But Is it Sartre?
Updated: Jan 24
Earl Fowler
J-P’s the name, existential detection the game.
Let’s say I’m in a room where the significance of doorknobs is encountered at eye level. The mysteries of fingertip memory. Perplexing dialectics of low ceilings, fluorescent lighting and linoleum floors. The armature around which the whole revolves. Only the storm makes sense of shelter. Le monde bat de l’autre côté de ma porte.
Places experienced in daydreams reconstitute themselves in the hollows of the hills like fireflies. In its countless alveoli, space contains compressed time. Conjunctive temporal tissue. Labyrinths of pre-human repose. Waves slosh and echo against the interiors of conch shells and vases. Sudden saliences on the surface of the psyche. Intuitive cosmogonies. At dawn, your freshly white-washed being opens its arms to us.
The rain poured down in sheets, like the universe itself had taken up a vendetta against meaning. It was midnight in Paris — l’heure des illusions — and I, detective of the void, was sitting over an apricot cocktail in my office, the Bec-de-Gaz on rue du Montparnasse, staring into the abyss of a blank sheet of paper. The Gitane in my hand was burning low, like a dying star, and the room smelled of dampness, loneliness and the remnants of sun-baked newspapers in Bouville gardens.
Like a shadow passing through my phenomenological despair, a man walked in.
He was the kind of mec who wore a cheap suit with a tie that looked as though it had given up. His face was pale, and his eyes held that unsettling look of someone who’d just realized they were trapped in a narrative they didn’t write.
“I need your help,” he said, his voice trembling, as if he’d walked through the wrong door into the absurd theatre of existence. “I think ... I think I’m not real.”
I raised an eyebrow, a pointless gesture in a world where nothing truly mattered. Cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same.
“Not real?” I repeated, flicking ash onto the floor. “You think you’re not real? You either are, or you’re nothing. There’s no middle ground in this — only despair.”
This is where the unconscious is housed like the odour of Moroccan dates drying on a wicker tray. An oneiric house, a house of dream memory. The crypts of the houses where we were born.
O, mes chemins et leur cadence. The frothing of hedges I keep deep inside me. Emmenez-moi, chemins!
On iron hooves the dream enters the little room at the end of the garret from the window of which, across the indentations of the roof, the man takes a rucksack down from a closet rack and opens it. He extracts from his pocket a tiny string and dangles it into the bag.
I ask what’s inside and am told that it’s the Siamese cat from my childhood that loved to perch on my shoulder, like in a Dylan song. “Well, why do you keep that cat in a bag?” The unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it ventures to the cellar. The rat in the hat sat on the mat.
His blue cotton shirt stands out joyfully against a chocolate-covered wall. That too brings on the Nausea. The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in the suspenders, everywhere around me. I go to my mirror, open my mouth: and my tongue is an enormous, live centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping my palate. Also, the cat has coughed up a hairball.
Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with drawers, chests with false bottoms are organs of the secret psychological life. Orderliness. Harmony. Piles of sheets in the wardrobe. Lavender in the linen. On the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe, black-stockinged, makeupless girls who smoke too many cigarettes and engage in who knows what follies besides.
“Alas,” says the man, “I am an alcoholic and suffer from the delirium tremens, so that I need the cat to keep away the rats.” The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, that they are walls with a single casing, walls that have the entire earth behind them. Mysterious underground passages and vaulted rotundas, flush with madness, Juliette Gréco hair and black woollen turtlenecks.
I myself have been mysteriously followed for months by lobster-like creatures on the edges of the bug-eyed field of my vision: octopuses, vultures, toads, beetles, snakes, fish, toads, crustaceans, exotic dancers. Since experimenting with mescaline procured by Lagache, my encounters with raw Being have been like waking up in this room and finding a stranger’s face an inch from my own. This stranger. Last night, I dreamt he went to Manderley again.
How I would like to tell him that he’s being deceived, that he is the butt of the important.
“But surely you realize that those rats are imaginary,” I reply with all the authority of an inhabited space in a labyrinth of corridors carved into the rock, its opacity and unwonted consistency of which debouches into a very narrow, steep stairway, which spirals as it rises, carved into the rock by means of a gimlet.
“Yes, indeed,” the man says, “but then, so is the cat.”
The side of his plate is adorned with lumps of gristle he spits out.
I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts bloat up like bubbles. I build memories within my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.
Nothing more is left now. No more than, on these traces of dry ink, is left the memory of their freshness. It is my fault: I had spoken the only words I should not have said: I had said that the past did not exist. And suddenly, noiseless, M. de Rollebon had returned to his nothingness. Reader, I marinated him.
Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.
My father, too, was a man with only one storey: he had his cellar in his attic. Wolves sharpened their claws on the heavy granite slab that formed our doorstep. My bed was a small boat lost at sea as the stove roared in the evening stillness and an icy wind blew against the house.
A great beast’s foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps.
All locks are invitations to thieves, all sorts of bolts, clamps, bars and levers, the keyholes of chests concealed under a button or a leather tongue. Jewels and precious stones in a slender casket. From the moment a casket is opened, dialectics no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke.
We shall never reach the bottom of the casket.
There is no joy in Bouville. Roquentin sits in cafés and listens to blues records instead of working on the biography. Throws pebbles into the snotgreen sea. Stares at the gnarled exposed root of a chestnut tree, which reminds him of a tongue of boiled leather, and is overwhelmed by Being and a pervasive, overpowering feeling of Nausea which spreads at the bottom of the vicious puddle, at the bottom of our time — the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.
In the circle of light shed by the lamp, living in the round house, here in the primitive hut of prehistoric man, I realize that my father, too, was an illusion. Dead lo these many years. The wardrobe filled with linen. In the dead linen in cupboards I seek the supernatural.
There are even moonbeams which I can unfold, my face still lit by the halo of the one lamp still burning.
I stand in the lighted casement of a distant hut, a hut that stands quite alone on the horizon before one comes to fields and marshlands. The tower room is the abode of a young girl haunted by memories of an ancient ancestress. What a joy for the legs to go up four steps at a time to see her! As Baudelaire said, in a palace there is no place for intimacy. Look at this spider’s web on the corner of the balcony.
Here the dead keep cropping up like people in Japanese prints, diaphanous, vaporous, with their trinkets pockets lockets worn steps, smooth and green, lovely dark summers of my childhood that swing on giant chains against the ocean wind, quivering with gulls and abolished symmetries as if the house were founded on the most fragile web of breath and I myself had blown it. Then I thought it might not exist at all as built by carpenter’s hands, nor had ever; and that it was only an idea of breath breathed out by you who, with that same breath that had blown it, could blow it all away.
Silence.
Some of these days,
you’ll miss me, honey
The lights go out, the guests, composed of belles and their beaux, and a few aging relatives, disappear pell-mell, into the mirrors and along the corridors and colonnades, without giving a thought to their dignity, while chairs and tables and hangings evaporate into thin air.
I, that ever-changing walled-in inhabited space, am my own hiding place among the worn coins of memory.
Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily in your heart like a great motionless beast.
It does not exist. It is even an annoyance; through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, thin and firm, and when you want to seize it, you find only existents, you butt against existents devoid of sense. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous: it is all the rest which in relation to it is superfluous.
It is.
When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into the legend, a hermit’s hut? The hermit is alone before God, immured in solitude and the inflections of beloved voices now silent. The God who does not exist. But then, neither does the hermit.
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by, water flowing underground
The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping. I lit another Gitane and stared at the empty chair across from me. In the end, nothing matters. A tout jamais.
Wind house, abode that a breath effaced, enclosing infinity. Chrysalis on a twig. Dancing against a background of clouds with which it mingles its smoke.
댓글