Aseroë

I returned to the same place several days in a row, in the forest of Cîteaux, after having noted, between the arbor and a group of dogwood trees, lodged on a dark, broken surface, a form of Anthurus archeri. On the preceding night, its eggs had ripped through the layer of dead leaves. The soil was lukewarm. In spite of the abundance of very common species such as the peppery Lactarius, the Anthurus was growing alone, isolated from every living creature around it.

Despite the mushrooms’ obnoxious odor, I bent over the soil and cried out to several large specimens that had reached maturity: Anthurus archeri! Anthurus aseroë! I couldn’t stay long in that bent-over position—not because of the smell, but because I felt ridiculous. I looked around; then I returned to the same spot, but without bending over or uttering a word. Nothing happened.

All week long, I made my way to the site of the experiment in the dawn light. I saw the Anthurus droop, its pseudopetals (more and more ravaged and pustulant) detaching themselves from the bulb, drying up, and rotting. At the point where the most hardy specimens seemed on the verge of disappearance, already mingled with the mulch of dead leaves, I caught myself mechanically pronouncing “Anthurus archeri sensu Dominici.” I immediately tried to get hold of myself and to supply the correct name: Anthurus archeri. I wouldn’t have had the right to add sensu Dominici unless I had myself discovered a subspecies of Anthurus or even a new characteristic of the old species, a simple detail that might have escaped the experts until then. Meanwhile, I repeated “sensu Dominici.” I think I’m alert enough to avoid any error in observation; I am leery of the hermeneutic delirium that leads certain learned scholars to devote hundreds of pages to a bagatelle. No, I had to admit it: my faculties were not deceiving me. I was witness, in my innermost being and against my will, to a proliferation of names provoked by the mere presence of Anthurus archeri. Its precarious life, at the point of vanishing, was clinging to my tongue, to my bumbling thought. I could hear myself reciting a stream of terms including French, Latin, and Greek words, as well as words pouring in from other languages unknown to me.

I made my escape, and the pentecostal phenomenon of which I was the victim ceased. I stopped going to this wood until the end of autumn. But this flight wasn’t enough to protect me from a serious infection. During the week following my experiment in involuntary verbigeration, I caught myself, early one morning, copying down into a notebook lists of names that seemed to be the names of Phallaceae. In less than three days, I had written down more than 120 species, in addition to the five species recognized by Romagnesi’s analytical key. At that rate, I could have had more than six hundred new species to my credit before mid-November.

This period was a nightmare. To blacken page after page with newly coined words could only be a meaningless exercise, whether in the service of poetry or the natural sciences. But I persevered, despite myself, in this distressing task. That’s when I considered putting an end to my days, be it out of cowardice or out of the fear of the unknown.

On November 11, I got up painfully, my mind worn out by this uncontrollable proliferation of newly named mushrooms. The fungi kept coming and coming.… I had covered endless notepads and notebooks with my crabbed handwriting.

I had been avoiding going out for a week. Even the sight of my garden through my window had become unbearable; I feared that nature would answer my summons in some insane way.

If the proliferation of new genuses rendered Romagnesi’s classification system useless, I could see the time coming when entire genuses that were universally loved, such as the Boletus or the Tricholoma, would be driven out of existence by this invasion of names without things.

Early that November morning, there I was in the woods, ready to do whatever it took to put an end to this torture. I approached, empty-handed, the location of the experiment. I bit my lips so hard that I drew blood, trying not to say a thing. The ground was bare. Where the Anthurus archeri had stood, the rotted leaves had broken down into a black mulch. A few straws, swept by the wind, were scattered here and there. I bent over the soil and, without waiting for the parasitic words to spill in chaotic fashion from my mouth, shouted out at the top of my lungs, then called out softly, “Come here… close to me…. Don’t be afraid…. I won’t hurt you.”

Then, seeing the earth stirred by a slight breeze, I bent forward and, gluing my lips to the cold surface of the ground, vomited up the whole list of names.

As evening approached, I returned to my home, exhausted. I felt a great tenderness for the garden and the house. New forms of Aseroë were growing along my walls, like common dandelions. The weather was beautiful; the sun wavered in the dusk.

I wasn’t sure if night would fall.

2 Aseroë

I CAN’T GET OUT OF MY MIND what this simple word, Aseroë, has cost me in terms of risk and peril, of danger and exhaustion.

On September 20, somebody, thinking to please me, sent me a few sentences copied from a book:

For sale, bodies and voices, for sale, enormous and unquestionable riches, for sale, that which will never be sold… The salesmen have not run out of their stock! It will be some time before travelers have to submit their invoices.

Before approaching—I can already feel it—this forbidden zone, I hand over to the idolaters of little Arthur, to the zealots of the Grand Seer, to the Rimbaud Maniacs, to the street-corner Illuminati, to the worshippers of holes without rims and underlined silences, these random reflections of a purely inventorial nature:

Names	Number of Camels
Saïd Massa	5
Abd el-Kader Daoud	12
Moussa and Sanzogoda	19½
Hassan Abou Boku	1½
Djabem	1
Ali Abey	10½
Assorted People of Tadoujna	12½
Saddik Hoummedan	5
Omar Bouda	3½
Mohammed Kassem and Abou Beker Balla	4½
Boguis	1½
Bouha	1
Hoummedou and the Adaïels	13
Totaclass="underline" 90½