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Existentialism
beyond
Circular ruins - Jorge Luis Borges |
Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable.
Why, now, should it be disagreeable?...Ah,I see; it's
life without a break. (Jean Paul Sartre - huis clos)
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No
one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the
bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there
was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from
the South and that his home had been one of those numberless
villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain,
where the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek
and where leprosy is infrequent. What is certain is that the
grey man kissed the mud, climbed up the bank with pushing
aside (probably, without feeling) the blades which were lacerating
his flesh, and crawled, nauseated and bloodstained, up to
the circular enclosure crowned with a stone tiger or horse,
which sometimes was the color of flame and now was that of
ashes. This circle was a temple which had been devoured by
ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god
no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched
himself out beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun
high overhead. He was not astonished to find that his wounds
had healed; he closed his pallid eyes and slept, not through
weakness of flesh but through determination of will. He knew
that this temple was the place required for his invincible
intent; he knew that the incessant trees had not succeeded
in strangling the ruins of another propitious temple downstream
which had once belonged to gods now burned and dead; he knew
that his immediate obligation was to dream. Toward midnight
he was awakened by the inconsolable shriek of a bird. Tracks
of bare feet, some figs and a jug warned him that the men
of the region had been spying respectfully on his sleep, soliciting
his protection or afraid of his magic. He felt a chill of
fear, and sought out a sepulchral niche in the dilapidated
wall where he concealed himself among unfamiliar leaves. The
purpose which guided him was not impossible, though supernatural.
He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute
entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had
exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked
him his name or to relate some event of his former life, he
would not have been able to give an answer. This uninhabited,
ruined temple suited him, for it is contained a minimum of
visible world; the proximity of the workmen also suited him,
for they took it upon themselves to provide for his frugal
needs. The rice and fruit they brought him were nourishment
enough for his body, which was consecrated to the sole task
of sleeping and dreaming. At first, his dreams were chaotic;
then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The
stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater
which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn
students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest
ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the
stars, but their features were completely precise. The man
lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the
faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly,
as if they guessed the importance of that examination which
would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion
and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake,
the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not
allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain
perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking
a soul worthy of participating in the universe. After nine
or ten nights he understood with a certain bitterness that
he could expect nothing from those pupils who accepted his
doctrine passively, but that he could expect something from
those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group,
although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to
the level of individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly
greater degree. One afternoon (now afternoons were also given
over to sleep, now he was only awake for a couple hours at
daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory student body for
good and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow boy,
at times intractable, and whose sharp features resembled of
those of his dreamer. The brusque elimination of his fellow
students did not disconcert him for long; after a few private
lessons, his progress was enough to astound the teacher. Nevertheless,
a catastrophe took place. One day, the man emerged from his
sleep as if from a viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon
light which he immediately confused with the dawn, and understood
that he had not dreamed. All that night and all day long,
the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him. He tried
exploring the forest, to lose his strength; among the hemlock
he barely succeeded in experiencing several short snatchs
of sleep, veined with fleeting, rudimentary visions that were
useless. He tried to assemble the student body but scarcely
had he articulated a few brief words of exhortation when it
became deformed and was then erased. In his almost perpetual
vigil, tears of anger burned his old eyes. He understood that
modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams
are composed was the most difficult task that a man could
undertake, even though he should penetrate all the enigmas
of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult than
weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind. He
swore he would forget the enormous hallucination which had
thrown him off at first, and he sought another method of work.
Before putting it into execution, he spent a month recovering
his strength, which had been squandered by his delirium. He
abandoned all premeditation of dreaming and almost immediately
succeeded in sleeping a reasonable part of each day. The few
times that he had dreams during this period, he paid no attention
to them. Before resuming his task, he waited until the moon's
disk was perfect. Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself
in the waters of the river, worshiped the planetary gods,
pronounced the prescribed syllables of a mighty name, and
went to sleep. He dreamed almost immediately, with his heart
throbbing. He dreamed that it was warm, secret, about the
size of a clenched fist, and of a garnet color within the
penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; during
fourteen lucid nights he dreampt of it with meticulous love.
Every night he perceived it more clearly. He did not touch
it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to observe it,
and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He perceived
it and lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth
night he lightly touched the pulmonary artery with his index
finger, then the whole heart, outside and inside. He was satisfied
with the examination. He deliberately did not dream for a
night; he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet,
and undertook the vision of another of the principle organs.
Within a year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids.
The innumerable hair was perhaps the most difficult task.
He dreamed an entire man--a young man, but who did not sit
up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night,
the man dreamt him asleep. In the Gnostic cosmosgonies, demiurges
fashion a red Adam who cannot stand; as a clumsy, crude and
elemental as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams forged
by the wizard's nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed
his entire work, but then changed his mind. (It would have
been better had he destroyed it.) When he had exhausted all
supplications to the deities of earth, he threw himself at
the feet of the effigy which was perhaps a tiger or perhaps
a colt and implored its unknown help. That evening, at twilight,
he dreamt of the statue. He dreamt it was alive, tremulous:
it was not an atrocious bastard of a tiger and a colt, but
at the same time these two firey creatures and also a bull,
a rose, and a storm. This multiple god revealed to him that
his earthly name was Fire, and that in this circular temple
(and in others like it) people had once made sacrifices to
him and worshiped him, and that he would magically animate
the dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except
Fire itself and the dreamer, would believe to be a man of
flesh and blood. He commanded that once this man had been
instructed in all the rites, he should be sent to the other
ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream,
so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted ediface.
In the dream of the man that dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.
The wizard carried out the orders he had been given. He devoted
a certain length of time (which finally proved to be two years)
to instructing him in the mysteries of the universe and the
cult of fire. Secretly, he was pained at the idea of being
seperated from him. On the pretext of pedagogical necessity,
each day he increased the number of hours dedicated to dreaming.
He also remade the right shoulder, which was somewhat defective.
At times, he was disturbed by the impression that all this
had already happened . . . In general, his days were happy;
when he closed his eyes, he thought: Now I will be with my
son. Or, more rarely: The son I have engendered is waiting
for me and will not exist if I do not go to him. Gradually,
he began accustoming him to reality. Once he ordered him to
place a flag on a faraway peak. The next day the flag was
fluttering on the peak. He tried other analogous experiments,
each time more audacious. With a certain bitterness, he understood
that his son was ready to be born--and perhaps impatient.
That night he kissed him for the first time and sent him off
to the other temple whose remains were turning white downstream,
across many miles of inextricable jungle and marshes. Before
doing this (and so that his son should never know that he
was a phantom, so that he should think himself a man like
any other) he destroyed in him all memory of his years of
apprenticeship. His victory and peace became blurred with
boredom. In the twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would
prostrate himself before the stone figure, perhaps imagining
his unreal son carrying out identical rites in other circular
ruins downstream; at night he no longer dreamed, or dreamed
as any man does. His perceptions of the sounds and forms of
the universe became somewhat pallid: his absent son was being
nourished by these diminution of his soul. The purpose of
his life had been fulfilled; the man remained in a kind of
ecstasy. After a certain time, which some chronicles prefer
to compute in years and others in decades, two oarsmen awoke
him at midnight; he could not see their faces, but they spoke
to him of a charmed man in a temple of the North, capable
of walking on fire without burning himself. The wizard suddenly
remembered the words of the god. He remembered that of all
the creatures that people the earth, Fire was the only one
who knew his son to be a phantom. This memory, which at first
calmed him, ended by tormenting him. He feared lest his son
should meditate on this abnormal privilege and by some means
find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be
a projection of another man's dreams--what an incomparable
humiliation, what madness! Any father is interested in the
sons he has procreated (or permitted) out of the mere confusion
of happiness; it was natural that the wizard should fear for
the future of that son whom he had thought out entrail by
entrail, feature by feature, in a thousand and one secret
nights. His misgivings ended abruptly, but not without certain
forewarnings. First (after a long drought) a remote cloud,
as light as a bird, appeared on a hill; then, toward the South,
the sky took on the rose color of leopard's gums; then came
clouds of smoke which rusted the metal of the nights; afterwards
came the panic-stricken flight of wild animals. For what had
happened many centuries before was repeating itself. The ruins
of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire.
In a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire
licking the walls. For a moment, he thought of taking refuge
in the water, but then he understood that death was coming
to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He walked
toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they
caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With
relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that
he also was an illusion, that someone else was dreaming him.
Ce
qu'on fait n'est jamais compris mais seulement loué ou blâmé.
Nietzsche, Gay Science |
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