The Passion According to G.H. (14 page)

— Listen, there’s something called human sainthood, and which is not that of the saints. I’m afraid that not even the God understands that human sainthood is more dangerous than divine sainthood, that the sainthood of the laity is more painful. Yet Christ himself knew that if they had done what they did to Him, they would do much more to us, since He said: “For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?”

Trial. Now I understand what a trial is. Trial: it means that life is trying me. But trial: means that I too am trying. And trying can become an ever more insatiable thirst.

Wait for me: I’m going to pull you out of the hell into which I descended. Listen, listen:

Since from the delight without reprieve, a sob was already being born inside me that seemed more like a sob of joy. It wasn’t a sob of pain, I had never heard it before: it was that of my life splitting in order to procreate me. In those desert sands I was starting to be of the daintiness of a first shy offering, like that of a flower. What was I offering? what could I offer of myself — I, who was being the desert, I, who had asked and had?

I was offering the sob. I was finally crying inside my hell. I use and sweat the very wings of blackness, and was using them and sweating them for me — which art Thou, thou, flash of silence. I am not Thou, but me art Thou. Only for that I shall never be able to feel Thee directly: because Thou art me.

Oh, God, I was starting to understand with enormous surprise: that my hellish orgy was human torment itself.

How could I have guessed? if I didn’t know that one laughs in suffering. Because I didn’t know that that was how one suffered. So I had called joy my deepest suffering.

And in the sob the God came to me, the God was occupying all of me now. I was offering my hell to God. The first sob had made — of my terrible pleasure and of my feast — a new pain: that now was as light and helpless as the flower of my own desert. The tears that were flowing now were like those for a love. The God, who could never be understood by me except as I understood Him: breaking me like a flower that at birth can barely hold itself up and seems to break.

But now, that I knew that my joy had been suffering, I was wondering if I was fleeing toward a God because I couldn’t stand my humanity. Because I needed someone who wasn’t petty like me, someone who was so much wider than I in order to allow my misfortune without even using pity and solace — someone who was, who was! and not, like me, an accuser of nature, not like me, a person astonished by the power of my own hates and loves.

Right this second, now, a doubt surprises me. God, or whatever Thou art called: I only ask for help now: but for Thou to help me now not darkly as Thou art me, but clearly this time and in plain sight.

Since I need to know exactly this: am I feeling what I am feeling, or am I feeling what I would like to feel? or am I feeling what I might need to feel?

Because I no longer even want the concretization of an ideal, what I want to be is just a seed. Even if afterwards from that seed ideals are born again, either the real ones, which are the birth of a path, or the false ones, which are the accretions. Could I be feeling what I would like to feel? Since a millimeter’s difference is enormous, and that millimeter of space can save me through truth or once again make me lose everything I saw. It’s dangerous. Men praise highly what they feel. Which is as dangerous as detesting what one feels.

I had offered my hell to the God. And my cruelty, my love, my cruelty had suddenly stopped. And suddenly that same desert was the still-vague sketch of what was called paradise. The moisture of a paradise. Not another thing, but that same desert. And I was surprised as one is surprised by a light that comes out of the nothing.

Was I understanding that what I had experienced, that nucleus of hellish rapacity, was that what is called love? But — neutral-love?

Neutral love. The neutral was whispering. I was reaching what I had sought all my life: whatever is the most final identity and that I had called inexpressive. That was what had always been in my eyes in the snapshot: an inexpressive joy, a pleasure that does not know that it is pleasure — a pleasure too delicate for my coarse humanity that had always been made of coarse concepts.

— I made such an effort to speak to myself of a hell that has no words. Now, how shall I speak of a love that only has whatever one feels, and before which the word “love” is a dusty object?

The hell I had gone through — how can I explain it to you? — had been the hell that comes from love. Ah, people put the idea of sin in sex. But how innocent and childish that sin is. The real hell is that of love. Love is the experience of a danger of greater sin — it is the experience of the mud and the degradation and the worst joy. Sex is the fright of a child. But how shall I speak for myself about the love that I now knew?

It’s almost impossible. Because in the neutral of love is a continual joy, like a noise of leaves in the wind. And I fit into the neutral nakedness of the woman on the wall. The same neutral, the one that had consumed me in pernicious and eager joy, it was in that same neutral that I now was hearing another kind of continual joy of love. Whatever God is was more in the neutral noise of the leaves in the wind than in my old human prayer.

Unless I could make the real prayer, and which to others and myself would resemble the kabbalah of a black magic, a neutral murmur.

That murmur, without any human meaning, would be my identity touching the identity of things. I know that, in relation to the human, that neutral prayer would be a monstrosity. But in relation to whatever is God, it would be: being.

I had been forced into the desert to find out with horror that the desert is alive, to find out that a roach is life. I had drawn back until I found out that in me the deepest life is before the human — and for that I had had the diabolic courage to get rid of feelings. I had to give no human value to life in order to understand the breadth, much more than the human breadth, of the God. Had I asked for the most dangerous and forbidden thing? risking my soul, would I have boldly demanded to see God?

And now it was as if I were before Him and didn’t understand — I was standing uselessly before Him, and I was once again before the nothing. To me, as to everyone, everything had been given, but I wanted more: I wanted to know about that everything. And I had sold my soul in order to find out. But now I was understanding that I had not sold it to the devil, but much more dangerously: to God. Who had let me see. Since He knew that I would not know how to see whatever I saw: the explanation of an enigma is the repetition of the enigma. What art Thou? and the answer is: Thou art. What do Thou existest? and the answer is: what thou existest. I had the ability to ask the question, but not to hear the answer.

No, I had not even known how to ask the question. Yet the answer had imposed itself upon me since I was born. Because of this continual answer I, the wrong way around, had been forced to seek the corresponding question. So I had got lost in a labyrinth of questions, and asked questions at random, hoping that one of them would occasionally correspond to the answer, and that I could then understand the answer.

But I was like a person who, having been born blind and not having anyone around who could see, that person could not even form a question about vision: she wouldn’t know that seeing existed. But, since vision actually did exist, even if that person didn’t know about it and had never even heard of it, that person would be motionless, restless, alert, not knowing how to ask about something she didn’t know existed — she would feel the lack of something that should have been hers.

She would feel the lack of something that should have been hers.

— No. I didn’t tell you everything. I still wanted to see if I could get away with only telling myself a little. But my liberation will only come about if I have the immodesty of my own incomprehension.

Because, sitting on the bed, I then said to myself:

— They gave me everything, and just look what everything is! it’s a roach that is alive and that is about to die. And then I looked at the door handle. After that I looked at the wood of the wardrobe. I looked at the glass of the window. Just look at what everything is: it’s a piece of thing, a piece of iron, of gravel, of glass. I said to myself: look what I fought for, to have exactly what I already had, I crawled until the doors opened for me, the doors of the treasure I was seeking: and look what the treasure was!

The treasure was a piece of metal, it was a piece of whitewash from the wall, it was a piece of matter made into roach.

Since prehistory I had started my march through the desert, and without a star to guide me, only perdition guiding me, only going astray guiding me — until, almost dead from the ecstasy of fatigue, illuminated by passion, I finally found the safe. And in the safe, sparkling with glory, the hidden secret. The most remote secret in the world, opaque, but blinding me with the irradiation of its simple existence, sparkling there with glory that hurt my eyes. Inside the safe the secret:

A piece of thing.

A piece of iron, a roach’s antenna, a plaster chip.

My exhaustion was prostrate at the feet of the piece of thing, hellishly adoring. The secret of power was power, the secret of love was love — and the jewel of the world is an opaque piece of thing.

The opacity was reverberating in my eyes. The secret of my millennial trajectory of orgy and death and glory and thirst until I finally found what I had always had, and for that I had had to die first. Ah, I am being so direct that I manage to seem symbolic.

A piece of thing? the secret of the pharaohs. And for that secret I had almost given my life . . .

More, much more: to have that secret, that even now I still did not understand, I would give my life again. I had risked the world in search of the question that follows the answer. An answer that was still a secret, even once the corresponding question was revealed. I had not found a human answer to the enigma. But much more, oh, much more: I had found the enigma itself. I had been given too much. What would I do with what had been given to me? “May the holy thing not be given to the dogs.”

And I was not even touching the thing. I was just touching the space that goes from me to the vital node — I was within the zone of cohesive and controlled vibration of the vital node. The vital node vibrates at the vibration of my arrival.

My greatest possible approach stops a step away. What prevents that step from being taken? It is the opaque irradiation, simultaneously from the thing and from me. Because we are similar, we repel one other; because we are similar we cannot enter the other. And if the step were taken?

I don’t know, I don’t know. Since the thing can never really be touched. The vital node is a finger pointing at it — and, the thing being pointed at, wakens like a milligram of radium in the tranquil dark. Then the wet crickets are heard. The light of the milligram does not alter the dark. Because the dark is not illuminable, the dark is a way of being: the dark is in the vital node of the dark, and you cannot touch the vital node of a thing.

Would the thing for me have to reduce itself to being just whatever surrounds the untouchable part of the thing? My God, give me what Thou hast done. Or hast Thou already given it to me? and I am the one who cannot take the step that will give me what Thou hast done? Am I what Thou hast made? and I cannot take the step toward me, me that art Thing and Thou. Give me what Thou art in me. Give me what Thou art in others, Thou art the he, I know, I know because when I touch I see the he. But the he, the man, takes care of what Thou hast given him and covers himself in a casing made especially for me to touch and see. And I want more than the casing that I love too. I want what I Thee love.

But I had only found, beyond the casing, the enigma itself. And was trembling all over for fear of the God.

I tremble in fear and adoration of whatever exists.

Whatever exists, and which is just a piece of thing, yet I must place my hand over my eyes against the opacity of that thing. Ah, the violent loving unconsciousness of whatever exists surpasses the possibility of my consciousness. I am afraid of so much matter — the matter vibrates with attention, vibrates with process, vibrates with inherent present time. Whatever exists beats in strong waves against the unbreakable grain that I am, and that grain whirls between abysses of calm billows of existence, it whirls and does not dissolve, that grain-seed.

What am I the seed of? Seed of thing, seed of existence, seed of those very billows of neutral-love. I, person, am an embryo. The embryo is only sensitive — that is its only particular inherence. The embryo hurts. The embryo is eager and shrewd. My eagerness is my most initial hunger: I am pure because I am eager.

Of the embryo that I am, this joyful matter is also made: the thing. Which is an existence satisfied with its own process, deeply occupied with no more than its own process, and the process vibrates entirely. That piece of thing inside the safe is the secret of the coffer. And the coffer itself is also made of the same secret, the safe holding the jewel of the world, the safe too is made of the same secret.

Ah, and I don’t want any of this! I hate what I managed to see. I don’t want that world made of thing!

I don’t want it. But I cannot help feeling all enlarged inside myself by the poverty of the opaque and the neutral: the thing is alive like weeds. And if that is hell, it is heaven itself: the choice is mine. I am the one who shall be demonic or angel; if I am demonic, this is hell; if I am angel, this is heaven. Ah, I send my angel to prepare the path before me. No, not my angel: but my humanity and its compassion.