— Hold my hand, because I feel that I’m going. I’m going once again toward the most divine primary life, I’m going toward a hell of raw life. Don’t let me see because I’m close to seeing the nucleus of life — and, through the cockroach that even now I’m seeing again, through this specimen of calm living horror, I’m afraid that in this nucleus I’ll no longer know what hope is.
The cockroach is pure seduction. Cilia, blinking cilia that keep calling.
I too, who was slowly reducing myself to whatever in me was irreducible, I too had thousands of blinking cilia, and with my cilia I move forward, I protozoan, pure protein. Hold my hand, I reached the irreducible with the inevitability of a death-knell — I sense that all this is ancient and vast, I sense in the hieroglyph of the slow roach the writing of the Far East. And in this desert of great seductions, the creatures: I and the living roach. Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.
I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.
It was then — it was then that as if from a tube the matter began slowly oozing out of the roach that had been crushed.
The roach’s matter, which was its insides, the thick, whitish and slow matter, was coming out as from a tube of toothpaste.
Before my nauseated and seduced eyes, the shape of the roach began slowly modifying as it swelled outward. The white matter slowly spilled atop its back like a burden. Immobilized, it was bearing atop its dusty flanks the weight of its own body.
“Scream,” I calmly ordered myself. “Scream,” I repeated uselessly with a sigh of deep quietude.
The white thickness had halted atop its scales. I looked at the ceiling, briefly resting the eyes that I felt had become deep and large.
But if I screamed even once, I might never again be able to stop. If I screamed nobody could ever help me again; whereas, if I never revealed my neediness, I wouldn’t scare anybody and they would help me unawares; but only if I didn’t scare anybody by venturing outside the rules. But if they find out, they’ll be scared, we who keep the scream as an inviolable secret. If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being.
I looked at the ceiling with heavy eyes. Everything could be fiercely summed up in never emitting a first scream — a first scream unleashes all the others, the first scream at birth unleashes a life, if I screamed I would awaken thousands of screaming beings who would loose upon the rooftops a chorus of screams and horror. If I screamed I would unleash the existence — the existence of what? the existence of the world. With reverence I feared the existence of the world for me.
— Because, hand that sustains me, because I, in a trial I never want again, in a trial for which I ask pardon for myself, I was exiting my world and entering the world.
Because I was no longer seeing myself, I was simply seeing. A whole civilization that had sprung up, with the guarantee that what one sees be mixed immediately with what one feels, an entire civilization whose foundation is salvation — so I was in its ruins. The only ones who could depart this civilization were those whose special role is to depart it: a scientist is given leave, a priest is given permission. But not a woman who doesn’t even have the guarantees of a title. And I was fleeing, uneasily I was fleeing.
If you knew the solitude of those first steps of mine. It wasn’t like the solitude of a person. It was as if I’d already died and was taking the first steps alone into another life. And it was as if that solitude was called glory, and I too knew it was a glory, and was shivering all over in that divine primal glory that I not only didn’t understand, but deeply didn’t want.
— Because, you see, I knew I was entering the crude and raw glory of nature. Seduced, I was still fighting as best I could against the quicksand that was swallowing me: and each movement I was making toward “no, no!”, each movement pushed me inevitably on; not having the strength to fight was my only forgiveness.
I looked around the room where I’d imprisoned myself, and sought an exit, desperately trying to escape, and inside me I had already shrunk so much that my soul was against the wall — not even able to stop, no longer wanting to stop, fascinated by the certainty of the magnet that was drawing me, I shrank into myself up to the wall where I was implanted in the drawing of the woman. I had shrunk into the marrow of my bones, my last refuge. Where, on the wall, I was so naked that I had no shadow.
And the measurements, the measurements were still the same, I could feel they were, I knew I’d never been more than that woman on the wall, I was she. And I was well preserved, a long and fruitful path.
My tension suddenly snapped like a noise interrupted.
And the first true silence began to whisper. Whatever I’d seen that was so calm and vast and foreign in my dark and smiling photographs — whatever that was was outside for the first time and entirely within my reach, incomprehensible but within my reach.
Which was giving me relief as a thirst is relieved, it was relieving me as if my whole life I’d been waiting for a water as necessary for my bristling body as cocaine is for a body that demands it. Finally the body, soaked with silence, was calming down. The relief came from my fitting into the mute drawing in the cave.
Until that moment I hadn’t wholly perceived my struggle, that’s how buried I was in it. But now, from the silence into which I had finally fallen, I knew I’d struggled, that I had succumbed and surrendered.
And that, now, I really was in the room.
As inside it as a drawing that has been in a cave for three hundred thousand years. And that’s how I fit inside myself, that’s how I inside myself was engraved upon the wall.
The narrow route passed through the difficult cockroach, and I’d squeezed with disgust through that body of scales and mud. And I’d ended up, I too completely filthy, emerging through the cockroach into my past that was my continuous present and my continuous future — and that today and always is on the wall, and my fifteen million daughters, from then up to myself, were there too. My life was as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages, and we call one of them death. I had always been in life, and it matters little that it wasn’t I properly speaking, not what I’d usually call I. I was always in life.
I, neutral cockroach body, I with a life that at last doesn’t escape me because I finally see it outside of myself — I am the roach, I am my leg, I am my hair, I am the section of whitest light on the plaster of the wall — I am every hellish piece of me — life in me is so demanding that if they hacked me up, like a lizard, the pieces would keep trembling and squirming. I am the silence engraved on a wall, and the oldest butterfly flutters and finds me: the same as always. From birth to death is when I call myself human, and shall never actually die.
But that isn’t eternity, it’s damnation.
How luxurious this silence is. It’s built up of centuries. It’s a silence of a roach that’s looking. The world looks at itself in me. Everything looks at everything, everything lives the other; in this desert things know things. Things know things so much that that’s . . . that’s what I’ll call forgiveness, if I want to save myself in the human world. It’s forgiveness itself. Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.
Forgiveness is an attribute of living matter.
—You see, my love, see how out of fear I’m already organizing, see how I still can’t deal with these primary laboratory elements without immediately wanting to organize hope. Because for now the metamorphosis of me into myself makes no sense. It’s a metamorphosis in which I lose everything I had, and what I had was me — I only have what I am. And what am I now? I am: standing in front of a fright. I am: what I saw. I don’t understand and I am afraid to understand, the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and roaches.
I, who used to live on words of charity or pride or anything. But what an abyss between the word and what it was trying to do, what an abyss between the word love and the love that doesn’t even have a human meaning — because — because love is living matter. Is love living matter?
What was it that happened to me yesterday? and now? I’m confused, I crossed deserts and deserts, but did I get stuck by some detail? trapped as beneath a rock.
No, wait, wait: with relief I must remember that I left that room yesterday, I left it, I’m free! and still have a chance to recover. If I want to.
But do I?
What I saw is not organizable. But if I really want to, right now, I could still translate what I found out into terms closer to ours, to human terms, and could still let those hours yesterday pass unnoticed. If I still want to I could, within our language, wonder some other way what happened to me.
And, if I put it that way, I can still find an answer that would let me recover. Recovery would be knowing that: G. H. was a woman who lived well, lived well, lived well, lived on the uppermost layer of the sands of the world, and the sands had never caved in beneath her feet: the coordination was such that, as the sands moved, her feet moved along with them, and so everything stayed firm and compact. G. H. lived on the top floor of a superstructure, and, though built in the air, it was a solid building, she herself in the air, as bees weave life in the air. And that had been happening for centuries, with the necessary or occasional changes, and it worked. It worked — at least nothing spoke and nobody spoke, nobody said no; so it worked.
But, precisely this slow accumulation of centuries automatically piling atop each other was what, without anybody noticing, was making the construction in the air very heavy: it was getting saturated with itself: getting more compact, instead of getting more fragile. The accumulation of living in a superstructure was getting increasingly heavy to stay up in the air.
Like a building in which everyone sleeps calmly at night, unaware that the foundations are sagging and that, in an instant unsuggested by the peacefulness, the beams will give way because their cohesive strength is slowly pulling them apart one millimeter per century. And then, when it’s least expected — in an instant as repetitively common as lifting a drink to a smiling mouth during a dance — then, yesterday, on a day as full of sunlight as the days at the height of summer, with men working and kitchens giving off smoke and a jackhammer shattering stones and children laughing and a priest trying to stop, but stop what? yesterday, without warning, there was the loud sound of something solid that suddenly crumbles.
In the collapse, tons fell upon tons. And when I, G. H. even on my suitcases, I, one of the people, opened my eyes, I was — not atop debris, for even the debris had already been swallowed by the sands — I was on a calm plain, kilometers and kilometers below what had been a great city. Things had gone back to being what they were.
The world had reclaimed its own reality, and, as after a catastrophe, my civilization had ended: I was nothing more than a historical fact. Everything in me had been reclaimed by the beginning of time and by my own beginning. I had moved onto the first foreground, I was in the silence of the winds and in the age of tin and copper — in the first age of life.
— Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.
No, don’t get scared! certainly what had saved me until that moment from the sentimentalized life from which I’d been living, is that the inhuman part is the best part of us, it’s the thing, the thing-part of us. That’s the only reason that, as a false person, I had never before burrowed beneath the sentimental and utilitarian construction: my human feelings were utilitarian, but I hadn’t burrowed under because the thing-part, matter of the God, was too powerful and was waiting to reclaim me. The great neutral punishment of general life is that it can suddenly undermine a single life; if it isn’t given its own power, then it bursts as a dam bursts — and arrives pure, unadulterated: purely neutral. That was the great danger: when that neutral part of things doesn’t sate a personal life, life arrives purely neutral.
But why exactly in me had the first silence suddenly reappeared? As if a calm woman had simply been called and calmly set aside her embroidery on a chair, stood up, and wordlessly — abandoning her life, renouncing embroidery, love and an already-made soul — wordlessly that woman composedly got down on all fours, started to crawl and drag herself along with calm and sparkling eyes: because the earlier life had called her and she went.
But why me? But why not me. If it hadn’t been me, I wouldn’t know, and since it was me, I knew — that’s all. What was it that called me: madness or reality?
Life was taking revenge on me, and its revenge was no more than coming back, nothing more. In every case of madness something came back. The possessed are not possessed by what is coming but by what is coming back. Sometimes life comes back. If everything broke in me as the force passed through, that’s not because its function is to break: it just finally needed to come through since it had already become too copious to be contained or diverted — along its way it buried everything. And afterward, as after a flood, floating upon the waters was a wardrobe, a person, a stray window, three suitcases. And that seemed like hell to me, that destruction of layers and layers of human archeology.