Image by: Man Ray
The Drug
For Marcel Raval.
In this land of enchantments, I regarded everything with a kind of unease. Nothing that I observed in the city seemed to be as my eyes showed it to me. It felt as though, through the infernal power of certain incantations, everything must have been transformed…
Apuleius
If the Sun & Moon should Doubt / Theyd immediately Go out
Blake
I had suspected it for a long time. I was sure of it. Hadn’t I mentioned it in two or three conversations? Had I spoken? I hadn’t seen in their eyes that they had heard. I wasn’t thinking about it; it was thinking me. I wasn’t acting; it was acting through me. I could no longer rise above things to examine my motives, no longer fix on a decision, no longer gather myself. Conduct business? And with whom was I dealing? Who exactly was in front of me? Where were those muffled voices rising from? Where were their assurances coming from? Where did those baroque, lazy words come from, like mushrooms slow to sprout? No more trust in speech, no more trust in anyone. In the street, I moved with great caution, with preliminaries and second thoughts, offended by the houses at every turn, fearing the next drink, weaving with the cunning of a hunter, brusquely questioned by the night air, slipping like a wreck between the shop portals, drying out in the cafés, exhausted, shrivelled, chewing on copper, tormented by a poorly phrased question, stared at for a long time by a sort of rift, a pointed absence irritating in its purity. I was on the side of Pascal, who always felt an abyss to his left. Did I even see the problem statement? I recalled certain burning and repressed periods of my childhood, full of murmurs, damp beams of light, and tears of pleasure, states of anger or silence, where the family doctor discerned mild disorders, attributable, he said, to my precocious activity, overwhelmed by vivid impressions, which I took great care not to betray, and which pierced me with bitter kisses, bestowed by some unrelenting marvel like a seashell in a display case, the atlas in a dictionary of natural history, a miniature ship at the maritime museum, or some absurdly lavish toy I could never possess. Never have I felt the sense of the impossible more acutely, except perhaps during certain feverish surges when I laboured like a machine to force an indeterminate but considerable mass through an imperceptible opening, like a cathedral through the eye of a needle; or unless, on the carousel, the order came for us all to commit suicide with our lances, under penalty of death, before the ride came to a complete stop, and which was already slowing down, under the gaze of my mother, who struggled to reach me before one of the long beasts, deformed like a cloud, and who could no longer save me.
But life was becoming unbearable. The atmosphere was thickening. I would abruptly get up while eating, only to realise I was standing, lying down, running through a crowd, out of place and dishevelled, with all the compartments of my spirit wide open. Naturally, sleep was impossible. I could no longer do anything properly. I had put my affairs in order. I hurried like a coachman racing against the night. I struggled like a patient who isn’t fighting back too badly, just from a somewhat abased position, with a little too much unnecessary movement, blowing a little harder than the day before. It was taking too long to shape itself, whether horizontally or vertically. I had either to win or break. How it happened, I no longer know. The scholar gives up on the problem that exhausts him, where the pencil slips, where the mind drifts off nibbling away. One day, the morning after a restorative sleep, he is awakened by the solution. The sorting is done. I had shaken the tree so much that the rotten fruits fell. The accused came sheepishly to the table. The question had been so tense that it sang. I finally received the warning. I got up and left, like someone rushing to bet when they feel a streak of luck. The problem statement telescoped into its solution. Everything became clear. I had only to follow. I went down. I followed one of them.
Why this one over another? What about him signalled my attention? Nothing perceptible in memory. He was tall, well-dressed, walking steadily. It wasn’t hard for me to keep track of him. He drew his lines, his pauses, his entrances, his exits, all intently within the galleries of the termite mound. He went about his day like any ordinary passerby. He played his role as a cheese-eater. I saw him plunge into the depths of maître d’s and the dimly lit windows of a luxury hotel. I waited there on a whim. He stayed inside for nearly two hours, and that’s what troubled me the most. Finally, here he is, resurrected, dragging me along like a tugboat with an invisible rope. He circles around a square for a long time, so anxious I thought he was missing an appointment. No? Off again. A tobacco shop, three stores. Shady neighbourhoods… Les Halles, rue Saint-Denis, boulevard de la Chapelle. I pass through all these places I love. In secluded streets, along sidings, we skirt rows of architectural prostitutes, of a style that is fading, rolling like locomotives on manoeuvres, or lighting up in the portholes of some lower deck. No fooling around, eyes on my man! His feints are a little obvious. The day wears on, and my feet harden. Is he planning to circle the globe? He passed by the Olympia, which has an entrance on rue Caumartin. He entered the buildings double-issued with number 18 rue Pigalle and number 56 faubourg Saint-Honoré. He came out faithfully again, the bastard. I began to take notice, however, because I could feel the thread slackening.
He crossed rue Royale. That’s when I lost him, crushed nose-to-tail in traffic. I thought I saw him get into a car, but it blurred into a peloton that was on the move again. I jumped into a car myself, but by then I wasn’t sure anymore, so I gave orders to pursue almost at random. The chase was taking me so far that doubt began to creep in, though it was fought off by some inner alarm… We were at Buttes-Chaumont. The suspected car slowed down. I pressed my driver to speed up. We overtook it. It was empty.
The day was fading. Nothing more to be done. My course set, I was heading back along rue Bolivar, turning over a bunch of miscalculations in my mind, when I saw my man coming toward me on foot, striding with long steps, his head obstinately and completely turned backward, as if it had come unscrewed. I avoided him and doubled back. I could feel the onward rush of events, I could hear my heart pounding. I resumed the chase, but this time I followed from the opposite sidewalk, on account of his head. He went down rue des Mignottes, then rue des Solitaires, without seeming to have noticed me, and this is what happened.
His gait became jerky, then undulating, his head hemmed with strange trim, the edges of his body, then the centre, began to lighten, transparently revealing, as if through smoked glass, the whole scaffold, all its recesses, everything he had in his pockets, everything he had eaten, like a satchel of Cardano; then the swirl of an intense colourant—he must have been treated with methylene blue—then the passers-by, who were becoming scarce, then the houses, then the sky. Suddenly, he stopped, and I barely had time to leap backwards as the footpath darkened in a ring around his feet, as if wet from the circling drizzle of a rotisserie; he became diaphanous and sank into the earth like a bag of silent glass. There was a faint crackle of static, two or three large blisters rose from the footpath, with a fairly loud pop, before everything returned to normal—I had won.
Since then, I haven’t given up the hunt. What day did I go home? So many, so many, that aren’t real! Most of them aren’t real! It happens in so many different ways! Some smoke softly, like a Solfataric emission, or rise from the ground like skeletal rigging, or almost invisibly float away like a balloon let go by a child. A woman rises, her hair standing on end, her skirt turned over like a candelabra. I don’t know if others see them, but I do. Others plunge into a porous partition, absorbed as if by blotting paper. Once, I saw two of them sink into the same spot in a factory wall. Night hemmed us in. Their double outlines became visible, like sympathetic ink, and remained glowing on the stone for a long time. Where are they? I couldn’t leave this palimpsest wall. One of them seemed to want to rise up again. I fled. There are those who surge up on the spot, almost under your feet, like a ghost of dust from a heating vent, armed from head to toe with their canes and briefcases. And there are the exchanges, the redemptions, the bad numbers, the replacements, the permutations, the prescriptions, the substitutions, the volunteers—ah, all sorts of combinations and resources, a monstrous movement, lost in the fray; a silent ferry-boat, a discreet coming and going from life to death. The reasons of the living and the dead waver. Love and death first traded blows at sea. They intertwine, they lose each other in stone. How far does their fencing go? The crammed text of the herd imposes itself on you. Smoke spindles, acrobats balancing on a ball, suspicious boats drawn into a cove, obese prowlers, hammerhead sharks from the rocky sea, tearing themselves apart on the breakers of the street, unravelling stitch by stitch, an oily mesh against the sky. A sort of muffled tom-tom of organs, danse macabre of soft batons, migrations of letters in mourning, dispersed order, field service confined to geodes, on account of asides full of numbers, couplings of garrulous worms, gluttonous cockroaches, sticky and sonorous barter, surrounding the houses like dark, dirty foam. It’s a question of untangling deceptive resemblances, memories from visiting demons, extras from phantoms, prematurely arrived figures from limbo, shirkers, simulators, precocious reincarnates, death’s defectors, the provisionally formed criminal thought, swollen like a steaming snout, the astral body stealing clothes. Someone made off with your overcoat in a café? Don’t bother looking—it wasn’t anyone other than yourself. What a job! An inflexible patience gives you mastery over it. If you fix your gaze on one sea louse among a thousand sea lice on the shore, if you don’t take your eyes off it, you mesmerise it. The others scatter in multiplied trembling, sifted by terror, but the one remains in place, with its big fat eye. You do the same for any countryside insect. Your gaze weighs on it. You can see it rear up, scissor emptily with its pincers, sharply lift the cases of its elytra, revealing a little engine that makes you want to say a prayer, and, just as you let go, it melts into the sky with a sad word… I’ve caught men just like these little creatures. Then I saw, yes, I saw: that there were some strange fish amongst them. Once, I came across my friend three times. Twice, in his eyes, it wasn’t him. The third time, he spoke to me. I took fright and slipped away into the crowd. The baker’s wife at the crossroads was abused for two years by a lover as light as air, who came from the beyond just for her. It’s important to distinguish between people. I could teach you how to follow them. I’ve caught many like that, who only busied about in their suits and hats for an hour, and I watched over them until the moment when they sank cowardly into the ground. There are many nurturing points, veins of escape, there are many divine pitfalls, misunderstood snares, mysterious Venus flytraps, opercula that give way, marshy spots, stone larynxes, obscure sequestrations, executions without trial. I hear at times in the crowd a strange bell. I discern the noise of cars from a muffled warning that comes on a sea breeze. Someone says: “There’s going to be a storm.” Around noon, senses are heightened. On the verge of evening, the currents freshen, the old dolmen no longer tosses wrecks, flies take off from dead belts, light undresses at the windows, and I remember that peace was good. Then, I uncork my solitude, lined with hard-won knowledge, and breathe it in the darkness.
At last, the divine spirit assails us. It’s had enough of stumbling against its material form. We are the material, this spirit that has hardened. It’s tired of feeling these heavy and incombustible flies in its flame; it’s irritated to feel in its belly, along the finest thread of its blood, these saline bubbles, these calculi, these filthy splinters, these miserly straws, these sad reserves, these fungal sinuses, this restless, unbearable question that we are. So, it throws us a lifeline, it hands us a drug, it poisons us, it chews us up and digests us. Catalytic resorption, spiritual precipitate, lightning-fast chemical dissociation, whatever you want to call it… At whatever point we pass, on whatever causeway of space and through whatever metamorphosis—across the centuries of centuries—we will have the honour of making exchanges with this inconceivable Spirit. Sometimes, for an incalculable period, it shrinks the world. It suspends space, time, and matter for a moment, rendering us all invisible. But does anyone notice? For the world remains to scale. You, perhaps, for whom adaptation does not happen quickly, with your compulsions, your slowness, your particular plasticity, your interminable intuitions. Shh! Let nothing argumentative infect your flair for God. At times I cling to his mast, and fly over myself in pursuit of him, in the fourth dimension, the radiant one. Yet, I was a poor man, and I would have liked to stay in my hovel, a humble master of anthologies, a subtle insect of genius, friendship, or love. Too late. I can be an artist no longer. I can keep still no longer. I hear behind me, like a train in the night, resounding cries starting to outpace me. If I want to maintain my distance, I must pursue something myself, I must track one of those macabre dancers, who do so much harm, and are caught in the act of not being human! I follow them, preyed upon by their thoughts, dissolved as if by a mordant, by indifference or by ecstasy. They no longer respond to the Eternal plasmagenesis. They no longer hear God telling them they exist. Then it is they doubt themselves and collapse. They die from an attack of scepticism, as one dies from septicaemia. Discriminative sensitivity to God. But I want to know how it works!
Ah! I’m an active occidental ghost! This changing of the guard, which I ask for so often, what would I do with it? I must stir things up, keep busy, hunt—men, the bus, or God. Strike the Earth’s backside with your leather flail, run along your little good-natured path, sweet pea. Shakyamuni can do nothing for you, sufferer!
