The Passion According to G.H. (16 page)

We are very behind, and have no idea how to take advantage of God in an interchange — as if we still had not discovered that milk can be drunk. A few centuries on or a few minutes on we might say astonished: and to think that God always was! the one who barely was was me — just as we would say of oil that we finally needed it enough to know how to wrest it from the earth, just as one day we shall regret those who died of cancer without using the cure that is there. Clearly we still do not need to not die of cancer. Everything is here. (Beings from another planet might already know things and live in an interchange that for them is natural; for us, meanwhile, the interchange would be “holiness” and would completely unsettle our life.)

The cow’s milk, we drink it. And if the cow does not let us, we resort to violence. (In life and in death everything is lawful, living is always a matter of life and death.) With God we can also force our way through violence. He Himself, when He more especially needs one of us, He chooses us and violates us.

Except my violence toward God must be toward myself. I must violate myself in order to need more. In order to become so desperately greater that I end up empty and indigent. Thus shall I have touched the root of needing. The great emptiness in me shall be my place for existing; my extreme poverty shall be a great volition. I must violate myself until I have nothing, and need everything; when I need, then I shall have, because I know that it is just to give more to whoever asks for more, my demand is my size, my emptiness is my measure. One also can violate God directly, through a love full of fury.

And He shall understand that this raging and murderous greed of ours is actually our sacred and vital rage, our attempt to violate ourselves, the attempt to eat more than we can to artificially increase our hunger — in the demand of life everything is lawful, even the artificial, and the artificial is sometimes the great sacrifice one makes in order to have the essential.

But, since we are little and therefore only need little, why should little not be enough for us? Because we suspect the pleasure. As the blind grope along, we foresee the intense pleasure of living.

And if we foresee it, it’s also because we feel uneasily used by God, we feel uneasily that we are being used with an intense and uninterrupted pleasure — moreover our salvation for now has been that of at least being used, we are not useless, we are intensely taken advantage of by God; body and soul and life are for just that: for the interchange and ecstasy of someone. Uneasy, we feel that we are being used every instant — but that awakens within us the uneasy desire to use as well.

And He not only allows us, but He needs to be used, being used is a way of being understood. (In all religions God demands to be loved.) In order for us to have, all we are missing is to need. Needing is always the supreme moment. As the most daring joy between a man and a woman comes when the greatness of needing is such that we feel in agony and fright: without you I could not live. The revelation of love is a revelation of neediness — blessed be the poor in spirit for theirs is the lacerating kingdom of life.

If I abandon hope, I am celebrating my neediness, and that is the greatest weight of living. And, because I owned up to my lacking, then life is at hand. Many were they who abandoned all they had, and went in search of the greater hunger.

Ah, I lost my shyness: God already is. We were already announced, and it was my own erring life that announced me to the right one. Blessedness is the continuous pleasure of the thing, the process of the thing is made of pleasure and contact with whatever is gradually more and more needed. My whole fraudulent struggle came from my not wanting to own up to the promise that is fulfilled: I did not want reality.

Since being real is owning up to the promise itself: owning up to one’s own innocence and retaking the taste of which one was never aware: the taste of the living.

The taste of the living.

Which is an almost null taste. And that because things are very delicate. Ah, the attempts to taste the host.

The thing is so delicate that I am astonished it manages to be visible. And there are things even so much more delicate that they are not visible. But all of them have a delicateness equivalent to what it means for our body to have a face: the sensitization of the body that is a human face. The thing has a sensitization of itself like a face.

Ah, and I who did not know how to consubstantiate my “soul.” It is not immaterial, it is of the most delicate material of thing. It is thing, I just cannot manage to consubstantiate it in visible thickness.

Ah, my love, things are very delicate. We tread upon them with a too-human hoof, with too many feelings. Only the delicateness of innocence or only the delicateness of the initiates can taste its almost null taste. Before I needed seasoning for everything, and that was how I leapt over the thing and experienced the taste of the seasoning.

I could not experience the taste of the potato, since the potato is almost the matter of the earth; the potato is so delicate that — from my incapacity to live on the level of delicateness of the merely earthy taste of the potato — I put my human hoof atop it and broke its living-thing delicateness. Because the living matter is very innocent.

And my own innocence? It hurts me. Because I also know that, on a solely human level, innocence is having the cruelty that the roach has with itself as it is slowly dying without pain; to go beyond pain is the worst cruelty. And I am afraid of that, I who am extremely moral. But now I know that I must have a much greater courage: that of having another morality, so exempt that I myself do not understand it and that scares me.

— Ah, I remembered you, who are the oldest thing in my memory. I see you once again fastening the electrical wires to fix the light socket, mindful of the positive and negative poles, and treating things with delicateness.

I didn’t know I learned so much from you. What did I learn from you? I learned how to look at a person intertwining electrical wires. I learned to see you once fixing a broken chair. Your physical energy was your most delicate energy.

— You were the oldest person I ever met. You were the monotony of my eternal love, and I didn’t know it. I had for you the tedium I feel on holidays. What was it? it was like water flowing in a stone fountain, and the years demarcated on the smoothness of the stone, the moss parted by the thread of running water, and the cloud overhead, and the beloved man resting, and love halted, it was a holiday, and the silence in the mosquitoes’ flight. And the available present. And my slowly bored freedom, the abundance, the abundance of the body that asks not and needs not.

I did not know how to see that that was delicate love. And it seemed like tedium to me. It really was tedium. It was a search for someone to play with, the desire to deepen the air, to enter into deeper contact with the air, the air that cannot be deepened, that was destined to stay right there suspended.

I don’t know, I remember it was a holiday. Ah, how I wanted pain then: it would distract me from that great divine void that I had with you. I, the goddess resting; you, upon Olympus. The great yawn of happiness? Distance following distance, and another distance and another — the abundance of space that the holiday has. That unfolding of calm energy, which I did not even understand. That already thirstless kiss upon the distracted forehead of the beloved man resting, the pensive kiss upon the already beloved man. It was a national holiday. Flags raised.

But night falling. And I could not stand the slow transformation of something that was slowly transforming into the same something, only increased by one more identical drop of time. I remember that I told you:

— I’m a little sick to my stomach, I said breathing with a certain satiety. What should we do tonight?

— Nothing, you responded so much wiser than I, nothing, it’s a holiday, said the man who was delicate with things and with time.

The profound tedium — like a great love — united us. And the next morning, very early in the morning, the world was offering itself to me. The wings of things were open, it was going to be hot in the afternoon, you could already feel it in the fresh sweat of those things that had passed the listless night, as in a hospital where the patients still awaken alive.

But all that was too refined for my human hoof. And I, I wanted beauty.

But now I have a morality that relinquishes beauty. I shall have to bid farewell with longing to beauty. Beauty was a soft enticement for me, it was the way that I, weak and respectful, adorned the thing in order to tolerate its nucleus.

But now my world is of the thing that I once called ugly or monotonous — and that no longer is ugly or monotonous to me. I went through gnawing the earth and through eating the ground, and I went through having an orgy in that, and feeling with moral horror that the earth gnawed by me also felt pleasure. My orgy really came from my puritanism: pleasure offended me, and from that offense I was making greater pleasure. Yet this world of mine now, I once would have called it violent.

Because the absence of the taste of water is violent, the absence of color in a piece of glass is violent. A violence that is all the more violent because it is neutral.

My world today is raw, it is a world of a great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible.

It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child — I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth.

Ah, and I also want to see if I can relinquish the horse drinking water, which is so pretty. Neither do I want my feeling because it prettifies; and could I relinquish the sky moving in clouds? and the flower? I don’t want pretty love. I don’t want dusk, I don’t want the well-made face, I don’t want the expressive. I want the inexpressive. I want the inhuman inside the person; no, it isn’t dangerous, since people are human anyway, you don’t have to fight for that: wanting to be human sounds too pretty to me.

I want the material of things. Humanity is drenched with humanization, as if that were necessary; and that false humanization trips up man and trips up his humanity. A thing exists that is fuller, deafer, deeper, less good, less bad, less pretty. Yet that thing too runs the risk, in our coarse hands, of becoming transformed into “purity,” our hands that are coarse and full of words.

Our hands that are coarse and full of words.

— Bear with my telling you that God is not pretty. And that because He is neither a result nor a conclusion, and everything we find pretty is sometimes only because it is already concluded. But what is ugly today shall be seen centuries from now as beauty, because it shall have completed one of its movements.

I no longer want the completed movement that never is really complete, and we are the ones who complete it out of desire; I no longer want to delight in the easiness of liking a thing only because, being apparently completed, it no longer scares me, and therefore is falsely mine — I, devourer that I was of beauties.

I do not want beauty, I want identity. Beauty would be an accretion, and now I shall have to dispense with it. The world does not have the intention of beauty, and that once would have shocked me: in the world no aesthetic plane exists, not even the aesthetic plane of goodness, and that once would have shocked me. The thing is much more than that. The God is greater than goodness with its beauty.

Ah, bidding farewell to all that means such great disappointment. But it is in disappointment that the promise is fulfilled, through disappointment, through pain the promise is fulfilled, and that is why one must go through hell first: until one sees that there is a much deeper manner of loving, and that manner relinquishes the accretion of beauty. God is whatever exists, and all the contradictions are within the God, and therefore do not contradict Him.

Ah, everything in me is aching as I let go of what to me was the world. Letting go is such a harsh and aggressive gesture that the person who opens her mouth to speak of letting go should be imprisoned and kept incommunicado — I myself prefer to consider that I have temporarily taken leave of my senses, rather than having the courage to think that all of this is a truth.

— Give me your hand, don’t abandon me, I swear I didn’t want it either: I too lived well, I was a woman of whom you could say “life and loves of G. H.” I cannot put into words what the system was, but I lived inside a system. It was as if I had organized myself inside the fact of having a stomachache because, if I no longer had it, I would also lose the marvelous hope of freeing myself one day from the stomachache: my old life was necessary to me because it was exactly its badness that made me delight in imagining a hope that, without that life I led, I would not have known.

And now I am risking an entire suitable hope, in favor of a reality so much greater that I cover my eyes with my arm in order not to have to face up to a hope that is fulfilled so now — and even before I die! So before I die. I too sear myself in this discovery: that a morality exists in which beauty is of a great fearful superficiality. Now whatever is luring me and calling me is the neutral. I have no words to express, and speak therefore of the neutral. I only have that ecstasy, which also is no longer what we called ecstasy, since it is not a peak. But that ecstasy without a peak expresses the neutral of which I speak.