The Book of Disquiet (47 page)

(The tilted urn of twilight pours out on us an oil
in which the hours, like rose petals, separately float.)

364

How can I possess with my body, when I don’t even possess my body? How can I possess with my soul, when I don’t possess my soul? How can I understand with my mind, when I don’t understand my mind?

There is no body or truth we possess, nor even any illusion. We are phantoms made of lies, shadows of illusions, and our life is hollow on both the outside and the inside.

Does anyone know the borders of his soul, that he can say ‘I am I’?

But I know that I’m the one who feels what I feel.

When someone else possesses this body, does he possess the same thing in it as I? No. He possesses another sensation.

Is there anything that we possess? If we don’t know who we are, how can we know what we possess?

If, referring to what you eat, you were to say, ‘I possess this’, then I would understand you. Because you obviously incorporate what you eat into yourself, you transform it into your substance, you feel it enter into you and belong to you. But it’s not with regard to what you eat that you speak of possession. What do you call possessing?

365

The madness known as affirmation, the sickness called belief, the infamy of being happy – all of this reeks of the world, it smacks of this sad thing that’s the earth.

Be indifferent. Love the sunset and the dawn because it does no good, not even for you, to love them. Dress yourself in the gold of the dying afternoon, like a king deposed on a morning of roses in full bloom, with May in the white clouds and the smile of virgins in secluded villas. Let your yearning perish among myrtles, your tedium cease among tamarinds, and may the sound of water accompany all of this as if it were twilight on the banks of a river whose only meaning is to flow – eternal – towards distant seas. The rest is but the life that leaves us, the sparkle in our eyes that fades, the purple robes worn thin even before we don them, the moon that shines down on our exile, the stars that spread their silence over our hour of disillusionment.
Assiduous is the sterile and friendly grief that clasps us against its breast with love.

Decadence is my destiny.

My domain of old was in deep valleys. The water that trickled in my dreams was never tainted by blood. The trees’ foliage that forgets life was always green in my forgetting. The moon was fluid like water between stones. Love never reached that valley, which is why life was happy there. Neither love, nor dreams, nor gods in temples – and we walked in the breeze and the indivisible hour without any nostalgia for drunken, useless beliefs.

366

Useless landscapes like those that wind around Chinese teacups, starting out from the handle and abruptly ending at the handle. The cups are always so small… Where would the landscape lead to, and with what
of porcelain, if it could continue past the teacup handle?

Certain souls are capable of feeling heartfelt grief because the painted landscape on a Chinese fan isn’t three-dimensional.

367

…and the chrysanthemums languish their sickly life in gardens made gloomy by their presence.

…the Japanese luxuriance of having only two apparent dimensions.

…the colourful existence of Japanese figures circling the teacups’ dull translucence.

A table set for a discreet tea – a mere pretext for perfectly sterile conversations – has always struck me as a kind of living thing, an
individuality with soul. It forms, like an organism, a synthetic whole, which is not the mere sum of its component parts.

368

And the dialogues in those fantastical gardens that indefinitely circle certain teacups? What sublime words the two figures seated on the other side of that teapot must be exchanging! And I without ears to hear them, a dead member of polychromatic humanity!

Exquisite psychology of truly static things, a psychology woven by eternity! And the expression of a painted figure, from the summit of its visible eternity, disdains our transitory fever, which never lingers at the windows of an attitude* nor pauses at the gates of a gesture.

Just imagine the folklore of the colourful people who inhabit paintings! The loves of embroidered figures – loves marked by a two-dimensional, geometric chastity – should be [probed] for the entertainment of venturesome psychologists.

We don’t love, we only pretend to. True love, immortal and useless, belongs to those figures whose feelings never change, since by nature they are static. Ever since I’ve known the Japanese man who sits on the convex [surface] of my teapot, he has yet to make a move. He has never savoured the hand of the woman who is forever out of reach. Enervated colours, like those of an emptied, poured-out sun, eternally unrealize the slopes of that hill. And the whole scene observes a moment of sorrow – a sorrow more faithful than the one that right now fills, without filling, the hollowness of my weary hours.

369

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyse and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

Whatever is real in our sensations is precisely what they have that isn’t ours. The sensations common to us all are what constitute reality. Our sensations’ individuality, therefore, lies in whatever they have that’s erroneous. What joy it would give me to see a scarlet-coloured sun! How totally and exclusively mine it would be!

370

I never let my feelings know what I’m going to make them feel. I play with my sensations like a bored princess with her large, viciously agile cats.

I slam doors within me where certain sensations were about to pass in order to be realized. I quickly clear their path of mental objects that might cause them to make gestures.

Little nonsense phrases inserted into the conversations we pretend to be having, meaningless affirmations made from the ashes of other, equally meaningless affirmations…

– Your gaze reminds me of music played on a boat in the middle of a mysterious river with woods on the facing shore…

= Don’t say that it’s a chilly moonlit night. I abhor moonlit nights… There are people who actually play music on moonlit nights…

– That’s also a possibility… An unfortunate one, of course… But your gaze evidently wants to be nostalgic about something… It lacks the feeling it expresses… In the falseness of your expression I can see many of the illusions that I’ve had…

= I can assure you that I sometimes feel what I say and even, despite being a woman, what I say through my gaze…

– Aren’t you being harsh on yourself? Do we really feel what we think we’re feeling? Does this conversation, for example, have any semblance of reality? Surely not. It would be unacceptable in a novel.

= And with good reason… Look, I’m not absolutely certain that I’m talking with you… In spite of being a woman, I made it my duty to be an illustration in the picture book of a mad artist… Some of
my detail is overly precise… I realize it gives the impression of an overwrought, somewhat forced reality… To be an illustration seems to me the only ideal worthy of a contemporary woman. As a child I wanted to be the queen of one of the suits in a deck of old cards we had at home… This seemed to me like such a compassionately heraldic vocation… For a child, of course, such moral aspirations are common… Only later, when all our aspirations are immoral, do we really think about this…

– Since I never talk to children, I believe in their artistic instinct… You know, even now as I’m talking I’m trying to fathom the true meaning of the things you’ve been telling me. Do you forgive me?

= Not entirely… We should never plumb the feelings that other people pretend to have. They’re always too intimate… Don’t think it doesn’t hurt me to share these intimate secrets, all of which are false but which represent true tatters of my pathetic soul… The most pitiful thing about us, believe me, is what we really aren’t, and our worst tragedies take place in the idea we have of ourselves.

– That’s so true… Why say it? You’ve hurt me. Why ruin the constant unreality of our conversation? This way it almost becomes a plausible interchange at a table set for tea, between a beautiful woman and a dreamer of sensations.

= You’re right… Now it’s my turn to ask forgiveness… But I was distracted and really didn’t notice that I’d said something that makes sense… Let’s change the subject… How late it always is!… Don’t get upset again – the sentence I just said, after all, is complete nonsense…

– Don’t apologize, and don’t pay any attention to what we’re talking about… Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue… We should ultimately be unable to tell whether we really talked with someone or simply imagined the conversation… The best and profoundest conversations, and the least morally instructive ones, are those that novelists have between two characters from one of their books. For example…

= For heaven’s sake! Don’t tell me you were going to cite an example! That’s only done in grammars; perhaps you’ve forgotten that we don’t even read them.

– Did you ever read a grammar?

= Never. I’ve always despised knowing the correct way to say something… All I ever liked in grammar books were the exceptions and pleonasms… To dodge the rules and say useless things sums up the essentially modern attitude. Did I say that correctly?…

– Absolutely… What’s especially irritating in grammars (have you noticed how exquisitely impossible it is for us to be talking about this?) – the most irritating part of grammars is the chapter on verbs, since these are what give meaning to sentences… An honest sentence should always have any number of possible meanings… Verbs!… A friend of mine who committed suicide – every time I have a longish conversation I suicide a friend – was going to dedicate his life to destroying verbs…

= Why did he commit suicide?

– Wait, I still don’t know… He wanted to discover and develop a method for surreptitiously not completing sentences. He used to say that he was searching for the microbe of meaning… He committed suicide – yes, of course – because one day he realized what a tremendous responsibility he’d assumed… The enormity of the problem made him go nuts… A revolver and…

= No, that’s preposterous… Don’t you see that it could never be a revolver? A man like that never shoots himself in the head… You understand very little about the friends you’ve never had… That’s a serious defect, you know… My best girlfriend, a ravishing young man I invented…

– Do you get along?

= As best we can… But this girl, you can’t imagine.....

The two figures sitting at the table set for tea surely didn’t have this conversation. But they were so well groomed and dressed that it seemed a pity for them not to talk this way… That’s why I wrote this conversation for them to have had… Their gestures, mannerisms, playful glances and smiles – those short interludes in the conversation when we stop feeling our own existence – clearly expressed what I faithfully pretend to be reporting… After they go their separate ways, each marrying someone else (since they think too much alike to marry each other), if one day they happen to look at these pages, I think they will recognize what they never said and will be grateful to me for so
accurately interpreting not only what they really are but also what they never wished to be nor ever knew they were…

If they read me, may they believe that this was what they really said. In the words that they apparently heard from each other there were so many
things missing, such as the fragrance in the air, the tea’s aroma, the meaning of the corsage of
which she wore on her chest… Although never stated, these things formed part of the conversation… All these things were there, and so my task isn’t really to write literature but history. I reconstruct, completing what’s missing, and this will serve as my excuse to them for having eavesdropped on what they didn’t say and wouldn’t have wanted to say.*