Redemption of the body

MODERN TIMES were built upon science and there is no science but that of the general. But since exclusion of the particular is destruction of the concrete, modern times were built up through philosophical annihilation of the body. And if the Platonists excluded it for religious and metaphysical reasons, science did so for coldly gnoseological ones. 

Among other catastrophes for man, this proscription exacerbated his loneliness. Because that gnoseological pro- scription of the emotions and passions, the sole acceptance of universal and objective reason, transformed man into thing, and things do not communicate — the nation with the most extensive electronic communications is also the one in which human beings are loneliest. 

Language (of life, not mathematics), like the other living languages, (art, love, and friendship) is the ego’s effort to reach out from its island to overcome its loneliness. And those attempts are possible from subject to subject not via abstract symbols of science but through the concrete symbols of art, through myth and fantasy — concrete universals. And the dialectic of existence operates in such a way that the deeper we plumb our own subjectivity the closer we come to others. 

We do not mean to say that modern times would have ignored the body, but that they lessened its cognitive capacity. They had expelled it from the realm of pure objectivity without noticing that in so doing they were reifying man himself since the body is the concrete support of his personality. This civilization, which is divisive, has separated everything from everything; the soul from the body as well. With terrible consequences. Consider love. 

The other’s body is an object and as long as contact is made with the body alone there is nothing but a kind of onanism. Only through the relation of an integrated body and soul can the ego emerge from itself, transcending its loneliness and achieving communion. For that reason, pure sex is sad, since it leaves us in the initial loneliness with the aggravating circumstance of the disappointed attempt. 

And it explains how love, although one of the central themes of all literatures, has in our time taken on a tragic perspective and a metaphysical dimension it did not have before: it has nothing to do with the courtly love of the epoch of chivalry, nor the worldly love of the eighteenth century. 

The redemption of the body through existential philosophies meant a re-evaluation of the psychological and the literary beyond the merely conceptual. Only the novel, then, can integrally encompass pure thought, feelings and passions, dream and myth. In other words, an authentic anthropology (metaphysical and metalogical) can be achieved only by the novel, as long, of course, as we broaden the genre without the guilt feelings that arise from literary sophistries or mistaken servitude to the spirit of science. 

The pre-eminence Nietzsche gave life has already been mentioned. The anthropocentric revolution of our time is synthesized in that election. That center will no longer be the object nor the transcendental subject but the concrete person, with a new awareness of the body that sustains it. 

Nietzsche’s vitalism culminates in existential phenomenology because it overcomes mere biologism without renouncing the concrete integrity of the human being. To Heidegger, in fact, to be a man is to be in the world and that is possible because of the body; it is the body that individualizes us, that gives us a view of the world from the “I and here.” No longer the impartial and ubiquitous observer of science or objectivist literature, but the concrete I, incarnate in a body, In the body that transforms me into “a being for death.” Thus, the metaphysical importance of the body. 

This concreteness of the new philosophy was always characteristic of literature which never left off being anthropocentric although many of its theoreticians paradoxically wanted it to. This concreteness restored man’s authentic tragic condition. Existence is tragic because of its radical duality, because of belonging at the same time to the realm of nature and to the realm of the spirit. As body, we are nature and, consequently, mortal and relative; as spirit, we share in the absolute and eternal. The soul drawn upwards by our anxiety for eternity and condemned to death by its incarnation seems to be the true representative of the human condition and the true seat of our unhappiness. We could be happy as animal or pure spirit, but not as human being. 

Klages asserts, after Nietzsche in part, and correctly, that the spirit (Gevst), the expression of the rational and transcendental in man, disturbs and even destroys the creative life of the soul (See/e) which is irreducible to the rational, to the impersonal and objective which is particular to the spirit. The soul is a force found in intimate connection with living nature, creator of symbols and myths, capable of interpreting enigmas that confront man and which the spirit, can at most, only exorcize. 

This destruction of the world of myth by the spirit through the mechanical action of concepts is depersonalization and death. The spirit judges while the soul lives. 

And the soul is man’s only power capable of resolving the conflicts and antinomies that the spirit spreads like a net overflowing reality. Only symbols invented by the soul, not the dry concepts of science, make it possible to arrive at man’s ultimate truth. Only the soul can express the flow of the living, the real-nonrational. 

Thus, the gnoseological transcendency of the novel. 

For the novel is a product of soul, not pure spirit.

Ernesto Sabato 

The Writter In the Carastrofe of Our Time 

Jean-Luc Nancy - The Intruder

There is in fact nothing so ignobly useless and superfluous as the organ called the heart, the filthiest invention that beings could have invented for pumping me with life.
-Antonin Artaud1

The intruder introduces himself forcefully, by surprise or by ruse, not, in any case, by right or by being admitted beforehand. Something of the stranger has to intrude, or else he loses his strangeness. If he already has the right to enter and stay, if he is awaited and received, no part of him being unexpected or unwelcome, then he is not an intruder any more, but then neither is he any longer a stranger. To exclude all intrusiveness from the stranger's coming is therefore neither logically acceptable nor ethically admissible.

If, once he is there, he remains a stranger, then for as long as this remains so-and does not simply become "naturalized"-his coming does not stop: he continues to come, and his coming does not stop intruding in some way: in other words, without right or familiarity, not according to custom, being, on the contrary, a disturbance, a trouble in the midst of intimacy.

We have to think this through, and therefore to put it into practice: the strangeness of the stranger would otherwise be reabsorbed-would be an issue no longer-before he even crossed the threshold. To welcome a stranger, moreover, is necessarily to experience his intrusion. For the most part, we would rather not admit this: the very theme of the intruder intrudes upon our moral correctness (and is in fact a remarkable example of the politically correct). But it is inseparable from the stranger's truth. This moral correctness presupposes that, upon receiving the stranger, we efface his strangeness at the threshold: it aims thereby not to have received him at all. But the stranger insists and intrudes. This fact is hard to receive, and perhaps to conceive ...

I (who, "I"? this is precisely the question, an old question: who is the subject of this utterance, ever alien to the subject of its statement, whose intruder it certainly is, though certainly also its motor, its clutch, or its heart)-I, then, received someone else's heart, about ten years ago. It was grafted into me. My own heart (you will have understood that this is the whole question of the "proper"-or else it is nothing of the sort, and then there is properly nothing to understand, no mystery, not even a question: just the mere evidence of a transplant, as the doctors prefer to call it)-my own heart, then, was useless, for reasons never explained. In order, therefore, to live, I had to receive the heart of another person.

(But what other program, then, was crossing my physiological program? Less than twenty years earlier, no one was doing grafts, and certainly not protecting against their rejection through the use of cyclosporin. Twenty years hence, to be sure, other grafts will involve other methods. Personal contingency intersects with the contingency of technological history. Earlier I would be dead, later I would survive by other means. But "I" always finds itself tightly squeezed in a wedge of technical possibilities. Hence the vain debate, as I watched it unfold, between those who wanted a metaphysical adventure and those who preferred a technical performance: certainly both are at stake, one inside the other.)

After they told me I needed a graft, any sign could fluctuate, any data be reversed. Without further reflection, certainly, without even identifying an act, a permutation. Just the physical sensation of a void already opened up in the chest, a sort of apnea where nothing, absolutely nothing, even today, could help me disentangle the organic from the symbolic and imaginary, or disentangle what was continuous from what was interrupted: it was like a single gasp, exhaled thereafter through a strange cavern already imperceptibly opened up and like the spectacle, indeed, of leaping overboard while staying up on the bridge.

If my own heart was failing me, to what degree was it "mine," my "own" organ? Was it even an organ? For some years I had already felt a fluttering, some breaks in the rhythm, really not much of anything (me-chanical figures, like the "ejection fraction," whose name I found to be pleasing): not an organ, not the dark red muscular mass loaded with tubes that I now had to suddenly imagine. Not "my heart" beating endlessly, hitherto as absent as the soles of my feet while walking.

It became strange to me, intruding by defection: almost by rejection, if not by dejection. I had this heart at the tip of my tongue, like improper food. Rather like heartburn [un haut-le-coeur]' but gently. A gentle sliding separated me from myself. I was there, it was summertime, we had to wait, something broke away from me, or this thing surged up inside me, where nothing had been before: nothing but the "proper" immersion in-side me of a "myself" never identified as this body, still less as this heart, suddenly watching itself. Later on, for example, when climbing stairs, feel-ing each release of an "extrasystole" like the falling of a pebble to the bottom of a well. How do you become a representation to yourself? And a montage of functions? And where, then, does it go, that potent, silent evidence that was holding things together so uneventfully?

My heart became my stranger: strange precisely because it was inside. The strangeness could only come from outside because it surged up first on the inside. What a void suddenly opened up in the chest or the soul-they're one and the same-as soon as I was told: "You will need a transplant" ... Here, the mind pushes against nothing: nothing to know, nothing to understand, nothing to sense. The intrusion of a body foreign to thought. This blank will stay with me like thought itself and its contrary, at one and the same time.

A heart that only half beats is only half my heart. I was already no longer inside me. I'm already coming from somewhere else, or I'm not coming any longer at all. Something strange is disclosed "at the heart" of the most familiar-but "familiar" hardly says it: at the heart of something that never signaled itself as "heart." Up to this point, it was strange by virtue of not being even perceptible, not even being present. From now on it fails, and this strangeness binds me to myself. "I" am, because I am ill. ("Ill" is not exactly the term: not infected, just rusty, tight, blocked.) But this other, my heart, is done for. This heart, from now on intrusive, has to be extruded.

No doubt this can only happen if I want it, along with several others. "Several others": those who are close to me, but also the doctors, and, finally, myself, now doubled or multiplied more than ever before. Always for different motives, this whole world has to agree, in unison, to believe that prolonging my life is worth the effort. It isn't hard to picture the complexity of this strange group, intervening thus in the most sensitive part of "me." Let's pass over those who are close and pass over my-"self" (which, however, as I have said, is doubled: a strange suspension of judgment makes me picture myself as dying without protest, but also without attraction ... we feel the heart weakening, we think we are going to die, we feel that we aren't going to feel anything anymore). But the doctors-here a whole team-are far more involved than I might have supposed: they have to decide, first of all, on whether a graft is indicated, then propose it without imposing it. (In doing so, they tell me there's to be a constraining "follow-up," nothing more-and what else could they guarantee? Eight years later, and after many other problems, I will develop a cancer brought on by the treatment: but today I'm still alive; who knows what's "worth the trouble," and what trouble?)

But the doctors also have to decide, as I will learn bit by bit, on inscription in a waiting list (in my case, for example, to accede to my demand not to be scheduled before the end of summer: presuming a certain confidence in the heart's staying power), and this list presupposes some choices: they will tell me about another candidate for a graft, apparently not in any shape, however, to survive the graft's follow-up, in particular the course of medication. I also know that I have to be grafted with a type 0+ heart, thereby limiting the options. A question I will never pose: How does one decide, and who decides, when a graft, suitable for more than one graftee, is available? Here we know that the demand exceeds the supply . . . From the very outset, my survival is inscribed in a complex process interwoven with strangers and strangenesses.

Upon what does everyone's agreement on the final decision depend? Upon a survival that cannot be strictly weighed from the standpoint of pure necessity: Where would we find it? What would oblige me to live on? This opens out onto many other questions: Why me? Why live on at all? What does it mean "to live on"? Is this even the appropriate term? In what way is a long life-span a good thing? At this point I am fifty years old: young only for people in an "advanced" country at the end of the twentieth century ... Only two or three centuries ago there was nothing scandalous about dying at this age. Why can the word scandalous occur to me in this context today? And why, and how, for us, the" advanced" people of the year 2000, is there not a "right time" to die (just shy of eighty years, and it will not stop advancing)? At one point a doctor, having abandoned the quest for the cause of my cardiomyopathy, told me that "your heart was programmed to last for fifty years." But what is this program, which I cannot turn into either a destiny or a providence? Just a brief programmatic sequence in an overall lack of programming.

Where are exactness and justice here? Who measures them, who declares them? This whole thing will reach me from somewhere else and from outside-just as my heart, my body, are reaching me from somewhere else, are a somewhere else "within" me.

I do not claim to scorn quantity or to declare that nowadays we know only how to measure a life-span and are indifferent to its "quality." I am ready to recognize that even in a formula such as "c'est toujours c;:a de pris" ["at least we've got that"] more secrets are hidden than might be supposed. Life can only drive toward life. But it also heads toward death: Why in my case did it reach this limit of the heart? Why would it not?

Isolating death from life-without leaving one intimately entwined with the other, and each intruding into the heart of the other-this we must never do.

For eight years, during these ordeals, I will so often have heard, and will so often have repeated to myself: "But then you wouldn't be here any more!" How are we to think this kind of quasi-necessity, or desirable aspect, of a presence whose absence could always, very simply, have configured otherwise the world of various others? At the cost of some suffering? Of course. But why persist in refiguring the asymptote of an absence of suffering? An old question, but aggravated by technology, and carried, we have to admit, to a point where we are hardly prepared for it.

Since the time of Descartes, at least, modern humanity has transformed the longing for survival and immortality into an element in a general program of "mastering and possessing nature." It has thereby programmed the growing strangeness of "nature." It has revived the absolute strangeness of the twofold enigma of mortality and immortality. Whatever religion used to represent, humanity has carried to a level of technical empowerment that defers the end in every sense of the word. By prolonging the span, it extends the absence of an end: prolonging what life, with what aim? To defer death is also to exhibit it, to underscore it.

We need only remark that humanity was never ready for any phase of this question and that its unreadiness for death is nothing but death itself: its stroke and its injustice.

Thus, the multiple stranger intruding into my life (my thin and winded life, sometimes slipping into malaise on the edge of abandonment, simply stunned) is nothing other than death, or rather life/death: a suspension of the continuum of being, a scansion in which "I" has/have nothing important to do. Protest and acceptance alike are strange to the situation. But nothing would not be strange. In the first place, the means of survival are themselves completely strange: What does it mean to replace a heart? Representing the thing is beyond me. (Opening up the entire thorax, taking care of the graft-organ, circulating the blood outside the body, sutur-ing the vessels . . . I know very well that surgeons insist on the  insignificance of this last point: the vessels in transplants are smaller. But still: transplanting imposes an image of passing through nothingness, a flight into space emptied of any propriety or intimacy, or else, conversely, an image of that space intruding upon the inside of me: feeds, clamps, sutures, and tubes.)

What, "properly," is this life whose "saving" is at stake? At least it's agreed, anyway, that this propriety does not reside anywhere within "my" body. It is not sited anywhere, nor in this organ whose symbolic reputation requires no further development.

(Someone will say: there is always the brain. And the idea of a brain transplant certainly makes it into the papers now and then. Someday, no doubt, humanity will raise it again. Meanwhile, we acknowledge that the brain does not survive without a remnant of the body. Conversely, and dropping the subject for now, it might survive with a whole system of foreign body grafts ... )

A "proper" life, not to be found in any organ, and nothing without them. A life that not only lives on, but continues to live properly, under a strange, threefold rule: that of decision, that of an organ, and that of sequellae to the transplant.

First of all, the graft is presented as a restitutio ad integrum: the heart is found to be beating once again. Here, the whole dubious symbolism of the gift of the other-a secret, ghostly complicity or intimacy between the other and me-wears out very quickly. In any event, its use, still widespread when I was grafted, seems to be disappearing bit by bit from the minds of the graftees: there's already a history of representing grafts. With the aim of stimulating organ donation, a great emphasis has been placed on the solidarity, and even the fraternity, of "donors" and recipients. And no one can doubt that this gift is now a basic obligation of humanity (in both senses of the word), or that-freed from any limits other than blood-group incompatibility (and freed especially from any ethnic or sexual limits: my heart can be a black woman's heart)-that this gift institutes the possibility of a network where life/death is shared by everyone, where life is connected with death, where the incommunicable is in communication.

Sometimes, however, the other very quickly appears as stranger: not as a woman, a black, or a young man, or a Basque, but as the immunitary other, the in substitutable other that has nonetheless been replaced. "Rejection" is its name: my immune system rejects the other's. (Which means: "I have" two systems, two immunitary identities ... ) Many suppose that rejection consists in literally spitting the heart out, vomiting it up: indeed, the word seems to be chosen to make this plausible. That's not it, but there is certainly something unbearable about the intruder's intrusion, and it is quickly fatal if left untreated.

The possibility of rejection resides in a double strangeness: the strange-ness, on the one hand, of this grafted heart, which the organism identifies and attacks as being a stranger, and, on the other hand, the strangeness of the state in which medication renders the graftee in order to protect him. It lowers the graftee's immunity, so that he can tolerate the stranger. It thereby makes him a stranger to himself, to this immunitary identity, which is akin to his physiological signature.

An intruder is in me, and I am becoming a stranger to myself. If the rejection is very strong, I need treatments to help me resist human defenses. (This is done by means of an immunoglobulin drawn from a rabbit and then assigned, as its official description specifies, to this "anti-human" use, whose surprising effects-tremblings almost convulsive-I remember very well.) But becoming a stranger to myself does not draw me closer to the intruder. Rather, it would appear that a general law of intrusion is being revealed. There has never been just one intrusion: as soon as one is produced, it multiplies itself, is identified in its renewed internal differences.

Thus, on several occasions I will know the shingles virus, or cytomega-lovirus-strangers that have been dormant within me from the very start and are suddenly raised against me by the necessary immuno-depression.

At the very least, what happens is the following: identity is equal to immunity, the one is identified with the other. To lower the one is to lower the other. Strangeness and being a stranger become common, everyday things. This gets translated through a constant exteriorization of myself: I have to be measured, checked, tested. We are flooded with warnings about the outside world (crowds, stores, swimming pools, little children, sick people). But our liveliest enemies are within: old viruses crouching all along in the shadows of immunity, having always been there, intruders for all time.

In this last instance, no possible prevention. Instead, treatments that deport to further strangenesses. They fatigue, they ruin the stomach, or there's the howling pain of shingles ... Through it all, what "me" is pursuing what trajectory?

What a strange me!

Not because they opened me up, gaping, to change the heart. But because this gaping cannot be sealed back up. (In fact, as every X-ray shows, the sternum is stitched with filaments of twisted steel.) I am closed open. Through the opening passes a ceaseless flux of strangeness: immuno-depressor medications, other medications meant to combat certain so-called secondary effects, effects that we do not know how to combat (the degrading of the kidneys), renewed controls, all existence set on a new register, stirred up and around. Life scanned and reported onto multiple registers, all of them recording other possibilities of death.

Thus, then, in all these accumulated and opposing ways, my self be-comes my intruder.

I certainly feel it, and it's much stronger than a sensation: never has the strangeness of my own identity, which for me has always been nonetheless so vivid, touched me with such acuity. "I" clearly became the formal index of an unverifiable and impalpable change. Between me and me, there had always been some space-time: but now there is an incision's opening, and the irreconciliability of a compromised immune system.

Cancer also arrives: a lymphoma, notice of whose eventuality (certainly not a necessity: few graftees end up with it), though signaled by the cyclosporin's printed advisory, had escaped me. It comes from the lowering of immunity. The cancer is like the ragged, crooked, and devastating figure of the intruder. Strange to myself, with myself estranging me. How can I put this? (But the exogenous or endogenous nature of cancerous phenomena is still being debated.)

Here too, in another way, the treatment calls for a violent intrusion. It incorporates certain amounts of chemotherapeutic and radiotherapeutic strangeness. Just as the lymphoma is eating away at the body and exhausting it, the treatments attack it, making it suffer in several ways-and this suffering links the intrusion to its rejection. Even morphine, easing pain, provokes another suffering-brutalization and spaciness.

The most elaborate treatment is called an "autograft" (or "stem-cell graft"): after relaunching my lymphocytic production through "growth factors," they take white blood cell samples for five days in a row (all the blood is circulated outside the body, the samples being taken as it flows).
These they freeze. Then I am installed in a sterile chamber for three weeks, and they administer a very strong chemotherapy, leveling my mar-row production before relaunching it as they reinject me with the frozen stem-cells (a strange odor of garlic pervades this injection ... ). The im-mune system is extremely weakened, whence the strong fevers, mycoses, and serial disorders that arise until the moment the lymphocytes start being produced again.

You come out of the whole thing bewildered. You no longer recognize yourself: but "recognize" no longer means anything. Very soon, you are just a wavering, a strangeness suspended between poorly identified states, between pains, between impotences, between failings. Relating to the self has become a problem, a difficulty or an opacity: it happens through evil or fear, no longer anything immediate-and the mediations are tiring.

The empty identity of the "I" can no longer rely on its simple adequa-tion (in its "I = I") as enunciated: "I suffer" implicates two I's, strangers to one another (but touching each other). The same holds for "I delight" (we could show how this is indicated by the pragmatics of either state-ment): in "I suffer," however, the one I rejects the other, while in "I delight" the one I exceeds the other. Two drops of water are doubtless no more, and no less, alike.

I end/s up being nothing more than a fine wire stretched from pain to pain and strangeness to strangeness. One attains a certain continuity through the intrusions, a permanent regime of intrusion: in addition to the more than daily doses of medicine and hospital check-ups, there are the dental repercussions of the radiotherapy, along with a loss of saliva, the monitoring of food, of contagious contacts, the weakening of muscles and kidneys, the shrinking of memory and strength for work, the reading of analyses, the insidious returns of mucitis, candidiasis, or polyneuritis, and a general sense of being no longer dissociable from a network of mea-sures and observations-of chemical, institutional, and symbolic connections that do not allow themselves to be ignored, akin to those out of which ordinary life is always woven, and yet, altogether inversely, holding life expressly under the incessant warning of their presence and surveil-lance. I become indissociable from a polymorphous dissociation.

This has always more or less been the life of the ill and the elderly: but that's just it, I am not precisely the one or the other. What cures me is what affects or infects me; what keeps me alive is what is makes me age prematurely. My heart is twenty years younger than I, and the rest of my body is (at least) twelve years older than I. Turning young and old at one and the same time, I no longer have a proper age, or properly have an age. Likewise, though not retired, I no longer properly have a trade. Likewise, I am not what I'm here to be (husband, father, grandfather, friend) without also being under the sign of this very general condition of an intruder, of various intruders who could at any moment take my place in the relation or representation to others.

In a similar movement, the most absolutely proper "I" retreats to an infinite distance (where does it go? from what vanishing point does it still proffer this as my body?) and plunges into an intimacy deeper than any interiority (the irreducible niche from which I say "I," but which I know to be as gaping as a chest that is opened over a void, or as a sliding into the morphine-induced unconsciousness of pain and fear mixed in abandonment). Corpus meum and interior intimo meo, the two being joined, in a complete configuration of the death of god, in order to say very precisely that the subject's truth is its exteriority and its excessiveness: its infinite exposition. The intruder exposes me to excess. It extrudes me, exports me, expropriates me. I am the illness and the medicine, I am the cancerous cell and the grafted organ, I am these immuno-depressive agents and their palliatives, I am these ends of steel wire that brace my sternum and this injection site permanently sewn under my clavicle, altogether as if, already and besides, I were these screws in my thigh and this plate inside my groin. I am turning into something like a science-fiction android, or else, as my youngest son said to me one day, one of the living-dead.

We are, along with the rest of my more and more numerous fellow-creatures,2 the beginnings, in effect, of a mutation: man begins again by passing infinitely beyond man. (This is what "the death of god" has always meant, in every possible way.) Man becomes what he is: the most terrifying and the most troubling technician, as Sophocles called him twenty-five centuries ago, who denatures and remakes nature, who recreates creation, who brings it out of nothing and, perhaps, leads it back to nothing. One capable of origin and end.

The intruder is nothing but myself and man himself. None other than the same, never done with being altered, at once sharpened and exhausted, denuded and overequipped, an intruder in the world as well as in himself, a disturbing thrust of the strange, the conatus of an on-growing infinity.3

1. In 84, no. 5-6, 1948, p. 103.
2. I rejoin certain thoughts of friends: Alex speaking in German about being un-eins with AIDS, to speak of an existence whose unity lies in division and discord with itself, or Giorgio speaking in Greek about a bios that is only zoz, about a form of life that would be no more than merely maintained. See Alex Garcia-Dlittmann, At Odds with Aids, trans. Peter Gilgen and Conrad Scott-Curtis (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), and Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). To say nothing of Derrida's grafts, supplements and prostheses. And the memoty of a drawing by Sylvie Blocher, "Jean-Luc with the heart of a woman." '
3. This text was first published in response to an invitation by Abdelwahab Meddeb to participate, for his review Df:dale, in a number that he entitled "The Advent of the Stranger," no. 9-10 (Paris: Masisonneuve and Larose, 1999).
Jean-Luc Nancy "Corpus,"

Defining unlimited

 A DIFFICULTY WITH THE WORD ‘NIBBĀNA’ IS THAT ITS meaning is beyond the power of words to describe. It is, essentially, undefinable. [It’s very easily to define nibbana, as long definition is negative. The problem starts with positive definitions, they ara all made in the situation where consciousness depends on nāmarūpa, while nibbana is liberation from that dependence. Also from positive description of the three undetermined markas of what is undetermined we can undetermined where the problem lies:

A definition of infinity is self-contradictory, verbally, since it involves placing a limit (finis) to that which is stated to have none. Nanamoli Thera. V.B]

Another difficulty is that many Buddhists see Nibbāna as something unobtainable – as so high and so remote that we’re not worthy enough to try for it. Or we see Nibbāna as a goal, as an unknown, undefined something that we should somehow try to attain.

Most of us are conditioned in this way. We want to achieve or attain something that we don’t have now. So Nibbāna is looked at as something that, if you work hard, keep the sīla, meditate diligently, become a monastic, devote your life to practice, then your reward might be that eventually you attain Nibbāna – even though we’re not sure what it is.

Ajahn Chah would use the words ‘the reality of non-grasping’ as the definition for Nibbāna: realizing the reality of non-grasping. That helps to put it in a context because the emphasis is on awakening to how we grasp and hold on even to words like ‘Nibbāna’ or ‘Buddhism’ or ‘practice’ or ‘sīla’ or whatever.

It’s often said that the Buddhist way is not to grasp. But that can become just another statement that we grasp and hold on to. It’s a Catch 22: No matter how hard you try to make sense out of it, you end up in total confusion because of the limitation of language and perception. You have to go beyond language and perception. And the only way to go beyond thinking and emotional habit is through awareness of them, through awareness of thought, through awareness of emotion. ‘The Island that you cannot go beyond’ is the metaphor for this state of being awake and aware, as opposed to the concept of becoming awake and aware.
In meditation classes, people often start with a basic delusion that they never challenge: the idea that “I’m someone who grasps and has a lot of desires, and I have to practice in order to get rid of these desires and to stop grasping and clinging to things. I shouldn’t cling to anything.” That’s often the position we start from. So we start our practice from this basis and, many times, the result is disillusionment and disappointment, because our practice is based on the grasping of an idea. [Grasping the idea of letting go isn't so bad, one has to start from where one is. But it is good to grasp, that "I am someone who ..." is the main problem, working with various desires without questioning this assumption may lead to some improvement, but unlikely to the abandoning of attavada. V.B]

Eventually, we realize that no matter how much we try to get rid of desire and not grasp anything, no matter what we do – become a monk, an ascetic, sit for hours and hours, attend retreats over and over again, do all the things we believe will get rid of these grasping tendencies – we end up feeling disappointed because the basic delusion has never been recognized.

This is why the metaphor of ‘The Island that you cannot go beyond’ is so very powerful, because it points to the principle of an awareness that you can’t get beyond. It’s very simple, very direct, and you can’t conceive it. You have to trust it. You have to trust this simple ability that we all have to be fully present and fully awake, and begin to recognize the grasping and the ideas we have taken on about ourselves, about the world around us, about our thoughts and perceptions and feelings.

The way of mindfulness is the way of recognizing conditions just as they are.

We simply recognize and acknowledge their presence, without blaming them or judging them or criticizing them or praising them. We allow them to be, the positive and the negative both. And, as we trust in this way of mindfulness more and more, we begin to realize the reality of ‘The Island that you cannot go beyond.’ When I started practising meditation I felt I was somebody who was very confused and I wanted to get out of this confusion and get rid of my problems and become someone who was not confused, someone who was a clear thinker, someone who would maybe one day become enlightened. That was the impetus that got me going in the direction of Buddhist meditation and monastic life.

But then, by reflecting on this position that “I am somebody who needs to do something,” I began to see it as a created condition. It was an assumption that I had created. And if I operated from that assumption then I might develop all kinds of skills and live a life that was praiseworthy and good and beneficial to myself and to others but, at the end of the day, I might feel quite disappointed that I did not attain the goal of Nibbāna.

Fortunately, the whole direction of monastic life is one where everything is directed at the present. You’re always learning to challenge and to see through your assumptions about yourself. One of the major challenges is the assumption that “I am somebody who needs to do something in order to become enlightened in the future.” Just by recognizing this as an assumption I created, that which is aware knows it is something created out of ignorance, out of not understanding.

When we see and recognize this fully, then we stop creating the assumptions.

Awareness is not about making value judgments about our thoughts or emotions or actions or speech. Awareness is about knowing these things fully – that they are what they are, at this moment. So what I found very helpful was learning to be aware of conditions without judging them. In this way, the resultant karma of past actions and speech as it arises in the present is fully recognized without compounding it, without making it into a problem. It is what it is. What arises ceases. As we recognize that and allow things to cease according to their nature, the realization of cessation gives us an increasing amount of faith in the practice of non-attachment and letting go.

The attachments that we have, even to good things like Buddhism, can also be seen as attachments that blind us. That doesn’t mean we need to get rid of Buddhism. We merely recognize attachment as attachment and that we create it ourselves out of ignorance. As we keep reflecting on this, the tendency toward attachment falls away, and the reality of non-attachment, of non-grasping, reveals itself in what we can say is Nibbāna.

If we look at it in this way, Nibbāna is here and now. It’s not an attainment in the future. The reality is here and now. It is so very simple, but beyond description. It can’t be bestowed or even conveyed, it can only be known by each person for themselves.

As one begins to realize or to recognize non-grasping as the Way, then emotionally one can feel quite frightened by it. It can seem like a kind of annihilation is taking place: all that I think I am in the world, all that I regard as stable and real, starts falling apart and it can be frightening. But if we have the faith to continue bearing with these emotional reactions and allow things that arise to cease, to appear and disappear according to their nature, then we find our stability not in achievement or attaining, but in being – being awake, being aware.

Many years ago, in William James’ book ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience,’ I found a poem by A. Charles Swinburne. In spite of having what some have described as a degenerate mind, Swinburne produced some very powerful reflections:

“Here begins the sea that ends not till the world’s end. Where   we stand,
Could we know the next high sea-mark set beyond these waves  that gleam,
We should know what never man hath known, nor eye of man  hath scanned ...
Ah, but here man’s heart leaps, yearning towards the gloom with  venturous glee ...
From the shore that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the sea.”

~ From ‘On the Verge,’ in ‘A Midsummer Vacation.’

I found in this poem an echo of the Buddha’s response to Kappa’s question in the Sutta Nipāta:

Next was the brahmin student Kappa:

“Sir,” he said, “there are people stuck midstream in the terror and the fear of the rush of the river of being, and death and decay overwhelm them. For their sakes, Sir, tell me where to find an island, tell me where there is solid ground beyond the reach of all this pain.”

“Kappa,” said the Master, “for the sake of those people stuck in the middle of the river of being, overwhelmed by death and decay, I will tell you where to find solid ground.

“There is an island, an island which you cannot go beyond. It is a place of nothingness, a place of non-possession and of non-attachment. It is the total end of death and decay, and this is why I call it Nibbāna [the extinguished, the cool].
“There are people who, in mindfulness, have realized this and are completely cooled here and now. They do not become slaves working for Māra, for Death; they cannot fall into his power.”
~ SN 1092-5, (Ven. Saddhatissa trans.)*

In English, ‘nothingness’ can sound like annihilation, like nihilism. But you can also emphasize the ‘thingness’ so that it becomes ‘no-thingness.’ So Nibbāna is not a thing that you can find. It is the place of ‘no-thingness,’ a place of non-possession, a place of non-attachment. It is a place, as Ajahn Chah said, where you experience “the reality of non-grasping.”

This anthology, ‘The Island,’ reflects on this. Its quotes and spiritual teachings are more pointers than definitions or specific directions. Through the use of various teachings, references, scriptures and some of their own experience in practice, Ajahn Pasanno and Ajahn Amaro are pointing to Nibbāna, pointing out that Nibbāna is a reality that each one of us can know for ourselves – once we recognize non-attachment, once we realize the reality of non-grasping.
Ajahn Sumedho Amaravati Buddhist Monastery
***
Ajhan Amaro:

As I listened to the daily Dhamma talks of Ajahn Sumedho, the abbot and founder of the monastery, I noticed that over and over again he made mention of Ultimate Reality, the Unconditioned, the Unborn and Nibbāna. This was very striking since, during my couple of years in monasteries in Thailand, I had hardly heard a word spoken about this, even though it was the goal of the spiritual life.

Certainly that goal, of the realization of Nibbāna, was acknowledged as the overriding aim of the practice. However, it was stressed repeatedly that the Buddha’s emphasis was on the path, the means whereby that goal could genuinely be reached, rather than on rendering inspiring descriptions of the end to which the path led. “Make the journey!” it was said, “the nature of the destination takes care of itself and will be vividly apparent on arrival. Besides, the true nature of Ultimate Reality is necessarily inexpressible by language or concept. So just make the journey and be content.” This had made sense to me, so I now wondered why it was that Ajahn Sumedho made such an emphasis on it.

Being an inquisitive sort, and not very good at holding back, one day I asked him the question straight out. His reply struck me very deeply and affected the way in which I have thought and spoken ever since. He said:

“After teaching in the West for a very short period of time, I began to see that many people were disappointed both in materialism and theistic religions. To them Buddhism had great appeal but, lacking any fundamental sense of, or faith in the transcendent, the practice of Buddhism became almost a dry, technical procedure – intellectually satisfying but strangely sterile as well.

“They had largely rejected the idea of an Ultimate Reality from their thoughts as being intrinsically theistic nonsense so I realized that people needed to be aware that there was also such a principle in the Buddha’s teachings, without there being any hint of a creator God in the picture. In Thailand, because there is already such a broad and strong basis of faith in these transcendent qualities, there is no need to talk about Ultimate Reality, the Unconditioned and so forth – for them it can be a distraction. Here, I saw that people needed something to look up to – that’s why I talk about it all the time. It goes a long way to cultivating faith and it gives a much more living and expansive quality to their spiritual life; there is a natural joy when the heart opens to its true nature.”

*1094. “Owning nothing, taking nothing:
this is the island with nothing further.
I call this ‘nibbāna,’ the extinction of old age and death. (3) 1095. “Having understood this, those mindful ones are quenched in this very life.
They do not come under Māra’s control, nor are they Māra’s footmen.” (4) 

(Bhikkhu Bodhi)

Champollion

 And so Jacques throws himself into teaching his brother. He sets him riddles—

Why is the Chorus made up of old men in the first part of the Oresteia, why of slave women in the second, why of the Furies in the third? What is the secret?
He explains the subtle nature of language to him, how the dry rules of grammar can create a deep puzzle, choosing lines from the tragedies that turn in on themselves—

The living are killing the dead.
The dead are killing the living.

—in Greek a single phrase which expresses both meanings at once, the words themselves intertwining, as inseparable as the crimes of the past and present to which they refer.
More gifted than his hard-working brother, Jean François is able to remember long phrases and grasp difficult grammatical concepts after hearing them just once, astonishing Jacques with his facility. What his older brother has taken endless pains to learn, Jean François picks up with ease. He is a prodigy, Jacques quickly sees. When the older brother returns to Grenoble, he makes further sacrifices and finds the money for Jean François to be enrolled in school.
But if Jean François is an enfant prodigue, he is a temperamental one. He hates the discipline of his new school. He gets into fights with the other boys there every day. He becomes lazy and refuses to study anything. His head is filled with scenes from antiquity. Called upon to divide ten by two, to know the population of Figeac, to jump over a low hurdle, to spell his own name, he cannot.
Letters go back and forth between Grenoble and Figeac, between Jacques and Jean François, who appeals to his brother to let him live with him in Grenoble.
His brother answers, “If you want to come and live with me, you must study. An ignorant person can achieve nothing.”
The boy says he cannot study what does not interest him: It has no meaning for him. What he does care about, he devours, obsessed. He begins to see that the world was old even in the first centuries, with exhausted oracles and gods who have ceased to speak.
He becomes preoccupied with time, with first beginnings, an endlessly receding horizon. And before that? And before that? he asks his brother like a child—relentlessly—but also like a philosopher. And with these insistent questions, he begins to stumble upon his fate, the life’s work that will one day be his.
And before Christ?
The gods of Olympus, serene in beauty and power.
And before them?
Brutal monsters, the Titans—giants who howl with fear and rage as they devour their young.
And before that?
The earth and sky which for the Greeks always existed—but which the Hebrew God created from nothingness, from a single word, Yehee!, Let there be!, uttered in the darkness of endless night.
But still there is something before that, before the Greeks and Hebrews, something prior, preceding and half-forgotten like a dream or an hallucination: There is Egypt. Working his way back through the many moments in Egyptian time, first Arab, then Christian, Roman, Greek, Persian Egypt, Jean François arrives at the Egypt of the Pharaohs, dynasty after dynasty of rulers whose glory and splendor dazzled the world for millennia (the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) before beginning to wane one thousand years before Christ. For when Athens was just a patch of rock-strewn ground and Jerusalem a crude Jebusite fortress; when Rome was a forest haunted by wolves, great pyramids and temples had already risen on the banks of the Nile.
The monuments, perfect in form and massive in size, are a measure of Egypt’s power. And the inscriptions with which they are covered are a measure of her wisdom: the writing which the Greeks call hieroglyphs, holy carvings, and which the Egyptians call “the words of the gods.” Fantastic pictures of walking jars and beasts with human bodies, a jumble of drawings: humpbacked vultures, squatting children, flowers and fruits, stars and palm trees and bald-headed priests, women giving birth, and male members spilling seed or urinating.
But what can they mean, these “words of the gods”? Their significance has been forgotten in the long course of time. “Speeches from the grave,” the hieroglyphs will be called even in Roman times when there are still a few old priests who understand them. “The language of the dead,” the Emperor Hadrian shrugs in the first century AD. But between “dying” and “dead” two centuries still remain and it is not until AD 394 that hieroglyphic writing, in use for more than three thousand years, is inscribed on a temple wall for the last time. And then silence descends: For fifteen hundred years the strange symbols stand as a puzzle and a challenge to all who see them. The cumulative experience and wisdom of a great civilization, they are a legacy—but only for the scholar wise enough to read them.
The young Jean François takes in the challenge, not yet seeing its connection to himself. This is the first moment of a great passion: The lover sees his beloved for the first time, but he does not yet understand his agitation. He sees the beloved and stands still in awe. There is no movement toward her, no declaration, no vow—no, the determined cry I will decipher the hieroglyphs! will come later. Jean François will not wait long, a few years, not more. When he is eleven he will take that step, too. For everything in his life takes place early, quickly, as if he knows that he has much to do in a short time. A bow that is tightly strung must be unstrung by midday will be one of his favorite quotations—from a pharaoh who also knew that he would not have many years to complete his desired tasks.
For the time being, though, it is enough that Jean François sees Egypt—and that he hears Egypt’s mysterious silence of fifteen hundred years. Aware of the challenge, he turns to other projects, work for which his immature skills are more suitable. His brother’s letters encourage him, exhort him not to be idle. He compiles a list of ancient peoples and then, still dwelling on origins, he compiles another list of famous dogs going back to the beginning of time. There is the dog of Odysseus and the dogs who devour the body of Jezebel and the “cynotherapists,” the dogs of the healing temples, the Asklepieions, who gently walk or lay among the afflicted . . .
Thusor of Hermione, a blind boy, had his eyes licked by one of the Temple dogs and departed cured  .  .  .
Thus, for Jean François the next years will be spent in study. In due course, his brother—finally!—will let him come to live with him in Grenoble although he never fulfills his brother’s requirements of “. . . first learning the simple, the necessary facts and practical skills—not the least of which is to write legibly!”
From the narrow winding streets of Figeac, Jean Fran-çois will be transported to a city two hundred miles away in which the snow-capped mountains can be seen on all sides. He will never see his mother again. She will die while he is learning Hebrew and Arabic and Chaldean, as well as Latin and Greek. For two years his brother will tutor him and then the next stage in his education will begin: the lycée.
Two contrary elements will be present from this time on. Two sign posts as contrary as east and west mark his way: the inevitable and the improbable.
For what could be more improbable than the fate awaiting him? What could be more far-fetched—who would have guessed it?—that a young boy living in a small French town would conceive a passion such as the one which consumes Jean François? Who could have known that the strange carvings covering the tombs and temples of Egypt—mere chicken scratchings to a philistine mind!—would make everything else pale in the life of Jean François?
But if it is a strange, a fantastic passion, it is also, like all great passions, an inevitable one. To understand this inevitability, though, to see how it came about, one must ignore external circumstances. The logic of Jean François’ development is an inner one. To understand, to be in sympathy with him, one must ask along with this young French boy—and with the same naïve wonder—And before that? And before that? And even before that? until one is standing in blinding light before a silent Egyptian tomb.

***
BUT IF THE world is dazzled by Napoleon, a certain unhappy, ridiculous, sublime—and vulnerable, very vulnerable—eleven-year-old schoolboy in Grenoble is not. Just the opposite: Jean François hates the military spirit sweeping France. He suffers from it. It oppresses him and makes him withdraw into himself, for it permeates every aspect of what he calls his “prison,” the lycée with its endless army-style parades and its Napoleon-worship.
Everyone in the lycée must conform—that is axiomatic in military life. Obedience and inflexible discipline dictate every detail, from how many jacket buttons must be done up and how many left undone, to the 526 books which make up Napoleon’s fiat on the curriculum: these and no others! It is a restraint terrible to a mind used to ranging where it likes. During Jean François’ first weeks he is discovered criminally hiding away a 527th—and a 528th—and a 529th. When the mattresses are restuffed with fresh straw, Persian and Arabic books come tumbling out, Latin poems, a list of Egyptian kings compiled by Manetho in Greek.
Word spreads like wildfire. The incident gives rise to laughter. The new boy is punished, not for hiding away the kind of books usually hidden in the straw—one of the very popular, scurrilous, and illustrated accounts of Marie Antoinette’s love life, for example; or a scandalous, lurid novel such as Diderot’s The Nun, the illicit writing of the day. No, Jean François is made to stand at attention all afternoon for an Arabic grammar and a Persian dictionary and a list of old kings!
For his difference, Jean François will have to endure a ridicule that he never forgets. And though he will later come up against mockery often enough, these early, childish griefs stay with him forever. Years later though occupied with his great work, he will sometimes recall them in letters. He recounts them in detail to his nephew, who leaves them out of his worshipful memoir. For though the schoolboy Jean François has amassed a great deal of precocious learning, still he is less mature than other children of his age and their laughter wounds an innocent nature formed by his solitary upbringing.
But, though his classmates laugh, the authorities take a more serious view. In the masters’ view, this hiding of respectable books reflects a rebelliousness, a dangerous independence—not merely a schoolboy’s forgivable prurience. By Napoleon’s orders, students are instructed under the most rigid constraints. For example, take the question Champollion is asked: What is the best form of government?
A universal state like the one Napoleon is creating. Everyone knows this answer. It is repeated often enough by every student—every student, that is, except for the brilliant yet stupid new scholarship boy. Jean François alone refuses to praise Napoleon when called upon in class. Even worse, he gives voice to his own opinions, quoting the classical authors on the tip of his tongue.
Champollion!
A long pause always follows after he is called upon, a silence that lasts forever, though he is self-assured intellectually. It is torture for him to speak in public. It is painful to fully emerge from his intense inner life. His mind, his consciousness is filled with sounds: First and foremost that is how he experiences the languages he studies. A torrent of sounds, soft or harsh, long or short, heavy or light, coming from the throat or the lips, rolled on the palate, or hissed from behind the teeth, combining and recombining like music. “If Arabic is the most beautiful of languages, then Persian is the sweetest, the Italian of the Orient.” Each language has a logic and a mystery all its own.
Champollion!
He stands awkwardly in his cracked shoes and the ill-fitting, secondhand uniform his brother bought him, facing the world: his twenty or so classmates.
What is the best form of government?
“The best form of government . . .” he begins, then pauses again. It is unbearable, excruciating. Taking his courage in his hands, he throws himself over the hurdle of his reticence, declaring as a shock goes through the room that he admires republics.
Republics? A few years before it would have been the correct answer, there would have been no other. As Talleyrand cynically remarks: “Treason is a matter of dates.” Now with Napoleon having assumed absolute power, such a response could cost Jean François his scholarship.
Not giving this a thought, though, Champollion goes on to explain why he admires republics—especially the ancient Roman one. He recites Latin epigrams on freedom and lines from Greek poems. His answer is half absurd with its abstruse references—and half sublime. Finally the astonished teacher recollects himself and interrupts with another question: “And what about the glory Napoleon has brought France?”
Again Jean François is ridiculous and sublime. Pale, struggling for breath—on the verge of fainting as is typical of him when he becomes excited—he quotes another classical author: “I love my country, but I love the truth more . . .”
The reply silences the teacher, and earns Jean François two zeros amid shouts of laughter, one for history and one for impudent behavior.
“There are certain incidents which affect the entire course of a student’s career in an academic institution,” Jacques tells his brother in a reproachful letter. “I have used all my savings and even so, I can barely pay half the costs of keeping you in the lycée. Without a scholarship, where would you be? I don’t mention the fact that your opinions will be attributed to me. And I don’t remind you that by your behavior . . .” But of course he is reminding him of what is at stake and he is mentioning every fact, every argument he can think of in his effort to make Jean François succeed.
But Jean François is stubborn. He will not, perhaps cannot, give in.
So the teachers quickly come to dislike the poor, arrogant boy with his flashing eyes and his precocious learning, his awkwardness in drill, and his indifference not only to the emperor, but to the great event of the week: the special Sunday dinner, sometimes of sausages, sometimes a fat capon. Even the way Jean François eats his meals makes a bad impression.
His trouble is that he is too much like the emperor he despises. The refusal to lose himself in Napoleon-worship could not be more Napoleonic. For like the emperor, Jean François is passionate, irritable, proud, sensitive, more than a little mad; a visionary.
When he starts to learn Coptic, the language of Egypt in the first centuries after Christ, he gives himself up to his studies so completely that not only does he compile a Coptic dictionary running over two thousand pages, but he himself becomes a Copt: “I think in Coptic,” he tells his brother. “I write my notes and keep my accounts and even dream in it.”
And when he studies Arabic, he is transformed. Not only are his inflections so perfect that he is indistinguishable from a native Arabic speaker, his voice changes so that even when he speaks French it takes on a throaty and guttural quality. “I barely move my lips when I talk.”
Later, this is what sets Jean François apart from other scholars: his emotional, libidinous, voluptuous relationship to ancient language. He is obsessed, driven, stalking his quarry not just with his mind but with all his instinct and passion.
For though his linguistic insights are based on solid scholarship, they are also acts of imagination. If he is a methodical, logical scientist, he is also a magician, a medium through whom ancient Egypt will speak, an artist who lives in the world of his inspirations and who sums up existence thus: “Enthusiasm alone is the true life.” Champollion writes the word in Greek letters, conjuring its original meaning: “possessed by the god.”
But how to survive in a state lycée when you are possessed by a god? If his artistic temperament serves him well in his work, it is an affliction in daily life. He feels every slight or constraint more keenly. The school’s routines drive him to despair. He lives for the hours when he can study his “beloved oriental languages” with the learned Abbé Dussert, a special dispensation Jacques has managed to arrange. They are his one joy. His need for these sessions is so strong as to be almost physical. Till the small hours, he pores over his grammars by the dim light of a courtyard lamp, holding the books up on the left side of his bed. The sight in his left eye will be permanently impaired from the strain. By day, he resists anything that takes him away from his languages, cursing the lessons in mathematics and technical drawing, the drills and inspections—“these stupidities.”
Hence his endlessly imploring letters to his brother:
“They are killing me with their orders of the day . . .
“I will surely sicken or lose my mind here . . . save me, I beg of you, before that happens . . .
“Set me free,” he writes Jacques week after week, month after month, year after year, astonishing letters when one considers that they are written by a young boy lamenting hours “stolen” from the study of languages. At the same time, though, he never forgets the sacrifices Jacques is making to keep him in school. More than that, these sacrifices are a sign of his brother’s faith in him, a faith which sustains him. He is ashamed, grateful, and furious all at the same time.
“You see everything through the eyes of a wild horse, as the saying goes: magnified times five,” Jacques admonishes. “How will you achieve anything in life if you are ready to die for no reason at all? Besides, I understand that Abbé Dussert is considering permitting you to add another language, either Chaldean or Syriac. Now will you be content?”
But of course Jean François is not content: “How can the Abbé make it a question of one or the other? Doesn’t he know I must study both? Doesn’t he realize”—etc., etc.
He finds a place to be alone. When the others are at meals, Jean François sits under the stairwell and reads Herodotus and Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, the Greeks and Romans who are Egypt’s heirs, and from whom he absorbs everything, whatever is known about Egypt and her gods—the divine vulture Nehkbet, the jackal-god Anubis, and Ra, god of the sun.
Alone in the courtyard of his school, hidden away in an empty classroom, Champollion reads a book in Latin (The Golden Ass) by the Greek, Apuleis, praising the Egyptian goddess Isis. He is in the middle of a description of how Isis appeared to author-narrator Apuleis in a vision. Apuleis had been turned into a donkey and had witnessed all the falseness and lusts of the world: the fakery of the eunuch-priests of Isis who take her statue on the road and swindle the people; and then the cruelty of thieves who ride the animal almost to death as they murder and rape. Finally, the donkey manages to eat a garland of roses offered to him by a beautiful nymphomaniac and suddenly he is human again and at the great temple of Isis, worshipping the goddess who has been welcomed into Rome by a people seeking something new: salvation.
“O heart that my mother gave me!” the ex-donkey begins an ancient Egyptian hymn.
“O heart of my different ages!” Apuleis cries out in the work Champollion is reading. And then a military drumroll is heard throughout the school, followed by an even harsher, more dream-destroying bugle call: ra-ta-ta! Another parade, another drill and inspection: Is the angle of Champollion’s hat correct? His back straight? Arms at the sides?
Darkness. Despair. The end of the world.
To put it in the words of his beloved Apuleis—that man-turned-donkey-turned-man-again by grace of Egypt’s gods—the problem is Et hic adhus infantilis uterus gestat nobis infantem aliem.  .  .  . This is a prophecy addressed to Psyche, to Mind, a young girl who has coupled with Eros or Love: Though you are still only a child, you will soon have a child of your own  .  .  .
Within Jean François, mind has also joined with passion. And though he too is young, he is heavy with intellectual child.

***
(...)
They meet by chance when the prefect comes to visit the lycée. A fateful chance, the ancient Egyptians would have dialectically called it because, despite the difference in their age and situations, it is impossible that two such kindred spirits should live in the same city and not know each other.
Fate throws them together in Grenoble and keeps them together forever. When they die, they will lie near each other under Egyptian-style monuments in the Père Lachaise cemetery. And even in the twentieth century, valleys named after them when the moon is explored will not be far apart.
What then was the teacher at the lycée thinking of that day? Did he imagine that by putting Jean François in the back row to hide his shabby uniform he could prevent the “Egyptian” prefect from noticing the “Egyptian” boy?
It is not just that Jean François knows something about Egypt. All the students have followed Napoleon’s campaigns, some have even heard firsthand accounts from relatives in the army of the battle of the pyramids, the Cairo uprising, and the siege at Acre. But Egypt has been Jean François’ imaginative home. When questioned by Fourier, not only does he answer, but he eagerly asks the prefect his own questions. He talks with intimate knowledge, ranging over place and time with such ease that finally Fourier can only exclaim, “Who has been in Egypt, this boy or me?”
Fourier invites Jean François—not the indignant teacher and not the distinguished head of the lycée—to visit him at the prefecture. Talking to the boy as an equal, as Champollion will later remember, he inquires in the polite language of the day whether Jean François will do him the honor of paying him a visit.
Then the prefect is gone and Jean François is alone in the lycée again—no longer a savant but a boy who cannot spell or do the simplest math problems and who has had the impudence to hold forth before such an important visitor. Of course this “unseemly self-display” will be forgiven later on when the learned societies and the lycée will fight to claim Jean François as their own, this student in a shabby uniform who did not even have the manners to thank the prefect for his invitation—disgraceful!—who did not have the sense to take Fourier’s extended hand but stood unsmiling, staring and speechless, self-conscious and overwhelmed.
Overwhelmed or not, Jean François accepts Fourier’s invitation and so it comes to pass that the two sit closeted together in the prefect’s office. The meeting will be a turning point in Jean François’ young life. (...)

IN FOURIER’S STUDY, Jean François wanders among the ancient objects covered with writing. He sees a fragment from a young man’s coffin, late, from the Roman period. His portrait has been painted, in encaustic: the pigments burned into the wood, on a gilded mask meant to cover his mummy. The youth’s black hair is a thick tangle of rough curls falling over his forehead, the barbarian style fashionable in the first century AD. His eyes are large and staring. Sparse beginnings of a beard cover his downy cheeks.
Next to him is another Roman-period coffin, a complete one of lime wood with a young girl portrayed on the mask.
Her cheekbones are high, her skin a warm pinkish apricot. Her white mantle and her jewelry—three gold snake bracelets—have been carelessly painted. From the left, light falls on her young face with its melancholy expression. Thick, red lips, a half frown. Large dark eyes look sadly to a point beyond the viewer. A garland of rosebuds encircle dark hair pulled back with a severity more in keeping with an older face.
Around the sides of the coffin and on the sides of the headrest under the girl’s neck, spells have been painted in brilliant colors, hieroglyphs invoking the gods of Egypt. Soon, in two centuries, they too will undergo the oblivion of death, their altars covered with sand or usurped by monks living in the desert.
Running his hand over the writing, Jean François asks the prefect if anyone knows what it means. Fourier shakes his head. A stone has been found in the course of reinforcing an old fort at el-Rashid (Rosetta)—an ancient decree written in both hieroglyphs and Greek. But the meaning of the hieroglyphs is still as obscure as the spells painted on the young girl’s coffin.
“Then I will be the one!” Jean François declares with a fervor Fourier will never forget. “I will decipher the hieroglyphs . . .”
***
Between that strangled, gluttonous cry and Alexander the Great’s pronouncement, To the strongest! lie two thousand years and a babble of languages echoing all the way back to the Greek carved on the Rosetta stone. This is the real prize of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, this paean of praise for Ptolemy V Ephiphanes “Who pardoned those who had been arrested and who were in prison, and every person who had committed whatever crime long ago; Who gave grain to the god-houses yearly; Who took care to send infantry and cavalry and ships to drive back those who came to fight against Egypt from the sea coast as well as from the Great Green . . .” This near-miraculous find will help open the way to the decipherment. When the British triumph over the pathetic, dwindling troops Napoleon has left to languish in Egypt, they demand the stone as part of the French surrender.
General Menou will not agree to this. Negotiating the surrender, he gives in to almost all their terms except the “theft” of the stone. Day after day, week after week, he uses all kinds of ruses and stratagems to retain it: hiding it, denying its existence, even insisting that it is his “personal property.” When he finally fails, he weeps openly as he hands it over. The French soldiers bitterly curse and swear at the victors carting it away. At every moment, a British officer reports, he fears that they will be attacked.
This is not the end of the matter: The inscriptions on the stone have been copied. Its gray surface has been covered with boot black (for lack of printer’s ink) and pressed onto sheets of paper: the emperor’s gift to the linguist.
The British may have the stone. On the side of it they arrogantly chisel the date and the fact of their victory. Theirs, however, is a victory that will be snatched away. This is the linguist’s gift to the emperor: for when twenty-three years later, after twenty-three years of unremitting toil, Champollion finally succeeds in its decipherment, he will reclaim its glory for France.
True, by then it is a gift to a dead man, to an emperor who had perished on a small, barren island; to an ex-general whose body is laid naked on a billiard table and eviscerated as a hurried autopsy is performed.
Like the copies made of the stone, a death mask is made of the Emperor’s face: a plaster impression of his features. That famous silhouette—through the memories and ideals it conjures—will continue to command.
***
Love, friendship, rebellion; then “a certificate of study and conduct” from the lycée. At sixteen, Jean François is ready to face the world, which he does suddenly, by surprise, five days after his graduation.
With more brotherly pride than wisdom, Jacques has decided to risk his own reputation and Jean François’ self-esteem, arranging for him to deliver a paper before the Académie delphinale. But why he should have chosen this particular setting for Jean François’ debut is a mystery. Jacques knows the conservative, skeptical nature of the academy’s membership, distinguished scholars and diplomats, scientists and mathematicians who are rigorous and critical and severe. Called away from their own work, they expect to be rewarded with discourse that is extraordinary. This is the raison d’etre of the Académie.
Jacques knows the idea of a young student presenting a paper here will astonish everyone. Regardless of what Jean François has to say, there is something to provoke ridicule simply in the fact of a sixteen-year-old lecturing established scholars, authorities in their respective fields. Jacques knows that a failure elsewhere could be shrugged off by his brother, but that here it will publicly humiliate Jean François. Yet Jacques goes ahead with the scheme.
There is a practical consideration, perhaps. Young men are being drafted daily, their ages younger and younger as Napoleon’s soldiers die on battlefields and must be replaced. But if a success would help Jean François receive a military exemption, why here, precisely where success is hardest to achieve?
Later Jacques will say that he had followed the progress of his brother’s ideas and decided that he was ready. Ready for what, though? Intense scrutiny of ideas which are just beginning to germinate? Examination of a judgment which is not yet mature? An ordeal?
It is true that by the time Jean François finishes at the lycée, he has already sketched out his plans for a work on Egypt, but this is an early attempt. Modestly giving it the title Essay on the Geographical Description of Egypt Before the Conquest of Cambyses (the Persian conquest), Jean François brings all his research to bear on a single question: the place names of ancient Egypt, its cities, rivers, oases, provinces . . .
Jacques feels the work is defensible. Actually, not only is the essay defensible, it reflects masterful scholarship, the control of an enormous amount of material woven into a coherent, thought-provoking whole.
Rather, it is an essay that would be defensible, if the young Jean François remembers to stay within its limits, if he is careful not to improvise or get carried away—dangers against which Jacques has cautioned his brother. But try to preach discretion to an enthusiast. Tell a moth to avoid the flame or Icarus to be wary of the sun . . . Jacques is pissing against the wind.
And so, five days after his graduation, the young scholar appears at the Académie delphinale. He is introduced briefly—what is there to say about him, after all? Striding up to the podium, he begins to speak.
He is brilliant. In a tour de force, he analyzes scores of Arabic, Latin, Greek, and Coptic Egyptian place names; sometimes they are translations or paraphrases of older, pharaonic names; sometimes, more rarely, they contain elements of the original language (the Coptic names especially). These are sounds that have survived thousands of years since last spoken as part of the ancient, forgotten language. Distorted, changed, combined with other languages, missing letters, endings (phonetic decay)—they nevertheless provide hints and suggestions, which Jean François explores in speculative asides.
Taking a first step out of the charmed circle of the defensible, he continues on his dangerous path by predicting that whatever ancient Egyptian has survived in Coptic will provide an important clue in the decipherment of the hieroglyphs.
Of course it must be remembered, he continues—proceeding in the self-contradictory, dialectical way characteristic of all real thought—that from antiquity on, the hieroglyphs have been described as a silent, symbolic language: each image representing an idea, a word, an allegory. There are far too many hieroglyphs to represent an alphabet, far too many to represent sounds . . . hundreds (in Ptolemaic times, thousands). Yet Coptic words, Coptic sounds are and will be crucial. Just why and how this is, he does not yet know and cannot yet explain.
Jean François, though deep in his studies, is still far from tackling any of the new inscriptions brought back to Europe by Napoleon’s savants, a wealth of writing, both papyri and statues and prolific copies made from vast temple walls and many-chambered tombs—Denon’s the most important among them.
It is an embarrassment of riches, in addition to which—most tantalizing of all—there are the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, the three scripts which have been studied unsuccessfully by linguists across Europe. In fact, the experienced authority Silvestre de Sacy, the decipherer of the Sassanid Persian inscriptions at Naqsh-i-Rustam, a man who will soon be one of Jacques’ mentors in Paris, has opined that in the present state of knowledge, decipherment of the hieroglyphs is impossible.
Perhaps one day, perhaps by chance, de Sacy believes, success will be achieved. But only by chance, only because of some lucky find, some fortuitous discovery that brings to light material not yet known. Until that time, declares this eminent professor of Persian and Arabic, this scholar well-versed in Coptic, the quest is futile.
This pronouncement Jean François completely rejects though he cannot yet say why. Seeing Jacques bury his face in his hands, he tries to circle back to the problem of Shunet es Zebib—the name for a fortress at Abydos meaning Storehouse of Raisins in Arabic. The same sounds appear in classical authors (predating the Arab conquest) and which must therefore . . . Mid-sentence Jean François stops. He has finished.
“I listened in the silence to my beating heart,” he later remembers. The young linguist stands alone and exposed. He has no idea that, after the first shock of surprise is over, this silence will give way to loud acclaim. Or that in the next moment, surrounded by admirers, he will become the youngest member of the Académie delphinale.
***
Years later, when Napoleon’s stolen books find their way back to the Vatican library, the scholar Sir William Gell will relate, “I think there are few Coptic books in Europe he [Champollion] has not examined. A friend of mine told me there is no book in the Vatican in that language, that has not remarks of Champollion in almost every page, which he made when the manuscripts were at Paris.”
Jean François devotes himself especially to his Coptic although, after all, what is it? A patois, a jargon written in Greek letters, a jumble of words spoken by a people who, conquered again and again, had forgotten not only the classical form of their language but even their own script. Moreover, a patois that has itself gone out of use a thousand years before Jean François takes up its study!
Replaced by Arabic after the Arab conquest, Coptic becomes an echo of an echo, a memory of a memory: a vernacular, a slang, a debased language gradually dying into silence. Its tones, inflections, its expressions are all reduced to a fixed liturgy of “corrupted” words and a few crates of books in the National Library—books looted by a visionary general and pored over night after night by a feverish boy!
His theory that Coptic still bears some affinity to ancient Egyptian is still an unproven theory, little more than a guess, as Jean François knows. And even supposing that it is a remote descendant of the ancient language, how changed it must be—another problem. How many centuries separate Coptic from ancient Egyptian—and how many foreign conquests, how many foreign words and sounds and scripts have been interposed between the two.
Still Jean François persists in his study, going through crate after unopened crate, cutting through twine and breaking the military seals affixed in Rome. Reading through the night, his voice echoes in the empty library, for he reads out loud, a habit picked up from the ancients for whom the written word was not silent but filled with sound. ... THE WATCHMEN GET to know him. They see him, hour after hour, as they make their rounds. Even their dogs, Jean François writes his brother, no longer growl.
This, then, is how the young man spends his nights in Paris.
***
A CARETAKER KNOCKS on the door but is sent away. Since coming to Turin, Champollion has been so forgetful of his appearance and surroundings that the servants have begun to whisper that he is not quite right. The scroll before him has not yielded its meaning easily: The complex writing presents endless difficulties, endless exceptions to principles he himself had discovered earlier, when he had made his great breakthrough.
He had been going along in the path which had been trod by scholars struggling with the hieroglyphs since the Renaissance, when suddenly he understood: first one word, then two, then the principle, the key which unlocked the mystery.
Half-mad then with excitement he had run through the streets of Paris to the library where his brother worked. Holding his tattered notebook out to the astonished Jacques, he shouted, “Je tiens l’affair! (I’ve done it!)” Then he fainted, falling into a coma and lying unconscious for eight days, more dead than alive.
From the first announcement of his discovery, it is fiercely disputed; the British especially cover him with scorn and fiercely contest his findings. Champollion’s theories are contrary to the ideas held about hieroglyphics from the earliest time, ideas which he himself had espoused until, in a moment of inspiration, all his years of study, all the concentrated effort of a lifetime, bore fruit.
The challenge now is proving what he knows. The first basis for Champollion’s conclusions had been the Rosetta stone, but this monument was not enough to refute his critics. True, the stone was inscribed both in hieroglyphic and Greek and by comparing the scripts, one could arrive at certain possibilities. But the inferences drawn from the stone are still only educated guesses, mere clues and theories.
First, the Greek and Egyptian writing on the stone are paraphrases of each other. They give the general meaning of the decree, and are not word-for-word translations. Also, the writing on the stone is dismissed by the experts as providing too small a sample to conclusively prove any theory. It contains only fourteen lines of formal hieroglyphs: a slender basis for Champollion’s claim that he can read the hieroglyphs.
The brilliant Englishman Thomas Young, physicist, physician, amateur classicist, had briefly studied the stone. He made a limited but important contribution to its decipherment before giving up. A wealthy and sophisticated scholar with a broad range of interests, Young makes Champollion, with his lifelong devotion to this one mystery, seem like a crank. Champollion, holed up in a cheap rooming house in Paris, lives for one reason and for one reason alone: the hieroglyphs.
From this obscurity, Champollion announces to the world that he can read them. Young, writing at ease from a fashionable seaside resort, gives his verdict: “Champollion is wrong.”
The burden of proof falls on Champollion. But in the time which has passed since his great discovery, physical ailments ravage the obsessed scholar. Intense intellectual effort and the struggle with poverty have taken their toll on the slender, handsome young man, prematurely aging him.
The race to confirm his discoveries is also a race with death, whose presence Champollion is not allowed to forget as he studies funerary papyri, coffin texts, and ancient dirges.
The question is, will Champollion’s discoveries be his “calling card on Immortality,” as he has put it in a letter to his brother, or will his work be dismissed as the egotistical ravings of a madman?
***
THE DECIPHERMENT BEGINS with a handful of “letters” thrown down on a page of Jean Francois’ notebook—Ptolemaios, the Greek form of Ptolemy, next to the eight hieroglyphs encircled in the cartouche on the Rosetta stone: if the cartouche is encircling a foreign name, it stands to reason that these eight letters must spell Ptolemy:
Not only Champollion but Young had been working on the problem of the foreign names—or rather, the foreign “name” on the Rosetta stone, for there was only one of them, “Ptolemy.”
Of the eight letters, Young got five of them right, but more important than conjecturing the value of a letter more or a letter less was Champollion’s overall approach.
At this point, both men assume that only the names of foreign kings would have to be written with an alphabet in Egyptian. How else but phonetically could Ptolemy or Berenike or Xerxes or Darius, etc., be recorded?
The principle for indicating such sounds might be like that of a “rebus,” Jean François conjectured. It would be as if when writing the English word “seer” one used a picture of the sea plus an “ear.” Or as if “seersucker” was jotted down—as in a seersucker suit—by joining a bearded sage to a fool scratching his head—a sucker—and so on, using fertile, inventive combinations for every contingency.
Or, Champollion also opined, these special cases where phonetic writing was required might use the “acrophonic” principle—a “rabbit” for the letter “r,” a door for the letter “d,” etc.; the initial sounds of a word being indicated by its picture.
Apart from these foreign names, though, the pure hieroglyphs “depict the ideas and not the sounds of the language . . .” as Champollion puts it.
This far, there is general agreement. But Egyptian script is another matter. The script had been thought to be a different form of writing from the “pure” hieroglyphs, and what’s more an alphabetic or phonetic one.
On the Rosetta stone, the Egyptian section made use of both hieroglyphs and “demotic” script, the latest and simplest form of cursive Egyptian. And there are also two other Egyptian scripts (not used on the Stone): the so-called “hieratic” or priestly script; and linear hieroglyphs, both simplifications of the detailed carvings and paintings on tombs and monuments. For example, oldman in its four forms:
Now while Young never learned to distinguish between “demotic” and “hieratic” and probably never even realized that linear hieroglyphs existed, Champollion immersed himself in the scripts obsessively. Going back and forth between them, he finally came to realize that all four forms of writing operated on the same principle. Therefore, the scripts—like the pure hieroglyphs—could not be phonetic since the pure hieroglyphs were not. They were not an alphabet.
Champollion became so expert in recognizing the correspondences between the scripts, that he would transcribe words, whose meaning he still did not know, back and forth from cursive to hieroglyph and from hieroglyph to cursive, until, like Coptic, it became second nature to him.
This fluency in the scripts—along with his deep knowledge of Coptic—gets him over his next and perhaps most formidable hurdle. But before he can take that leap, first there is a vital piece of the puzzle which Fate or Chance must supply.
For up until this point, the eight letter/hieroglyphs which have been deciphered from the name of Ptolemy are only guesses or conjectures. In order to proceed according to sound linguistic principles, Champollion needs to cross-check them against a second ancient source. And like the Rosetta stone, this second source—whatever it might be—must contain a known, foreign royal name other than Ptolemy—yet containing some of the same letters.
Even as Jean François wrestles with this problem, this second ancient source—a gift of the gods—has finally, after endless difficulties and delays lasting more than a decade, reached England.
***
LATER, CHAMPOLLION WILL write of the hieroglyphs: “It is a complex system, a writing that is pictorial, symbolic and phonetic at one and the same time, in a single text, a single phrase and even in a single word. Each of these types of character aids in the notation of ideas by different means: It is a code.”
As he refines his understanding, he identifies many different aspects of the writing. “Determinatives”—for example, non-phonetic indicators as to what order of being a word belonged. So that a hieroglyph to which a small bird was added (a determinative) took on a negative or evil or sickly connation; whereas that same hieroglyph with a small flag would indicate divinity. A wavy line was the determinative for liquid; a phallus emitting liquid, procreation; a forearm with a stick, force—and so on.
Champollion will work with hapax legomena (words connected to a specific time or subject, such as our “Watergate”). He toils over foreign words, Aramaic or Hebrew, embedded in Egyptian. He suffers the agonies of the damned deciphering ancient classics which only existed in the careless practice copies of schoolboys.
In defense of his decipherment, he will travel to Egypt and find hundreds upon hundreds of examples of writing to prove his discovery—which, like every great discovery, must go against tenaciously held ideas. Like Columbus, who was forced to controvert known fact, Champollion rejects the givens of the linguistic world, and presents a far-fetched theory of an ancient language endlessly complicated and rich and subtle: “visual poetry,” he will call it, an interweaving of thought and image, of writing and sound.
But first—before he does any of this—he must run through the streets of Paris to tell his brother. And then he lies in a faint, in a coma. For eight days, he remains in a drugged dream.
After all, how can he bear it? It’s a wonder it doesn’t kill him! How can anyone bear such joy?
***
HONORS ARE BESTOWED upon Champollion from all sides. The pope, the French king, learned societies, universities, all extol his achievement. But Champollion views such praise only as a means to an end. Having the ear of the world, he can plead for more care in the excavation of the ancient sites of Egypt. Funds are made available for an Egyptian wing in the Louvre. A chair of Egyptology is established in the University of Paris.
There is still much work to be done, many mysteries of the ancient language to be unraveled. Yet with Champollion’s decipherment, knowledge of our shared past is extended to include the long-silent millennia before Christ.

CHAMPOLLION RETURNS TO France from his researches in Egypt in the dead of winter. Perhaps with Drovetti’s connivance, his boat is made to remain in quarantine outside of Marseille an extraordinary forty-two days. Not longer after, Champollion, at the height of his powers, dies at forty years of age.
His brother spends the next three decades editing and posthumously publishing his work.

The LINGUIST and the EMPEROR
NAPOLEON and CHAMPOLLION’S

QUEST to DECIPHER the ROSETTA STONE
Daniel Meyerson