Detachment

Detachment

BY MICHEL SERRES

Translated .from the French by Genevieve James & Raymond Federman

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS ATHENS

Translation copyright © 1989 by Genevieve James and Raymond Federman. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper.oo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Serres, Michel. [Detachement. English] Detachment / by Michel Serres : translated from the French by Genevieve James & Raymond Federman. p.

cm.

Translation of: Detachement. ISBN 0-8214-0935-2 (alk. paper) I. Title. PQ2679.E679D4813 844'.914-dc20

1989 89-35167 CIP

Originally published as Detachement by Flammarion Press, 1986.

CONTENTS

Introduction by Rene Girard

Vll

PART ONE: Farmer 1. China Loam

3

PART TWO: Sailor 2. The Capehorners' Ball

27

PART THREE: Wanderer 1. Trees of Death, the Tree of Life

43

Trees of Death The Tree of Life PART FOUR: Friar 1. Stakes, Fetishes, Merchandise

65

INTRODUCTION Rene Girard

It is impossible to present in a few words a thinker and a writer who does not belong to any of the recognized fields into which our intellectual life is distributed. Michel Serres has written a great deal about scientific discovery, and yet to define him as a historian or even as a philosopher of science would not do justice to the breadth of his work. The origin of culture is one of his favorite subjects, but he is more than an anthropologist. His exquisite use of literary texts-especially the French fabulist La Fontaine who makes an appearance at the end of the present book-does not allow us to regard him simply as a literary critic. In comparison with the work of Michel Serres, much of our intellectual life looks terribly bureaucratic and stodgy. As we contemplate the enormous range of his interests, we may be tempted to conclude that he must be superficial and impressionis­ tic. This is never the case; if we read him with a little care we will see that his seeming capriciousness and his refusal to leave any trace of scaffolding around the completed edifice are decep­ tive. He always pursues a definite goal and the diversity and poetic concreteness of his examples do not make the pursuit desultory or lackadaisical. All his best readers and students agree that the idea of a workable passage between the exact sciences and the sciences of man is never far from his mind. Methodological straight-jackets can only suppress the emer­ gence of new ideas. Theoretical imperialism is stifling . . . Many people repeat these principles most piously, even turning them vii

Introduction

into some kind of orthodoxy; very few actually come up with new ideas by putting them into practice. Michel Serres does. When an idea is new it inevitably falls between existing catego­ ries and it may go unnoticed for a long time; it may even look irrelevant and silly to "serious" researchers. Michel Serres is not an author for those people whose intellectual life consists in "keeping up with the literature" in one of our constantly shrink­ ing "fields" and in believing that steady progress is being achieved simply because, as the field gets smaller, the objects left in it look larger. The present book shows us Michel Serres at his freest. It is composed of separate essays, some of which are close to a kind of controlled dream. The first is inspired by the Chinese country­ side but is also about the impossibility of historical thinking in China and its possibility in the West. Another is about California redwoods. The author imagines that the biggest and oldest tree in the forest, Sequoia sempervirens, is really a sacred monument and the product not of natural selection but of intelligent plan­ ning, the masterpiece of a culture haunted by eternity like many others, but more successful than any other in creating something truly immortal, or almost immortal . . . The four essays have an ethical and even a satirical dimension, always directed against our modern competitiveness. One is inspired by a famous institution of ancient Italy, the Nemi priesthood, which provided J. G. Frazer with his introduction and his title for his famous Golden Bough. There was only one priest and the man who aspired to the position could achieve his aim only by slaying the man in charge; in his turn, he retained office until he was himself slain, as he had slain his predecessor. Our modern professional lives often resemble the uniformly terrified and terrifying destiny of these priests. . . . Future historians of ideas may decide, at some point, that Michel Serres was one of the leading spirits in a revolution that is taking place in our midst at this very moment and is transforming our conception of knowledge. This will happen when the categories are finally created that will make his thought viii

Introduction

more predictable and classifiable than it is now. If Michel Serres lives long enough to see that day, he will be already thinking something else, somewhere else. For the time being he remains so undefinable and indescribable that to read him is as full of enj oyable surprises as it is indispensable.

IX

PART ONE

Farmer

China Loam

I regret you could not come. With you I would like to have seen these rice paddies and walked with you by these wheat fields, soybean and linseed crops. Amazed, you would have touched these mulberry tree stumps. You would have squatted beJore the water chestnuts, smiled at the reeds and bamboo-canes. You would have been pleased to see how the other side oJ the world is cultivated. Why did you have to diefifieen years ago? I missed you in Mali, on the banks oJ the Black River, where tall black women water their tomato plants with calabashes, while boatmen steer their gliding pirogues in the bend oJ the river-Jarmers oj the river-just as we were near the Garonne, just as our ancestors were Jor so long. But here in China, we should have brought along your Jather, Augustin, the lock-keeper, my grandfather. During my first exile in Paris, I had regretted his death, when homesick I wandered along the Saint-Martin Canal. I tended my yearning, talking trade with the local lock-keepers who lived in the middle oj the boulevard or under the elegant bridges, a stone's throw from the bistros. Augustin would have liked the irrigation trenches, the barges, the sluggishness oj the loamy water. His jovial passivity would have been gratified as would your delight in a job well-done. The three oj us would have understood this mingling oj water and loam oj which we too are made. These people are from the flooded plain, from the toll-gates and the store-ships, from the dikes and alluvions, farmers Jrom the wet flat-land just as our family was Jor so long. The three oj us would have opened a path to that end oj time, from where they are coming and to where we are going. Come with me Father, Jor the land. Come with me GrandJather, Jor

3

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the water. Come back both of you, for the mud and clay, to tell whether I am telling it right.

All is consumed. All is occupied, exploited, filled to the mouth, the rim, the edge. Space is pregnant. Places are full. Each section is full. Full of wheat, rice, soybeans, mulberry trees and linseed crops along the plain. Elsewhere you could say the soil is rich. Here you cannot. The land is dense, saturated, bulging, filled to capacity. It chokes. I choke. I feel claustrophobic outside. Wheat, rice, soybeans are already in themselves plenitude. No one wastes space or time cultivating what will not fill the stom­ ach. Here all is seriousness, not luxury. Fruits would be mar­ ginal, costly supplements. Here I understand why a fruit is a sin of the flesh, why sin is a lack, a fruit, a fruition. Rice and wheat are maximum assets. They exclude everything else. An agricultural god passing through this land would certainly have removed the apple trees. They take space, require labor for almost no return, a touch of sweet water which never fills the stomach. Only what yields plenty is allowed: wheat, rice. Space is given only to water. Water in turn nourishes the nutrient space. It borders the crammed places, crosses dense locations, cuts saturation. Are these canals, these lakes lacunas? No, they are also cultivated. Water chestnuts overgrow the muddy surface. White ducks glide by and eat aquatic weeds. Once in a while someone goes fishing there. Yet roads are needed. Why roads, they would waste more space? One sees everywhere inaccessible houses, farmers buried in density. Never will they join us, never will we join them. Caught, trapped inside this dense agriculture, their exit is blocked. It is a narrow path, wide as one's footstep, trodden by a procession of tightrope walkers laden with massive loads or voluminous slanted yokes blotting out their bodies. Only the necessary, the sufficient have ever endured here. One must learn 4

Farmer

how to place one foot exactly in front of the other, here and there. For on both sides of this narrow track, to the right and left alternately seedlings are planted in each footprint. The cut­ off road like a stranglehold strangles us. No path of knowledge goes to the Chinese farmers, ignored, buried in alluvion and oblivion since the beginning. Is it possible to imagine that almost one billion men are cut off from us and from everyone else, hidden behind plants whenever the pathway vanishes? Farming here floods like an inundation. I am not speaking of the act of flooding the rice paddies, but of cultivating the land. The edges of the road are sown, the sidewalks, the quasi-vertical slopes, the banks, the embankments are sown. The unarable land is tilled. Farming has covered over everything like a tidal wave. It is the totality. It is so positive, so rational, so well-adapted that one can only speak of it in negative terms. It has in front of it suppressed, prohibited, banished everything else. It absolutely triumphs with no compromise, even prevailing over those who labor for it. Never in my life was I so terrified by reason. This total occupa­ tion of the land is rational, its optimization is of the type that can be proven. Even those who pronounced that reality was rational were not able to go as far. Would I have ever believed that I, the son of land and water, one day would be frightened by agriculture? This positiveness is so complete, so compact, that it can only be expressed negatively. There is no margin, no gap, no passes, no omission, no waste, no vestiges. The fringe, the fuzzy area, the refuse, the wasteland, the open-space have all disappeared: no surplus, no vacuum, no history, no time.

In the delta and alluvial plains, the tangled irrigation ditches born from the Yellow and Yang-tse rivers and their tributaries take full possession of the area, leaving no empty space. Spread­ ing mercilessly to the loess hills, occupancy goes as far as possi5

Detachment

bIe. Down on the loamy open plain the earthbanks were low and the ditches shallow:just enough to let a stream flow. Up here, on the hills labor has carved the rugged surface. Farming Was fitted to the flat ground, shaping the contours of the land. The earth is no longer cultivated in terms of ploughing, it is also cultivated in the geographic sense. All that is assumed to be given to men else­ where: their landscape; all that is assumed to be given to farmers: their native soil, is planned here, designed, more than designed, fabricated. We, too, from Gers or Tuscany, know how to remake the skyline. We know how to make a palette of colors or curves for future painters who will copy them, but we have never rebuilt hills, cut out valleys. We have never played God, never torn up the underground. Here the farmer has been a civil engineer for millennia. His work was completed when it began; a work that we have hardly begun, since the war, since the bulldozers. He has transformed his land, in the image of Hoang-he, his God. He did not find a rational geographic map at the dawn of the world. The relief curves and steep gradients came out of his workmanship. Reality becomes rational by optimization, and its appearance is shown in the petrified frost of its alterations. Again, no possible gap exists: no flaw, no shortage, no surplus, no losses. The cut-out pattern is the best one available, the slope is optimal, the embankment does not exceed the correct height. It is no longer the plain that is filled, but rather the outer casing, the non-developed surface, the volume which are worked exhaustively to perfection. The absence of deficiency is three­ dimensional. The useless pit is filled in, the useless bump is leveled, the useless flat plane is carved. I did not know what old age meant before coming to these surroundings, I could not imagine what the ultimate was. We are undoubtedly destined or condemned to the same fate. Here the utmost limit of what we call history had already been reached a thousand years ago. What remains is the assertion of reason itself.

6

Farmer

I thought of myself as a farmer, the son of a farmer, the grandson of a lock-keeper, the great-grandson of farmers. In my family, from my father's and my mother's sides we had cattle, plants, loamy and alluvial tracts of land. I thought all farmers were alike around the world. I was secure in my belief I had seen evidence of this everywhere my ship or my language had taken me, from Quebec to Mali, from the Middle East to Per­ nambuco. I understood and was understood everywhere. It was enough to take on my father's gesture or some ancestral familiar stance. I knew that within myself were all the farmers of the world. I was mistaken. I had not seen China, where I shall never be acquainted with its farmers because the routes are cut off What I should understand is simple. Who are we? What do we do? For us westerners here are the bare facts: the little bushy grove, the boggy area, the brushwood bordering the field, the space left untilled, the little patch of land which remains un­ ploughed, the thin thicket on the hilltop which produces barely four bundles of firewood per year and where flap mushrooms can rarely be found, if by chance rain cooperates with sunny weather. What we find here is a combination of passes and misses, of losses and gains. I was ignorant until the day my work brought me to the banks of the Yang-tse River, across the loess country to the Yellow River's dikes on the other face of the earth. I was unaware that our essence was a margin, our being only a swerve. I was un­ aware that our wisdom lay in that little bushy grove, that humid low tract through which we wade awkwardly or that abandoned field with weeds and that little thicket of low bushes, all these deserted fields. I can breathe freely and fully in a field because it is bordered by brushwood full of quarrelling birds, because that field lies at the outskirts of a forest, marked by deserted areas, by spaces left fallow, badly tilled. Our wisdom consists of this negation, this disorder, this lack of culture. How can one breathe in a field without boundaries surrounded by other fields? How can any motion be possible when there are only positive affirma­ tions, when the entire land is in the grasp of reason? Where can 7

Detachment

one go when everywhere is like this? Why would one move in the realm of similarity? What is the use of roads in a space of the reproduced? However far I go, wherever I go, rice, wheat, soybeans, mulberry trees are present to the last millimeter. The Chinese are not farmers but agricultural experts or physicists. They have fulfilled the unwavering law of the best return for their land.

We are farmers. Our culture is our agriculture. I am frightened now that I know. We are destined to the same law, condemned to reason. We are rushing eastwards where fields have no lacunas. Because we will be hungry, and no one can speak out against reason, we are moving lucidly toward th� swarm of positivities. At this moment today, we are still a margin, a surplus, a swerve. I do not know why my ancestors spared these untilled spaces, groves, waste-lands. Here these empty fields were per­ haps tithed for the gods as sacrifices, left as sacred woods, black forests, margins of mystery. They were left perhaps out of sheer laziness or the impossibility of being rational to the very end. I know this residual unculture, I live in it, I work with it: it obsesses and possesses me. I never finish anything perfectly. I let go. At a certain point I leave unfinished works to chance vaguely thinking they can survive only in this condition. My books have rough edges and boggy patches in them, portions left to the gods, for chance, for life, for unlikely occurrences. This unculture is my culture. This unreason is my reason. To me a true rationalist is a barbarian, a corpse, a dead man, a flat surface. My father lived, just as all of us lived regarding our land. We would never quite finish anything, always leaving some neglected remnants. We appeared a little insane in the eye of the sensible people. How many living dead I have encountered in my rationalistic milieu! You are unreliable they said, full of harshness. I carry in me the excess, the residue, the shortage. It seems to me unreasonable to appear reasonable everywhere and always. 8

Farmer

This swerve brings time into existence, it produces it. Some­ thing remains for an upcoming project. Some day the vacant little patch of land will have to be tilled. Next year the marshland will have to be drained. We have a lot of work to do, more work than bread. My daily bread comes from the wheat field. But next year's bread, I prefer to think, will come from somewhere else. It will not be stale bread but delicate flap mushrooms collected from the thinning grove that vegetates among stones and vipers. Rational­ ity lies under my plough, my work is ordinary, but a prodigious future lies ahead in that residue: chance, my time, my history, my life. What would I do without it? Should I not live off my intellect? I would perhaps become an insect, adaptable and geometrical. We expect to have on hand the swerve, it provides time. It throws us off balance, makes us unsteady. Hence we are on the move. Hence we have a history. Ulysses went to the Mediterra­ nean Sea on the fringes of the wind. Columbus sailed to America. Then came the Far West and the adventure of science. We never stop. We run endlessly sticking our nose in the bushes with our feet in the muddy wilderness. Israel's prophets said it, when they invented history. They celebrated this surplus. We are Jewish farmers. We push goats toward the brushwood. We are war survivors living on the earth's surplus. In our ancient world, the name of this crossing of the desert is history. It proceeds from the fields to the forests.

Here in China, the swerve does not exist. There are no bound­ aries, no shallow boggy patches, no stunted shrubs left neglected. There are no losses, no surplus. There is no exception to unculti­ vated areas. Everywhere culture is under the control of reason, exploitation and law. No swerve, no time. No time, no history. For millennia 9

Detachment

agricultural China shows the end of history, the end of time an adapted eternity - the absorption of humanity into the loam. Stable, stopped, vertical, endless. Would you ever believe one quarter of the human race has, long ago, entered eternity? That such a fact is seen and lived? Indeed, they have reached their goal. Behold our end, our burial. We shall never know, my dead father and I, who the Chinese farmers are! Not only because the routes are cut off, but because my father, although deceased, and I, although wiser, both live in history, and those we desperately seek to catch up belong to eternity. Eternity is here on earth, in the earth, sunk in the loam. Politics, the stories told about the Chinese are deceitful screens, dishonest publicity, evanescent verbiage, written shields in­ vented or taken seriously by people who have forgotten or lost the loam. They did not see that everything here is made of earth: houses, town-walls and immobility. This nation no longer has a history, it happened long ago. I do not know whether formerly China ever entered history, accordingly it must have stepped out of it. Unless history is a western specialty, a cultural species like a type of cooking or a special kind of feather on a hat, the peculiar feature of those tribes of farmers who do not always cultivate everything, leaving something to be gleaned, or who have desolate wilderness, disor­ der and forests. Unless perhaps history is an eccentric singularity, our very own anomaly. The expression "the history of China" seems to me nowadays as ludicrous as the high fashions of the Kwakiutl Indians. Of what can we write a history when all the goals have been reached, when a perfect balance has been secured, when stability, adaptation to environment, the transformation of objects and metamorphosis of human beings through work have reached a rare degree of completion, thereby eliminating all other possibilities? Yes, indeed, history is certainly outlawed. History is an imbalance, an eccentricity. Well-adapted living beings have no history, for they have fallen into the evolutionary process. When reality is rational, the threat of animalistic nature 10

Farmer

is near. Pure reason leads to the status of insects gathered in bee­ hives or ant-hills and strictly to when a mongoose eats a naja. A touch of irrationality is a saving grace for us, a stroke of luck which gives us some breathing space, a loose fit in the machine which makes us alive. Life, intelligence, goodness prob­ ably came out of this free play and this lack of restraint. Leave some ears of wheat in the field for the gleaners, he said. Perhaps we shall learn one day that the most reliable machines leave room for the unexpected. A successful policy results from a distinct preference for final­ ity. The investigator's passion is to be informed everywhere, of everything, by everybody. He is a recognizable classic, who knows how to apply the good old methods of exhaustion and completion. He is a good Chinese. Labor leaves nothing behind. It leaves nothing to be desired, as the saying goes. Nowhere can any object of desire be found. No time is left. Fullness is totally achieved, the exception disap­ pears in its density, exhaustion whirls on. Everything originates there. Artificiality's triumph for instance, overlaps the land, artifacts and faces precisely. Last night, the opera puppet-doll was so exactly painted, so perfectly made-up, she simulated a ghost. Her body's lack of depth made her appear two dimensional, like a placard, a plank, a drawing on the set, a paneling on the wall. She blended in the flat scenery of the stage like a farmer in the loam. There she sang: a woman, a doll, a figure, a profile, an effigy, motionless for two thousand years. Everything originates there. Our sacred mountains, those of Oedipus and Abraham are surrounded by clouds. Goats feed upon wild bushes there. In China, the holy mount is a written mountain, entirely covered with engravings, entirely chiseled and etched with carvings. Not a square inch is without relief, statues or calligraphy. Meaning in its wholeness covers the land without any waste. What is missing is nonsense. Do not expect a miracle tomorrow. Tomorrow does not exist. The origin of 11

Detachment

time is lost in that inscribed mountain. And that inscribed moun­ tain displays the divine from the earth, on earth, in the rock and the loam. Immanence i� absolute and the gods reside here. What we call hope is absent in the mountain of meaning. Here, I understood why hope was dark, intelligence exceptional and reason with no choice unbearably heavy. At last, I understand the value of our absent gods. I recognized the destruction of the paradise on earth. Of the emperor-god and the heavenly State. Tiresome forbidden city, let me long once more for a heaven, even though I can barely conceive or imagine one. Everything originates there. You will not escape this legal confinement. No evasion from this wholeness, no disorderly movements are possible in this exact economy. We too are con­ demned to be ruled by economics, the law of the world, greedi­ ness, productivity, exhaustion. Economists will make us become exact beasts. We have almost reached that point, we are close to history's end. I see no possible escape from this lack of exception: no path, no time, no breathing space. At home a farm lies at the end of a path, which leads to other roads, highways, thoroughfares, as if we were always expecting to go out. Over here mud houses are interred in the ground. Clay houses are sunk in the loam. Tomorrow I will die of claustrophobia, of suffocation, of ratio­ nality, of completeness. My forefathers and I would have died from this agriculture. How can one escape this absolute density? We would have died from their cooking too, where everything is edible. Everything is utilized: bamboo shoots, red-cooked duck web-feet served as appetizers. Never any left-overs. Yes indeed, everything originates there. At home we only eat what cannot be discarded. And tomorrow garbage will smother us. There is truly no escape from it, when budding leaves are imme­ diately eaten, dung collected right after being discharged. Indeed, there is no margin, no time left. We would die from immobility and stiffness. How can they 12

Farmer

not die? I am mistaken. They have been immortal since their ancient history ended.

I am mistaken. I am a farmer from the plain. In the Spring, the blossoms of the fruit-trees lift them from the ground. One can hardly see their trunks a few feet from the earth. The entire flat landscape levitates in pink clouds. The plain hovers in ecstasy. Farmers in the valleys and sailors at sea, both commonly live in the open air. A small shrub, a single bush can obscure the horizon. A row of maize prevents me from seeing the entire world. The land is bracketed, it barely exists, just a tiny territory under my feet where I work. My body lives in the sky except for my shoes, hands and tools whenever I stoop. The sky is overbearing, the land absent. To my left, it rains. In front of me the yellow sun is bleeding. Somewhere behind me a storm is brewing. Different kinds of weather take possession of the space: rainbows and meteors are concurrent. I live in the immense sky, no longer paralyzed in the loamy quicksands, sunk but flying. A sailor barely sees the first wave of the sea. He lives in the wind and sky. I did not notice any chances when I went from the valley of the Garonne River to the rolling swell of the ocean. Nothing in the world is interesting except things of ecstasy. How can one escape from totality? In the absence of roads, how can one get out? A merciless agriculture becomes a shut-in culture. The exhaustive exhaustion goes from loam and loess to numbers and codes. In the realm of signs everything is made with a minimum help of ciphering, without cost or waste, loss or shortage, omission or repetition. Without exception the entire flow of numerals uses two markers: a point and a line, the simple difference of zero and one. On the level of signals, it is good Chinese agriculture, everything closes in suddenly with very little gesture, in strict economy. Yes indeed, everything origi13

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nates there. Reason crowns in both cases the overflow of wheat and rice and the overflow of symbols. One does not escape, since one flees a pathless house only to find an enclosed abstractness. Form is a prison for the head as matter has custody over the hang. How can one get out of these perfectly encircled farms? Through height. Everybody runs upwards, as we do in the plain. A little curtain of three mulberry trees blocks the view of the wide loess plateau, the rice-pool attracts the eye, again guests come from the sky. Sons of height, children of the flying dragon. Once more I understand, once more I know how they can so easily dispense with pathways. The roads across the loam lead only to places of complete similarity, blank identity and total suffocation. They might as well reside in the most-high. See the roofs. If their incline was straight and the right angle retained, your eyes would look down to the ground, that must be avoided: the line would be pointing a finger at the loam. However, at home, safety brings us back to the ground, to reality, as they say. Not here. The edge of the roof is turned upwards in a rounded curve, a runway; taking off from it, you would go in the sky in ecstasy, flying, hovering in the air. There is not a single empty space down in the loamy sands, nowhere on the ground could there be an empty nest for you, to soar vertically is the only possible direction. This flying dragon, not a fabulous creature, comes from this very land, indigenous and well recognized by almost a billion farmers, who would be dumbfounded to find out from the lips of some who read it in books that dragons do not exist. Approximately a billion dragons in the plain from Peking to Canton, will this testimony be strong enough to convince a bunch of small argufiers? They only notice workers there, give these blind fellows binoculars, and magnify­ ing glasses. Perhaps one day, they will be able to see flying dragons taking off from ramps along the roof-tiles of pagodas, sometimes stacked by three, five or seven harmonies. Yes indeed, everything originates there. It seems to me that we from the West, the people from the plain should have invented these cornered roofs and temples, since we share with the Chinese 14

Farmer

farmers from the Huang-he and Yang-tse rivers this levitational space. We do not have here anything for our archangels to lift off, no place in the air where angels can alight. Our temples stand either flat or pointed, rugged, uncomfortable, inhospitable. A plain is a rare sight here, the farmers as sons of the sky do not form the majority. Barbarians from the forests and mountains decided on our culture. Over there, I become aware of my body of the plain, the ecstatic elevation, my flight. Oh you, my brothers from the sky, you knew it already. The plain towers. Dragons and pagodas are in the sky. Roof­ corners are ramps for lifting off. Culture contemplates a land filled to capacity. Farmers are in the sky, their heads in the clouds above the plain with no place where to rest their heads, no roads allow them to get away, kite-like farmers, sons of the land and fathers of the sky. Left in the wind and the wide open space, they are the sailors of the loamy sands and muddy loess, they become masters of the .sky, or Levites. The emperor, in return, just landed, he imparts heaven on earth. The area not planted or unploughed, unseeded, unfilled, marks the trail of the sky, it's the seal of his return. Such a miracle, so rare, that this area is well worth this price. The emperor lives alone on earth totally unwieldy and im­ prisoned in the weight of his flesh, addicted to gravity, in a cone's bottom, point turned down above whose nappe the Chinese peo­ ple are flying. The valley of the kings' tombs hovers in mid-air, outside the universe like a simulated plateau clinging to an im­ mense circus of indented mountains, you gain access to it only through an avenue of colossal statues, an elevated funnel. Any space not assigned to vegetation marks the trail of the sky. On the scrolls, like vertical lanes images flutter to the cyma, the painting appears as smoke amidst leaves and flowers, multiple cornices go beyond the clouds, sometimes they reach the clouds, sometimes they do not, forming column-like icons and columns of the sky. These painted or written chimney-elevations do not reach down to the lowest point at the base of the scroll, their upper volume is so high, there is no end to the descent, do we know from which nebulous location clouds one day arise? The 15

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wise man lives in the clouds, his wall-less abode, his boat, his gar­ den with bridges and surrounding water float in the knowledge of the sky. He poses, alights in his flight, in ecstasy he reposes. Rain­ ing signs in ascending smoke stride on hazy grades, on a trail plaited with helices or spirals. Where do you come from, what are you seeking, oh you, who leave stretching marks from the zenith to the nadir without ever delineating any equilibrium? I sought the meaning of what you are leaving behind. You are saying the land is inaccessible. It is fully occupied and saturated. Even before you were born, no room is left for you. To leave traces of your passage, you have the air and the clouds where kites fly, let us build kite­ frames with small wattles. Let letters go through them, I do not see their veiled sails, I only notice their masts and the tangle of their riggings, I do not see their membrane or their transparent skin, only the wicker-work. The signs are flying in columns like vessels of the sky. A billion Chinese are holding a kite rope straight toward the sun, it is their writing. Here in the West, when we leave penmarks or brushstrokes we line them on our horizon, we leave footprints in the same manner. Our writing is horizontal, our paintings are elongated. Only our statues are standing, raised on pedestals or columns, our dead. Thus tomorrow we shall go farther, either to the far west or to the end of time, toward the end of what we call history, thus we say: tomorrow, we always lengthen our extended platitudes. Our writing gives way, our paintings are lopsided, they are topheavy. But you will go to the ultimate depth, and the far end will yield, you will go to the ultimate height, the sky is wide-open, the future has no meaning for you. Another world probably flies ten thou­ sand feet high in another layer of mist. Underneath this layer, the wiseman made his abode, his balcony, his garden, his lake, a brush is painting his character. You leave only vertical traces without setting high or low limits, proving that your steps are those of a dragon. The Chinese farmer is untraceable, if one were to follow him on a narrow path, however heavy his yoke, his steps would leave no imprints in the loam. Smaller and smaller footprints are laid down: a farmer sunk in the loam, untraceable, forgotten. We 16

Farmer

shall find him though among the acrobats, throwing himself up, flying between the kites above the heads. Crowds stroll about, stand gaping, star-gazing at the upright writing on the scrolls, at the vertical calligraphy or at the dragons, the phantoms, the tumblers, even themselves. China is flying, soaring, deserting its exhaustive loam. Proceed through the entrance wall, enter the garden and walk into a man-made paradise. What do you discover behind that wall, enclosed in midtown, in the circle of closed walls beyond the arched bridge over tranquil waters? A garden as everywhere else, laid out among rocks. It is not designed in grotesque, rococo, ro­ caille style, even though the rocks are imitations. Under their con­ spicuous shape, their hardness is misleading. They are like clouds, rounded and dappled, they rise from the ground, tattered, in rags, a paradox of the stone mist! 0 marvel, our strQll is tri-dimensional, we do really walk into the levitation of the scroll, here is the house. I recognize the balcony, the secret closed garden, the little bushes; here the river, the flat boat; over there a lake. We do not have to look for the solitary meditating wise-man, for we become he. We are going above the clouds, our mass is flying toward the sky, the entire garden levitates, glides, slides successively by degrees and stages, bewildered, lost, suspended, undulating, fragile and awk­ ward, a sinuous figure with the double curve of multiplied drag­ ons. The garden is flying, the dragon is flying, what height are we reaching now, what is behind the walls will not leave any imprint on earth, a gap in the universe, a cleft through which a soft helix flies away: the garden itself. Proceed through the entrance wall, . leave the earth. The involved course marked by stops, is simply sublime, in the precise sense that the stony substance becomes ethereal. The garden not tilled, planted or sown, does not belong to husbandry, it is its reverse, its complement, it bursts from the land straight up to the sky, it belongs to culture. Do I speak of mysticity or is our mysticism enlightened? Is there anything mysterious or divine in the act of flying, where is the miracle? Dream or phantasm born from desire? What a horrifying mediocre thought! No, it is a very natural agrarian 17

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practice common to people living in the plain, a cultural wisdom which goes with the growth of plants; we imitate the leaves, flowers and stems, an exercise commonly shared by all farmers from the Nile, the Garonne, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Ganges, the Yang-tse or Huang-he rivers. The Chinese farming space, like a garden with few rest stops, a difficult and winding course, is an outlined space filled with flying people and dragons. China's sky levitates above its loam, the sky soars above the plain. The feet are in the mud, the ankles in the water, the unfettered body is forgotten, the head reaches the sky. The air and sky continue the land and water, have spread so totally over the ground that they drive out the inhabitants. Loam, loess, silt, slime must be worked, what is left for habitation is the upper level. Those who work the land do not reside on it. They are either cave-dwellers below or dragons above in the air. They fly. The kites fly, they escape, we must hold them back. Rocks become clouds. Here in the garden substance is melting. See the doors: oval, round, complicated like locks, skew-arched orjigsawed, geometry is eliminated to make room for topology. The bricklayer dismissed hardness and stiffness to enter softness, mellowness, viscosity, variability; doors, forms and boundaries vary like clouds. The architect left out perspective, projective geometry, viewpoints, theatrical apparatus, to get inside the variable objects, directly and uninterruptedly. When clouds are rolling and metamorphosing, when they change shapes at any moment, do you think about viewpoints? Flying among clouds implies losing one's being and representation in order to hurl oneself foolishly into volubility. One does not fly/twice in the midst of the same sky. One pays eternity with instability and reasoning with varying objects.

China is caught in the universal. The agrarian way of thinking on this earth cannot tolerate exceptions, culture becomes a total affirmation, any excess is to be eliminated. Farmers, the ones 18

Farmer

who produce this culture and who are in return produced by it, find themselves involved in a sheer cycle, so perfect that they become an imperfection, a dent, a miss, a mistake. They tend to disappear. They go underground, in a hole, inside mud walls or above ground in the air. Either in the sunken loam or ecstatic, indeed either beasts or angels. The option is a rigorous one: either in ecstasy or in an ant-hill, a totally beastly adaptation or a serene wise levitation. China dwells in geometry. A simple uniform law takes posses­ sion of the horizon, its universal rule overruns without any exception the entire plain. A second law, probably the same one, draws a vertical line on this horizon. All originates from this norm. It comprises China's apparent addiction to the last universaliz­ ing ideology. In front of such a cross I am learning who we are. We are the oblique, the inclination, the angle. I am learning in front of this stability what makes us run and why the earth turns. We are offbalance, we are going to fall. Our swerve is imminent, com­ pleted, recovered, facing us, behind us; the swerve has a thousand names: Hebrew remainder, ears of wheat left for the gleaners, land's rags laid fallow, exceptions, resistance to total invasion by reasons and standards, the irrational sacrificed cursed portion, the spark of invention facing the tidal wave of reproduction, what horrifies us in front of the Chinese identity, the morning bliss of newness. At home nothing is horizontal or vertical except the dead embalmed with intellection and power. Here everything for a while still makes history, through imperfections and la­ cunas. Our pillars are tilted, we live among forests of buttresses, we only have peneplains. We are drunk with motion, drugged by perspective. Choose a Chinese object, one of those new ones which did not stir its society or its time at all, transport it to the West, whether powder or compass it upsets our systems, changes the face of our world, runs in a snowball effect, it becomes historic while over there it simply did not stir anything. As if 19

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this object moved according to the spatial curves on which it lands. Powder explodes and spreads, compass leads to the Amer­ icas. I chose small objects, multiplied by our propensities they have boundless consequences. Our history sometimes provokes great effects with small causes. Sometimes also it has great causes with small results. It depends on the angle, the compass' angle. Take a historical object: let us say an enormous system that in the West produced gigantic changes, transfer it to the East, soon it abates and slowly decants itself in the existent vertical and horizontal massive capacity for completeness and overview, it stops, becomes stable, soon it is motionless, invariable, it brings its angles to the zero position, imitating the established norm, it mimics the environment. A long march subsides. The wave's tremor born over here rides out the horizontal current over there. A long time ago an ancient history barely imaginable ended between two great rivers. Tomorrow what we call our new history will run out, flattened in the loamy loess of the Far Eastern plains. An ideology of history simply cancels itself in Universality.

Listen. I am returning to the pathways so well sown on the left and right, in alternate rows where only small feet are barely capable of passing through. Is it always advantageous to see a beautiful road in front of one's home, maintained by public authorities so that it is con­ nected to the wide world's highways? We have wished many times to be lost, buried, sunk in loamy slime and loess with no roads leading in or out, lost not only like Majorana without leaving any traces, but lost all of us together without having to map out a path. Remember he who came walking toward us on the road, remember he who introduced himself one morning at the farm gate or at the end of the field: the spot where the path vanishes into the furrow. That space distinguishes between those who 20

Farmer

move from those who do not keep pace, those in space from those on earth, the messengers from those sunk in the loam. Remember the priests. They came to make us talk, to make us tell our secrets and intimacies. It was not very serious, one trumped up stories. Remember the soldiers, gendarmes, police­ men. They rode on horses like in a game hunt to hound our sons and send them to fight wars. Remember the bankers, the salesmen who instead of talking about God and his angels or the fatherland, spoke of money and economy. Within a few centuries those who came became craftier, wilier, more rapacious and dangerous. For God, for military forces, for business. Conse­ quently we diminished in numbers. They ransacked, emptied, quashed us. As we are dying, ethnologists dressed in white are paying us a visit. They have no places where to go overseas, it seems. I envy the lack of roads in China, its dense settlement in the loamy plain, the fading of its agriculture in a thickset fixity. The C hinese farmer protects himself from history with his own resources, he farms everywhere so densely that he strangles the road. He plants in front of him and is sunk in the loam behind this abolition of passage. Hidden is a billion or so of them, impervious to history since the end of their own history. How­ ever they form an immense reserve for roaming hungry beasts ready to devour future history. They are the treasure, the human stock we ransacked in the West. All those who came, came to defend us. All loved us, all were so righteous. Politics and kings came to shield us from other kings and politics. Clergymen to protect us from evil and Satan, from wolves and our own violence. Gendarmes to guard us against bandits. The soldiers came and took our children to protect us against the Germans. They were conscientious about us for us. The militant wing of the party defended us against exploiters. There is no end to their protection. Later came those who protect us from rain, forest, hail, drought, accident, sickness, deflation, our future and old age. Economics brought a tightened host of 21

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insurers, investors and bankers. A tractor alleviates our weari­ ness, and a bank loan protects us from the fleetness of time. Now they possess the entire earth. We are ruined, decimated, dispersed, they killed us all, see we have almost disappeared, we are only a small surplus of old men and ghosts, the history I tell is a ghost story. Sometimes our names are recorded on account books, marble steles placed in front of empty tombs. Neverthe­ less they keep coming. Some of them want to register our name on books, to protect us from oblivion, to protect our culture, our ancient sport and mirth from obliteration and misappreciation. Others, others still are coming to defend our liberties. Did we ever ask them to come, did we ever entrust our defense to all these men of history? What would have happened to us if they had truly assaulted us? Perhaps they would have been a little less dangerous. We are dying because we were defended. Peace, let us have peace. Leave us alone. Allow us to die now in peace. We never knew how to seed our pathways and our road tightly, we never knew how to hide inside our wheat fields. North America has roads but no places. I mean manmade places: it is a space where one passes through. China has places engulfed in loam without even tiny paths, it is a land where one remains, a boundless place. In Europe we have places, roads and paths. At least, as long as paths which create places are not replaced or destroyed by thoroughfares.

What happened to the Chinese people that made them bury themselves and hide from history? What happened to them at the beginning? What immense catastrophe or terrible split caused them to cut themselves off from us, from their own, from every­ one by farming their land totally? From what original deluge the Chinese farmers are still trying to escape through their deluge of culture? From what primeval horror still powerfully present? I know, I see it, we lived through it, a silent horror that came upon us, farmers of the far West: it was a total suppression, a 22

Farmer

radical elimination, an eradication. Who ever said a word during that genocide? In less than forty years our agrarian space has been emptied. In our deserted hamlets our culture diCjs. Yes, I saw the deluge sweep the earth. Here, one billion men are fighting history in silence and immo­ bility: a multitude between the cracks of the alluvion and the wind of the skies. China loam.

No. I am no longer a farmer, neither a turf nor a stone breaker. My kin have been farmers from neolithic times, probably from the time farming was of stones and soil and they are still farming. I know some around me who have known how to write for four thousand years, since the stylus and calamus, wax or papyrus, I admire them, they fascinate me, and I understand why they are sometimes tired of that weight. And why like spoiled children they wish to break their toys. I understand because I have been writing for only a few years, I am catching up with lost time, I would write on walls, on earth, on stones, I feel I could even leave a mark on water. Four thousand years without writing, what can I do against this force that pushes me from behind? I even write in my sleep. Yes, I write what they did not write. As long as I shall have any breath left, I shall try to satisfy those who in my background never knew how to write nor could write. I know some around me who have read since the dawn of history and who have made history since. They were my greatest wonder when I met them shortly after I left my loam. We did not belong to history. I still remember my amazement and I am still amazed in front of their gestures and words. No, neither my kin nor I belonged to history. No. No, I no longer belong to the loam, but to writing. No, I will not write as people who write would make me write. No, I will not write for struggle. My kin who did not know nor could write were always defeated in that contest. No, I will not write for vio23

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lence wherever it comes from, neither for contention nor competi­ tion. No, I will not write to keep any pledges. Their pledges are only advertisement for themselves, for their foes. A poster is entic­ ing whenever its violence is heightened. This contract signed be­ tween fighters strengthens their power and glory, they become, they remain great, above all if some error bloodstained their writ­ ings. But, a paper matters only when filled with blood. No, I will not write with blood. The committed writer, doubly ferocious destroys and defends at the same time. No. No. I understood the billion silences, the lesson written with furrows on the loam and covered with water, plants and obliv­ ion, I understood the immobility, the refuge, the absence, the recess, the detachment, the thick and soft great wall of rice, soybeans, linseeds and mulberry trees. No, I shall never move restlessly on the roads. By a miraculous chance I left the loam. I shall not come back to it and will not, as many who do, stop at the spot where the path ends in the furrow, where the ateriole and veinlet penetrate the earth, where the pieces of life are formed. No, I will avoid the flow of parasites. I will not make noises on the pathways or canals. No. I am sowing letters and planting words, I implant.signs on lines, scattering them tightly, in front of them, and in front of me, in order to finally disappear behind the hedge. (Agri)cultural modes will make roads collapse. Nothing will ever go through the fields or paddies, their heavy vehicles will sink into the loamy holes. Beautiful cultural modes are mining the passage of the tanks. I am stepping back endlessly behind the grooves of my writing. No. I will stay in the sky, flying, slowly flying amidst clouds, between kites, letters and lakes, in the pleasant company of all the farmers of the loam. I will not turn back, I rediscovered the loam in the sweet company of my ancestors, and you, father. -So you had come, after all?

24

PART TWO

Sailor

(�

The CapeHorners' Ball

Toward the end of his life the man felt apprehensive at the change of even a few millimeters of mercury. At the turn of this century a cumbers�me hurricane had left him with almost no leeway in the sea waters of the Kerguelen Archipelago, putting his ship, sails and oars, at three degrees from the seven hundred mark, on the barometer. Who ever lived through that? When you are thirty or forty feet deep in a wave trough you no longer think of measuring, the landscape is so different. You only see the surge: a wall diverting terrifying winds from your sails at a devastating height. You get a quick uppermost view of an infernal litter of scum. My life has two eras: a time which predates a similar moment-it lasted five days-and a time which follows. You come out of it differently, changed, I do not say for the better. Since that time he had read in the newspaper the report of a bad hurricane recounting one or two millimeters less, was that possible? He wanted to find out whether it was history or gossip. He wished to know how you go through it when the situation grows worse. With the grace of God, no doubt. But whom to ask, how to get to the bottom of it? Soon, a similar instance would wait for him, it is in store for everyone of us. It happened to him. May God protect me.

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A shy little old man-he died last year-he lived in an old house in Le Mouleau among pine trees, three hundred yards from the sea. I never saw him go aboard a boat, even inside the natural harbor. He was like a cat fearful of water. The young sailed pleasure boats and loved picnic navigation. They had the appropriate vocabulary and clothing. You see them in the harbor by the hundred nowadays, never leaving it, holding a small anchor in their hands. They look like sailors even more so than the real ones, these jokers. I must say they impress me. I have always sailed large tugs over five thousand tons, I am afraid of these ping-pong balls. I am not kidding. I did experience grand pleasure boats, though. Greetings to' you my friend de Roos who forced open, better than me, the true Northwest Passage. Anyway, at his age he still climbed pine trees when a dead limb was threatening his roof or his grandchildren. A' slight wind made the mast a little shaky, in those days the boat would roll so much that the yardarms alternately dipped to the sea from port to starboard. How could he cling up there, his hands lowering the sails, a miracle? One arm for the shipowner, one arm for his life, that was the adage. What was he dreaming of, at the age of eighty atop these trees, hung like an insect atop the mast, seeing the vertiginous forest laid out to the dunes? Was he sleeping suspended in the set of the wind? Was he still on the lookout? Stone deaf, silent, he rarely left his room. Doesn't a dignified skipper also stay in his cabin? A scaled reproduction of his first schooner was displayed well in sight on the mantlepiece. Near it was the funeral urn of his daughter who died in Shanghai during the Sino-Japanese war. In that upheaval, bodies could not be transported. He read a little, chemistry and physics manuals, little or no literature. He wasn't tormented by imagination. When he died, they put in his coffin the urn of his daughter's ashes. Next year, the mingling.

28

Sailor I had the impression I knew him. I stayed with him for a long time, I waited for him to speak. You simply had to tame him. I memorized the old seaman's handbook, knots, signals, the Makaroff fender, the Hydrographic Service No. I , and other trifles. I had identified the Leie's buoy two hundred times. I wasn't quite unworthy of his silent companionship. His life had been ruptured, his time interrupted like in a dream, a fairy tale as in Sleeping Beauty. He ended up in France after the war, more than ten years of absence had separated him from his family. His children had almost become strangers, he left a pregnant wife on a wharf in Shanghai, when he returned his younger son was nearly a teenager. On one side, famine; on the other, the Japa­ nese. A strange host in his own household. An almighty master and an invited guest. I saw the continuation of The Odyssey. Was Ulysses ever happy, living with Penelope or Telemachus seized with xenophobia? A sailor always brings back the scent of Circe, Scylla and the Sirens: he can't help it. He comes from elsewhere, lives elsewhere, is an absentee. Fifteen years after the festivities of his return, the rift had remained. He still stayed in his room, didn't take his eyes off the urn he brought back: it was his sole family. Frightened by so many changes that had occurred, he failed to solder the times of his life. Perhaps he agreed to talk, to speak to me because I helped with the soldering. For him I belonged to the post-war generation, however I knew how to moor a ship with two anchors at the bow. I had drifted riding at anchor toward Port Said and I had experienced the Guardafui Cape. We would discuss indefinitely of sailing maneuvers.

Without pomposity he would recount "Frisco's earthquake, " the three hundred tons of cement carried from Liverpool six months around the Cape Horn, doldrums included. The whole load was towed with a whaleboat when strong winds were lacking. Why did he escape so young from his little village of 29

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the Gers? Never does the sea so fascinate like a glaucous eye, when it is flat and transparent. The sailing ship is set in a viscocity congealing with large patches. The oars seem not to pull through the compactness. Water is alive only when fringed, broken, painful. Frisco? Very little recollection. The Gold Rush craze? No memories. A seaman only remembers the sea. He spoke of Tasmania, the Southern Forties and the Cape of Good Hope, the forgotten seaways from before the steamboats. Nowadays who goes through there? The wind, the wind alone whirls around the ring of those free waters under the capes. A few young men go there running after fame, they pick up plastic bottles, they say. Steam, steel, paddle wheels and propellers came afterward. He spoke of Darjeeling he had seen built on the border of the Himalayas, he rushed there during a forced stop­ over caused by damage to his ship, as it often happened then; five months for repairs, the only available propeller was coming from Osaka, it took time, alone, always alone since he had left Cazaubon, alone since his feet had touched a moving deck. He would tell about pirates from Malaysia, tariffs paid when required, corruption and long pow wow. He asked: but why so few Frenchmen anywhere around the world? I answered: you know very well, to emigrate is a punishment. He added: I know. Tell me, the Kerguelen are not as high as the Cape Horn, are they? No, sir, not as high. Then believe it or not I passed through the Cape in beautiful weather, no wind, calm water, magnificent view, a cruise. The next time it was hell. The noise howled so loudly you didn't hear anything, a second silence it was. Do you understand that? A maddening stillness beyond the uproar? I understand. I too had heard it, one day.

One summer evening he scared me because of the near disap­ pearance of history. You just arrived from Baltimore? he asked me. I often go there for my work. Sometimes one leaves one's country to protect oneself a little from local hatred. He closed 30

Sailor

his eyes. The sun was bleeding in the pine trees. Tell me, isn't Baltimore at the far end of a long intricate bay? Indeed, I said, and a very beautiful one, I assure you. I don't know it, but are the wharfs still made of wood? Are you kidding, Sir? He slowly imparted his wife's parentage. Her grandfather, a merchant from Bordeaux had embarked on a sailing ship from Saint-Malo going to America, just to sell wines to these people. His letters proved that he had become bored. Passionately fond of music, he longed for the concert season in Bordeaux. He returned and recounted Baltimore to his granddaughter, who confirmed its description in fine details. During an evening of August 1976, I listened to the report of Chateaubriand's journey: same ship, same port of departure, same voyage and same Baltimore. A report told by a single intermediary who had it personally hearsay. Neither my old Capehorner nor his wife were capable of deceit, literature remained foreign to them. The posthumous was speaking, two centuries collapsed in front of us, such a brief and brisk interval. I know, soon I will die. I hardly have time to love, to breathe, hardly, but I believed in history, under my feet, long-standing, stable, strong. Likewise it slips away, bleeds, cracks, I nearly saw Chateaubriand's Rene at my side: his expectations, his vessel, his race up the mainyard under the applause of the crew, the beautiful young black woman and that same light anxiety of living. The foolish French failure in America.

He had sailed even through the seaports of the Levant, from Marseilles to the Black Sea, through the Hellespont and Greece. Not only did he know the wide world, he had also navigated the Mediterranean Sea. We both liked especially the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. It almost looks too much like its painted reproductions, one would think it took its colors, its squalor, its transparency from them. It reproduces almost too much our dreams, illusions, our lost ancient times. Our Sea has three sectional boxes. Like a strong-box it has three secrets. From 31

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Gibraltar to the stiff barrier framed by Italy, Sicily and Tunisia, we have our everyday common mother. The Sea is old, like us, a slave of the barbarians from the North, it gave us birth natu­ rally. Past Pantelleria, it is our grandmother. There, seaboxes can be found already divine, deified. Who wouldn't tremble off Kusadasi, between Ephesus and Miletus in front of the givers of geometry and physics; between Samos and Patmos in front of the givers of arithmetic and the apocalypse or the Gospel of love, what would we be without this little circle barely twenty miles wide, where Saint Paul deposited certain letters? I sailed through that area, now and then, humble and grateful amidst the stupid indifference of my fellow shipmates. Luckily I came back there since, surrounded by warm and intelligent people. Beyond Crete and Carpathos which close the Greek seabox, behold our great­ grandmother, our unconsciousness. Things remain buried deep in our body like our great oblivions from Palestine and the Nile. At Port-Said, in a radiant afternoon, a sort of fakir came nimbly on board without anyone noticing. Naked except for a short loin-cloth, he was freeing doves and handkerchiefs from his nakedness, the sailors couldn't make head or tail of him. At last I understood the questions of appearance, the often men­ tioned delusive senses that exist only marginally under our lati­ tudes. My sight never deceived me, only during some impressive eastern mirages, when the nearby cliff, serving as a mark, is transformed into multiple minarets under the astonished eyes of nightwatchmen. It never happens at home. In Paris, they trust in Plato's words because they believe what is written in books, they would laugh at it in the countryside. One believes in it immediately in the second box, in the summer when the horizon begins to move. Everything is explained in the third box when fantastic visions brutally replace what is perceived. I am di­ gressmg. Thus he was sailing around the Mediterranean Sea when luck­ ily he made a detour through Algiers where he found his wife at her piano, waiting for him and for adventure. Yes, the grand­ daughter of the wine peddler from Baltimore. He just took the 32

Sailor

time to put his head under her umbrella and make an appoint­ ment to meet her in China the following year, for a possible wedding, in the meantime he was summoned to pilot to the Far East. One fine morning she left on a steamer to join him without really knowing what she was going to do there. The answer: seven children and the life of a lady. She is still living beautifully amid the pine trees, stable, light, a little evanescent, a contempo­ rary of Chateaubriand and decadent France, for breakfast she still drinks boiling water like the poor do over there. She pursues her long superb old age. No, she said, I would never have married any other man but a sailor. You are a fool, my mother used to say, sailors are never home, they keep a woman in every port, they are quiet as logs when they set down their bags, one never knows what they are staring at. They are more absent even nearby than when you are waiting for them. Nevertheless I preferred them to those little tyrants who bring home every evening the complicated little miseries of their resentment. Say, imagine a world where men would be all at sea. Fancy that paradise . . . We would scratch the earth a little, we would feed pigs and geese; occasionally we would have children, and the rest of the time would be for music. On ships, men might be remote enough from each other to forget hatred and war. And if they tried their hands at it they would sink to the bottom. The shipwreck would filter peace. See what happens to the bees which die as soon as they sting, whose bellies burst at the first jab of a sword.

She also said: I wanted a sailor for another reason. Honesty does not exist on this earth, it is not possible, not practical, never has a single truthful man ever been found. When the wind blows, the sail bends, honesty cannot be a stable position; it is not endurable, it bends immediately, lays down, quickly tugs toward dishonesty. No one resists the wind. Should you stand in its way, it blows 33

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fiercer and knocks you down. Thus the whole world turns to dis­ honesty, this rule has no exception. Everything tends to equilib­ rium. No, I never met a truthful man. Sometimes though I found a holy man. Holiness can discover means to rise against the wind, it is a stable position from the other side. Therefore honesty never belongs to this world, though holiness may be found. To be holy is to be detached. See them set sail and cast off the hawsers. God willing they are detaching themselves, they are loosening their cockle-shell. Not very many aboard, they will be dancing atop five thousand meters of depth as if pinned on top of the Mont Blanc or on the profile of the Karakorum mountains. No, they are not yet detached. See this complicated rig, these capstans, these coiled lines, these chains, ties every­ where. They know very well that when the first strong squall comes all that will fly away like a cobweb, like a ragged banner. Then another weighing occurs when the hawsers, the sails, the rigging have slipped off. God willing for the second time. It's this time, or other times still. One never stops weighing anchor, one never stops casting off the hawsers. Which cordage shall I loosen today? Yes, holiness is to fly. I wanted a sailor for this gesture which he can do and always knows how to do with emotion. To cast off. Have you heard sometimes the sound of a horn when a ship is getting under way? That little sob in the blindness of dawn? To cast off from the wharf, the port, the city, the walls and all the stories of envious and competitive men, when one's skin shrivels in the cold, to withdraw from the earth in order to rely on the wind. I wanted a sailor because a sailor flies. He doesn't swim like a fish or an oar, he flies. Upon return he touches ground, he lands on his rivals' shores. To cast off from the shores of a river or ocean is to enter the violent peace of the winds. She was quietly looking straight into my eyes. I wanted a sailor in order to marry a saint, to have a flying husband.

34

Sailor

Listen, she said, to the adventure of the Malayan pirates. Everybody was dissuading me from sailing the small liners. Filth, time lost, money stolen, all kind of dangers. I found the small ships so peculiar though. No, I don't despise large ocean liners. I adore them. When I learned that they had disappeared, I wept over an entire lost culture. Fabulous ships-I will tell you about them another time, she said. So, one summer I took the children, how many were they at that time I really don't know, besides, I was probably pregnant. Well. Instead of the direct ocean liner, I took the coastal steamer that goes from port to port like a milkman delivering milk bottles door to door. The children were happy, they could move around, shout, run, play with sailors. A week passed, the children were masters on board having taken over the ship. But to wrong me a catastrophe had to happen. One fine afternoon, pirates came on board. I didn't see them arriving. Between you and me, I think that they agreed to share the booty and ransom with the coastal steamers. They were not very reassuring, in rags, armed, gesticulating ruthlessly and screaming ferociously. No, I am not going to tell you about violence, rape, robbery or torture as in adventure novels. The children rushed upon them without hesitating as in a new surprising game. They jump up and down with glee, amazed at their alarming garb and sinister movements. They are in their arms, on their shoulders, pulling their belts, handkerchiefs and hats. The little one had pulled a saber and the red-haired one was blowing into a gun muzzle. I perceived the flickering moment of their waiver. The free-boot­ ers were for a brief instant between carnage and laughter, massa­ cre and laissez faire, or rather between the real and the imaginary. The swarm of children almost naked, sitting on their knees, clinging to their arms or perched on their heads transformed them instantly into an operatic troop. They were ridiculous, they felt it suddenly. They understood that everything was falling to pieces in a burst of laughter. They left embarrassed, uneasy, under the outcry of the brats who wanted to keep their toys longer. Our sailors didn't dare look at us. It was a beautiful 35

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victory, one of those you don't find in the books. I never forgot that day, she said. A real thing happened, did it not? Amidst the worse battles, clashes and scuffles-God knows how many an eighty-year-old woman has seen-I have always imagined a flock of clever kids who while dispersing a fight would immedi­ ately make the warriors look stupid and theatrical, transforming their wrath and hatred into carnival masks. Or else, she said, turning around, transforming into the massa­ cre of the innocents.

The seas whose brine had not sprayed the old sailor's face could be counted on the fingers of one hand. The Aral Sea probably, and the Caspian Sea, I woulli think. However I had the advantage over him to have been in that interval between Spitsbergen and the edges of the ice floe. Then he wanted me to tell him my story. I had gone higher than he had gone low. The grey clouds, the heavy sea when ice is forming. No, it isn't a dream or a vision, as one says when one hasn't been there, it's the normal continuation between free running water and an icefield. I was telling the special fear of high latitudes. I see a definite anguish in dealing with each sea: a black one and a white one, a red one and a yellow one. Deadly green fears and terrible blue agonies belong to all seas, as you see. He had lived through them one after the other, you recognize a former sailor from his loyal shivering memories of such terrors.

Ninety-nine years of monastic life for three days of ecstasy is the sailor's lot, and so it is with the farmer, the writer, the lover. The simple holiness of the solitary anchorite. No. A full one hundred years of happiness. I no longer know how to count. I do remember well the beginning. We were dredging on outer roads, a badly neglected chain with its loops and rusted links 36

Sailor

kept the anchor down. We were stopped around the Nile's delta, it was shown by the color of the water, the windlass needed repairs. It was loose. You may well say that we couldn't do anything. From Djibouti on we had been powerless anyway. It took us half a day to break away from that confinement. The swell was becoming choppy, the wind strong, we couldn't stay tied up in that manner. We used a hatchet. We lost an entire line including its anchor. An expensive price but we had to escape. Four hours later, in the twilight, the storm indicated nine on the Beaufort scale. By my mid-watch we were already at ten. Yes it began. From there on, another world, another history, we no longer were part of this world. The Admiralty reported us lost at sea with all hands. I am still speaking posthumously. But never mind. I remained-I think­ that strange place where circumstances had thrust me .

We no longer live on this earth, ecstasy. Why? Because some­ times I walk on walls or bulwarks, because the floor rises perpen­ dicular to the horizon. It gives way abruptly, I fly. I weigh thirty tons, one hundred tons, as much as the ship, when all flows back toward me like a flood. Off-hand on earth, seating, standing, walking or scaling, I know my weight as constant. My move­ ments automatically take it into consideration. But you know the emaciated convalescent's unsteadiness, you know how much we are sensitive to the slightest variation of our weight. To a certain degree all this is mental, skeletal anchorites or fat bud­ dhas. Now, my weight, the force that keeps my feet on the ground, my strength, levity, every instant is variable, irregular, varying at random, from the impact of a solid mass of steel to the flight of an empty feather. Joy. So, one of my corporeal invariances becomes a pure inconstant, and when a thing is variable, changing to that point, you may as well say that it is canceling itself. Try to fancy yourself being able to change your age every two minutes: sixty years, childhood, maturity, in37

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fancy. What a unique rapture, and if that were eternity? Imagine you could change your size as fast and as brutally, lengthwise, breathwise, giantlike or dwarflike. What fabulous worlds would you see? It is believed that the wild sea changes the trihedral perception of height, width, length. In fact it does change: up, down, and out of sight. What it really changes is the weighty relationship of things. What creates the foundation of our main­ stay is that leaden pillar passing through the arch of our legs. We no longer live on this earth, our base is ruptured. Ecstasy. Archimedes, dripping wet and naked, came out of his bath, ran through the streets of Syracuse, shouting: I have found it. He had felt the force pulling him from under the water, the one that prevents you from drowning and lets you float, the improbable vertical arrow that brings you back to the lurch. He had discovered the only worthy idea, the gracious idea of moving water. The new idea is directed from bottom to top. Archimedes, naked, flies very high above a sunken Syracuse. Poor Newton, poor trifle, poor foot-soldier, poor force that stumbles and falls, our world is oblivious to water, the earth's gravity and the sea's grace. I navigate above a glaucous translucence, six thousand meters from earth. Forget water for a moment, and see how we fly. Archimedes swam over water a thousand feet deep. No, sailors do not live on this earth. The clipper is pierced with an arrow flying upward. The bow of the legs sustains it, vibrating, erect, stretched, ready to fly away, incorporeal. My old parent, the sailor, is hovering, clinging atop his pine tree, bird-like.

When I met him he had an insurance business, sometimes misfortune has a sense of humor. He had come back penniless from I know not where, to his childhood niche and he needed to make an earthly living. He wasn't bored in his little nook, but he was sumptuously incompetent in paper matters. It was the era when parasites were proliferating by multiplying administrative

Sailor

constraints, no one yet saw that this flood would bring them to supreme power. Like everyone else he was surprised by the surge, by that frantic hunger for security. They came to him for insuring themselves against bad weather, he signed contracts without blinking his blue eyes. He sold his business full of paradoxes, to conform to his children's advice, when his losses had gone beyond reason. After that I saw him become still. He had spent in eighty years all that a living body is capable of drive, flight, flexibility, adaptability, mobility, only permanence was left to him. He began to consume his untouched capital of eter­ nity. I believe he had a gigantic reserve in store. Only those who have sailed the seven seas have that ponderous cogency of stability.

One morning he came out of his room, asked to be driven to Bordeaux. It was an event after ten years of seclusion. He was pointing to a newspaper. An evening for the Capehorners was announced for that very day in capital letters, a band, a ball, a buffet, performers, a big party at the Grand-Theatre. He was a little surprised about it. He had sailed around the three capes in his youth, he was ninety years old, but it was a ball for centenari­ ans, he said. So-and-so I knew is dead, also this one, and that one. I thought myself a living corpse. Prepare the car, he said, I want to see for myself. I will perhaps know tonight who saw and lived through the millimeter of mercury I missed. True or false, which ship passed through that hole, at last, I will know the answer to that question. Which captain, a man f::om Bordeaux perhaps, who knows . . . It was raining that evening, his daughter-in-law told me. Again he came out of his room, beaming, wearing an immaculate starched white collar, black tie, glittering patent shoes; only his navy blue suit, a little worn out, had a strong odor of moth balls, he looked fifteen to thirty years younger. Grand old gentlemen have such remissions, I knew some in love who seemed almost 39

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adolescent, shy, reserved, leaning a bit toward the future. He had perfumed his white handkerchief. All the family members who had just finished dinner, looked at him as if they saw him for the first time. Like the Resurrected. It rained all through the trip. Firm-eyed he sat before the windshield wipers that were singing softly; he didn't say any­ thing, he smiled in rapture. He was jubilant, he filled the space around him with compact joy. No, he was not simply coming back to his youth, he was overcoming everything in addition. In Bordeaux they were going to ask him questions, toast him with champagne, question him on the legendary sea-waters. He was coming back, he was bearing down on them, he had subdued insurmountable hurricanes, he had recognized rocks outside the sailing courses, he knew nonhydrographic details. Since he had sailed everywhere, he embodied the living memory of the world. Behold, tonight it was his hour of recognition. He deserved it. He had never gotten it. It had come. The car stops short at the foot of the steps. He steps out. He goes up quickly, he flies. He is in front of the illuminated doors. From the outside one hears the sounds of the orchestra. One hundred longnecked girls in light long dresses pass behind the glass door. The apotheosis with flowers is being prepared. Two polite young men standing on either side of the door. Sir? Good evening. Do you have your card? What card? Well, my dear Sir, your Capehorner's card! I don't have that paper but I am a Capehorner. Who can tell? How do we know, if you don't have a card? No, you cannot come in. He goes down the steps slowly in the rain. The car takes him home. No, he did not die of it.

The young men, after a boat ride at sea with the girls, continue to dance under the long banderole honoring the Capehorners.

PART TH R E E

Wanderer

' &"

Trees of Death, The Tree of Life

Trees of Death

I barely dream more than once or twice a year, my nights are dark, my days full of meaning, I only dream in the middle of the day, I dream by trade, laborer, artisan, goldsmith. However one rare night, I did dream I was in a forest, it was, I recall, in India, I was walking amidst gigantic trees and suddenly I found myself in front of an enormous tree trunk. It divided its space in all directions, each branch, each ramification ending with an animal, a lion, a bear or a leopard. That single tree was in itself a forest of tigers, giraffes, pandas and wolves. There were many wild beasts, all very mighty and powerful. Each tree limb sprouted forth to become the backbone of an animal. Each moved a little, while remaining linked, since its body, from the bottom or from the back, identified with the timber of the tree. It was terrifying, hideous like Medusa's head bristling with snakes, the entire hair of this fleshy flaming bush bustled, con­ torted and growled. Noah's complete Ark as vegetation came out from the earth upon the spine of that trunk. It was terrifying but very gentle. Richness, satisfaction and plenitude emanated from this plant, it overwhelmed me. Even the wild beasts arched their backs. It seems to me I always knew wood was made of flesh, and if branches did bifurcate, flesh had to change its species. 43

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This multiple assemblage of regulated madness gave me rapture, a great peaceful rejoicing. I never forgot that tree, that glowing reproductive bouquet of life. That great animal plant is the tree of the species. It is the tree of life, perhaps I found the tree of knowledge.

I do not know whether mankind dreams collectively, I do not know if there exist dreams we have together, nightmares for crowds or dreams for groups-a dream for each world: ancient Latin dreams for those who spoke Latin, Jewish dreams in Jewish scripture, French dreams for French history-Do you think a history, a culture or a language are cut out from a common tissue of dreams? Does loving someone, living with someone mean dreaming the same story? I never attempted in my dream of India-1 am not an Indian­ never attempted to remove any fruit or branch, break or take any bough amidst the proliferating foliage of my living plant. At each point a wild animal was watching. There was no reason for my hand to reach out. Yet the moving animals seemed to be sleeping, contented, gratified to return to their original branch. They seemed to be in a vegetal slumber, motionless and yet awake, in motion. Awake, sleeping, mobile, immobile, animal, vegetal. I imagine the tree growing from their collective dream, or rather them awakening from the tree's dreams. My dream summarizes all their collected dreams. From which root do I sprout? On which branch am I grafted? Behold our living flock. Am I or not a part of it? If ! extend my hand, will an added bough twist in the animated hair of the tree? IfI extend my hand, will my hand become a bough? If ! extend my hand, will my hand have to break a bough from the tree? If ! extend my hand, will my hand be crushed by a sharp fang, as a weak bough would?

44

Wanderer

If you go to Italy, do not fail to visit the Alba Mountains near Rome, and Lake Nemi. There learned wisemen will tell you a story. Near the lake is a wood, a sacred wood during Antiquity. Whoever, in former times, crossed that wood found himself suddenly in front of a terrifying tree. At any hour of the day, and probably late into the night, one could see a stealthy disquiet­ ing form, a figure of hallucination. An old man stood there brandishing an unsheathed sword, scanning his surroundings with an ever watchful eye, as if at any moment he expected an enemy's attack. The unsettled old man on the watch is the priest of the sacred wood, a priest and a murderer. The enemy he is expecting, the one he mistrusts, from whom he protects himself with unrelenting vigilance, is the man who will sooner or later kill him, who will replace him in his power, his position and his priesthood. He recently acquired this position himself paying the same price. Such is the rule of the sanctuary. Every candidate must stab his predecessor, then he assumes his function and keeps it until he is in turn stabbed by someone stronger, younger perhaps, smarter, craftier. He enjoys wearing the title of king during his precarious tenure. What crowned head has been haunted with worse dreams than this head? The position taken only through murder, is held only through murder and finally given up because of a murder. Who is the king? He who killed the king through violent death. He who is waiting to die of a violent death. Who wants to become king? Who wants to be made king of the woods? He who wants to be king must pick the golden bough before the battle. Go ahead, extend your hand, break a bough from the tree. Extend your hand then, grab it and take it. A wild beast, an armed hand or a haggard sleepless eye is watching, it is neither day nor night: a pallid dreamless face.

+=c=" I

It is said that a bough from that tree is the golden bough. He who possesses that bough conquers death. He who holds it in 45

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his hand can descend into Hades and speak to sallow shadows without fearing for himself the dead's ghastliness. He keeps the fountain of life, the secret, the essentials of life shown on the tree of life. This tree is birth and rebirth, germination in plants, parturition in women, growth in living beings, genetic heat in males-the burning delight of coincidence. The golden bough is green of springtime's hope, even in winter, red as autumn, golden as summer: it is the good life, full of goodness, the only goodness, the first sowing of all goodness. Its high unquenchable glow makes shadows recede into darkness. In front of the golden bough, with it and through it, the priest of the sacred wood fights his opponent, they fight each other unto death. Their struggle is endless, unceasing their vigil and watchfulness. Everlasting are their fragility, their anguish, their tension. One fighter remains alive to protect himself, the other lives only for the attack. They apply their life to this fatal strug­ gle, theirs is a mortal combat to take hold of life's secret. In essence, this is the struggle for life. The law of the forest, the law of this jungle, the martial law observed is a bestial silent rule: an irrational and brutish code of the origin of the species. It is the law of a myth from the lake­ shore, an illusionary rule for beasts. It is said that the king of the wood keeps life's secret, yet he spends his life fighting a deadly war. Thus the war unto death is the sought-after secret. What foolishness! The world forgets that all things are emptied of their reality through rivalry. The battle does not reveal life's secret, it forbears all secrets, the battle obliterates the world, objects, trees, it obliterates everything, including life. The law of battle makes everything believable, even the most contradictory absurdities; it pretends that living beings exist only under the rule of death and that there is life only through the rage of carnage. That desire is but a frail fluttering bridge ready to collapse under a murderous torrent of violence. Life, where is thy victory, if thou ever livest but of death? Life, where is thy secret, if it embodies thy suppression? While the king fights, replace the tree with a cardboard image, he will still fight, he will fight forever even 46

Wanderer

when the scenery has been burned. Thus, the struggle is the secret of nothing, or rather the struggle makes everything a secret. It obliterates all things, it disregards our life.

From which wood am I issued, which bough shaped my cradle? This awaking, sleeping, rejoicing, animal tree in the forest of India, this tree of animals dreaming my dream perhaps duplicates the tree of order and ramifications, the tree of genera . A bouquet of all living beings breaking out into space. The tree of darkness on the shore of Lake Nemi tells, through the remote vestige of a myth, the origin of the species. Trees of knowledge, of understanding and misunderstanding. Behold, that is the first tree of the garden of Eden. I recognize the soldier-priest awaiting and watching in the night's dark hours, a ravenous owl with immense haggard eyes widened by anxiety to see inside darkness, I see his claws full of daggers, he is the priest of knowledge. A knowledge kinglet, the precarious master of a type of learning, he occupies the territory around the tree of science, he has been controlling the area since he put his predecessor to death, who supported another theory. More educated and informed, prudent and meticulous, he now has allies, a school, other places under other trees, he holds the wood, he has lieutenants who watch his rear-guard. He constantly prepares new weapons and convincing arguments: unswerving arguments and destructive weapons. Yet he knows that sooner or later a more cunning, powerful and craftier succes­ sor will know how to kill him. The lakeshore priest thinks only of attack, considers only defense, forgets that he keeps life's secret. The soldier of knowl­ edge imagines only the position, envisages only power and power relationships, he forgets what he intends to protect, he has destroyed knowledge long ago. The struggle unto death destroys life, the battle obliterates the object of the fight, the combat for knowledge results in the destruction of knowledge. 47

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All things are emptied of their reality through rivalry. Every science is void of its truth through rivalry. You who fight for your truth possess only the truth of the contest. You who fight for knowledge possess only the knowledge of the battle. Soon, there will be only one science, the science of battles. The science of all sciences will only be an immense strategy, the space of knowledge lies in the hands of soldiery. The secret of the golden bough is being lost. The one who kept it has forgotten it since the beginning, because he was guarding it, defending it with tooth and nail, with his weapons, his vigilance and all his attention. His back against the tree, he confronts his attacker, his face, eyes and all senses strained and turned toward his opponent, the secret remains in the back­ ground and the tree becomes dry for never having been looked at. Thus, the secret of knowledge is destroyed in the know-how of the quarrel. We lost, we lose consciousness every day. We turn our back to knowledge in order to fight face to face. Nobody fights for knowledge and truth. Everybody fights for the sake of fighting. That is knowledge itself, and the only truth. The tree of life is dying, the golden bough dries up.

I came from far away, from a dream, a bestiary in the forest of India, I came from the East where the sun rises. I come from very ancient times, from a myth of darkness and from paradise. What happened in the garden between two seas, of which we never found the trace? Everything was replete over there. The tree of knowledge became a dry tree. I came from a dreamed image and I come from an image narrated in former times, I am pursuing my journey, my pilgrimage, I am now near Flanders where I see in front of me the red and black image of the dry tree. Its trunk is cut off from the earth, its two main branches open a fork which is curved at the top, as a dome, an arch or a cupola, the entire arborescence forms a nearly rounded crown. Not a

Wanderer

[Reproduction of Madonna on a dry tree, by Petrus Christus. Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza. Lugano, Switzerland.]

49

Wanderer

single leaf, bract, bud, flower, fruit or joyful bough, not a single touch of green. It is all black, made of black wood. The wood is smooth, glossy, brownish on a black background, its bark is slit here and there, lips and seams like old wounds, the wooded crown ends on all sides with hard pointed thorns. The trunk is divided into two branches, a bifurcation, a fork for punishment, a cross: behold the wood of the cross. The cross or the dry tree. The dry tree is divided and curved as a crown, a thick thorny shrubbery: behold the crown of thorns. If you are standing inside, nailed to your ideas, you cannot move without tearing yourself to pieces. The tree of knowledge has become a bush of painfully fixed ideas. The petrified dry tree is waiting for its own crucified as if the author of the image knew how to carve his name there. Acerated acacia needles; acrid, acid, apertured, astringent haw­ thorn; acute angles, acrimonious as arms; acidulous, ascetic, anhydrous arborescence. A woman is standing inside the bough-like ornament of the crown, dressed in red among thorns, a virgin woman, a virgin . mother, a red-colored mother, crimson from bloodshed, her eyes lowered. An alluring chaste Aphrodite appears in the adorable alvealus, exalted with animated affection, austerely awaiting an agreement of appeasement accruing from an accepted reception.

Ezekiel the Prophet said: trees of the air beware, Yahweh humbles the arrogant tree, brings to acme the adulterated shrub, dries the burning tree, alleviates the parched tree. What happened then in the garden between two seas, of which we never found a trace? Everything was replete over there. Thorns came from comparing, dryness from wanting to be equal to greatness, de­ struction of knowledge comes from above and below, from the Most-High and Most-Base, from apogee or perigee, from alpha or omega, from battle's principles. 51

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Looking at the image I see that light does not come solely from the bloodstained coat of the red virgin, nor from the global domination of the earth now so small in the child's hand, it does not wholly come from the cradle formed by the motionless crown made of sterile thorns. Light comes also from archangels, angels, absent adjectives dispersed in the setting of the tree, flying circumstances around the arborescence. An admirable appease­ ment comes from fifteen Gothic A's, golden vowels attached to the branches, hanging like convicts or garlands-hooks, gibbets, gallows, patibulary forks. Light comes from the little wavering motion bending each initial with a slightly different angle. These inclinations reflect the brightness underneath a multiplied day­ light as if fifteen moving tableaux, fifteen profiles or planes, fifteen flickering positions of the frail bough were vibrating. These golden initial letters crowned with halos transformed the tree into a golden bough. It becomes the golden bough anew, it is flowing, sparkling with light, it vibrates, moves, rings. Its garland bough of Palm Sunday announces Easter, it is rocking, shaking, tingling, increasing in clamor and magnitude. Its beau­ tifully fringed cascade multiplies its golden initials. Hail Ann, Mary, hail son of David, hail pagan bough of life and of begin­ mngs. The painter secretly grafted the two trees together: the bough of the new Eve and the bough of the forgotten myth. Aurora: two meanings with golden initials forming an undivided rebirth. I can travel now, the green bough has returned. At last, I am able to seek immortality. I can scour the West where the sun vanishes into a golden glow.

The Tree of Life

Upright and praying for four thousand years with its branches raised like elbows to the light-if I know what praying means52

Wanderer

it has been praying, keeping vigil, motionless, monstrous, co­ lossal. I had been walking toward it for a long time. I dreamt twenty years ago that mankind was born everlasting, death was simply a mistake, we only had to locate that blunder, we had to erase our ill-will. Our wickedness comes from thinking that time can progress only through destruction, that the future lies outside decay and children were born beyond our ancestors' graves. Is this inevitable? I no longer see any difference between the nega. tive approach of the philosophers and the human sacrifices of the Aztecs tearing out a victim's heart on a pyramid so the sun could rise. They too believed that death was within time, prime mover of the world and history. Give up sacrifices, soon you will see the sun nevertheless pursuing its course. Stop plundering, destroying, killing, history will go on quietly without a blood­ bath. And later, your great-grand nephews will remember you with disgust. Forget the time, they would say to their sons, when our barbarous forefathers called history their insurmount­ able taste for corpses. What would happen if we did not assist death in its task? What could death do without us? What if death's necessity resulted only from our whims? What if what we believe to be nature's law was only a bad habit? What if death were to let go of its hold as soon as we stopped helping it? I took a plane, as usual, from New York to San Francisco, coming from Paris, rushing westward. Nothing is as beneficial to thoughtful meditation as to be confined in silence and seclusion thirty thousand feet above ground or water. The sun should be setting in two hours, but our speed is preventing it. The moon is at the zenith, I am leaning my forehead against the porthole's cold pane, silence begins in this immense quadrature. Poised, immobilized at a corner of a right angle, the moon above me is still, the sun in front of my eyes stationary: Joshua. I do not hear the jet engines, passengers come and go without talking, something has just been discontinued, I know I am suspended and flying without moving, the hubbub that accompanies ordi­ nary life is suppressed, letting one hear through its very extinc53

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tion its faded presence, I enter goodwill. How dreadful, even Joshua stopped the sun, so he could continue to heap up more of his enemies' dead bodies, so the killing could be longer and the slaughter fiercer. When peace occurs it points to the battle­ ground. Peace so seldom seen, manifests everywhere war's inevi­ table uselessness. However, in the end the sun will always set. Upright and praying for four millennia, with its elbow-like branches raised to the light, it has been here, massive and terrify­ ing, in vigil, a unique founder. I am afraid with that kind of fear my Latin tongue calls a religious fear. I know because of my terror that this giant tree is a sacred tree. All the sequoia trees in the vicinity, some just as tall seem to me to belong to the forest, this one partakes of a temple. One should perhaps be kneeling. My body is looking for a posture. The uprightness of this god induces in me a bowing pose, nearly a prostration. I know that the space enclosed by its trunk and prominent roots, on which nobody should walk, delineates indeed a sylvan protection, but mostly it defines profa­ nation. In front of its epiphanic presence, the entire forest, myself included, becomes profane. Someone is here, established in a formidable silence. Already here two thousand years ago, when our God was born from a virgin, young, unchangeable, twenty centuries old, when our God broke the laws of living. The tree is too huge not to be sacred. I do not know what I am saying when I say it is sacred. I do not know also what it indicates. I know I am fearful, but why am I fearful and of what? It seems so strange to me it should bear green branches and boughs, it seems unusual to me it should live. It carries a remem­ brance. My awe forces me to read it as a kept memento that life is preserving. Life is the workings through which time carries a summons for a form, a disposition, a meaning or colors. The tiger comes bringing on its coat spots and stripes from the core of times. Zebras it seems do likewise, so do moon-fish, peacocks, female breasts. These remembrances are much more stable than lifeless museums and our written signs. Will I know how to read 54

Wanderer

a non-written text from another history, preceding our own, from another world preceding this world? No, you said. Fear comes from seeing nature alive for once, for the first time. Raw nature is almost never seen or lived by anyone. We must run far away to meet nature. We have never seen or lived but through work, our work, our neighbor's or a foreigner's work. We transformed the face of the earth. Behold these indefinite agrarian landscapes, shaped loess-hills, moun­ tains laid out as valleys, forests of high trees opening avenues, . or wild bushes reappearing on deserted works, disease, rotten­ ness and pestilence. Our countryside becomes just another kind of city in the wide expanse of history. Nature has disappeared. But here is a high monument of primitive forests on an unhewn living estate. This rawness makes one suffocate from fear. Sa­ credness is found but in the purity of nature. See a geyser of life solidified before you, breaking away from a world without man. See the witness of a land before culture where strength explodes madly. Fear comes from seeing nature unexpectedly, elsewhere hidden by labor. I cannot blot out those who passed through this area forty centuries ago. Within a hundred days of walking or sailing, men were always waiting for us. The island found vacant is always but a deserted island. The farthest or the most exotic place is not necessarily the most natural one. No, this tree did not come alone, it came escorted like a blindman. No, this world should not be called the new world, a bare world, we were the newcom­ ers, even the nouveaux-riches in a world just as old as the one we sailed from. I think my brothers' forebears prayed here, so did some other lost forefathers who were excluded and banished by my brothers, forebears with as much cruelty as my immediate forefathers. We always distribute dread quite fairly among our­ selves. I am a monster, the son of a monster, I am the brother of my fellowmen, this thought does not comfort me. I imagine, in former times, as many men lived here as on the other slope of the sun. I believe that four thousand years ago men planted this sacred 55

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tree, it is tooJarge not to be sacred. I am afraid of human beings not things. This tree manifests an excess, a swerving deviation, an insane extravagance. I was going to say, an intelligence. A megalomaniac delirium is in this tree and its sneering betrays a human vestige. Hear the madness crying amidst a dense super­ natural silence. Nature alone does not terrify in this manner, nature is boundless, intense but not demoniac. I am not as afraid of an avalanche, a tornado or a bull, as I am worried of a strange neighbor at night, or apprehensive of those adept in lying shrewdly. I am having a dream, a dream not in my sleep but in my daydream. A heedful sharp controlled but unacceptable dream. I see how this tree was planted four thousand years ago by a society of priests. Why do I say magi, priests, I should have written scholars, but why scholars, our social characteristics are so recent, what should I say? I speak with my own distinctions, they are probably meaningless. Some folks planted this tree with their own hands, it could not have come by itself, carried by the wind. This tree has been found, discovered, invented. It has been fashioned, shaped, worked, calculated. Today we would say crossed, selected, or we could say it was a mutant tree. All this is not important, we do not have the same science nor do we have the same prejudices. The tree was planted in a sort of garden, in a hollow boundless territory, larger than the valley of the Kings or the encircled plateau where the Ming kings rest in China; these men, from the dawn of humanity, had inborn ideas regarding life. We lost the knowledge upon which they built their culture, a culture inscribed in agriculture. Behold the precise agrarian sacred space, cultivated because it was extensive. We puny newcomers were too small to quantify it. The entire valley, the entire mountain, the entire forest, the whole country is sa­ cred, land and flora included. They looked for immortality here. One day with the fulminating humility of a true intuition, they invented it. In the winding of their quest, they came across it, at a sudden bifurcation of their wisdom. They found it, they discovered it, 56

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fashioned, shaped, calculated it. I am telling as my language allows me to say it, and as my knowledge imagines it. However, there exists no dictionary going from a culture that sought im­ mortality to a culture that runs after death pushing history ahead, my own history. They looked for a durable species in the floral and animal kingdoms. They sought an individual whose patience would wear out a planet's orbit. But, until this day, animals make short blazes, even the slowest, simplest, frigid ones. They searched the forest. Perhaps they were not savages; perhaps they pierced through the forest, or perhaps they invented the forest in order to penetrate immortality's secret. They sought to perpetuate in the wood the gesture of their raised arms, their immemorial prayer. They were looking for someone who would eternally pray to their gods. Stricken with humility they sought someone who could face the gods for them, like a permanent point in time, a peaceful axis of the world, a thorn pinned inside history, a constant quietude. They were simply seeking God, like us. They found it, discovered, invented, shaped, calculated it. They became acquainted with this tree's species. They studied, observed, manipulated it, I presume. They obtained a variety whose bark resists fire, remains undamaged when tested by short thunderbolts. In front of the thundering god, the tree does not fall, it does not light a torch to answer the flaring voice. They worked at this variety. Their knowledge was considerable and their experience had no relationship to ours. Then in a sudden new flash of lightning, one of them recognizes the immortal sub­ variety of the intense vegetal. Gaunt, not believing their eyes and holding their breath, they planted it, they told their sons and nephews to be on guard near it, to become priests of the god of these premises. They died one after the other, but the tree is still here. We can forget everything when a timeless being prays face to face for us to the Lord. One can attend one's business naked in the garden without fearing snakes. I am pursuing only one idea in this dream. What if it were true? What if mutation produced an immortal sub-variety in a 57

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given species? What if it existed for any variety? In short, what if we too were immortal? We brought death into this garden, into this banquet of im­ mortality. We came like deadly flood water and we drowned all the monuments of the greatest of all human knowledge. We ravaged these forests, killed these trees, and brought back death in the premises where it had given us precedence. I am afraid. I am no longer afraid of the tree, of its colossal and pious stillness. I am afraid of myself, my scholarship, my culture and my bitter tongue. No, I am not dreaming entirely. Four thousand years ago some gifted ancestors-I did not keep track-bequeathed to us plants and animals on this side of the world, on the other slope of the sun. Today we eat lamb, are clothed with wool; my father raised cattle, we taste wheat-bread, we drink wine from the vine, thanks to their immortal genius. We keep saying they invented rurality, farmed a type of flora, domesticated certain wild ani­ mals. We never say they invented immortality. However, breed­ ing and cultivation perpetuated themselves without shortcom­ ings. Wheat never reappeared as a wild variety which we no longer recognize, lambs, puppies never run toward the woods as they come out of their mother's womb, forgetting their training. They belong to the household from birth. They have been ours for four thousand years, this result does not change although its knowledge is lost; we never learned how to domesticate any other species. We sometimes know how to train a wild animal, but its offspring, if it has one, will escape, flying away or running off as soon as it can. We train the animal, we do not train its gene, worse, we kill it. Zoo animals reproduce themselves with difficulties and rarely. As if the proximity of these new men extinguished the genetic heat in them. But what kind of death lay in our groups for these animals to be struck by sterility? However, our forefathers of forty centuries ago trained phylog­ eny. They forever domesticated the species. They formed the matrix of all matrices. They awakened their genealogy, we only know how to lull it asleep, they created it to serve them, we can

Wanderer

only kill it. A prodigious cognizance must have existed but we lost track of it. What was the aroma of Noah's first wine-vat? In our exact languages, we can say as little about it as about the great flavor of these wines of Graves, I mean last year's. We remain as ignorant before this Cabernet, as I was in front of the giant sequoia tree of my naive anguish. We lost track of these things, we are so accustomed to only recognizing regulated signs. But these vestiges can be read on the animals' body, their feathers' color, their coat markings. Therefore, I am dreaming that this knowledge must have canceled death and absurdly we want death to be life's incentive in sex and history's secrecy. This knowledge without death however came to us silently even speechlessly through rustic practices. Four times forty genera­ tions of taciturn and illiterate peasants exploited to death and taken for nothing were determined to preserve this heritage. Newcomers in what they called the new world slaughtered the Indians and repressed an ecstatic learning perhaps already lost. And new parvenus in my oId world destroyed the peasantry and wiped out its silent knowledge. Where can one decipher it today? In the desperate look of some animals, in the stare confined under the vent-hole of language, the transparent prison our gifted ancestors composed for themselves? I am dreaming: outside our knowledge there exists a learning sealed off by our very science, killed by our very language. Perhaps I should remain silent. I am dreaming: all these killings are going in the same direction, it seems. We killed peasantry and pre-Columbian culture because they carried in them a knowledge of life that ridicules our knowl­ edge and reveals it to us as a deadly one. I am dreaming: we never did stop to be ashamed of our learning. It has the stench of death's decay. I am dreaming of immortality. I am dreaming as they were dreaming. No, I am not dreaming completely. Four thousand years ago, we from the eastern Mediterranean Sea did not keep records of what some gifted ancestors bequeathed us in written signs. We never could obliterate them. We never succeeded in destroying or burning them. As unlikely as a calf forgets its grassy patch, 59

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a dog withdraws from his bondage or a genuine culture is de­ prived of its good wine, never has any human era forgotten letters or given up drawing. We keep saying they invented writ­ ing, we never say invented immortality. Wherever they opened the way, it was forever. No culture is known for having a writing and losing it. Those which do not have one, never had. Our culture, my culture, the one through which I write what I am writing here near the Pacific Ocean, my Mediterranean culture begins basically with an epic, with the inaugural song of a hero investigating immortality. He went in quest of immortality. One fine day he hit upon it, in a humble flashing of true intuition, he found it, invented, fashioned, shaped, calculated it, I really don't know. In fact, he wrote it. And it still remains here, like the sequoia tree. I do not know why, in those days under every latitude, the whole world was struck with a longing for immorality. By a prodigious miracle, they found it. They found it here, in the ceaseless reproduction of faithful rams and goats and the sweet­ ening of grapes. They found it there, in the linear print of marble and in the sequoia tree. This giant tree is responding to Gil­ gamesh, our first parent who wanted to be immortal and who succeeded in being so. I am the great-great-great-grandson of his Mediterranean quest and know that this colossus with arms raised toward heaven was planted because of a dream related to his dream and perhaps to my dream. The former remained immortal in writing, the latterfor having been planted. Did such a prodigious knowledge make mankind proud enough to want to equal God? Did such a successful undertaking make humanity deserve to be punished by flood, with the exception of wine, text and a few animals? It is said that somewhere in the world, in the days preceding the flood, the sacrificial bull was not killed, had they pity on the animal? The bull returned the favor with one hundred genera­ tions of silence and a closer relationship. Who that day decided to abolish indefinitely the death penalty for all sacrificial species? Who thought of postponing indefinitely the bloodshed? 60

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Who today will have the peaceful thought of postponing ev­ erywhere human bloodshed? Who will forever have love for their body? Who is longing for immortality? Who is seeking it, who is going in a quest for it, who is leaving home, throwing everything in the fire including sandals, knowledge and science, in an attempt to discover immortality? The day the miracle happened, the great surge of the eternal godsends stopped in Greece. They keep saying our Greek ances­ tors invented our geometry, our arithmetics and rigors, but they never say they invented immortality. However, they found it, fashioned, shaped it, calculated it to the letter. Wherever the road of mathematicity was opened, it was forever. Henceforth one does not find or lose it. It is always present like the sequoia tree. This numeral, this triangle, the proof by absurdity positively unchangeable since the beginnings of Thales, the premises of Pythagorus, grew incredibly identical as did the giant tree's form, its being, its presence, its uprightness, and bushiness. No, the Greek miracle does not indicate a beginning, but the instance when a powerful, inventive, foolishly intelligent knowledge was disappearing at sunset, in the Mediterranean deluge. Only monu­ ments are left for us. Breeding, writing, vegetables, pure reason­ ing. And this praying tree. Why do we no longer invent durable traditions? Why do we only foment revolutions lasting hardly one generation? Why do we no longer discover new know-hows cutting through time? What did we lose to allow us to enter history, this myth of death? I am no longer dreaming, perhaps I did not dre,am. We are the forewarned masters of a tremendous science, why are you speaking to me of vegetables and oxen, we are barely masters of a considerable power that would make barbarians full of pride. Our know-how rules over our cities and fields, our rivers and seas, and all populations. We shall soon be unable to consider anything outside rationality. We can cultivate deserts, jostle rocks on the moon, translate signals from far-away worlds, break particles, cure our diseases, but we also invented immortality. Neither in written signs, nor for the living, immortality on 61

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the contrary is in lifeless things. Nuclear waste that we do not know where to put will surely last more than four thousand years. What twisted, sneering, gangrened abortive human speci­ men will have the possibility to unearth these wastes in forty centuries and, for a while, dream of life, just as I did, in front of the giant sequoia tree? Upright and praying, keeping a colossal vigil, with its branches raised like elbows to the light-it is praying to some god of life which I will never know, if I still know what praying means. Perhaps today I should forget my knowledge.

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PART FOUR

Friar

Stakes, Fetishes, Merchandise

He is there, among the rubbish, crouched in his barrel, naked, dirty, silent. There, on the public square, and the passers-by make a little detour for fear of stepping on him. He pisses in front of everybody. He eats in his hand or right there on the ground whatever is thrown to him. Diogenes the tramp has abandoned everything. Dog. He lives like a dog. He barks at those who go by, the strong as well as the weak, the rich and the poor-dignitaries or effigies. Dog. His barrel is his dog-house. He is outside. He has forsaken all inside: the inside of the house, the warm inside of the group. He has forsaken society. Diogenes has abandoned everything. He doubts everything. He reduces everything to what is without illusion, without dis­ course, without style. He comes out of the solid house, takes off the woolly clothes, escapes the viscous relations, naked, alone in his barrel. He is the Cynic. Facing the sun, when it's sunny.

You must believe Diogenes more than any other spokesman of radical doubt. Do not listen to those who say they doubt, unless they have abandoned their coat, their money, their rank in the group, their little power and their mediocre glory. They only undress the words of their adornment, only separate the idea from its adventitious formation or its prejudices, and return 65

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to the hard, naked reality only in their minds, in their dreams. They say they think, but in fact they only say. Diogenes the tramp, naked like Francis of Assisi, is hungry, wanders outside on the roads and the public squares, eats what is thrown to him. He is cold and doesn't speak. He has no room of his own, no stove, he has burned coat and shoes, has no gold, has abandoned all value. He has left behind value and place. He has no place. He has loved peace to the point of risking death for it because any place in the social body, however small, is acquired with weapons. He has dropped his weapons, surrendered his place, to love peace. Perhaps he has loved the world. Francis of Assisi loves the world. He speaks to the flowers, sings to the birds, talks to the wolf. He dialogues at length with the wolf of Gubbio. I think I know what he said to him. I am writing down everything he said to him. And so the wolf-man a wolf for man, a monster who devours other wolves, other men-in order to make his place at Gubbio, the city of wolves, slowly leaves the city without turning around to look at Francis, without growling nor speaking. His she-wolf will not nurse any twins, nor will she found a city. Frigid she-woW Diogenes, crouched in front of his barrel, warms himself in the sun when it's sunny. Francis of Assisi sings the hymn to the sun. I am writing down this drama under his dictation.

He is there, in front of his barrel. He is cold, alone, and he looks around; there, on the public square, not far from the public fountain where the women come to draw water. Each carries her jug, shows off her beautiful vase. They gossip. A boy runs by out of breath. He slips between the skirts, leans over the basin, dips his hand in the water, drinks several times from the palm of his hand. With a glitter of laughter in his eyes, Diogenes reaches inside his barrel, pulls out his bowl and breaks it. The boy has just taught the dog that the dog still lives in luxury. 66

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From the mouth to the water, why this useless intermediary? Useless or dangerous? Water is water in my hand, on my lips. It is the water of my thirst and of my rejoicing. A transparent water. Let it reside for a moment inside a vase, inside a jug or a bowl, and immediately the opacity of the container's surface is visible. Water is lost. Only the vase can be seen. Made of stone or earth or silver or crystal, it has a price. Water, by comparison, has no more value. The vase is chalice, it is sacred; the water is not blessed. Soon we are going to fight, suffer for the possession of this hanap. It will become hatred among men; it will reveal their arrogance for power, or their mad race for what is most precious. Diogenes therefore forsakes the bowl for water. He forgets, wretched that he is, that one can worship water, one can fight for it, one can also sell it, make it rare.

Water or vase, any object presupposes relations among us. It exists, changes, disappears with them. Could an object truly exist without a group to recognize it, to make it, name it or qualify it? Is there ever a single object for a man alone, that's a question. The inverse question is just as profound: can a single human group exist, can there be a single agreement among a few men, without the pre-existing condition that an object exists for them? There is no object without a collectivity, and no collectiv­ ity without an object. Diogenes has abandoned everything. Diogenes, the dog, is alone. He shatters the bowl, abandons all objects, and objects abandon him. Diogenes in his barrel-tramp, vagrant, Francis­ can-forsakes all human relations, and human relations forsake him. He has left everything, he is abandoned. Living alone, does he need a bowl? Does he even need a coat? Living alone in the crystal of dereliction, does he suffer from the cold? During a harsh, grey winter night, when some boys made a snowman on

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the public square, Diogenes rises, ghostlike, out of his barrel. He drops his cloak to the ground and naked advances on the esplanade to face the statue of snow. He stands there. Waits. Naked, he embraces the naked statue. Is he cold now? He drinks the bare water in his bare hand. Was he even thirsty? He forsakes the things which screen the things of the world.

The bowl can be given away, the cloak can be sold. These things have no more value. Or perhaps they still have: they can be exchanged as gift or as damage, gratuitously or for money. If the bowl is a chalice and the coat a pallium, if the vase is the Grail and the cloth the veil of Tanit, these things, blessed and sacred, are worshiped, and we kneel before them. Whatever the value of these objects, we always fight among ourselves to pos­ sess them, to exchange them, to worship them, and fight again, but hardly to enjoy them. There are no things without these collective relations, no objects without these struggles, these exchanges, these venerations. Diogenes has left the struggle of life, this struggle to the death of wolves against wolves. Diogenes is forsaken, in peace. He has forsaken exchange, damage, gift, selling and buying, value. Diogenes is not poor if one compares rich and poor. Francis of Assisi is not assigned a place on the scale of the rich and the poor. Francis Diogenes of Assisi and of Athens has forsaken value and scale, forsaken the scale of values, the strong and the weak, the powerful and the miserable. He has left comparison, from which comes all the evil of the world. One always detaches oneself only from comparison. Diogenes gives up groveling. Don't you fear, my daughter, he says to a beautiful woman who is kneeling before the Gods, don't you fear, my daughter, that a God may indeed be standing behind you to take advantage nimbly of his omnipresence, of his ubiquity? Don't you fear, my daughter, the consequences of your position, and of his? 68

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Francis leaves society for the world, leaves competition, glory, fortune, masterdom or servitude for reality itself. Francis, a pantheist, believes this world is divine. All divine. Only divine. Objective. Water and snow, sun.

In the fury of the battle, in the circuits of exchange, on the altars of worship, objects do not remain objects. Before the marble of tabernacles or in the Ark of the Covenant, things become fetishes. In the midst of the battle's dust, things are transformed, and become stakes. In the banks, the stock-markets, the department stores, the supermarkets, the street stalls, exchange transubstantiates objects into mer­ chandise. The objects have just disappeared, assuming they ever appeared: they have now become stakes of struggles, fetishes designated for veneration, merchandise for exchanges. That's giving a price to things, spice to our relations. What would our lives be without this spice? And our world without this price? Without a price, even a dog's bowl is of no use, perhaps even a coat is of no use. Diogenes the Cynic has forsaken this price. Diogenes has forsaken the spice of life. Appeased, in rags, alone in front of his barrel, pointing to the zero of usefulness on the nakedness of his skin, he meditates and asks: can we invent relations other than those of struggle, other than those of exchange or worship? Is it possible for me to place my hand on an object, or look at an object which is not a stake, a fetish or merchandise? Roaming on the public square in the middle of the day, a lighted lantern in his hand, it is said that Diogenes was looking for an honest man. Certainly, such a man is hard to find. And I say that he was searching for a thing. I say that he sought an object. That rarest of obj ects which is neither the stake of a struggle, nor the fetish of an adoration, nor a merchandise for exchange. He was looking for the lost object. 69

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Wandering haggardly in the streets with his lighted lantern in his hand, Di:ogenes is the ancestor of the seeker of science.

He is there, among the rubbish, on the public square. Motion­ less, alone, crouched, meditating. Alexander the Great passes by, in sight of the barrel. Alexander stops with his attendants, his company, his pomp. The procession-horses, armors, the crimson cloak, the parade-as it stops makes a rattling noise. It is never fixed for very long. By nature, power passes. It does not stay. It has thousands of other things to do elsewhere, where you are not. Power is absence. Greatness harangues ignominy: "What do you want, what do you desire? My glory and my power are capable of giving you everything. " Power, the Empire, from its height, offers to the dog everything the dog craves for. "Right now, remove yourself from my sun, " answers Francis Diogenes who was warming himself in the sun. "I do not know what I want, in my body, in my mind, for tomorrow, but I know that right now, at this very moment, a black shadow has suddenly made my bones cold. Remove this shadow, your shadow Alexander, from the presence of the sun. " Baseness's second meditation: between my mouth and water, there is this bowl. I break the bowl and touch the water with the palm of my hand and with my teeth. Between the snowman and my skin, there is my coat. I throw the coat away and naked I embrace the snow. Between my body and the sun Alexander has passed and veiled the sun. Remove yourself from my sun Alexander. Between my attention and a worldly object there is always an interrupter, an interceptor that creeps in-a bowl, a coat, Alexander: a screen. A parasite comes and places himself between the subject, me for instance, and the object, in this case the greatest object of all knowledge, the sun. Seen from the earth, the sun is screened by the power perched on his horse. 70

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In the solar brightness my light flickers. A puny lantern. In the light of the sun, my gaze is frail and defective. At least, let me avoid shadows. What shadow prevents me from seeing, what parasite forbids me to bathe continually in the sun? Diogenes is in the design, the exact calculation of the shadow and of the interception. He is caught in the sketch of geometry. The shadow is always cast by the Great, by the King, by the highest possible Upper Case, dominant and capital, so high that I always live in its shadow. The shadow always spreads below the prince, below power and glory. Always. Not below a specific prince, not below Alexander the Great explicitly, but below the ladder of height itself, armed of its maximums, the animal ladder of struggle, value and prosterna­ tion, and specifically, at that moment, below the one who appears the strongest now in the relations of strength, the one most wealthy in the comparison of mercantile values, generally the one most worthy in the hierarchy of veneration. The solar design calculates a maximum. Outside the shadow one only sees the master of the stake, the most dignified fetish, the one whose eyes are on the price. Whoever seeks to think of an object or to see an object always lives in the shadow, a shadow projected from above the barrel. Between Francis of Assisi and the sun a wolf passes, a rural wolf, the local wolf of Gubbio. Francis spoke to the wolf. In what language? Who will ever know. I am listening to him. Between the dog and the sun, the King of wolves, the Great, the one who even in comparison with other wolves who fight other wolves cannot be thought greater, Alexander the Great passes and stops for a moment. Right now, remove yourself from my sun, Alexander!

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He who is the greatest sums up and assumes the parasitic chain. By himself, he is the whole network of interceptions. He is the one who dazzles me and forbids me intuition. He who darkens and cancels knowledge is never anyone else than the prince or the first one, that is to say he is the race itself, competi­ tion and rivalry, imitation, exchange and prosternation. Culture constructs the set of means which permits escape from compari­ son. Indifferent to power, disgusted by competition, culture escapes glory. The culture which makes living possible, the kind of culture which does not delight in death, which laughs at hierarchy, is never part of the race. Pitiful in its barrel, it watches the barbarians play the deadly games of competition. They no longer see things, do not know them nor do they draw benefit from them; instead, attentive to others, and especially to the greatest among the others, they only see stakes, fetishes, mer­ chandise. Crouched in the shadow of Alexander, Diogenes ap­ pears to be prostrated before Alexander, the Great Fetish. We only exchange Alexander in print, engraved on coins. We only learn about Alexander's conquests drugged with fascination by the size of empires. That's giving a price to things, or how interest was born. The transparent water, without smell or taste, the cold snow without color, this banal sun, all shine for everybody. And besides, he who has knowledge knows what has interest. We are only interested in what has a price: the stakes of heated battles, the fetishes of humiliated respects, merchandise in the current of exchange. But wait! What is interest? Our wise language says it unequivocally: it is that which resides between, situates itself in the interval. Between me and whatever is out there resides interest. Alexander, perched on his horse, intervenes between Diogenes and the sun, he is interesting. The bowl is interesting, it stands between the mouth and water: chalice, hanap, precious vase, potsherd, it moves. The coat is interesting, it floats between the snow and my skin: chasuble, quilted wrap, neither the snow nor the skin changes. 72

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Words are interesting, they whirl or rest between us. Diogenes dis­ cards the coat, breaks the bowl, remains silent. He abandons interest­ ing objects, and he asks the king to move away from the sun. Who is the king? Or Alexander? The most interesting object, the most interesting person in the world! Power is that much greater in that it intervenes everywhere. And if one becomes the greatest, then there is no place, no time where one does not intervene. Power is therefore what is most interesting. Diogenes forsakes power. He asks the king to allow the rays of the sun to bathe him directly with heat and light. Diogenes tries to erase mediation. He bridges intervals. He turns off mediums. He attempts to push aside the parasites, with his hand, with his voice. He is disinterested. Behold, he is the inventor of the fundamental theorem of knowledge. By theorem I mean that which allows us to see. Diogenes says: things to see, things to know, water, snow, sun are uninteresting. Culture and knowledge say in unison: what is truly interesting has no interest. If learned people and scientists were only interested in what has no interest, the world would be showered with inventions, in abundance and grace. Gratuitously, and without exhaustion of resources.

Diogenes, there under the shadow of the king, looks at Alex­ ander standing, the sun to his back. Diogenes mourns greatness. It seems to him that the body of the king is descending to its grave. Diogenes thinks he sees rising before him a tomb instead of a king, the Great Pyramid of Egypt which weighs upon the mummy of Pharaoh the Great; it contains and hides, buried and locked forever, his assets, his stakes or fetishes. The sun shines behind the Pyramid as if intercepted by the living body of Alexander: embalmed dead, statue in its coffin. The sun rises behind the pyramidal tomb, yes, the sun moves aside from the tomb, peaks over the summit of this perfect polyhedron. 73

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I no longer recognize Diogenes the Cynic, dazzled, trans­ formed by the sun. The whole scene changes and yet remains the same, but now it is the primitive scene of geometry. It is the day and the place where Thales saw the sun pass above the tomb and traced on the sand that very first theorem of similar stable forms by variation of size, the first exact space, the first act of science. Let greatness intervene before the sun, and the dog rests in shadow. Let the sun rise just above the summit of the king's tomb, and the wise man reads on the sand the first invented exactitude. Thales and Diogenes share the same stage: one is the theorem of Thales, first invention of geometry, the other its condition, the theorem of Diogenes, first invention of the theory of knowledge: remove yourself from my sun, let me forget your power. Thales comes here to prove Diogenes, and Diogenes renders Thales possible.

Remove yourself from my sun. If the king moves a little, if he draws aside from the direct light and from my gaze, I see the object as a sun, it floods me freely of its heat. Knowledge originates, at first, without greatness, without power, without adoration, without conquest, without value. Invention, intu­ ition, discovery, however light, happen without force, without gold, without incense. Perhaps without a place. Without Alexan­ der, science is a sun-bath. Alexander descends to his grave, and on the sunbathed earth geometry is born. It is born of the sun which rises behind the mausoleum. The sun traces theorems and graphs on the sand. Alexander descends to his grave. From the king's corpse, from the Pharaoh's mummy, fetishes, stakes and merchandise are born. The mummy itself becomes a fetish, a stake, the first merchandise, the first value, the first gold. The primordial cur­ rency which has no smell. One must forget the corpse which lies between us, among us, 74

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the king's corpse, the king's power, in order to enter into the sun'" knowledge. One must forsake the fetish, the statue, the mummy, the floating incense, the clouds of glory, the rumor of triumph around Alexander in apotheosis. Abandon the corpse, forget the fetish. The closing of the tomb was necessary in order to see the sun shine on Thales, in order for him to invent geometry. Yet it is said that never, nowhere in any region of the world, a God of gravity was ever seen. And yet, physics is born from the fall of heavy bodies, from the movement of heavy bodies. Banal phenomenon, scorned enough to be a Godless place. Everywhere else the Gods were present, protecting these places, preventing the local objects from being seen. Geometry is born in the space outside the shadow of the king, and mechanics in a rare lacuna in the emprise of fetishes: a rupture in space was as improbable as the very space of geometry. The stake veils the object, power covers it with shadow, the fetish transubstantiates it. Forsake the stakes and the idols, and irresistibly the object reappears and rises like a sun. The great inventions begin. Expelled from the market-place, from competition and from the temples, undoubtedly expelled from all stakes, from all the great debates at the Agora, expelled from categories, some anon­ ymous Greek ancestors have sought blindly, in order to subsist, a space everywhere else absent, full of impossible objects. Even­ tually, they appropriated a place without place-the pure space of abstract exactitude, this perfect utopia outside the world without which knowledge will only be laughable, only be an accumula­ tion, a copy. To be sure, no one has ever seen, touched, felt, heard nor tasted this strange non-sensible space, no one has ever experienced the curious objects which fill it, and yet we know nothing about our world without that space and without these objects. A pure utopia, the objects of the world are gathered in it. 75

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If someone seeks a space or an object outside the ascendancy of the tomb, outside the reach of power and glory, if someone seeks a place without stake, without fetish, without merchandise, if he seeks utopia, you will say of this ridiculous seeker, that he will not find a world which does not exist, that no one has ever seen a space where things gather abstractly by themselves. And yet, those anonymous Greek ancestors have seen it. They have seen it and we have seen it through them and thanks to them. And we have never gained any knowledge but thanks to this space. Since they are still anonymous, they have been chased even from posthumous glory, from apotheosis. Detached from this kind of glory, they have conquered that world, the condition for knowing. They gave birth to knowledge.

Alexander the Great lets his long shadow drag on Diogenes the dog. Ostentatiously deployed, the entire scale of greatness plunges knowledge into shadow. After the great beginning of each science, anyone could exert himself to become great in the order of knowledge. All sorts of Alexanders of knowledge could be seen taking shape. Knowl­ edge was filled with stakes, fetishes, merchandise. Instead of pursuing the glory of arms, of rank or of gold, one saw people, otherwise reputed wise, pursuing the glory of knowledge. Once again, the sciences began to plunge themselves into the shadow. The era of inventions was closed. Scientists receive from their skills only social rewards, positions, prizes, renown. At birth, their knowledge was devoid of stakes, fetishes, merchandise. Now the objects of knowledge are full of these. Knowledge is reduced to the common world, that of Alexander. Knowledge no longer makes the worker better, and the improvement of the subject no longer reveals new objects. No, the scientists see their power grow, therefore their shadow. They see their size and their glory grow, therefore their shadow. They see their treasures

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grow, their importance, their power, and the long shadow of Hiroshima stretches over the world. Here they are like everyone else, foolish, arrogant, conceited, dull, cheating and competing like vulgar kings of glory. The great shadow of Alexander once again shrouds knowledge. The work improves the worker who improves the work, each making its place in the liveliness and breadth of the other. The work which does not improve the worker is only the work of death, a shadow, a banal work, a banal glory, an ordinary plague. The world shines so beautifully that the worker who made it all week long, suddenly, one fine Sunday, became God. Recog­ nizing that his work was good, he became good in front of the beautiful world. If science was good and beautiful, scientists would transfigure themselves in the process of working with such matter, and that would be noticeable. If scientists became better, better because of their work, one would notice the sign of good work outside the shadow of Alexander. It is because science is not good and beautiful that this change does not occur. Perhaps one must invent, urgently, a new science through which the scientists can improve themselves: Come on, Alexander, remove your shadow! Stated differently though still badly: if epistemology is reduced to a logic of various methods in progress, plus a concrete sociology of groups in conflict, then science lies stagnant in ordinary garbage. Everything in it comes from power and becomes power, comes from glory and becomes glory, comes from gold and transmutes itself into gold. Contemporary science, which for a long time has penetrated the secrets, the ancient secrets of transmutation, will cover itself with historical shame in having discovered the philoso­ pher's stone backward. Everything, in the end, is transmuted into gold, but the worker remains unchanged.

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Remove yourself from my sun! If, perchance, you move aside, knowledge becomes a hymn to the sun. It is, basically and beforehand, a matter of displacing the king's body. Who has the power of displacing the king's body? No one. Who could have power over the almighty? No one, except the one who is stronger, richer, more worthy than the king, another king, or rather that very king. If he has all the power, no one has power over his displacement. The entire space is Alexander's space-Alexander who has transformed everything through the relation of order. Not the order he gives, but the one of which he holds the maximum point. How can one displace the entire scale of order? I would have to oppose myself to the king. But if I oppose him, strong or weak against strong, rich or poor against rich, lowborn or bigwig against fetish, I will camp in Alexander's space, in the battlefield; I will confirm, within their law, the relations of value and the heights of idolatry. Alexander will then rule over me just as well, the relation of order imposing its law upon me. Alexander rules over all, including those who oppose him. He is such a powerful king that he has no contradictors. To contradict the king is to belong to the king, to oppose power forces one to enter into the logic of power, to contest wealth imposes arithmetic of accounting, to destroy idols causes one to enter into the sacred. If I win this struggle, I lose for having accepted the relation of order, and in lose, I lose. I place myself in the space already divided between the vanquished and the triumphant conquerors. Alexander is truly named the Great be­ cause he governs everywhere: from Macedonia to the River Ganges, as well as on the little public square. In the entire space of actions, behaviors, transactions and intentions. Catastrophe! He invades all of space, Europe and Asia, near me and far from me. He occupies the space I myself occupy, and the space occupied by the sun: the entire design from Alexander to Diogenes, plus the entire margin flooded by sunlight. He has invaded the sun. He is Sun-King. Foolishly intelligent, he occupies my scheming soul and my place.

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Cunning strategist, he has conquered radiation-the nuclear power of the sun. He has conquered knowledge, or all the power that knowledge can give when its objects become again, beyond the stage of discovery, stakes, fetishes, merchandise. The kings's body is not reduced only to the king's body itself, but occupies volume, and reaches the sun's body. Since Hiroshima, the king has become Sun-King. He can, with a touch of his fingers, unleash solar storms. Never, never more will the Sun-King move away from my sun. He himself, in his own body, could not do it.

Has anyone ever been able to measure the thunder of Bossuet? In front of the Sun-King, in front of absolute monarchy in person, he wields in his elevated words God's thunderbolts. Lightning strikes at the feet of Sun-King. "He who rules in Heaven, " thunders Bossuet, "and to whom all empires belong, and to whom glory, majesty, independence alone belong, is also the only one who can boast of giving the law to kings, and of giving them, whenever he wishes, great and terrible lessons. " Louis the Great, at the sound of this thunder, moves aside and bows. Knowledge dwells behind him, in the Almighty glory of God. The sun here below is veiled by the Most High. The master has found his master, absolute power has found its counterpoise. In Alexander's back the sun does not submit to his power. Who, henceforth, can speak in the name of another thunder but temporal thunder itself? Who can counterbalance with a giant thunderbolt the sun's explosion at Hiroshima? Confronting Louis the Great, Bossuet forces him to move aside from the sun of justice. Has anyone ever measured the strange freedom of spirit brought about by this blast and carried by its flight? It had not happened for centuries that the absolutely greatest on earth was forced to lower himself in order to allow the true sun of knowledge and the great sun of power to shine, that the strongest was publicly indicted for being a mere understudy. No doubt, 79

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this will never happen again, we no longer have the Almighty power of the world beyond to moderate the powers of this world. And so the powers of this world finally hold in their hands the mighty force given by science: that of the sun-nuclear power. The sun falls now into the dangerous hands of hazardous, unpredictable, undetermined groups. Who today could displace the body of Sun-King? No one. No one can displace the world. I only have the power to move the body of the king in me.

Alexander covers space, from the West to the East. He trans­ forms the world into battles, into victories, competitions, catas­ trophes, into triumphs, humiliations, fortunes, profits, poverty, glory, obscurity, into power and weakness; he traces in space the lines of order, constructs the rungs of the ladder. Wherever Alexander passes, one can only win or lose, raise one's arm in triumph or be defeated. From the places where one's head rested, only those of exhaltation or humility remain. The entire space, from the sun to the barrel, is covered by this ladder. There are no paths to go around, to avoid it, to move away from it. I am seeking an absent place, a gap in my body held by Sun­ King, the eye of a needle in my scalar soul, where I would have the power to move Alexander's body.

This space has vanished. The tradition I am reporting, the scene I am re-enacting, these words spoken by the dog to the king, that immense flight of eloquence before Sun-King are but Diogenes' written panegyrics. Assembled people-history-admire the statue of the dog made of Paros marble exhibited on top of a column: he knew how to vanquish the Great, he is even greater 80

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than him. He provoked him, he showed his haughtiness and arrogance, he scorned him, defeated the Great, and won. History only tells of the barking dog's victory over the mighty king: remove yourself from my sun. My sun and your little shadow, Alexander. And Diogenes spoke these words only to defeat Alexander under the applause at the Agora, in the history classes, and the philosophy lessons. I suspect this conceited dog to have dragged his barrel there, on the public square, in the fervent expectation of being able to provoke the king who would pass by, just as a spider stretches its sticky threads to capture flies. Playing the weak to be stronger than power. Forsaking society, pretending to forsake it, in order to checkmate the king. Pretending to be ignominious in order to ennoble himself above the prince. Alexander knows this. He admits it: if I had not been Alexan­ der, I would want to have been Diogenes, he says. If I had not been king, I would like to have been philosopher. Alexander fears nothing, neither the Persians nor the Medeans, neither Europe nor Asia, neither the West nor the East. He fears this spider. He would have liked to have become Diogenes. He does not say Plato or Aristotle, philosophers in the service of Philip II or Dionysius, tyrants of Macedonia or Sicily, no, he prefers Diogenes. If I had not been in power, I would have liked to have been cynical. I would have liked to have become an adverse philosopher, snarlingly barking. It is true that committed philos­ ophers are given national funerals which, humble in their glory, they have already refused before the fact; nonetheless, they are followed to their graves in processions rarely given to the kings they have vilified. This brings more profit for much less trouble. Suetonius defeated twelve Caesars altogether, dragged down into ignominious memory, and Voltaire cast his shadow over the crowned heads of Europe. Diogenes won. No, Diogenes lost, Alexander won. The non­ cynical dog has abandoned nothing-neither struggle nor value nor grimace. He lies in wait for the king in the space of struggle where he checkmates him. He wins, but he obeys the laws of 81

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battles, and by this obedience, he loses. Henceforth, he is in Alexander's camp. He has always resided there: the barrel lies on the Agora only for the panegyrics. Diogenes could have dragged it to the end of some desert, but the Cynic is not a hermit, an anchorite, lost in some island where no one ever passes. The dog is leashed, a cynic leashed. No, your eyes are not deceiving you: crouched before his barrel in the great shadow of Alexander, the dog is prostrated before the king, before the entire ladder of great kings, the ladder which reaches all the way up to the sun. Your gaze does not deceive you, it is your ear which deceives you at the reading of this written lie. Diogenes has invented logical weapons to use against material weapons: irony, eloquence, writing-a kind of publicity of speech against the bomb. His slovenliness becomes a weapon and his dereliction a decor. The one who has won against the king is disguised in a verminous Alexander-a hypocritical and lying stage director. Do not believe Diogenes more than any other spokesman of radical doubt. He remains within the power, he clings to maximum stakes, he manipulates solar fetishes, he creates value inside language and signs. He remains eternally inside the sunless barrel tomb, under the great shadow of Alexander.

Antigone is facing Creon. She is going to descend to her grave, crushed by politicians, condemned by the State for having defended the indefeasible rights of love. I was not born for hatred, she cries, but for love. She lost, and is going to die. Her piety, her funerary pity toward her brother defeats her. Antigone is a victim, a victim of love. I do not know if this scene ever took place, in some moment of the past. Perhaps. Surely, weakness often dies before strength . But this very scene has been played on stage, before the pit, in the theater, for the past two thousand years. For the past twenty­ four centuries, Antigone has been defending the rights of love 82

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in front of Creon, the State, against Creon who is hatred. To­ night we hear her once again as thousands have heard her thou­ sands of times. We spectators of this day, or auditors of history, we are outraged by the abominable Creon. Together we are ready to rush upon him. What does Antigone, the pious love, do? For more than two millennia she hands over this man, whoever he may be, to the execration of the crowd, to the hatred of the people, to the curses of all. Some love! Some beautiful love, go ahead measure it: one afternoon of fervor for 2400 years of vengeance. History, writing, implacably ignores the statute of limitation. Creon is eternally without forgiveness, just as Alexander is ridiculous before the nagging dog. With a few words, Diogenes gains immortality. Alexander had to defeat Darius and Porus and so many others to obtain immortality. He crossed deserts all the way to the sea on the East. Diogenes gains immortality with one phrase. Antigone won: every evening she kills Creon whenever a woman recites Sophocles. Antigone loses and descends to the grave. Antigone wins: she hands Creon over to our hatred. Antigone loses: love loses the game because it plays the game. This love which kills every evening must be another name for hatred. How many so-called loves are but hatreds thus disguised? Antigone was not born for love, but to be against love. Love is not the reverse of hatred. Hatred is the whole of contraries. And the whole of the games. Creon and Alexander win and lose, by force, a few games. Antigone and Diogenes always win the entire game in the course of history, through the redoubling of the stakes of writing, through staging. Win or lose, whoever plays loses. He loses for having obeyed the rules of the game or the redoubling of the stakes. He enters into the seductive space of squabbles and submits to it. Drooling madly with obedience, intoxicated by it, he kneels before the laws of strategy, of st�uggle, of victory. Diogenes is the double of the king's body. Antigone, full of Creon, definitively loses, she has entered the sunless tomb through the door of hatred.

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Francis of Assisi speaks to the wolf. Antigone speaks to Creon. Diogenes harangues Alexander the Great, and Bossuet the Sun-King. Couples abound in this multiple fable. They line up to face one another as in a mirror. Francis faces the wolf. Behind the wolf, but stronger than the wolf, stands Creon the politician who is yet another wolf. And behind Creon, Alexander the Great, greater than Creon, is the greatest of all political wolves. The series of the strong reinforces itself. It rises in space all the way up to the sun. On the opposite side, the series of the weak, weaker and weaker crawls on the ground and humiliates itself. It is a continuation of the series of the strong. Erect and vertical, the ladder goes from the sun to the earth and from the earth to the sun. Who, weaker yet, can be placed before the wolf? A lamb. A white, weak, bleating lamb, first in line in the series of the weak facing the mirror before the wolf. The lamb drinks on the river bank, almost voiceless, trembling in front of the pure water. He is there on the bank, facing the rival, and appears to struggle against one stronger than him. The weak lamb loses. The wolf carries him away into the depth of the forest and devours him. But what a revenge! The lamb wins in the long run. We never listen to the wolf. His pitiful complaint sounds right: we speak evil of him, we slander him, we hardly spare him, we the shepherds and the dogs. He is alone, we are in number: families of shepherds, packs of running dogs, herds of sheep surrounded by rams. The dogs, the Cynics bark at the solitary figure. But behold, those who are numerous are those who know the fable, who recite it and teach it to children, from generation to generation. They are innumerable. The mightier's reason is that of the lamb-pure reason or pure soul, white virginal wool coat. The mightier's reason is that of the dogs, and no longer that of the shepherds, no longer that of 84

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the hunters, no longer that of the fabulators, no longer that of the poor trembling victim lacerated in the depth of the forest. Finally, it is that of the cruel fable repeated in the morning at the school of reason and repeated in the evening in the house of prudence-very reasonable reason, inscribed reason, which makes us hate the transhistoric wolf. The lamb has strength, therefore he also has weakness and innocence. The wolf, always wicked, becomes the scapegoat. The wolf is the real invisible victim of the real wicked lamb. The lamb is the real wolf. He places himself in a spot which renders criticism impossible: pure water, innocent and martyred childhood, ingenuous and candid, a white wool coat on which history is inscribed, upright reason. As a result, he wins implaca­ bly, he has won for a long time, since his fabulous past, as far back as the fabulists and the rationalists.

He lost, he was devoured. He won, inexorably. He lost, he is but a well-disguised wolf, a wolf so strong because he has, above all, the argument of weakness, a wolf so great because he has, above all, the condition of smallness, a winner so totally victori­ ous that he occupies, above all, the place of the victim, a wolf stronger than all the wolves together and who delivers all the wolves of space and of history to the never enforceable hatred of the crowds fascinated by his representation. Indeed, the hatred of those who know, the theoretical hatred of those who know how to stage is beyond any comparison with the simple and savage hatred of the wolf who satisfies his hunger. The latter wins for the moment, for the occasion, in the particular set of circumstances, it makes history contingent as it passes and dies; the former holds in its hands the protection of the stakes for the whole game, the strategy of memory, it is the totality of hatred. Sometimes it tries to call itself love, and succeeds often in calling itself reason. The best power is that of reason: the perpetuation of savagery through the most stable means, called

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culture and science. Style assassinates more surely than the wolfs teeth, and for much longer. It is said that Diogenes wanted to be buried face down in the earth. Eventually, values and situations are reversed, he said, and the bottom becomes the top, the master becoming slave. In fact, when he was sold as a slave, during the auction at the market he was asked what he knew how to do. He replied: "I know how to lead men. " The slave knows mastery. Diogenes knew how to rule over Alexander. Proof, not of his vanity, as Plato believed, but decisive proof of his strategy. Diogenes plays the low place, the wretched spot, plays the victim, plays morality, plays the role of the censor, convinced that from behind the scene, or by some new twist, this place is higher than the highest. Or, at least, it is equal. Even though he is devoured by the wolf, the lamb is at least as cruel as the wolf. He is armed with an excess of resentment which is always the case when one lacks teeth. Antigone takes her long revenge against Creon, even though she has no crown. Diogenes rules, or at least becomes equal to the Great Alexander. Job, ultimately, as he scratches his ulcers with his potsherd in his manure, thinks himself equal to God. He speaks to Him face to face and harangues Him. We are at the limits of the ladder of order. From the animal on the ground to the sun in open sky.

Born of the earth, the great ladder of greatness and hierarchy plunges first into the animal before rising toward the sky. Dioge­ nes the dog drags his belly on the ground; the watch-dog barks at the wolf without any mercy; the predatory wolf watches the lamb on the river bank; the rival trembling lamb does not know how to stray, cannot stray from the herd; the wolf prowls around Gubbio; the horde confronts the herd to protect the flock which is the stake. First the dogs, then wolves, then lambs, alone or in groups. The ladder of order relates to animal. Do not read these as either fables or images-the struggle, the devouring, 86

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the hierarchy, the greatness, the respect-remain beastly values. They come to us from beasts and flatter the beast in us. What is animal in us is addicted to politics. Beastliness and Lyceum. Lyceum, the very name admits it: it is the place where wolves are reared. The ladder comes out of the earth and out of the belly of the beasts. It rises. It rises toward us: pharaohs' mummies in the grave, funerary sister, thinker in rags, lay monk, little kings, great kings, kings of kings, sun. The ladder goes beyond the sun, marvelous transcendance, it goes toward God, the Almighty. Diogenes won for having controlled time and the stable inte­ gral of the game. Diogenes found a way to redouble the stakes of history through writing, through staging. He also holds power into space through language. See: all at once he wins the totality of the ladder. He gains control of the entire span of its extension. Cynical and beastly, he rolls on the ground, buried inside his barrel. He remains at the root of the ladder, on the ground, he comes out of the earth, he belongs to the order of the beasts, of beastliness. But as human, he seeks an honest man. His lighted lantern in full daylight illuminates but himself, and shows that Diogenes is a man. Diogenes holds in his hand the fire of his own publicity. He is a philosopher and as such appro­ priates the sun for himself. He speaks to the king as if the king were his equal, as if the king were his servant, and speaks of the sun as if it belonged to him: my sun. He is almost king, he goes beyond the sun. And finally, he is Dio-genes: that is to say of the family, of the lineage, of the people of Zeus. Diogenes: of the genus of God. By his very name, he is son of God. A dog, he barks; a human, he speaks and the sun is his, and he names himself son of God. He occupies the entire ladder from the beast to God, from the earth to the sky, and from the barrel to the sun. He has won in time, he has won in space. Glory be to the verminous divine son of God. What can Alexander the Great weigh next to the one who is everything and whose family resides beyond the sun and unleashes thunder? Alexander holds

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on to but a local rung of the ladder, however high this rung may be. Diogenes covers the entire ladder. The sun has changed hands. Even if the king prints the sun's effigy on his coins, without knowing it, it is Diogenes' face he draws there, the divine face. Light and nuclear power are no longer in the king's hands, the king stops, he dismounts his horse before the son of God. Diogenes knew how to move the body of (the) Sun-King. Alexander bows and the dog remains mockingly seated. The entire ladder of order bows before the animal.

Here they are: winners, vanquished, elevated, lowered, equal in power and glory, the dog and the wolf, the wise dog and the great wolf-king, both of them beasts. They control space, one by fact the other by right, one by tactic the other by strategy, one through great energies the other through small energies, one through strength the other with l�nguage. Alex­ ander and Diogenes come to us as a couple on the same vignette from the depth of history. Inseparable twins or tenon and mortise, who glorifies whom? Who of the two gives power to the other? Philosophy, wisdom, invent the place where one sees the tenon and the mortise unite. The lamb is a permanent wolf, the wolf a scapegoat. Both come to us on the same vignette from the depth of tradition, reciprocal and twin. Who made the other famous? For more than two thousand years, in front of the same decor, Antigone, the funerary queen, and Creon, the cold potentate, blindly play at sending each other the same ball of glory, while hiding from us the ruins of Thebes. Does Job sing the glory of God, does he harangue God for the glory of Job, so that from generation to generation children can recite his potsherd? The ladder of greatness slowly bends. The stronger and the weaker are mutual: the weaker and the stronger are often twins. A circle is formed, a kind of circus, a kind of circular ring where 88

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the bezel, with its transparent stone, freezes and reveals these united couples which were believed separated by the entire space of the open sky. The right side incurvates while the rival stations, complementary and reciprocal, are locked together. Lightning closure: zipper!

Blessed be the weak, blessed be the humble. This was spoken on the high mountain. What need of height is there to say how happy the lowly are? Blessed be the strong. This was spoken on even higher mountains, toward the high Engadine. Swinging pendulum. No doubt the strong sometimes must be protected from the weak. The relation of order is a seesaw, it is not vertical and straight, it goes up and down. But what is happiness doing there in the midst of these ups and downs? Nothing goes up this scaffold, only unhappiness falls from it. Let us listeQ. to the song of The Magnificent: He has routed the proud of heart, pulled down princes from their thrones and exhalted the lowly, raised those who were lying on the ground; the hungry He has filled with good things, the rich sent away empty. I sing and magnify Him and His power unfolds. The Almighty has done great things in me and for me. He has looked upon his lowly handmaid. Yes, from this day forth all generations will call me blessed. She won. She found a way to redouble the stakes of history. Magnificence produces greatness. It makes it, builds it, ele­ vates it with baseness, with servitude, as if one could only fill by emptying, raise by lowering, ennoble by means of ignominy. Happiness is sung for the one who rises from the ancillary earth on a powerful arm, an arm which at the same time disperses the proud. Exult the one who is humiliated, and the potentates fall. As if all space was but one place. As if the entire mass of the whole wide world was reduced to a few points marked on the scaffold-ladder, on the road which appears to be straight but 89

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which is a merry-go-round. The space of order is linear and curved. The space of relations between us is a narrow circumfer­ ence, whereas the space of the world is immense. The former, as a result, is crowded and overloaded, the latter is empty and free.

Revolt is an exact word which draws a circle. The revolution makes a turn-about. The high becomes the low, the low is raised, smallness is magnified, the left passes to the right, for once the word says the thing with perfect geometry. Nothing changes through symmetry or substitution. What great interest is there that such or such be stable on the throne or be humiliated under the ashes, if throne and wallow still remain, if some are satiated with goods while others are starving for bread? What interest is there in the movement of exhaltation if the ladder is fixed and stable? What interest in changing if everything is invariant? Even if another turn of the screw is added. In growing, the magnificent leaves constant what was humili­ ating him before rising. He magnifies himself while minimizing the previous great. Scale, seesaw. In order to become great the magnificent needs these new small ones whom he humiliates. These changes or exchanges are exact apparent movements­ phenomena. Once these so-called phenomena have been clearly described-the Diogenes and Antigones, the hordes and the herds-what remains as essential is the incurvated ladder, the invariant circle of order, on which these apparent movements, these displacements, occur. When the distance between two proper names is cancelled, when the difference between two names vanishes, when the name itself is lost, the couple is of little importance since couples abound indefinitely. When the variations between positions are immobilized, what remains is the invariant, the stable relational path on which everyone moves or seems to move. What remains is that on which the phenomena appear: the relation of order, 90

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finally revealed as curved, the oldest merry-go-round in the world.

Servility, delighting in obedience, is the dream of sovereignty, and feeds it in return. Sovereignty, for its part, delights in obedi­ ence, and that's what it means to enjoy sovereignty. The master and the slave feast on their ignoble relation of servitude and mastery. They are bound together through mortise and tenon, or through the knot of feed-back, or through a direct link of equilibrium, or through an apparent movement which maintains equilibrium in time. But this dazzling movement, which is all one can see, while acting like a rheostat maintains fixity, its goal, through an expenditure of forces and movements, its means. Connected by this feed-back in the most refined cases, the master and the slave, in fact, attend to the donkeys, the pack-mules, the same old animal wheel which regulates the beasts among themselves. We have not left beastliness: the dog of the philoso­ phers and the wolf of the fables. As if animality lay there apparently drowned and fixed in the circus of its own relation. And vice versa. Let man appear on the scene.

The master-but why call him master still?-has no master, and certainly he does not have a slave either. The master has no disciple. He does not need a chorus to sing his mastership. He has mastery over things. The great-why name him great?­ does not know any small ones. Greatness does not need small­ ness. Only the rooster needs the poultry-yard: the lower court. The need around oneself of small ones for one's dignity is a sickness of dependence as grave, a drug as hard, a subjection to appearance as stupid as the need of a master above oneself . To free oneself of it, it suffices to recognize the breadth of space, its 91

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unfolding, the greatness of the earth, of the sea, of the world, the forbearance of wise intelligence. Strength freely covers space. It bewails weakness, but does not require it to recognize itself as strong. Strength resists compe­ tition, and distinguishes itself from aggression. To be powerful is to resist comparison. To be great is to resist the ladder of sizes. Blessed be the one who lives in the new space which is not ravaged by the relation of order.

The relation of order produces values, unleashes wars: it is the great fetish, the matrix of fetishes. It designates the stakes, it fixes the prices. It is what remains in us of the animal kingdom, it is the trace, in our groups, of the beasts we once were. It is pre-hominid. Wolves, dogs, lambs, hordes, herds, flocks: man is born, will be born when forsaking the relation of order, which is the leash of the dog, Diogenes. Diogenes is held in leash by Alexander. In turn, wolf-the- great is held in leash by the dog. The dog will become man only when he unleashes himself, unties the leash of order, to forsake the riding whip of comparison. Alexander is not yet born, Dioge­ nes hardly. They are still immersed in beastliness inside the lyceum. Consider relations rather than beings, and beings rather than names, and paths rather than movements. Do not allow yourself to be dazzled by the king's pomp-it's easy-nor by the barrel of the self-styled wiseman-it's less easy. The slave and the master are kneeling together, they both venerate the relation which binds them. It is moving, stable, variant, invariant, de­ pending on those who venerate it, and from where. Their place changes, the spot of relation remains. They sustain it and feed it. They would die for it. They give their bodies, their blood, their lives to struggles whose only purpose is to keep this relation alive. A monstrous God who lives off the death of these sectari­ ans. A monster whose attributes are the specter and the barrel, 92

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the crown and the rubbish, the empire and madness. We sacrifice our children to it. Dogs feed their puppies to it, and the wolves their cubs.

I have told, I have staged the very scene of Diogenes. He is there, in front of his barrel on the public stage, he waits, exhibit­ ing himself. He waits for the Great, hopes for the greatest, waits for the sun. Perhaps he waits for God. He presents his case, prepares the drama. He breaks the bowl, drinks in his hands, like the child at the fountain leaning over the water. He drops his cloak, embraces the mass of snow. We spectators hidden in the shadow of the square, we understand, we know that the verminous cynic is destroying the parasites, that he is forsaking intermediaries. Alexander passes. The drama rises to its apex. Alexander and his shadow extend the order of the broken vase, of the discarded coat: all of them screens of the object, of the greatest object, of the sun. Let us push Alexander aside. But it is not a question of the king-Noel, sun! On the contrary, it is only a question of the king. The scenes within the Scene abound, they create shadow within Shadow, as ifimplicated. Creon the king enters unexpectedly under Alex­ ander. Antigone answers him standing before Diogenes who is seated. This is the stable dialogue of the weak against the strong whose minimal state is that of the lamb and the wolf, and whose maximal infinite state is that of wretched Job in his manure before God Almighty Himself. The whole space before the sun is occupied, including the sun, including the one who seeks a sun­ bath for his body and for his soul. The entire mass is invaded by the scalar path of order. Even the sun disappears. It is not the object of innovation, the nova of knowledge, it is, inexorably and ferociously, the Great. On the ladder which suddenly traverses the stage, vertically, and which obstructs the spectacle with its height and its multiple invaginations, the weak who plays minimum, Dioge93

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nes, Antigone, the weak who plays the game of the vlCtlm, substitutable but stable, and who plays on stage the game in question, wins implacably, not in the closed space of the drama, but in all of space and throughout time. Victory! They have all won. Alexander wins locally, from our sea to the Indus River, but by passing through the tenuous point of the minor scene. Diogenes wins globally. The redoubling of the stakes is for Antigone, for the dog or the lamb. The redoubling of the stakes furnishes history: the mother, the brother, all your kin, omnes generationes. No more struggle, only a sharing of the glory, between the humbleness of glory which is long, and the glorious which is short. He is there, eyes lowered, holding his lily in his joined hands, chaste, modest, as if absent. His statue on a gigantic column opens one of the most immense temples in the world. By chance, tomorrow, the iconoclasts will bring him down. Let us kneel before such humility, such absence. Let us kneel before the white lamb or before Job festered with ulcers. No, they do not delineate the straight ladder of Jacob, upright, marking the hierarchy, touching the sky with its top, but a circle, a circumference whose curve cannot be seen. No, upstream height does not separate the wolf from the lamb, Creon from Antigone, the king from the dog, a pure water multiplies them through optical effects, a simple or complicated montage, mov­ ing or stable, binds them together, through the quick and bal­ anced rhythm of victories and defeats. The winners and the masters, on the side of the logical and on the side of the material, the false losers of long triumphs, kings and thinkers of glory, sanguine wolves, lambs full of gall and milk, all the figures of the scene are gathered in the space of the same stage, the dazzling mass of representation. Here is the amphitheater, the ring of the circus. I did not relate, act by act, and under a certain dictation, a drama, comedy or tragedy, tales among others, acted out fables. I have described exactly, under the same dictation, the slow construction of the space of theater, the hardness of its closure, this kind of relativity 94

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which reveals a curved space where each sees only vertical hierar­ chies. This theater is well drawn now, as on the blueprint of an architect, with lines locally straight and globally incurvate, with locked-in singularities: the rich, the wretched, the strong, the scorned, well arranged in lines and columns. Each spot is making a stake which is paid for or which impresses. High classes or low classes, low-born and high-born are caught and frozen in this field of forces, below the statues of fetishes, in the ring of the circus, in the closing of prices, of stakes, of adulation. Whoever descends or climbs the tiers of order soon rises on the podium, on the public square, where Diogenes lives, night and day, certain of holding the position in this fashion, sure of being seen where Alexander passes, sure of a strength which pushes obstacles aside. The space ravaged by the lines of force of order jumps on stage, flows toward it or in it. Closure held by tenon and mortise, stable in time with knots of feed-back. It is the banal social circus, also the circus of knowledge. Thus is formed a closed society. Do you know any open ones?

The circus fascinates people and locks them in their relations. Nothing else exists for them but the ties which unite them. The clamor of the stadium drowns the noises of the world. Even the sky, the ceiling, is painted. The representation is filled with the network of ties and thus carries on. It is empty of objects. The theater only circulates things which become relations in the network. It only knows stakes, fetishes, merchandise. We are troglodytes of our collectivity. The group closes on itself It ignores the world. It only knows what it produces, its own representations. Politics has no need of the world. Philosophers no longer mention it, they remain inside the circus, no longer inhabit the earth, nor the sea, nor the forest, nor the sun. They lock themselves inside the letter of language and of contract. They lock themselves inside the cave of media, inside the grotto of politics, inside the well of representation, in the scoop of the 95

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letter. Even those who know or try to invent descend into the sap of the politics of sciences. How long has it been since we have erased the world, our antique necessity, the unique obj ect? The philosopher no longer needs the world, he has no more experience. He lives in the shelter of lined books-his writing.

This closure is harder than we think since it makes the whole of our relations. It is made of invincible solidity. Proof is that if in order to preserve its present state, in order to assure its permanence, one had to decide to destroy the sea and the whole earth, no one in the circus would hesitate a moment to do so. Rather die than stop the movement of stakes or the staging of struggles, the mass production of fetishes, and the circulation of merchandise. One would rather annihiiate the world than let the closure of the circus dwindle away. Since the world is absent, to suppress it does not count. Let us continue to drug ourselves with relations inside the mortal comfort of the cave. That is the point of the fable at noon today, that is the point of our headway: we have decided to destroy the world rather than exchange the gladiator's amphitheater for the whole of our relations. We have decided to destroy the world in order to have the means to destroy those who want to destroy us-twins bound together by feed-back, obvious escalation and circle of history. The last tragedy of the world's oldest theater. All tragedies have as a goal to make the circus exist and reinforce it, to emprison us in its walls, drooling there with the drug of obedience. We will stay inside the theater while outside the nuclear sun ravages the earth. The peasant earth, its sun; the sea of the Capehorners, its winds; the forest of wandering; their high knowledge. Last tragedy which ought to make us aware of a new knowledge.

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To remain in the theater, one must fight for the scarce places. The circus is built, is made to cause this scarcity. I have made it so that weak and strong, suns and shadows abound. See now forty Diogenes inside forty barrels close together on the public square, waiting for Godot. What quarrel of misery in sight. What struggle of rags. What theology to be argued! As far back as one can think, from these forty Godots we know wars, gods and Sun-Kings. The battle makes the spectacle of the theater perma­ nent, the definition of each place, the devastation of space. It comes and publicizes that all things and history are engendered by pugnacity. What a fine stroke of publicity. What a beautiful surplus of closure! The passage of the squadron can ransack the body of water, the pugnacious in their revels can trample the harvest, the bomb can annihilate the world, public dialectics can put new shoes on old mules and weaken the collective until it becomes anaemic, scientific polemics can mask new ideas with their clanking and make them abort, the vulgarity of the scuffle can kill beauty, each however continues to go on saying that debate is the father of things and war its mother. The loss of the world will not awaken us from our sleep of war, from the drug of representa­ tion. Pity on the world! To come out of the maelstrom, to come out of the black hole in which the group has fallen, where space becomes more and more rare, where obj ects disappear, where knowledge deceives, will almost cost life and credit, but not to come out will cost the world. Pity for the world and not pity for me! To come out. To set out. To disappear beyond the sheaf of furrows. To wander. To come out wounded, haggard, drugged, intoxicated with despair. To go down slowly into the loamy sand. To go and fly over the plain, over the seas. To meditate at length in front of the great trees. Nothing is as vast as space. Nothing is as common as the place, under the sun, as long as our sun has not yet vitrified it. Pity for the world. Let the new knowledge come. 97

A Note about the Author and Translators

Michel Serres is professor of the history of philosophy and science at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, and currently Visit­ ing Professor at Stanford University. A prolific writer, he is considered one of contemporary France's most original and im­ portant thinkers. Genevieve James is Associate Professor of Modern Languages at Canisius College. Raymond Federman is the author of Double or Nothing: A Novel (Swallow) and the editor of Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow (Swallow) . A professor of creative writing, he currently teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo.