FROM JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT (L.F. CÉLINE)
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My heart, warm behind its little rib cage, a restless, curled-up, stupid rabbit.
When you jump from the top of the Eiffel Tower, you must feel things like that. You'd like to cling to space.
That village kept its threat secret from me, but not completely. In the center of a square, a tiny fountain gurgled all to myself. I had it all to myself that night. I was finally the owner of the moon, of the village, of a tremendous fear. I was about to trot out again (Noirceur-sur-la-Lys must still be at least an hour's walk away), when I noticed a very faint glow above a gate. I headed straight for it and thus revealed a kind of audacity, deserting, it's true, but unsuspected. The glow disappeared immediately, but I had seen it clearly. I knocked. I insisted, knocked again, shouted, first in German and then in French, just in case, to those strangers, locked in the shadows.
Finally, the door opened, a single leaf.
"Who are you?" said a voice. I was saved.
"I'm a dragoon..."
"French?" I could make out the woman speaking.
"Yes, French..."
"So many German dragoons have passed through here... They spoke French too, those..."
"Yes, but I'm really French..."
"Ah!" He seemed to hesitate.
"Where are they now?" I asked.
"They left for Noirceur around eight o'clock..." And he pointed north at me with his finger.
Post script
ResponderExcluirYears ago I wrote a short story based on the SUBTLE-NOSED COW by CAMPOS DE CARVALHO, our best surrealist writer together with Manoel de Barros, which features a Cow very similar to Céline's End of the Night - LOOK!
WAR BULLETIN
ExcluirSperm. I feel I've forcefully expressed a tantric agitation that nothing will appease. I left my name, children, and a brand-new leather jacket hidden in that shit. And a jar of hairspray. All political demands—I left my homeland, my family, and bad checks—will be paid; they're nothing more than the disguise under which my pent-up shit hides! I left my red shorts, a sliver of soap, and a kind of anguish that incessantly demands change and destruction. I left a rusty razor, books open at key points, and closed mouths: I left unintelligible erasures in enchanted readings, and also: street and party shoes; dandruff, the smell of inert feet, and a closed checking account. I left family quarrels behind, after Kung Fu. And I left many papers in the drawer, destined for the world, before going to the asylum.
Distant and as imperceptible as a point, piercing the misty thickness of the night, yet never appearing except as the elusive flicker of lightning.
The drone of war suspends us high above ourselves. Didn't Nietzsche write, "I lie in ignorance, I die hopeless"? Even from the hospice, I heard him:
"It is on high that we must bury what we were."
With war having broken out, I became incapable of waiting. Exactly: of waiting for a liberation that this book represents for me. Disorder is the condition of this book. It is the condition of this war. It is limitless in every sense. My shoulders weigh heavily. My head flies. I am without support from ground or cloud. I love that my moods, my excesses, have no goal. Yet, I wanted to arrive, but I know I never will... A desire persists, mocking my impatience. The early morning weeping. The marquise's pavane. The mine that doesn't always explode. The gold that doesn't always arrive. We become distant and indifferent during this war. We quickly become accustomed to pure and simple plunder. Distant in words. Indifferent to the dangers that so attract us. Beyond the turmoil, men bury themselves in gold. But outside of raw, measurable ambition lies the desire we have to go to the extreme of an obvious destiny: DEATH? --- is something we don't ask ourselves anymore.
ExcluirFor no soldier in today's war is it virile to live under a spell. What outside oneself does not exalt, but rather terrifies, is very little: a handful of blood-stained earth. For a few days, life reaches the empty obscurity of the battlefields. And with these aged things, the abstract rhymes with the absinthe of extreme situations. The result is invariably a wonderful relaxation: the spirit reveals the universe at the disposal of desire and bodily movements, but the turmoil of war soon sets in. Life begins to be felt like a nausea in the stomach; the existence of the soul itself like a discomfort in the muscles. The desolation of the spirit, when acutely felt, sends ripples through the body from afar, and hurts by proxy. Nothing is achieved this way above the savage mood. What persists outside of us is only the limit that was not reached, the end that one does not seek but keeps trapped in one's own navel. One is conscious of oneself one day, when conscious pain is, as the poet says: "laguidity, seasickness, and anguished desire."
ExcluirIt's difficult. The Logos is constructed in my sailor's retina...
Tonight I felt like my tongue was cut out again. Body in, body out, what is my job? It turns out that the state of war thus far has only brought me this extreme opportunity. This one of absorbing the dead, ours and others'. A kind of merciless liberation. Just as fortune arrives during sleep, insurmountable obstacles easily overcome in a dream. I "saw," whereas until now I had only struggled. There was always a feeling of struggle. And even this: assuming the space between demarcated blocks of perception. But the dream fell into the trap of my desires as simply as I write this. Such a bewitching opportunity in a world that has become dreadful made me tremble: tremble with joy! I rediscovered, lost to addiction, purity and innocence. For the rest, I let myself moan freely. I saw that I will not die without first escaping all my hells, and much less this war.
ExcluirJust now I saw the damage in the nearby outskirts. The bombs fell when I was near Baixada. Many dead. I'm like a specter gliding among them. The air lets me pass... in the most dire circumstances... by chance... events... gnawing at me like a rat... distorting its judgment... being gnawed... against reality... cutting force... all hallucination, bad dream... horror grabbing me by the throat... passing into the unspoken mistakes... and far beyond... and full sun on the edge of the swamp... if we reach the other side (which remained unmentioned) the loneliness will vanish into thin air... but look, be careful... the first attack wasn't like the last, it won't be like the next... but we're not so far from home anymore, and the angel of the barcarolle has neither body nor voice. The taste of life is too little to give it up. A house of tolerance. Peanuts. Coal. I speak from one wave to another. Fire destroys the wind's brake. The crooked, the aborted, the boats in bloom, in the mud, become whiter than they are. That's it. The prism doesn't know the servitude into which I sink. The little man who suffers as misfortune grows, the little man confused amidst the legion of little men to whom the kingdom of heaven was promised. Ascetic, how I mocked myself....................................
Excluir...............................By the absurd acceptance of a conviction that has been touched upon. This me, in the taxi, nonexistent, a mere incarnation of the character's idea, a bipedal symbol of a puritanism made of negatives: no to alcohol, no to tobacco, a no equivalent to money---nobody, really; a name, a number, a tiny idea mechanically constructed in conjunction with the market and psychoanalysis. Without serious opposition or initiatory setbacks. Perhaps this is what we are learning over time, insensibly, without paying attention. Perhaps the bones know this.
Excluir
ExcluirI spoke to her slowly, as if things could improve if I chose my words carefully, as if the impatience in her small, rounded mouth was no longer visible. "I just want to talk to you for a moment (.)" I added. "But if you're bothering me (.....)" Then she smiled, amused, raised one hand and let it fall, stepping aside to let me pass. I don't know if she was joking as she inclined her head, smiling. "Just a moment," I repeated. "But sit down," she said, "in a gesture of welcome." "Would you like something to drink (?)" at the table, her hands hidden behind her. I nodded, taking note of every change in the room, remembering my first visit, the siege in the physiognomy of disorder, the accumulated experience of battle. But some unknown element continued to impose itself through my actions, emanating the same atmosphere of unfounded joy, of efficient war artifice; the feeling of a life outside of time and redeemable through literature.
---- War literature? --- she laughed
I got up to fill my glass and approached her with the bottle. The new hairstyle softened the animalism of my face; my lips tried to swell; my eyelids descended like thick, calloused membranes, like valves from which one could foresee the dry, anti-intellectual blow of the Zen abyss. We drank, and I sank back into the armchair, smiling at the memories of our youth. ----- I think of your hatred of lies, the Zen rapture becoming bon; of how you become exasperated and your voice falters when it's necessary to save the meaning of life, digging, convincing, breaking your nails to unearth and destroy like insects those ubiquitous lies that act without anyone mentioning them, and which the exegete Bon underlines and bewitches -----, I said. She flinched, standing in the room ----- Why won't you let me explain? What do you want to know? See???? You won't let me talk. You thought I liked what happened that night, that I could do whatever I wanted with you because your books weren't selling so well? You came up with a lie and I just listened, that's all................
Excluir..................He seemed like a distinguished man, half-crazy, as he accused the mercenary art of industry of keeping his poems in limbo, so that the world's time wouldn't restart. I thought of the beginning of it all, how well you shrugged off other people's questions. Amidst so many people talking at once, your voice seemed like a strong and dangerous poetic mystic. Understand: I was enjoying listening to you that night and lost track of time; it's your fault (.) In the end, as neutralizable as "Poor Antonin Artaud" --- the demented aunt of our abject erudition of madhouse and war.
ExcluirEvery night, a star in the same spot in the sky. The absurdity of the self of fleas or flies is disjointed in the absurdity of the star's beauty. Nothing more than a star ----- simply a star. Matter "is" to the extent that it dissolves a man or exposes his devices and arrangements. The opaque self keeps the self in opacity. Think of the monstrosity of the selves of hell and paradise, think of the God of the Self, who ordered their delirious multiplicity. At that point, I had already accepted what awaited me hidden in the drawer. I could not disinterest myself in my characters. A thousand times would I have paid the price to abandon myself, without interruption, to the spell, to be able to watch them come and go, to abandon myself to the absorbed attention with which I followed their exotic movements, the situations that repeated and changed without reason. Turning over an afternoon, a desire, a discouragement, over and over again;
Excluirso I could transform my wanderings into a whirlwind, sympathize, become complete, let myself be loved, flow into a zone of soft light that contained us. I played at measuring my sweat by examining the cloudy surface of the glass. "Note that ghost stories are all the same, one story," I began. "We often tell them as if they were different, as if we hadn't heard the same thing ten times before. See how much importance we give to details."
ExcluirAuauauauauauauauauau.
ResponderExcluir