Читать книгу Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality - UNIV PLYMOUTH - Страница 5

Moments of Crisis

“I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire”

P. B. Shelley

When I gaze for a long time at a fixed point on the wall, what sometimes happens is that I will no longer know who I am or where I am. I sense my lack of identity from afar, as though I had, for an instant, become a complete stranger. With matching strength, this abstract personage and my real person vie to convince me.

In the following instant my identity is regained, like in those stereoscopic views when the two images sometimes separate by accident and only when the projectionist readjusts them, superimposing them, do they all at once provide the illusion of depth. Then it appears to me that my room is of a freshness it did not previously possess. It regains its prior consistency and the objects in it fall back into place, in the same way as in a glass of water a lump of crumbled soil will settle in strata of different, well defined and variously coloured elements. The elements of my room stratify into their own outlines and into the colouring of the old memory I have of them.

The sensation of distance and loneliness in the moments when my everyday self has dissolved into inconsistency differs from any other sensation. When it lasts longer, it becomes a fear, a terror of not being able to regain myself ever again. Afar, an uncertain outline lingers in me, encompassed by a great luminosity, in the same way as objects sometimes loom from the mist.

The terrible question “Who exactly am I?” then dwells in me like an entirely new body, having grown in me with skin and organs that are wholly unfamiliar to me. The answer to it is demanded by a deeper and more essential lucidity than that of the brain. All that is capable of stirring in my body writhes, struggles and rebels more vigorously and more elementarily than in everyday life. Everything begs a solution.

Oftentimes, I regain the room as I know it, as though I were closing and opening my eyes; each time, the room is clearer – just as a landscape looms in a telescope with increasing structure, the more we pierce all the veils of intermediary distances by adjusting the focus.

In the end, I recognise myself and regain my room. It is a sensation of slight intoxication. The room is extraordinarily condensed in its matter, and I am implacably returned to the surface of things: the deeper the wave of uncertainty the higher its crest; never and under no other circumstances does it seem to me more evident than in those moments that each object must occupy the place it occupies and that I must be the one who I am.

My struggle in incertitude then no longer has any name; it is the mere regret that I have not found anything in its depths. What surprises me is merely the fact that a complete lack of significance could have been so profoundly bound to my intrinsic matter. When I have come back to myself and seek to express the sensation, it appears wholly impersonal to me: a mere exaggeration of my identity, having grown like a cancer from its own substance. A jellyfish arm that extended immeasurably and groped among the waves in exasperation before finally retracting beneath the gelatinous sucker. In a few instants of disquietude, I have thus traversed all the certainties and uncertainties of my existence, only to return definitively and painfully to my solitude.

It is then a solitude that is purer and more poignant than previously. The sensation of the world being far off is clearer and more intrinsic: a limpid and delicate melancholy, like a dream we recall in the depths of the night.

It alone still reminds me of something of the mystery and rather sad charm of my childhood “crises”.

Except that in this sudden disappearance of identity, I rediscover my descents into the cursed spaces of former times. Only in the moments of immediate lucidity that follow upon the return to the surface does the world appear to me in that unusual atmosphere of pointlessness and desuetude, which formed around me when my hallucinatory trances finally overwhelmed me.

*

It was always the same places on the street, in the house, or in the garden that would provoke my crises. Whenever I used to enter their space, the same faintness and dizziness would overwhelm me. They were invisible traps dotted around the town, in no way distinct from the air that encompassed them. They would ferociously lie in wait for me to fall into the trap of the special atmosphere they contained. If I took so much as a single step and entered such a cursed space, the crisis would inevitably come.

One of those spaces was in the town park, in a small glade at the end of a lane, where no one ever walked. The wild rose bushes and dwarf willows that surrounded it opened on one side onto the desolate vista of a deserted field. There was no place in the world sadder or more abandoned. A dense silence settled on the dusty leaves, in the stagnant heat of summer. Now and then, the echoes of the garrison bugles could be heard. Those protracted, futile calls were achingly sad... Far off, the sun-scorched air quivered vaporously like the transparent steam that hovers over a boiling liquid.

The place was wild and isolated; its loneliness seemed endless. There, I felt the heat of the day was more wearying and the air harder to breathe. The dusty bushes were scorched yellow by the sun, in an atmosphere of consummate solitude. A bizarre sensation of pointlessness floated in that glade, which existed “somewhere in the world”, somewhere upon which I myself had happed pointlessly, one ordinary summer afternoon, which in itself had no meaning. An afternoon that strayed chaotically in the heat of the sun, among bushes anchored in space somewhere in the world. Then I would feel more profoundly and more painfully that I had nothing to do in this world, nothing to do except roam through parks – through dusty glades baking in the sun, deserted and wild. It was a roaming which in the end rent my heart.

*

Another cursed place was at the very other end of town, between the high and cavernous banks of the river in which I used to swim with my playmates.

The riverbank had subsided in one place. At the top there was a factory for extracting sunflower seed oil. The husks of the seeds were discarded among the walls of the subsided riverbank. In time the heap grew so high that a slope of dried husks formed, from the top of the bank as far as the water’s edge.

It was down this slope that my mates would descend to the water, warily, clutching each other by the arm, their footsteps sinking deeply into the carpet of putrefaction.

The high walls of the riverbank to either side of the slope were precipitous and full of fantastical irregularities. The rain had sculpted fine fissures in long streaks, like arabesques, but as hideous as unhealed lesions. They were lacerations in the flesh of the loam, horrid, gaping wounds.

It was between these walls, which impressed me exceedingly, that I too used to have to descend to the river.

Even from afar and long before reaching the riverbank, my nostrils would be filled with the reek of putrid husks. It readied me for the crisis, like a brief period of incubation; it had an unpleasant and nonetheless delicate smell, as did the crises.

Somewhere within me, my olfactory sense would split in two, and the effluvia of the odour of putrefaction would reach different regions of sensation. The gelatinous smell of the decomposing husks was separated and very distinct from, although concomitant to, their pleasant, warm, domestic aroma of toasted nuts.

As soon as I sensed it, that aroma would, in but a few moments, transform me, permeating all my inner fibres, which it would seemingly dissolve, only to replace them with a more ethereal, indefinite matter. From that moment I would no longer be able to avoid it. A pleasant and dizzying faintness would begin in my chest, hastening my steps towards the riverbank, towards the place of my definitive defeat.

I would descend to the water in mad flight, down the mound of husks. The air would resist me with a density as sharp and hard as a knife’s blade. The world’s space would tumble chaotically into an immense hole with unimagined powers of attraction.

My mates would gaze frightened at my mad flight. The shingly bank at the bottom was very narrow and at the slightest wrong step I would have been hurled into the river, at a spot where eddies at the surface of the water hinted at great depths.

But I was unaware of what I was doing. Reaching the water, at the same speed, I would skirt the mound of husks and run along the river’s edge to a certain spot where there was a hollow in the bank.

At the bottom of the hollow a small grotto had formed, a cool and shady cavern, like a chamber excavated from a rock. I would enter and fall to the ground sweating, exhausted and trembling from head to foot.

When I began to come to my senses, I would discover next to me the intimate and ineffably pleasant décor of a grotto with a spring that spurted sluggishly from the rock and trickled over the ground, forming in the middle of the shingly bank a basin of very limpid water, above which I would bend to gaze, without ever wearying of the wonderful lacework of the green moss at the bottom, the worms clinging to spelks of wood, the slivers of old iron covered in rust and mud, the various animals and things at the bottom of the fantastically beautiful water.

*

Apart from these two cursed places, the rest of the town dissolved into a mush of uniform banality, with buildings that were interchangeable, with exasperatingly immobile trees, with dogs, vacant lots, and dust.

Indoors, however, the crises occurred more readily and more often. As a rule, I could never bear solitude in an unfamiliar room. Should I be made to wait, the delicate and terrible swoon would come within moments. The room itself made ready for it: a warm and welcoming intimacy would seep from the walls, oozing over all the furniture and all the objects. All of a sudden, the room would become sublime and I would feel very happy within its space. But this was nothing more than a deception produced by the crisis; its delicate and gentle perversity. In the following moment of my beatitude, everything would be turned upside down and thrown into confusion. I used to peer wide-eyed at everything that was around me, but the objects would lose their usual meaning: they would be bathed in a new existence.

As if suddenly unpackaged from the thin transparent paper in which they had hitherto been wrapped, their appearance would become ineffably new. They seemed intended for some new, higher, and fantastical use, and in vain did I wrack myself to discover it.

But this was not all: the objects would be seized by a veritable frenzy of freedom. They became independent of one another, but they were of an independence that meant not only their isolation, but also an ecstatic exaltation.

Their enthusiasm to exist in a new aureole would overwhelm me, too: powerful attractions bound me to them, their invisible interconnecting ducts transformed me into an object in the room like the others, in the same way that an organ grafted to raw flesh becomes one with the unfamiliar body by means of subtle exchanges of substance.

Once, during a crisis, the sun shed a tiny cascade of rays onto the wall: a golden, unreal water marbled with luminous ripples. I could also see the corner of a bookcase, with thick leather-bound tomes behind its glass pane, and these real details, which I could perceive from the distances of my swoon, managed to dizzy me and topple me, like a final gasp of chloroform. It was what was ordinary and familiar in objects that disturbed me the most. The habitude of seeing them so many times probably ended up wearing away their external membrane and thereby they appeared to me from time to time as having been flayed down to the flesh: raw, unspeakably raw.

The supreme moment of the crisis would consume itself in a floating outside of any world, pleasant and painful at the same time. Should the sound of footfalls be heard, the room would quickly regain its former appearance. Between the walls there would then take place a dwindling, an extremely small, almost imperceptible diminution of its exaltation; this gave me the conviction that the certitude in which we live is separated from the world of uncertainties by but a fine pellicle.

I would awake in the all too familiar room, perspiring, weary and overcome with a sensation of the pointlessness of the objects that surrounded me. I would notice in them new details, just as it can happen that we discover some unusual detail in an object that has served us daily for years in a row.

The room would preserve a vague memory of the catastrophe, like the smell of gunpowder in a place where there has been an explosion. I would look at the leather-bound books in the cabinet with its panes of glass and in their motionlessness I would detect, I do not know how, a perfidious air of secrecy and complicity. The objects around me never gave up their mysterious attitude, one they ferociously preserved in their stern immobility.

*

Familiar words are invalid at certain depths of the soul. I try to define my crises precisely and all I can find are images. The magic word that might express them ought to borrow something from the essences of other sensibilities in life, distilling from them a new odour in a scholarly composition of perfumes.

In order to exist, it ought to contain something of the stupefaction that overwhelms me when I see a person in reality and then closely follow his gestures in a mirror: then, there is something of the disequilibrium of plummeting in a dream, with the whistle of rushing terror that runs up the spine in an unforgettable instant; or something of the mist and the transparency inhabited by bizarre scenes in glass balls.

*

I envied the people around me, hermetically enclosed in their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They lived as prisoners beneath raincoats and overcoats, but nothing from without could terrorise or conquer them, nothing penetrated into their wonderful gaols. Between the world and me there was no separation. All that enveloped me permeated me from head to foot, as if my skin were porous. The otherwise highly distracted attention with which I gazed around was not a mere act of will. The world extended its tentacles into me in a natural way; I was riddled with the thousand-fold arms of the hydra. I was forced to ascertain, to the point of exasperation, that I lived in the world I could see. There was nothing to be done against this.

The crises belonged to an equal extent both to me and to the places where they occurred. It is true that some of these places contained a “personal” malevolence of their own, but all the others themselves lay in a trance long before my arrival. And so it was with certain rooms, where I used to feel that my crises crystallised from the melancholy of their immobility and boundless solitude.

Like a kind of equity, however, between the world and me (an equity that plunged me even more irremediably into the uniformity of raw matter) the conviction that objects could be innocuous became equal to the terror that they sometimes inflicted upon me. Their innocuousness came from a universal lack of powers.

I vaguely felt that nothing in this world could last to the very end, and that nothing could be perfected. The ferocity of objects exhausted itself in the world. It was thus that there arose in me the idea of the imperfection of any manifestations in this world, be they even supernatural.

In an interior dialogue which, I think, never came to an end, I sometimes defied the malefic powers around me, just as sometimes I would ignobly adulate them. I practised certain strange rituals, but not without purpose. If, on leaving the house and walking along various roads, I always used to retrace my steps, I did so in order not to describe in my passage a circle in which houses and trees would have remained enclosed. In this respect, my walk would resemble a thread and if, once unravelled, I had not gathered it back up, along the same path, the objects caught in the knot of my steps would have forever remained deeply and irremediably bound to me. If during a rain shower I avoided touching the cobbles in the way of the streams of water I did so in order not to add anything to the action of the water and in order not to intervene in the exercise of its elementary powers.

Fire purifies all. I always used to keep a box of matches in my pocket. When I was very sad, I would light a match and pass my hands through the flame, first one, then the other.

In all these things there was a kind of melancholy at existing and a kind of torment arranged banally within the limits of my life as a child.

In time the crises vanished of themselves, but not without leaving behind their powerful memory in me forever.

When I embarked upon adolescence I no longer had crises, but the crepuscular state that preceded them and the profound sense of the world’s pointlessness, which followed upon them, somehow became my natural state.

The pointlessness filled the cavities of the world like a liquid that would have spread in all directions. And the sky above me, the eternally prim, absurd and indefinite sky, took on the colour proper to despair.

In this pointlessness that surrounded me and under that eternally cursed sky I still walk even today.