« Qu’est-ce que le cerveau humain, sinon un palimpseste immense et naturel ? Mon cerveau est un palimpseste et le vôtre aussi, lecteur. Des couches innombrables d’idées, d’images, de sentiments sont tombées successivement sur votre cerveau, aussi doucement que la lumière. Il a semblé que chacune ensevelissait la précédente. Mais aucune en réalité n’a péri. »
—Charles Baudelaire, “Le palimpseste”, in Les Paradis artificiels (1860)
« Chez l'homme, la mémoire est moins prisonnière de l'action, je le reconnais, mais elle y adhère encore : nos souvenirs, à un moment donné, forment un tout solidaire, une pyramide, si vous voulez, dont le sommet sans cesse mouvant coïncide avec notre présent et s'enfonce avec lui dans l'avenir. Mais derrière les souvenirs qui viennent se poser ainsi sur notre occupation présente et se révéler au moyen d'elle, il y en a d'autres, des milliers et des milliers d'autres, en bas, au-dessous de la scène illuminée par la conscience. Oui, je crois que notre vie passée est là, conservée jusque dans ses moindres détails, et que nous n'oublions rien, et que tout ce que nous avons perçu, pensé, voulu depuis le premier éveil de notre conscience, persiste indéfiniment. Mais les souvenirs que ma mémoire conserve ainsi dans ses plus obscures profondeurs y sont à l'état de fantômes invisibles. Ils aspirent peut-être à la lumière ; ils n'essaient pourtant pas d'y remonter ; ils savent que c'est impossible, et que moi, être vivant et agissant, j'ai autre chose à faire que de m'occuper d'eux. Mais supposez qu'à un moment donné je me désintéresse de la situation pré- sente, de l'action pressante, enfin de ce qui concentrait sur un seul point toutes les activités de la mémoire. Supposez, en d'autres termes, que je m'endorme. Alors ces souvenirs immobiles, sentant que je viens d'écarter l'obstacle, de soulever la trappe qui les maintenait dans le sous-sol de la conscience, se mettent en mouvement. Ils se lèvent, ils s'agitent, ils exécutent, dans la nuit de l'inconscient, une immense danse macabre. »
—Henri Bergson, "Le rêve", in L'Énergie spirituelle (1919)
« Je crois qu'on entend encore dans les entrées d'immeubles l'écho des pas de ceux qui avaient l'habitude de les traverser et qui, depuis, ont disparu. Quelque chose continue de vibrer après leur passage, des ondes de plus en plus faibles, mais que l'on capte si l'on est attentif. Au fond, je n'avais peut-être jamais été ce Pedro McEvoy, je n'étais rien, mais des ondes me traversaient, tantôt lointaines, tantôt plus fortes et tous ces échos épars qui flottaient dans l'air se cristallisaient et c'était moi. »
—Patrick Modiano, Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978)
« Qu’est-ce que le cerveau humain, sinon un palimpseste
immense et naturel ? Mon cerveau est un palimpseste et le vôtre aussi,
lecteur. Des couches innombrables d’idées, d’images, de sentiments sont tombées
successivement sur votre cerveau, aussi doucement que la lumière. Il a semblé
que chacune ensevelissait la précédente. Mais aucune en réalité n’a
péri. »
"Once upon a time, somewhere miles and miles beneath the surface of the ocean, there lived a young octopus named Nina. Nina spent most of her time alone, making strange creations out of rocks and shells. She was very happy. But then on Monday, the shark showed up.
'What's your name?' said the shark.
'Nina,' she replied.
'Do you want to be my friend?' he asked.
'Ok. What do I have to do?' said Nina.
'Not much,' said the shark. 'Just . . . let me eat one of your arms.'
Nina had never had a friend before, so she wondered if this is what you had to do to get one. She looked down at her eight arms and decided: it wouldn't be so bad to give up one. So, she donated an arm to her wonderful new friend.
Every day that week, Nina and the shark would play together. They explored caves, built castles of sand, and swam really really fast. And every night the shark would be hungry, and Nina would give him another one of her arms to eat. On Sunday, after playing all day, the shark told Nina that he was very hungry.
'I don't understand,' she said. 'I've already given you six of my arms and now you want one more?'
The shark looked at her with a friendly smile and said, 'I don't want one. This time I want them all.'
'But why?' Nina asked.
And the shark replied, 'Because that's what friends are for.'
When the shark finished his meal, he felt very sad and lonely. He missed having someone to explore caves, build castles, and swim really really very fast with. He missed Nina very much. So he swam away to find another friend."
"We are partisans in the persistent and hopeless fight for human dignity."
—Béla Tarr and László Krasznahorkai, Sátántangó (1994)
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Céline going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town the impossibility of being human Burroughs killing his wife with a gun Mailer stabbing his the impossibility of being human Maupassant going mad in a rowboat Dostoevsky lined up against a wall to be shot Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller the impossibility Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops the impossibility Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench Chatterton drinking rat poison Shakespeare a plagiarist Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness the impossibility the impossibility Nietzsche gone totally mad the impossibility of being human all too human this breathing in and out out and in these punks these cowards these champions these mad dogs of glory moving this little bit of light toward us impossibly.
—Charles Bukowski, "beasts bounding through time—" in You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986), p. 21-22.
« Il se sent humilié d'un abandon et d'un isolement si nouveau pour lui au milieu de son entière liberté. Enfin après des longues hésitations, on le voit de son propre mouvement venir se mêler à la société des autres malades; dès ce jour, il revient à des idées plus sensées et plus justes. »
—Scipion Pinel, Traité complet du régime sanitaire des aliénés (1837)
Dear C.,
Every night before I fall asleep, I'd start imagining things. Perhaps "things" is not quite an accurate word — a "scene" would be closer to the reality. Yes, a scene: always the same one, hopelessly and irredeemably repeated without the slightest possibility of alternatives. And this is how it usually proceeds: first I lie motionless on my bed and, facing upwards, stare fixedly at the blank ceiling of my own room. Then, once my eyes were finally closed under fatigue, the originally indefinite mass of darkness that surrounds me (or surrounds my pupils at any rate) would suddenly (mysteriously) gain a momentum of its own — or so it seems to me, which is why I opted for the word "imagine" in the first place — and start swelling upwards across the (now) invisible ceiling in a way that it forms a gigantic black cylinder continuously in movement, as if somewhere up there (in heaven?) were a huge, celestial vacuum cleaner seeking at all costs to suck off all the "remains of the dark" in my pupils: a diabolical bliss indeed. At such moment, needless to say, my original sense of space has collapsed, and all there's left for me is myself and my vertical tunnel, extending endlessly into nowhere. (Think perhaps of the state Gandalf's in when he sprawls hopelessly at the bottom of Saruman's dark, hollow tower: that old man in grey petrified by the infinite space between himself and an exit is me, every night before sleep . . .)
Still, however hopeless the situation may seem, I've always managed to escape from it — and it's actually not even half as difficult as it appears at first glance: all I need to do is to flip to my side, facing the wall on the left that seems to me infinitely more concrete (and thus more reliable) than my characterless ceiling, which at once reconstitutes my sense of being protected impeccably within a well-defined space. But then of course this (no doubt enviable) feeling of being at home with oneself — of finally locating "a room of one's own" — is as precarious as it is vain: no sooner had I felt the palpable presence of the wall than the same regression experienced with the pathetic ceiling happened again, the only difference being, if this is any comfort, that the previously unheimlich vertical tunnel has now fallen back on earth and thus restored to the state of a tunnel as we ordinarily perceive it except, alas, it's a tunnel without the twinkling end of light, an endless Wendersian highway road trip without the point de fuite between two parallel lines: and so I'm in the wilderness of nothing again. (Think, this time, of the meandering, dark corridor where the innumerable piles of bureaucratic files that populate a kafkaesque labyrinth are deposited — and I've become K.: the Kalumniator K. who accuses himself innocently to expose the inherent emptiness of the Trial, the Agrimonsor K. who struggles endlessly unto death in the vain hope of finally finding a way back to the Castle where he belongs.)
--------The end of the scene. ----------------------------------------------------------
Now (surely you'd like to ask): why am I recounting this somewhat strange vision (that is, if we could call it a vision in its strictly ocular sense) to you, anyways? How on earth would this "bedtime story" be of any significance to you especially when, speaking of strangeness, it's not even half as strange as the "infantile fantasies" that, I'm sure, most of us have had experienced of before surrendering ourselves ignominiously to the terrible reign of Reason (when I was around five or six, whenever I spent my night in the very same room in question which belonged to my brother then, I used to see several vampires attached so effortlessly to the surface of the wardrobes while hearing for hours on end their excruciating laughters accompanied by the squeaking screams of their victims, but let's not go there for now)? Well here's the reason: strangely, ever since I came back from that not-so-bad-but-then-again-not-so-impressive-either Hirokazu Koreeda film I watched with you the other day, all of a sudden my seemingly inalterable bedtime ritual has been changed — that, as I flip to the side waiting silently for my lost highway, having just finished playing for the 79th time the Gandalf pinned to the cold, hard ground of Saruman's tower, I simply don't see that eternal "long and winding road" anymore. Instead, all that I see now — et voilà! — is you: first the face, then the whole of your body in that (equally strange, this anachronism) quasi-skirt suit you wore the day we met at Kafka on the Shore, emerging slowly but determinedly from the uncoordinated chaos of darkness: like a nebula against the infinite nothingness of our universe.
Tonight, then, marks the sixth time that I'd have looked straight into the starlights in your eyes that anchor me silently, unwaveringly, as if the whole world has stopped moving. Before long, I know now, a rising wave of desire gentle as the tides of a sunny day on the beach will sweep over me entirely whence, reaching out my trembling hand, I'll start caressing you, ever so slowly, ever so tenderly from head — the curls of your hair, the contour of your profile, the delicate shoulder, "nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands", the lacuna of your waist, the slightly bulging hip, the firmness of your thighs — to calves, but always, just barely touching; barely touching, so never actually there. But like this — particles floating in the air, barely touching, barely caressing, barely embraced — the tide would gradually recede from the shore of my body, like a photography forgotten by the sea, then washed away into the realm of Morpheus, without trace or memory. Oblivion. Kinesis. Timelessness.
Post scriptum. I've recently just finished a collection of essays by Murakami where he talks here and there about the "eventual sadness of [using, speaking, hearing] foreign languages." "What I was thinking about is this: for those who cannot always convey what they're really getting at in Japanese, their hope of expressing themselves fully and successfully in a foreign language — no matter how hard they've been working on it — is perhaps only futile," he writes. I suppose I'll have to respectfully disagree. As is the case in this letter, I feel that, by appropriating a language in principle foreign to me — a syntactic and lexical field where my arbitrary selections can by no means be called "idiomatic" — a strange yet refreshing liberty somehow emerges from (if not altogether exceeds) its vessel that is me as subject for which, perchance, I get to express certain sentiments or emotions more directly (to say nothing of the question of truth, of expressing more truthfully or not) — things that, at any rate, I would never dare (nor can) write to in our first language. I trust (hope) you won't therefore find this letter too unbearably presumptuous and/or offensive. Also, I remember promising you to write about that complex, insupportable feeling of "xi-xu" (唏噓): of its contour or shape, of the descriptive and affective characters it inevitably entails — in short, its infinitesimal phenomenology. But what's the use of still clinging desperately to it if, thanks to our mutual xi-xu at the outset, we've begun to talk and listen to each other anew? Or better still: why bother explaining a (though no doubt fundamental) Stimmung that always has its roots deeply in the past, if we have already caught a glimpse of the possibility of a "here and now"? I have thus decided to drop it.
