He thinks Americans are a very gullible people. He tells me about the
credulous souls who succored him there---the Quakers, the Unitarians,
the Theosophists, the New Thoughters, the Seventh-day Adventists,
etc. He knew where to sail his boat, this bright young man. He knew
how to make the tears come to his eyes at the right moment; he knew
how to take up a collection, how to appeal to the minister's wife, how
to make love to the mother and daughter at the same time. To look at
him you would think him a saint. And he is a saint, in the modern
fashion, a contaminated saint who talks in one breath of love,
brotherhood, bathtubs, sanitation, efficiency, etc.
The last night of his sojourn in Paris is given up to "the fucking
business." He has had a full program all day---conferences, cablegrams,
interviews, photographs for the newspapers, affectionate farewells,
advice to the faithful, etc., etc. At dinner time he decides to lay aside
his troubles. He orders champagne with the meal, he snaps his fingers
at the garcon and behaves in general like the boorish little peasant
that he is. And since he has had a bellyful of all the good places he
suggests now that I show him something more primitive. He would like
to go to a very cheap place, order two or three girls at once. I steer
him along the Boulevard de la Chapelle, warning him all the while to be
careful of his pocketbook. Around Aubervilliers we duck into a cheap
dive and immediately we've got a flock of them on our hands. In a few
minutes he's dancing with a naked wench, a huge blonde with creases in
her jowls. I can see her ass reflected a dozen times in the mirrors that
line the room---and those dark, bony fingers of his clutching her
tenaciously. The table is full of beer glasses; the mechanical piano is
wheezing and gasping. The girls who are unoccupied are sitting placidly
on leather benches, scratching themselves peacefully just like a family
of chimpanzees. There is a sort of subdued pandemonium in the air, a
note of repressed violence, as if the awaited explosion required the
advent of some utterly minute detail, something microscopic but
thoroughly unpremeditated, completely unexpected. In that sort of
half-reverie which permits one to participate in an event and yet
remain quite aloof, the little detail which was lacking began obscurely
but insistently to coagulate, to assume a freakish, crystalline form, like
the frost which gathers on the windowpane. And like those frost
patterns which seem so bizarre, so utterly free and fantastic in design,
but which are nevertheless determined by the most rigid laws, so this
sensation which commenced to take form inside me seemed also to be
giving obedience to ineluctable laws. My whole being was responding to
the dictates of an ambiance which it had never before experienced;
that which I could call myself seemed to be contracting, condensing,
shrinking from the stale, customary boundaries of the flesh whose
perimeter knew only the modulations of the nerve ends.
Amid the more substantial, the more solid the core of me became, the
more delicate and extravagant appeared the close, palpable reality out
of which I was being squeezed. In the measure that I became more and
more metallic, in the same measure the scene before my eyes became
inflated. The state of tension was so finely drawn now that the
introduction of single foreign particle, even a microscopic particle, as I
say, would have shattered everything. For the fraction of a second
perhaps I experienced that utter clarity which the epileptic, it is said,
is given to know. In that moment I lost completely the illusion of time
and space: the world unfurled its drama simultaneously along a meridian
which had no axis. In this sort of hair-trigger eternity I felt that
everything was justified, supremely justified; I felt the wars inside me
that had left behind this pulp and wrack; I felt the crimes that were
seething here to emerge tomorrow in blatant screamers; I felt the
misery that was grinding itself out with pestle and mortar, the long dull
misery that dribbles away in dirty handkerchiefs. On the meridian of
time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating
the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes
face to face with the absolute, that great sympathy which makes men
like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing
is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for
some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or
other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade
through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas; he will reduce
himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his
eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured---disgrace,
humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui---the belief that overnight
something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all
the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach
in there and shut it off. All the while someone is eating the bread of
life and drinking the wine, some dirty fat cockroach of a priest who
hides away in the cellar guzzling it, while up above in the light of the
street a phantom host touches the lips and the blood is pale as water.
And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no
microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas
which have to be fattened by slaughter; ideas which come forth like
bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open.
And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man
attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two
enormous turns which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What
if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals
clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a
silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing
more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. That, I
believe would be more miraculous than anything which man has looked
forward to. It would be miraculous because it would be undreamed of.
It would be more miraculous than even the wildest dream because
anybody could imagine the possibility but nobody ever has, and probably
nobody ever again will.
Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a
salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all
my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some
extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by
the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though
a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. At dawn I parted
company with the young Hindu, after touching him for a few francs,
enough for a room. Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let
myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no
matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to
me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been
destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. The world was
intact. Tomorrow there might be a revolution, a plague, an earthquake;
tomorrow there might not be left a single soul to whom one could turn
for sympathy, for aid, for faith. It seemed to me that the great
calamity had already manifested itself, that I could be no more truly
alone than at this very moment. I made up my mind that I would hold on
to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as
an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer. Even if were declared,
and it were my lot to go, I would grab the bayonet and plunge it, plunge
it up to the hilt. And if rape were the order of the day then rape I
would, and with a vengeance. At this very moment, in the quiet dawn of
a new day, was not the earth giddy with crime and distress? Had one
single element of man's nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally
altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better
part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme
limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage.
When he finds God, as it were, he has been picked clean: he is a
skeleton. One must burrow into life again in order to put on flesh. The
word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye
fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing,
then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have
been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces
of meat that hid my bones. I am done with that. I have reached the
limits of endurance; My back is to the wall; I can retreat no further.
As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall
have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only
spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world
which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new
world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If
I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself.