Shalamov - Pain

 This is a strange story, so strange that anyone who hasn’t been in a camp, who doesn’t know the dark depths of the criminal world, the realm of gangsters, cannot even understand it. The camps are the very bottom of life. The criminal world isn’t the bottom of the bottom. It’s an utterly, utterly different and inhuman world.

There is a banal saying that history repeats itself twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.

No. There is also a third reflection of the same events, the same plot, a reflection in the underworld’s distorting mirror. The plot is unimaginable but nevertheless real: it genuinely exists and is there alongside us.

The utterly real gallows “courts” and “courts of honor” that the criminals hold at the mines are reflected in the distorting mirror of feelings and actions. Here war games are played, scenes of war are reenacted, and real blood is shed.

There is a world of higher forces, a world of Homeric gods who come down to our world to reveal themselves and to improve the human race by their example. True, the gods tend to be late. Homer praised the Achaeans, but we are enthused by Hector: the moral climate has changed a little. Sometimes the gods would invite human beings to heaven to observe their “lofty spectacles.” All this is a mystery that the poet solved a long time ago. There is a world and an underground hell from which people sometimes return, where they do not disappear forever. Why do they return? These people have hearts filled with an undying anxiety, an eternal horror of the dark world, and that is not the world beyond the grave.

This world is more real than Homer’s heavens.

*

Shelgunov “got stuck” in the Vladivostok transit camp: he was a ragged, dirty, hungry, badly but not yet fatally beaten objector to work. People had an urge to live, but the ships and their prisoners, one party after the other, were constantly being transported across the sea, on ship after ship, like the train cars feeding the Auschwitz gas ovens. On the other side of a sea from which nobody ever returned, Shelgunov had been in the valley of death on which the hospital stood, and he was lucky enough to be sent back to the mainland: Shelgunov’s bones were not good enough for the gold mines.

At this moment danger was again coming close; the lack of certainty that affected all of a prisoner’s life was becoming more and more palpable to Shelgunov. And there was no escape from that uncertainty, from the fragility of hope.

The transit camp was an enormous settlement, divided in various directions into zones, which were precise squares, and entangled with barbed wire; it lay in the line of fire of a hundred or so guard towers, and it was lit, flooded with light by a thousand searchlights that blinded the prisoners’ weak eyes.

The bunks at this enormous transit camp were the gates to Kolyma: they could suddenly empty and then fill up again with exhausted dirty people, new parties of prisoners from the outside world.

The steamships came back, the transit camp belched out a new portion of men, was emptied and then filled again.

In the zone, the largest in the transit camp, where Shelgunov was staying, all the barracks had been cleaned out, except for the ninth. The ninth was where the gangsters lived. That was where the King, the godfather, held sway. Wardens didn’t show their faces there; the camp staff would go every day to the porch and collect the bodies of those who’d pushed their luck too far with the King.

The cooks carted off to this barracks the kitchen’s best dishes and best items—the clothes brought by all the parties of prisoners always ended up as stakes in the gambling games of the ninth barracks, the King’s.

Shelgunov, a direct descendant of the Shelgunovs of the People’s Will,19 had a father who was an academician and a mother who was a professor in civilian life; since childhood, he had lived on books and for books; a bibliophile and a bookworm, he sucked in Russian culture with his mother’s milk. Shelgunov was shaped by the nineteenth century, the golden age of humanity.

Share your knowledge! Trust people, love people! That was what Russian literature taught, and Shelgunov had some time ago felt enough strength to give back to society what he had inherited. Self-sacrifice was for everyone. To rise up against lies, however petty, especially if they were close by.

Prison and exile were the state’s first response to Shelgunov’s attempts to live as books had taught him to live, as the nineteenth century had taught him.

Shelgunov was struck by the vileness of the people surrounding him. There were no heroes in the camps. Shelgunov refused to believe that the nineteenth century had deceived him. A deep disillusionment in people, acquired during his interrogations, during his journey as a prisoner and in the transit camp, was suddenly replaced by his old cheerfulness, his old exaltation. Shelgunov found what he wanted, what he had been seeking and dreaming of: living examples. He met a force about which he had read a great deal, and which inspired a belief that was absorbed by his blood. This was the world of gangsters and criminals.

The bosses trampled down and despised Shelgunov’s neighbors and friends, as well as Shelgunov himself, but they feared and revered the professional criminals.

Here was a world that boldly set itself against the state, a world that could help Shelgunov in his blind, romantic thirst for good and for vengeance.

“You wouldn’t have a novelist here, would you?”

Someone had put a foot on the bunk to change his footwear. Judging by the necktie and the socks, in a world where only foot wrappings had existed for many years, Shelgunov quite rightly classified the man as someone from the ninth barracks.

“We have one. Hey, writer!”

“You’ve got a writer here!”

Shelgunov twisted himself around into the light.

“Let’s go and see the King. You can ‘print’ us something.”

“I’m not coming.”

“What do you mean, you’re not coming? You’ll be dead before nightfall, you stupid fool.”

The fiction he’d read was a good preparation for Shelgunov when he met the criminal world. Shelgunov crossed the threshold of the ninth barracks in a spirit of reverence. All his nerves, all his gravitation toward the good were tensed, as resonant as taut strings. Shelgunov had to have success, had to gain attention, trust, love from his noble listener, the barracks boss, the King. And Shelgunov did have success. All his miseries stopped the moment that the King’s dry lips parted in a smile.

God knows what Shelgunov “printed”! Shelgunov absolutely refused to begin by playing an ace, The Count of Monte Cristo. No. He resurrected before the King’s very eyes Stendhal’s chronicles, Cellini’s autobiography, the bloodthirsty legends of medieval Italy.

“Great stuff, great stuff!” rasped the King. “Those cultures really knew how to fill their bellies.”

After that evening there was no question whatsoever of Shelgunov doing any work in the camp. He was brought a dinner and tobacco, and the next day he was moved to live permanently in the ninth barracks, officially, if that could be done officially in a camp.

Shelgunov became the court novelist.

“What’s making you so miserable, novelist?”

“I’m thinking about home, about my wife . . .”

“Well . . .”

“You know, the interrogations, the train journey, the transit camp. I’m not allowed to write until I’m taken to the gold mines.”

“You really are dumb. What are we here for? Write to your little beauty, and we’ll send the letters . . . We don’t use the post, we have our own railway. Okay, novelist?”

So once a week Shelgunov sent letters to Moscow.

Shelgunov’s wife was a performer, a Muscovite performer and the daughter of a general.

Some time ago, at the time of his arrest, they had embraced.

“I don’t mind if I don’t get any letters for a year or two. I’ll wait, I’ll always be with you.”

“The letters will come before that.” Shelgunov confidently calmed his wife as husbands do. “I’ll find my own channels. And you’ll get my letters through those channels.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“Shall I get the novelist? Or are you bored with him?” Karzubyi, concerned, asked his boss, the King. “Shouldn’t I bring you a nancy from the new party? You can have one of our lot, or one of the politicals, the article fifty-eighters.”

“Nancy” was the criminal’s word for a homosexual.

“No, call the novelist. Mind you, we’ve stuffed ourselves enough on that literature. It’s nothing but novels and theory. There’s another game we can play with that freier. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

•

“My dream, novelist,” said the King, when all the ceremonies of going to sleep had been observed: he’d had his heels tickled, a cross hung around his neck, and prison “hot cupping”—tweaks with the fingernail—on his back. “My dream, novelist, is for a woman like yours to write to me from the outside. She’s a looker!” The King turned in his hands a crumpled, faded photograph of Shelgunov’s wife, Marina, which he’d managed to hang on to despite thousands of searches, disinfections, and thefts. “A real looker! Just right for a séance. A general’s daughter! A performer! You freiers really are lucky, all our lot get are the poxy ones. And we don’t even notice the clap. All right, time for bed. I’m already dreaming.”

The next evening the novelist printed no novels.

“There’s something I like about you, freier. You may be a dummy, but there’s a drop of crook’s blood in you. Write a letter to the wife of my pal, a real man, to put it in a nutshell. You’re a writer. Make it really tender and clever: you know all those novels. I’ll bet no woman can resist a letter from you. What are we? Just ignorant. Write. The man will copy it and send it. You even have the same name: Aleksandr. That’s a laugh. Mind you, he’s only Aleksandr for the job he’s in here for. But he’s still Aleksandr, Shura for short, or Shurochka.”

“I’ve never written that sort of letter,” said Shelgunov. “But I can have a go.”

For each letter the King told him the overall gist, and Shelgunov-Cyrano20 turned the King’s ideas into reality.

Shelgunov wrote fifty of those letters.

One said, “I’ve confessed to everything; I’m asking Soviet power to forgive me.”

“Do convicts, I mean gangsters,” asked Shelgunov, unable to go on with the letter, “really ask for forgiveness?”

“Of course they do,” said the King. “This bit of writing is a dummy, a hoax, a spoof. Military tactics.”

Shelgunov asked no more questions; he just meekly wrote whatever the King dictated.

Shelgunov would read his letters out loud, polish the style, proud of his still-flamboyant brain. The King gave his approval, his lips barely parting in his royal smile.

Everything comes to an end. So did writing letters for the King. But there may have been an important reason: there was a rumor through the camp grapevine that the King was eventually going to be sent with a party of prisoners to Kolyma, where he had sent, by murder and deceit, so many others. He was going to be grabbed while he was asleep, it was said, his arms and legs bound, and then put on board the steamship. It was time to stop the correspondence; after all, Shelgunov had been speaking words of love to Roxane in Christian’s voice for nearly a year now. But the game had to end the criminal way, with real live bloodshed . . . 

Blood was congealing on the temple of a corpse lying before the King’s eyes.

Shelgunov tried to cover the corpse’s face, the reproachful look in its eyes.

“You see who it is? It’s the man with your name, Aleksandr, Shura, the man you wrote the letters for. The special action squad finished him off today, cut his head off with an ax. He seems to have been walking around with his face covered by a scarf. Write: ‘It’s a friend of your Shura writing! Shura was executed today, and I am writing as fast as I can to let you know his last words . . .’ Have you written that?” asked the King. “We’ll copy it, and then we’re quits. No need to write any more letters. I could have written that letter on my own.” The King smiled. “We value education, writer. We’re an ignorant lot.”

Shelgunov wrote the funereal letter.

The King must have been clairvoyant: he was seized that night and sent overseas.

Shelgunov couldn’t get in touch with home, and despaired. He struggled on, all alone, for a year, for two, for three, moving from hospital to work, outraged with his wife for having turned out to be a bitch or a coward, not using the “safe channels” to get in touch, forgetting him, Shelgunov, and trampling on every memory she had of him.

But it so happened that the hell of the camps ended and Shelgunov was released. He came back to Moscow.

His mother told him that she knew nothing about Marina. His father had died. Shelgunov found the address of a girlfriend of Marina’s who worked in the same theater and he went to her apartment.

The girlfriend cried out.

“What’s happened?” asked Shelgunov.

“Didn’t you die, Shura?”

“What do you mean, die? I’m standing here, aren’t I?”

“You’ll live forever.” A man emerged from the next room. “That’s the belief.”

“Marina is dead. After you were executed, she threw herself under a train. Not where Anna Karenina did it but in Rastorguyevo. She put her head under the wheels. The head was cut off clean and even. After all, you’d confessed to everything, but Marina refused to hear of it, she believed in you.”

“I confessed?”

“You wrote so yourself. But a friend of yours wrote about your being executed. Look, that’s her chest.”

The chest contained all fifty letters that Shelgunov had written to Marina through his Vladivostok channels. The channels had worked perfectly, but not for freiers.

Shelgunov burned his letters. But where were Marina’s letters with her photograph, that she had sent to Vladivostok? Shelgunov imagined the King reading his love letters. He imagined the King using the photograph “for a session.” And Shelgunov burst into tears. After that, he wept every day for the rest of his life.

Shelgunov rushed to see his mother, to find at least something, at least a line in Marina’s hand. It didn’t have to be to him. There were such letters, two faded letters, and Shelgunov learned them by heart.

The general’s daughter, the performer, was writing letters to a gangster. Gangster slang has a word “blagging,” meaning “bragging.” The word, khlestat’sia in Russian, came into gangster jargon from the boastful hero of a major literary work, Gogol’s Government Inspector’s Khlestakov. The King certainly had something to “blag” about: that freier of a novelist. Good for a laugh. That nice Shura. But the proper way to write letters is “You disgusting bitch, you can’t put two words together . . .” The King was reading phrases from his own affair with the prostitute Zoya Talitova.

“I haven’t had an education.”

“There’s no such thing. You sluts should learn how to live.”

Shelgunov, standing under a dark Moscow arch, could see all that easily. It was the scene with Cyrano, Christian, and Roxane, but acted in the ninth circle of hell, almost on the ice of the Far North. Shelgunov had trusted gangsters, and they had made him kill his wife with his own bare hands.

The two letters had become moldy, but the ink hadn’t faded and the paper had not turned to dust.

Shelgunov read these letters every day. How could he keep them forever? What glue would repair the crevices, the cracks in these dark sheets of writing paper that once were white. Certainly not liquid glass: that would burn and annihilate them.

All the same, letters can be restored so that they last forever. Every archivist knows how to do this, especially one who works in a literary museum. All you have to do is make the letters speak.

The lovely woman’s face was fixed to the glass next to a twelfth-century Russian icon, just above an icon of the Three-Handed Virgin. A female face, Marina’s photograph was perfectly apt here: it was superior to the icon . . . In what way was Marina less of a Virgin, a saint? In what way? Why are there so many women who are saints, apostolic martyrs, while Marina was only an actress, an actress who put her head under a train? Or does the Orthodox religion not accept suicides as angels? The photograph was tucked away among the icons and was itself an icon.

Sometimes Shelgunov would wake up in the night and, without turning on the lamp, search the table with his hands for Marina’s photograph. His fingers, frostbitten in the camp, could not distinguish an icon from a photograph, or wood from cardboard.

But perhaps Shelgunov was merely drunk. He drank every day. Of course vodka is bad for you, alcohol is hell, while disulfiram, the cure for alcoholism, is good. But what can you do if Marina’s icon is on the table?

•

“Do you remember that freier, that novelist, the writer, Genka? Eh? Or did you forget him ages ago?” asked the King, when the time came to get to sleep after all the ceremonies had been carried out.

“Why should I forget him? I remember him. He was that jerk, that ass!” And Genka waved his stretched-out fingers over his raised ear.

1967

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD

Further Kolyma Stories

VARLAM SHALAMOV

Herman Melville Billy Budd - review

 Billy Budd, a big, fair, good-looking sailor on board a merchantman, is impressed into the Royal Navy. His captain complains to the naval officer of the great loss this means to him. In Budd he is losing one of his best sailors and one who, by sheer kindness and availability, has made a peaceful crew of the wild rabble on board. When Budd first arrived, the captain says, only one person took an immediate dislike to him, a bad character whose motive he states precisely: envy of the newcomer because everyone else liked him so much.[1] After picking a quarrel with Billy Budd, however, the envious character was so promptly and thoroughly thrashed that from then on he, also, was one of his friends. The captain fears unrest in his crew if Budd, the peacemaker, leaves it. But characteristically Budd himself voluntarily submits to conscription aboard the warship.

Melville depicts Budd not only as an exceptionally handsome and skilled young seaman; we are also told that he is probably a foundling of aristocratic birth. But Budd has a slight impediment—excitement deprives him of the power of speech. Billy Budd’s downfall stems from the person of the master-at-arms, John Claggart. Melville intimates by hints about Claggart’s origins and his civilian career that this is a man who, on several counts, is seething with resentment against society and life in general.

Billy Budd gets on well with his shipmates. He is popular and in addition does his utmost to carry out his duties with painstaking efficiency. Having, at the very beginning of his service, witnessed the flogging of a sailor for a minor mistake, Billy seeks to avoid attracting the attention of his superiors. But he soon notices that minor accidents keep befalling him. His gear, carefully stowed, is in disorder. The malice of inanimate objects constantly thwarts his endeavour to be a perfect seaman. He discusses this with an old sailor who explains that the master-at-arms is down on him. This Billy cannot believe, since his shipmates have told him that the master-at-arms always calls him ‘the sweet and pleasant young fellow.’ For Billy, Claggart always has a friendly word and a smile.

Melville several times describes the petty officer’s envious look of hatred when he knows himself unobserved either by his victim or by the other sailors. Melville also muses on the fact that the envious man’s chosen victim is seldom able to detect the intentions and feelings of his persecutor from his expression or behaviour. Resentment and envy are hostile feelings that are easily concealed, and which it is often essential to disguise if the plot is to succeed.

Billy Budd, Melville’s embodiment of everything that is innocent, good and harmless, cannot comprehend why Claggart, whom he seeks to please by the exemplary performance of his duties, pursues him with the bitterest envy simply because Billy is the man he is. Thus, before relating the tragic events, Melville interpolates an analysis of envy.

After Melville has shown the reader what Billy and a number of his shipmates refuse to believe, namely, that ‘Claggart is down on him,’ and has confirmed this through the mouth of one of the crew, he looks for possible motives. Several are discussed and rejected before, very cautiously and gradually, Melville advances envy. At first, all he says is:

. . . yet the cause [of Billy’s persecution by the master-at-arms], necessarily to be assumed as the sole one assignable, is in its very realism as much charged with that prime element of Radcliffian romance, the mysterious, as any that the ingenuity of the author of The Mysteries of Udolpho could devise. For what can more partake of the mysterious than an antipathy spontaneous and profound, such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be, if not called forth by this very harmlessness itself?[2]The novelist thus perceives something that the modern social scientist is seldom able to perceive, because the latter seeks the primary cause of evil outside the perpetrator. Envy, hatred and hostility may be provoked in the aggressor while the man with whom the stimuli originated can in no way prevent this from happening. Only self-disfigurement or self-abasement might prevent envy in the other. With an understanding of the problems of human relations on board a warship—problems which modern small-group research, in costly and laborious experiments, claims to have solved anew—Melville describes the social climate in which the drama is played out:

Now there can exist no irritating juxtaposition of dissimilar personalities comparable to that which is possible aboard a great warship fully manned and at sea. There, every day among all ranks almost every man comes into more or less of contact with almost every other man. Wholly there to avoid even the sight of an aggravating object one must needs give it Jonah’s toss or jump overboard himself. Imagine how all this might eventually operate on some peculiar human creature the direct reverse of a saint.[3]

Many a novelist and most sociologists of our time would be content to cut short the analysis of Claggart at this point. Melville continues: ‘But for the adequate comprehending of Claggart by a normal nature these hints are insufficient. To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross “the deadly space between.” And this is best done by indirection.’[4]So far, Melville has not introduced the concept of envy or resentment. He first recounts a conversation he had once had with a scholar on the subject of worldly wisdom and the understanding of human nature. The scholar seeks to convince Melville that worldly experience does not of itself entail knowledge of the deeper labyrinths of human nature. He concludes with the remark: ‘Coke and Blackstone [jurists whose writings are legal classics] hardly shed so much light into obscure spiritual places as the Hebrew prophets. And who were they? Mostly recluses.’ At first, Melville says, he did not see this. Now, faced with the task of explaining Claggart’s antipathy to Billy Budd, he believes he understands his old friend’s advice and says:

‘And indeed, if that lexicon which is based on Holy Writ were any longer popular, one might with less difficulty define and denominate certain phenomenal men. As it is, one must turn to some authority not liable to the charge of being tinctured with the Biblical element.’[5] Melville is no doubt inferring that the problem of envy is frequently discussed in the Old and New Testaments. Yet he himself goes on for nearly three more pages before he lets fall the decisive word. He is set to prove conclusively that the malice in Claggart is something which the environmental theory, later so popular, cannot explain. The evil in Claggart lies at his very core, quite independent of the world around him.

Melville quotes a definition of ‘natural depravity’ attributed to Plato: ‘Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature.’ Melville hastens to warn us against the error of believing that what is meant here is the depravity of the whole of mankind, in Calvin’s sense. It is found only in certain individuals. And ‘Not many are the examples of this depravity which the gallows and jail supply.’ Claggart’s depravity, for which Melville is seeking the right word, is always dominated by the intellect. In a brief and masterly paragraph that might have come from the pen of a Scheler or a Nietzsche, the author of Billy Budd takes us into the phenomenological sphere of the envious personality—without having once mentioned the word ‘envy’:

Civilization [by which Melville clearly means something like the educated, worldly-wise, urbane man], especially if of the austerer sort, is auspicious to it. It folds itself in the mantle of respectability. It has its certain negative virtues serving as silent auxiliaries. It never allows wine to get within its guard. It is not going too far to say that it is without vices or small sins. There is a phenomenal pride in it that excludes them from anything mercenary or avaricious. In short the depravity here meant partakes nothing of the sordid or sensual. It is serious, but free from acerbity. Though no flatterer of mankind it never speaks ill of it.[6]A man so endowed by nature should, Melville thinks, be altogether subject to the law of reason. In reality, however, such natures are capable of the greatest irrationality, and such a man will, ‘toward the accomplishment of an aim which in wantonness of malignity would seem to partake of the insane. . . direct a cool judgement, sagacious and sound.’[7] Melville sees such people as blinded by their madness, though to the ordinary observer their actions are indistinguishable from the normal. They never announce their true aim, yet their methods and mode of behaviour are always completely rational. Claggart was that kind of man, possessed of an inward malice not wholly explicable from his environment, but which, as Melville writes, was innate—in other words, ‘a depravity according to nature.’[8]The reluctance to attribute envy

Up to this point the author has not once used the word ‘envy.’ But in Claggart’s characterization there is some evidence of those envious characteristics so often found in literature: he hides behind the mask of negative virtues such as spartan asceticism, his malignity is not to be bought off, he is unbribable, he never speaks ill of mankind, he appears to be extremely reasonable and yet is capable of the folly of self-injury if he can thus get at the object of his envy.

Here Melville interposes the digression on lawyers, experts and clerics. He asks whether the phenomenon (still not called envy) just described in Claggart which is always denied, or at least concealed, is not the motive behind the deed for which juries in many a criminal case vainly rack their brains. Surely, then, recourse should be had to men who know about the ‘rabies of the heart,’ rather than to ordinary doctors?[9]This shows remarkable insight in Melville. There has remained in criminological literature and practice up to the present a noticeable aversion towards express reference to the envy-motive, although there is convincing evidence in other sources of its significance in crime.

Not till now, forty pages after the beginning of the story, does Melville introduce the concept of envy, in a section headed ‘Pale ire, envy, and despair,’ the words Milton uses to characterize Satan. From this point, envy recurs again and again as the motive behind the master-at-arms’ persecution of Billy Budd. Claggart is himself handsome, but his frequent ironic remarks about the sailor’s beauty are explained by the author as envy:

Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is envy then such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody disown it but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest imputed to an intelligent man. But since its lodgement is in the heart not the brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it.[10]The passion of envy is kept secret by all men, regardless of their culture and language, more fearfully and shamefully than any form of erotic passion or perversion. To become a topic for literature and polite conversation, the latter needed a Sigmund Freud and his school. And it is no coincidence that Melville wrote this novel, in which envy is depicted in all its dangerous ugliness, at the end of his very long life fraught with privation and disappointment; for he must completely have resigned himself to his personal fate and to his lack of success in his own time.

In Claggart it was no vulgar envy that the author depicted, not just morbid jealousy which ‘marred Saul’s visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David.’ ‘Claggart’s envy struck deeper.’ He sensed that Billy’s outward beauty was related to a nature innocent of evil and envy. It was this strange moral phenomenon that drove Claggart to extremes of envy.

Melville even recognizes the paranoid aspect of such envy; because Claggart found it both inconceivable and intolerable that Billy should fail entirely to return his hatred, he read deliberate insults into chance happenings, like the spilling of the soup, so that his envy of Billy could find nourishment in self-righteous contempt and indignation.[11]The blind spot in Melville scholars towards the envy-motive in 

Billy BuddIt is not just the social sciences of this century that exhibit a blind spot so far as envy is concerned, but also its literary criticism. When a writer of Herman Melville’s standing devotes many pages of his last work to preparing the reader, in exemplary fashion, for the dominant motive of the drama’s enigmatic central character, when he provides in addition what amounts to a phenomenology of envy from the standpoint of depth psychology, and when he chooses this concept, in a special series of words taken from Milton’s Paradise Lost, as a chapter heading, it might be supposed that Melville scholars, at least when treating of this novel, would be bound to mention, if only once, Melville’s attempt to solve the riddle of envy and of crime resulting from it. We look in vain for any such mention. A systematic survey of works on Billy Budd reveals that most of them totally disregard the problem of envy. This is the more surprising in that Melville repeatedly referred to the motive in other works, and was concerned with its metaphysics in discussing John Milton.[12]In some 280 pages of what is now apparently a manual much used by American college students, Merlin Bowen offers an analysis of Melville. It deals exhaustively with Billy Budd, from page 216 to 233, and in ten other passages in various parts of the book. While there is frequent mention of Claggart as the symbol of evil, there is not one word about the envy-motive, so unmistakably stressed and carefully developed by Melville.

Bowen avoids the term, stating only that Claggart is filled with malice and evil. His longest section concerns the conflict of motives in Captain Vere. And even when he returns on occasion to the supposed motives of the informer, Claggart, he does not get beyond generalizations (the puzzle of depravity), or mentions only that most superficial motive, shown clearly enough by Melville to derive from envy: ‘. . . Claggart whose covert hatred, feeding upon a supposed injury . . .’[13] Melville would not have had to construct half the novel upon the envy-motive had he merely intended to explain Claggart’s hatred of Billy Budd in terms of what Claggart supposed to be insolence on Billy’s part. No reader, indeed, could possibly deduce from Bowen’s book that in Billy Budd Melville had given one of the most detailed analyses of envy and one, moreover, of crucial importance in the plot.

A. R. Humphrey’s Melville comprises 114 pages, more than three of which are devoted to Billy Budd. The author leaves no doubt as to the importance attached by Melville to the analysis of Claggart’s character: Among the finest things in Melville’s work is the analysis of Claggart’s mixed yearning and malice, real in its strangeness. . . . The analysis is probing, adumbrative, quietly troubled, and more interesting than any sensationalism could be. It presents, one might say, original sin according to agnosticism.’[14] There is no mention of envy in Humphrey’s work.

In a study devoted to Melville’s shorter works, Richard Harter Fogle has occasion to mention Claggart only once. All he says is: ‘Claggart, the master-at-arms . . . who is pure evil according to nature.’[15] The nature of this evil, made so plain by Melville, is not mentioned.

Tyrus Hillway, in the 176 pages given to the novelist’s work, unreservedly considers Billy Budd to be Melville’s best and most mature achievement. It is not only his final work, the product of the decade between his seventieth and eightieth birthdays, but a statement of his philosophy, a novel written without any thought of financial gain, or contemporary readership, a work hastened only by the prospect of premature death. One would have thought that Hillway would, if only in one sentence or phrase, have intimated to the reader that Melville discusses the problem of envy. But the word ‘envy’ does not appear even once. Claggart is the embodiment of evil—nothing more.[16]

Geoffrey Stone’s depiction of Melville, more than three hundred pages long, is aimed at the general reader. Billy Budd and Claggart are dealt with at length. The latter is one of the only two characters in the whole of Melville’s opus to be dominated by evil.[17]Yet here, too, we look in vain for an indication that in this novel and Claggart’s character Melville is investigating the problem of envy. Stone quotes long passages from the novel on the subject of the master-at-arms’ motivation, but avoids all those in which Melville uses the term ‘envy.’ Stone even goes into what he declares to be the modern interpretation of Claggart, according to which he is a homosexual, no less, whose unrequited love for the beautiful sailor turns into ambivalent love-hate and eventually into mortal hatred. This interpretation Stone rejects: ‘Melville constantly addresses himself to the metaphysical implications of Claggart’s depravity, and if these are not his chief concern with the matter, we are left with the curious spectacle of a highly intelligent old man devoting the last three years of his life to pondering a simple case of thwarted pederasty.’[18] Here Stone is right, but there is not a single word to suggest that Melville devoted three years of his life to the anatomy of envy. The few authors, however, who have gone into the matter, demonstrate how obvious the chief subject of Melville’s concern really is.

Milton R. Stern, for instance, devotes seven pages to a detailed interpretation of Claggart, mentioning the envious element several times.[19] F. O. Matthiessen puts it most clearly, perhaps, in his work on American literature: ‘. . . Claggart . . . whose malignity seems to be stirred most by the envious sight of virtue in others, as Iago’s was.’ And elsewhere:

To characterize what Claggart feels, Melville has recourse to the quotation, ‘Pale ire, envy and despair,’ the forces that were working in Milton’s Satan as he first approached the Garden of Eden. Melville has also jotted down, on the back of his manuscript, some remembered details about Spenser’s ‘Envy’: and in his depiction of Claggart’s inextricable mixture—longing and malice—he would seem to be reverting likewise to the properties he had noted in Shakespeare’s conception of this deadly sin.[20].

ENVY

A Theory of Social Behaviour

by Helmut Schoeck

The “civilized” barbarians and two mothers

 The government, however, at that time, had not thrown off all appearance of law; yet the men who hesitated to throw my mother into prison did not scruple to attempt her assassination. The Septembriseurs, as these hired ruffians were called, were placed for several days about the precincts of the Palais de Justice; but though my mother was warned of her danger, nothing could deter her from daily attending the trial, and seating herself at the feet of her father-in-law, where her devoted mien softened even the hearts of his murderers.

Between each sitting of the court she employed her time in privately soliciting the members of the committees and of the revolutionary tribunal. A friend of my father’s, in costume à la carmagnole, generally accompanied her, and waited for her in the antiroom.

In one of the last sittings of the tribunal her looks had drawn tears even from the women in the gallery, commonly called “the furies of the guillotine,” and the tricoteuses of Robespierre. This so enraged Fouquier-Tinville, the chief prosecutor, that he sent secret peremptory instructions to the assassins outside.

After the accused was re-conducted to prison, his daughter-in-law prepared to descend the steps of the palace, in order to regain, on foot and alone—for none dared openly to accompany her—the hackney coach, which waited for her in a distant street. My mother, naturally timid in a crowd, stood trembling at the head of this long flight of steps, pressed on all sides by an enraged and bloodthirsty populace. Her eyes involuntarily sought the spot where Madame de Lamballe had been murdered some time before. She felt her presence of mind departing, as from the ferocious mob the cry, “It is the daughter of the traitor, it is La Custine,” mingled with horrid imprecations, reached her ears. How was she to pass through this crowd of infernal, rather than human beings? Already some, with naked swords, had placed themselves before her; others, half clothed, had caused their women to draw back—a certain sign that murder was about to be enacted. My mother felt that the first symptom of weakness she might betray would be the signal for her death: she has often related to me that she bit her hands and tongue so as to bring blood, in her endeavor to preserve a calm countenance at this juncture. At length she observed a fishwife among the foremost of the crowd. This woman, who was revolting in appearance, had an infant in her arms. Moved by the God of mothers, the daughter of the traitor approached this mother (a mother is something more than a woman), and said to her, “What a sweet babe you have in your arms!” “Take it,” replied the parent, who understood her by one word and glance; “you can return it to me at the foot of the steps.”

The electricity of maternal feeling had thrilled through these two hearts. It communicated itself also to the crowd. My mother took the child, pressed it to her bosom, and held it as an aegis in her arms.

Man, as the child of nature, resumed his superiority over man brutalized under the influence of social evils. The “civilized” barbarians were vanquished by two mothers. She, who was mine, descended, thus rescued, into the court of the Palais de Justice, unsaluted by even an abusive word. She returned the infant to her who had lent it: they parted without interchanging a syllable: the place was not favorable to thanks or explanations, and they never saw each other afterwards; but assuredly the souls of these mothers will meet in another world.

The young woman thus miraculously saved, could not save her father-in-law. He died, and to crown the glory of his life, the veteran soldier had the courage to die a Christian. A letter to his son attests this humble sacrifice, the most difficult of all, in an age of practical crimes and philosophical virtues. In proceeding to the scaffold he embraced the crucifix. This religious courage ennobled his death, as much as his military courage ennobled his life; but it gave great offense to the Brutuses of Paris.

During the trial of General Custine, my father had published a sober but manly defense of the former’s political and military conduct. This defense, which had been placarded on the walls of Paris, only served to bring upon the author the hatred of Robespierre. He was imprisoned soon after the death of his father. At this period the Reign of Terror was making rapid progress: to suffer arrest was to receive sentence; the process of trial had become a mere form.

From:

LETTERS FROM RUSSIA

ASTOLPHE DE CUSTINE

Shalamov - A Piece of Flesh

 YES, GOLUBEV had brought this blood-soaked offering. A piece of flesh had been cut out of his body and thrown at the feet of the almighty god of the camps: to appease the god. To appease him, or to deceive him? Life repeats Shakespeare’s plots more often than we think. Are Lady Macbeth, Richard III, King Claudius merely remote medieval figures? Is Shylock, who wanted to cut a pound of live human flesh out of the merchant of Venice, a fairy-tale figure? Of course, the wormlike bit of gut, an appendix, a rudimentary organ, weighs less than a pound. Of course, the blood-soaked offering was made under fully sterile conditions. Yet, all the same. . . . The rudimentary organ turned out to be not at all rudimentary. It was vital, active, and lifesaving.

The end of the year fills prisoners’ lives with anxiety. Anxiety besets everyone whose place is insecure (and what prisoner could be sure that he was secure), especially if they are convicted under article 58, once they have managed, after many years’ labor at the pit face, hungry and frozen, to win the illusory, uncertain good fortune of a few months, a few weeks working either in a job they were trained for or at some cozy idiot’s job—as a bookkeeper, a paramedic, a doctor, a laboratory assistant—everyone who’s won the fight for a job that is supposed to go to a free hired worker (except when there are no such workers available) or to a nonpolitical convict (and ordinary convicts look down on these “privileged” jobs, because they can always get one, and for that reason they spend their time getting drunk or worse).

Fifty-eighters can get permanent staff jobs, and they do them well. Very well indeed. And without hope. For a commission is bound to come, find them, and get them dismissed, and, what’s more, give their boss a reprimand. No boss wants to spoil his relations with this powerful commission, so he acts in advance by getting rid of anyone who is not entitled to work at these “privileged” jobs.

A good boss waits until the commission has arrived. Let the commission do the hard work of deciding whom they can dismiss and send away. Those who are sent away won’t be away for long, and those who aren’t dismissed will stay for some time, for a year, until the next December. At the very least, six months. If the boss himself does the dismissing, without waiting for the commission to arrive so he can report that everything is in order, he’ll do it worse and more stupidly.

The worst sort of boss, the least experienced, will conscientiously carry out his superiors’ orders and not allow anyone with article 58 to do any job that doesn’t involve pickax and wheelbarrow, saw and ax.

That sort of boss presides over the worst-run enterprises, and they are the ones who get dismissed quickly.

The flying visits by commissions always happen toward the end of the year. The top bosses have their own backlog of checks and control, and they therefore make an effort to catch up on the backlog by the end of the year. So they send out commissions. Sometimes they make personal visits. In person. That means they get travel expenses and their “hot spots” have not been left personally unsupervised. They can tick the boxes for fulfilling their duty, and they can simply relax, have a nice trip, or if they like, show what they’re made of, display their strength and their importance.

Both prisoners and their bosses, from the lowest to the highest rank with big stars on their epaulets, know all this. It’s an old game, a very familiar ritual. But it is still worrying, dangerous, and relentless.

A December flying visit can reverse the fate of many and quickly drive yesterday’s children of fortune to an early grave.

After such visits nobody in the camp ever experiences any changes for the better. Prisoners, especially if they come under article 58, expect only the worst from such visits. For them there were no good expectations.

Ever since the previous evening there had been rumors, camp “grapevine” whispers, the kind that always turn out to be true. People said some important bosses had come, with a whole truckload of armed soldiers and a prison bus, a Black Maria, to take their captives to a hard-labor camp. Faced with those masters of life and death, the local bosses went into a panic; even the senior figures began to seem juniors, unknown captains, majors, and lieutenant colonels. Lieutenant colonels were hiding deep in their offices. Captains and majors were running around the courtyard holding various lists, lists that probably contained surnames, and among those surnames Golubev’s was sure to be found. Golubev felt this, he knew it. But nothing had been announced and nobody had been summoned. Not one name in the zone had been listed yet.

About six months earlier, when a Black Maria had made its regular visit to the settlement and there had been another manhunt, Golubev, who was not on the lists then, was standing by the guardhouse next to a prisoner-surgeon. The surgeon was working in the hospital not just as a surgeon but as a general physician.

The new group of prisoners who had been caught, hunted down, or exposed were pushed into the Black Maria. The surgeon took his leave of a friend who was being sent away.

Golubev was then standing next to the surgeon. When the truck crawled off, raising a cloud of dust, and disappeared in the mountain ravine, the surgeon looked Golubev in the eyes and said, referring to his friend who had now gone to a certain death, “It’s his own fault. If he’d had an attack of acute appendicitis, he’d still be here.”

Golubev had committed those words to memory. It wasn’t the thought or the reasoning he remembered. It was a visual memory: the surgeon’s eyes, the mighty clouds of dust. . . .

“The clerk of works is looking for you,” said someone who had just run up to him. Golubev saw the clerk of works.

“Get your things!” The clerk was holding a paper list. It was a short one.

“Right away,” said Golubev.

“Then come to the guardhouse.”

But Golubev did not go to the guardhouse. He clutched the right side of his belly with both hands and groaned as he staggered in the direction of the clinic.

The surgeon came out onto the porch: it was the same surgeon. Something was reflected in his eyes, something he remembered. Perhaps it was the dust cloud that covered the truck that was taking his friend away forever. The examination was quick.

“Admit him. And call out the theater nurse. Call a doctor from the free village to assist. It’s an urgent operation.”

In the hospital, about two kilometers from the zone, Golubev was undressed, washed, and registered.

Two male nurses took him in and laid him on the operating table. They tied him to the table with canvas straps.

“The injection’s coming,” Golubev heard the surgeon say. “But I think you’re brave enough.”

Golubev said nothing.

“Answer! Nurse, talk to the patient.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Yes.”

“It’s always like that with local anesthesia.” Golubev heard the surgeon’s voice explaining something to the assistant. “It’s all talk, it doesn’t really work. Here it is. . . .”

“Hang in there just a bit longer. . . .”

A sharp pain made Golubev’s whole body jerk, but the pain stopped being acute almost immediately. The surgeons started talking, interrupting each other cheerfully and loudly. The operation was coming to an end.

“Well, we’ve removed your appendix. Nurse, show the patient his bit of flesh. Can you see it?” The nurse held a snakelike piece of gut, about half as long as a pencil, over Golubev’s face.

“We have instructions to show patients that there was a good reason for an incision, that the appendix really has been removed,” the surgeon explained to his assistant, who was a free worker. “Well, this gives you a little bit of practical experience.”

“I’m very grateful to you,” said the free doctor, “for the lesson.”

“For a lesson in human kindness, a lesson in philanthropy,” said the surgeon, speaking in metaphors as he took off his gloves.

“If you get anything else like this, be sure to call me in,” said the free doctor.

“If we get anything else like this, I certainly shall,” said the surgeon.

The male nurses, convalescent patients wearing patched white gowns, carried Golubev into the hospital ward. It was a small, postoperative ward, but there weren’t many operations in the hospital and none of the patients there were surgical ones. Golubev lay on his back, cautiously touching the bandage wrapped around him, like an Indian fakir’s or yogi’s loincloth. When he was a child, Golubev had seen drawings of such people in magazines; for almost the whole of his adult life he hadn’t known whether those fakirs and yogis really existed or not. But the thought of yogis slipped past and disappeared from his brain. The efforts of his will and his nervous tension weakened, and a pleasant feeling of having done his duty flooded his body. Every cell of that body was singing, purring a happy tune. This meant a break for a few days, a reprieve from being sent into the unknown realm of hard manual labor. For the time being Golubev was saved. This was a postponement. How many days did a wound take to heal? Seven or eight. So danger would return in a fortnight. Two weeks is a very long time, as good as a thousand years, long enough to prepare oneself for new ordeals. And in any case the time it takes for a wound to heal according to the textbooks, and for healing by primary intention, is seven or eight days, so the doctors said. And if the wound gets infected? If the plaster stuck over the wound should come off the skin too early? Golubev cautiously felt the plaster: it was a piece of gauze impregnated with gum arabic, and it was firm, already drying. He felt it through the bandaging. Yes. . . . This was an emergency exit, a reserve, a few extra days, possibly months if need be. Golubev recalled the big ward at the mine where he had been a patient a year ago. Almost all the patients there would undo their bandages at night and put in a bit of salutary dirt, real dirt picked off the floor, which they would rub in with their fingernails and thus reopen the wounds. Golubev was then a novice and these nighttime changes of dressing used to arouse his amazement to the point of contempt. But a year had passed and Golubev now understood why the patients had acted as they did. It was time for him to profit from what he had learned there. He fell asleep and woke only when somebody’s hand pulled the blanket off his face. Golubev always slept as camp prisoners did, with his head under the blanket, trying above all to get warm and to protect his head. Someone’s very handsome face was bending over Golubev. The face had a mustache and a haircut, which was either short on the back and sides or a crew cut. That meant the head was not a prisoner’s head. Golubev opened his eyes and thought it must be the memory of the yogis or a dream, perhaps a nightmare, but perhaps just an ordinary dream.

“Just an ordinary freier,” the man rasped in disappointment, putting the blanket back over Golubev’s face. “An ordinary freier. No proper people about.”

But Golubev’s feeble fingers pulled his blanket down so that he could look at the man. That man knew Golubev, and Golubev knew him. There was no doubt about it. But he must not, must not be in any hurry to show he recognized him. He had to remember things properly. Remember everything. Golubev did remember. The crew-cut man was. . . . Any moment now the man would be taking off his shirt by the window and Golubev would see a cluster of intertwined snakes tattooed on his chest. The man turned around and the cluster of intertwined snakes appeared before Golubev’s eyes. This was Kononenko, a gangster with whom Golubev had been in a transit camp a few months ago, a man who had served several sentences for murder, a prominent gangster who had been “taking a break” for several years in hospitals and pretrial prisons. Whenever the time came for him to be discharged, Kononenko would murder someone in a transit camp: he didn’t care who, any freier would do, and he would suffocate them with a towel. A towel, a prison-issue towel was Kononenko’s favorite murder weapon, it was his calling card. He would be arrested, a new case would be opened, he would be tried again and get an extra twenty-five years to add to the many hundreds of years he already had to serve. After the trial Kononenko would do his best to get into the hospital “for a rest,” then he would murder again, and the whole process would start anew. At the time execution of common criminals by shooting had been abolished. The only people who could be executed were “enemies of the people” under article 58.

“Kononenko’s in the hospital now,” Golubev reflected calmly, every cell of his body singing for joy, afraid of nothing, confident of success. “Kononenko is in the hospital now. He’s going through the hospital cycle of his horrible transformations. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after tomorrow, Kononenko’s well-known program will require yet another murder.” Would that not make Golubev’s efforts—his operation, his terrible effort of willpower—count for nothing? He, Golubev, would be the next victim whom Kononenko would strangle. Perhaps he shouldn’t have tried to get out of being sent to hard-labor camps, where prisoners had the “ace of diamonds,” a five-digit number, stitched to their backs and were issued striped uniforms. But at least you didn’t get beaten there and they didn’t strip the flesh off your bones. And there weren’t all those Kononenkos there.

Golubev’s bunk was by the window. Kononenko was lying opposite him. By the door, a third man lay, his feet close to Kononenko’s feet. Golubev could see the third man’s face clearly, he didn’t even have to turn his head to see that face. Golubev knew that patient, too. It was Podosionov, a permanent inhabitant of the hospital.

The door opened and a paramedic brought the medicines in.

“Kazakov!” he shouted.

“Here,” yelled Kononenko, getting up.

“Something for you to read,” said the paramedic, handing a piece of paper folded over several times.

“Kazakov?” the name wouldn’t stop pounding inside Golubev’s brain. But this was Kononenko, not Kazakov. Suddenly Golubev realized what was going on, and his body broke out in a cold sweat.

Everything had taken a turn for the worse. None of the three men was mistaken. This was Kononenko, a “cold fish” as the criminals called him, who had taken somebody else’s name and under that name, Kazakov’s name, along with Kazakov’s criminal record, had gotten himself admitted to the hospital as a “shift worker.” This made things even worse, even more dangerous. If Kononenko was just Kononenko, his next victim might be Golubev or it might not. In that case there would still be a choice, a chance, a possibility of salvation. But if Kononenko was Kazakov, then Golubev had no hope of survival. The moment Kononenko suspected anything, Golubev would die.

“You, have we met before? Why are you looking at me like a boa constrictor looking at a rabbit? Or a rabbit looking at a boa constrictor? Which is the right expression, in your learned opinion?”

Kononenko was sitting on a bedside table in front of Golubev’s bunk; he was crumpling up his message with his big, hard fingers, scattering crumbs of paper over Golubev’s blanket.

“No, we haven’t met,” said Golubev hoarsely. He was turning pale.

“Well, it’s a good thing we haven’t,” said Kononenko, taking a towel off a nail that was hammered into the wall over the bunk, and shaking the towel in Golubev’s face. “Only yesterday I was going to strangle that ‘doctor’ over there,” he said, nodding in the direction of Podosionov, whose face now expressed boundless horror. “After all, what is the bastard doing?” Kononenko went on cheerfully, pointing the towel at Podosionov. “He’s mixing his own blood into his urine—look at the jar under his bunk. . . . He scratches his finger and puts a drop of blood in his urine. He knows what he’s doing. He’s as good as the doctors. The laboratory analysis results: blood in his urine. Our ‘doctor’ stays in the hospital. Well, tell me, does a man like that deserve to live or not?”

“I don’t know,” said Golubev.

“You don’t? You do. And then you were brought in yesterday. You were in transit camp with me, weren’t you? Before I was tried. I went under the name of Kononenko at the time.”

“I’ve never seen your face before,” said Golubev.

“You have. So I’ve decided. Instead of the ‘doctor,’ I’ll finish you off. What has he done wrong?” Kononenko pointed to Podosionov’s pale face, which was very slowly turning red as the blood began to circulate again. “What has he done wrong? He’s trying to save his life. Like you. Or, if you like, me. . . .”

Kononenko paced the ward, tossing the crumbs of paper, all that was left of the message he’d received, from one hand to the other.

“And I would do you, I’d send you to the next world, and I wouldn’t hesitate. Except the paramedic’s just brought me a message, you see. I’ve got to get out of here as quick as I can. The bastards at the mine are trying to kill us. All the thieves in the hospital have been called on to help. You don’t know what our life is like. . . . You stupid freier!”

Golubev said nothing. He did know what their life was like. As a freier, of course, by observation only.

After dinner Kononenko was discharged and he was out of Golubev’s life forever.

While the third bunk was still empty, Podosionov managed to get himself to the edge of Golubev’s bunk, where he sat at Golubev’s feet and started whispering.

“Kazakov is going to strangle both of us, no doubt about it. We’ve got to tell the bosses—”

“Go fuck yourself,” said Golubev.

1964

KOLYMA STORIES

Volume One

Cioran - The Undelivered

The more we consider the Buddha’s last exhortation, “Death is inherent in all created things; labor ceaselessly for your salvation,” the more we are troubled by the impossibility of feeling ourselves as an aggregate, a transitory if not fortuitous convergence of elements. We readily conceive ourselves as such in the abstract; in the immediate, we physically gainsay it, as if we were faced with some unassimilable evidence. So long as we have not triumphed over this organic repugnance, we shall continue to suffer that illusion-based scourge which is the craving to exist.

That we unmask things, that we stigmatize them with the name of appearances counts for nothing, for we admit thereby that they harbor being. We cling to anything, if only we don’t have to tear ourselves away from that fascination accountable for our actions and even our nature, from that primal dazzle which keeps us from discerning the nonreality in everything.

I am a “being” by metaphor; if I were one in fact, I should remain so forever, and death, stripped of meaning, would have no hold on me. “Labor ceaselessly for your salvation”—that is, don’t forget that you are a fugitive assemblage, a composite whose ingredients are only waiting to come apart. Salvation, indeed, has a meaning only if we are provisional to the point of mockery; if there were the slightest principle of duration in us, we should have been forever saved or lost: no more quest, no more horizon. If deliverance matters at all, our unreality is a real godsend.

.   .   .

We should deprive being of all its attributes, make it no longer the support, the site, of all our attachments, the eternal reassuring impasse, a prejudice—the most deeply rooted of all, the one we are most accustomed to. We are accomplices of being, or of what seems so to us, for there is no being, there is only the ersatz of being. If there were a true one, we should still have to release ourselves from it, extirpate it, since everything which is turns to subjection and shackles. Let us ascribe to others the status of shades; we shall separate ourselves from them all the more easily. If we are mad enough to believe they exist, we expose ourselves to nameless miscalculations. Let us have the prudence to acknowledge that everything that happens to us, every event, like every bond, is inessential, and that if there is a knowledge, what it must show us is the advantage of maneuvering among ghosts.

Thought, too, is a prejudice, a shackle. It liberates only at the beginning, when it permits us to break certain moorings; afterwards, all it is capable of is to absorb our energy and to paralyze our impulses toward liberation. That it can help us in no way is sufficiently proved by the happiness we feel when we suspend it. Like desire, to which it is related, thought feeds on its own substance; it likes to manifest, to multiply itself. At best, it can tend toward truth, but what defines thought is bother: We think by a liking for thought, as we desire by a liking for desire. In either case, a fever amid fictions, an over-exertion within nescience. The man who knows has recovered from all the fables engendered by desire and by thought; he leaves the current, no longer consents to the deception. To think is to participate in the inexhaustible illusion which begets and devours itself, greedy to perpetuate and destroy itself; to think is to compete with delirium. In so much fever, the only sensible thing is the pause when we breathe, the moments of suspension when we get the better of our hard breathing: the experience of the void—which is identified with the totality of such pauses, of such intervals in delirium—implies the momentary suppression of desire, for it is desire which plunges us into nescience, which sets us straying, which drives us to project being all around us.

The void allows us to erode the idea of being; but it is not drawn into this erosion itself; it survives an attack which would be self-destructive for any other idea. It is true that the void is not an idea but what helps us rid ourselves of any idea. Each idea represents one more mooring; we must free the mind of them, as we must free ourselves of all beliefs, those obstacles to withdrawal. We shall succeed only by raising ourselves above the operations of thought: as long as thought functions, as long as thought is rife, it keeps us from discerning the depths of the void, perceptible only when the fevers of the mind and of desire diminish.

All our beliefs being intrinsically superficial and governing only appearances, it follows that all are on the same level, at the same degree of unreality. We are constituted to live with them, we are constrained to do so: They form the elements of our ordinary, everyday malediction. This is why, when we happen to expose them and sweep them away, we enter into the unheard-of, into an expansion next to which everything seems pale, episodic, even that very malediction. Our limits retreat, if we have any left. The void—myself without me—is the liquidation of the adventure of the “I”—it is being without any trace of being, a blessed engulfment, an incomparable disaster.

(The danger is to convert the void into a substitute for being, and thereby to thwart its essential function, which is to impede the mechanism of attachment. But if the void itself becomes the object of attachment, would it not have been wiser to abide by being and the cortege of illusions which follows it? In order to throw off our fetters, we must learn to adhere to nothing any longer, if not to the nothing of freedom.)

.   .   .

Ideally, we should lose—without suffering from the loss—our liking for beings and for things. Every day we should honor someone, creature or object, by renouncing them. Thereby we should arrive, inventorying appearances and dismissing them one after the other, in perpetual withdrawal, the very secret of joy. Everything that we appropriate, our knowledge even more than our material acquisitions, merely feeds our anxiety; on the other hand, what calm, what radiance when that frenzied pursuit of possessions, even spiritual ones, abates! It is already a serious matter to say “me,” more serious still to say “mine,” for that supposes an additional collapse, a reinforcement of our allegiance to the world. It is a consolation, the notion that we possess nothing, that we are nothing; the supreme consolation resides in the victory over this notion as well.

So closely does anxiety adhere to being, that it must tear itself away if it would overcome itself. If it aspires to rest in God, it will succeed in doing so only insofar as He is superior to being or at least insofar as He contains a zone where being is reduced or rarefied: it is here that, no longer having anything to contend with, anxiety is freed and approaches those confines where God, liquidating His last vestiges of being, lets Himself be tempted by the void.

.   .   .

The sage, as the East has always known, refuses to make plans, never projects. Hence you would be a kind of sage. . . . To tell the truth, you make plans, but it revolts you to carry them out. The more you brood over one, the more you feel, abandoning it, a well-being which can reach the point of ecstasy.

Everyone lives in and on the project, consequence of nescience: a metaphysical confusion on the scale of the species. For the awakened, becoming, and a fortiori every action which is inserted within it, is no more than a lure, a deception begetting disgust or dread.

What matters is not to produce but to understand. And to understand signifies to discern the degree of awakening to which a being has achieved, his capacity to perceive the sum of unreality which enters into each phenomenon.

.   .   .

Let us abide by the concrete and the void, let us proscribe whatever is located between the two: “culture,” “civilization,” “progress.” Let us brood over the best formula ever devised here on earth: manual labor in a monastery. . . . There is no truth, except in physical expenditure and in contemplation; the rest is accidental, useless, unhealthy. Health consists in exercise and in vacuity, in muscles and meditation; in no case in thought. To meditate is to be absorbed into an idea and to be lost there, whereas to think is to leap from one idea to the next, to delight in quantity, to accumulate trifles, to pursue concept after concept, goal after goal. To meditate and to think are two divergent, even incompatible activities.

To abide by the void—is this not also a form of pursuit? No doubt, but it is to pursue the absence of pursuit, to aim at a goal which sets aside all the others from the start. We live in anxiety because no goal can satisfy us, because over all our desires, and a fortiori over being as such, floats a fatality which necessarily affects those accidents which are individuals. Nothing of what becomes actual escapes forfeiture. The void —a leap outside this fatality—is, like every product of quietism, antitragic in essence. Thanks to the void we might learn to recover ourselves by climbing back toward our origins, toward our eternal virtuality. Does it not put an end to all our desires? And they—what are they, taken together, next to a single moment when we pursue none, when we feel none! Happiness is not in desire but in the absence of desire, more precisely in our enthusiasm for that absence—in which we would like to wallow, to sink, to vanish, to exclaim. . . .

.   .   .

When the void itself seems too heavy for us or too impure, we hurl ourselves toward a nakedness beyond any conceivable form of space, while the last moment of time rejoins the first one and dissolves into it.

.   .   .

Let us scour consciousness of everything it includes, of every universe it drags in its wake, let us purge ourselves along with perception, confine ourselves to white, let us forget all the colors except the one which denies them. What peace, once we annul diversity, once we escape the calvary of nuance and are engulfed in the uniform! Consciousness as pure form, then the very absence of consciousness.

To elude the intolerable, let us seek out a counterirritant, a means of avoidance, a region where no sensation condescends to take a name, nor any appetite to be made flesh—let us recover that initial repose and abolish, with the past, odious memory and consciousness above all, our age-old enemy whose mission it is to impoverish us, to erode us. Unconsciousness, on the contrary, is nutritive, it fortifies, it makes us participate in our beginnings, in our primal integrity, and plunges us back into beneficent chaos, the chaos before the trauma of individuation.

.   .   .

Nothing matters: a great discovery, if ever there was one, from which no one has been able to gain any advantage. To this discovery, supposedly a depressing one, only the void, of which it is the motto, can give a stirring resonance; only the void takes its place, takes the place of everything, fulfills all the irreparable into the possible. That there is no self we know, but our knowledge is encumbered with reservations. Luckily the void is there, and when the self is withdrawn the void takes its place, takes the place of everything, fulfills all our expectations, affords us the certitude of our nonreality. The void—the abyss without vertigo.

Instinctively, we incline to the self; everything in us lays claim to it: It satisfies our demands for continuity, for solidity, it confers upon us, against all evidence, a timeless dimension: Nothing more normal than to cling to it, even when we put it in question, divulge its impostures: The self is any living man’s reflex. . . . All the same it seems inconceivable for us once we consider the self coldly: it crumbles, it vanishes, it is nothing more than the symbol of a fiction.

Our first movement bears us toward the intoxication of identity, toward the dream of indistinction, toward Atman, which answers our deepest, most secret summons. But as soon as we gain a little perspective, coming to our senses, we abandon the supposed basis of our being, turning toward the fundamental destructability, knowledge and experience of which, a disciplined obsession, lead to nirvana, to plenitude within the void.

.   .   .

It is because it gives us the illusion of permanence, it is because it promises what it cannot provide, that the idea of the absolute is suspect, not to say pernicious. Assailed at the roots of our being, utterly unfit to last, perishable to our very essence, it is not consolation we require but cure. The absolute neither resolves our perplexities nor suppresses our ills: It is merely a makeshift and a palliative. A doctrine which extols it is true insofar as it confines itself to analysis, insofar as it exposes appearances; it inspires doubts as soon as it confronts them with an ultimate reality. Once we leave the realm of the illusory and struggle to substitute the indestructible for it, we skid into falsehood. If we lie less with the void, it is because we do not seek it out for itself, for the truth it is supposed to contain, but for its therapeutic virtues; we make it into a remedy, we imagine it will correct the mind’s oldest deviation, which consists in supposing that something exists. . . .

A compromised animal, man has passed the stage of being content with a “hope”; what he expects is not just another artifice, but deliverance. Who will bring it to him? On this point, the only one that matters, Christianity has shown itself less helpful than Buddhism, and Western speculation less effective than Oriental. Why bother with abstractors deaf to our cries or with redeemers busy rubbing salt into our wounds? And what is still to be hoped for from this part of the world which regards contemplation as abulia, awakening as torment?

We need some saving shock. It is incredible that a Saint Thomas should have seen in stupor an “obstacle to philosophic meditation,” whereas it is precisely when we are “stupefied” that we begin to understand, that is, to perceive the inanity of all “truths.” Stupor benumbs us only to awaken us the more readily: it opens to us, it releases us to the essential. A complete metaphysical experience is nothing but an uninterrupted stupor—a triumphal stupor.

.   .   .

It is a sign of indigence to be unable to open ourselves to the purifying void, the void that appeases. We are so low, and so entangled in our philosophies that we have been able to conceive only nothingness, that sordid version of the void. We have projected all our uncertainties, all our miseries and terrors there, for what is nothingness, finally, but an abstract complement of hell, a performance of reprobates, the maximum effort toward the lucidity available to beings unsuited for deliverance? Too tainted by our impurities for it to let us make the leap toward a virgin concept such as the void is for us (the void, which has not inherited from, “taken after” hell, which is not contaminated by it), nothingness, in truth, represents only a sterile extremity, only a disconcerting, vaguely funereal way out, quite close to those attempts at renunciation which turn sour because too much regret is mixed in with them.

The void is nothingness stripped of its negative qualifications, nothingness transfigured. If we should manage to develop a taste for it, our relations with the world are transformed; something in us changes, though we keep our old defects. But we are no longer from here in the same way as before. This is why it is salutary to resort to the void in our crises of rage: our worst impulses are blunted upon that contact. Without the void, who knows, we might now be in prison or in some padded cell. The lessons in abdication it teaches also invite us to a subtler behavior with regard to our denigrators, our enemies. Should they be killed, or spared? Which does more harm, which gnaws deepest: vengeance, or victory over vengeance? How decide? In our uncertainty, let us choose the torture of not taking revenge.

Such is the limit-concession we can make if we are not saints.

.   .   .

Only the man oppressed by the universality of torment is ripe for deliverance. To try to free yourself without the awareness of this torment is either an impossibility or a vice. There is no gratuitous deliverance; we must be liberated from something, in this case from the omnipresence of the intolerable—which we suffer as much in the hypothesis of being as of non-being, since things and the appearances of things make us suffer equally. But the hypothesis of vacuity offers an advantage after all: it casts a clearer light over the excess of the torment, over the proportions it assumes and the inanity of the cause which provokes it. We always torture ourselves too much, whether this world is real or unreal. The majority, it is true, are unaware of how much they are suffering. It is the privilege of consciousness to waken to the excruciating, to perceive the throbbing illusion to which human beings are in thrall.

It is with deliverance as it is with Christian salvation: some theologian, in his scandalous naïveté, believes in redemption even while denying original sin; but if sin is not consubstantial with humanity, what meaning can we attribute to the advent of the redeemer? What has he come to redeem? Anything but accidental, our corruption is permanent, it is congenital. The same with iniquity: abusively charged with “mystery,” iniquity is an evidence, it is even what is most visible here on earth, where to put things back in order would require a savior for each generation, or rather for each individual.

.   .   .

Once we cease to desire, we become the citizen of all worlds and of none. It is by desire that we are from here; desire vanquished, we are no longer from anywhere and have nothing further to envy a saint nor a specter.

It may happen that there is happiness in desire, but beatitude appears only where every bond is broken. Beatitude is not compatible with this world. It is for beatitude that the hermit cuts all his moorings, for beatitude that he destroys himself.

.   .   .

Cow’s urine was the only medicine monks were authorized to use in the first Buddhist communities. One cannot imagine a more judicious restriction. If we pursue peace, we shall reach it only by rejecting whatever is a factor of disturbance, whatever man has grafted onto simplicity, onto his original health. Nothing exposes our failure better than the spectacle of a pharmacy: all the remedies desirable for each of our ills, but none for our essential ill, for the disease of which no human invention can cure us.

.   .   .

If believing ourselves unique is the result of an illusion, it is, let us admit, an illusion so total, so imperious that we are entitled to wonder if we can still call it one. How desist from what we shall never recover, from that pathetic and unheard-of nothing which bears our name? The illusion in question, source of all the pangs we must suffer, is so deeply anchored in each of us, that we can vanquish it only by means of a sudden whirlwind which, sweeping away the ego, leaves us alone, without anyone, without ourselves. . . .

Unfortunately, we cannot exterminate our desires; we can only weaken them, compromise them. We are up against the self, infected with the venom of the “I.” It is when we escape it, when we imagine we escape it, that we have some right to use the high words employed by the true (and the false) mysticism. As for a fundamental conversion, there is no such thing: we convert with our nature. Even the Buddha after illumination was only Siddhartha Gautama with knowledge in addition.

Everything we believe we have smothered rises to the surface again after a certain time: defects, vices, obsessions. The most patent imperfections we have “corrected” return disguised but as awkward as before. The pains we have taken to rid ourselves of them will not, however, have been altogether in vain. A desire, long supplanted, reappears; but we know it has come back; it no longer gnaws us in secret nor takes us unawares; it dominates us, subjugates us, we are still its slaves, true, but not consenting slaves. Every conscious sensation is a sensation we have unsuccessfully opposed. We are not the more pained for that, since its victory will have driven it from our deepest life.

.   .   .

In each encounter we have chosen what is easiest: God or His substitutes, persons in any case, in order to have someone to gossip or argue with. We have replaced contemplation with tension, thereby creating tiresomely emotional relations between divinity and ourselves. Only men who seek but are unwilling to find could have become virtuosi of the inner drama. The great modern discovery is spiritual malaise, the quartering between substance and vacuity, more precisely between the simulacre of each. Whence the cult of singularity, in every realm. In literature, a rare mistake is worth more than any tried, acknowledged truth. The unwonted, on the contrary, has no value on the spiritual level, where all that matters about an experience is its depth.

According to the Bhagavadgita, a man is lost to this world and to the other who is “given over to doubt,” that same doubt which Buddhism, for its part, cites among the five obstacles to salvation. This is because doubt is not depth or a search for depth but stagnation, the vertigo of stagnation. With doubt, it is impossible to advance, to arrive; doubt is corrosion and nothing but. When we suppose ourselves farthest from it, we relapse into it, and everything begins all over again. It must explode for us to be able to take the path of emancipation. Without this outburst which must pulverize even the most legitimate reasons for doubting, we perpetuate ourselves in malaise, we cultivate it, we avoid the great solutions, we corrode ourselves and delight in our corrosion.

.   .   .

The passion to withdraw, to leave no trace, is inaccessible to anyone attached to his name and to his work, and even more inaccessible to anyone who dreams of a name or a work—the trifler in short. Such a man, if he persists toward salvation, will achieve it, at best, only by bogging down in nirvana.

.   .   .

We do not conceive of a bitter mystic. Knowledge according to the world, clairvoyant aridity, excessive lucidity without an inner dimension, bitterness is the appanage of the man who, having cheated in his relations with the absolute and with himself, no longer knows what to hold onto nor whom to turn to. Bitterness is after all more frequent than we suppose, it is normal, everyday, the common lot. Joy, on the other hand, fruit of an exceptional moment, seems to rise up out of a disequilibrium, a derangement in the depths of our being, so contradictory is it to the appearances where we live. And if it were to come from elsewhere, from further than ourselves? Joy is expansion, and every expansion participates in another world, whereas bitterness is constriction, even if infinity looms in the background. But it is an infinity which crushes instead of liberating.

No, it is inconceivable that joy should be deranged, still less that it should come from nowhere; joy is so complete, so enveloping, so marvelously unendurable that we cannot confront it without some supreme reference. In any case it is joy and joy alone which allows the notion that we can forge gods out of our need for gratitude.

.   .   .

It is not difficult to imagine the language a contemporary man would use if he were obliged to declare his opinion about the only religion which has contributed a radical formula for salvation:

“The search for deliverance is justified only if we believe in transmigration, in the indefinite vagabondage of the self, and if we aspire to put an end to it. But for those of us who do not believe in this, what is there to put an end to? To this unique and infinitesimal duration? It is obviously too brief to deserve the exertion of withdrawing from it. For the Buddhist, the prospect of other existences is a nightmare; for us, the nightmare is the cessation of this one—of this nightmare. As for nightmares, better give us another, we should be tempted to cry out, in order that our disgraces not end too soon, in order that they have time to follow us through several lives. . . .

“Deliverance corresponds to a necessity only for the man who feels threatened by an additional existence, who dreads the task of dying and dying all over again. For us, condemned not to be reincarnated, what is the use of struggling to liberate ourselves from . . . nothing? to free ourselves from a terror whose end is in sight? And what is the use of pursuing a supreme unreality, when everything here on earth is already unreal? Why bother ridding ourselves of something so little justified, so unfounded? . . .

“An increase in illusion and in torment, that is what each of us aspires to, each of those who have no opportunity to believe in the endless circle of births and deaths. We sigh for the curse of being reborn. The Buddha has really taken too much trouble to what end? A definitive death: what the rest of us are sure to obtain without meditations or mortifications, without any effort whatever. . . .”

It is more or less in this manner that our fallen man would express himself, if he consented to expose his real thoughts. And who would dare cast the first stone? Who hasn’t spoken this way to himself? We have sunk so deep into our own history that we want it to be perpetuated without respite. But whether we live once or a thousand times, whether we own one hour or all of them, the problem is the same: an insect and a god would not differ in their way of considering the fact of existing as such, which is so terrifying (as only a miracle can be) that when we linger over it, we conceive the desire to disappear forever, in order not to have to consider it again in other existences. It is on this phenomenon that the Buddha has insisted, and it is doubtful that he would have modified his conclusions if he had ceased believing in the mechanism of transmigration.

.   .   .

To find that everything lacks reality and not to put an end to it all, this inconsistency is not an inconsistency at all: taken to extremes, the perception of the void coincides with the perception of the whole, with the entrance into the All. At last we begin to see, we grope no longer, we are reassured, we are confirmed. If a chance of salvation exists outside of faith, it is in the faculty of enriching ourselves upon contact with unreality that we must seek it.

Even if the experience of the void were only a deception, it would still deserve to be tried. What it proposes, what it attempts, is to reduce to nothing both life and death, and this with the sole intention of making them endurable to us. If it occasionally succeeds, what more can we desire? Without it, no cure for the infirmity of being, nor any hope of reinstating, even for a few moments, the prenatal joy, the light of pure previousness.

From: The new gods by E. M. Cioran; translated from the French by Richard Howard

Cioran - Thinking against oneself

ALMOST all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God, insofar as He interests us—it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us. Blasted by the curse attached to acts, the man of violence forces his nature, rises above himself only to relapse, an aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having instigated them. Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career, I cannot, at any price, retain my identity: whatever residue I retain must be liquidated; if, on the contrary, I assume a historical role, it is my responsibility to exasperate my faculties until I explode along with them. One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

Faithful to his appearances, the man of violence is not discouraged, he starts all over again, and persists, since he cannot exempt himself from suffering. His occasional efforts to destroy others are merely a roundabout route to his own destruction. Beneath his self-confidence, his braggadocio, lurks a fanatic of disaster. Hence it is among the violent that we meet the enemies of themselves. And we are all violent— men of anger who, having lost the key of quietude, now have access only to the secrets of laceration.

Instead of letting it erode us gradually, we decided to go time one better, to add to its moments our own. This new time grafted onto the old one, this time elaborated and projected, soon revealed its virulence: objectivized, it became history, a monster we have called up against ourselves, a fatality we cannot escape, even by recourse to the formulas of passivity, the recipes of wisdom.

Try as we will to take the “cure” of ineffectuality; to meditate on the Taoist fathers’ doctrine of submission, of withdrawal, of a sovereign absence; to follow, like them, the course of consciousness once it ceases to be at grips with the world and weds the form of things as water does, their favorite element—we shall never succeed. They scorn both our curiosity and our thirst for suffering; in which they differ from the mystics, and especially from the medieval ones, so apt to recommend the virtues of the hair shirt, the scourge, insomnia, inanition, and lament.

“A life of intensity is_contrary to the Tao,” teaches Lao Tse, a normal man if ever there was one. But the Christian virus torments us: heirs of the flagellants, it is by refining our excruciations that we become conscious of ourselves. Is religion declining? We perpetuate its extravagances, as we perpetuate the macerations and the cell-shrieks of old, our will to suffer equaling that of the monasteries in their heyday. If the Church no longer enjoys a monopoly on hell, it has nonetheless riveted us to a chain of sighs, to the cult of the ordeal, of blasted joys and jubilant despair.

The mind, as well as the body, pays for “a life of intensity.” Masters in the art of thinking against oneself, Nietzsche, Baudelaire, and Dostoevsky have taught us to side with our dangers, to broaden the sphere of our diseases, to acquire existence by division from our being. And what for the great Chinaman was a symbol of failure, a proof of imperfection, constitutes for us the sole mode of possessing, of making contact with ourselves.

“If a man loves nothing, he will be invulnerable” (Chuang Tse). A maxim as profound as it is invalid. The apogee of indifference—how attain it, when our very apathy is tension, conflict, aggression? No sage among our ancestors, but malcontents, triflers, fanatics whose disappointments or excesses we must continue.

According to our Chinese again, only the detached mind penetrates the essence of the Tao; the man of passion perceives only its effects: the descent to the depths demands silence, the suspension of our vibrations, indeed of our faculties. But is it not revealing that our aspiration to the absolute is expressed in terms of activity, of combat, that a Kierkegaard calls himself a “knight of Faith” and that a Pascal is nothing but a pamphleteer? We attack and we struggle; therefore we know only the effects of the Tao. Further, the failure of Quietism, that European equivalent of Taoism, tells the story of our possibilities, our prospects.

The apprenticeship to passivity—I know nothing more contrary to our habits. (The modern age begins with two hysterics: Don Quixote and Luther.) If we make time, produce and elaborate it, we do so out of our repugnance to the hegemony of essence and to the contemplative submission it presupposes. Taoism seems to me wisdom’s first and last word: yet I resist it, my instincts reject it, as they refuse to endure anything—the heredity of revolt is too much for us. Our disease? Centuries of attention to time, the idolatry of becoming. What recourse to China or India will heal us?

There are certain forms of wisdom and deliverance which we can neither grasp from within nor transform into our daily substance, nor even frame in a theory. Deliverance, if we insist upon it, must proceed from ourselves: no use seeking it elsewhere, in a ready-made system or in some Oriental doctrine. Yet this is often what happens in many a mind avid, as we say, for an absolute. But such wisdom is fraudulent, such deliverance merely dupery. I am indicting not only theosophy and its adepts, but all those who adopt truths incompatible with their nature. More than one such man has an Instant India and supposes he has plumbed its secrets, when nothing—neither his character nor his training nor his anxieties—prepares him for any such thing. What a swarm of the pseudo-”delivered” stares down at us from the pinnacle of their salvation! Their conscience is clear—do they not claim to locate themselves above their actions? An intolerable swindle. They aim, further, so high that any conventional religion seems to them a family prejudice by which their “metaphysical mind” cannot be satisfied. To convert to India, doubtless that is more satisfying. But they forget that India postulates the agreement of idea and act, the identity of salvation and renunciation. When one possesses a “metaphysical mind,” such trifles are scarcely worth one’s concern.

After so much imposture, so much fraud, it is comforting to contemplate a beggar. He, at least, neither lies nor lies to himself: his doctrine, if he has one, he embodies; work he dislikes, and he proves it; wanting to possess nothing, he cultivates his impoverishment, the condition of his freedom. His thought is resolved into his being and his being into his thought. He has nothing, he is himself, he endures: to live on a footing with eternity is to live from day to day, from hand to mouth. Thus, for him, other men are imprisoned in illusion. If he depends on them, he takes his revenge by studying them, a specialist in the underbelly of “noble” sentiments. His sloth, of a very rare quality, truly “delivers” him from a world of fools and dupes. About renunciation he knows more than many of your esoteric works. To be convinced of this, you need only walk out into the street… But you prefer the texts that teach mendicancy. Since no practical consequence accompanies your meditations, it will not be surprising that the merest bum is worth more than you … Can we conceive a Buddha faithful to his truths and to his palace? One is not “delivered-alive” and still a landowner. I reject the generalization of the lie, I repudiate those who exhibit their so-called “salvation” and prop it with a doctrine which does not emanate from themselves. To unmask them, to knock them off the pedestal they have hoisted themselves on, to hold them up to scorn is a campaign no one should remain indifferent to. For at any price we must keep those who have too clear a conscience from living and dying in peace.

*

When at every turn you confront us with “the absolute,” you affect a profound, inaccessible little ogle, as if you were at grips with a remote world, in a light, a darkness all your own, masters of a realm to which nothing outside of yourselves can gain access. You grant us other mortals a few scraps of the great discoveries you have just made, a few vestiges of your prospecting. But all your labors result in no more than this: you murmur one poor word, the fruit of your reading, of your learned frivolity, of your bookish void, your borrowed anguish.

The Absolute—all our efforts come down to undermining the sensibility which leads to the absolute. Our wisdom (or rather our unwisdom) repudiates it; relativists, we look for our equilibrium not in eternity but in time. The evolving absolute, Hegel’s heresy, has become our dogma, our tragic orthodoxy, the philosophy of our reflexes. Anyone who supposes he can avoid it is either boasting or blind. Stuck with appearances, we keep espousing an incomplete wisdom, half-fantasy and half-foolishness. If India, to quote Hegel again, represents “the dream of the infinite Spirit,” the turn of our intellect, as of our sensibility, obliges us to conceive of a Spirit incarnate, limited to historical processes, embracing not the world but the world’s moments, a faceted time which we escape only by fits and starts, and only when we betray our appearances.

The sphere of consciousness shrinks in action; no one who acts can lay claim to the universal, for to act is to cling to the properties of being at the expense of being itself, to a form of reality to reality’s detriment. The degree of our liberation is measured by the quantity of undertakings from which we are emancipated, as by our capacity to convert any object into a non-object. But it is meaningless to speak of liberation apropos of a hurried humanity which has forgotten that we cannot reconquer life nor revel in it without having first abolished it.

We breathe too fast to be able to grasp things in themselves or to expose their fragility. Our panting postulates and distorts them, creates and disfigures them, and binds us to them. I bestir myself, therefore I emit a world as suspect as my speculation which justifies it; I espouse movement, which changes me into a generator of being, into an artisan of fictions, while my cosmogonie verve makes me forget that, led on by the whirlwind of acts, I am nothing but an acolyte of time, an agent of decrepit universes.

Gorged on sensations and on their corollary—becoming, we are “undelivered” by inclination and by principle, sentenced by choice, stricken by the fever of the visible, rummaging in surface enigmas of a piece with our bewilderment and our trepidation.

If we would regain our freedom, we must shake off the burden of sensation, no longer react to the world by our senses, break our bonds. For all sensation is a bond, pleasure as much as pain, joy as much as misery. The only free mind is the one that, pure of all intimacy with beings or objects, plies its own vacuity.

To resist happiness—the majority manages that; suffering is much more insidious. Have you ever tasted it? You will never be sated once you have, you will pursue it greedily and preferably where it does not exist, you will project it there since without it everything seems futile to you, drab. Wherever there is suffering, it exhausts mystery or renders it luminous. The savor and solution of things, accident and obsession, caprice and necessity—suffering will make you love appearance in whatever is most powerful, most lasting, and truest, and will tie you to itself forever, for “intense” by nature, it is, like any “intensity,” a servitude, a subjection. The soul unfettered, the soul indifferent and void— how in the world achieve that? How conquer absence, the freedom of absence? Such freedom will never figure among our mores, any more than “the dream of the infinite Spirit.”

To identify oneself with an alien doctrine, one must adopt it without restrictions: what is the use of acknowledging the truths of Buddhism and of rejecting transmigration, the very basis of the idea of renunciation? Of assenting to the Vedanta, of accepting the unreality of appearances and then behaving as if appearances existed? An inconsistency inevitable for any mind raised in the cult of phenomena. For it must be admitted: we have the phenomenon in our blood. We may scorn it, abhor it, it is nonetheless our patrimony, our capital of contortions, the symbol of our hysteria here on earth. A race of convulsionaries, at the center of a cosmic farce, we have imprinted on the universe the stigmata of our history and shall never be capable of that illumination which lets us die in peace. It is by our works, not by our silences, that we have chosen to disappear: our future may be read in our features, in the grimaces of agonized and busy prophets. The smile of the Buddha, that smile which overhangs the world, does not elucidate our faces. At best, we conceive happiness; never felicity, prerogative of civilizations based on the idea of salvation, on the refusal to savor one’s sufferings, to revel in them; but, sybarites of suffering, scions of a masochistic tradition, which of us would hesitate between the Benares sermon and Baudelaire’s Heautontimoroumenos? I am both wound and knife”—that is our absolute, our eternity.

As for our redeemers, come among us for our greater harm, we love the noxiousness of their hopes and their remedies, their eagerness to favor and exalt our ills, the venom that infuses their “lifegiving” words. To them we owe our expertise in a suffering that has no exit. To what temptations, to what extremities does lucidity lead! Shall we desert it now to take refuge in unconsciousness? Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher the poet’s equal there. But our perspicacity cannot bear that such a marvel should endure, nor that inspiration should be brought within everyone’s grasp; daylight strips us of the night’s gifts. Only the madman enjoys the privilege of passing smoothly from a nocturnal to a daylight existence: no distinction between his dreams and his waking. He has renounced our reason, as the beggar has renounced our belongings. Both have found a way that leads beyond suffering and solved ail our problems; hence they remain examples we cannot follow, saviors without adepts.

Even as we ransack our own diseases, those of other people regard us no less. In an age of biographies, no one bandages his wounds without our attempting to lay them bare, to expose them to broad daylight; if we fail, we turn away, disappointed. And even he who ended on the cross— it is not because he suffered for us that he still counts for something in our eyes, but because he suffered and uttered several lamentations as profound as they were gratuitous. For what we venerate in our gods are our own defeats en beau.

*

Doomed to corrupted forms of wisdom, invalids of duration, victims of time, that weakness which appalls as much as it appeals to us, we are constituted of elements that all unite to make us rebels divided between a mystic summons which has no link with history and a bloodthirsty dream which is history’s symbol and nimbus. If we had a world all our own, it would matter little whether it was a world of piety or derision! We shall never have it, our position in existence lying at the intersection of our supplications and our sarcasms, a zone of impurity where sighs and provocations combine. The man too lucid to worship will also be too lucid to wreck, or will wreck only his … rebellions; for what is the use of rebelling only to discover, afterwards, a universe intact? A paltry monologue. We revolt against justice and injustice, against peace and war, against men and against the gods. Then we come around to thinking the worst old dotard may be wiser than Prometheus. Yet we do not manage to smother a scream of insurrection and continue fuming over everything and nothing: a pathetic automatism which explains why we are all statistical Lucifers.

Contaminated by the superstition of action, we believe that our ideas must come to something. What could be more contrary to the passive consideration of the world? But such is our fate: to be incurables who protest, pamphleteers on a pallet.

Our knowledge, like our experience, should paralyze us and make us indulgent to tyranny itself, once it represents a constant. We are sufficiently clear-sighted to be tempted to lay down our arms; yet the reflex of rebellion triumphs over our doubts; and though we might have made accompushed Stoics, the anarchist keeps watch within us and opposes our resignations.

“We shall never accept history”: that, it seems to me, is the adage of our incapacity to be true sages, true madmen. Are we then no more than the ham-actors of wisdom and of madness? Whatever we do, with regard to our acts we are subject to a profound insincerity.

From all evidence, a believer identifies himself up to a certain point with what he does and with what he believes; there is no significant gap between his lucidity, on the one hand, and his thoughts and actions, on the other. This gap widens excessively in the false believer, the man who parades convictions without adhering to them. The object of his faith is a succedaneum. Bluntly: my rebellion is a faith to which I subscribe without believing in it. But I cannot not subscribe to it. We can never ponder enough Kirilov’s description of Stavrogin: “When he believes, he doesn’t believe he believes; and when he doesn’t believe, he doesn’t believe he doesn’t believe.”

*

Even more than the style, the very rhythm of our life is based on the good standing of rebellion. Loath to admit a universal identity, we posit individuation, heterogeneity as a primordial phenomenon. Now, to revolt is to postulate this heterogeneity, to conceive it as somehow anterior to the advent of beings and objects. If I oppose the sole truth of Unity by a necessarily deceptive Multiplicity—if, in other words, I identify the other with a phantom—my rebellion is meaningless, since to exist it must start from the irreducibility of individuals, from their condition as monads, circumscribed essences. Every act institutes and rehabilitates plurality, and, conferring reality and autonomy upon the person, implicitly recognizes the degradation, the parceling-out of the absolute. And it is from the act, and from the cult attached to it, that the tension of our’mind proceeds, the need to explode and to destroy ourselves at the heart of duration. Modern philosophy, by establishing the superstition of the Ego, has made it the mainspring of our dramas and the pivot of our anxieties. To regret the repose of indistinction, the neutral dream of an existence without qualities, is pointless; we have chosen to be subjects, and every subject is a break with the quietude of Unity. Whoever takes it upon himself to attenuate our solitude or our lacerations acts against our interests, against our vocation. We measure an individual’s value by the sum of his disagreements with things, by his incapacity to be indifferent, by his refusal as a subject to tend toward the object. Whence the obsolescence of the idea of Good; whence the vogue of the Devil.

As long as we lived amid elegant terrors, we accommodated ourselves quite well to God. When others—more sordid because more profound—took us in charge, we required another system of references, another boss. The Devil was the ideal figure. Everything in him agrees with the nature of the events of which he is the agent, the regulating principle: his attributes coincide with those of time. Let us pray to him, then, since far from being a product of our subjectivity, a creation of our need for blasphemy or solitude, he is the master of our questionings and of our panics, the instigator of our deviations. His protests, his violences have their own ambiguity: this “Great Melancholic” is a rebel who doubts. If he were simple, all of a piece, he would not touch us at all; but his paradoxes, his contradictions are our own: he is the sum of our impossibilities, serves as a model for our rebellions against ourselves, our self-hatred. The recipe for hell? It is in this form of revolt and hatred that it must be sought, in the torment of inverted pride, in this sensation of being a terrible negligible quantity, in the pangs of the “I,” that “I” by which our end begins …

Of all fictions, that of the golden age confounds us most: How could it have grazed our imaginations? It is in order to expose it, to denounce it, that history, mans aggression against himself, has taken its flight and form; so that to dedicate oneself to history is to learn to rebel, to imitate the Devil. We never imitate him so well as when, at the expense of our being, we emit time, project it outside ourselves and allow it to be converted into events. “Henceforth, time will no longer exist,” announces that impromptu metaphysician who is the Angel of the Apocalypse, and thereby announces the end of the Devil, the end of history. Thus the mystics are right to seek God in themselves, or elsewhere, anywhere but in this world of which they make a tabula rasa, without for all that stooping to rebellion. They leap outside the age: a madness to which the rest of us, captives of duration, are rarely susceptible. If only we were as worthy of the Devil as they are of God!

*

To be convinced that rebellion enjoys an undue privilege among us, we need merely reflect on the manner in which we describe minds unfit for it. We call them insipid. It is virtually certain that we are closed to any form of wisdom because we see in it a transfigured insipidity. However unjust such a reaction may be, I cannot help suffering it— to Taoism itself. Even knowing that it recommends efface-ment and abandonment in the name of the absolute, not of cowardice, I reject it at the very moment I suppose I have adopted it; and if I acknowledge Lao Tse’s victory a thousand times over, I still understand a murderer better. Between serenity and blood, it is toward blood one finds it natural to incline. Murder supposes and crowns revolt: the man who is ignorant of the desire to kill may profess all the subversive opinions he likes, he will never be anything but a conformist.

Wisdom and Revolt: two poisons. Unfit to assimilate them naively, we find neither one a formula for salvation. The fact remains that in the Satanic adventure we have acquired a mastery we shall never possess in wisdom. For us, even perception is an upheaval, the beginning of a trance or an apoplexy. A loss of energy, a will to erode our available assets. Perpetual revolt involves an irreverence toward ourselves, toward our powers. How can we find in it the wherewithal for contemplation, that static expenditure, that concentration in immobility? To leave things as they are, to regard without trying to regulate the world, to perceive essences—nothing is more hostile to the conduct of our thought; we aspire, rather, to manipulate things, to torture them, to attribute to them our own rages. It must be so: idolators of the gesture, of the wager and of delirium, we love the daredevil, the stake-all, the desperado, as much in poetry as in philosophy. The Tao Te Ching goes further than Une Saison En Enfer or Ecce Homo. But Lao Tse has no delirium to propose, whereas Rimbaud and Nietzsche, acrobats straining at the extreme limits of themselves, engage us in their dangers. The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.

No way out for a man who both transcends time and is bogged down in it, who accedes by fits and starts to his last solitude and nonetheless sinks into appearances. Wavering, agonized, he will drag out his days as an invalid of duration, exposed at once to the lure of becoming and of eternity. If, according to Meister Eckhart, there is an “odor” of time, there must with all the more reason be an odor of history. How can we remain insensitive to it? On a more immediate level, I distinguish the illusion, the nullity, the rottenness of “civilization”; yet I feel I belong to this rottenness: I am the lover of carrion. I cannot forgive our age for having subjugated us to the point of haunting us even when we detach ourselves from it. Nothing viable can emerge from à meditation on circumstances, from a reflection on the event. In other, happier times, the mind could unreason freely, as if it belonged to no age, emancipated as it was from the terror of chronology, engulfed in a moment of the world which it identified with the world itself. Without concern for the relativity of its work, the mind dedicated itself to that work entirely. Inspired stupidity, gone forever! Fruitful exaltation, never compromised by a consciousness drawn and quartered! Still to divine the timeless and to know nonetheless that we are time, that we produce time, to conceive the notion of eternity and to cherish our nothingness; an absurdity responsible for both our rebellions and the doubts we entertain about them.

To seek out suffering in order to avoid redemption, to follow in reverse the path of deliverance, such is our contribution in the matter of religion: bilious illuminati, Buddhas and Christs hostile to salvation, preaching to the wretched the charm of their distress. A superficial race, if you like. The fact still remains that our first ancestor left us, for our entire legacy, only the horror of paradise. By giving names to things, he prepared his own Fall and ours. And if we seek a remedy, we must begin by debaptizing the universe, by removing the label which, assigned to each appearance, isolates it and lends it a simulacrum of meaning. Meanwhile, down to our nerve cells, everything in us resists paradise. To suffer: sole modality of acquiring the sensation of existence; to exist: unique means of safeguarding our destruction. It was ever thus, and will be, as long as a cure-by-eternity has not disintoxicated us from becoming, from duration, as long as we have not approached that state in which, according to a Chinese Buddhist, “a single moment is worth ten thousand years.”

Then since the Absolute corresponds to a meaning we have not been able to cultivate, let us surrender to all re bellions: they will end by turning against themselves, against us … Perhaps then we shall regain our supremacy over time; unless, the other way round, struggling to escape the calamity of consciousness, we rejoin animals, plants, things, return to that primordial stupidity of which, through the fault of history, we have lost even the memory.

From: The Temptation to Exist