I don’t understand what I saw. And I don’t even know if I saw it, since my eyes can’t differentiate themselves from the things they see. Only an unexpected tremor of lines, only an anomaly in the uninterrupted continuity of my civilization, made me experience for an instant vitalizing death. The fine death that let me brush up against the forbidden fabric of life. It’s forbidden to say the name of life. And I almost said it. I almost couldn’t untangle myself from its fabric, which would be the destruction of my age within me.
Perhaps what happened to me was an understanding — and for me to be true, I have to keep on being unable to grasp it, keep on not understanding it. All sudden understanding closely resembles an acute incomprehension.
No. All sudden understanding is finally the revelation of an acute incomprehension. Each moment of finding is a getting lost. Maybe what happened to me was an understanding as complete as an ignorance, and from it I shall emerge as untouched and innocent as before. No understanding of mine will ever reach that knowledge, since living is the only height within my grasp — I am only on the level of life. Except now, now I know a secret. Which I am already forgetting, ah I feel that I am already forgetting. . . .
To learn it again, I would now have to re-die. And knowing might be the murder of my human soul. And I don’t want that, I don’t. Handing myself over to a new ignorance could save me, possibly. Since as I struggle to know, my new ignorance, which is forgetting, became sacred. I’m the vestal priestess of a secret I have forgotten. And I serve the forgotten danger. I found out something I could not understand, my lips were sealed, and all I’ve got are the incomprehensible fragments of a ritual. Yet for the first time I feel that my forgetting is finally on a level with the world. Ah, and I don’t even want anything explained to me that in order to be explained would have to be removed from itself. I don’t want anything explained to me that once again needs human validation to be interpreted.
Life and death were mine, and I was monstrous. I was courageous like a sleepwalker who simply goes. During the hours of perdition I had the courage not to compose or organize. And above all not to look ahead. I’d never before had the courage to let myself be guided by the unknown and toward the unknown: my expectations preconditioned what I would see. They weren’t previsions of a vision: they were already the size of my concerns. My expectations closed the world to me.
Until for several hours I gave up. And, my God, I got what I didn’t want. I didn’t wander through a river valley — I had always thought that finding would be fertile and moist as a river valley. I didn’t realize it was the great un-finding.
To continue being human will my sacrifice be forgetting? Now I’ll know how to recognize in the common faces of a few people that — that they forgot. And no longer know that they forgot what they forgot.
I saw. I know I saw because I didn’t give my meaning to what I saw. I know I saw — because I don’t understand. I know I saw — because there’s no point to what I saw. Listen, I’m going to have to speak because I don’t know what to do with having lived. Even worse: I don’t want what I saw. What I saw smashes my daily life. Sorry for giving you this, I’d much rather have seen something better. Take what I saw, deliver me from my useless vision, and from my useless sin.
I am so afraid that I can only accept that I got lost if I imagine that someone is holding my hand.
Holding someone’s hand was always my idea of joy. Often before falling asleep — in that small struggle not to lose consciousness and enter the greater world — often, before having the courage to go toward the greatness of sleep, I pretend that someone is holding my hand and I go, go toward the enormous absence of form that is sleep. And when even then I can’t find the courage, then I dream.
Going to sleep so closely resembles the way I now must go toward my freedom. Handing myself over to what I don’t understand would be placing myself at the edge of the nothing. It will be just going, and like a blind woman lost in a field. That supernatural thing which is life. Life that I had tamed to make it familiar. That brave thing that will be handing myself over, and which is like grasping the haunted hand of the God, and entering that formless thing that is a paradise. A paradise that I don’t want!
While writing and speaking I will have to pretend that someone is holding my hand.
Oh, at least at the beginning, just at the beginning. As soon as I can let go, I will go alone. In the meantime I must hold this hand of yours — though I can’t invent your face and your eyes and your mouth. Yet even amputated, that hand doesn’t scare me. Its invention comes from such an idea of love as if the hand really were attached to a body that I don’t see only because I can’t love enough. I cannot imagine a whole person because I am not a whole person. And how can I imagine a face without knowing what expression I need? As soon as I can release your warm hand, I’ll go alone and with horror. The horror will be my responsibility until the metamorphosis is complete and the horror becomes light. Not the light born of a desire for beauty and moralism, as before without realizing I intended; but the natural light of whatever exists, and it is that natural light that terrorizes me. Though I know that the horror — I am the horror in the face of things.
For now I am inventing your presence, just as one day I won’t know how to risk dying alone, dying is the greatest risk of all, I won’t know how to enter death and take the first step into the first absence of me — just as in this last and so primary hour I shall invent your unknown presence and with you shall begin to die until I learn all by myself not to exist, and then I shall let you go. For now I cling to you, and your unknown and warm life is my only intimate organization, I who without your hand would feel set loose into the enormous vastness I discovered. Into the vastness of the truth?
But the truth never made sense to me. The truth doesn’t make sense! That is why I feared it and fear it. Helpless, I give you everything—so you can make a joyous thing of it. Will speaking to you scare you and make me lose you? but if I don’t speak I’ll be lost, and in losing myself lose you.
The truth doesn’t make sense, the greatness of the world restricts me. What I probably asked for and finally got, left me needy as a child wandering the earth alone. So needy that only the love of the entire universe for me could console me and overwhelm me, only a love that trembled the very egg-cell of things with what I am calling a love. With what I can really only call but without knowing its name.
Could what I saw have been love? But what love is as blind as that of an egg-cell? was that it? that horror, was that love? a love so neutral that — no, I still don’t want to speak to myself, speaking now would hasten a meaning like someone swiftly freezing into the paralyzing security of a third leg. Or am I just putting off starting to speak? why don’t I just say nothing and simply buy some time? Out of fear. I need courage to venture making something concrete out of my feeling. It’s like having a coin and not knowing in which country it is legal tender.
I shall need courage to do what I’m about to do: speak. And risk the enormous surprise I shall feel at the poverty of the spoken thing. As soon as it’s out of my mouth, I’ll have to add: that’s not it, that’s not it! But I cannot be afraid of being ridiculous, I always preferred less to more also out of fear of the ridiculous: because there’s also the shattering of modesty. I’m putting off having to speak to myself. Out of fear?
And because I don’t have a word to say.
I don’t have a word to say. So why don’t I shut up? But if I do not force out the word muteness will swallow me forever in waves. Word and form will be the board upon which I float atop billows of muteness.
And if I’m putting off the beginning it’s also because I don’t have a guide. The account of other travelers offers me few facts about the voyage: all the information is terribly incomplete.
I feel a first freedom seizing me little by little. . . . Since until today I never had so little fear of lacking good taste: I wrote “billows of muteness,” which I never would have said before because I’ve always respected beauty and its intrinsic moderation. I said “billows of muteness,” my heart bows humbly, and I accept it. Have I finally lost a whole system of good taste? But is that all I’ve gained? I must have lived so imprisoned to feel freer now just because I no longer fear the lack of aesthetics. . . . I still can’t tell what else I gained. Slowly, perhaps, I’ll figure it out. For now the first timid pleasure I am having is realizing I lost my fear of ugliness. And that loss is such goodness. It is a sweetness.
I want to know what else, in losing, I gained. I don’t know yet: only by reliving myself shall I live.
But how to relive myself? If I don’t have a natural word to say. Will I have to make the word as if creating whatever happened to me?
I shall create whatever happened to me. Only because life cannot be retold. Life is not livable. I shall have to create atop life. And without lying. Create yes, lie no. Creating isn’t imagination, it’s taking the great risk of grasping reality. Understanding is a creation, my only way. I’ll have to make the effort to translate telegraph signals — to translate the unknown into a language I don’t speak, and without even understanding what the signals mean. I shall speak that sleepwalker’s language that would not be a language if I were awake.
Until I create the truth of what happened to me. Ah, it will be more like scratching than writing, since I’m attempting a reproduction more than an expression. I need to express myself less and less. Is that something else I lost? No, even when making sculptures I was already trying only to reproduce, and only with my hands.
Will I get lost amidst the muteness of the signs? I will, because I know how I am: I could never see without immediately having to do more than see. I know I’ll be horrified like a blind person who finally opened her eyes to see — but see what? a mute and incomprehensible triangle. Could that person consider herself no longer blind just because she could see an incomprehensible triangle?
I wonder: if I peer at the darkness with a magnifying glass, will I see more than darkness? the glass doesn’t expose the darkness, it only reveals more of it. And if I look at light with a magnifying glass, with a shock I will only see more light. I saw but am as blind as before because I saw an incomprehensible triangle. Unless I too transform myself into the triangle that will recognize in the incomprehensible triangle my own source and repetition.
I’m putting it off. I know that everything I’m saying is just to put it off — to put off the moment when I will have to start to speak, knowing I’ve got nothing left to say. I’m putting off my silence. Have I done that my entire life? but now, out of disdain for the word, perhaps at last I can begin to speak.
The telegraph signals. The world bristling with antennas, and I picking up the signal. I can only make the phonetic transcription. Three thousand years ago I went astray, and what was left were phonetic fragments of me. I’m blinder than before. I saw, I did. I saw, and was frightened by the brute truth of a world whose greatest horror is that it is so alive that, in admitting I’m as alive as it is — and my worst discovery is that I’m as alive as it is — I shall have to heighten my consciousness of exterior life until it becomes a crime against my personal life.
For my previous profound morality — my morality was the desire to understand and, since I didn’t, I arranged things, this was only yesterday and now I’ve discovered that I was always profoundly moral: I only admitted the purpose — for my previous profound morality, having discovered that I’m as crudely alive as that crude light I learned yesterday, for that morality of mine, the hard glory of being alive is the horror. Before I lived in the humanized world, but did something purely alive collapse the morality I had?
Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell.
Because a world fully alive has the power of a Hell.
Yesterday morning — when I left the living room to enter the maid’s room — nothing led me to suspect that I was a step away from discovering an empire. Just a step from me. My most primary struggle for the most primary life would open with the calm, devouring ferocity of desert animals. I would encounter inside myself a degree of life so primal in myself that it was nearly inanimate. Yet no gesture of mine hinted that I, with my lips dry from thirst, would come to exist.
Only afterward did an old sentence occur to me, one that years before had been unwittingly engraved upon my memory, no more than the subtitle of a magazine article I ended up not reading: “Lost in the Fiery Hell of a Canyon a Woman Struggles Desperately for Life.” Nothing led me to guess where I was going. But then I was never one to recognize events as they were unfolding; every time they came to a head, they surprised me like a break, explosion of instants, with a date, and not the continuation of an uninterruption.
That morning, before entering the maid’s room, what was I? I was what others had always seen me be, and that was how I knew myself. I don’t know how to say what I was. But at least I want to remember: what was I doing?
It was almost ten in the morning, and for a long time my apartment hadn’t much belonged to me. The maid had quit the day before. The fact that nobody was talking or walking and making things happen expanded in silence that house where in semi-luxury I live. I lingered at the breakfast table — how difficult it’s being to know what I was like. Yet I must try to at least give myself a prior form in order to understand what happened when I lost that form.