8
Aseroë
IT WAS IN APRIL THAT I MET the Japanese choreographer Hideyuki Yano for the first time. I had admired his At the Hawk’s Well, inspired by Yeats. Yano had succeeded in seamlessly blending the mythologies of Japan, Africa, and Europe. This had enchanted me. I loved the balletic duet, River Sumida Madness, that he had composed with the African dancer Elsa Wolliaston.
Yano had come to Dijon for a dance workshop and that spring, engaged as I was in editing a certain book, I found myself at a very low ebb, unable to establish the most simple relationships between words and feelings. I sensed that my language was betraying me. The very act of writing seemed like some nasty ordeal I had to undergo before gaining access to a single clear thought. I had just devoted several days and several nights to the perception of blackness, engaged in what I called my séances noires. Since the eyes tend to become accustomed to darkness, gradually adjusting to all the tiny gleamings it contains, I had prepared several darkrooms, which I had carefully sealed against any intrusions of light. I needed to mislead my sight, to remove it from any known object, to devote it strictly to the apprehension of absolute blackness.
By keeping my eyes open as long as possible, by not allowing my vision to seize on any single point of reference, by losing all notion of time and space in a completely darkened room, I thought that these “black sessions” might allow me to discover thought in its purest—and most perceptible—form. I had no delusions: I didn’t expect to achieve absolute lucidity at the end of each of these voluntary seclusions. To achieve a healthy state of stupefaction would be sufficient. I was fully ready to embrace idiocy, provided it might help me to discover an unknown connection between writing and feeling. I hoped that out of these séances of darkness, words would emerge—vivid words, innocent of any lie, words devoted to the simplest of perceptions, virgin words.
At several points, I tried my hand at writing in total darkness, hoping to seize the moment—which would then immediately disappear, like dreams at the moment of waking. Each time, I had to overcome my body’s stubborn resistance. In the end, I had to recognize that I had failed; in fact, I had even (predictably) regressed, tormented by the amnesia and the anxiety traditionally referred to as la petite mort.
Far from having diminished the separation between perception and writing, I had only increased it. But the fact that I had failed only reinforced my absurd conviction that it was my duty to persevere, to proceed onward without any determined goal in mind. I would solicit the powers of innocence at some other time, and in a different fashion. The pitiful result of this series of self-mortifications was a manuscript about fifty pages in length, which I was cruel enough to submit to several friends. I knew I was putting them in an awkward position: they were, after all, aware that I wasn’t doing very well and therefore wouldn’t dare tell me how they really felt, afraid as they were of hurting my feelings.
When Yano came to Dijon that April, a month had passed since I had finished writing up the sessions of my séances noires and I was ready to forget those pages. However, after lunch, Yano asked me what I was writing, and since he had just mentioned that in his work as a dancer he had always wanted to prolong words into the silence of gestures—to invent, as it were, a danceword—I described to him—without concealing my difficulties nor my ultimate embarrassment—the paltry little adventure to which I had sacrificed so much time. As I was describing my obstinate path to failure, I saw that he was raptly listening. In my retelling of my adventure, a drama was clearly taking shape in his mind—one in which I played no part. I fell silent. The silence lasted a long time; then I heard him softly pronounce the following sentence, as though he were protecting an invalid:
“Night is indeed our house, but not one I could ever enter while talking.”
Yano begged me to lend him my text and advised me to read two works by the Japanese novelist Kõbõ Abe: The Woman of the Dunes and The Wall. A few months later, I met J.-M. in Paris; he asked me if I would agree to allow Yano to use my Séances noires for a dance piece. I asked J.-M. to convey my sincerest regrets. I wanted nothing more to do with this text.
I saw Yano again in Besançon in December, for the second and last time. He was presenting a piece produced by his dance workshop. At the end of the performance, we spoke briefly. He interrupted himself in the midst of a conversation having to do with contemporary dance, and turned toward me. The sentence he spoke hovered between an affirmation and a question.
“What beauty in the art of falling.”
I learned of Yano’s death through friends two years later. It was only then that I opened The Woman of the Dunes and The Wall. At the end of the first short story in The Wall, this passage seemed addressed to me:
How was it possible that there was a blank everywhere my name should have been signed? Or was it that there were only things that refused to call out my name, or else refused to have it mentioned?
Further on, another sentence alarmed me, for I thought I was hearing the voice of the deceased dancer, at a slight remove:
Yes, I do indeed possess a house, but where at the moment find the “I” capable of entering it?
How to sleep after that? But the night was not alarming: I saw names, processions of names, parading along like living beings. Some of the names were speaking themselves out loud; others were joined together into a cascade of phrases. The names were peaceful, at once light and self-assured. It was enough for me to hear these names to feel absolutely happy. The absence of this dancer, who was almost a stranger and who had understood me so well, was shining like a star.
Among the names, I hear HANA—Crystal Flower of the Dance.
I also hear AS T AR T E, goddess of air and of water, white and black, fecund-fecundating.
To impart at least a bit of meaning to this madness: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. The dance is not finished; the thread drawn by the Fates cannot be broken. It weaves the invisible fabric of language, its scattered consonants and vowels intertwined, then snipped apart again, then reknotted. Yano-Hana-Crystal Flower has left his gestures, his words behind. To others, he lends the names he no longer owns.
Night—a thickness, an excess, a vanishing of light. For those who look at night and utter its name aloud, the obscurity that ensues constitutes a kind of monstrous OUTSIDE, without entry. But obscurity—at least the vision one gains of it on a clear night at the end of July—can provoke a troubling sensation. A night that bathes you in its absent rays.
In the night, all possible space gathers into itself, and dissolves. The void suddenly calls out to you, freighted with meaning. Behold me here, absorbed into the very thing that had eluded my grasp. In order to look upon the night, I need to forget its name—and this forgeting becomes the extreme form of memory, the very vigil of its origin.