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Did something happen to me that I, because I didn’t know how to live it, lived as something else?
if I go ahead with my fragmentary visions, the whole world will have to be transformed in order for me to fit within it.
I know I can only walk with two legs. But I feel the useless absence of that third leg and it scares me, it was the leg that made me something findable by myself, and without even having to look for myself.
How could I explain that my greatest fear is precisely of: being? and yet there is no other way. How can I explain that my greatest fear is living whatever comes? how to explain that I can’t stand seeing, just because life isn’t what I thought but something else — as if I knew what! Why is seeing such disorganization?
Am I afraid now that my new way of being doesn’t make sense? But why not let myself be carried away by whatever happens? I would have to take the holy risk of chance. And I will substitute fate for probability.
and maybe only thought can save me, I’m afraid of passion.
But I’m afraid to begin composing in order to be understood by the imaginary someone, I’m afraid to start to “make” a meaning, with the same tame madness that till yesterday was my healthy way of fitting into a system. Will I need the courage to use an unprotected heart and keep talking to the nothing and the no one?
For now I am inventing your presence, just as one day I won’t know how to risk dying alone, dying is the greatest risk of all, I won’t know how to enter death and take the first step into the first absence of me — just as in this last and so primary hour I shall invent your unknown presence and with you shall begin to die until I learn all by myself not to exist, and then I shall let you go.
So needy that only the love of the entire universe for me could console me and overwhelm me, only a love that trembled the very egg-cell of things with what I am calling a love. With what I can really only call but without knowing its name.
Life is not livable. I shall have to create atop life. And without lying. Create yes, lie no. Creating isn’t imagination, it’s taking the great risk of grasping reality.
“Lost in the Fiery Hell of a Canyon a Woman Struggles Desperately for Life.”
I’m going to begin my exercise in courage, courage isn’t being alive, knowing that you’re alive is courage
My tragedy was somewhere. Where was my greater destiny? one that wasn’t just the story of my life. Tragedy — which is the greatest adventure — would never happen to me. All I knew was my personal destiny. And what I wanted.
imitating a life probably gave me assurance precisely because that life wasn’t my own: it wasn’t a responsibility of mine.
Give me your unknown hand, since life is hurting me, and I don’t know how to speak — reality is too delicate, only reality is delicate, my unreality and my imagination are heavier.
what seems like a lack of meaning — that’s the meaning. Every moment of “lack of meaning” is precisely the frightening certainty that that’s exactly what it means, and that not only can I not reach it, I don’t want to because I have no guarantees.
What surprised me was that it was a kind of detached hatred, the worst kind: indifferent hatred. Not a hatred that individualized me but merely the lack of mercy. No, not even hatred.
The room was the opposite of what I’d created in my home, the opposite of the soft beauty I’d made from my talent for arrangement, my talent for living, the opposite of my serene irony, of my sweet and absentminded irony: it was a violation of my quotation marks, the quotation marks that made me a citation of myself. The room was the portrait of an empty stomach.
What did she want, that woman who is me? what was happening to a G. H. on the leather of her suitcases?
Nothing, nothing, only that my nerves were now awake — my nerves that had been calm or simply arranged? had my silence been a silence or a high mute voice?
As if the room weren’t deep enough to hold me and I had to leave pieces of myself in the hallway, in the worst rejection to which I’d ever fallen victim: I didn’t fit.
It had a sameness that made it endless.
A whole lifetime of awareness — for fifteen centuries I hadn’t struggled, for fifteen centuries I hadn’t killed, for fifteen centuries I hadn’t died — a whole lifetime of tamed awareness was now collecting inside me and banging like a mute bell whose vibrations I didn’t need to hear, I was recognizing them. As if for the first time I was finally on the level of Nature.
To have killed opened the dryness of the sands of the room to dampness, finally, finally, as if I’d dug and dug with hard and eager fingers until I found within myself a thread of drinkable life that was the thread of death.
if I had the courage to abandon . . . to abandon my feelings? If I had the courage to abandon hope.
To find out what I really could hope for, would I first have to pass through my truth? To what extent had I invented a destiny now, while subterraneously living from another?
I too, who was slowly reducing myself to whatever in me was irreducible, I too had thousands of blinking cilia, and with my cilia I move forward, I protozoan, pure protein.
Life, my love, is a great seduction in which all that exists seduces. That room that was deserted and for that reason primally alive. I had reached the nothing, and the nothing was living and moist.
But if I screamed even once, I might never again be able to stop. If I screamed nobody could ever help me again; whereas, if I never revealed my neediness, I wouldn’t scare anybody and they would help me unawares; but only if I didn’t scare anybody by venturing outside the rules. But if they find out, they’ll be scared, we who keep the scream as an inviolable secret. If I raised the alarm at being alive, voiceless and hard they would drag me away since they drag away those who depart the possible world, the exceptional being is dragged away, the screaming being.
a first scream unleashes all the others, the first scream at birth unleashes a life, if I screamed I would awaken thousands of screaming beings who would loose upon the rooftops a chorus of screams and horror. If I screamed I would unleash the existence — the existence of what? the existence of the world.
My life was as continuous as death. Life is so continuous that we divide it into stages, and we call one of them death. I had always been in life, and it matters little that it wasn’t I properly speaking, not what I’d usually call I. I was always in life.
life in me is so demanding that if they hacked me up, like a lizard, the pieces would keep trembling and squirming. I am the silence engraved on a wall, and the oldest butterfly flutters and finds me: the same as always. From birth to death is when I call myself human, and shall never actually die. But that isn’t eternity, it’s damnation.
It’s a metamorphosis in which I lose everything I had, and what I had was me — I only have what I am. And what am I now? I am: standing in front of a fright. I am: what I saw. I don’t understand and I am afraid to understand, the matter of the world frightens me, with its planets and roaches.
what an abyss between the word love and the love that doesn’t even have a human meaning — because — because love is living matter. Is love living matter?
G. H. was a woman who lived well, lived well, lived well, lived on the uppermost layer of the sands of the world, and the sands had never caved in beneath her feet: the coordination was such that, as the sands moved, her feet moved along with them, and so everything stayed firm and compact.
Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.
The great neutral punishment of general life is that it can suddenly undermine a single life; if it isn’t given its own power, then it bursts as a dam bursts — and arrives pure, unadulterated: purely neutral.
Becoming unclean with joy.
In my mute plea for help, what I was struggling against was a vague first joy that I didn’t want to perceive in myself because, even vague, it was already horrible: it was a joy without redemption, I don’t know how to explain it to you, but it was a joy without the hope.
Time trembles as a motionless balloon.
For the present has no hope, and the present has no future: the future will be exactly once again present.
“Lost in the Fiery Hell of a Canyon a Woman Desperately Struggles for Life.”
oratorio
I want to find the redemption in today, in right now, in the reality that is being, and not in the promise, I want to find joy in this instant
even in secret, freedom doesn’t take care of guilt. But one must be greater than guilt. The tiny divine part of me is greater than my human guilt.
In truth I had fought all my life against the profound desire to let myself be touched — and I had fought because I couldn’t allow myself the death of what I called my goodness; the death of human goodness.
It was the loud monotony of an eternity that breathes. That terrified me. The world would only cease to terrify me if I became the world. If I were the world, I wouldn’t be afraid.
Because my mute hoarseness was already the hoarseness of someone enjoying a gentle hell.
Killing is also forbidden because it breaks the hard casing, and leaves one with the sticky life.
And me — who would want me today? who had already become as mute as I was? who, like me, was calling fear love? and want, love? and need, love? Who, like me, knew that I had never changed my form since they had drawn me on the stone of a cave? and next to a man and a dog.
