During the whole day that followed this encounter, I was ill, incapable of doing anything. My passionate negation of a person about whom I knew absolutely nothing caused me to throw my own well-being into question. By trying to cast this encounter into words, by trying to somehow name it, wasn’t I getting off on the wrong track? I’m not saying this out of any pretense toward artistic sensibility: I mean what I say. I am overwhelmed when I think of the final madness of Friedrich Nietzsche. I can see him throwing himself in tears upon the neck of that beaten horse in Turin. I hear these words; they stagger me:
That December evening, I sensed that the train of thought that had been opened by the Anthurus archeri—that is, by the “devil’s fingers” in the form of Aseroë—needed to be brought to a close or else to change in such a way that the words at my disposal—designating not only a very ancient form of life but also an originary lightning strike—would have to undergo a violent crisis. This time, I feared I was confronting a trial beyond my capacities. The frank indifference of the stranger, which was equal to my indifference to the hurrying crowd, did not lie at the source of my disarray. I know that our laziness causes us to simplify the faces we see. Wasn’t it I who, jostled by a passing stranger, neglected to register the details of an ordinary face, reducing it to a few summary odious features that served my purpose? I was imparting a false appearance to it—a convenient mask of Otherness.
The late afternoon of July 21 (my birthday) found me sprawled out on an armchair in front of the television. There was a very cheerful master of ceremonies hosting a strange game: the television audience, men and women alike, had been invited to create on live TV the stylized portrait of their ideal man and woman. While the women described over the telephone (you could hear their live voices) the features of their dream man, a computer recorded their votes as to some detail or another, and from this collection of desires the machine averaged out the features, which were then gradually projected onto a giant screen. The technique of the “robot portrait” (or “Identi-Kit”), invented by the police to profile potential suspects, here found its televised application. In my mind, I saw the rather handsome creature who was being here suggested: he could have been a reporter or a young CEO or the master of ceremonies himself—who did not fail to point out, in jest, his close resemblance to the media meme of the ideal man that had just been computer-generated.
Suddenly, as the eyes were finally being drawn in on the computerized portrait, I saw my passerby of December emerge from the intense light. His inhuman face, his stylized features were henceforth more than probable. I imagined the proliferation of these clones. Statistical indifference having become the norm, there was only one step left to be taken in these times of crisis and generalized panic. Only racist violence could resolve this nightmare into broad daylight. Any statistical deviation from the norm, as slight as it might be, becomes a handicap for the victim. This process of “othering” is propagated slowly and insidiously—every day a little more—and generates its own crop of wops, coons, wogs, or gooks in every city, in every district, in every family. The desire to eradicate the half-breed, the métis, to eliminate the Other from the circle of the living—an absurd but entirely realizable proposition—will express itself more distinctly over the media. How modern: to smile at the very strangers you want to eliminate.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I’ve been affected; my appearance has changed. Words, having lost their individuality, fail to express my disarray. I thought enviously of that Australian tribe that created a new word each time one of its members disappeared. Whereas with us, language under the impress of the various media undergoes an opposite fate: at each birth, another sentence disappears. Language will disappear by attrition. Already, during the night, personal pronouns suffer from anemia: the penury of nouns and verbs forces them to slash each other to ribbons. Every morning, in front of the mirror, the faces tormented by this nightly combat remake a mask for themselves. It’s vitally important to remove, as much as humanly possible, any personal emotion. Gone are distant gazes, the tentative inquiries. Competitions, stereotypes, knee-jerk reactions, sound bites, blogs, tweets, tabloids, sports, video games, and, from time to time—like the attacks of malaria every four days—hooligans from rival soccer teams going at one another, or attacks against immigrants. CAUTION: KEEP YOUR DISTANCE.
______
The nameless arcanum is not attached to the number it announces. Unbeknownst to me, it lurks within the twelve chapters of this book. Coming from without, where books are humiliated by being deliberately ignored, it already stalks a child I once loved and indirectly attacks what I hold most dear. This morning, July 21, I’m waiting for the boy in the yellow sweater, holding a bouquet of daffodils in honor of my birthday.
11
Aseroë
IF, UNBEKNOWNST TO ME, any attentive reader were to venture to gaze intently at the white page I wish to offer, if any reader were to make an effort to probe its apparent emptiness with all the passion required by an undertaking on which this reader’s life would suddenly depend, would I at last be satisfied? If my project—come to maturity some time ago—at last found its completion in the adherence of this ideal reader, then a path leading to the Other Language might finally open, a path paved with desire and longing, capable of carrying both of us into the land of the marvelous, into a never-ending story.
For some time, I have been envisaging some space to come that would be devoid of all inscription, a space where only the gaze of the other would manage to embody my thoughts, where the precise meaning of everything I had wished to say would depend on the other’s discerning eye. Such a work—immaculate, but certainly not innocent—would be empty enough and sufficiently generous to satisfy every expectation and to exceed anything I myself might have been capable of imagining while inventing this series of ineffectual little tales.
From the very outset, the project I had in mind involved the writing of a LIBER MUTUS—that “silent book” whose mysterious and vacant meaning was the only grail that ever seemed worthy of my pursuit, that unknown book that offers its pages wide open to whomever might want to approach them without losing courage, without averting their eyes from the dizzying surface where nothing lies written prior to the moment of its reading. A foolhardy project, of course, based as it is on the dream of a virgin book whose inviolate text would be released only by the act of reading and whose resultant lines and paragraphs would follow the movements of a thought process until then held captive, its pages animated only by the generous gaze of a reader prepared to see in them what no one before had suspected.
This book is very ancient—and very modern. As it makes its way ashore, it creates flecks of black-and-white foam (distant cries from the past, veiled allusions to archaic practices of kissing, of killing, of saying farewell). It advances with the whole wave swell of this past bearing it forward, its breakers rolling in with the collective crash of forgotten lives, resounding with all that is alive and joyous, all that is tragic or inopportune—the roar of the hosts of the dead, their persistent customs, their frivolous ways, their abandoned rituals, their deposed sovereigns, their trails of tears, their words of love echoing on long after their bodies have disappeared.