The Passion According to G.H. (18 page)

And now I am not taking your hand for myself. I am the one giving you my hand.

Now I need your hand, not so that I won’t be scared, but so that you won’t. I know that believing in all this will be, at first, your great solitude. But the moment will come when you will give me your hand, no longer out of solitude, but as I am doing now: out of love. Like me, you will no longer fear adding yourself to the extreme energetic sweetness of the God. Solitude is having only the human destiny.

And solitude is not needing. Not needing leaves a man very alone, all alone. Ah, needing does not isolate the person, the thing needs the thing: all you have to do is see the chick walking around to see that its destiny will be what neediness makes of it, its destiny is to join as drops of mercury join other drops of mercury, even if, like each drop of mercury, it has in itself an entirely complete and round existence .

Ah, my love, do not be afraid of neediness: it is our greater destiny. Love is so much more fatal than I had thought, love is as inherent as wanting itself, and we are guaranteed by a necessity that shall renew itself continuously. Love already is, it is always. All that is missing is the coup de grâce — which is called passion.

All that is missing is the coup de grâce — which is called passion.

What I am feeling now is a joy. Through the living roach I am coming to understand that I too am whatever is alive. Being alive is a very high stage, it is something that I only reached now. It is such a high unstable equilibrium that I know I shall not be able to know about that equilibrium for long — the grace of passion is short.

Maybe, being man, like us, is only a special sensitization we call “having humanity.” Oh, I too fear losing that sensitization. Until now I had called life my sensitivity to life. But being alive is something else.

Being alive is a coarse radiating indifference. Being alive is unattainable by the finest sensitivity. Being alive is inhuman — the deepest meditation is so empty that a smile exhales as from a matter. And even more delicate shall I be, and as a more permanent state. Am I speaking of death? am I speaking of after death? I don’t know. I feel that “not human” is a great reality, and that it does not mean “unhuman,” to the contrary: the not-human is the radiating center of a neutral love in Hertzian waves.

If my life is transformed into it-self, the thing I today call sensitivity will not exist — it will be called indifference. But I cannot yet grasp that way. It is as if hundreds of thousands of years from now we are finally no longer what we feel and think: we shall have something that more closely resembles a “mood” than an idea. We shall be the living matter revealing itself directly, ignorant of word, surpassing thought which is always grotesque.

And I shall not wander “from thought to thought,” but from mood to mood. We shall be inhuman — as the loftiest conquest of man. Being is being beyond human. Being man does not work, being man has been a constraint. The unknown awaits us, but I feel that this unknown is a totalization and will be the true humanization for which we longed. Am I speaking of death? no, of life. It is not a state of happiness, it is a state of contact.

Ah, don’t think this all doesn’t nauseate me, I even find it so tiresome that it makes me impatient. Because it seems like heaven, where I cannot even imagine what I would do, since I can only imagine myself thinking and feeling, two attributes of being, and I cannot imagine merely being, and relinquishing the rest. Just being — that would give me an enormous lack of things to do.

At the same time I was also a bit suspicious.

Because, just as before when I had frightened myself by entering what could end up being despair, I now suspected that I was once again transcending things. . . .

Could I be excessively enlarging the thing precisely in order to surpass the roach and the piece of iron and the piece of glass?

I don’t think so.

Since I was not even reducing hope to a simple result of constructing and counterfeiting, nor denying that something to hope for exists. Nor had I removed the promise: I was simply feeling, with an enormous effort, that the hope and the promise are fulfilled every instant. And that was terrifying, I was always afraid of being struck down by completion, I had always thought that completion is an end — and had not counted on the ever-born need.

And also because I feared, unable to bear simple glory, turning it into yet another accretion. But I know — I know — that there is an experience of glory in which life has the purest taste of the nothing, and that in glory I feel it empty. When living comes to pass, one wonders: but was that it? And the answer is: that is not only it, that is exactly it.

Except I still must be careful not to make more of it than this, or else it will no longer be it. The essence is of a pungent insipidity. I will have “to purify myself” much more in order not to even want the accretion of events. Purifying myself once meant a cruelty against what I called beauty, and against what I called “I,” without knowing that “I” was an accretion of myself.

But now, through my most difficult fright — I am finally heading toward the inverse path. I head toward the destruction of what I built, I head for depersonalization.

I am avid for the world, I have strong and defined desires, tonight I’ll go dance and eat, I won’t wear the blue dress, but the black-and-white one. But at the same time I need nothing. I don’t even need for a tree to exist. I now know of a way that relinquishes everything — and including love, nature, objects. A way that does without me. Though, as for my desires, my passions, my contact with a tree — they are still for me like a mouth eating.

Depersonalization as the dismissal of useless individuality — losing everything one can lose and, even so, being. Little by little stripping, with an effort so mindful that one does not feel the pain, stripping, like getting rid of one’s own skin, one’s characteristics. Everything that characterizes me is just the way that I am most easily visible to others and how I end up being superficially recognizable to myself. As there was the moment in which I saw that the roach is the roach of all roaches, so do I want to find in me the woman of all women.

Depersonalization as the great objectification of oneself. The greatest exteriorization one can reach. Whoever gets to oneself through depersonalization shall recognize the other in any disguise: the first step in relation to the other is finding inside oneself the man of all men. Every woman is the woman of all women, every man is the man of all men, and each of them could appear wherever man is judged. But only in immanence, because only a few reach the point of, in us, recognizing themselves. And then, by the simple presence of their existence, revealing ours.

Whatever we live from — and because it has no name only muteness pronounces it — it is from that that I draw closer to myself through the great largess of letting myself be. Not because I then find the name of the name and the impalpable becomes concrete — but because I designate the impalpable as impalpable, and then the breath breaks out anew as in a candle’s flame.

The gradual deheroization of oneself is the true labor one works at beneath the apparent labor, life is a secret mission. So secret is the true life that not even to me, who am dying of it, can the password be entrusted, I die without knowing wherefrom. And the secret is such that, only if the mission manages to be accomplished shall I, in a flash, perceive that I was born in charge of it — every life is a secret mission.

The deheroization of myself is subterraneously undermining my building, coming to pass without my consent like an unheeded calling. Until it is finally revealed to me that the life in me does not bear my name.

And I too have no name, and that is my name. And because I depersonalize myself to the point of not having my name, I reply whenever someone says: I.

Deheroization is the great failure of a life. Not everyone manages to fail because it is so laborious, one first must climb painfully until finally reaching high enough to be able to fall — I can only reach the depersonality of muteness if I have first constructed an entire voice. My civilizations were necessary for me to rise to a point from which I could descend. It is exactly through the failure of the voice that one comes to hear for the first time one’s own muteness and that of others and of things, and accepts it as the possible language. Only then is my nature accepted, accepted with its frightened torture, where pain is not something that happens to us, but what we are. And our condition is accepted as the only one possible, since it is what exists, and not another. And since living it is our passion. The human condition is the passion of Christ.

Ah, but to reach muteness, what a great effort of voice. My voice is the way I go in search of reality; reality, before my language, exists like a thought that is not thought, but inescapably I was and am compelled to need to know what the thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but as the earth precedes the tree, but as the world precedes the man, but as the sea precedes the vision of the sea, life precedes love, the matter of the body precedes the body, and in turn language one day will have preceded the possession of silence.

I have to the extent I designate — and this is the splendor of having a language. But I have much more to the extent I cannot designate. Reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it — and the way I do not find it. But it is from searching and not finding that what I did not know was born, and which I instantly recognize. Language is my human effort. My destiny is to search and my destiny is to return empty-handed. But — I return with the unsayable. The unsayable can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.

And it is no use to try to take a shortcut and want to start, already knowing that the voice says little, starting straightaway with being depersonal. For the journey exists, and the journey is not simply a manner of going. We ourselves are the journey. In the matter of living, one can never arrive beforehand. The via crucis is not a detour, it is the only way, one cannot arrive except along it and with it. Persistence is our effort, giving up is the reward. One only reaches it having experienced the power of building, and, despite the taste of power, preferring to give up. Giving up must be a choice. Giving up is the most sacred choice of a life. Giving up is the true human instant. And this alone, is the very glory of my condition.

Giving up is a revelation.

Giving up is a revelation.

I give up, and will have been the human person — it is only in the worst of my condition that that condition is taken up as my destiny. Existing demands of me the great sacrifice of not having strength, I give up, and all of a sudden the world fits inside my weak hand. I give up, and onto my human poverty opens the only joy granted me human joy. I know that, and I tremble — living strikes me so, living deprives me of sleep.

I climb high enough to be able to fall, I choose, I tremble and give up, and, finally, dedicating myself to my fall, depersonal, without a voice of my own, finally without me — then does everything I do not have become mine. I give up and the less I am the more I live, the more I lose my name the more they call me, my only secret mission is my condition, I give up and the less I know the password the more I fulfill the secret, the less I know the more the sweetness of the abyss is my destiny. And so I adore it.

With my hands quietly clasped on my lap, I was having a feeling of tender timid joy. It was an almost nothing, like when the breeze makes a blade of grass tremble. It was almost nothing, but I could make out the minuscule movement of my timidity. I don’t know, but with distressed idolatry I was approaching something, and with the delicateness of one who is afraid. I was approaching the most powerful thing that had ever happened to me.

More powerful than hope, more powerful than love?

I was approaching something I think was — trust. Perhaps that is the name. Or it doesn’t matter: I could also give it another.

I felt that my face in modesty was smiling. Or perhaps it wasn’t, I don’t know. I was trusting.

Myself? the world? the God? the roach? I don’t know. Perhaps trusting is not a matter of what or whom. Perhaps I now knew that I myself would never be equal to life, but that my life was equal to life. I would never reach my root, but my root existed. Timidly I let myself be pierced by a sweetness that humbled me without restraining me.

Oh God, I was feeling baptized by the world. I had put a roach’s matter into my mouth, and finally performed the tiniest act.

Not the maximum act, as I had thought before, not heroism and sainthood. But at last the tiniest act that I had always been missing. I had always been incapable of the tiniest act. And with the tiniest act, I had deheroized myself. I, who had lived from the middle of the road, had finally taken the first step along its beginning.

Finally, finally, my casing had really broken and without limit I was. Through not being, I was. To the ends of whatever I was not, I was. Whatever I am not, I am. All shall be within me, if I shall not be; for “I” is just one of the instantaneous spasms of the world. My life does not have a merely human meaning, it is much greater — so much greater that, as humanity goes, it makes no sense. Of the general organization that was greater than I, I had previously only perceived the fragments. But now, I was much less than human — and I would only fulfill my specifically human destiny if I handed myself over, as I was handing myself over, to whatever was no longer I, to whatever is already inhuman.