CHAPTER V
EXPERIMENTAL
SCHIZOPHRENIA
. but there was a fourth time. Through an error of calculation I swallowed six times what is for me a sufficient dose. I was not aware of it immediately. Eyes closed, I watched in myself, as on a screen or a ship's log, mescaline's colors, and its lines, enormous this time, appearing in my inner vision, and the constant and always amazing shaking of the images. Then suddenly -nothing. I saw nothing any longer. I had slipped down to the bottom of something. A door, open until now, had suddenly closed in absolute silence.
What is it? What is happening? Taken by surprise the general staff loses sight of its troops. More defenseless than a cork dancing on rough waters, more vulnerable than a little boy advancing against a column of tanks debouching onto the road.
The waves of the mescalinian ocean had suddenly broken over me, buffeting me, tumbling and tossing me like grains of sand. The movements, which till now had been in my vision, were now on top of me. It had not lasted more than ten seconds and it was done. I was lost.
But just a moment. We mustn't be in such a hurry. The torture is going to last for hours. It has not even begun. It is half-past one. I am not yet aware that I am about to come to grips with the mind's severest test.
Innocent, like a tourist, I watch the first changes. Calmly, I observe the queer internal tremblings which I know already, which I recognize. I become conscious of the beginnings of the shreddings that I am probably soon going to see, of the horses' mouth sensation, and that, over by the window, with curtains only partly drawn, great dazzling white sheets appear to be fluttering.
In my chest there is a deeper respiration, prelude to a different kind of "attention." Lines, more and more lines, which I am not sure I really see, though already distinct and fine (which I feel?) which I begin to see (how tenuous they are this time!) and how ample their curves, so very ample ! I notice that at moments they disappear and again their amplitude, really extraordinary compared with their thinness, and I know that the color white, which I am soon going to see, will be slightly violet, though I can still see nothing but the very light, light gray of the spidery threads which boldly, rhythmically, incessantly stride over empty space.
Really enormous the amplitude of the sinuosities, and so very fine the lines, which could nevertheless step over houses. Something never seen before ! I feel like telephoning B. to tell him about this formidable sight. I give up the idea for fear of interrupting for too long this extraordinary hour. Then this thought of telephoning, this thought of hardly more than a dozen seconds ago, begins to recede, quickly and gravely, taking on at thé same time an extreme importance, like the last traveler on the station platform in your native city as you are leaving, whom you see from the train which is imperturbably, irrevocably starting to move. Such is this progressive moving away. It is still there, the thought, like an echo, as though it were at the other end of the nave of a great silent church (that of time?) and had sent back to me not the sound but the "wave of a presence." Thus it "echoed," so to speak, in the silence, this idea which had gone, but which is now inside the great church. Strangely enough I was delighted to be the only one to know that I had had this thought, so ordinary in other respects, but rendered peculiarly majestic, imperial, by its resonance.*
Enormous Z's are passing through me (stripes-vibrationszig-zags?). Then, either broken S's, or what may be their halves, incomplete O's, a little like giant eggshells a child has tried to draw without ever succeeding. These shapes, like an egg or an S, begin to disturb my thoughts as if they partook of the same nature.
I have once more become a passage, a passage in time. This then was the furrow with the fluid in it, absolutely devoid of viscosity, and that is how I pass from second 51 to second 52, to second 53, then to second 54 and so on. It is my passage forward.
Anesthetized to the world that is in possession of my body, and to everything that only an hour ago was con
* Vanity of being alone in the presence of such majesty?
tinually filling it, I feel nothing now but the going forward. I am all prow.
From time to time I encounter a crossroads of irritations, a terrace filled with the insufferable winds of the mind, and I begin to write, almost without knowing, without thinking, intent on the transmission, these words, whose significance, great as it is, I fail to recognize "Too much ! Too much ! You are giving me too much!"
The lines follow each other almost without stopping. Faces slide over them, outlines of faces (usually in profile) are caught in the moving line, are stretched and contorted like the heads of aviators subjected to too much pressure that kneeds their cheeks and foreheads like rubber. Much more linear these faces, less terrible, simply grotesque. What becomes disturbing is their size, the size of cliffs, which, with the sinusoidal lines that carry them, keeps on increasing.
Except for these grotesque faces senselessly laughing (or was it a sign of my situation, which I failed to understand?), nothing.
They are the only ships carried, not on, but inside these enormous waves.
How huge a thing can be ! There is something prodigiously exaggerated about it without in the least modifying the grotesque character of the heads, which are even ornamented with silver gray pearls, some with a bluish tinge, and, I must say, delicate, in startling contrast to such hyperbolical lines.
For an instant they leave me. A something. I don't know what, descends into a vertiginous gutter. But it doesn't last, and they return, the lines, the lines, the diabolical lines of dismemberment.
My head, meanwhile, more and more insensible, like cardboard, I rub - under my shawl - rub it mechanically, furiously, the only living zone of my being, all that I have left, my homeland that keeps shrinking more and more.
And the lines, the dismembering lines seem to me more gigantic than ever. I have to force myself not to have recourse to sugar, which is supposed to be an antidote. Nevertheless, almost mechanically, I begin to eat a few sections of an orange. For there is something suspect about these lines that are growing, these lines that are becoming cliffs, that keep stretching the faces interminably, but the act of trying to jot it down keeps the consciousness of the fact still at a distance.
And they are still growing, the lines. I wouldn't know how to draw them even vaguely, the paper is no longer on the same scale. I pause, put down my pencil, push aside the paper, and decide to try something else.
People had told me about visions in crystal balls. (But I must have misunderstood them, thinking that I could transfer the visions in my head to the crystal.) So I picked up the crystal ball, ready beside me. I turned it round and round in my hands, puzzled, as I recall, like a child with a new object, not knowing what to do with it, or whether it is worth bothering about at all, and ready to put it down. That is what I was about to do, having already held it in three or four different positions and seen nothing but my own fingers enlarged by the refracdon, when ... I WENT DOWN.
The submergence was instantaneous. I closed my eyes to recover my visions but, as I realized, it was no use, it was over. I had cut off that circuit. Lost at an amazing depth, I was no longer moving. Still in this stupor, several seconds elapsed. Then suddenly, the innumerable waves of the mescalinian ocean came pouring over me and knocked me down. Kept knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down, knocking me down. It was never going to end, never. I was alone in the vibration of this wreckage, without periphery, without connection, a man-target without hope of return.
What had I done? Plunging, I had, I believe, rejoined• myself in my depths and I now coincided* with myself,
* To coincide, what does it mean? In life I try to approach as near to myself as possible (since I want to observe), without letting myself go, without giving myself.
I want to keep a certain margin, which is also like a margin of security.
It may seem excessive that, in order to be myself, a gift on my part should be necessary. It is nevertheless true. A false Narcissus, not walking with myself, not submitting to myself. And I am not the only one. There are any number of others like me. The gift - they refuse to make the gift.
no longer observer-voyeur, but myself reunited with myself -and with that, instantly the typhoon is upon us.
The crystal ball perhaps only hastened my destruction. I was going to be knocked down anyway. Or was I ? I shall never know.
Meanwhile outside objects had to a considerable extent returned to their natural colors. As for the visual exhitation, it seemed to have disappeared.* Everything had been restored to order except myself.
How agonizing, agonizing in essence, it was I cannot find words to express, and even trying makes me feel like an imposter.
It was where one is nothing but oneself, it was there that, with mad speed, hundreds of lines of force combed my being which could never reintegrate itself quickly enough for, before it could come together again, another line of rakes began raking it, and then again, and then again. (Will it go on all my life now that it has started, now that I am in the path over which it passes?)
In a flash I recalled that strangely dishevelled look peculiar to mad women, dishevelled, not by the wind alone or by their grabbling hands, or by their slovenly habits, but by the imperative inner need of translating, if only in this way, the swift diabolical combing-dishevelling
To have a religion does not mean to believe in a divinity, as opposed to those who do not believe. It is a gift one longs, with an irresistible longing, to give to someone infinitely above oneself. In the same way, love does not postulate a perfect woman. It is a gift of oneself, it is a need to make this gift, and any man, even a eunuch, may have this intolerable desire. Narcissism itself is not possible without making this gift of oneself to oneself.
And curiously enough, for this too one must believe (believe in oneself).
So then, giving up my "casual liaisons, my liaisons of propinquity, of necessity," what I had just done, thanks to the magic of the crystal ball, was to give myself up, to give myself to myself, and, in the very worst moment of my whole life, to return to my own true truth-homeland-unity, to my first name. The terrible cyclone caught us, me and myself, united so idiotically, so indissolubly, and from that moment, instead of watching them, I received all the blows.
* In spite of the very pronounced mydriasis which was to last for hours.
of their whole being, indefinitely martyrized, criss-crossed, wire-drawn.
In the same way, and always at this incessant, inhuman speed, I was beset, pierced by the electric mole boring its way through the essence of the most personal part of myself.
Caught, not by anything human, but in a frenzied mechanical agitator, a kneeder-crusher-crumbler, treated like metal in a steelmill, like water in a turbine, like wind in a blower, like a root in an automatic fibre-shredder, like iron in the tireless motion of a milling machine cutting gear teeth. But in my case I was also forced to look on !
Like a bird in the eddy of the propeller of a fourengine plane, like an ant pinned under the crushing waters of a flood gate, like nothing I can think of, like nobody.
Intense beyond intensity, the struggle, and I, active as never before in my life, miraculously surpassing myself, but surpassed out of all proportion by the dislocating phenomenon.
The horror of it was that I was nothing but a line. In normal life one is a sphere, a sphere that surveys panoramas. One is in a castle, one is constantly going from one castle to another, such is the life of even the poorest man who is mentally sound.
Now only a line. A line that breaks up into a thousand aberrations. The whiplash of an infuriated carter would have been a relief to me. And no pity either. I, the accelerated line I had become, did not retreat, withstood each new slashing, was ready to form again, was on the point of forming again when the force, swifter than a meteor, falling upon me. . . . It was agonizing because I resisted.
What of emotion? I could not even retreat into emotion. The natural diffusion of the emotions that go straight to the heart, making it beat more rapidly or more slowly, as well as to the lungs, changing their respiration, did not take place. This was brought home to me ten days later when at a moving picture theatre, watching a typical movie drama, I felt an emotion "pierce my heart". In my days of horror I had forgotten this path, this comfort.
* * *
To have become a line was a catastrophe, but, even more, it was a surprise, a prodigy. All of me had to pass along this line. And with the most appalling jolts.
The metaphysical taken over be the mechanical.
Forced to pass over the same path, myself, me thought, and the vibration.
Myself only a thought, not the thought become myself, or developing in me, but myself contracted to the thought.
At the same time came the dislocating vibration which "rejected" the thought and, after a few modulations that tore it to bits eliminated it.
The thoughts struggled furiously, desperately against their disintegration. But each time thee were worsted. It didn't take long. A bacillus under the radiation of radium salts understands this, but a man doesn't. He is protected from it.
How profoundly intimate it was I can never repeat often enough, and how an idea is your center, and how destructable it is, how pliable, how easily disintegrated. No one who has not experienced it can know how easily ideas can be disintegrated.
Yes, an idea can be scourged, can be dissolved. And this thee were, endlessly. Destruction quicker be far than myself.
The waves, expert at kneading the thoughts, kept passing incessantly.
The cruelty with which a thought was pounced on is unimaginable. After escaping in shreds several times, no longer recognizable, it would disappear.
It was as if, having become a conductor of I don't know what electricity, me mind had just been adopted as a convenient path for currents that were deadly to thought. The lightning and I had to pass together.
Impossible to leave the bed of the terrible phenomenon. There was no path for it to take but right through the center of me Self. Vibrating comb, it was everything, I, practically nothing, without a chance, constantly subjected to the merciless carding.
The thalli of a laminaria, forever agitated be a restless sea, are on vacation compared to me. I was given no vacation, not even for a second.
Terrible beyond all that is terrible ! Yet I felt no terror. The soldier under fire has something else to think about. I never stopped struggling. I could not indulge in terror. I didn't have time.
I knew very well that I should not resist as I was doing, first with my whole Self, then with my most cherished ideas. I saw that the diabolical motion was jeering at me, disintegrating me, finding me each time more stricken, dispossessed, done for. I should have changed my tactics, let my troops shift for themselves.
The madman is a brave fellow who tries to cope with the destructive phenomenon himself, instead of letting his subaltern functions take over.
But in so critical an hour it is difficult to take in sail. You don't have the five seconds of calm necessary, in which to "collect yourself".
Stupid ideas of no importance, would have served just as well, doomed as they were to become the thoughts of a mechanical force and, after being diabolically misused, to disappear. Instead, especially at the beginning, I presented my most trustworthy ideas, the ones on which I could absolutely rely, and in less than no time they were torn apart, severed from their axis and rendered worse than ridiculous, unthinkably rejected, destroyed, null and void. But although I had seen the workings of the mechanism, I persisted in offering the best I had, the most intimate, the most Henri Michaux, so to speak, (and in spite of the advice I was beginning to give myself) like a man whose arm has been caught in a revolving belt and who in spite of himself is drawn toward the center of the machine which in no time will tear him to pieces.
Everything you offer to the mescalinian schizo will be ground to pieces. So never offer yourself. And never offer any vital idea, for what mescaline does to it is frightful.
Offer what is of little importance, mental images, little everyday ideas.
Otherwise you will be wholly uninhabitable, horrifying to yourself, your house in the torrent, an object of ridicule in your own eyes.
* * *
I began eating all the sugar I could swallow. Tablets of sugar plain, or great desertspoonsfull in hot drinks. But I only vomited. And It continued to make headway against me.
Yet something had to be done. In the midst of the devastation that was driving me mad, and the undulations, in which my ideas were going insane-those, that is, which passed along the line of my Self, but not those from me to other people (the social circuit of speech was different), I telephoned A. and told him calmly, too calmly : "An overdose. I must have made a mistake. It is hard to stick it any longer. I should have an antidote." My calmness was deceptive. It will be all right, he thinks, the worst is over. Over ! It was still to come.
This calm of mine had a different origin. To look up the doctor's number, I had turned on more light in the dimly lit room. The lamp next to a mirror, showed me a face I had never seen before, the face of a raving madman. It would have frightened a murderer. It would have made him retreat. Frantic, completely extroverted, terrifyingly photogenic and determined (whereas I am the opposite) it was the face of one possessed, though neither the face nor I had stirred. It was the mask of a person who no longer listens, the face of a raving madman, a man, that is, mad with fear. A wild animal at bay, the face had become vicious. Yet my voice (later verified by those who heard it) was composed, almost gentle, and I felt not the slightest anger or hostility. "He" must have killed already, I thought, for I could not consider this face on the brink of murder as belonging to me. "It must be only a question of minutes now, a very few minutes." That is why I was calm,* the grave calmness of someone who is responsible for a dangerous maniac, since this
*Telephoning later when S. was with me, again I spoke calmly as if fearing to alarm the doctor unduly, or myself. I mean the "self" in charge of conduct and organization who, I knew, must not at any cost be affected, become excited. There had to be bulkheads and fortunately they happened automatically, it was my only salvation, one or more parts remaining cool, off the circuit, and practically strangers.
S., surprised at what I was saying, seized the telephone and quickly rectified : "No, no, it's urgent". But it was too late, the receiver had already been replaced.
changed the situation. As to horror, I could still be affected gravely in another way. How vast a man is.
When, at the moment of the intolerable inner trepidations and destructions, the madman will have to express them in corresponding actions, destroying, breaking, burning, wounding, killing someone or killing himself, when, in short, he starts "his work," will I be able to control him until he is taken away or, ridiculous as an inadequate sphincter, will I be unable to control him? In the latter case, I ought to call for a straight-jacket at once.
That was my problem which had to be solved calmly and sensibly in a moment of rupture and disintegration.
I was so anxious not to attract attention to myself, if possible, not to forfeit by a premature surrender, a cowardly, cautious appeal for help, all that I had left of independence(!) and of life. Drink the cup to the dregs in silence. Drink, I kept saying to give myself courage.
There were, however, new developments, and they were bad. What had been separated was separated no longer. Two bulkheads had just been inundated. I now had to struggle with all my might against the preposterous acts which were rushing into my mind, and which I had known, at the sight of that face in the mirror, were bound to come. But I could never have imagined anything like this. At a mad, an unbelievable speed, they would arrive, seize me, shake me to make me carry out the acts in question, keep shaking me like a rag in the draft of a windmill, then they would disappear. Others would come, would goad me, goad me, all abnormal, avid for realization, not one kind but ten different kinds, not against such and such a person, but against anyone, anything, impartial, insatiable and which ten murders and as many fires would not have satisfied, which could not be satisfied. As soon as they appeared I had to try, not to struggle -out of the question-but to put another inoffensive idea in their place. But this idea, after a few quick triturations, would in turn become dangerous (for is there anything in a word which cannot be turned into a dagger? And after that how can one keep from seizing the dagger, how stop it?) Resist them? Absurd. I am they. They are identical with me, and I am more than acquiescent, I am inseparable from them the moment they appear. In madness everything happens because nothing can be seen in perspective. An idea passes with you along the one and only path. No panorama. No diversion. No third person. No comparison. No pause (so necessary to judgement).
The idea and you, at breakneck speed. Essential phenomenon of insanity, of which the other face is undoubtedly fascination.
Deranged behavior : any chain of thoughts and imagined actions, mechanically, automatically pursuing a course that is the opposite of the usual course.
The perverse impulses had not taken over the motion entirely. I was still being just as terribly mauled by the prodigious vibratory motion. The effects were numerous. M.S. had come to me at my request and had gone into the next room where there was more light so that he could read until I needed him, yet such was the power of the zigzags that not more than five minutes after he had left me I could not be sure whether he was really there, whether he had come or not, or even whether I had asked him to come. For, in the five minutes after he left me, the ample evidence I had had of his presence had been so often shaken, broken, above all interrupted, interruptions of consciousness, that it was no longer either true or false, past or future, but only a jumble out of which I was unable to extract a single definite fact. Nothing could be halted.
Certainty, shaken like a tangible thing, lacerated like flesh, disaffirmed as soon as affirmed, after taking dozens of different and soon contradictory positions (such as He might have come if I had called him. I can try calling him. After all why might I not have called him? Or, I might have sent him away already. Why didn't he want to stay? Or, did I tell him not to stay because I didn't want to bother him? Or, perhaps he couldn't stay any longer? Or was he too busy to come, and tomorrow it will be too late etc. . . . etc. . . . ) certainty, varying indefinitely, became negative and inoperative.
Tentatively, just in case he might possibly be near me, I said S. out loud, and, hearing his name, he came into the room, looking worried. I made some sort of remark to hide the humiliating, not the dangerous truth.
He left me again without protest and was hardly out of my sight when the revived certainty, a prey to the same assaults, crumbled and, tobogganing constantly, ceased to be certainty to become subject, theme - a theme with endless constructions-destructions - and nugatory.
No certainty without stability. Certainty comes from permanence. Certainty of a single second means nothing.
With S. . . , and later with the doctor, I kept close watch on my words, or rather having said certain words which I thought I should not have spoken-words too liable to rouse their suspicion - I would prepare others, either to avert any possible suspicion on their part, or to test them, trying to discover what they really thought of my extraordinary condition. For they certainly could not have found it ordinary, though they pretended to be calm. The calm, the mass of calm, that calm in great lumps of calm of people mentally sound, is something altogether fantastic and beyond belief. Fluttering with a thousand different motions, you cannot believe that others are without motion and without ideas swarming at the back of their heads. You watch them surreptitiously as you watch your words, in which they could find, if they paid attention, a whole world of things to be used against you. Aren't they really paying attention then? To put them off the track, you are careful to say nothing that will reveal the exact state you are in, but a different, though similar state, less serious, or in another category. (For, to pretend that you are normal would be impossible and silly.) You use certain ambiguous expressions to make your listener wonder if you are really mad or simply trying to pull his leg.
Such behavior, so new to me, I observed with surprise as I talked, or rather after I stopped talking. I had learned to dissemble.
Talking to others was creating problems, revealing the full extent of the havoc. Later on, after the doctor, to whom I could explain certain things, had come and had pronounced me out of danger (was he telling the truth?), and was beginning to feel reassured about my condition, several times I ceased to take part in the conversation (as I realized afterwards), being imperiously summoned from within, where what was happening was far too serious to let it go bounding on alone. This terrible race within me forced me to close in a hurry the parenthesis of my explantations which, in any case, seemed to me like polite small talk, the kind of thing you say to a society woman who wants you to explain India in three words. The doctor, though extremely intelligent, not being in the same state as myself could not understand all that my words implied. I had to make abridgements. Invent them for him. Veer off from the complex truth. These bridges, which I was forced to build, tired me. I would abandon them before they were finished.
After he had gone, I talked for a while with S ...* So I must be recuperating. But I was still not convinced. I was still in the front line and the rumors of imminent peace could not cop- as "real presence" with the reality of the furious battles** to which I was being ceaselessly brought back Besides, one can succumb just before an armistice. It is well known.
My words, still in snatches, were tending, perhaps through naivety rather than successful ruse, and certainly incompletely, to convince him that I was returning to a semi-normal condition, just when I myself was beginning to perceive the possibility of permanent damage. Wondering if he guessed it too, I tried, not speaking too haltingly I believe, to distract him, to divert his thoughts. It is possible that the doctor had warned him to watch for this and, if necessary, to call a hospital, although as I told myself, this would be contrary to their characters, unlike their usual attitude. However, if they had been aware of the vortex in which I was struggling, such a step would have been only natural, and still more natural to have had me interned on the spot.
During our conversation I again noticed my fits of inattention. When my disorder had been at its height, when I was harboring the lightning, all my attention had been fixed on one thing, on my dangerous interior.
*Afterwards, as S . told me, remaining silent for half an hour. Probably due to the fatigue of my first efforts. Then talking with great volubility.
** Not so much battles any longer. Going back into myself was more like returning to listen to an invisible orchestra which, without interruption, was giving a prodigious, strange, and distturbing concert whose waves were entirely non-acoustical.
Now, for moments at a time I would come back to the exterior, to intercourse with the exterior. More periods of absence also meant more periods of presence.
I divided myself between inside and outside. What was taken from one went to the other. Neither now contained everything. This passage back and forth this shuttling, gave me a disagreeable sensation of fogginess and tedium, which has left me only a vague recollection. My attention being diverted by the conversation from the diabolic furrow in my center, the hurricane, as though following the direction of my attention was spreading itself, scattering, taking several different paths, was outside as much as inside (less maniacal inside, less stupendous than before) and was in more than one respect like a hurricane you might watch on shipboard without going out on deck, following it from various signs, bottles rolling around or the flapping of a carelessly fastened tarpaulin lashed by the wind, which augments in fury or which finally diminishes, while the ship is still painfully tossed about.
The doctor returned in the evening and, after questioning me with the most friendly interest, left without further examination and apparently reassured. I still felt doubtful, but my doubts seemed absurd.
I went to bed, the first night began, the first of the nights unlike the others. What I had mistaken for calm was, I found as soon as I got to bed, a very slight agitation, so slight as to make me ask myself if I really felt it, though I could not suppress it. And it was right in my center, only there, a nasty little disturbance, hardly anything, not at all unruly, but which could upset everything, and which had been masked by the spectacular violence of the day's storms. The mescalinian excitation was gone. What next?
Now I had plenty of cause to be desperate. I was still mad, and for no reason.
As I had felt a slight palpitation, I thought to reassure myself by blaming it on my heart, and tried to take my pulse. It was now one-thirty in the morning. I don't know how many times I tried. Ten times? Fifteen times? Twenty times?
I would begin to count the pulsations. After counting a certain number, I could no longer remember at what division on the face of my watch I had begun, and would begin all over again. A few seconds would elapse when again I would ask myself how long I had been counting, or else how long since I had stopped counting, for I would also often stop counting. To gain time I began counting from the fifteenth second or the thirtieth, then I would forget, would get mixed up, would begin again at the tenth second and, long before the thirtieth, would wonder where I was, lost in doubts more numerous than the seconds, more numerous than the pulsations of my heart, finally deciding, rather than verifying, that there were not more than a hundred to the minute, and perhaps not more than ninety.
Quantities of mad ideas, or rather a procession of mad ideas, for they always came one by one, occurred to me and I began to think - without knowing that it was what Jaspers had said on the subject - that "for the madman to have only one mania is already a sort of relief." He knows what to expect. I would have been hard put to know what to expect. I was at the swarming, the polivalent stage. I might do a thousand insane things, cut my finger, break the window, set fire to the chairs, open my veins with a razor, smash the mirrors. The contrary of normal action* was what seemed tempting. Any object, when an idea for dramatizing life gets hold of it, is capable of anything. I was afraid to go to sleep. I was afraid to let myself go. I was afraid to turn out the light, knowing that in the dark my thoughts would be without opposition.
Toward three o'clock in the morning there were a few visions again. Forms like needles, like the branches of compasses, very close together, at very acute angles, and, as I remember, moving at a moderate speed. Their color pale violet. The visions would now be coming back perhaps. Leaving my dangerous center I would return to what is called the visual cortex. False hope. I had to con
*In the insane the fascination of the abberant idea, the fascination of the thing that should not be done, operates by virtue of the same laws that govern expression and works of art in general. An oppressive uneasiness whose cause they cannot perceive, at cross-purposes, parasitic, a state of constant suspense, will reappear through a sort of affinity with the devious ideas and acts that violate normal behaviour.
tinue to keep a close watch on myself without any distraction.
I tried in vain to attract my body. It certainly needed to be sensualized. But it had become a stranger, took no interest in anything.
Trying to rouse it, I began reading passages from new books and from others whose effect on me I knew, books of every sort, poetic, epic, mystic, sentimental, heroic, erotic, Chinese, Hindu, Hebrew. Nothing. I might just as well have picked up bricks as books. Vainly I tried to make a muff for myself. Agreeable sensations, that was what I needed, or emotions. The only real shield against madness - the soft shield of pleasure.
Sleep ! I implored, "Today, this night of all nights, sleep, come to me if you can. Come and assuage the exhaustion of a wretch who has been buffeted by all the winds of heaven. Sleep, will you never again find your plains in me? Sleep, after this terrible day . . ." and I kept imploring. But sleep did not come. Besides, in spite of all my solicitations, all my coaxing, I was really on my guard against it. Yet I had not altogether wasted my time by talking to it so absurdly, absurdly but in a way that was, I am sure, for me necessary. Indeed, in this long detour my whole being relaxed. Suddenly the touch of my steamer rug seemed soft and warm to the palm of my hand which sent the news all through my body, soothing it a little.
Saved? Was I saved? It was probably only a beginning. But it was marvelous : my body was coming back to me. I was going to stop being mad. It was my body that would be the stabilizer. It knows all the pleasures, all the antagonistic sensations.
Morning came at last, the dawn. I must have dozed off. The various landmarks which were reappearing with the nascent light were signs of the renascence of reality. They still had very little density, but that little I appreciated as a connoisseur with grateful recognition.
They indicated that my body, taking pleasure in its senses, was going to get back its voice. I would no longer be so quickly overthrown.
"You see, the fallen leaves are returning to the tree ..." I said to myself. For, having become a stranger, alienated from myself, I could talk to myself as if I were some one else.
To complete this amelioration I decided to go to the country to visit F . . . who had been a faithful friend for countless years, and whose tact was almost Chinese.
I arrive at the Gare Montparnasse without any untoward incident. An idea of throwing myself under the train that is just pulling into the station. The impulse is not very strong. Without any trouble I climb into the last car. A slight headache. The succession of reflexes -buses to catch, buses to get off, tickets here, others there, looking for the right track - I feel the usual fatigue.
Dry tongue. (Yesterday my liver must have been involved in the struggle as well as my head.) The thought occurs to me that it is like rabies. There was nothing mad in this observation. But immediately the mechanism of dramatization was set in motion. And what if it really were rabies? Of course not, ridiculous, it's simply because of all that mescaline I swallowed yesterday. Probably, but what if I had been bitten by a dog three weeks ago? Absurd, no dog has bitten me. But this cut on my hand? But it's nothing but a scratch, entirely superficial, Superficial now, but before? And what if I were to bite people? What if from now on I couldn't control myself ... And that was that ! Impossible to reach any definite conclusion because my arguments were shifting all the time, continually changing. Was fear at the bottom of it? Fear that has attached itself to rabies, a rabies which I have to keep trying in vain to prove doesn't exist, fear that gives me not one moment of respite. But this is not only fear, since, without seeming to, at this very moment it is inciting me to bite people who are nothing to me, in order to relieve this hydrophobia which in all probability I don't have.
Mechanism of perversity, that is, of revolt a priori against peace, against tranquility, against acquiescence in the habitual order, against reflex actions.
Active perversion which automatically rejects the truth. There is still a slight ground-swell, an uneasy agitation, inducing antagonistic outbursts.
The evening did me good. I came back quieted apparently.
A few days passed.
I could now believe myself cured. I was entering upon my fourth night. What I was really entering upon, without knowing it was pure horror - I was entering into intimate relations with horror. In my sleep I felt myself going down. I came to a landing. I continued down, and down, and down, to the level probably of a second subterranean vault, then a third, then still lower, to the depth of an eighth, a ninth subterranean vault, still lower, still lower. I pushed open a door into a cell. The door closed. The key fell through a crack in the stone floor into an abyss. I was lost : At this point one might have thought the program completed, fear being at the origin of this dramatic action. That would be to discount its insatiable motion. And so it happened that successively I was being held in a room, that I was caught between the bulkheads of a lost cabin on a transatlantic liner, that the fallen key became a swallowed key, then the key of an enemy(?), picked up, pocketed, then lost, then that some one came for me and took me to a room higher up, some one else, again slamming the door shut behind me, to a still more subterranean cabin, then to another, then to an oubliette, etc.... when I woke up. No, I was not in a cold sweat. I was just thinking it over.
It was hard to resist panic for, even with two electric lamps turned on again, I still felt imprisoned. The episodes I had just experienced, sometimes contradictory, should have cancelled out one another, on the well-known principle of the necessity of choice. But not at all. It was very cunningly devised. Having forgotten all the details, a few of which I have just been patiently trying to recall (cells, cabins, rooms, oubliettes etc.), I retained only the general line. I was unable to fix a single lasting image which, when awake, I could have repudiated. All I knew was that I was imprisoned.
This knowing was what no episode had contradicted, and what had driven everything home. This fear had been intimatized. And in intimacy it had become unbridled.
It would snatch at me and, as soon as I struggled to interpose obstacles of logic, would recapture me, each time recapturing me more quickly. What created the drama was that neither of us was ever appeased. To all my efforts to prove that none of it was true, since I was here in my own room which I recognized with all its familiar objects, it would reply by manufacturing new episodes, insane and contradictory, but so instantaneous that I had hardly a second to parry them before the next one, which had to be answered victoriously, was hectoring me, seizing me so that, with the key already lost countless times, and in the face of actual proofs, even my room, my books right before my eyes were lost in their turn, were immaterialized, and, even when I looked at them again, they could no longer command my attention, could not emerge (any more than I could) out of the abyss of the successive engulfments and buryings.
This malevolence having once become related to infinity you are lost. It is fascination. When a sound is indefinitely reverberated, who thinks of doubting his ears? Out of the question. A kind of wonder is the response to such multiplicity.
At a certain moment, in a flash of recognition, and also in order to use the discovery as a support, a mysterybreaker, I said to myself that the source of all this was simply the fear I had had of being interned. But this idea, from which one might have expected more, failed to offer resistance for long and in the end only served to make me feel more imprisoned than ever. So strong an idea-feeling as that of being imprisoned, countered by ideas which it promptly devours, assimilates or denies, becomes a certainty of the second degree, which countered with new arguments, rises up again, destroys them, "sows" them to the four winds, and becomes a certainty of the third degree, and, once more attacked by your desperate efforts to escape, is victorious and becomes, thanks to your very attempts to free yourself, a certainty of the fourth degree, and so on until it is a certainty that approaches the absolute about which it is vain to argue, and everything else then becomes definitively uncertain.
This vertiginous game doesn't take many minutes. That you are imprisoned has become entirely abstract.
The prison in which you are confined is now the essence of prison. It is no longer a nightmare. All the terror is now interiorized. Stones, doors, keys are superfluous.
Become essence, your prison is now invulnerable. You can no longer hope to escape.
* * *
Essenciation . . . is there any one who can endure t? The trend toward essence is a vertiginous pleasure, secret frenzy.
The madman essenciates, is fascinated by essenciating, and it is dangerous. When the accumulation of the facts of experience was small, in ages when people liked to essenciate, they naturally and almost exclusively essenciated on God.
Even on God it is dangerous to essenciate. For the scrupulous, religion is hell. To that infinite being, whom they cannot conceive, and who is constantly impelling them toward infinity and inciting their infinitizing propensities, they respond with the consciousness of their infinite inadequacy, of their sins. They live infinitely in guilt. The scrupulous person will go to confession five hundred times to lay bare the same old trivial sin for which a general absolution has already been given four hundred and ninety-nine times but which still breaks out because nothing can be severed, nothing can be saved from prolongations without end, not excepting infinitization.
One would have to go to India and see people terrorized by defilement, those whom neither rites, nor separation of castes, nor asceticism can relieve of their insane fear of defilement, to understand what an infernal machine the idea of total purification can be. And that is not the only Danaides seive they have to keep filling. All the terrors of essence are contained in the great books of India.
There is a certain temperament which longs to adore God, cannot adore God and is frightened to death by God. How many men have become atheists* (above all theophobes) in order to get back their peace of mind.
* The insane fear of microbes, of contagion and of dirt certainly also exists, but how much more tolerable, more moderate... .
Following these hours, crowded with perverse thoughts so close to action that it was torture to restrain myself, there was no sign of anger in me, not even lurking in the shadows, not even when faced with things that would normally have irritated me.
When some imperative action occurred to me as for instance, if I happened to be walking along the Seine, that of pushing a man into the water, I noticed that it was without the least aggressiveness, without the least antipathy. On the contrary, a displeasing face would probably have stopped me. The man I would be most tempted to push into the river was always one who had his back turned ,-- emotionally neutral. It reached such a point that for several days I preferred to avoid the Seine. The action to be performed, entirely separated from a feeling of resentment, appeared, not so much gratuitous as like a reflex, like kicking a ball you see on the street. A reversed reflex. Being by nature a man of decided likes and dislikes, I was particularly struck by the complete emotional indifference that characterised this anger.
But not long after that, X ... having telephoned me, argumentative as usual and moreover, in spite of his friendly intentions, being one of those obstinate verbose bores who had irritated me for a long time, I was seized with a sudden fury, such a blind fury that I didn't know how to give vent to it, how to rid myself of it, a domoniac fury, a completely novel kind of fury.
My loud vocal outburst - altogether unlike me - was nothing compared to the continual frenetic outbursts of anger within me, that kept spreading with incredible speed.
I was not particularly incensed by his proposition and his ridiculous conclusions. Against them my anger would have been silly, disproportionate. What I aimed at was himself, was his quintessence, all that it contained contrary to my own, and which I should have liked not only to injure but to annihilate, to abolish for good and all, the essence of essence against which I could never be virulent enough, hostile enough, antagonistic enough. I essenciated our fundamental opposition in order to make it something fixed and irreversible forever. Whirlwinds of anger swept through me. But it was entirely incorporeal. I should not have been satisfied to hit him, to knock him down. Meeting him on the street I doubt if I should have recognized him as the object of my fury. I was far beyond that, uplifted to prodigious heights.
All day long I had to make an effort to keep my mind from the intolerable thought of our co-existence on the earth.
* * *
It was the evening of a tiring day. The journey in the early morning, then the walk on a pebble beach, the change of air, all this had exhausted me.
Before going down to dinner, as I was slipping into my jacket, I glanced at myself in the glass. (No, this is not yet the "sign of the mirror." But it is true that the normal state had taught me the utility of observing externals). I had the face of a man being tracked. It was again, I might say, an expression I had never seen on my face before. But it may have been only the shadow of the great sequoia across my window that was deforming my features.
I dined -soon left to myself. The deserted hotel had a park. I went out. What calm ! All around me were tall beautiful trees that grew gradually blacker with the progressive withdrawal of the light.
Suddenly, I was being persecuted ! What was the connection? And by whom? If I left the park, perhaps it would pass. But I stayed. I had to find out. Not a leaf stirred. With evening the sea breeze had died down. Rather suddenly, as often happens.
It was as if this calm had been intentionally contrived "against" me. Immobility in the dark, like a revolver pointed at me. Yet at the moment I had no thought of any revolver. This sudden immobilization, taken out of context, so to speak, I must have felt as one of the natural categories of the mind. Sudden immobility-threat, and now the threat was felt as essential, needing no inquiry into what constituted it, where it could well have come from. The stern aspect of the trees surrounding me (so like a stage setting) offered it sufficient support. Did these surroundings recall the sensation of internment which I had dreaded? And the dusk, did it make me think of the state which was possibly mine(!) the crepuscular state that also calls for internment? Who knows? My sensationnotion was Immobility plus darkness equals threat, which is a sensation known to innumerable children and, even, to not a few gangsters. That is when children often have "night terrors." They are crazed by metaphysical terrors which they cannot describe, in which there is nothing they have imagined, though adults keep tormenting them trying to force them to "tell" what it was that has frightened them, or that frightens them. Fear of danger. That is, fear that cannot be diverted into anything concrete. Reality always falls short of essence. Every child knows that. I felt that if I really examined myself I should find that what kept me deep in the pit of this sensation of persecution (by whom, by what?) was the fascination of being threatened, which one feels not without a certain relish, a certain acquiescence in the terrible sensation.
Personally, I had always been impervious to this idea of persecution. What a lack of pride, I had always thought - in spite of the example of great writers, those persecuted madmen - to admit that other people were enemies, and powerful enemies ! Now I believed I understood. The staging, for the man who feels persecuted, is not what counts. He begins by feeling the threat, by feeling himself threatened. Afterwards he finds the people who are threatening him (people who fit the role more or less).
The impression produced by the tall presences surrounding me was final. I had, to an abnormal degree, given in to it. Instead of considering it as an indication or a comparison, I had succumbed to it as to an hypnotic. I had yielded to the dramatizing suggestion of the park. It was sensation in its pure state. No, it was sensation apprehended as abyss. I was plunging into it. Once more I was lost, for I could see no way of getting out. I was hypnotized by persecution, but without ever bothering to find out by whom. I am rather lazy.
But all the same, this was going too far. Something had to be done. It was high time. I left the park, I concentrated on taking long strides, making a noise, and going toward the sea.
I had undoubtedly applied a known mechanism at an
unknown point. Even a certain coquetry toward this persecution which had so intrigued me, and which, when it appeared, I could not let go without trying to understand. But this abyss* into which I slip the moment I am tired, is it really going to keep returning forever?
*The expression of my face in the glass, which may also have influenced me, was more like that of a man who senses the abyss rather than the enemy.