This mastery of our innermost movements, which in the long run we can acquire, is well known: it is yoga. But yoga is given in the form of coarse recipes, embellished with pedantism and with bizarre statements. And yoga, practiced for its own sake, advances no further than an aesthetics or a hygiene, whereas I have recourse to the same means (laid bare), in despair.
– Bataille, Inner Experience (tr. L.A. Boldt)
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As she rubbed the furniture to make it shine, she upbraided me, telling me that the life I led was unhealthy. She had remarked that I had a tendency to drink a little too much, it was bad for the health. Very bad, for a man at the height of his powers. Wasn’t I going to buckle down and find some work for myself? All right, so I had an inheritance. That was no reason to sit around and do nothing all day. At least get married. Did I intend to go one living all alone, like some impotent? I ought to start a family. Man is made to have children, and there’s nothing cuter than little ones underfoot. And then when they grow up and you grow old, they don’t abandon you to poverty; no, they reach out a helping hand when you need it most. If there’s anything worse than living alone, it’s dying alone, with no one around to offer you a little milk of human kindness. I didn’t know what was in store for me.
*
She was downstairs, with the concierge, next to her door. When they saw me they stopped talking. Were they talking about me? All I want is for them to leave me alone. I can do whatever I want. I can loaf all day if I’ve a mind to. That’s my business. Oh! I can feel myself getting angry. I hurried through the lobby. But before I exited I glanced back: I saw them looking at me. They were waiting till I had disappeared before going on with their backbiting, their malicious small talk. What could they be dreaming up about me? The whole concierge system is a kind of plot.
*
She had grown used to my comings and goings at the same time every day, and adjusted to my strange solitude. ‘You look to me’, she said to me at one point, ‘like you’re hiding from the police. Or from some rivals’. I told her that no one was after my skin, that as far as my hash was concerned I was sure no one was trying to settle it, and that I had never belonged to the underworld. ‘Just as I suspected’, she said, ‘you don’t look brave enough for that’.
– Ionesco, The Hermit (tr. R. Seaver)
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If only he had some philosophical talent, X tells me. Then he might be able to explain his feelings, then he might not need to talk to me. If only you’d answer, he says. How am I supposed to get any philosophical talent if you don’t answer my questions? It’s because you know you’d only explain what I already feel, isn’t that why? So why don’t you say something if it’s so easy, he says. He would have been happier if he hadn’t taken up with me, that much is clear, he says. If you’re not a thinker you shouldn’t think, that much is clear too. He tries not to, he says. He has no system, no philosophy, all he does is wait for my answers, so why don’t you answer, he says.
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‘I talk to push my self out on the low tide of my words; to leave an emptiness for you to fill.’
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X tells me he doesn’t want to be or think anything anymore. He doesn’t want to submit to anything, let alone me. What’s the point of thinking, he says, since we don’t even comprehend the basis of our thought, since our words mean nothing? Better not to think, he says. No ties even to ourselves! That means you have to leave me alone, he says, because I’m not thinking anymore, let alone of you, there’s nothing here for you. So this is goodbye, he says.
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I wasn’t a rebel. Which is not to imply that I was resigned, for the fact was I didn’t know what I ought to resign myself to.
*
I was in a vast space, and yet it was locked.
*
When do I hit upon the truth, when I see everything as desolation and despair, or when I see all creation as a joyous month of May in full bloom? But we cannot know, our ignorance is boundless. We have neither the right to judge, nor the possibility of judging.
*
I don’t have any desires, or rather only a few, or rather I don’t have them any more. If I have any, they’re not worth being exploited and encouraged. Perhaps I actually do have desires. But they’re dormant. I’m not inclined to wake them up. What are my desires? That people leave me alone; that other people’s desires leave me alone and don’t involve me in their repercussions. What I desire most of all is not to have any desires. And yet I notice that I do have some.
*
‘Aren’t you ashamed to have no goal in life, to be living for nothing?’ Pierre Ramboule asked me one day, unless it was Jacques, I don’t remember which. After a thorough self-examination, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t ashamed […] I don’t feel obliged to answer that question.
*
People tend to avoid or forget the unthinkable; their thinking begins where the unthinkable ends; they base their thinking on the unthinkable, and for me too that is unthinkable.
*
I think that I’m at the wall of the world; forget the other side of the wall.
*
No one is guilty of anything. Or else everyone is guilty of everything, which comes to the same thing.
– Ionesco, The Hermit (trans. R. Seaver)
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X tells me he’s always been afraid of dusk. Summer or winter, it doesn’t matter, he says. Some sort of gloom fear or boredom always descends on him with the murk, he says, that’s when he’s confronted by whatever it is that keeps trying to peel him apart and smother him. That’s why he makes sure to be sloshed by dusk, he tells me, to make a buffer zone.
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Q. ‘What kind of intellectual aims do you…’
A. ‘These are all questions that can’t be answered because no one asks themselves that sort of thing. People don’t have aims. Young people, up to 23, they still fall for that. A person who has lived five decades has no aims, because there’s no goal.’
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X tells me this is it, this is the end. He’s clapped-out, tied up and binned, finished. He’s like a winter coat in Africa, he says, irrelevant, useless, unfit for purpose. Everyone can see it, he says, even children. It’s obvious in the way they all look at him, and in the way they look away from him. Why’s he even allowed to walk around, he says, why don’t I stop him?
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‘You disappear and return as what has disappeared. To know you is to lose the possibility of emerging from you.’
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