The author-reader-witness-hero of this book invests its words with the power to speak for all time, unwilling to shy away from what the future promises or from the eventual circumstances of their own death. This absolute knowledge lies beyond reach, for the presumptuous reader would have to agree to read the same blank pages over and over without exhausting their emptiness; the reader would have to submit to the risk of a reading that was different on each occasion, until the reader’s existence became one with the vanity of the book, which, ceasing at that point to provide satisfaction, would precipitate the reader’s fall.
The reader’s eyes will grow weary; the reader will dread this book that is without end and that bears no title. The tale, thought out and unfolded in the mind of the ideal reader, now slips away. The reader’s eyes henceforth find themselves facing blank pages, empty except for the occasional bits of crabbed handwriting in the margins—tiny tracks, filled with gaps, like cutoff sentences. ASER… wou… ang… liv… Thus translated by the reader:
ASEROË wounded angel lives.
Before the book apparently comes to a close—and it’s a big book, judging by the thickness of the volume, made up as it is of so many blank pages (or “beauties,” as the typographers call them)—a torn sheet emerges from its depths, of which only a lateral fragment remains, featuring an inner margin on which the words ang… and liv… are inscribed, as well as further phrases that nobody has signed.
We see this tear sheet, far older than the book that contains it. We hear laughter, cries, weeping, all these noises then sucked up by silence and scattered this way and that, like seeds strewn on the cold, desolate ground. There, in the night of the dead, lie models without portraits, the folly of forgotten promises, and the errant words that now and then remind us of the early sorrows of little children.
12
Aseroë
WHAT IS THE VOCATION of the dead? This crazy, answerless question would be the fruit of the ordeal that I first imposed on myself upon discovering this fragment from The Testament of Orpheus:
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…
From the first time I read this, I vowed to explore the path toward the Other Language, to discover the instructions, the passwords without which Orpheus could not have spoken to the guardians of the forbidden threshold. To bestow life upon the ellipses following the words SAY UNTO THEM, to pass through the portal without loss of life or voice—such, from the very outset, was my dearest wish. In short, to become as Orpheus, to obtain that special dispensation that would allow me to pass through life into death, singing. And what’s more, I nurtured the insane hope that upon my return journey, I would not yield to the blackmail of the lament that trailed behind me. I would not turn around before I had reached broad daylight. I would carry the Unknown Language back with me.
However mad my ambitions, I wasn’t oblivious to the dire consequences of such a project—to whose repeated failures the bemused disdain of my contemporaries could certainly be added. But what did it matter? I was not dealing with maenads. To experience failure and disdain was a small price to pay for the adventure that awaited me.
But there was a more serious objection that came to mind: “The gods are unfamiliar to you; you wouldn’t even know how to begin to invoke their favor.” And what about the inevitable likelihood that I would entirely forget everything I had seen beyond the forbidden threshold, once I returned safe and sound? And the nagging question: “Why hurl yourself into the abyss? There will be ample occasion for that when it comes to be your turn.”
Every day I would examine my blank sheet of paper, then gaze at the horizon. I scanned the faces I knew; I spied on others unknown to me. I awaited messages that might be arriving from elsewhere; I awaited a special herald bearing a sign that might arise from daily events; I awaited a lover’s secret. There was nothing: I could discover no special indication that my expectations might be fulfilled. The words that followed the THOU SHALT SAY in The Testament of Orpheus refused to appear. The ellipses remained: THE COOL WATERS OF THE LAKE OF MEMORY…. THE GUARDIANS…. THOU SHALT SAY… To say, to sing, to scream out—yes—but for whom or what? Innocence is no longer permitted once memory is involved: to refuse forgetfulness is, by the same token, to restore the stifled cries of all those millions of senseless lives whose names are now gone. Is their list on file somewhere? If so, what echo can reach back through all this irreparable distress? At most it might produce the whisper of numberless victims, a murmur of all those legions who lie discarded. And who was I to imagine myself frolicking about in happy song, playing at being inspired by logos and lyre? Once I had passed over the threshold, the song I would discover would not be divine: it would merely be the song of unheard screams, of silence.
Furthermore, whose orders was I supposed to obey in order to make any real progress? Or should I just fall silent, lest I fail? The more I reread the fragment, the more I felt myself drawn to the Other Language. I needed to respond, even though there might be no promise of an answer.
Sometimes I imagine that, in the absence of any response, all one can do is remain alone and wait. This waiting must be so prolonged that no sentence could ever fill in its ellipses. At which point it’s just possible that a reader might fall in love with Orpheus’s unfinished command and might add his or her expectations to mine, in turn stimulating other readers to respond without ever closing the cycle of questions. Thus, question after question might echo forth, all spiraling around the same enigma, caught up in the undecidable movement of the Unknown Language, ever reaching forward.
Every morning, I observe the daylight. It fills us with talk; it bears us onward. I watch the children playing around the lake; I notice the bent-over figures of the old people strolling through parks; I see three young idiots on green motorcycles plowing their way through a mound of greenery covered with anemones. The sheer joys of the present moment are enough to make one forget all one’s troubles. The ordinary words of the world come to us in broad daylight like the flames of Pentecost descending upon the heads of the apostles and it seems as if we miraculously speak in tongues. But as the daylight wanes, the ellipses of the unfinished sentence come back to me and pursue me through the dark. There I wait and listen, gritting my teeth in order not to reveal my anger and frustration. Sometimes, my vigilance weakens and I yield to the cowardice of sleep—just as soldiers are said to doze off toward dawn after having kept vigil all night long while awaiting the onset of the morning battle.
Ideally, I would have nothing to say or do. I would simply give myself over to whatever came along or to whatever sentences I might hear, even the most ordinary ones: “Go fetch some bread”, “The children are coming over this evening”, “Someone’s at the door, let me get it.” This is where the answers I seek will emerge, from the accumulation of phrases, from the accretion of inert objects that bear within themselves—like the faint sorrow on the face of a young girl—the trace of lost voices. I would learn to read the air, to decode the vibrations it transmits. I would learn how to decipher the cracks in tortoise shells or the marks on charred bones, in the manner of the ancient Chinese. I would rediscover a state of the world prior to the separation of names from things. I would learn the art of “the rectification of names” (chêng ming). I would learn forms of writing that had not been invented but that inhered in our perception of the world.