My method of vision was entirely impartial: I was working directly with the evidences of vision, and not allowing suggestions outside the vision to predetermine my conclusions; I was entirely prepared to surprise myself. Even if the evidence ended up contradicting everything that had alighted upon me in my most tranquil delirium.
I know — from my own and singular witness — that in the beginning of this my work of searching I didn’t have the slightest idea of the kind of language that would be slowly revealed to me until one day I could arrive at Constantinople. But I was already prepared to have to bear in the room the hot and humid season of our climate, and with it snakes, scorpions, tarantulas and myriads of mosquitoes that arise when a city collapses. And I knew that many times, in my work in the open field, I would have to share my bed with the livestock.
For now the sun was scorching me at the window. Only today had the sun fully reached me. But it was also true that only when the sun was reaching me could I, because I was standing, become a source of shade — where I would keep fresh wineskins of my water.
I would need a drill twelve meters long, camels, goats, and sheep, an electric strip; and I would have to use the expanse itself directly because it would be impossible to reproduce, for example, in a simple aquarium, the richness of oxygen found on the surface of the oceans.
To keep my enthusiasm for the work from fading, I’d try not to forget that geologists already know that in the subsoil of the Sahara is an immense lake of potable water, I remember reading that; and that in the Sahara itself archeologists already unearthed the remains of household utensils and old settlements: seven thousand years ago, I had read, in that “region of fear” a prosperous agriculture had developed. The desert has a moistness that must be found again.
How should I set to work? to keep the dunes in place, I would have to plant two million green trees, especially eucalyptus — before bed I’d always read something, and I’d read a lot about the properties of the eucalyptus.
And I couldn’t forget, at the outset of the job, to prepare myself to err. Not forgetting that the error had often become my path. Every time something I was thinking or feeling didn’t work out—was because finally there was a breach, and, if I’d had courage before, I’d have already gone through it. But I’d always been afraid of delirium and error. My error, however, must be the path of a truth: since only when I err do I step out of what I know and what I understand. If “truth” were whatever I could understand — it would end up being just a small truth, one my size.
The truth must be exactly in what I shall never be able to understand. And, later, could I understand myself afterward? I don’t know. Will the man of the future understand us as we are today? He distractedly, with some distracted tenderness, will pet our head as we do with the dog that comes over to us and looks at us from within its darkness, with mute and afflicted eyes. He, the future man, would pet us, remotely understanding us, as I remotely would understand myself later, beneath the memory of the memory of the memory already lost of a time of pain, not knowing that our time of pain would pass just as a child is not a static child, it’s a growing being.
Anyway, beyond keeping the dunes in place with eucalyptus, I couldn’t forget, if it turned out to be necessary, that rice prospers in brackish soil, whose high salt content it helps to cut down; I also was remembering that from my nightly readings that I, deliberately, tried to make impersonal so they would help me fall asleep.
And what other instruments would I need to dig? pickaxes, a hundred and fifty shovels, winches, even though I didn’t exactly know what a winch was, heavy wagons with steel axles, a portable forge, besides nails and twine. As for my hunger, for my hunger I’d rely on the dates of ten million palms, not to mention almond and olive trees. And I’d have to know, beforehand, that, when praying from my minaret, I could only pray to the sands.
But I had probably been ready for the sands since birth: I’d know how to pray them, for that I wouldn’t need to train beforehand, like witch-doctors who don’t pray to things but pray things. I had always been prepared, trained as I had been by fear.
I remembered something engraved in my memory, and until that moment uselessly: that Arabs and nomads call the Sahara El Khela, the nothing, Tanesruft, the country of fear, Tiniri, land beyond the regions of pasture.
To pray the sands, I like them was already prepared by fear.
Once again too scorched, I sought the great blue lakes where I plunged my withered eyes. Lakes or luminous stains of sky. The lakes were neither ugly nor beautiful. And that was just what was still terrifying my human. I tried to think about the Black Sea, I tried to think about the Persians descending the ravines — but in all of that I found neither beauty nor ugliness, just the infinite successions of centuries of the world.
Which, all of a sudden, I could no longer stand.
And I suddenly turned to the interior of the room which, in its burning, at least was not populated.
I suddenly turned to the interior of the room which, in its burning, at least was not populated.
No, during all that I hadn’t been crazy or beside myself. It was just a visual meditation. The danger of meditating is accidentally beginning to think, and thinking is no longer meditating, thinking leads to an objective. The least dangerous thing, in meditation, is “seeing,” which dispenses with thinking words. I know that an electronic microscope now exists that shows the image of an object one hundred and sixty thousand times larger than its natural size — but I wouldn’t call the vision one has through that microscope hallucinatory, even if one no longer recognizes the small object that it monstrously enlarged.
If I was wrong in my visual meditation?
Absolutely probable. But also in my purely optical visions, of a chair or of a jug, I’m the victim of error: my visual witness of a jug or of a chair is defective in various ways. Error is one of my inevitable ways of working.
I sat back down on the bed. But now, looking at the roach, I already knew much more.
Looking at it, I was seeing the vastness of the desert of Libya, in the region of Elschele. The roach that had reached that spot millennia before me, and also reached it before the dinosaurs. Faced with the roach, I could already see in the distance Damascus, the oldest city on the earth. In the desert of Libya, roaches and crocodiles? All that time I hadn’t wanted to think what I had really already thought: that the roach is edible as a lobster, the roach is a crustacean.
And all I have is disgust for the crawling of crocodiles because I am not a crocodile. I am horrified by the crocodile’s silence full of stratified scales.
But disgust is as necessary for me as the defilement of the waters is necessary for the reproduction of the things in the waters. Disgust guides me and fertilizes me. Through disgust, I see a night in Galilee. A night in Galilee is as if in the dark the breadth of the desert moved. The roach is a dark breadth moving.
I was already living the hell through which I was yet to pass, but I didn’t know if all I had to do was pass through it, or if I’d have to stay there. I was already coming to know that this hell is horrible and good, maybe I myself wanted to stay there. Since I was seeing the deep and ancient life of the roach. I was seeing a silence that has the depth of an embrace. The sun is as much in the desert of Libya, as it is hot in itself. And the earth is the sun, how had I never seen that the earth is the sun?
And then it will happen — on a naked and dry rock in the desert of Libya —, the love of two roaches will happen. I now know what it’s like. A roach waits. I see its brown-thing silence. And now — now I am seeing another roach moving slowly and with difficulty across the sands toward the rock. Upon the rock, whose flood dried up millennia ago, two dry roaches. One is the silence of the other. The killers who meet: the world is extremely reciprocal. The quivering of an entirely mute rattling in the rock; and we, who made it to today, are still quivering with it.
— I promise this same silence for myself one day, I promise us what I now learned.
Except for us it will have to be at night, for we are moist and salty beings, we are beings of seawater and tears. It will also be with the wholly open eyes of the roaches, but only if it is night, for I am a creature of great moist depths, I do not know the dust of dry cisterns, and the surface of a rock is not my home.
We are creatures that must plunge into the depth in order to breathe there, as the fish plunges in the water in order to breathe, except my depths are in the air of the night. Night is our latent state. And it is so moist that plants are born. In houses the lights go out in order to hear the crickets more clearly, and so the grasshoppers can walk atop the leaves almost without touching them, the leaves, the leaves, the leaves — in the night the soft anxiety is transmitted through the hollow of the air, the void is a means of transport.
Yes, not for us the love in the diurnal desert: we are the ones that swim, the night air is soggy and sweetened, and we are salty since sweating is our exhalation. Long ago I was drawn with you in a cave, and with you I swam from its dark depths up to today, I swam with my countless cilia — I was the oil that did not gush until today, when a black African woman drew me in my house, making me sprout upon a wall. Sleepwalking like the oil that gushes at last.
— I swear that’s how love is. I know, only because I was sitting there and knowing. Only by the light of the roach, do I know that everything the two of us once had was already love. The roach had to hurt me as much as if my nails were being torn out — and then I could no longer stand the torture and confessed, and I’m informing. I could no longer stand it and am confessing that I already knew a truth that never had use or application, and that I would be afraid to apply, since I’m not grown-up enough to know how to use a truth without destroying myself.
If you could know through me, without having to be tortured first, without having to be split by the door of a wardrobe, without having broken your casings of fear that were drying with time into casings of stone, as mine had to be broken under the force of tongs until I reached the tender neutral of myself — if you could know through me . . . then learn from me, who had to be wholly exposed and lose all of my suitcases with their engraved initials.
— Guess at me, guess at me because it’s cold, losing the lobster’s casings is cold. Warm me up with your guesses about me, understand me because I am not understanding me. I am only loving the roach. And it’s a hellish love.
But you’re afraid, I know you were always afraid of the ritual. But when one has been tortured to the point of becoming a nucleus, then one starts demonically wanting to serve the ritual, even if the ritual means consuming oneself — just as in order to have the incense the only way to get it is to burn the incense. Listen, because I’m as serious as a roach that has cilia. Listen:
When one is one’s own nucleus, one has no more deviations. Then one is one’s own solemnity, and no longer fears consuming oneself when serving the consuming ritual — the ritual is the unfolding of the life of the nucleus, the ritual is not outside it: the ritual is inherent. The roach has its ritual within its cell. The ritual — believe me because I think I know — the ritual is the mark of the God. And every child is already born with the same ritual.
— I know: the two of us were always afraid of my solemnity and of your solemnity. We thought that it was a solemnity of form. And we always disguised what we knew: that living is always a question of life and death, hence the solemnity. We also knew, but without the gift of the grace of knowing it, that we are the life within us, and that we obey ourselves. The only destiny we are born with is that of the ritual. I had been calling the “mask” a lie, and it wasn’t: it was the essential mask of solemnity. We would have to put on ritual masks to love one other. Scarabs are born with the mask with which they will fulfill themselves. Through original sin, we lost our mask.
I looked: the roach was a scarab. It was entirely only its own mask. Through the profound absence of the roach’s laughter, I was seeing its warrior ferocity. It was meek but its function was fierce.
I am meek but my function in living is fierce. Ah, pre-human love invades me. I understand, I understand! The form of living is a secret so secret that it is the silent crawling of a secret. It’s a secret in the desert. And I certainly already knew. Since, by the light of the love of two roaches there came to me the memory of a true love I once had and that I didn’t know I’d had — since love then was something I understood with a word. But there is something that must be said, it must be said.
But there is something that must be said, it must be said.
— I’m going to say what I never said to you before, maybe that’s what’s missing: having said. If I didn’t say it, it wasn’t out of greed in telling, or because of my muteness of a roach that has more eyes than mouth. If I didn’t say it it’s because I didn’t know that I knew — but I know now. I’m going to say to you that I love you. I know that I said that to you before, and that it was also true when I said it, but only now am I really saying it. I have to say it before I . . . Oh, but it’s the roach that’s going to die, not I! I don’t need this letter from a cell on death row. . . .
— No, I don’t want to give you the fright of my love. If you’re afraid of me, I’ll be afraid of me. Don’t be scared of the pain. I’m now as certain as the certainty that in that room I was alive and the roach was alive: I’m certain of this: that all things course above and below pain. Pain is not the true name for whatever people call pain. Listen: I’m certain of it.
Since, now that I was no longer struggling with myself, I quietly knew that that was a roach, that pain was not pain.
Ah, if only I’d known what was going to happen in the room, and had picked up more cigarettes before coming in: I was consuming myself with the will to smoke.
— Ah, if I could transmit the memory to you, the memory that’s just now come alive, of what the two of us had lived without being aware of it. Do you want to remember with me? oh, I know it’s hard: but let’s go toward ourselves. Instead of surpassing ourselves. Don’t be afraid now, you’re safe because at least it already happened, unless you see danger in knowing that it happened.
It’s that, when we loved, I didn’t know that love was happening much more exactly when the thing we were calling love wasn’t there. The neutral of love, that was what we were living and despising.
What I’m talking about is when nothing was happening, and, we called that nothing-happening an interval. But what was that interval like?
It was the enormous flower opening, all swollen with itself, my great and trembling vision. What I was watching, was immediately clotting beneath my gaze and becoming mine — but not a permanent clot: if I pressed it between my hands, like a bit of clotted blood, the solidification would liquefy again into blood between my fingers.
And time wasn’t totally liquid because, for me to gather things with my hands, things had to coagulate like fruits. In the intervals we called empty and calm, and when we thought that the love had stopped . . .
I remember the soreness in my throat back then: tonsils swollen, clotting within me was swift. And could easily liquefy: my sore throat went away, I was telling you. Like glaciers in summertime, and liquefied the rivers run. Every word of ours — in the time we called empty — each word was as light and empty as a butterfly: the word from inside fluttering out to meet the mouth, the words were said but we didn’t even hear them because the melting glaciers made so much noise as they ran. Amidst the liquid din, our mouths were moving speaking, and in fact we only saw the moving mouths but didn’t hear them — we each looked at the mouth of the other, seeing it speak, and it hardly mattered that we didn’t hear, oh, in the name of God it hardly mattered.
And in our name, it was enough to see the mouth speaking, and we laughed because we were hardly paying attention. And yet we were calling that not-listening indifference and lack of love.
But we actually were speaking and how! speaking the nothing. Yet everything shimmered as when heavy tears stick in the eyes; that is why
everything shimmered.
In those intervals we were thinking of ourselves as resting from one being the other. Really it was the great pleasure of not being the other: since that way each of us had two. Everything was going to end, when what we called the interval of love ended; and because it was going to end, it weighed tremulous beneath the very weight of its ending already in itself. I remember all this as through a quake of water.
Ah, could it be that we were not originally human? and that, out of practical necessity, we became human? that horrifies me, as it does you. Since the roach was looking at me with its scarab carapace, with its broken body made completely of pipes and of antennae and flabby cement — and that was undeniably a truth prior to our words, that was undeniably the life that up till then I had not wanted.
— Then — then through the door of damnation, I ate life and was eaten by life. I was understanding that my kingdom is of this world. And I understood that through the hell inside me. Because inside myself I saw what hell is like.
Because inside myself I saw what hell is like.
Hell is the mouth that bites and eats the living flesh with its blood, and the one being eaten howls with delight in his eye: hell is pain as delight of the matter, and with the laughter of delight, the tears run in pain. And the tear that comes from the laughter of pain is the opposite of redemption. I was seeing the inexorability of the roach with its ritual mask. I was seeing that that was hell: the cruel acceptance of pain, the solemn lack of pity for one’s own destiny, loving the ritual of life more than one’s own self — that was hell, where the one eating the other’s living face was indulging in the joy of pain.
For the first time I was feeling with hellish voracity the desire to have had the children I never had: I wanted to have reproduced, not in three or four children, but in twenty thousand my organic hellishness full of pleasure. My future survival in children would be my true present, which is, not just myself, but my pleasurable species never interrupted. Not having had children left me spasmodic as if confronting an addiction denied.