What IS outside we know solely by the face of the animal; as for children, already too early on, we turn them backwards and force them to see, from behind, readymade forms, and not what is open, which, in the faces of animals, is so profound, so free from death.
Yes, act like a dog, before writing a single line of verse. Several weeks later, in Montpellier, at a time when I had an appointment with “Captain Hatteras,” I was dragging around my carcass here and there. I felt too low to appear in public, and at one point I started following a mongrel dog, a cross between a pointer and a terrier, who had obviously lost its master. I followed it step by step through the Peyrou garden, down the length of its beautiful alleyways, around the trees at its corners, and wound up in front of a balustrade, where the dog agreed to nuzzle up to me. From there I observed the Roman aqueduct, which extended beyond the central lane all the way, so I imagined, toward Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert.
Instead of keeping me company, the dog abandoned me. Bereft of my new companion, I followed a winding path through the narrow streets of the city, which took me all the way to the Place de la Comédie and rue de la Loge. It’s silly, but I was depressed because of a book. I needed to trace out this particular route because I was stuck on one of its pages, endlessly bogged down in an Orphic proclamation whose enigma continued to resist me:
THOU SHALT FIND A SPRING TO THE LEFT AND A WHITE CYPRESS. TAKE CARE NOT TO APPROACH THIS SPRING. THOU SHALT FIND ANOTHER FROM WHENCE FLOW THE COOL WATERS OF THE LAKE OF MEMORY. BEFORE IT STAND THE GUARDIANS. AND THOU SHALT SAY UNTO THEM…
I had sworn to fill in the ellipses of this final mutilated command (from a golden plaque on a sixth-century BC tomb), but I despaired of ever succeeding.
The probable conclusion of the fragment must be a password—the formula without which Orpheus would never have succeeded at his task. “I AM A CHILD OF THE EARTH / AND OF THE STARRY SKIES.” I admired this sentence, but my familiarity with it did little to diminish my anxiety. Its words had lost any clear meaning: the way they were used in ancient Greek signifies that we (as humans) belong both to this Earth and to the far-reaching heavens, that we are the children of an Earth rendered fertile by the light, but the Greek words that once meant Earth, Sky, Light possessed spiritual overtones that have long been lost.
Today, numerous barriers block out the echoes of even the simplest song. How was I to restore the ancient text? By skipping over the time-out demanded by Buchenwald and Dachau? By delivering myself of the occasional poem that attempted to bemoan this disaster? By executing a sheer leap of the soul?
I wept as I walked, keenly aware of the ridiculous dead end I had reached in my attempt to decode The Testament of Orpheus. I was thinking of an idiotic dream I had had several days earlier: The Poets’ Society had summoned me; the event was taking place in a shabby room (an attic room?), a cramped room bursting at the seams, with distinguished poets squeezed together, each one remaining, in spite of the presence of the press, aloof from all the others. Some of them were declaiming while pretending not to, others were weeping, still others were snoring, but upon my arrival there was an outburst of sarcasm: “The cur! The cur! How wretched he looks with his short hair!” I wasn’t proud; I was gripping in my pocket a very wrinkled piece of paper onto which, that very morning on the train, I had scribbled this quotation from Virginia Woolf, lifted from one of her journals: “Art is inadmissible. Yet the absence of art would mean that society as a whole had turned into a nightmare without end—the boundlessness of thought upended into the boundlessness of horror.”
At that point, a dismaying idea occurred to me—of the sort that always causes me to rise up in revolt. Instead of wasting your time mucking around in some ancient text, why not spend your time on worthwhile and socially beneficial causes? You’re getting all stirred up over nothing; you’d be better off spending your energies on taking some sort of immediate action against everything it is you loathe. That’s when I felt like hitting somebody. I needed a scapegoat to justify the miserable fact that I had decided to give up writing, Any journalist or pollster or top-notch executive would do. It could be just about anybody: the arbitrariness of my action would be matched by arbitrariness of their misdeeds—just as long as I had the opportunity of slugging someone for no reason whatsoever. No, that was too cowardly; what I needed was a real victim, a completely innocent bystander.
I espied an old man, oddly dressed, hunched over, carting around his shopping basket. He was shuffling along quite quickly on his bandy legs. Just a flick of a finger would be enough to topple him over. Then I would courteously come to his aid and pick him up again, casting the blame for my assault on some imaginary passerby. Here was a real challenge, worthy of our times. After which, I would do away with myself—assured of not suffering any consequences.
I was about to proceed as planned but was held back by a ludicrous detaiclass="underline" my intended victim was talking to himself aloud as he shuffled along. I caught up with the poor wretch; when I held out my arm to touch his shoulder, he turned around as if he had sensed me coming all the while and shouted out at the top of his lungs:
“She told me so.”
The old man kept heading toward the market. I followed him as far as the wholesalers’ stalls; a woman, all smiles, hurried toward him to put some vegetables in his basket. The old man just stood there shuffling, without turning his head or uttering a word of thanks. He frowned, all the while casting his eyes down at the ground and up to the sky. Then he was off again. At a butcher’s stall, he shouted the same sentence out aloud—“SHEETOLDMEESOO”—and again farther along—“SHEETOLDMEESOO”—clearly enunciated, with the same vehemence.
The man moved on at a steady pace, his basket now filled, his shoulders sagging. As he moved along, his feet dragging in their oversize slippers, every twenty or thirty yards he would repeat the same refrain—“SHEETOLDMEESOO.” The passersby watched and grinned. A girl pointed him out to her mother: “Look, Ma, it’s the prophet!” Other people turned around, shot him a glance, and just shrugged. A shopkeeper said to her daughter, “Go give something to the loony!” Again the old man stopped, shuffled in place, frowned, and looked at the ground and into the distance. Then he was off again, shouting out:
“SHEETOLDMEESOO…”
An idiotic refrain: the reprise of an unknown disaster, the echo of a broken promise, of a grief too grievous to be shared? A caesura? You have nowhere to go and yet here you are shouting, claiming that a woman had said something to you, but what? Admit it, forget it, fill the gap with a random tic, a random gesture, a cry in the night—and transform it into this pathetic, magnificent outburst addressed to nobody in particular in broad daylight. Some children were laughing. I couldn’t blame them. Their easy laughter and his wounded words were two parts of the same poem.
It’s hard to kill yourself, and it’s almost impossible to do so when the time is no longer right. You let yourself be carried along by the painful slippage of days, your memory in disarray—the loss of a wife, the absence of a lover, the disappearance of friends. You get up, you go to bed, you get up again, you put one foot after the other. The litany of pain.
The old man was leaning against a wall, having put his basket down. I approached him and whispered into his ear, “Aseroë.” Without so much as looking at me, he replied, “Exactly!” He picked up his basket and went on his way. Farther on, before crossing the street, he again shouted out, “SHEETOLDMEESOO.” Then he shuffled past a school and disappeared, still in search of some ancient promise, now cruelly consigned to oblivion.