Paleontology

 

An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me into the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has been months since this accidental visit, and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology.

Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed upon its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves. The flesh appears as an imposture, a fraud, a disguise which masks nothing. Was this all it was? And if it is worth no more, how does it manage to inspire me with repulsion or with terror? I have always felt a predilection for those who were obsessed by its nullity, those who made a great case for its insignificance: Baudelaire, Swift, Buddha. . . . The flesh, so obvious, is yet an anomaly. The more we consider it, the more aghast we turn away, and, by dint of such weighing, we tend toward the mineral—we grow petrified. In order to endure the sight or the idea, we require much more than courage: we require cynicism. We are deceived as to its nature if we call it, with one Church Father, “nocturnal.” That would be paying it too much honor. The flesh is neither strange nor shadowy, but perishable to the point of indecency, to the point of madness. It is not only the seat of disease, it is itself a disease, incurable nothingness, a fiction which has degenerated into a calamity. The vision I have of it is the vision of a gravedigger infected with metaphysics. Doubtless I am wrong to keep thinking about it; one cannot live and lay much stress on it: A colossus would perish in the attempt. I feel it as it is not permitted to feel it; it takes advantage of the fact, it obliges me to confer upon it a disproportionate status and monopolizes me to such an extent that my mind is no more than viscera. Next to the solidity, the seriousness, of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life.

At the entrance, man standing. All the other animals slumped over, borne down, sagging, even the giraffe, despite its neck, even the iguanodon, grotesque in its effort to pull itself upright. Closer to us, that orangutan, that gorilla, that chimpanzee—easy to see that they have struggled in vain to be erect. Their efforts having failed, they stay where they are, unhappy, arrested halfway, thwarted in their pursuit of verticality. Hunchbacks, in short. We should be like them still, no doubt about it, without the luck we had to take one decisive step forward. Ever since, we labor tooth and nail to eliminate every trace of our low extraction; whence that provocative expression so peculiar to man. Beside him, his posture, and the airs he assumes, even the dinosaurs seem timid. Since his real reverses are only beginning, he will have time to settle down. Everything suggests that, returning to his initial phase, he will rejoin this chimpanzee, this gorilla, this orangutan, that he will resemble them once again, and that it will be increasingly uncomfortable for him to fidget in his vertical posture. Perhaps, indeed, yielding to fatigue, he will be even more bowed than his former companions. Having reached the threshold of senility, he will “re-ape” himself, for one fails to see what would be better for him to do.

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Much more than the skeleton, it is the flesh, I mean the carrion flesh, which disturbs and alarms us—and which alleviates us as well. The Buddhist monks gladly frequented charnel houses: where corner desire more surely and emancipate oneself from it? The horrible being a path of liberation, in every period of fervor and inwardness, our remains have enjoyed great favor. In the Middle Ages, a man made a regimen of salvation, he believed energetically: the corpse was in fashion. Faith was vigorous then, invincible; it cherished the livid and the fetid; it knew the profits to be derived from corruption and gruesomeness. Today, an edulcorated religion adheres only to “nice” hallucinations, to Evolution and to Progress. It is not such a religion which might afford us the modern equivalent of the danse macabre.

“Let a man who aspires to nirvana act so that nothing is dear to him,” we read in a Buddhist text. It is enough to consider these specters, to meditate on the fate of the flesh which adhered to them, in order to understand the urgency of detachment. There is no ascesis in the double rumination on the flesh and on the skeleton, on the dreadful decrepitude of the one and the futile permanence of the other. It is a good exercise to sever ourselves now and then from our face, from our skin, to lay aside this deceptive sheathe, then to discard—if only for a moment—that layer of grease which keeps us from discerning what is fundamental in ourselves. Once the exercise is over, we are freer and more alone, almost invulnerable.

In order to vanquish attachments and the disadvantages which derive from them, we should have to contemplate the ultimate nudity of a human being, force our eyes to pierce his entrails and all the rest, wallow in the horror of his secretions, in his physiology of an imminent corpse. This vision would not be morbid but methodical, a controlled obsession, particularly salutary in ordeals. The skeleton incites us to serenity; the cadaver, to renunciation. In the sermon on futility which both of them preach to us, happiness is identified with the destruction of our bonds. To have scanted no detail of such a teaching and even so to come to terms with simulacra!

Blessed was that age when solitaries could plumb their depths without seeming obsessed, deranged. Their imbalance was not assigned a negative coefficient, as is the case for us. They would sacrifice ten, twenty years, a whole life, for a foreboding, for a flash of the absolute. The word “depth” has a meaning only in connection with epochs when the monk was considered as the noblest human exemplar. No one will gainsay the fact that he is in the process of disappearing. For centuries, he has done no more than survive himself. To whom would he address himself, in a universe which calls him a “parasite”? In Tibet, the last country where monks still mattered, they have been ruled out. Yet it was a rare consolation to think that thousands and thousands of hermits could be meditating there, today, on the themes of the prajñāparamita. Even if it had only odious aspects, monasticism would still be worth more than any other ideal. Now more than ever, we should build monasteries . . . for those who believe in everything and for those who believe in nothing. Where to escape? There no longer exists a single place where we can professionally execrate this world.

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In order to conceive, and to steep ourselves in, unreality, we must have it constantly present to our minds. The day we feel it, see it, everything becomes unreal, except that unreality which alone makes existence tolerable.

One sign of enlightenment is to have the obsession of the aggregate, the ever-increasing feeling of being just the place where certain elements come together, welded for the moment. Conceived as a substantial and irreducible datum, the “self” dumbfounds more than its reassures: How to admit that anything that seemed to hold so fast should let go, should stop? How to be parted from what subsists “by itself,” from what is? We can discard an illusion, no matter how inveterate; but what to do when we are faced with the consistent, with the durable? If there is only what exists, if being spreads everywhere, how do we break away from it without falling to pieces? Let us postulate a universal fallacy out of precaution or therapeutic concern. The fear there is nothing is followed by the fear there is something. We are far more comfortable bidding farewell to nonbeing than to being. Not that this world doesn’t exist, but its reality is no such thing. Everything seems to exist and nothing exists.

Every concerted pursuit, even that of nirvana, if we are not free to abandon it, is a shackle as much as any other. The knowledge we convert into an idol is corrupted into an unknowing, as the Vedic wisdom already preached: “They are in the depths of darkness, those who give themselves up to ignorance; those who delight in knowledge are in a darkness deeper still.” To think without being any the wiser, or rather not to think at all but to remain there and to devour the silence—that is where perspicacity should lead. No pleasure is comparable to that of knowing we don’t think. It will be objected, Isn’t knowing we don’t think still thinking? No doubt, but the wretchedness of thought is surmounted for the time that, instead of leaping from idea to idea, we remain deliberately within just one, one which rejects all the rest and which dissolves itself as soon as it takes for its content its own absence. This interference with the normal mechanism of the mind is fruitful only if we can renew it at will. It must cure us of the subjection to knowledge, of the superstition of system. The deliverance which seduces, which beclouds us is not deliverance. We must act so that nothing is ours, beginning with desire, that generator of dread. When everything makes us tremble, the one recourse is to realize that if fear—being a sensation, the sensation par excellence—is real, the world which causes it is reduced to a transitory assemblage of unreal elements. In short, our fear is intense in proportion as we give credence to the self and to the world, and that our fear must inevitably diminish when we discover the imposture of the former and of the latter. Only our triumph over things is real, only our realization of unreality, which our acumen constructs every day, every hour. To be delivered is to rejoice in this unreality, to seek it out each moment.

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Seen from outside, each being is an accident, a lie (except in love, but love is located outside of knowledge, outside the truth). Perhaps we should regard ourselves from outside, somewhat as we regard other people, and try to have nothing further in common with ourselves: If, toward myself, I were to behave as a stranger, I should see myself die with utter unconcern; my death would be “mine” no more than my life. One and the other, insofar as they belong to me and I assume them, represent ordeals beyond my powers. When, on the contrary, I convince myself that they lack intrinsic existence and that they are of no concern to me—what a relief! Why then, knowing that in the last resort everything is unreal, still be carried away for such trifles? I am carried away, granted, but I am not involved, which is to say that I take no real interest. This disinterest I cultivate I achieve only when I trade in my old self for a new one, the self of a disabused vision which triumphs here, amid these ghosts, where everything enfeebles me, where the one I was seems to me so remote, so incomprehensible. The evidence on which I used to turn my back now is discernible in all its clarity. The advantage I derive from this is that I no longer feel any obligation with regard to my flesh, to any flesh. A far better context in which to savor the eighteen varieties of void set forth in the Mahayanist texts, so scrupulous in cataloguing the several types of deficiency! For here, instantly, I am in an acute state of unreality.

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It is scarcely credible to what degree fear adheres to the flesh; it is glued to it, inseparable, almost indistinct from it. These skeletons—happy skeletons!—feel no such thing. Fear is the one fraternal link which joins us to the animals, though they know it only in its natural—its healthy—form, so to speak. They know nothing of that other fear, the one which arises without motive, which we can reduce, depending on our whim, either to a metaphysical process or to a lunatic chemistry and which, daily, at an unpredictable moment, attacks us, overwhelms us. In order to hold it in check, we would require the cooperation of all the erstwhile gods. It reveals itself at the nadir of our daily failure, at the very moment when we would be quite ready to disappear if a mere nothing did not keep us from it; this nothing is the secret of our verticality. To remain erect, standing, implies a dignity, a discipline that has been laboriously inculcated in us and that still saves us at the last minute, in that spasm when we grasp what may be abnormal in the career of the flesh, threatened, boycotted by the sum of elements which define it. The flesh has betrayed matter; the discomfort it feels, it endures, is its punishment. In a general way, the animate appears quite guilty with regard to the inert; life is a state of guilt, a state all the more serious in that no one is really conscious of it. But a crime coextensive with the individual, which weighs upon him without his knowledge, which is the price he must pay for his promotion to a separate existence, for the infraction committed against the undivided creation. This crime is no less real for being unconscious and is crucial to the prostration of every creature.

As I circulate among the carcasses, I try to conceive of the burden of fear they must have borne, and when I stop in front of the three apes I cannot fail to attribute the evolutionary hitch they have suffered to an analogous burden which, weighing upon them, has given them that obsequious and flustered expression. And even these reptiles—isn’t it under a like load that they have had to grovel so shamefully and to concoct their venom in the dust of the earth, if only to be revenged for their ignominy? Whatever is alive, the most repellent animal or insect, shudders with fear—does nothing but. Whatever is alive, by the simple fact of living, deserves commiseration. And I think of all those I have known, all those who are no more, long since sprawling in their coffins, forever exempt from flesh—and from fear. And I feel relieved of the weight of their death.

Anxiety is consciousness of fear, a fear to the second degree, a fear reflecting upon itself. It consists of the impossibility of communing with the all, of assimilating ourselves with it, of losing ourselves in it. It breaks the current which passes from the world to us, from us to the world, and favors our reflections only to frustrate their growth, ceaselessly disintoxicating the mind. Now there is no speculation of any scope which does not proceed from rapture, from a loss of control, from a faculty to lose and hence to renew the self. Inspiration in reverse, anxiety calls us to heel at the slightest impulse, the slightest divagation. This surveillance is deadly to thought, suddenly paralyzed, trapped in a calamitous circle, doomed never to escape itself except by fits and starts, by stealth. Hence it is true that if our apprehensions make us seek deliverance, yet it is they which keep us from achieving it. Though he dreads the future to the point of making it the sole object of his preoccupations, the anxious man is a prisoner of the past; he is, in fact, the only man who really has a past. His tribulations, of which he is the slave, move him forward only to yank him back. He comes thereby to regret the raw, anonymous fear from which everything starts, the fear that is beginning, origin, principle of everything alive. Terrible as it is, such fear is nonetheless endurable, since whatever lives resigns itself to it. It lacerates and ravages the living—it does not annihilate them. Such is not the case with this refined fear, this “recent” fear posterior to the appearance of the self, in which the diffuse, omnipresent danger is never materialized, a reflexive fear which, for lack of other nourishment, devours itself.

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If I have not returned to the museum, I have been there in spirit almost every day, thereby deriving considerable advantage: what could be more settling than to brood over this ultimate simplification of beings? A moment comes when the imagination clears and you see yourself as you will be: a sermon—no, a seizure of modesty. On the proper use of the skeleton. . . . We should help ourselves to it in difficult moments, especially since we have it right under our hand.

I have no need of Holbein nor of Baldung Grien; with respect to the macabre, I rely on my own resources. If I see the necessity for it, or if I am overcome by a craving, there is no one I cannot strip of his carnal envelope. Why envy or fear those bones which bear such and such a name, that skull which has no love for me? Why, too, love someone or love myself, why suffer in any case, when I know the image I must invoke in order to alleviate these miseries? The sharpened consciousness of what lies in wait for the flesh ought to destroy both love and hate. Actually it manages only to attenuate and, in rare moments, to subdue them. Otherwise it would be only too easy: represent death and be happy . . . , and the macabre, gratifying our most secret desires, would be all profit.I suspect that I would never have returned—in flesh or in spirit—so often to those premises if, evidently, they hadn’t flattered my incapacity for illusion. Here, where man is nothing, you realize how unsuited the doctrines of deliverance are to understand him, to interpret his past and to decipher his future. This is because deliverance has a content only for each of us, individually, and not for the mob, which is unable to grasp the relation between the idea of emptiness and the sensation of freedom. It is hard to see how humanity might be saved en bloc; engulfed in the false, committed to an inferior truth, it will always confuse substance with semblance. Granting, against all appearances, that it is following an ascending path, humanity cannot acquire, at its zenith, the level of insight of even the most obtuse Hindu sanyāsi. In everyday existence, it is impossible to say if this world is real or unreal. What we can do, what we do do, is to keep shifting from one thesis to the other, all too happy to evade a choice which would settle none of our immediate difficulties.

Awakening is independent of intellectual capacities: a genius can be a dunce, spiritually speaking. Moreover, knowledge as such gets one no further. An illiterate can possess “the eye of understanding” and thereby find himself above and beyond any scholar. To discern that what you are is not you, that what you have is not yours, to be no longer the accomplice of anything, even of your own life—that is to see clearly, that is to get down to the zero root of everything. The wider you open yourself to vacuity, the more deeply you steep yourself in it, the further you remove yourself from the fatality of being—yourself, of being man, of being alive. If everything is null and void, this triple fatality will be so too. Thereby, the magic of the tragic is exorcised. Is the failing hero worth as little as the hero who finally triumphs? Nothing more glamorous than a splendid ending, if this world is real; if it is not, it is pure foolishness to go into ecstasies over any denouement whatever. To deign to have a “destiny,” to be blinded or only tempted by “the extraordinary,” proves that we remain opaque to any higher truth, that we are far from possessing “the eye” in question. To situate someone is to determine his degree of awakening, the progress he has made in the perception of the false and the illusory in others, in himself. No communion is conceivable with the man who deceives himself as to what he is. As the interval separating us from our actions widens, we see the subjects of dialogue and the number of our kind diminish. Such solitude does not engender bitterness, for it does not derive from our talents, but from our renunciations. Yet it must be added that it does not in the least exclude the danger of spiritual pride, which certainly exists as long as we nurse the sacrifices we have consented to and the illusions we have rejected. How vanquish ourselves unbeknownst, when detachment demands an insistent sounding of consciousness? Thus, what makes it possible threatens it at the same time. In the order of internal values, any superiority which does not become impersonal turns to perdition. If only one could wrest oneself from the world without realizing the fact! One should be able to forget that detachment is a virtue: otherwise, instead of delivering, it envenoms. To attribute to God our successes of any sort, to believe that nothing emanates from ourselves, that everything is given—that, according to Ignatius Loyola, is the one effective means of struggling with pride. The recommendation is valid for the thunderbolt states in which the intervention of grace seems de rigueur, but not for detachment, an undermining labor, long and painful, of which the self is the victim: how fail to pride yourself on that?

Our spiritual level may be raised, yet we do not thereby change qualitatively; we remain prisoners of our limits: the impossibility of uprooting spiritual pride is one consequence of it—the most unfortunate one. “No creature,” Saint Thomas observes, “can attain a higher degree of nature without ceasing to exist.” Yet if man interests us, it is precisely for having sought to surmount his nature. He has not managed to do so, and his inordinate efforts were not to fail in adulterating, in denaturing him. This is why we do not question ourselves in his regard without torment, without passion. No doubt it is also more decent to commiserate with him than with oneself (as Pascal so well understood). In the long run, this passion becomes so tiring that we think of nothing but means of escaping it. Neither the fatality of being oneself nor that of being alive can be compared with that of being man; once that fatality spurs me on, I reconstruct—in order to escape it—my promenade among those bones which, these days, have so often been helpful to me; I recognize them, I cling to them: confirming me in my belief in vacuity, they grant me a glimpse of the day when I shall no longer have to endure the obsession of the human, of all shackles the most terrible. From that we must free ourselves at all costs, if we would be free at all; but to be really free, one more step must be taken: to be free of liberty itself, to reduce it to the level of a prejudice or a pretext in order not to have to idolize it any longer. . . . Only then will we begin to learn how to act without desire. For this the meditation on the horrible prepares us: to circle around the flesh and its decrepitude is to be initiated into the art of dissociating desire and act—an operation fatal to enterprising minds, indispensable to contemplative ones. So long as we desire, we live in subjection, we are given over to the world; once we cease to desire, we accumulate the privileges of an object and of a god: we no longer depend on anyone. That desire cannot be extirpated is all too true; yet what peace, merely to imagine being exempt from it! A peace so unwonted that a perverse pleasure creeps into it: would not so suspect a sensation come down to nature’s revenge upon the man who has made himself guilty of aspiring to a state so unnatural?

Outside of nirvana in life—a rare exploit, a virtually inaccessible extremity—the suppression of desire is a chimera; we do not suppress desire, we suspend it, and this suspension, very strangely, is accompanied by a sense of power, by a new, an unknown, certainty. The vogue of monasticism in past centuries is doubtless explained by this dilation succeeding the ebb of appetites. It takes strength to struggle against desire; this strength increases when desire withdraws; desire halted, fear halts as well. For anxiety, on its part, to conclude any such truce, we must go further; we must confront a much more rarefied space, we must approach an abstract joy, an exaltation granted alike to being and to the absence of being.

It is said in the Katha Upanishad apropos of Atman that it is “joyous and without joy.” That is a state to which we accede as well by the affirmation as by the negation of a supreme principle, as much by the detour of Vedanta as by that of Mahayana. Different as they may be, the two paths meet in the final experience, in the glide outside appearances. What is essential is less to know in whose name one seeks liberation than how far one can advance on the path to it. Whether one is dissolved into the absolute or into the void, in either case it is a neutral joy one achieves: a joy without any determination, as denuded as the anxiety of which it seeks to be the remedy, and of which it is merely the outcome, the positive conclusion. Between them, the symmetry is patent; they may each be said to be “constructed” on the same model; they dispense with any external stimulant, they are self-sufficient, they correspond and communicate in depth. For just as concrete joy is only a vanquished fear, neutral joy is only a transfigured anxiety. And it is from their affinities, from their permeability, that the possibility derives of mounting from one to the other, and the danger of falling back, of a regression to an earlier state supposedly transcended. Which suggests to what degree all spiritual progress is threatened at its base. For the unfulfilled seeker after deliverance, for the beginner in nirvana, nothing is easier, nothing more frequent than to retreat toward his old terrors. But when, at long intervals, he manages to hold fast, he makes his own the exhortation of the Dhammapada, “Shine for yourself, as your own light,” and, during the time he adopts and follows it, he understands, from within, those who conform to it always.

The New Gods by E. M. Cioran; 

translated from the French by Richard Howard.