No. It seems to me that tiredness just isn’t right for them; they regard it as a kind of misbehavior, like going barefoot. What’s more, they can’t supply an image of tiredness, because their activities don’t lend themselves to that kind of thing. The most they can do is look “weary unto death” at the end, but we can all manage that, I hope. Nor am I able to visualize the tiredness of the rich and powerful, with the possible exception of deposed kings, such as Oedipus and Lear. On the other hand, I can’t conceive of fully automated factories disgorging tired workers at closing time. I see only big, imperious-looking louts with smug faces and great flabby hands, who will hurry off to the nearest slot-machine establishment and carry on with their blissfully mindless manipulations. (I know what you’re going to say now: “Before talking like that, you yourself should get good and tired, just for the sake of fairness.” But there are times when I have to be unfair, when I want to be unfair. Anyway, I’m good and tired already from chasing after images, as you accuse me of doing.) Later on, I came to know still another kind of tiredness, comparable to what I experienced in the shipping room; that was when I finally started writing in earnest, day after day for months at a time — there was no other way out. Once again, when I went out into the city streets after the day’s work, it seemed to me that I had lost my connection with all the people around me. But the way I felt about this loss of connection wasn’t the same anymore. It no longer mattered to me that I had ceased to be a participant in normal everyday life; on the contrary, in my tiredness verging on exhaustion, my nonparticipation gave me an altogether pleasant feeling. No longer was society inaccessible to me; I, on the contrary, was now inaccessible to society and everyone in it. What are your entertainments, your festivities, your hugging and kissing to me? I had the trees, the grass, the movie screen on which Robert Mitchum displayed his inscrutable pantomime for me alone, and I had the jukebox on which, for me alone, Bob Dylan sang his “Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” or Ray Davies his and my “I’m Not Like Everybody Else.”
Wasn’t that sort of tiredness likely to degenerate into arrogance?
Yes, I’d often, in looking myself over, surprise a cold, misanthropic arrogance or, worse, a condescending pity for all the commonplace occupations that could never in all the world lead to a royal tiredness such as mine. In the hours after writing, I was an “untouchable,” enthroned, so to speak, regardless of where I happened to be: “Don’t touch me!” And if in the pride of my tiredness I nevertheless let myself be touched, it might just as well have never happened. It wasn’t until much later that I came to know tiredness as a becoming-accessible, as the possibility of being touched and of being able to touch in turn. This happened very rarely — only great events can happen so rarely — and hasn’t recurred for a long while, as though such miracles were confined to a certain segment of human existence and could be repeated only in exceptional situations, a war, a natural catastrophe, or some other time of trouble. On the few occasions when I have been — but what verb goes with it? — “favored”? “struck?” with such tiredness, I was indeed going through a period of personal distress, during which, fortunately for me, I met someone who was in a similar state. This other person always proved to be a woman. Our distress was not enough to bind us; it also took an erotic tiredness after a hardship suffered together. There seems to be a rule that before a man and a woman can become a dream couple for some hours at a time they must have a long, arduous journey behind them, must have met in a place foreign to them both and as far as possible from any sort of home or hominess, and must have confronted a danger, or perhaps only a long period of bewilderment in the midst of the enemy country, which can also be one’s own. This tiredness, in a place of refuge that has suddenly become quiet, may suddenly give these two, a man and a woman, to each other with a naturalness and fervor unknown in other unions, however loving; what happens then is “like an exchange of bread and wine,” as another friend put it. Sometimes when I try to communicate the feeling of such a union in tiredness, a line from a poem comes to mind: “Words of love — each one of them laughing …” which isn’t far from the “one body and one soul” cited above, though in that case both bodies were steeped in silence; or I would simply vary the words spoken in a Hitchcock film by a tipsy Ingrid Bergman while fondling the tired and (still) rather remote Cary Grant: “Forget it — a tired man and a drunken woman — that won’t add up to much of a couple.” My variation: “A tired man and a tired woman — what a glorious couple that will be.” Or “with you” appears as a single word, like the Spanish contigo … or in German (or English), perhaps instead of saying: “I’m tired of you,” one might say: “I’m tired with you.” In the light of these extraordinary findings, I see Don Juan not as a seducer but as a perpetually tired hero who can be counted on to be overcome by tiredness at the right time in the company of a tired woman, the consequence being that all women fall into his arms, but never waste a tear on him once the mysteries of erotic tiredness have been enacted; for what has happened between those two will have been for all time: two such people know of nothing more enduring than this one entwinement, neither feels the need of a repetition; in fact, both dread the thought. That’s all very well, but how does this Don Juan bring on his forever new tiredness, which makes him and his mistress so wonderfully ready to succumb? Not only one or two but a thousand and three such simultaneities which, down to the tiniest patch of skin, engrave themselves forever on this pair of bodies, each and every impulse being genuine, unmistakable, congruent, and of course spontaneous. In any case, you and I, after such ecstasies of tiredness, would be lost to the usual bodily fuss and bother.
What did you have left when it was over?
Even greater tirednesses.
Are there, in your opinion, even greater tirednesses than those already referred to?
More than ten years ago, I took a night flight from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York. It was a long haul from Cook Inlet, great ice floes rushing in at low tide and galloping back into the ocean at low tide, a stopover amid snow flurries in the gray of dawn in Edmonton, Canada, another in Chicago after much circling around the airfield and waiting in line on the runway under the harsh morning sun, to the final landing in the sultry afternoon, miles out of New York. Arriving at the hotel, I felt ill, cut off from the world after a night without sleep, air, or exercise, and wanted to go straight to bed. But then I saw the streets along Central Park in the early-autumn sunlight. People seemed to be strolling about, as though on a holiday. I wanted to be with them and felt I’d be missing something if I stayed in my room. Still dazed and alarmingly wobbly from loss of sleep, I found a place on a sunlit café terrace, with clamor and gasoline fumes all around me. But then, I don’t remember how, whether little by little or all at once, came transformation. I once read that depressives can be cured by being kept awake night after night; this “treatment” seemed to stabilize the fearsomely swaying “suspension bridge of the ego.” I had that image before me when the torment of my tiredness began to lift. This tiredness had something of a recovery about it. Hadn’t I heard people talk about “fighting off tiredness”? For me the fight was over. Now tiredness was my friend. I was back in the world again and even — though not because this was Manhattan — in its center. But there were other things, many, in fact, one more enchanting than the last. Until late that night I did nothing but sit and look; it was almost as if I had no need to draw breath. No spectacular breathing exercises or yoga contortions. You just sit and breathe more or less correctly in the light of your tiredness. Lots of beautiful women passed, sometimes an incredible number, from time to time their beauty brought tears to my eyes — and all, as they passed, took notice of me. I existed. (Strange that my look of tiredness was especially acknowledged by the beautiful women, but also by children and a few old men.) Neither they nor I thought of going any further and trying to strike up an acquaintance. I wanted nothing from them; just being able to look at them was enough for me. My gaze was indeed that of a good spectator at a game that cannot be successful without at least one such onlooker. This tired man’s looking-on was an activity, it did something, it played a part; because of it, the actors in the play became better, more beautiful than ever — for one thing because while being looked at by eyes such as mine they took their time. As by a miracle, the tiredness of such an onlooker nullified his ego, that eternal creator of unrest, and with it all other distortions, quirks, and frowns; nothing remained but his candid eyes, at least as inscrutable as Robert Mitchum’s. The action of this selfless onlooker encompassed far more than the beautiful female passersby and drew everything that lived and moved into its world-center. My tiredness articulated the muddle of crude perception, not by breaking it up, but by making its components recognizable, and with the help of rhythms endowed it with form — form as far as the eye could see — a vast horizon of tiredness.