By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin

The Infernal Voyage

I awoke in the midst of a cavalcade of bare feet trotting on all sides. I was on the platform of a station. There was an orange scarf under my head, a pile of bags, and above my head a poster. With one bound I was on my feet; he was there, squatting on the ground, upright, as if he were watching over me. The sun was beating on the corrugated iron, I was splashed with mud. Our train had gone.

Dazed, I looked at the crowd, the crows hopping about, my filthy clothes. Suddenly, last night's dream flashed into my mind with a surge of joy, clear, clearer than the crowd. It was alive, intense, compact, as life never is: a thousand meanings packed into a whiff of odour. I closed my eyes, letting the image rise, I was almost breathing it. I was completely awake. The odour of an image that was unfolding like a flower ...Une odeur d'image qui s'ouvrait comme une fleur. And each petal opened up a new layer of feeling, a new depth of the same thing. Here, our odours are flat, they mean jasmine or filth—they are silly odours; there, they contain a world. They are the odours of feelings: fear, hate, joy: and fantastically precise as if, at one go, one swallowed the terror of the Inquisition or the scent of wild Himalayan rhododendrons. Just a vibration. I always have the impression that life here is an abstract copy of a true image behind; one enters into it as if into a caricature: it sticks to the face, it is hard, dry, masked, and terribly inadequate.

I was in a rather gloomy medieval fortress—a European fortress, it was in the West—and I was walking down a narrow alleyway paved with huge flagstones. I can still see them, solid, polished, uneven, and the high walls with small wrought-iron balconies which seemed to lean down towards me. I was walking there, feeling quite small in the midst of an obscure foreign crowd. It was this. Crowd which: had an odour. A strangely silent crowd: each being crouching in silence. A subterranean odour. I saw myself in the midst of them, quite small, almost somber; as if I were looking at myself over my shoulder (it is curious. In certain: cases, I see myself fry: the. Outside and above; as if I was entering into someone taller behind or above me, and: I am a witness. One might say that I am an onlooker at myself. And in that case, the image is indelible, fixed for eternity in all its details, by an eye which will not close. Perhaps it never closes and it is I who, from time to time, pass into that eye). I was going towards a door; I knew there was a door at the bottom. But as I advanced I felt that I was not dressed as I ought to be, that I was not doing what I ought to be doing, I was not like them, I belonged to another place or another time perhaps, a sort of intruder, and they were staring at me. And those looks were getting more and more menacing and aggressive. The more alien I felt, the more their hostility rose. It rose from all sides, even from the walls, the stones—a world of stone. And I did not know what to do; I was searching desperately for the right gesture, the right word: I bent double, hugged the walls, filled myself with grey—it was no good. I was singled out by that mute crowed. Then my uneasiness increased and became almost intolerable, stifling, as if my clothes were horribly false, even my face and my colour—I was caught in a sort of dwarf-self which was me all the same: I could not find anything that suited me, I could not do as they did, I did not know the word, I did not know the gestures, everything was oppressive. And, of course, the policemen would come, and I, had no passport either, I had nothing—I was locked up, a prisoner in that horrible stone fortress... Suddenly, springing from I know not where, in the middle of the alleyway, a great white horse appeared—white, radiant, oh! a superb animal, and tall, so tall that it almost reached the top of the walls and dominated the crowd. A gigantic, formidable breast. And before I could even understand what was happening, I found myself on its back and galloping away: a fantastic gallop. A god-like gallop. Everything gave way before me: the crowd, the doors, the guards—nothing resisted. Then, suddenly the wide open spaces, freedom, pure air—all the rhododendrons of the Himalayas in one breath. My lungs were full, I expanded, widened, lit up almost—I recovered my height and my colour. A liberation.

—Here, drink.

I could still feel that white inane in my hands, the warm flanks against my thighs, and then the wind which lashed my face, the joy in my veins. Carried away by a triumphant, irresistible power... We were entering a forest.

—Up! boy.

He held out a bowl of tea and some cholum. Iron trollies were rolling by in the dampness. The crows were flapping about around me, the place was like a bunker.

—And our train?

He looked surprised, then majestically, he pointed to two trains being stoked near the opposite platforms.

I looked at the sun. The east was over that way, so these trains were going westward.

—But we have come from there!

He shrugged his shoulders and picked up his staff.

—Come on, let's be an our way, it's time.

This began an infernal journey. We went towards the west, then to the east, and sometimes to the north only to come back immediately to the south, and perhaps we were still in the outlying area of the port? I looked at the time; but whether it was a quarter to six or seven o'clock, it was all the same, it was always the time to sweat and to chew cholum, and when it was night, I knew it. Disgusted, I threw my watch out the door. He laughed, as usual. I hated him. And so what? I had embarked, so I might just as well go through to the end go where? I had exchanged my two banknotes for a copper bowl and a piece of soap. I was rigged out like a beggar. Even if we reached port one day, what difference would it make? I had not even a cent for a shave and I had also thrown my shoes out the door. If I went to the consul... Repatriated compulsorily, I know the refrain and the red tape. And repatriated to where? I return to the Fortress and everything starts again.

—Will you tell me why I have come here?

He did not reply.

—And not only once: three times—you said so yourself.

He did not move. He was like a log.

Three times? It was not three times that I had come here, but thousands of times E It was like black lava, as old as the Valley of Kings. But it was not a “here” of corrugated iron and rails, but an inner “here”, infinitely more torrid, acute, more and more acute—like the smell of that silent crowd. Sometimes, I was afraid to stretch out my hands, as if I were going to touch still more dreadful walls. Perhaps Destiny was that: I could see it, I could almost touch it in that dampness. No, Destiny is not a mystery; on the contrary, it is a well-known, oft-repeated situation. Slowly and surely I was being pushed into a trap, and I was going to be caught there without any escape-hatch, in front of... in front of what?

—Whom had I killed?

He was silent. He was rolling the rudraksha beads of his necklace. To kill... To kill, was only a news item; there is a point of radical guilt deep within, before which all the crimes on earth are as nothing—it is the crime, naked, unique, the same for everyone. Something on the watch in the depths like a cowering animal suddenly caught in the glare of a head-light. Something that struggles to the death, which does not want, which says no! And it is clamped onto oneself, harder than iron. It is there, right at the bottom... I know it; I have always known it and I am awaiting the hour, as if all the minutes of my life were only a rehearsal for that moment.

—What do you want me to say, boy? What is the use of speaking, you have to understand... To understand does not mean to know, it means to stand inside. When the time comes, you will understand. You people, in your countries, you have seen the whole world through your binoculars, and you have understood nothing.

I was exasperated. He was leaning against a pillar on the platform, squatting cross-legged, perfectly at home—he was always at home: on platforms, in compartments, warehouses, filth, the hissing of boilers (he seemed to choose those places purposely) or mosquito-bites—and all those people hurrying on the platform were the servants of his palace. A full-fledged log. And when he was not playing the log, he was laughing, or lecturing the goats. It was disgusting. In fact, he was constantly and silently lying in wait for me; I had the feeling that he was turning a screw into me, millimetre by millimetre, and he was approaching an invisible point.

—It is simple, little one. In fact, everything is admirably simple. I am going to tell you...

He sniffed and pulled at his scarf.

—Listen, one day, when I was a child, there was someone I loved very much. She went away; they took her to the hospital. I suffered. Then I found that it was really unnatural not to be able to see her simply because her body was no longer with me. I wanted to see her always... “And suppose I thought of her very hard?” I thought of her very hard, I clasped her to my heart. And then she was there. I saw her, I knew what she was doing. She was a silly goose, I realised it afterwards. After all, one gets tired of a face. Then I started thinking very hard of the river that I loved so much. It was there also, I saw it, I knew when the ferryman would leave the shore, I even knew when it would rain. But, after all, one gets tired of a river. I thought very hard of the morrow, because I was always expecting a miracle; and then I saw that I would fall into the tank while fetching water—the next day I almost drowned in the tank. I thought of all kinds of things, and everything was there, it was enough to think of it—one pushes, one extends oneself and then one sees. But after all, one knocks against the curb one day or another, the neighbour's daughter has rubella and the river flows on still. Then I thought very hard of something which remains, something which always brings contentment...

His look rested on a flock of pigeons, then he closed his eyes—he had gone... Nothing, nobody. It was the suddenness with which he. cut contacts that always astonished me., Or he would open one eye suddenly, to make the most unexpected gesture, getting up abruptly in the middle of the night and taking a train, or begging for a bowl of tea when I-was thirsty, or pulling me by the sleeve when I was thinking of the devil. Then, hop! he had disappeared again, and all the mosquitoes in the station would not be able to move him the length of a thumb.

—Something that one can always look at, eh, do you know what it is?

He opened his eyes and sniffed again.

—In your country, they do not know how to look. So they always invent new things to look at again; they invent in order to look far, to look close up, to look through, to look askance—but their eyes are never filled, neither: are their hearts nor their ears. You are excellent inventors. But it is not so, you have not invented anything at all—you have imitated everything. Later on, people will say that you were the great counterfeiters. But the tail of the Real Thing you have not caught... The world is simple, child, I have told you, there is only one thing to find and not two; then everything is invented, every day and every minute of the day. An inexhaustible invention of life. And one is content, always content, oh!

He took his nose between his fingers and blew it vigourously. I was overpowered.

—Sannyasi, you see the future. So tell me what it is that I feel weighing upon me, coming upon me...

—But I do not see the future, ignoramus! I do not try to see it. I am not trying anything at all! It comes of itself when it is necessary. It is perpetually being invented. The head is empty, then it is filled with an image, just at the right moment.

—Then why do you say that I have come here three times?

—How do I know? I have no wisdom, except what is put into my mouth.

—You are as slippery as an eel, Sannyasi, it is very convenient. But I want to know, you understand, I want to touch, I want to see.

—You will see and you will touch. Only, you cannot reasonably ask an ass to touch an eel, eh? Your ass will have to learn how to swim. It's logical. You say: “I want to see”, and then you put your hand over your eyes because you are afraid that it will not be exactly like your sack of bran. And if it's not exactly like your sack of bran, you do not even see it! You are right in the middle of the miracle, O simpleton, and you do not see it!

He took his copper pot and thrust it into my hands.

—Here, as clear as that. In short, you would like something, else; while remaining the same. Besides, men do not really ask for “something else”, they only ask for the same thing with a few improvements, they ask to become superior asses. But they will never catch the eel: they will only make a dictionary of the eel.

—Then, tell me what one must do in order to see?

—One must not do, my boy. One must undo.

—What?

Everything that impedes.

Suddenly, he stretched out his arm towards a pigeon near the Refreshment-Room:

—You see this pigeon..., what does it do? It pecks at lime. Why? Because it is going to lay its eggs and it needs lime for the shells. Does it like lime? No. Does it know? No. But it acts. You do not like lime or cholum, you also do not like policemen, mosquitoes, goats and... who knows what else. But you like freedom, music, birds and guava-jelly, and who knows what else. So you do not know and you do not act. You are full of your own story, you hear only your own music. But I tell you that when you have emptied yourself of your music you will begin to hear something else. You will go and peck directly at what is necessary, and at every moment you will have the right thought. When I say “it is time”, it is time, and I do not need to consult the time-table: the train leaves. Did not wait for you at the tea-shop?

This time, I was riveted. A door opened, and a mass of little details sprang out from all sides: his unpredictable gestures, his almost alarming way of doing things abruptly, without any connection, and yet it was always the right thing. Like that night when I was lying on those sacks of raffia; he pulled me off brutally and lifted the sacks: there was a nest of scorpions underneath!

—You knew the scorpions were there?

—No, idiot! I know nothing at all, I act. Besides, it is not true, I do not act: “that” acts... ҫa fait. “I” do nothing at all: he copies, imitates—and makes mistakes.

—But how...

—Oh! What a slowcoach you are! There is only one life, child. Nothing is separate: the sack, the scorpions, you and I. It is one life. The scorpions are not hidden! It is you who are hidden in your head!

And his way of catching trains just when they were starting, of begging from just the right person (and never twice) or waking me up when I was struggling with horrible snakes... And suddenly, I had the impression that there was a much more radical secret in this than having divine visions.

All the same, I hated him.

—Your right time is all very well, but what purpose does it serve since we are going nowhere?

Then he became serious. I even thought that he was going to thunder:

—I am going somewhere and that somewhere is everywhere, and it is important to be exactly on time at every minute. Because if I am not on time here, I shall never be on time anywhere.

—But, confound it all, ifs no life to go from east to west and from west to east as though we were crazy about railways, and to go on eating soot with cholum or cholum with soot! What the devil am I doing here, tell me? Life is made to serve some purpose, isn't it? I don't know...

—No, you don't know.

—And the world and the others? What are you doing for others, eh, tell me? You laugh? Of what use are you? (I don't know why I suddenly appeared to be a philanthropist—as if I were a bell-ringer for the offended Salvation Army.) We are in the world to do something, non? What are we doing in these damned stations, I ask you? Look at this leper, what about your hospitals...

—They are full of ignorant people—like you.

He stared at the leper.

—This one drags behind him a swarm of completely black leeches... Listen, child, there is only one illness in the world; I have told you, the world is simple. As long as men do not want to be cured of that illness, they can build millions of hospitals, and nothing will be cured. You are seeking something else—well, you have got to rid yourself of the old thing. And the most difficult thing to get rid of, mind you, is not evil, but what you think is good. There is nothing more sticky than goodness. It is the last thing to leave. It is the final wall; and the most solid,—because one does not see it. But if you do not empty yourself of your evil and your good, you will have no right to the wide, wide truth. You will see nothing, you will hear nothing, you will know nothing but your own noise or your own virtues, which have never cured anything, not even you. Now, that's enough. I have spoken.

It was the first time he had spoken at such length, and it proved to be the last. Besides, I had no more questions to ask, I was caught in a kind of struggle for life.

Thus believed Nil.

He believed, but men believe many things. They believe they are good, wicked, merchants or kings, and wise men. They do not know what they are, they are not yet born... He believed he was struggling for life, but it was death that was struggling in him, it was my life that wanted to enter into him. Men are not born if they are not dead to death, they are living corpses, merchants or kings who die. Indeed, I was watching over him, I had never ceased to watch over his destiny, here and there, this traveller without a real name, for they go nameless and meaningless whilst I approach:

Pierre or Paul and Paul or Pierre
They have landed in a body
They move like marionettes
They know not from whence they come
Nor where they go.
They are grey, they go fast
Ils sont gris, ils vont vite

But I approach stealthily while the centuries go by, while the carapace wears away; one day, I place my hand on his shoulder, I cast my shadow over them, or so they think, for they discover they are dead before they have even been born, they discover me through this growing shadow:

They wake up clothed in black
Ils se réveillent vêtus de noir
And shod with lead
With a flame of anguish which cries out their first name

They are completely black
And discontented
They are going to die, perhaps
They want to die and do not want to die

And when my last shadow has enveloped his last cry, I pass into him, he passes into me, for we are always one: I, his brother of light, his peaceful immensity who watches over the journey across eternal hills; he, my tenacious discoverer, my pilgrim with the dark lantern, my great bonfire on the revealed heights; I, his deliverance; he, the deliverer of my abysses.

He hardly spoke again; he even pretended not to see me, as if I were a passenger sitting beside him by chance, and when I wanted to attract his attention, he turned his back on me and went on counting the rudraksha beads of his necklace. Sometimes, I was so full of despair in those stations that I would have kissed his hands if he had had only one word of affection for me, or perhaps I would have started weeping pail-fulls of tears like an idiot. So, I gritted my teeth and counted the carriages going by. There was nothing, nobody. I was not even at the end of the world, not even a negation, which would still be a positiveness of something: I was in nothingness, in that sticky humidity, with the goats trotting along the lines and that leper with his hands eaten away; the only difference between him and me was that he no longer had any hope whilst I did have hope—but for what? I do not know. Perhaps he wanted me to abandon all hope. Perhaps, he wanted to reduce me to the state of a sieve, like my shirt.

I had the impression that he was assassinating me in small doses.

And the days, the months went by. Or were they years? I no longer know, time had lost its meaning. I even had a sensation that it was not really going forward, but backward, far, far back towards a very old story, a world at the end, and every day I had to demolish one story in order to approach the place.

And in that burning chaos, the same question kept coming back, acute, gratingly like the carriages: what? meaning what? What is there... Qu'est-ce qu'il y a? So I fabricated lightning lives for myself: a man on a boulevard with a brief-case under his arm—what? meaning what? A brief-case which walks and walks; there is nobody, only a small brief-case which walks. A man on a bed of bauxite—what? meaning what? A small hammer which strikes and strikes, there is nobody. A man with a stethoscope, a man at the helm. All my little men collapsed one after the other, not a one that held up! If I took away the gesture and the instrument, there was nothing left but a tramp on a platform and the old question which burned underneath: quoi, quel sens? what? meaning what? Where is that real moment, the fragment of being without a décor and without a gesture, without anyone around to make a fuss? There is no fragment, there is nothing! There are axles which grate and crows that roam about on the platform. There is the stark, burning question.

Yes, there is this fire below, there is only that. Man is fire first of all, like the primeval nebula.

—Come on, let's be on our way.

He woke me up in the dead of night, and we ran after a phantom train—only to come back here tomorrow, perhaps—and I did not know whether I was here or there nor whether the chaos was inside or outside. I collapsed with exhaustion in a corner and everything collapsed around me: houses, castles, temples, places I did not even know, from another country, another age. Each night, everything collapsed around me. It was the same; I went into a new region as if I had always been seeking the place—there was that column last night, a huge pillar, and me, very tiny, always very tiny, in that vast stone hall with inscriptions on the walls, two great open wings painted blue like those of an Egyptian god—and then, suddenly, a noise of thunder. Everything collapsed, a fantastic chaos, the earth opened up. I was underneath. And just at the moment I was about to wake up with a cry, I saw myself tall, dressed all in white and almost luminous, crawling out of the ruins—each time the same vision. That being, dressed in white, emerging from a cataclysm—invulnerable. He seemed to emerge from a life, or one kind of life (or perhaps from a kind of experience which creates a castle, a fortress, a temple) and everything is very familiar at that moment: it is a place where I am “at home”; and the following night I enter another place, another life, and everything starts all over again. And it is never the place, never my home! I have no place, no refuge.

—Sannyasi, what does all this mean...

—It does not mean anything. Things do not have a meaning, my boy, they are... elles sont: and you, you are—or you are not. If you are, you understand, if you are not, you have no meaning.

I hated him. Sometimes, insane ideas crossed my mind; to push him under a train and be done with it—ah! to be done with it com-plete-ly. But the idea of pushing him from behind repelled me; I would have liked to seize him by the neck, and strangle him slowly, face to face.

He looked at me suddenly.

—Here.

He handed me his knife.

—It may be of use to you one day, keep it.

And he started counting his wooden beads again.

I became as white as a sheet. I took the knife. I turned it over my hands. My eyes widened. Everything stood still around me: the crows, the leper, the notice over the tap, “for external use only”, the naked child splashing water over his head... That notice, I am sure I shall take it with me into another life, even the patch of sulphur on the child's loins. Perhaps, one day, in a station from the twenty-second millennium, I shall awaken once more at the foot of a collapsing street-fountain.

Then I began to think that it was not he who should be made to disappear but me. But disappear? Disappear where?... Into death? There is no death! It is a myth: And in a flash, on that platform, I saw something like fabulous conspiracy: to the right, to the left, above, below, inside: walls, walls, everywhere; here, on the other side and on all possible sides—no outlet. The complete programmation, mathematical and planned. One dynamites one corner only to enter another. There is no death; one simply passes into another room! Where that never-neverland specimen—the free man?... I drew out the knife. I opened it. It was a Nepalese kris with a swastika on it. The Sannyasi was counting his wooden beads. He, too, was a prisoner in an orange robe, just like the rest of us—tout pareil.

I felt dizzy. I did not know whether I could turn my head to the right or the left; I was caught in a leaden strait jacket. That was it: the “X” point, the impossible point. I was there. One can no longer retreat or advance, go up or come down, not even seize a reassuring thought. Every thought was a trap. Then everything happened very quickly as at the moment of drowning, an accelerated film: ten years of life in one second, ten little-fellows-me who came to burst like bubbles, each with his own little story—one image per life. And it was always the same image, under all latitudes, in all costumes: rolled up in a hammock, shivering with fever—my first night in the virgin forest in South America—no, not malaria, not tropical fever: the fever; it was always the fever, as the only way out, the only ultimate way of catching the boat. I had just left the boat, I could not return to it! I had just landed from Europe in my town shoes and it was full of snakes in that forest. I had two iron rods instead of legs, hands swollen With blisters, and that night which hissed like a boiler—it was not possible, pas-pos-si-ble.

The next day, I laughed out loud and, found my first speck of gold. I had become a gold-seeker.

And that night again, in the Brazilian Sertao, rolled up a shack, without a cent, without a map, without even knowing where I was going or what i was doing, and then suddenly those planters who stowed me away on a lorry with sacks of cocoa; and I drove through the night as though I were being taken to a firing-squad—then I laughed. I planted cocoa. I had become a planter. Each time, there is someone who is going to die, someone who has to be executed. And if he is not executed, it is pas-pos-si-ble, one dies completely. But they grow again like weeds. And each time it descends one degree; it is deeper, more relentless; at each degree the fellow comes up, harder to die, clinging more and more, as though one were going step by step towards an ultimate stronghold, a final rebellious and infernal marionette a sort of unyielding No right at the bottom. And this time, too, I was going to have my fever, but I was no longer a gold-seeker, a planter or a, sailor. I was nothing-at-all, and it was the twenty-second waggon of coal. I had already marked out the corner near the tool-shed; I will go there and roll up on the cadaver like a hedgehog—and leave the anchorage in the dark.

—You little slug!

He brought his fist down on my back. The knife slipped from my hands.

I turned preen, then white—I passed through all the colours of the rainbow. Blood spurted out of my left hand. There was not the least trace of laughter in his eyes.

—You are a slug.

I sobered up.

—Are you sure, I said, that it is not you I have returned to kill?

He looked at me calmly, steadily. Then he went back to counting his rudraksha beads.

My fever had passed.

—Sannyasi...

He spat in front of him.

I looked at the blood dripping onto the cement, the knife lying on the ground. I did not know whether I was going to weep like a woman or throw myself under a train.

—Sannyasi, I've had enough of your filth! Enough of your journey, enough...

I stopped. I had no more words. I was like a dead man who looks on. He got up.

Five minutes later, he came back with a barber.

—If you think this will cleanse you, go ahead, man. They are clean in your country, apparently.

The barber installed himself. I didn't move.

I was not dead, no. I was only wondering how that could live: if I closed my eyes for five minutes holding my breath, I was sure to slip away. “I”... but there is always an I which slips away, like an eel out of a glass jar, and as long as there is an I, everything will have to be redone! No, there is only one enigma in the world: without the “I”, one cannot live, (or can one?), with the “I”, one suffocates... sans je, on ne peut pas vivre... avec je, on étouffe. It is the central contradiction, the knot which holds everything. And the more one approaches the centre, the more it burns like Hades.

The barber opened his bag. There was everything inside—for a shave, for cleansing the ears, paring the nails and powdering the armpits. He filled his basin at the tap, then squatted in front of me on the platform. I looked at him—looked without understanding. I was there, but seized with a kind of aloofness: it is true there was something that was being shaved on the platform; there was also a plump nymph brandishing a tin of Dalda oil on the tool-shed, and little bits of dirty cotton in the bag, the locomotive on Track N° 9, the travellers... The world seemed to be going away in little pieces, trotting, trotting, each with his own separate bit of existence, his little business under his arm—they had plundered everything. They had robbed me of myself on the way. There was only a plump nymph winking, and this fellow hacking away at my beard as though on a sugar-plantation, sprinkling it from time to time. It was smarting. It was even that which held everything together: the burning. If there were not that pain, perhaps the world would go off in fireworks like a flock of sea-gulls leaving behind a bare rock under a searing sun?... I began to slip into something around me, to almost see myself from the outside, but I was no longer the main object: it seemed that I could just as well be something else—it seemed only a matter of looking: one places oneself here, there or somewhere else. One is the barber, the coolie, the nymph. And I had the vague impression that the “one” was everything, at will. But there was the black head of that barber in front of me; which held me. He had prigged my look, like my portrait in a mirror. Perhaps, the other also, the man who was being shaved, had prigged my look for the last thirty years... Then suddenly, everything camp back to me: the same scene, the same image, clear, oh! so clear...—everything, repeats itself. There are moments when life repeats itself. Destiny is perhaps that... those moments of repetition... C'est peut-être cela, le Destin, ces moments de répétition. I was going into a bathroom, flanked by two policemen, after three days of interrogation. I plunged my head into the wash-basin, I straightened up... there was that other in the mirror. An absolutely strange face, and those eyes—above all, those eyes—which looked at me with a crazed intensity, riveted there suddenly, as if I had passed into the mirror: “No, it is not me!” A sort of stupefaction, and then that no. It was an eighteenth of November. I was twenty years old. It was there that everything began. It was the starting point, the first true minute of my existence as if, there, I had left the civil-register for the first time. We all have une fausse tête... a false head in life, but we are accustomed to it, and, suddenly, I had stopped being accustomed to it: I was going about with a false head on my shoulders and everything was false: my name, my country, my papers. And since that day, I have been looking everywhere for someone to replace the head I left in the mirror.

—Thirty paise.

Only, there was that burning which held everything together. When it burns no longer, perhaps I shall fly away also, leaving a small black barber on the platform and a wallpaper smile?

—Do you want me to tell you, boy?

He bent over me with his shining dyes; and “I” was just a hard point against something—obstinately against—against him, against that barber, against everything.

—You are banging your head against a wall—a formidable wall...

He blew into the air.

—As thick as a sheet of rice-paper!

And he laughed like a sea-lion coming out of the water. I looked at him. I no longer had any hatred in my heart. I was too far away.

—If you stopped thinking of things for a minute, boy, it would be over. One minute only and you switch off. The comedy would be over! It is a screen, you understand, a smoke-screen. Ah! Men are mad, boy, if they stopped thinking about it they would be kings!

—Sannyasi, I am worn out.

—You are wriggling pretty hard for someone who's worn out!

—I am at the end of my tether, Sannyasi. I implore you, listen to me, my body is tired and my eyes are burning, too. Could we not go up there, to the Himalayas, where everything is white?

—The Himalayas!

This time, he threw his head back. I. thought he was going to explode.

—The Himalayas... But when you come down from your Himalayas, my friend, it will be just the same! Everything will have to begin again. Do you want to be a spiritual tourist?... Don't you understand, you stupid fellow, that I an offering you pure honey, eternal snow on every latitude.

He stretched out his finger and pressed it firmly in the hollow of my chest.

—The Himalayas are there ... il est là.

And it burned there, also.

—Come on, let's be on our way, it's time.

I plunged into a landscape of rails and burning platforms interspersed with miraculous paddy-fields whence white birds took wing. We were going towards the east, but the north or the south would have been just the same, and I no longer knew whether I was moving outside in a rocky desert strewn with mounds of huge stones, or into the chaos of my soul under the blaze of a white-hot furnace. I was going on endlessly, backwards in time, emptier, older, burning, like a carcass eaten away by the sun.; I was descending into a prehistory of the soul, a first fold of pain under a great, fiery, motionless eye—which felt nothing, wanted nothing; I was descending into cataracts of stone and yawning holes, and ascending again; I was crouching in black folds and suffocating; I was waiting for I knew not what cataclysm or what erosion, as if some scaly, iron monster would finally emerge from the hill and devour all this nightmare, or, perhaps, perish open-jawed from sunstroke, and me with it?

I came to the end of the journey at last. I no longer had even the shadow of a refuge: I was void and ravaged. In truth, we need a carapace to house our petitesse, and when the hurricane has demolished the house, one finds oneself stripped of everything, unless one has the courage to contain everything. And perhaps destiny will come and demolish our houses, our bodies and our loves, one after the other, until we are capable of loving everything and creating our refuge in a body that does not die. We are there, yes. Life goes, by at an infernal speed, it goes by madly in our boxes of iron or of fluff, our lovely furnished rooms. It runs towards no station, or perhaps towards the Constellation of the Swan at one hundred and forty thousand kilometres a second, in a myth that we call tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes—the train never reaches the Constellation of the Swan. It just runs on and on, dragging with it our boxes of miseries or of feathers and our chosen thoughts, it runs on and nothing happens—no one, for millions and millions of years to come, not a cat on the planet, not a living soul! Or always the same shadow, endlessly repeated, through autumns and winters, the Acropolises, the Pyramids, the dreary suburbs—the stone or the concrete age; we are already in tomorrow—it was yesterday, and everything begins again. Yes, we are there, I have ridden on all the trains, and they turn in circles. But where is my Constellation of the Swan, my refuge which never moves?

O traveller
Nothing happens
On this little planet
Except yourself
You are the only happening

So I closed my eyes. There was really nothing more to be seen. I put my carcass down on a packing-case, squatted in the acrid smell of beedies³, withdrawn and alone like squatting Peruvian mummies. Was I not really dead? Who was pulsating inside? What? I stretched out my hands inside that tomb which was my body and I seized nothing, only that burning question, that very small “what?”—wordless, meaningless—that warm thrust against my walls. I had nothing, I was nothing, but that—a fire that burns—what else was there?

O brother, just like me in the depths of a tomb, what makes a man live?... qu'est-ce qui fait vivre un homme? What? That single question. I do not ask for greatness nor for wealth, nothing sensational, no apparitions, no hallucinations, no fabulous powers, but simply that: what makes my heart beat, what makes it be? Only that little question, no bigger than the light of a glow-worm... I have asked so many questions in my life, and this evening, I see that it is always the same one: there is only one question in a man, a little cry within which always says “what”... quoi—purely, “what”. It is all I have, all that I hold in my night, my sole belonging, my sole life—my blind life, my burning life, my life truer than life. One can take away everything, but that remains. One can add everything, and that is unchanged. One can put that in a prison, a palace, a train, it is always the same; throw gold or mud at it, it still shines, it burns within; it is man's cry, perhaps the animal's cry, the plant's cry; a small flame within which burns everywhere, which inhabits everything, like a golden spark in the heart of things, like a pure sound in the depths of everything, which fills everything, which prays everywhere; which vibrates, vibrates in the desert and in the stars, in pain and in joy—that, that everywhere, at the beginning and at the end, in the midst of everything: one unique life of a million fires.

I drew the curtain on the world. I took that fire like a bird in the hollow of my hands and I did not know what to do. It was all dark and oppressive in the depths of this body, it was perhaps nothing—but it was everything. Ah! what else is there? Outside, trains rumble by, people pass—it is like a death with open eyes; within, it is like a life which has not yet been born. And I looked at that nothing, that minuscule nothing which burned; it was imperceptible, but it was alive. It seemed to be in the hollow of my chest. I took that bird-warmth and clasped it so strongly to my heart that perhaps it would live, I looked at it so hard that perhaps it would spread its wings and carry me away. And I spoke to my bird (or was it he who spoke?). It was like a murmur, a prayer belonging to no church, a lonely sound which stammered: “I do not know, I do not know, but I feel; I do not see, I do not see, but I feel—I feel, I feel.” A slender flame of something which wanted to live, needed so much to live: “Oh it must be since I thirst so much, it must, it must.” It was almost painful in the hollow of my chest. “Where is it? Where is it? I have lived for millions of years, I have knocked at all the doors. Where is the space, the life? Where is my great sun to plunge within with wings outspread, and it would be that at last—that, that. Ah! life is not alive, life is not yet, and what is? Weeks and days go by, bodies walk, bodies die, hearts believing that they love, hours and hours to adorn, feed, and clothe a body—where is the true moment, the vast moment, for nothing, for the sheer joy of being? Where is life like the plunge of a sea-gull's wing on the high back of the tide?” And my whole heart was gathered there, in that thrust of flame, that wordless cry, and I pushed, pushed against those walls. I was a compact density, a suffocation, a ball of circumscribed space, as if all the tides of the world and all the cries of wild sea-gulls were gathered there.

And suddenly, everything became very silent. There were no more prayers, no more words, no more feelings. A silence unknown to me. It was not an absence of sound, nor even the fading of a worn-out prayer, nor the appeasing of the heart—it was, strangely, a substance made of silence, like a flow of solid silence, a frost of silence which fell upon me. Something which seized everything: the thoughts, the heart, the stirrings of the body and enveloped them or wrapped them up in a soft, invisible snow. It was compact and transparent simultaneously, crystalline, like a frosted dawn whence rises the chanson of Chantecleer. I was caught, transfixed, in that cool compactness, and I no longer knew very well who was caught: that was caught. It was like a snowy irruption that seeped through all the pores of the skin, instilling itself slowly, softly, as if it were filling all the cells of the body with millions of little bubbles of air; it was subtly aerated, it dilated, swelled almost; the body became porous, and all that self-contained density began to escape through thousands of minute little holes in a sort of expansion of easiness. It was like innumerable little breaths which puffed out in all directions making a foamy coolness. And at the same time, I or what was me, poured out horizontally. It unfolded, spread out, lengthened indefinitely in all directions, and I... I do not know—it had melted, it had gone. It was the screen which had blocked the space. It had gone and everything entered; a sudden breath which ceased not to fill up and flow, flow everywhere like the limpid coolness of the great bluish fields of the night. There were no longer any barriers, nothing which obstructed: I had passed through all the pores of my skin, I had lost myself in the sweet waters of the night. There a train rumbled past—towns, villages, stations flashed by, voices hailed across motionless fields; and the sounds no longer knocked against me; they rose from a great, clear night and lost themselves in distances, in the tall grasses of my silence. And everything was perfectly still. So still that there was no longer a breath of me nor weight—not the least pebble of the I anywhere: it passed through. I was far away, yet there; I was at thousands of points but did not know where I began nor where it ended—cicadas chirped in me as in a great Asian paddy-field, the train ran inside without the slightest displacement. Everything was captured in a millennial quietude. The world moved in a perfect immobility. But it was neither a disintegration, an annihilation, nor a sleep: it was a living, awakened, teeming immobility, as if innumerable eyes had opened at the end of a million antennae—awake and motionless. A motionless, multiple look, without comments, without feelings, without interpretation: it simply looked—at what? I do not know. It was the immense night. A look containing all, bearing all, self-sufficient, self-fulfilled; an objectless bliss, content to be itself, for ever. And sometimes that perfect eye seemed to come back on “me”, and then there was a slight contraction at one point, a tiny malaise, but it was really so tranquil that it was like a non-existence, or perhaps like a limitless existence; like an imperceptible fold of being, a thin image, which plunged downwards perhaps thousands of feet, or like a blue depth bearing this reflection of me.

But it was still night, a nocturnal bliss, almost vegetal—as a fruit steeped everywhere in its own succulence. And something touched an invisible frontier of dissatisfaction—just a limitation which automatically created a dissatisfaction—and instantly, I was thrown back onto myself: the fire, the asphyxiation, the suffering, that cry again. That impossibility which drags us like doleful ghosts. Ah! we come back, but it is not from death! And it was even more stifling now; I held it, I almost touched it down to my flesh, that single crime, that root of everything—of all maladies, all suffering, all revolt, all the aberrations that perturb man: that simple sorrow of being small, so very small—in a body. In the immensity, there is not a single scar of suffering. It was that which I held in both hands, or rather-that which held me by the throat, like a thief caught in the night: the radical fault of not being in the immensity. It was evident, as evident as a ton of lead. It crushed me from all sides. I thought I was going to let go of everything, open my eyes, plunge again into my desert of rocks and definite dwarfdom—roll on again with that Sannyasi. Then, there was something like a crying out in my being, something so deep, so intense; all at once I was in front of the wall of sorrows—the great ancient sorrow of being there but without being able. to get out of it. Oh! as if I had been there millions of times; all paths, all detours had led there; I found them all again, my brothers in misery, my pilgrims in the night, my hopefuls of I know not what—all gathered together in a cry. I was at the foot of the wall, at the end of the journey. I was facing the Fact, there was nothing more to be done!... Then, simply, there was one second of abandon. I opened my hands, I said yes. Yes, as one throws oneself into the fire. I sank into it, disappeared—body and soul and everything, without a second of memory, nothing to retain, nothing to keep, not a single item of worth; I was only that fire... J'étais seulement ce feu... that pure, pure fire.

And behold, that fire was like love. A pure love, for nothing, for everything, comme ҫa, simply because it burned. It burned all, devoured all: the past, the present, the future, good and evil, hopes and despair—it did not want anything, did not ask for anything except that one merge with it—annihilate oneself in it. It had no need of anything, but to burn, to keep on burning, to burn for ever. An abyss of sweetness. And it rose, rose... It grew, filling me with gold; a flaming thrust which vibrated and vibrated, which seized everything, invaded everything, without my having to do anything, without my wanting anything, oh! above all, I wanted nothing, I did not want a single second of anything: only to burn and go on burning and to let everything be abolished in that burning. Then, I understood the marvel. It became compact. It was like a tide of power: an ascension of dense force, warm, solid, which hardened my loins, my back, expanded my chest, tightened my throat. I was as though solidified. A pillar of fire. Next, the nape of my neck. I heard a cracking in the vertebrae.

Then I emerged.

Light, nothing but light! De la lumière, rien que de la lumière... Space, the open air, great bowlfuls of it! An immensity of light which became clearer as it rose, more intense, azure-blue, silver-blue. No more “I”, no more “I will”, “I strive”, “I think”, “I feel”... plus de moi, plus de je veux, plus de je tends, plus de je pense, je sens: it was carried away, vacuumed upwards, lost in its own flight. It rose,... rose: a linear, imperturbable flight into pure silence, solitary, effortless—a missle of being with a wake of white. It rose,... rose by itself as towards its source, its twin density; it winged its way like an Arctic bird towards a great snow up high, it soared as in an infinitude of release... Then the movement slowed down, I tilted into another horizontalness as if nearing the end of my course. Then everything became very vast and wide and slow. It was another journey. A rhythmic, bluish expanse.

A great eternal rhythm like two wings beating across eternal hills, travelling on and on through steppes of soft light, Labradors of peace; gliding endlessly through rippleless ages, seas of calm vision, beatitudes surprised like bays of smiles. A smooth, slow flight through centuries of ermine, a luminous white migration through an eternal sweetness. And a prodigious Harmony. A breath of harmony behind the suffering and the chaos, a great, tranquil respiration which draws upwards the moons and the breasts of men and the song of the galaxies, makes joy rise like a myriad golden bubbles, like a sparkle of gratitude everywhere; which descends, descends endlessly through rapids of mute meditation, gulfs of sudden adoration, sweet glades of nameless love, for no reason, but simply because it loves, loves to distraction. And the peace of being for ever, the unshakable Force! The powerful blue flow of silence through the grand canyons of eternity... I spread my wings, my heart, my body, and the whole fortress; I was borne along for ever, I was in the great motionless Rhythm which upholds the worlds. I gazed, and it was full—it was the Fullness. A golden smile under the closed eyes of the world.

Then my body fell asleep.

Someone seemed to call me. I pulled together all the strands of my being. It took a long time to reassemble them, as though I had to haul them in from a faraway country. Then I saw a silvery flame passing by in the silence, like a coloured, vibrating streamer. I pulled that light toward me; and it produced an ever so slight rhythm, like a fragment of some song in the distance, and at the same time I saw the image of a brother passing by—which brother? I could not say. But it was evidently a brother. I pulled again, and that slight rhythm issued the words:

O Brother
What are you waiting for?
It is time
And life passes in vain

The refrain repeated itself: what are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?... A slight poignant sound at the edge of the world. I descended a few more degrees towards my body, and the further I descended, the clearer and more logical it became: the whole ladder of the descent became visible. First, the Light—the immense light—then the great Rhythm (but really, it was not “then”: it was the light which created the rhythm), then forms, sounds, rhythms more and more sporadic and broken, colours more and more opaque; and I saw so clearly the forms, the words, the sounds like condensations of coloured light more or less pure. I had touched the source of true language, of true music perhaps. And suddenly I saw the whole vista of creation; I knew whence those things came, which I had heard sometimes creating a kind of music in the distance and sometimes words, if I insisted a little. In a flash of joy (because that light created joy also, it was the joy-light), the whole of life appeared to me like the art of condensing luminous vibrations, which created events just as they could create music or architecture. And the suffering below was the absence of light—the absence of rhythm, the absence of everything. The further I descended, the harder, more opaque and partitioned it became—no rhythm any longer; only noise, confusion, fragmentation; a kind of buzzing blackish-grey atomisation. The mechanism had started again. The asphyxiation too. One re-entered the cavern. Then I invoked the silence. It came down massively: a dark blue invasion petrifying that swarm of thinking flies; a litmus-dye which turned everything instantaneously to blue. Just one drop of that. And all was motionless blue. Peace again, and aquamarine coolness.

The powerful tranquillity of the True.

I remained there between two worlds; I seemed to hear the train rumbling over a bridge for a long time, with a very supple rhythm. Someone shook me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes: we were entering a station.

And suddenly the avalanche: the cries, the rush, the crowd, the grinding rails—grinding lives; a gigantic iron invention which one had to traverse very quickly from one compartment to another, the automatic doors close and one runs. One goes into another identical compartment—a clever super-mechanism to measure the degree of intelligence of rats. But intelligence was not vision, it was to chew faster and faster. I watched that strange thing. I took one step... And I found myself light, unencumbered, as though I had been dragging my baggage for a long time, and then, pfft! gone, no more baggage! The density of my substance had changed. I skip-jumped onto the platform and made three little bounds; I heard a burst of laughter, he was there, upright, looking at me, his staff in his hand. Then, such a joy came over me, clear, overwhelming; I caught him by the arm; my heart babbled, I could have hugged him, told him... I looked at that tall triumphant Asiatic in his orange robe, who dominated life with his insolent laugh and demolished our wind-mills with one push of his shoulder, and that crowd, that other one over there, on a platform, in front of a small black barber, with his false head on his shoulders, and I too, felt like laughing in the face of all-the misery of the world, the comedy of the world, this fabrication of lies, each one holding fast to his own sordid little business, his little baggage, rolled up on the cadaver like a hedgehog—the great pity of so many men in a box. And in a dazzled glance, oh! luminously, sovereignly, I saw them all running from one room to another, from one corner to another, from one idea, one feeling to another, chewing, chewing... grignoter, grignoter—nothing true! A tremendous fabrication. Not a single living minute... not a single true minute in the world. There is only one minute—the minute when one opens the door and walks out on the cadaver.

—Sannyasi...

He turned his back on me...

Then he changed his mind, groped in his belt and drew out a handful of grains:

—Here, eat.

—You know...

—I know. Don't choke. You have taken only half of the first step.

And that night, in the corner of a warehouse which smelt of fish-paste, I heard a divine music. Perhaps people will say I am mad or suffering from hallucinations, but I know now that the world is profound and full of marvels, and that behind our vain noises, there is a great kingdom of light which sings—and we are today, perhaps, like the ancient barbarians before unimaginably peopled oceans. Oh! I have heard sublime music, and some of Beethoven's deaf-notes had seemed to me higher than many a cathedral, but that night I heard as if for the first time in my life. In truth, until that day I had heard only thin little sounds, a translation of music, and then it was no longer a translation; it was no longer the expression of something, else behind which one felt was divine; it was not even like “to hear” music—I did not “listen” to the music, I was not outside the music: I was in the music as one is in an ocean or in a cataract; it surged up from everywhere, it was an immensity of music. And blue, everything was blue, a pure cerulean blue; every drop of space, every particle of blue radiated its own music. It was a blue which sang out everywhere, an immensity of symphonic light. It was not split up, splintered into little fragmentary notes which formed a melody: it was a plenitude of music, a unique total Sound which contained all possible sounds and chords, and true! So true that one was struck with absoluteness—one drop of that and everything became real, beautiful, pure, full, that, absolutely that, the concrete divinity. A single golden vibration across space, an immense welling-up, a plenitude of pure song which swelled the lungs as if one were swallowing all the infinity of the heavens, as if the music were only space, only the sound of the infinite, and one expanded, spread out everywhere in that singing blueness... and the joy! Or perhaps, the joy first. An abundance of being, an effusion of being which created the music—which created all that light and that space, and the whole world of things—a single substance of joy which sang of itself, a grandiose flow of one single note like a myriad violins which rose in an apotheosis, like a myriad voices modulating endlessly on great azure wings—or perhaps a solitary flute, very pure, welling forth from the eternal, lost in the eternal, which would leave that single quivering trace on the blue waters of the world... I do not know, but it was that.

When I awoke the next day, I was leaning on a sack, my head in my hands, and I repeated like someone thunderstruck: Ce n'est pas possible, ce n'est pas possible... “It is not possible, it is not possible...”

But it was there.
I got up, I wandered about the platforms.
Then I looked around me: the Sannyasi had disappeared.