Anathemas and Admirations (65 page)

I have often wondered whether, in the case of Caillois, the refusal of reassessment (what he calls his “fundamental dispersion”) would not make difficult and even impossible any attempt to identify his “true self.” He is the contrary of an obsessive, yet only obsessives yield their “true self,” for they alone perhaps are sufficiently
limited
to have such a thing. Without attributing to him obsessions that he would reject, I have nonetheless been led to seek
where
he is supremely himself, and which of his books, had he written only that one, would reveal him best and testify that he has pursued and overtaken his own essence. It has seemed to me that Caillois, subject to so many enthusiasms, has encountered only one passion, and that in the work where he describes it, he has divulged the best part of his secret.

When one undertakes a quest in any realm, the sign of finding is a change of tone, those outbursts of lyricism that are not a priori indispensable.
Stones
begins with a preface-hymn and continues, for page after page, on a note of enthusiasm tempered by meticulousness. I leave aside the secondary reasons for this fervor in order to indicate only the principal one, which seems to me to reside in the search and the nostalgia for the primordial, in the obsession with beginnings, with the worlds before man, with a mystery “slower, vaster, and graver than the fate of that transitory species.” To hark back not only beyond the human but beyond life itself, to attain to the principle of the ages, to make oneself a contemporary of the immemorial: such is the enterprise of this exalted mineralogist who rejoices when he detects, in a nodule of agate that is abnormally light, the sound of a liquid, water hidden there since the dawn of the planet, “anterior” water, “water of origins,” “incorruptible fluid” that gives the sensation to the living man contemplating it that he is but a “dumbfounded intruder” in the universe.

The quest for beginnings is the most important of all those we can undertake. Each of us makes it, if only in brief moments, as if performing this return presented the unique means of recovering and transcending ourselves, of triumphing over ourselves and over everything. It is also the only mode of escape that is not a desertion or a deception. But we have got in the habit of attaching ourselves to the future, of putting apocalypse above cosmogony, of idolizing the explosion and the end, of banking to an absurd degree on the Revolution or the Last Judgment. Would it not be wiser to turn back, toward a chaos much richer than the one we anticipate? It is toward the moment when this initial chaos, gradually subsiding, experimented with form that Caillois chooses to turn, toward that phase where stones, after the “glowing moment of their genesis.” became “algebra, vertigo, order.” But whether he invokes them burning, melting, or incurably cold, he exhibits, in his description of them, an ardor that is not habitual in him. I am thinking particularly of his almost visionary way of presenting a specimen of native copper taken from Lake Michigan, whose brittle meshes, “at once fragile and hard, offer the imagination the paradox of a hyperbolic sclerosis. They inexplicably transcend the Inert; they add the rigor of death to what never was alive. They inscribe upon the metal’s surface the folds of a superfluous, ostentatious, pleonastic shroud.”

Reading
Stones
, I found myself wondering more than once if this was not a language sealed inside its own significations, with no reality other than its particular glamour. Under these conditions, why not go see for myself? After all, I have never
looked at
a stone, and as for the ones called “precious,” that epithet alone suffices to make me detest them. So I paid a visit to the Hall of Mineralogy and, to my great surprise, discovered that the book had merely told the truth, that it was the work not of a virtuoso but of a guide, determined to grasp
from within
certain solidified marvels, in order to reconstitute, by a scarcely conceivable regression, their state of original indeterminacy. I had just initiated myself into the mineral, during a crucial hour that brought home to me the inanity of being a sculptor or a painter. Having haunted, a few years earlier, the paleontology section of the museum, I felt then that the skeletons on display were so clean as to disgust one with the scandalous precariousness of flesh, that they could by contrast suggest a certain serenity. Yet compared to stones, skeletons are pitiful. But do stones themselves actually afford, as Caillois observes, “several serenities,” and will they wield their spellbinding power over him to the end? Will they resist his need for change, his craving for the new, the disease of “dispersion”? In thinking back to the moment of their genesis, he approached an illumination an unexpected kind of mystical state, an abyss in which to dissolve. This illumination was to be short-lived: once the abyss has been escaped, we are informed very clearly that it contains nothing divine that is not matter, lava, fusion, cosmic tumult. I cannot insist sufficiently on the originality of this failure. We are all, of course, failures in some mystic aspiration; we have all recorded our limits and our impossibilities at the heart of some extreme experience. But if we have tried to explode our temporal shackles, it is because we have frequented the Desert Fathers, Meister Eckhart, or the later Buddhists — whereas it was by brooding over dendrites and pyrites, or by following in reverse the career of a certain quartz, of a certain agate, that Caillois felt himself slide out of time and made contact, beyond the great “technical ordeals,” with the “motionless matter of the longest quietude,” where he could not continue because his mind, tempted and disappointed by trance, found it impossible to accede to deliverance by Nothing, not even the mineral. He would say it himself in his book, and better still in the conclusion of the
Récit du Délogé,
a revealing text recently published in
Commerce
: “I have attained the ultimate reality, which is not nothingness but the blur that I have become.” Hence not nothingness, and we realize why: nothingness is ultimately merely a
purer
version of God, which is why the mystics have plunged into it with such frenzy, as have, moreover the unbelievers with a certain religious capital. Caillois does not envy the former and would probably shrink from being classed with the latter. He acknowledges himself unsuited for the “illuminating annihilation”; he admits his defeat, his lassitudes, and his resignations; he proclaims and savors his collapse. After the enfeeblement of a fascination, after the orgy and ecstasy of origins — the
superbia
of disarray, the journey into . . . blur.

13

Michaux

The Passion of the Exhaustive

F
IFTEEN YEARS AGO, Michaux would take me regularly to the Grand Palais, where all sorts of scientific films were shown — some curious, others technical, impenetrable. To tell the truth, I was intrigued less by the projections than by the interest my friend took in them. I could not understand the motive behind so obstinate an attention. How, I kept wondering, did a mind so vehement, so oriented toward itself, in perpetual fervor or frenzy, manage to be attracted by demonstrations so meticulous, so scandalously impersonal? It was only later, brooding over his explorations of drugs, that I understood what excesses of objectivity and rigor Michaux could achieve. His scruples were to lead him to a fetishism of the infinitesimal, of the imperceptible nuance, as much psychological as verbal, endlessly recapitulated with a breathless insistence. To reach vertigo by
investigation
, that seemed to me the secret of his enterprise. Read, in
L’Infini turbulent
, the page where he describes himself as “pierced by white,” where everything is white, where “hesitation itself is white,” and “horripilation” no less. After that there is no more white: he has exhausted white, he has killed white. His obsession with the bottom of things makes him brutal: he liquidates appearance after appearance, not sparing one; he exterminates them by engulfing himself in them, by pursuing them precisely to their bottom — that bottom which is nonexistent, radically insignificant. . . . One English critic has found these soundings “terrifying.” For me, on the contrary, they are positive and exalting in their impatience to disintegrate and to pulverize — by which I mean to discover and to know, truth in anything being merely the consummation of a sapping operation.

Though he classified himself among those who are “born tired,” what has he ever done but flee delusion, excavate, search? Nothing, it is true, is so tiring as the effort toward lucidity, toward the vision without mercy. Apropos of a famous contemporary fascinated by that universal gangrene, History, he one day used a revealing expression: “spiritual blindness,” Michaux himself, on the contrary, is someone who has abused the imperative to
see
within and around himself, to get to the bottom not only of an idea (which is easier than one thinks) but of the merest experience or impression: has he not subjected each of his sensations to a scrutiny that includes everything — torture, jubilation, will-to-conquest? This passion to apprehend himself, this exhaustive coming-to-consciousness, leads to an ultimatum he ceaselessly addresses, a devastating incursion into the darkest zones of his being.

It is from such a given that we must envision his revolt against his dreams, and the need he feels, despite the hegemony of psychoanalysis, to minimize them, to denounce them, to lay them open to ridicule. Disappointed by them, he delights in punishing them and in proclaiming their emptiness. But the real reason for his fury is perhaps less their nullity than their total independence of him, the’ privilege they enjoy of escaping his censorship, of hiding, of mocking and humiliating him by their mediocrity. Mediocre, yes, but autonomous, sovereign. It is in the name of consciousness, of becoming conscious as an exigence and a duty, and also out of wounded pride, that Michaux inculpates and calumnies them, that he lodges an indictment against them, a veritable challenge to the enthusiasms of the period. By discrediting the performances of the unconscious, he rids himself of the most precious illusion in circulation for over half a century.

All interior violence is contagious; his more than any other. One never leaves his presence demoralized. And it is of little consequence after all whether one frequents him assiduously or only on occasion, from the moment when, in all essential circumstances, one tries to imagine his reaction or his remarks: solitary, omnipresent, he is always there . . . , forever inseparable from what counts in an existence. This long-distance intimacy is possible only with an obsessive who is capable of impartiality, an introvert who is open to everything and disposed to speak of everything (even of current affairs). His views on the international situation, his diagnoses of political matters, are remarkably just and often prophetic. To have so exact a perception of the external world and at the same time manage to apprehend delirium
from within
, to traverse its many forms, to appropriate them, so to speak — one can accept this anomaly, so captivating, so enviable, as just that, without seeking to understand it. Yet I am going to suggest a necessarily approximate explanation. Nothing is more agreeable, at least for me, than a conversation with Michaux about sickness. It is as if he had anticipated and feared all diseases, expected and fled them. . . . Any one of his books is a procession of symptoms, of threats glimpsed and in part made actual, infirmities pondered again and again. His sensibility to the diverse modalities of disequilibrium is prodigious. But politics, that sub-Promethean temptation, what is politics but a permanent and exasperated disequilibrium, the curse par excellence of a megalomaniac monkey? The least neutral mind, the least passive I know, could not help but be interested in politics, if only to wield his sagacity or his disgust. Writers in general, when they comment upon current events, display a laughable naïveté. It is important, it seems to me, to cite an exception. I believe I caught Michaux only once in flagrante delieto, not of naïveté (he is psychologically unfit for it) but of “good feelings,” of confidence, of abandon, of something I translated at the time into terms it may be useful to give here:

“I admired him for his aggressive clear-sightedness, for his denials and his phobias, for the sum of his aversions. Last night, in the little street where we had been talking for hours, he told me, with quite an unexpected touch of emotion, that the idea of man’s ultimate disappearance moved him. . . . Whereupon I left him, convinced I should never forgive him for that commiseration and that weakness.”

If I extract this unspeakably naive note from an undated diary, it is to show that at the time what I especially prized in him was his incisive, tense, “inhuman” aspect, his explosions and his sneers, his flaying humor, his vocation as a convulsionary and a gentleman. Indeed, it seemed secondary that he was a poet. One day he confessed, I remember, that he sometimes wondered whether he was one. That he is a poet is obvious, but it is conceivable that
he might not have been one
.