Anathemas and Admirations (43 page)

At the source of the least thought appears a slight disequilibrium. What then are we to say about the kind from which thought itself proceeds?

If in “primitive” societies the old are disposed of a little too readily, in “civilized” ones, on the other hand, they are flattered and overfed. The future, no doubt about it, will retain only the first model

Though you abandon all religious or political faith, you will preserve the tenacity and the intolerance that impelled you to adopt it. You will still be in a rage, but your rage will be directed
against
the abandoned belief; fanaticism, linked to your very essence, will persist there independent of the convictions you can defend or reject. The basis, your basis, remains the same, and it is not by changing opinions that you will manage to modify it.

The Zohar puts us in a quandary: if it is telling the truth, the poor man presents himself before God with only his soul, while the others have nothing to offer but their bodies. Given the impossibility of making a choice, best to keep on waiting.

Do not confuse talent and verve. Most often verve will characterize the charlatan. From another point of view, without it, how give any spice to our truths, to our errors?

Not a moment when I am not incredulous at finding myself in just that moment.

Out of dozens of our dreams, only one has any meaning, and even then! The rest — discards, simplistic or vomitive literature, imagery of sickly genius. The dreams that are long-drawn-out testify to the indigence of the “dreamer,” who cannot see how to conclude and struggles unsuccessfully to find a
dénouement
, just as in the theater the playwright multiplies peripeties, not knowing how and where to stop.

My problems — or rather, my pains — follow a policy that is beyond me. Sometimes they are concerted and advance together, sometimes each goes its own way, very often they oppose each other, but whether they agree or dispute, they behave as if their maneuvers had nothing to do with me, as if I were merely their flabbergasted spectator.

Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been.

To dream of an enterprise of demolition that would spare none of the traces of the original Big Bang.

8

Saint-John Perse

B
UT WHAT IS THIS, oh! What is it, in each thing, that suddenly falls short?” No sooner is the question asked than the poet, dismayed by the evident sources from which it rises (as though from the abyss to which it leads), turns against it and wages — in order to compromise it, to destroy its insidious authority — a battle whose details and vicissitudes we do not know, as we do not know what secrets this abstract confidence conceals: “There is no history save of the soul.” Reluctant to divulge his history, he condemns us to guess or to construct it, hides behind the very avowals to which he assents, and does not intend us to touch the “pure keys” of his exile. Impenetrable out of a certain modesty, anything but inclined to the abdications of limpidity, the compromises of transparency, he has multiplied his masks, and if he has enlarged himself beyond the immediate and the finite, past that intelligibility which is limit and acquiescence to limit, it is not in order to espouse the Vague, poetic prelude to vacuity, but to “haunt Being,” his sole means of escaping the terror of insolvency, the flashing perception of what, in each thing, “falls short.” Rarely given, almost always conquered, Being well deserves the honor of a capital letter; in this case the conquest is so brilliant that it seems to emanate from a revelation rather than from a process or a struggle — whence the frequent surprises, the sensation of the instantaneous. “And suddenly everything is power and presence for me, there where the theme of nothingness is smoking still”; “The sea itself, like a sudden ovation . . .” Aside from the abyssal interrogation quoted above, emphasis is laid on the sudden, on the unforeseen, so as to mark the emergence and the sovereignty of the positive, the transfiguration of the inanimate, victory over the void.

To have celebrated Exile, to have replaced the
I
as much as possible by
the Stranger
, yet to come to terms with the world, to find anchorage there, to become its spokesman — such is the paradox of a continually triumphant lyricism in which each word inclines toward the thing it translates, so as to bring it level with an apparently undeserved order, so as to hoist it up to the- miracle of a never-vanquished Yes and to enfold it in a hymn to diversity, to the iridescent image of the One, An erudite and virgin lyricism, concerted and original, produced from a knowledge of life-fluids, from a learned intoxication with the elements, pre-Socratic and antibiblical, a lyricism that calls sacred everything capable of bearing a name, everything over which language — that true savior — can have a hold. To justify things is to baptize them, is to wrest them from their darkness, their anonymity; insofar as he succeeds, he will love them all, even that “golgotha of ordure and rust,” the modern city. (The recourse — however ironic — to Christian terminology has a strange effect in a fundamentally pagan work.)