Report to Grego (72 page)

I know of no animal more disgusting than the mouse, no bird more disgusting than the bat, no edifice of flesh, hair, and bones more disgusting than the human body. But think how all this manure is transubstantiated and deified when God is embedded in it—the seed which develops into wings.

I return to the house; this thought comforted me the entire night. At daybreak my father come to me in my sleep, his motionless face beaming and filled with gentleness. He stood before me in the middle of a green pasture, extraordinarily high and transparent, as though composed of cloud. And as I gazed at him and began joyfully to open my mouth to pronounce the kind word I had never uttered while he was alive, a gentle breeze blew (was it a breeze, or perhaps my own breath?), the cloud stirred, attenuated,
lost its former human shape, and dispersed everywhere over the grass, like morning frost.

When I awoke, I found the sun in my room, filling my bed. Propping myself on my elbows to look through the window, I saw the sea laughing and raising tiny breasts so that the warm rays could caress them. This was another divinely beautiful day. Each morning the world rediscovers its virginity; it seems to have issued fresh from God's hands at that very instant. It has no memory, after all; that is why its face never develops wrinkles. It neither recalls what it did the day before nor frets about what it will do the day after. It experiences the present moment as an eternity. No other moment exists; before and behind this moment is Nothing.

Sitting in front of the window to receive the sun squarely upon my chest, I bent over the blank page. It was not a blank page, it was a mirror in which I saw my face. I knew that all I wrote, no matter what, would be a confession. This was the critical hour of the Last Judgment. Standing before the invisible Judge, your heart begins shamelessly to cry out its sins: I stole, I murdered, I lied, I coveted my neighbor's wife, fashioned a whole troop of gods, worshiped them, smashed them, fashioned others. I had the impertinence to wish to surpass the human being and do what You were unable, or did not wish, to do. I conspired with all the luminous and tenebrous forces I had at my disposal, in order to drive You from Your throne, sit there myself and establish a new order in the world—less injustice and hunger, more tender-voiced virtue, more militant love.

I felt my heart crying out inside me. It had ample complaints, it disagreed with God, and the time had come for it to prepare a report and inform Him, mincing no words now, of its indignation and pain. The years were rolling by, after all, and I with them; clay must not stop up my mouth before I spoke out. Every man has a cry,
his
cry, to sling into the air before he dies; let us waste no time, therefore, lest we be caught short. It is true that this cry may scatter ineffectually in the air, that there may be no ear either below on earth or above in heaven to hear it. No matter. You are not a sheep, you are a man, and that means a thing which is unsettled and shouts. Well then—shout!

Do not turn coward, I told myself, do not think that since you
are an ephemeral animal you cannot interfere in the government of the cosmos. Alas! if you only knew your strength, you would already have overstepped human limits.

S
pring came and found me still wrestling and toiling to tame those wild mares: words. Though thousands, millions, of years have passed since man's first dawn, the technique of enticing the invisible has remained forever the same, the rules of the hunt have not changed. We still use the same artifice, the same self-interested prayers; we entreat, threaten, ambush the invisible with the same coarse wiles—for the soul cannot spread free wings, overladen as it is with body, but is obliged to follow the pathways of the flesh, on foot.

Primitive men in caves struggled to paint the wild beast they longed to catch. They did this because they were hungry; they had no intention whatsoever of producing art or unremunerative beauty. The beast's outline which they depicted with paints or with incisions in the rock was a magic charm for them, a mystical trap which would draw the beast to it, whereupon the animal would enter and be caught. That was why it was so absolutely necessary for the outline to be as faithful as possible, so that the hunted beast could be deceived more easily.

In the same way, I was setting words as traps, setting them with all the cunning I possessed, so that I could capture the uncapturable Cry which kept advancing in front of me.

Suddenly the dividing wall of exploration and effort crumbled noiselessly. Just as savages upon discovering the name of the god or devil tormenting them are able to pass a bit between his jaws, mount him, and apply the spurs to make him carry them where they wish, so I too in giving a name to my hero felt his strength penetrating me just as the horse's strength penetrates the rider, and I began to plunge impetuously forward.

Everything unfolded before my eyes—empty shadows pining for me to give them my blood so that they could form bodies; the hero's travels and adventures; wars, massacres, conflagrations, love affairs, mystical encounters with great souls, and finally at the journey's very end a long and narrow coffin-like skiff and in it two aged oarsmen, two elderly stalwarts, my hero and Charon. And the waves of the Cretan main, swelling in mid-sea, flashing and
guffawing in the sunlight as they rolled one after the other and ran in flocks to break murmuringly upon the pebbles of the beach, these became octameters, and my brain's sun-washed hem received them and laughed like a Cretan shore line.

As the days and weeks went by I was ever-anxious for dawn to come so that I could bend over the blank page again and see what my hero was going to do today, where he would go, how he would wrestle with the luminous and tenebrous forces blowing from the horizon's entire arc and bellying out his sail. Not even I knew what lay in store. I waited, unrolling the myth from inside me in order to learn. I wrote without a mental plan; other forces governed me, forces which had their seat, not in the head, but around the loins. These guided my hand and obliged the brain to follow and establish order.

Never had I experienced the silkworm's mute agony and relief with such a sense of identification. When all the mulberry leaves it has eaten are finally transformed inside it and turned to silk, then the creative process begins. Swaying its head from side to side, it plucks out its entrails with a convulsive shudder, withdraws the silk, tiny thread by tiny thread, and with patience and mystic wisdom knits—white, gold, all of precious substance—its coffin.

There is no sweeter agony, I believe, no more urgently imposed duty than for the entire worm to turn to silk, the entire flesh to spirit. Nor is there any undertaking more in keeping with the laws reigning in the workshop of God.

T
HE ENTIRE TIME
a person creates, he has the morning sickness of the woman nourishing a son with her vitals. I found it impossible to see anyone. The slightest noise made my entire body quake; it was as though Apollo had flayed me and my exposed nerves were being wounded by mere contact with the air.

The octameters rolled clamorously one behind the other and spread sealike over the paper. Stationary in my chair, I was experiencing the exploits and ordeals of Odysseus. He had weighed anchor for the great journey from which there is no return; his minuscule island, insignificant little wife, and simple-minded, well-meaning son were too constricting for him now. Disgusted, he picked up and left. He stopped at Sparta and abducted Helen, who felt constricted in her own right by the peaceful life. Going down to Crete and joining the barbarians, he burned the decadent palace. But he was suffocating, even this great archisland constricted him, and he shaped a course southward once more. I myself had boarded his ship; I was journeying with him, a mermaid figurehead on his prow. My mind had become a perfect sphere, a terrestrial globe on which, in red ink, I marked the ports we had called at and those which still remained—to the ends of the earth. I knew everything, absolutely everything; I saw everything and guided the way. The terrible route shone with utter clarity inside me; but what a struggle to lock that entire vision inside words without letting even a single drop spill out!

The creator wrestles with a hard, invisible substance, a substance far superior to him. Even the greatest victor emerges vanquished, because our deepest secret, the only one that deserves expression, always remains unexpressed. This secret never submits to art's material contours. We suffocate inside every word. Seeing a blossoming
tree, a hero, a woman, the morning star, we cry, Ah! Nothing else is able to accommodate our joy. When, analyzing this Ah! we wish to turn it into thought and art in order to impart it to mankind and rescue it from our own dissolution, how it cheapens into brazen, mascaraed words full of air and fancy!

But alas, there is no other way for us to impart this Ah!—the only bit of immortality in us—to mankind! Words! Words! For me, alas, there was no other salvation. Under my authority I had nothing but twenty-six lead soldiers, the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. I will proclaim full mobilization, I said, raise an army, and battle against death.

I know perfectly well that death is invincible. Man's worth, however, lies not in victory but in the struggle for victory. I also know this, which is more difficult: it does not even lie in the struggle for victory. Man's worth lies in one thing only, in this: that he live and die bravely, without condescending to accept any recompense. And I also know this third requirement, which
is
more difficult yet: the certainty that no recompense exists must not make our blood run cold, but must fill us with joy, pride, and manly courage.

As I wrote, I saw that two words kept reappearing and refusing to go away, even though I did not want this, indeed tried to avoid it. The words were God and
ascent
. What is God: the supreme chimera, the supreme hope, or the supreme certainty? Or perhaps the supreme uncertainty? Although I had been struggling for years, I still could not decide how to answer this tragic question definitively. Inside me the answer kept changing in accordance with the valor, trust, or discouragement my soul felt in its meditations upon God. I was never firmly certain at which of these three Sirens—the Chimera, Hope, or Certainty—I should halt and render up my soul. All three of their songs bewitched me equally, and the more I heard of any one of these songs the less I desired to proceed and perish further on.

All my life, however, I was sure of one thing: that one road, and one road only, leads to God—the ascent. Never the descent or the level road, only the ascent. My inability to distinguish the contents of that word
God
with any clarity, that word so soiled and overused by men, made me hesitate many times, but I never hesitated
regarding the road which leads toward God, in other words toward the supreme peak of man's desire.

There is this as well: I was always bewitched by three of God's creatures—the worm that becomes a butterfly, the flying fish that leaps out of the water in an effort to transcend its nature, and the silkworm that turns its entrails into silk. I always felt a mystical unity with them, for I always imagined them as symbols symbolizing the route of my soul. It is impossible to express the joy I experienced when I first saw a grub engraved on one tray of the delicate golden balanees discovered in the tombs of Mycenae and a butterfly on the other—symbols doubtlessly taken from Crete. For me, the grub's yearning to become a butterfly always stood as its—and man's—most imperative and at the same time most legitimate duty. God makes us grubs, and we, by our own efforts, must become butterflies.

I experienced equal joy and excitement at seeing the flying fish on the frescoes of Knossos, seeing it soar above the sea on the wings it had developed. I sensed my identification with extremely remote ancestors. Now, thousands of years later, I was faithfully following in their footsteps: I too was transforming Cretan earth into wings.

And once in a tiny country chapel on a Greek island I saw (saw? or perhaps dreamed that I saw?) an icon of the Virgin to which the faithful had coupled a frame of thorns. They had strewn silkworm eggs over this frame, the eggs had opened, and the tiny wonder-working worms which emerged had been fed daily on mulberry leaves. The worms had accomplished their duty on the day I saw the icon, had transubstantiated the mulberry leaves and turned them into silk. The Virgin was framed with white cocoons. I thought to myself, O if only I could remain in front of her until spring to see the cocoons break open and the fuzzy white butterflies—the “souls” as the peasants call them—encompass the Mother of God with their glossy, microscopic eyes!

A faithful Christian would have said to me, “What you saw was not a dream. You did not see worms, you saw us—human beings. As soon as we accomplish our duty upon earth, we shall enter the grave and emerge therefrom as souls to flap our wings around the Mother of God for all eternity. God gave us eyes, and with these eyes we see that He sent us the silkworm to point out our way.
The sacred, prophetic symbols disconcert our hearts for a moment, but we dare not take the next step: to believe, and convert hope into certainty.”

I
n the morning the world was resplendent and steaming. A violent squall had broken out during the night; the parched soil had received the celestial waters and been refreshed. When I went to my window, I found the earth and sea sweetly fragrant, the sky freshly washed and sparkling, brilliantly white from the sun's radiance. My breast, like a parcel of land, had been refreshed as well; like parched soil it had received the entire nighttime squall. The joy I felt was so great that I found it impossible to bend over my paper on this day and turn the world into octameters. Opening the door, I went outside.

It was August, the most openhanded and beloved of months, a robust paterfamilias who, with armfuls of succulent fruit, strolls in the melon fields and vineyards, spattered with sediment from the wine-making—a holy double-chinned, triple-bellied, vertical-tailed Satyr, great is his grace! who enjoys and eternally vintages his vineyard, Greece.