The Book of Disquiet (59 page)

The essence of pleasure is in multiplication. Open your shutters to the Feline in you.

How to upset your husband…

It’s important that your husband gets angry now and then.

Learn to feel attracted to repulsive things without relaxing your outward discipline. The greatest inward unruliness combined with the greatest outward discipline makes for perfect sensuality. Every gesture that realizes a dream or desire unrealizes it in reality.

Substitution
is less difficult than you think. By substitution I mean the practice of imagining an orgasm with man A while copulating with man B.

My wish for you, my dear disciples, is that by faithfully following my advice you’ll experience vastly multiplied sensual pleasures
with
, not in the
acts of
, the male animal to whom Church and State have tied you by your womb and a last name.

It’s by digging its feet in the ground that the bird takes off in flight. May this image, daughters, serve as a perpetual reminder of the only spiritual commandment there is.

The height of sensuality, if you can achieve it, is to be the lewdest slut imaginable and yet never unfaithful to your husband, not even with your eyes.

To be a slut
on the inside
, to be unfaithful to your husband
on the inside
, to cheat on him as you hug him, to kiss him with kisses that aren’t for him – that is sensuality, O superior women, O my mysterious and cerebral disciples.

Why don’t I give the same advice to men? Because the man is a different kind of creature. If he’s inferior, I recommend that he seduce as many women as he can, resorting to my contempt when ..... The superior man doesn’t need women. He can have sensuality without sexual possession. This is something a woman, even a superior one, could never accept. The woman is a fundamentally sexual creature.

Since every step I took in life brought me into horrifying contact with the New, and since every new person I met was a new living fragment of the unknown that I placed on my desk for my frightful daily meditation, I decided to abstain from everything, to go forward in nothing, to reduce action to a minimum, to make it hard for people and events to find me, to perfect the art of abstinence, and to take abdication to unprecedented heights. That’s how badly life terrifies and tortures me.

To make a decision, to finalize something, to emerge from the realm of doubt and obscurity – these are things that seem to me like catastrophes or universal cataclysms.

Life, as I know it, is cataclysms and apocalypses. With each passing day I feel that much more incompetent even to trace gestures or to conceive myself in clearly real situations.

With each passing day the presence of others – which my soul always receives like a rude surprise – becomes more painful and distressing. To talk with people makes my skin crawl. If they show an interest in me, I run. If they look at me, I shudder. If .....

I’m forever on the defensive. I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful – only then do I find myself and feel comforted.

Life makes me cold. My existence is all damp cellars and lightless catacombs. I’m the disastrous defeat of the last army that sustained the last empire. Yes, I feel as if I were at the end of an ancient ruling civilization. I, who was used to commanding others, am now alone and forsaken. I, who always had advisers to guide me, now have no friend or guide.

Something in me is always begging for compassion, and it weeps over itself as over a dead god whose altars were all destroyed when the white wave of young barbarians stormed the borders and life came and demanded to know what the empire had done with happiness.

I’m always afraid others might talk about me. I’ve failed in everything. I didn’t dare think of being something; I didn’t even dream of thinking about being something, because even in my dreams – in my visionary state as a mere dreamer – I realized I was unfit for life.

No feeling in the world can lift my head from the pillow where I’ve let it sink in desperation, unable to deal with my body or with the idea that I’m alive, or even with the abstract idea of life.

I don’t speak the language of any reality, and I stagger among the things of life like a sick man who finally got up after being bedridden for months. Only in bed do I feel like part of normal life. It pleases me to get a fever, since it seems perfectly natural
to my recumbent state. Like a flame in the wind I flutter and get dizzy. Only in the dead air of closed rooms do I breathe the normality of my life.

I don’t even miss the ocean breeze. I’ve become resigned to having my soul for a cloister and to being no more to myself than an autumn
in an arid expanse, with only a glimmer of living life, as of a light which expires in the canopied darkness of pools, with no energy and colour but that of the violet splendour of exile when the sun dips behind the hills…

I have no other real pleasure besides the analysis of my pain, nor any other sensual delight besides the morbid dribbling of sensations when they crumble and rot – light footsteps in the murky shadows, and we don’t even turn around to find out whose they are; faint songs in the distance, the words of which we don’t try to catch, for we are lulled more by the vagueness of what they’re saying and by the mystery of where they come from; hazy secrets of pallid waters, filling the
and nocturnal spaces with ethereal far-aways; bells of distant carriages, and who knows where they’re returning from or what laughs and gaiety they contain, because from here they’re just distant, drowsy carriages in the dull torpor of an afternoon in which summer is giving way to autumn…

The flowers in the garden have died and withered to become other flowers – older and more noble, their dead yellow more compatible with mystery, silence and solitude. The water bubbles that surface in the pools have their place in dreams. The distant croaking of frogs! O lifeless countryside within me! O rustic peacefulness of dreams! O my life, futile as that of a shiftless vagabond who sleeps on the side of the road, in a fresh and transparent slumber, with the fragrance of the meadows entering his soul like a mist, profound and full of eternity like everything that’s not linked to anything, nocturnal, anonymous, nomadic and weary beneath the stars’ cold compassion.

I follow wherever my dreams lead, making the images into steps that lead to other images; I unfold – like a fan – each chance metaphor into a large, inwardly visible picture; I cast off my life like a suit that’s too tight. I hide among trees, far away from the roads. I lose myself. And for a few tenuous moments I’m able to forget my taste for life, to bury the thought of daylight and bustle, and to consciously, absurdly terminate in my sensations, with an empire in agonizing ruins but also with a grand entrance amid victory banners and drums into a glorious final city where I would weep over nothing and desire nothing, asking no one – not even myself – for so much as the right to exist.

It’s me who suffers from the sickly surfaces of the pools I’ve created in dreams. Mine is the paleness of the moon I envision over wooded landscapes. Mine is the weariness of the stagnant autumn skies that I remember but have never seen. All of my dead life, all my flawed dreams and all that I had that wasn’t mine oppresses me in the blue of my inner skies, in the visible rippling of my soul’s rivers, and in the vast, restless serenity of the wheat on the plains which I see but don’t see.

A cup of coffee, a bit of tobacco whose aroma passes through me when I smoke it, my eyes half shut in a half-dark room – this, and my dreams, are all I want from life. If it doesn’t seem to me like too little? I don’t know. How should I know what’s a little and what’s a lot?

O summer afternoon outside, how I’d like to be utterly different… I open the window. Everything outside is soft, but it cuts me like an indefinite pain, like a vague feeling of dissatisfaction.

And one last thing cuts me, tears me, rips my soul to pieces. It’s that I, in this moment and at this window, thinking these sad and soft things, ought to be an attractive, aesthetic figure, like a figure in a painting – and I’m not even that…

Let the moment pass and be forgotten… Let the night come, let it grow, let it fall over everything and never lift back up. Let this soul be my tomb for ever, and
become sheer darkness, and may I never be able to live again without feelings and desires.

Make sure, first of all, that you respect nothing, believe nothing,
nothing. But while showing disrespect, you should hold on to the desire to respect something; while despising what you don’t love, you should retain the painful longing to love someone; and while disdaining life, you should preserve the idea that it must be wonderful to live and cherish it. Having done this, you’ll have laid the foundations for the edifice of your dreams.

Remember that you’re embarking on the loftiest task of all. To dream is to find ourselves. You’re going to be the Columbus of your soul. You’re going to set out to discover your own landscapes. Make
sure you’re on the right track and that your instruments can’t mislead you.

The art of dreaming is difficult, because it’s an art of passivity, in which we concentrate our efforts on avoiding all effort. If there were an art of sleeping, it would no doubt be somewhat similar.

Note that the art of dreaming is not the art of directing our dreams. To direct is to act. The true dreamer surrenders to himself, is possessed by himself.

Avoid all material stimulants. In the beginning you’ll be tempted to masturbate, to consume alcohol, to smoke opium..... This is all effort and seeking. To be a good dreamer, you have to be nothing but a dreamer. Opium and morphine are purchased in pharmacies – how can you expect to dream through them? Masturbation is a physical thing – how can you expect.....