Tedium and Torpor

I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life,
the slow foundering of all that I wanted to be. I can say,
with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that
there’s nothing I’ve wanted – and nothing in which I’ve
placed, even for a moment, the dream of only that
moment – that hasn’t disintegrated below my windows
like a clod of dirt that resembled stone until it fell from
a flowerpot on a high balcony. It would even seem that
Fate has always tried to make me love or want things
just so that it could show me, on the very next day, that I
didn’t have and could never have them.

But as an ironic spectator of myself, I’ve never lost
interest in seeing what life brings. And since I now know
beforehand that every vague hope will end in disillusion,
I have the special delight of already enjoying the
disillusion with the hope, like the bitter with the sweet
that makes the sweet sweeter by way of contrast. I’m a
sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has
learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details
of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new
engagement.

My destiny, which has pursued me like a malevolent
creature, is to be able to desire only what I know I’ll
never get. If I see the nubile figure of a girl in the street
and imagine for the slightest moment, however
nonchalantly, what it would be like if she were mine, it’s
a dead certainty that ten steps past my dream she’ll meet
the man who’s obviously her husband or lover. A
romantic would make a tragedy out of this; a stranger to
the situation would see it as a comedy; I, however, mix
the two things, since I’m romantic in myself and a
stranger to myself, and I turn the page to yet another
irony.

Some say that without hope life is impossible, others
that with hope it’s empty. For me, since I’ve stopped
hoping or not hoping, life is simply an external picture
that includes me and that I look at, like a show without
a plot, made only to please the eyes – an incoherent
dance, a rustling of leaves in the wind, clouds in which
the sunlight changes colour, ancient streets that wind
every which way around the city.

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I
unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate
myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m
like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and
in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m
like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that
are still alive in my dreams. And above all I’m calm, like
a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and
occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top
of its pointed cap (a component part of the same head)
produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble
notice to Fate.

But how often, in the middle of this peaceful
dissatisfaction, my conscious emotion is slowly filled
with a feeling of emptiness and tedium for thinking this
way! How often I feel, as if hearing a voice behind
intermittent sounds, that I myself am the underlying
bitterness of this life so alien to human life – a life in
which nothing happens except in its self-awareness! How
often, waking up for a moment from this exile that’s me,
I get a glimpse of how much better it would be to be a
complete nobody, the happy man who at least has real
bitterness, the contented man who feels fatigue instead of
tedium, who suffers instead of imagining he suffers, who
kills himself, yes, instead of watching himself die!

I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life
one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that
I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put
into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into
rhythms that are something else altogether. From so
much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much
self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed
myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life
wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb
except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the
mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that
observes me observing it.

I’m like a playing card belonging to an old and
unrecognizable suit – the sole survivor of a lost deck. I
have no meaning, I don’t know my worth, there’s
nothing I can compare myself with to discover what I
am, and to make such a discovery would be of no use to
anyone. And so, describing myself in image after image –
not without truth, but with lies mixed in – I end up more
in the images than in me, stating myself until I no longer
exist, writing with my soul for ink, useful for nothing
except writing. But the reaction ceases, and again I resign
myself. I go back to whom I am, even if it’s nothing. And
a hint of tears that weren’t cried makes my stiff eyes
burn; a hint of anguish that wasn’t felt gets caught in my
dry throat. But I don’t even know what I would have
cried over, if I’d cried, nor why it is that I didn’t cry over
it. The fiction follows me, like my shadow. And what I
want is to sleep.

I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I’m nobody, nobody. I don’t know how to feel or think or love. I’m a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I’ve even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breath life into me.

Dreaming is the worst of drugs, because it’s the most natural of all. It works its way into our habits like no other drug can. We take it unawares, like poison slipped in a drink. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t make you pale, and won’t knock you out, but the soul that takes it can’t be cured, for it can never let go of its poison, which is its very own self.

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.

My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.