Anathemas and Admirations (37 page)

Unrivaled in the worship of Impassivity, I have aspired to it frantically, so that the more I strained to achieve it, the further from it I found myself. A just defeat for a man who pursues a goal contrary to his nature.

Man proceeds from one chaos to the next. This consideration is of no consequence and keeps no one from fulfilling his destiny — from acceding, in short, to the
integral
chaos.

Anxiety, far from deriving from a nervous disequilibrium, is based on the very constitution of this world, and there is no reason why one should not be anxious at every moment, given that time itself is merely anxiety fully expanded, an anxiety whose beginning and end are indistinguishable, an eternally victorious anxiety.

Under an incomparably desolate sky, two birds, indifferent to that lugubrious background, pursue one another. . . . Their obvious delight is more apt to rehabilitate an old instinct than the entire body of erotic literature.

Tears of admiration: sole excuse for this universe, since one must be found.

Out of solidarity with a friend who had just died, I closed my eyes and let myself be flooded by that semi-chaos preceding sleep. After a few minutes I began to realize that infinitesimal reality which still binds us to consciousness. Was I on the threshold of the end? A second later I was at the bottom of an abyss, without the slightest trace of fear. Then was no-longer-existing so simple? Probably, if death were only an experiment; but it is The Experiment. And what a notion, to
play
with a phenomenon that occurs but once! One does not test the unique.

The more one has suffered, the less one demands. To protest is a sign one has traversed no hell.

As if I didn’t have enough troubles, here I am harassed by those that must have been known to the caveman.

We hate ourselves because we cannot forget ourselves, because we cannot think of anything else. It is inevitable that we should be exasperated by this excessive preference and that we should struggle to triumph over it. Yet hating ourselves is the least effective stratagem by which to manage it.

Music is an illusion that makes up for all the others. (If
illusion
is a term doomed to disappear I wonder what will become of me.)

To no one is it vouchsafed, in a state of neutrality, to perceive the pulsation of Time. To achieve this, a malaise sui generis is necessary, a favor, proceeding from who knows where?

When we have glimpsed vacuity and offered sunyata, a worship alternately patent and clandestine, we are helpless to ally ourselves with a personal, incarnated, paltry god. From another aspect, nakedness unscathed by any presence, by any human contamination, scoured of the very idea of a self, compromises the possibility of any worship whatever, necessarily linked to a whiff of individual supremacy. For as a hymn of Mahayana Buddhism has it, “if all things are empty, who is celebrated, and by whom?”