Anathemas and Admirations (26 page)

Consciousness intervenes in our actions only to frustrate their execution; consciousness is a perpetual interrogation of life, it is perhaps the ruin of life.
Bewusstsein als Verhängnis
(Consciousness as Fatality) is the title of a book published in Germany between the two world wars, whose author, drawing the consequences of his vision of the world, committed suicide. There is, as far as we can see, in the phenomenon of consciousness a dramatic and deadly dimension that did not escape Valéry (we need merely recall the “murderous lucidity” of
Dance and the Soul
), but he could not emphasize it too much without contradicting his usual theories about the beneficent role of consciousness in literary creation, as opposed to the suspect character of trace. His entire poetics, what is it but the apotheosis of consciousness? If he had lingered too long over the tension between the Vital and the Conscious, he would have had to reverse the scale of values that he had set up and that he remained faithful to throughout his career.

The effort to define oneself, to bear down upon one’s own mental operations, Valéry took for true knowledge. But to know
oneself
is not
to know
, or rather is only a variety of knowing, Valéry always confused
knowledge
and
clear-sightedness
. Indeed the will to be clear-sighted, to be inhumanly disabused, is accompanied for him by an ill-concealed pride: he knows himself and admires himself for knowing himself. Let us be fair: he does not admire his mind, he admires himself as Mind. His narcissism, inseparable from what he called “emotions” and the “pathos” of the intellect, is not a narcissism of
journaux intimes
, it is not the attachment to the self as a
unique
aberration, nor is it the ego of those who like to
hear themselves
, psychologically speaking; no, it is an abstract ego, far from the complacencies of introspection or the impurities of psychoanalysis. Note that the flaw of Narcissus was not consubstantial with him: how else explain that the sole realm in which posterity has strikingly vindicated Valéry is that of political considerations and prophecies? History, an idol he was concerned to demolish, is largely what ensures that he will last, that he will continue to be
present
. For it is his observations concerning History that are quoted most frequently — an irony he would perhaps have enjoyed. Doubts are cast on his poems, his poetics are rejected, but increasingly we set store by the moralist and the analyst attentive to events. This lover of himself had the stuff of an extrovert. Appearances, one feels, did not displease him; nothing in him assumed a morbid, profound, supremely intimate aspect; even the Nothingness he inherited from. Mallarmé was merely a fascination exempt from vertigo, and never opened out onto horror or ecstasy. In one of the Upanishads, it is said that “the essence of man is speech, the essence of speech is the hymn,” Valéry would have assented to the first assertion and denied the second. It is in this assent and this denial that we must seek the key to his accomplishments and to his limits.

1970

5

The Lure of Disillusion

I
T IS NEVER ideas we should speak of, only sensations and visions — for ideas do not proceed from our entrails; ideas are never truly
ours
.

Glum sky: my mind masquerading as the firmament.

Ravaged by boredom, that cyclone in slow motion.

There exists, I grant you, a clinical depression, upon which certain remedies occasionally have an effect; but there exists another kind, a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us
alone
for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself.

I assure this foreign poet, who after hesitating among several capitals has decided on ours, that he has chosen well, that here he will find, among other advantages, that of starving to death without troubling a single soul. To encourage him further, I explain that here failure is so normal that it is a kind of Open Sesame. This detail provided the finishing touchy judging from the gleam I detected in his eyes.

“The very fact that you have reached the age you have proves that life has a meaning,” I was told by a friend I hadn’t seen in over thirty years. This remark often comes back to me, more striking each time, though it was made by someone who has always found a meaning in everything.

For Mallarmé, who claimed he was doomed to permanent insomnia, sleep was not a “real need” but a “favor.” Only a great poet could allow himself the luxury of such an insanity.

Insomnia appears to spare the animals. If we kept them from sleeping for a few weeks, a radical change would occur in their nature and their behavior. They would experience hitherto unknown sensations, the kind that seemed to be specifically human. Let us wreck the animal kingdom, if we want it to overtake and replace us.

In each letter I send to a Japanese friend, I have got into the habit of recommending one or another work by Brahms, She has just written that she is leaving a Tokyo clinic where she was taken by ambulance for having excessively sacrificed to my idol, I wonder which trio, which sonata was responsible. It doesn’t matter. Whatever induces collapse is thereby deserving of being listened to.