intentions over the part of me that’s awake. A warm dew of tedium falls from an unknown firmament. An enormous, inert anxiety sifts through my soul and unwittingly changes me, as the breeze changes the line formed by the tops of the trees.

In my warm, languid alcove, the imminent dawn is just a shadowy glow. I’m overwhelmed by a quiet confusion… Why must a new day break?… It weighs on me to know it will break, as if I had to do something to make it happen.

Slowly, as if in a daze, I grow calm, then numb. I hover in the air, neither awake nor asleep, and find myself engulfed by another sort of reality, appearing from I don’t know where…

This new reality – that of a strange forest – makes its appearance without effacing the reality of my warm alcove. The two realities coexist in my captivated attention, like two mingled vapours.

And that tremulous, transparent landscape clearly belongs to them both!…

And who is this woman who joins me in clothing, with her gaze, that forest of otherness? Why do I stop to ask myself?… I don’t even know how to want to know…

The hazy alcove is a dark glass through which I consciously view
that landscape… And I’ve known that landscape for a long time, and for a long time I’ve walked with this woman I don’t know, wandering as a different reality through her unreality. I can feel, deep down, all the centuries through which I’ve known those trees, those flowers and those straying paths, as well as the me that wanders there, ancient and visible to my gaze – a gaze that’s shadowed by my awareness of being in this alcove.

Sometimes in that forest, where from afar I see and feel myself, a light breeze spreads a mist, and that mist is the dark, clear vision of the alcove where I exist in reality, among these hazy pieces of furniture and drapes and nocturnal torpor. Then the breeze subsides and the landscape of that other world returns to being completely and exclusively itself…

At other times this small room is but an ashen whiff of fog on the horizon of that so different land… And there are times when this tangible alcove is the ground we tread in that other land…

I dream and lose myself, doubly so, in me and the woman… I’m consumed by the black fire of an overwhelming fatigue… I’m constricted by the false life of an enormous, passive yearning…

O tarnished happiness!… Eternal hesitation at the crossroads!… I dream, and behind my consciousness someone is dreaming with me… And perhaps I’m no more than a dream of that Someone who doesn’t exist…

The dawn outside is so far away! and the forest so near to those other eyes of mine!

When I’m far from the forest, I almost forget it, but when I have it I feel nostalgia for it, and roaming through it makes me weep and yearn for it…

The trees! the flowers! the paths hidden among the brush!…

We sometimes strolled arm in arm under the cedars and redbuds, and neither of us thought about living. Our flesh was a wispy fragrance and our life the echo of a trickling fountain. We held hands and our gazes wondered what it would be like to be sensual and to try to live out the illusion of love in the flesh…

Our garden had flowers endowed with every kind of beauty: roses with ruffled edges, yellowish-white lilies, poppies that would remain hidden if their deep red didn’t betray them, violets towards the verdant
borders of the flower beds, delicate forget-me-nots, camellias with no scent… And above the tall grasses, the startled eyes of solitary sunflowers stared at us intently.

Our souls, which were pure vision, stroked the visible coolness of the mosses, and passing by the palm trees we vaguely intuited other lands… And tears welled up at the thought, for not even here were we happy when happy…

Oak trees full of knotty centuries made our feet trip over the dead tentacles of their roots… The plane trees stood perfectly still… And through the nearby trees we could see, in the distance, blackish clusters of grapes hanging in the silence of trellised vines…

Our dream of living went ahead of us, on wings, and we both smiled at it with the same detached smile, agreed upon in our souls without looking at each other, unaware of each other except for the felt presence of one person’s arm supporting the other’s.

Our life had no inner dimension. We were outer and other. We no longer knew ourselves. It was as if we had arrived back at our souls after a journey through dreams…

We had forgotten time, and the immensity of space had become tiny in our eyes. Besides the nearby trees and the distant grape vines and the last hills on the horizon, was there anything real, anything worthy of the rapt attention paid to things that exist?…

In the clepsydra of our imperfection, steady drops of dreaming marked the unreal hours… Nothing is worth our while, O my faraway love, except to know how sweet it is to know that nothing is worth our while…

The static motion of the trees; the troubled quiet of the fountains; the indefinable breathing of the saps’ deep pulsing; the slow arrival of dusk, which seems not to fall over things but to come from inside them and to reach its spiritually kindred hand up to that distant sorrow (so close to our soul) of the heavens’ lofty silence; the steady and futile falling of leaves, drops of estrangement in which the landscape comes to exist only in our hearing, and it becomes sad in us like a remembered homeland – all of this girded us uncertainly, like a belt coming undone.

There we lived in a time that couldn’t possibly flow, in a space one could never even dream of measuring. A flowing that occurred outside of Time, an expanse that didn’t respect the norms of spatial reality…
All those hours we spent there, O useless soulmate of my tedium! All those hours of joyful disquiet that pretended to be ours!… All those hours of spiritual ashes, days of spatial nostalgia, inner centuries of outer landscape… And we didn’t ask what it was all for, because we revelled in knowing that it was for nothing.

There we knew, by an intuition that was surely not ours, that this sorrowful world in which we were two was situated – if it existed – beyond the farthest line where the mountains were only hazy shapes, and we knew that beyond that line there was nothing. And it was this contradiction that made the time we spent there dark like a cave in a superstitious country, and our awareness of the contradiction was eerie, like the silhouette of a Moorish city against an autumn sky at twilight…

On the horizon of our hearing, unknown seas lapped beaches we would never be able to see, and it was a joy to hear – and to see in ourselves – that sea on which caravels no doubt sailed, and for other ends besides the useful ones that reign on Earth.

We suddenly realized, as when someone realizes he’s alive, that the air was full of birdsong and that we were imbued by the loud rustle of leaves – like satin by an ancient perfume – even more than by our consciousness of hearing it.

And so the warbling of the birds, the whispering of the trees and the monotonous, forgotten depths of the eternal sea circled our abandoned life with a halo of no longer knowing that life. There we slept away waking days, glad of being nothing, of having no desires or hopes, of having forgotten the colour of loves and the taste of hatreds. We thought we were immortal…

There we lived hours that we felt in a new way, hours of an empty imperfection that were therefore perfect, perfectly diagonal to life’s rectangular certainty… Deposed imperial hours, hours clad in fraying purple robes, hours fallen into this world from another world, one that boasts of having more dismantled anxieties…

And to enjoy all of that was painful, truly painful… For in spite of the peaceful exile it afforded us, the landscape smacked of our belonging to this world, it was steeped in the pomp of a vague tedium, sad and vast and perverse like the decadence of some unknown empire…

In the curtains of our alcove the morning is a shadow of light. My
lips, which I know are pale, taste to each other like they don’t wish to live.

The air of our neutral room is as heavy as a drape across a doorway. Our drowsy attention to the mystery of all this is limp like the train of a robe dragged across the ground during a ceremony at twilight.

None of our yearnings has any reason to exist. Our attentive gaze is an absurdity allowed by our winged inertia.

I don’t know what penumbral oils anoint the idea we have of our body. The fatigue we feel is the shadow of a fatigue. It comes from far away, like the idea that our life exists…

Neither of us has a plausible existence or name. If we could be noisy to the point of imagining ourselves laughing, we would doubtless laugh at our belief that we live. The warmed-up coolness of the bed sheet caresses (surely for you as well as for me) our two feet that nakedly touch each other.

Let us stop being deluded about life and its ways. Let us flee, my love, from being ourselves… Let us never remove from our finger the magic ring that summons, when turned, the fairies of silence and the elves of darkness and the gnomes of oblivion…

And just as we were thinking of mentioning the forest, it looms once more before us, as dense as ever but now more anguished with our anguish, and sadder with our sadness. Our idea of the real world flees in its presence like a dissipating fog, and once more I possess myself in my wandering dream, set in that mysterious forest…

The flowers, ah, the flowers I lived there! Flowers that our eyes recognized and translated into their names… Flowers whose fragrance was gathered by our soul – gathered not from the flowers but from the melody of their names… Flowers whose names, repeated in sequence, were orchestras of resonant perfumes… Trees whose green sensuality gave cool shade to their names… Fruits whose names were a sinking of teeth into the soul of their pulp… Shadows that were relics of happy yesteryears… Clearings, bright clearings, that were broad smiles of the landscape, and after each smile it yawned… O multicoloured hours!… Moments like flowers, minutes like trees, O time frozen in space, time dead from space and covered by flowers, by the fragrance of flowers, and by the fragrance of the names of flowers!…

Dreamed madness in that estranging silence!…

Our life was all of life… Our love was love’s perfume… We lived impossible hours, full of being ourselves… And all because we knew, with every scrap of our flesh, that we were not a reality…

We were impersonal, devoid of self, something else altogether… We were that landscape dissipated in its self-awareness… And just as it was two landscapes, in the reality it was and in its illusion, so we were obscurely two, neither of us knowing for sure if we weren’t actually the other, or if the uncertain other even lived…

When suddenly we came out to the stagnation of the ponds, we felt like weeping… There the landscape had eyes brimming with water, eyes perfectly still, full of the endless tedium of being, full of the tedium of having to be something, reality or illusion – and that tedium had its homeland and its voice in the speechless exile of those ponds… And although we kept walking, without realizing it or wanting to, it seemed we still lingered at the edge of those ponds, so much of us staying and abiding there with them, symbolized and absorbed…

And what a fresh and happy horror that there was nobody there! Not even we, who walked there, were there… For we were nobody. We were nothing at all… We had no life for Death to have to kill. We were so tenuous and slight that the wind’s passing left us prostrate, and time’s passage caressed us like a breeze grazing the top of a palm.

We belonged to no age and had no purpose. For us the ultimate purpose of all beings and things had remained at the door of that paradise of absence. The souls all around us, so as to feel us feel them, had become perfectly still: from the woody soul of branches to the reaching soul of their leaves, from the nubile soul of flowers to the dangling soul of fruits…