It is a bitter truth our travels teach!
Tiny and monotonous, the world
has shown — will always show us — what we are:
oases of fear in the wasteland of ennui!
In that line alone there is more than enough. In the middle of a desert of ennui, an oasis of fear, or horror. There is no more lucid diagnosis of the illness of modern humanity. To break out of ennui, to escape from boredom, all we have at our disposal — and it’s not even automatically at our disposal, again we have to make an effort — is horror, in other words, evil. Either we live like zombies, like slaves fed on soma, or we become slave drivers, malignant individuals, like that guy who, after killing his wife and three children, said, as the sweat poured off him, that he felt strange, possessed by something he’d never known: freedom, and then he said that the victims had deserved it, although a few hours later, when he’d calmed down a bit, he also said that no one deserved to die so horribly, and added that he’d probably gone crazy and told the police not to listen to him. An oasis is always an oasis, especially if you come to it from a desert of boredom. In an oasis you can drink, eat, tend to your wounds, and rest, but if it’s an oasis of horror, if that’s the only sort there is, the traveler will be able to confirm, and this time irrefutably, that the flesh is sad, that a day comes when all the books have indeed been read, and that travel is the pursuit of a mirage. All the indications are that every oasis in existence has either attained or is drifting toward the condition of horror.
One of the most vivid images of illness I can recall is of a guy whose name I’ve forgotten, a New York artist who worked in the space between begging and the avant-garde, between the adepts of fist-fucking and the modern-day mendicants. One night, years ago, very late, when the TV audience had dwindled to me, I saw him in a documentary. He was an extreme masochist, and extracted the raw materials of his art from his proclivity or fate or incurable vice. Half actor, half painter. As I remember, he wasn’t very tall and he was going bald. He filmed his experiments: scenes or dramatizations of pain. Pain that grew more and more intense, and sometimes brought the artist to the brink of death. One day, after a routine visit to the hospital, they tell him he has a fatal illness. At first he is surprised. But the surprise doesn’t last long. Almost straightaway, the guy begins to film his final performance, which, as opposed to the earlier ones, turns out to be admirably restrained, at least at the start. He seems calm and, above all, subdued, as if he had ceased to believe in the effectiveness of wild gestures and overacting. We see him, for example, on a bicycle, pedaling along a kind of seaside boulevard — it must be Coney Island — then sitting on a breakwater, reminiscing about unrelated scenes from his childhood and adolescence while he looks at the ocean and occasionally throws a sidelong glance at the camera. His voice and expression are neither cold nor warm. He doesn’t sound like an alien, or a man desperately hiding under his bed with his eyes shut tight. Perhaps he has the voice, and the expression, of a blind man, but if so, it is clearly the voice of a blind man addressing himself to the blind. I wouldn’t say that he has serenely accepted his fate or resolved to resist it with all his strength, what I would say is that he is a man who is utterly indifferent to his fate. The final scenes take place in the hospital. The guy knows he won’t be getting out of there alive; he knows that death is the only thing left, but he still looks at the camera, whose function is to document this final performance. And only at this point does the sleepless viewer realize that there are in fact two cameras, and two films: the documentary that he is watching on television, a French or German production, and the documentary recording the performance, which will follow the artist whose name I’ve forgotten or never knew right up to the moment of his death, the documentary that he is directing, with an iron hand or an iron gaze, from his procrustean bed. That’s how it is. A voice, the voice of the French or German narrator, says goodbye to the New Yorker, and then, when the screen has faded to black, pronounces the date of his death, a few weeks later. The pain artist’s documentary, however, follows the dying step by step, but we don’t see that, we can only imagine it, or let the image fade to black and read the clinical date of his death, because if we watched, if we saw, it would be unbearable.
Between the vast deserts of boredom and the not-so-scarce oases of horror, there is, however, a third option, or perhaps a delusion, which Baudelaire indicates in the following lines:
Once we have burned our brains out, we can plunge
to Hell or Heaven — any abyss will do—
deep in the Unknown to find the new!
That final line, deep in the Unknown to find the new, is art’s paltry flag pitting itself against the horror that adds to horror without making a substantial difference, just as one infinity added to another produces an infinite sum. A losing battle from the start, like all the battles poets fight. This is something that Lautréamont seems to contradict, because his voyage takes him from the periphery to the metropolis, and his way of traveling and seeing remains cloaked in the most impenetrable mystery, so that we can’t tell if we’re dealing with a militant nihilist or an outrageous optimist or the secret mastermind of the imminent Commune; and it’s something that Rimbaud clearly understood, since he plunged with equal fervor into reading, sex, and travel, only to discover and accept, with a diamond-like lucidity, that writing doesn’t matter at all (writing is obviously the same as reading, and sometimes it’s quite similar to traveling, and it can even, on special occasions, resemble sex, but all that, Rimbaud tells us, is a mirage: there is only the desert and from time to time the remote, degrading lights of an oasis). And then along comes Mallarmé, the least innocent of all the great poets, who says that we must travel, we must set off traveling again. At this point, even the most naïve reader has to wonder: What’s got into Mallarmé? Why is he so enthusiastic? Is he trying to sell us a trip or sending us to our deaths with our hands and feet tied? Is this an elaborate joke or simply a pattern of sounds? It would be utterly absurd to suppose that Mallarmé had not read Baudelaire. So what is he trying to do? The answer, I think, is perfectly simple. Mallarmé wants to start all over again, even though he knows that the voyage and the voyagers are doomed. In other words, for the author of Igitur, the illness afflicts not only our actions, but also language itself. But while we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the new, which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.
And now it is time to return to that enormous elevator, the biggest I’ve ever seen, an elevator in which there was space enough for a shepherd to pen a smallish flock of sheep, or a farmer to stable two mad cows, or a nurse to fit two empty gurneys, and in which I was torn between asking the tiny doctor — almost as small as a Japanese doll — if she would make love with me, or at least give it a try, and (this was the likelier option) bursting into tears, like Alice in Wonderland, and flooding the elevator not with blood, as in Kubrick’s The Shining, but with salt water. This was one of those situations in which good manners, which are never redundant, and rarely a hindrance, did in fact hinder me, and soon the Japanese doctor and I were shut in a cubicle, with a window from which you could see the back part of the hospital, doing some very odd tests, which seemed to me exactly like the tests you find on the puzzle page of the Sunday paper. I was careful to do them as well as I could, as if I wanted to prove to her that my specialist was mistaken — a futile enterprise, because however perfectly I did the tests, the little Japanese doctor remained impassive: not even a tiny smile of encouragement. Between tests, while she was getting the next one ready, we talked. I asked her about the chances of success with a liver transplant. Vely good, she said. What percent? I asked. Sixty per cent, she said. Jesus, I said, that’s not much. In politics it’s absolute majolity, she said. One of the tests, maybe the simplest, made a big impression on me. It consisted of holding my hands out in a vertical position for a few seconds, that is, with the fingers pointing up, the palms facing her and the backs to me. I asked her what the hell that test was about. Her reply was that at a more advanced stage of my illness, I wouldn’t be able to hold my fingers in that position. They would, inevitably, curve toward her. I think I said: Christ almighty. Maybe I laughed. In any case, every day since then, wherever I happen to be, I take that test. I hold my hands out, palms facing away, and for a few seconds I examine my knuckles, my nails, the wrinkles that form on each phalange. The day when my fingers can’t hold themselves up straight, I don’t really know what I’ll do, although I do know what I won’t do. Mallarmé wrote that a roll of the dice will never abolish chance. And yet every day the dice have to be rolled, just as the vertical-fingers test has to be taken every day.