Memoirs of a Patagonian

Introduction

I drank the infinite like a baby who knows because he drinks his mother's love, like a wild child who sees because he listens to the ocean on the shores of his Beautiful Island and its endless surf. The infinite beats without end, loves without end, because that itself is what loves and makes a first love in the world, a first music to love itself a million times in everything that beats in the world.

And then one goes to school to learn tales that make no sense — our Gaulish ancestors and goodness knows what else and all those bloody, sordid wars one after another, up to the next final one, and our Holy Mother the Church. I had an old mother, very much a seafaring woman, who would open her arms wide toward the shimmering, luminous Coast and say: "For me, God is out there." And that seemed wiser to me than all their pious platitudes. And one lives through story after story that means nothing, loves that always come crashing down in the end — has one ever truly lived, or no more than a little surf, not even silver-tipped, breaking on the old rock. Yet there were old pagans who knew better, who lived better, it seems. And what do you make of it, my brothers of today? What do you breathe that is a true second of life? Beating, singing, living like a seagull on the rock, like a first sun trembling over the cliff of men.

"Men" — what does that mean?

Must there be a final second closing on death to say what? and to open one's eyes onto a new "life" that will say what again?

And life is so beautiful and the earth is so beautiful and she wants to live again and again to find her own mystery, her own fable never found and never told.

Of course! It is not something to be "said" — it is something to be lived, this never-yet-lived thing, in a human skin or in some other unknown bird that wants to live all the same and beat with its own heart.

*

It is this fable that began to beat in my heart in a death-row cell. That very final second of the last what in their horrible prisons.

Now, in an English prison in Calcutta, at Alipore, there was a great Indian revolutionary awaiting his hanging — he waited for a full year, day after day — who was opening eyes infinitely more ancient than mine upon this old "what" of men, and without doubt it was not the first time he had opened a condemned man's eyes upon old Death. His name was Sri Aurobindo. He was acquitted a year later and freed on 6 May 1909, to take refuge in Pondicherry. I was freed on a 5th of May, a few decades later. When I emerged from their Nazi hell, I was forever in tune with human suffering and its revolt and its sorrows. But Sri Aurobindo was a greater revolutionary than all our Lenins and our Robespierres — "incorruptible," betrayed and guillotined — it was the Revolution of Man he wanted, it was the age-old "what" of the millennia from which he meant to wrest its mystery and its fable, it was the Liberation of the Earth from a dominion more horrible than that of those English Gentlemen and their Bible or assorted pieties. It was the physical, material, cellular key to the transformation of Homo sapiens, who was never sapiens and grows less so by the day: all those millennia of painful, groping Evolution were not going to end at the "summit" of a small learned misfit who knew nothing except how to destroy himself cruelly and his whole earth. And Sri Aurobindo saw far ahead what now lies spread before our eyes (for those willing to see): "The close of a stage of evolution is marked by a powerful recrudescence of all the elements that have to go out of evolution." We are well equipped to know it, and to shoot each other to pieces. "Here comes the time of the murderers," said our brother Rimbaud in 1873, after attempting to flee as far as the Sunda Islands — but one cannot flee one's condition as a man: one can change it. That is what Sri Aurobindo affirmed upon leaving Alipore prison:

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"Man is a transitional being."

It is the whole Earth that is in a dangerous, perilous transition.

By a sublime grace or a sublime "Chance" that seems to know beneath our feet what our heads do not know, I met Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, his companion, a little less than a year after crossing the barrier of the Mauthausen camp and the other very corporeal barrier of a mortal typhus and tuberculosis. My body, then, knew something of what Sri Aurobindo knew and of what the Mother — his French companion, born in Paris like that other rebellious youngster I was — who held my hands for so long to slip unbeknownst into my cells what She was living all alone after Sri Aurobindo's departure:

"Expect nothing from heaven," she would say, "salvation is terrestrial."

And it was She who spoke to me of "the next species" on earth, and the means of fashioning it by digging an infernal hole in the consciousness of the body, while her disciples hastened to shut her door to me and to condemn her to death, alone, so they could close her coffin saintly and cruelly, and proclaim their "new religion of Sri Aurobindo" — very profitable — She who told me: "The age of religions is past," "This is the time of Divine Materialism." This is the time of Something Else. And in her last words to me, giving me a small handkerchief and tapping my heart with a finger, she said:

It is all here.

And indeed it is all here, in a heart and in the millions of cells of a body — only one must have the courage to go and find it there.

This is the time of "divine materialism," she said.

This is the time of Something Else on earth.

This is ours — our own human fable.

*

Thus my brother and companion Robert Laffont asked me: "Why not write the story of a little boy in a boat sailing from Belle-Île who would dream about his future life and so tell your life in reverse…"

But instead of a little boy of today, I had a remarkable vision which I now recount: I saw a first child from before learned mankind, a prehistoric little Patagonian, who marvels at the world and wonders who is what. A kind of first childhood of men — and the Future, what?

21 May 2001

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Memoirs of a Patagonian

I awoke in wonder.

I am seventy-seven years old, apparently, and I was opening my eyes for the first time in the world, at the age of seven thousand seven hundred years — I was being born 7,700 years after my birth, and it was as if for the very first time in the world, it was all new, astonishing, marvellous and sublime as though one wanted to adore everything. An adorable world. Like a savage prostrating himself before the first sunrise on earth. Or like a wild lover gazing for the first time at his old Beloved as though he had never seen her before. With the words of today's man who has learned to "think," I would call it a sacred world, a divine world, freshly Divine.

*

So I woke dumbfounded, with one foot in prehistory and one foot in… what? a murky present. A Time completely riddled with holes as if it were flowing in all directions at once with no present wall.

Perhaps I have known other Egypts and other Indias on other planets before landing in Paris (14th borough!)

One needs a very solid head to bear that.

And people walk step by step along their boulevard as if nothing were happening, or as if so little were… and then it gapes open on all sides with a little Patagonian of 7,700 years underfoot and an immense history stretching far far behind, and ahead it rushes into an enormous mystery that is yet already there and calls us to its discovery, but in an interminable step by step, like on a ridge between two worlds, with a microscopic present stuffed with little stories and little nothings that believe themselves to be Mr or Mrs So-and-so endowed with seventy or eighty years and something to do to earn a living and some pleasant provisional wife, or several according to taste — a Present Prison solidly walled and registered with a birth certificate and unavoidable death when one has had enough of this routine, and perhaps that is just as well because it could go on indefinitely in a thousand nothings pretending to be something, running and running after their Mystery never found, never pierced through in their inexorable Prison.

Is it truly inexorable?

Is there truly no other way out than our endless deaths to begin the same thing again with a few culinary or aeronautical improvements that will briefly overfly our interminable hunger for Something Else and our spaces ever more populated and ever less green?

Where is the Mystery? And if there is no mystery, what is this absurdity onto which one can paste any philosophy one likes, according to taste, along with some cinema for distraction.

But the true Unknown? where can it be, if not the extension (for better or worse) of what we already know — some fabrication of a great enigmatic Fable that never starts from a true zero but from an unfathomable Mystery, or one not yet fathomed?

My little Patagonian of 7,700 years ago runs with me and goes — or wants to go — beyond this duly certified human Prison and these inexorable deaths, to put an end to this idiotic routine.

And so I remember, one day on the Boul'Mich', when I was a student, I was perhaps seventeen, it was centuries ago perhaps, having seen, pasted to the wall of a poster for some great bank making an advertisement for savings and the interest rate, and then that formidable Armchair, that living scandal, right there before my eyes:

YOUR FUTURE IN AN ARMCHAIR

The future of whom and of what?

This senseless present on the boulevard of the 5th borough — where was it going?

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I never got over it… it was revolting and unacceptable, my whole idiotic historical being cried out NO, it is not possible, not possible. And EVERYTHING was revolting.

I have never stopped being revolted since… years before my duly certified birth at the registry office of the 14th borough?

So I ask myself, this morning full of wonder, whether I am not mad, or something other than what all men take one another to be — these Savages of Patagonia and other places — for the past few hundred millennia of thinking hominids?

And what is there inside this human skull, or what calls itself such?

Perhaps we got the wrong skull, or put on the head of a learned or pontifical clown in place of what is actually inside — inside what, precisely?

I have not stopped marvelling and revolting since so many Egypts and Indias on other vanished planets — what?

Perhaps I am the Rebel Angel of the universe!

Or its next unknown skull in the archaeological entrails of this earth beneath its well-asphalted boulevards?

Anything — but not "the future in an armchair." Not even the future in a well-padded coffin, not even in a venerable sarcophagus of honoured mummies at Thebes.

Enough of all that!

I would love to be reborn in the skin of a Patagonian savage 7,700 years ago, and see whether one can do better — not more "wise" or more "learned" or genetically improved, but Something Else than these honourable molecules that will make other little molecules that will make other little beasts with a high annual interest rate — what interest is all that! Even all those years, one has had enough! and their calendars and their little or great Histories.

What if we changed our story for once?

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1. A Little Devil of a Patagonian

Once upon a time, in the Kermadec Islands of some ill-mapped prehistoric latitude, there was a wild child of whom no one could say whether he was angel or devil — devil certainly, as far as his old mother was concerned, the widow Lisette, who had lost her husband at sea, vanished at sea aboard his old sinagot with its red sail, all patched up but sailing all the same.

— Where is Papa?

Everyone has a father. He had none — a tremendous piece of luck, which others call misfortune.

Old Lisette scratched her bun and looked at the dark continent over there, and tossed her lock of hair in the wind.

— There was a north-easterly wind and he did not come back. The Great Goddess took him in her arms.

The old Patagonian woman stamped her foot in the orange sand of the cove, which flew off with the wind.

— But…

— That's enough.

— But, persisted our amiable little devil, insufferable to all — and to himself — except to his little mother — there is still a cemetery behind the cliff, on the other side of the Lion Rock? What is a cemetery? Everyone goes there. What is it, to "disappear" — without a cemetery?

— There are easterly storms. There is no cemetery for him.

— Then I want to do like him. I'd rather run like him.

Old Lisette shrugged, looked at her devil with a kind of love in her narrowed eyes, the way one gazes at the shimmering open sea with its little silver ripple.

— Right, enough, let's go home.

And they took the moorland path back to the village. A dozen huts, each with its devil and its greedy goats. And a great owl carved in granite, emblem of the place. There was even a school, alas, which our angel rarely attended — he preferred the breeze and his red-sailed dinghy, and off you go! Besides, he had few friends; he fought with everyone — not with his fists but with a kind of rage in his heart… for nothing, or for what? The "dark continent" over there interested him more.

A goat came to lay its rubber lips on his fingers and pulled and pulled to browse some more.

— Tell me, little mother…

— What now?

Old Lisette had turned toward the great wind behind — it smelled of sea-foam and fresh moorland.

— What is life? What does one do?

— Well! one makes girls and boys, that brings joy all round. And then one goes tuna fishing.

— Joy… I don't like girls and boys. I'd like to go fishing for joy.

Old Lisette was left speechless. There was a smile in her eyes, and it was love that understands without understanding. This devil of a son was decidedly… what?

— Me, I'd like to love always and always… like you.

And he darted off toward the Coast.

*

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2. The Dark Continent?

She had a few doubts about this improbable son and set off toward the quay with her basket of shrimps.

And indeed, there he was tightening the sheets of his jib, still at anchor. She walked toward the little slipway. The seagulls were watching for fish on the orange dunes, and everything was smooth — it smelled nicely of home. A dozen sinagots, sails furled, waited at anchor.

— Well now, what are you cooking up?

He turned his fair lock with a broad smile and I know not what storm behind it. He was a strange combination, this sailor — where did he come from?… He did not know himself; that was the difficulty, otherwise everything would be as smooth as a good harbour.

— I'm heading to the Kernic passage.

— Be careful, it's dangerous.

That was the worst thing to say to this cheeky one.

— Not at all! There's a light north-westerly, we're at half-tide.

— The winds shift…

— Not my head. Tell me, little mother — how far is the "dark continent"? How many days?

— Ah! I knew it, so that's what it is…

— What do they do on the continent?

Stiffly came the reply, with a most uncharming pout.

— They learn to live.

At that, our charming devil stood open-mouthed… "Learn to live"… as if that could be taught! All you have to do is breathe the surf and off you go far-far into the blue beyond with the laughing gull in its black hood. It's right there just under the hood.

— And what do they fish for?

— They don't fish. They eat other people's fish.

— Then they are thieves.

— Well!…

And our Vicki — for such was his never-baptised name, and for good reason: there was no church at this happy uncertain latitude, in these islands never overflown save by gulls. Nobody to tell you "good" and "evil," so everything was good, except when the hull was sinking, and even then too, there is some good to be found — Vicki, then, unfurled the little red sail of his cutter, tightened the shrouds, and Off-we-go.

Good mother Lisette heaved a sigh, shrugged her shoulders, bought a full basket of shrimps and rock crabs, and headed home.

All the same, she began to ponder that open mouth of her beloved devil: "Learn to live"… what?

It would seem to be a mystery from which one returns, or does not return, like her old thunderclap of a husband.

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3. The great Goddess

That day, the wind was raging. Full north-east. "The winds shift," his little mother used to say. Our vagabond went to sit in his favourite corner, which could have been the corner of all the worlds and all the winds of the earth: the Lion Rock. A cormorant was beating its wings, all black and pearled with foam. It was a sudden white sea making a great wild music, and his eyes were lost out there-out there as if that out-there never ended, and he would have liked to sail off into that beyond-out-there — and where is it? His eyes were an immense wordless question; perhaps they would have liked to roll some music too, to be that which was beating in there without words — and what beats? It rose from far-far away like bottomless seas, perhaps it was always. The Lion's jaws spurted from wave to wave — perhaps it was an eternity of waves — and everything was melted as if into oneself. That self-same was like everything and everywhere. It was the old storm of the blasted worlds raging that they did not know where they were in this world, or what they were doing in it — music perhaps, and for whom?

Our vagabond of here-and-now would have liked to drown in it, once and for all. The Great Goddess would have taken him in her arms. And then what? Perhaps he would run everywhere with her and stroke her foam-hair. It was so intense inside.

Then she appeared, slowly, gently, like foam that condenses, just beneath the Lion's jaws, and slowly, gently, she grew and wrapped her arms around that heartbeat so intense one could not tell whether it was rage or love — that fire-what that wanted to be in there.

— At last! You are here. I have been waiting for you a long time.

That had been known forever, and it had not been known.

— But I was always there, little one! and I have loved you for a long time.

Her voice was gentle and tender, like the music of all the seas making a great surf known and recognised.

— Yet I could not hear you…

— Now you will always hear me, if you call me.

— And shall I see you? I would like to caress you.

— But that is why I made all these vagabond Vickis! and all these lions and beasts howling because they cannot find me. And all these worlds. You will see my hand in every circumstance.

— And what shall I do now?

— You will make a little one of me.

Then everything fell silent in that wild heart, as though it had gone deaf and mute, quiet as a great smooth harbour.

*

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4. The golden line

That Beloved of a forgotten old Patagonia has come back — where is she?

Perhaps she runs with a little wild Vicki who wanted to love always and always, like his old mother Lisette — not to make girls and boys, not to go tuna fishing, but to fish for joy? And how does one fish for all that? with what golden line?

There is a line to be found — not that of these blasted ancestors, all cultivated and proper in their armchair. And even less that of those photogenic and hypnotic rascals who practise their learned black magic or their religions of death and cemeteries.

All that we know — but where is… what we do not know? Because it is not yet born. And yet it was born with a first wonder of a savage prostrating himself on the earth before the first sunrise.

I have always awoken with clenched teeth in the morning of the world, and this morning there was a Smile — like after storms, old storms, interminable storms. All of that was over.

I was discovering the golden line.

A strange golden line emerging from the Silence of my heart after all the noise of the world and its latest news recounting the old murders of the Dark Continent or the discoveries of some super-molecule that would make other little beasts just as dim-witted.

Or the latest prophecies of a trembling earth.

My golden line said nothing — absolutely nothing at all — perhaps it murmured like the little ripple on the smooth sea; it was the empty void, full of who-knows-what, yet knowing all the same without knowing. When one knows, everything is already lost.

That is what Vicki did, step by step on the orange dunes where not even a solitary seagull was laughing. But there was a Smile watching him, like that of a vanished Beloved still seeming to whisper her love. It was always and always, like a little unfathomable spring making a music without notes, for nothing, or for whoever thirsts for something at last.

Vicki walked with his line of thirst.

He walked for a long time.

— But where were you! I looked and looked for you…

It was little mother Lisette, worrying about her vagabond son, always ready for thirty-six improbable adventures of the world.

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5. The Season of Smiles

—… How you have changed! said old Lisette.

— Me!

— What happened to you?

— Nothing!

Nothing — but everything had changed within, as if it were a powerful, thirsting Nothing that was digging a bottomless hole to fill that vagabond with… what? It said nothing, it did nothing, except to take a step and one more — to walk in that. It was the Mystery of the world, right there. Vicki was a hole of mystery searching for its key and rummaging through everything like beneath all the ruins of the world. He no longer wanted to sail toward the Dark Continent — it was there too, along with everything else that had fallen to ruin. And what is there underneath? What is there? He was no longer Vicki nor anything known. He was a consuming thirst, a mystery to himself.

He walked. Was it years, ages or minutes, all full of another Time that did not make tomorrows or other days — only equinoxes and solstices and tides beneath the moorland wind.

And then she arrived.

One equinox day with its furious tides.

Hair dishevelled in the wind and drenched all over as after a shipwreck. Yet she was clutching something to her soaking throat.

It was on the beach behind the quay, where her hull had run aground.

The eastern island — the last of the Kermadec — had sunk, the fishermen were saying: the latest mischief of the Dark Continent.

She looked at him, a little lost, but suddenly upright, the way one looks for the first time in the world at a beloved face — lost and found again on an unknown land. It made a small trembling note in his heart.

She smiled.

The fishermen were gathering round.

— What is your name? he asked.

— I don't know.

— Come.

They took the moorland path.

She was still holding to her heart that thing wrapped in a scrap of orange silk torn from her dress.

— We'll go and see my little mother.

The fishermen grumbled amongst themselves: the seasons are unhappy, the islands are sinking, everything is topsy-turvy.

But there was a Smile behind it all.

It was the Season of the Smile beneath the night of the earth.

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6. My sweet castaway

Without knowing why, she took his hand in hers.

It was the time of the Patagonians — one could do anything without thinking, provided it felt right; one had only to listen within for what makes a little music, or does not, in this forest of the body.

— I lost everything in the water, so everything is new here and it smells good.

— But what are you holding? asked Vicki.

— It is my ektara — it is all I have left.

She unwrapped a small oval instrument of rose-coloured wood, with a long neck and a tiny soundbox, and one string — just one — which she plucked to make sure. It produced a small, thin sound that went far-far away and seemed to echo with the soft voice of the castaway and her hair in the wind.

Little mother was arriving, and she exclaimed…

— Ah! I knew something had happened to you. Who is this?

— She is my Sweet.

Little mother looked at her with those narrowed eyes that gaze at the ocean as if embracing everything in a single glance.

— She ran aground with her hull on the beach.

— Yes, she is soaked — she needs to dry. I'll give her a dress… How old are you?

— I don't know.

— You seem older than my sailor boy…

She looked again at the long auburn or golden-brown hair.

— It seems you come from far away.

— I come from the sea and the rocks.

— Then that's fine. I'll put you in my thunderclap of a husband's workshop.

And off they went.

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7. An otherworldly Sweet

Vicki went back to the Coast alone.

Everything was silent within him, save for a kind of joy in the body — like a good wind blowing. Something was blowing, he knew not what. He no longer wanted to know what. He wanted to take a step and one more. He held his line of joy. It was this that trembled with the wild lavender with its tiny blue flowers, that shivered with the orange fold of the dunes, with the seagull perched on one leg. Perhaps it was the Great Goddess caressing her world. And the world was opening its eyes, opening its eyes wide and round like the first time in the world. It was vast and calm and smooth, with just a little silver ripple coming to lick the rock — and I rather believe the rock itself was enchanted. One could lose oneself in there and find oneself in the world like a first unknown self, with all manner of little things trembling and pulsing in the virgin forest of a man.

The world was delightful.

And then my Sweet arrived with a little dancing step, her ektara perched on her shoulder, head tilted as though she were listening and listening to a music from elsewhere — and it was all there in her rosy face and the folds of her dress in the wind.

— At last, we find each other again!

And it was like love always-and-always finding itself again as if there had never been anything else in the world — only that breathing, everywhere, in everything, that ran and ran to find itself again and was lost and was reborn to be all new, like the rhythm of the equinoxes and the birds' nests in the hollow of the rock and the warmth of the sands.

All one had to do was go, a step and one more, in this blossoming and trembling of the world, with another hand in his to set joy running and one ektara string to pluck all that in a little moment of always-and-always…

*

But then — where does it lead?

With his sailor's blood, he was searching for his heading. There had to be a heading and landmarks. Joy, love — very well; that is what carries you, like the sea of all seas, but to go where? Not to make girls and boys who will sail again to go where? Run aground or sink somewhere.

— You say you lost everything…

— Except this.

And she clutched her ektara.

She looked at the sky for a long time, as if she too were searching for her heading — a star shining in the East, as if it were speaking to her within. A surf from far-far away.

— I don't know why, but I have always loved the stars. But I remember a shock, as if I were sinking in the night. I was sinking and sinking — it was long and dark. I held this to my heart like a drowning woman, like my last lifeline to the earth.

— What was the earth like?

— I don't remember any more… There was a light air, it smelled good… It was luminous.

She stayed there, nose in the air.

— There was a great Queen too, and then… a great white bird…

All at once she entered into silence as if into deep meditation.

— You have forgotten everything.

— Except this.

And she plucked a string that went to join the shivering of the moorland and the cry of the rock beneath its caress of foam.

— Yes, indeed! One can make music — but for whom?

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— Perhaps I fell from my land to make the night here sing? to listen to the little surf from elsewhere… And oh well! one makes music for nothing… because it sings, that is all. If it does not sing, there is nothing.

She made a little pout trying to smile at her impossible Vicki.

— Your eastern island sank beneath the Continent's tide, the fishermen say.

— But I am still singing, you see, you hear — and it is for you.

He remained silent. And there was "something" filling his hole of silence; he seemed to sense the Smile of the Great Goddess.

— One day, I saw the Great Goddess…

She started.

— You saw her?

— Yes. She was all white, there, beneath the Lion Rock — like foam so soft and tender, filling everything. She told me: "You will make a little one of me."

Sweet was left mute, with an immense question in her eyes.

— How does one make an unknown one…? with a vertebrate carcass that is not made of foam?

— Perhaps one must sail in order to know?

— Sail in what? in nothing? It is not yet! And on what sea? I know only the Kernic passage and the Dark Continent over there… But what? Another quay with men who are not good? "They smell bad," my little mother told me.

— Here it smells good.

— Then sail in your heart!

And she laughed and laughed like the foam pearling beneath the Lion's snout.

Out there, there was a wise old Patagonian, perhaps the ancestor of peoples, who murmured in his beard:

we are all castaways from nowhere.

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8. A journey into the Void

I shall never cease to be astonished by life.

So: I am seventy-seven years old, apparently, and I woke up 7,700 years before my birth — but the strange thing is that I continue to be seventy-seven years old, duly recorded at the registry office of the 14th borough on some well-asphalted continent, with strange things swarming under my before-feet — or after-feet? One does not quite know in which direction it moves. It is an unknown that perhaps belongs to always-and-always, and if one were to know that Unknown, perhaps there would be no more stories, or it would be a different Story. We live a Mystery that perhaps runs with us — with Anubis and Gilgamesh — on two legs that think we know everything, or nearly everything. But perhaps our legs know better than we do?

It is a strange thing — like two lives walking one upon the other (like two "programmes," our learned contemporaries would say): one that is entirely genetic and well-determined, and the other… that is not yet born, or not quite yet, or perhaps born always. And we go along the Boulevard of our provisional seventeen years with a trembling question of an old Patagonian who thought himself prehistoric. But if one could only and simply ask the question, it would be a true revolution — more revolutionary than that famous 1789 of ours — after so many other lives ruined at Thebes or Memphis and their venerable sacred sarcophagi, or other necropoles perhaps on vanished planets — but there, underfoot, as we run along the boulevard without knowing?

The wise old Patagonian would mutter under his beard: "We are all castaways from nowhere."

But three years later, on the Boul'Mich' of my rebellious seventeen years with its respectable armchair inviting me toward no future — thus, at twenty, in a millennium already gone — I found myself plunged at once into an unknown, stupefying, palpitating "programme," like a last heartbeat…

I was alone in a death-row cell and I listened to an electric saw endlessly cutting planks and planks, a hundred metres from my cell. It was perhaps my last plank. My heart was beating nonetheless in a stupefying naked Silence — like after tombs and all the tombs — but it was my tomb underfoot, I crouching on the frozen granite floor — staring at… nothing. Except for the zinc Kübel^* on the ground. Into nothing.

It was my tomb.

Those seconds were worth an eternity.

There was not even a question. There was only that electric saw and a heartbeat that kept on stubbornly. And a gaze into Nothing.

It took me fifty-seven years to understand that heartbeat and that small second.

That other programme.

^* "Sanitary bucket."

*

When I emerged from that shipwreck still alive, it was a radical Revolt — down to the very depths of the cells of a survivor, or a sur-dead. But tombs — that was finished forever, unless I chose to die by my own hand; but that was still Death winking slyly at me from the corner.

I had an old score to settle with death.

So what then? And that too was a radical and infernal what — it was yes or it was NO.

I ran across three hemispheres of this Dark Continent on the two legs I had left, which were all that remained to me. I was the definitive vagabond of the Void, at every instant on the edge of Yes or No — Yes meant keeping that stubborn heart beating, meant gazing at that Nothing which was perhaps "something," meant running and running still until the thirst was gone; but precisely, a Thirst remained. A formidable Thirst… for what? I ran in the virgin forest with its immense murmuring — murmuring what? Its stridulating green cicadas singing what? and its wings all the same — red or green or yellow — flying where? and its innumerable serpents as if rising from all the hells. All this vibrating, beating people, like the heart of a single Being wanting to beat still in that something-of-a-Nothing astounding — at least there were no men in there. Nor any programme. My null programme was under my feet, in my feet — running with them, watching-watching with eyes of fire as if I were about to burn or burst in a Nothing so intense it might at last be something.

And one day, in a white flash, I said to myself: but this is exactly like my cell over there! Beneath the piercing shriek of my electric saw, with the same heartbeat and those little seconds of nothing lasting an eternity. "That" which made one beat and beat again and breathe. And my whole mad race was carried by that same small null second underfoot in my cell — it was that second making me run and run as if it willed it despite me, as if it were carrying me toward… "something,"

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in its sublime or infernal — unknown — programme; because there was something to be and to know.

I was the castaway of an old country of always, before Ramesses and Gilgamesh — a life that wanted at last to be born, at the end of all those stridulations, and to come forth from the belly of the earth.

Then, so many years or centuries later, I realised that this small null second in my cell was made of Love and that this stubborn heartbeat — here and now, and beneath all the forests of the world and in all the little surfs here or there, on the coast of all the islands appeared and disappeared — was the loving heartbeat of a Mother carrying her little… man still, or… what?

Suddenly, I was falling in love with life.

*

And out there, in an island carried by an old owl, there was a little Vicki sailing in his heart toward that unknown Cape, as if the very Cape were calling him and carrying him in the hollow of its wave.

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9. Before or After?

Now, one day, my old Beloved — this was still in this time or that, on our amnesiac Dark Continent, in a well-known and forgotten country — my old beloved brought me a transcribed page from an ancient prehistoric Sumerian text:

Gilgamesh, I will reveal to you
a hidden thing,
Yes, I will reveal to you
a secret of the Gods:
There exists a PLANT like a thorn
It grows at the bottom of the waters
Its thorn will prick your hands
As the rose does
If your hands pull up this plant
You will find NEW LIFE

*

Now, after so many mad races and wounding thorns across so many fractured and divided continents in the great drift of worlds — having fallen in love with life, returned to some Patagonia, with my young Sweet of always, under the sign of the Owl — I tell myself:

*

*

And fortunately — for sometimes I wonder whether I did not wake up 7,700 years after my birth.

It was an After-Patagonia.

After the shipwreck of the Dark Continent and all those demented little men beneath their enormous learned Artifice. One breath and it would pass.

But the little surf remained, with an old Beloved all new.

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10. A little note of nothing

— So, my sailor, where are you sailing?

— I don't know.

It was old mother Lisette with her wide-open smile of the sea, all crinkled with love and sparkling like foam.

— Well! where is your sail? You haven't capsized like your thunderclap of a father.

— I sail with my Sweet — she is my sail.

— Yet you look all changed. What happened to you?

— Nothing…

Then he looked up, nose to the wind, as if searching for something.

— I met the Great Goddess of the equinox on the Lion Rock. It was on the other side of the cemetery — I want no more cemeteries, never. I want no more fathers, never. I want you who love me, and the wave that loves me, and the Great Goddess of foam.

— Goodness! You won't leave me all alone with the sorrow if you love me.

— Well, no! I want to change men without passing through the cemetery and without sinking my hull. I want… I don't know.

— Your Sweet is good — she comes from the sea and the rocks. So I trust her — listen to her.

She heaved a sigh, breathed in the Coast and looked at her devil of a son.

— You know, life, it's…

— It's what?

— It makes sorrow and tides and joy nonetheless. As long as you have joy, you will sail.

And Vicki went off along the moorland path.

Then he turned sharply and retraced his steps.

— Tell me, little mother…

— What now?

— What was there before the thunderclap fathers?

She was left speechless, mute.

— There were other thunderclaps… and other barques…

— Could we not change tack for once? The Coast tells me I have had many sorrows before my last surf… Sorrows from where?

— I don't know… There are high tides, low tides.

She fell to musing, and her sailless sailor resumed the moorland path.

Decidedly, this son of heaven-knows-what thunderclap would always set her thinking.

*

He walked along his beloved Coast, a step and one more, and that hole of nothing always filled with thirst — as if thirst were the only something in there — and that hole grew ever more hollow, as if it were bottomless, or perhaps like a cry at the bottom calling to him, an old thunderclap of a thousand thunderclaps that never burst.

Then she appeared — his Sweet, veil of a mysterious wind — smiling, with a step that seemed always to dance, hair in the wind that he longed to caress, her ektara on her shoulder, head tilted as if she were listening out there. She plucked the string and that same small frail sound trembled with the surf like all the surfs of the world in a single sound — or a single sound of all the seas of the world. That was the Mystery.

— Sweet, tell me…

— What is there to say, my beloved? I listen and listen to what has no end, what goes far and far like all the capsized barques come back to listen again to the forgotten music of an old shipwreck.

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— What was there on your island?

— I don't remember… there was my ektara. That is all I have left.

Perhaps his hole of nothing was full of music at the bottom? Or of storm and rage because he could not catch that music. A step and one more, a hole and always more. Yes, I did say to little mother: "I have had many sorrows before." That is what that far-away out-there says to me — and a nameless revolt like the roaring of the equinoxes breaking on the rock… to make foam again?

Then the Great Goddess appeared in a white flash of an instant and breathed in his ear:

— Shatter your own rock.

He walked and walked with his Sweet and it never wore away.

She too had heard something blow, but she did not know what and had no desire to know — only to listen and listen again to that small note of nothing that told her everything.

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11. A fountain from the depths

He walked with the surf; he walked as after shipwrecks vanished and always still there. He listened to the wind telling him the same open sea without end or bottom. And him? This point inside. The seagulls, the crabs, the tides, the little lavender in the wind — all made for them; one has only to let it happen as it pushes itself, all on its own. Him, this son of a thousand thunderclaps turning by themselves with the warmth, the cold, the mists and the sun turning by themselves… Him, he was not made all by itself, it did not push itself alone, and the open sea said nothing except that it was open all by itself.

Then, weary of a thousand nothings sailing all alone with no answer, he sat on the dunes that let their sands run away, and he entered into silence.

A Silence like from before the worlds and the tides. A naked, empty silence — almost terrifying or crushing — but it was that point of "him" that was being crushed. Yes, like a bare rock — a first rock perhaps in the sands of the world. That "him" did not stir; it let itself be crushed and crushed by this Silence like a first tomb from before the tombs of a geology never dug — like a first womb of a life never birthed. It pressed and pressed upon that lump of rock-him, as if this very Silence wanted something in the mute Night of an earth not yet born. And it lasted and lasted without time or end, as if that Rock could not be worn away — as if all the power of the worlds were gathered there, coagulated in an imperturbable atom where nothing had ever breathed — as if that very atom, that very power wanted something in its night of stone and silence. And that "him" was there nonetheless beneath that crushing pressure — that self of nothing that cared not for all the tombs and all the lives, that persisted and waited in the belly of no mother, or perhaps of an unknown Mother who knew the hour and the time. And it pressed and pressed.

Close to nothing, his Sweet castaway was there, his old love — but she was like something nonexistent; he saw nothing, heard nothing; he was deaf even to the small surf. He was like a block of stone — some first stone in the world — calling, aspiring with a wild intensity, a crushing intensity of silence, wanting to make "something" come out of that nakedness. A thirst that had never known any river, a cry that had never said what was crying within it, which perhaps had even made all those sands and stones spring forth to call for a drop of love — to awaken all this nothing in the night of the earth…

Then more shipwrecks still, to knock against a null rock and make a drop of foam sparkle.

And it pressed and pressed within that atom of "him" — this fire, this thirst of nothing that would perhaps make Something Else of all those castaways of the islands appeared and disappeared, some brand-new Patagonian on an old submerged geography with all its thunderclaps and deadly knowledge that knew only how to make death live and grieve the old grief.

Then his Sweet sail of old navigations touched a string with a single note, gone with the wind but always there like his one heartbeat in the world — like his single bottomless spring.

A "man" — perhaps that was only this singing flow upon which someone had laid a stone.

Someone had laid a stone over it.

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12. A body

— So, son, where is your sail in the wind?

It was old Lisette — but without a smile, still anxious about her sailor from nowhere, her vagabond without harbour or heading.

— Your Sweet is here, that's certain — but one sails as two in order to…

— To what? That is what I don't know.

— One comes to know by sailing — one tack and then another. One comes to know at the end; it is the wind calling you to its harbour…

Vicki looked at that smile which no longer smiled.

— Or else you stay sitting in your dreams of nothing.

— My dreams are burning — that is all I know. It hurts; it is this aching of nothing that calls me. It is as if your belly had not yet brought me into the world.

— But I love you, you little fool! that is not for nothing. And your Sweet too.

— Well yes! But there is still something calling me — from where, from I know not what coast — it is this I-know-not-what tormenting me like a surf, like the ektara of my Sweet who no longer knows her shipwreck or from which island. So I walk and I listen. And it is silence. And it burns.

Old Lisette remained silent. But her silence spoke love all the same.

*

And the years, or the ages, passed, and a small nothing-fire burned on still — risen from all the shipwrecks to listen once more to one ektara string trembling at the bottom of his heart like the very spring of what makes a being, a world, and all the worlds to come.

There was no longer life or death in that small one, no longer a shipwreck — there was a body risen from the same rock as all the rocks of the world and all the wombs that made and will make a small fire of nothing filled with the same thirst of what murmurs and beats beneath that rock. And that silence itself dug and dug in the hole of sorrow — that nameless cry that had made a body in the world.

It began there.

Afterward — centuries later — other Patagonians on other shores had made heavens and hells and sordid business to earn their lives of identical nothings and their posterity of an equally null anteriority, under their concrete pavements and their science forever re-beginning to embellish an old grief never exorcised.

A body — it began there, but nobody knew what was beginning within, because it always ended the same, on the same note.

Perhaps there was a last missing note.

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13. The last note

He went to the Coast to greet the rising Sun and pressed his forehead to the sand. Perhaps this was what burned at the bottom, beneath the rock, beneath the unknown walking with his steps. It was red like fire-gold, it iridised the whole sea and all the rocks, it kindled the beating life. It was the first mystery of the world. For a long time he remained there, forehead on the sand, gently caressed by that nascent sovereignty. Then the first east wind came to blow its little surf. It was always and of always — like tireless love — that which made an unknown and always-known body, that which beat at the bottom of all bottoms. But he was "him" nonetheless, this fathomless question making a fire within, which would have liked to merge with that Sun and all its iridescent ocean. That which perhaps awaited a gaze — a body — to love Itself and recognise Itself in a million shimmering waves and little wild grasses and trembling leaves leaning to receive this caress. Perhaps one was all-born without knowing it — or in order to know, a million times in a million strange forms, what was being born there and to grow and become this immense beauty pulsing, this which made a little music within — a seagull's cry or Vicki's cry beneath the rising sun.

This small form — of man, apparently, or of who-knows-what beating-there, trembling-there beneath the caress of a million surfs — let itself sink into that null or full or void immensity of who-knows-what, that caress filling itself with a cry of always more, always more, like an ocean calling itself to be still further, still there-beyond, as if beyond all beyond — to be perhaps a single drop of all the bottoms, a single cry of all the surfs, a point crying and so mute, so alone in its call of nothing which would perhaps be the only something at last — the animal cries, the plant cries in its leaves, the savage beats his drum as if that sound were intoxicated by another sound still further, still more beating in an immense always-there that was never enough there, that called, that would perhaps have liked to vanish in its echo, in its desert of thirst, its single drop that would fill everything.

Vicki was that cry, that fire which would perhaps have liked to disappear into its own blaze — and yet it did not want to disappear; it wanted, or it called, that point of sun forever from the other side of all suns and all iridescent seas with a single ray that would radiate everywhere at last — in everything and in those millions of cells of a thirst never healed. He sank into it despite himself, as through layers and layers of geological strata, layers of lives always dead — at Thebes as in the Himalayas — that cried out, called for Life at last beneath their endless deserts, their not-yet, not-yet, searching for that single drop of ocean, their single sound of all the surfs, their single beat of all the drums never extinguished.

It was crushing in that heartbeat of the earth — screaming, burning, like Death itself calling and wanting its own death once and for all, its ultimate pyre in a million and a billion cells.

*

And that very Death knocked and knocked against this Wall of fire or rock that men call "life" — it was the tomb again, or what? Vicki pressed and pressed in that strangling, mortal, crushing, mute hole — as in that death-row cell, after others who gazed at Nothing beneath the strident shriek of an electric saw — that terrifying nullity of everything about to topple again against a firing-squad wall, in some pit or some sarcophagus of the millennia or some pyre of the Inquisitions — and what? This so-called "thinking man" at the end of all those null thoughts collapsing beneath the same gyrating skull going round and round, with a final cry as one calls one's mother on the first day of the world without anything yet having been born in that convolution — except two legs running and running after their own mystery.

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Vicki knocked and stumbled there — this desperado of the last hope striking with his last fire of life, with his last gaze, with the intensity of a million deaths in a single perfectly physiological and terrestrial little cell — and a cry calling upon that Mother who had made all those worlds and all those sorrows — a fiery why, or a Challenge to what had begun there with a first sun.

*

Then the Great Goddess appeared. She caressed her little one with an ancient tenderness, like always… And everything melted — the walls, the sorrows, the cries.

A hole… immense.

*

He did not know; he no longer knew anything of what happened in that second.

It was like a total forgetting down to the depths of the cells, or a first memory, a recognition of… what? It was not born or always born — it was of always; it was love like so many beloved mothers returning through centuries of night that were only an endless tomb. It was almost terrifying in its intensity in those millions of cells, and it rose and rose powerfully from that hole — irresistibly, like millions of springs bursting all at once, sprung from a fountain of fire — and immense, like all the earth caught in its fountain of thirst and all the seas seized in a single drop and all the pearl-foamed surfs in a single note, like a great nuptial hymn never sung on any earth — a great surge of union or reunion of the hells of sorrow with their lost joy and their solar light. A first sun bursting through millions and billions of buried atoms. Like earth and sky become one.

Was this Vicki about to burst? It was terrifying and marvellous — never lived, never so utterly unknown in an earthly body — so that it was like a new kind of death alongside another kind of life, side by side, impossibly possible, crushing in the sudden air of a stratosphere that imperiously, almost ferociously, wanted to pass through those nerves, those ligaments, those cells of an old, recalcitrant skeleton.

And it rose and rose through all the pores of the old earth like a sublime cataclysm that could destroy everything and remake everything in a single irreversible gushing from that hole — or that miraculous breach — that bottomless fountain that could quench all sorrows and alter all the old tombs where we pretended to live.

All masks fell, all words failed, all knowledge collapsed vertiginously in a cruel ultimate savagery where each killed the other to dominate the rest — religiously or otherwise — in a last convulsion of the Living Death, triumphant.

It was Yes, or it was No.

It was another Being on the earth, or the old Beast.

It was the Unknown casting a last note into the madness of men — a tiny note of nothing going far-far away with the caress of the winds, for souls in distress, those who call without words, and the silent listening of an old Mother awaiting her golden child.

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14. The first time in the world

She was there — his Sweet, veil of always, separated and found again, shipwrecked and recognised in this immense Unknown of life, this Mystery spurting beneath his feet, opening like a tomb of all the tombs from the bottom of the earth — terrifying and sublime, infernal and miraculous — like a gushing of fire and freed shadows rushing toward their Light, their sky on earth, like a cataract in reverse or a volcano.

It was old Death in reverse casting its cry buried through so many deserts in the sands, so many continents gone under the waters and the rubble — come back to live once more their Secret never found: That which was there in a first beginning of everything, making a simple heart beat and our paws run along so many tracks, and mutely carrying our senseless race through everything and despite ourselves — calling and calling our last cry at the end of it all, in that despair that wanted its Hope all the same on this earth and in a body.

His Sweet looked at him as if for the first time of all the lost times. She smiled.

— You are here.

It was simple and it was full.

Like a drop of all the suns and all the seas.

*

Slowly he straightened himself.

Slowly he came out of his hole.

He nearly toppled and swayed on his legs like a drunken man, as if the earth were no longer solid beneath his feet.

He looked at his Sweet with a lost, slightly haggard air — as if he were finding his harbour again through the mists, his point of sun, his North of all the lost compasses. He heard the small silver surf like a first good morning — but it was no longer the same Day; it was the Day as after death and all deaths, like a living eternity present in every second. IT LIVED like an adoration that adores without knowing — it was, IT IS, of always and since always, like an infinite Sun embracing everything, beating in everything, like a point of all the points of the world, like a single beat of being on the earth that was Love, made of Love, carrying all those billions of atoms and cells toward the immortal and imperious Cape, toward their great Air of another breathing, toward their great Note of another Music singing everywhere like a single immense symphony of the worlds — a single embrace comprehending everything, feeling everything at the same time in the same heartbeat, a single second of all times, without past or present but an eternal Future already here, groping toward its encounter with Itself, like little Vicki toward his Sweet of always.

— What? she said with her smile from far-far away that was all here — as if she were still listening to the small note of his ektara that brought her the sound of the worlds and told her everything without words.

He swayed on his feet like a Dionysus fallen from elsewhere — like a trembling bird risen from an earthquake. It was crushing, and yet it was light, as if he could take flight through all the stratospheres and dance wildly with all the little leaves in the wind.

— Sweet, listen… I no longer know the languages of here, but you will hear my new ektara.

And the surf rolled:

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He swayed again on his old beast's paws.

His Sweet watched her Dionysus from Elsewhere with the wonder of an old Beloved gazing for the first time at her wild lover as though she had never seen him.

It was the first time in the world, in an old unknown Patagonia that wanted to know itself, to sing itself, in a marvellous Unknown to be explored without end.

She smiled, the surf rolled its light foam, and everything was freed, exorcised forever.

The first note was complete.

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15. The new life

The future takes a long time to enter our present — and yet it runs with us, like that little Patagonian of 7,700 years ago who ran with me beneath that Boulevard of my seventeen years and stirred an incomprehensible and so profound Revolt against that "future in an armchair," as if he remembered a truer, greener Time — and perhaps as if he remembered a Future already here that was calling me — as if the cells of the body knew and understood something that the Mind does not understand, and pushed and pushed toward their own unaccomplished Mystery, toward their "already-here," yet to be discovered.

Life is a great Enigma.

And these cells sometimes push toward the worst or the infernal in order to wrest from it a sublime cry opening unexpected doors — the Future at last in bloom beneath an old Void, or what still seemed to be a tomb — as in that condemned man's cell and that stupefying Silence, that null and mortal second that made me run through deserts still more to slake my incomprehensible Thirst, and dig through tombs and tombs yet again and odious pyres to kindle that Fire at the bottom — that ultimate cry and that Defiance to the old triumphant Death that wanted to die in order to be born again to its sinister story and pretend to live within our four present walls. But these old cells knew their bottomless Spring upon which a stone had been laid; they knew their singing flow that at last wanted to cry its cry, to sing its Life of an old Country of always-always that was not in Paradise but under our feet, beneath this old Rock, this walled-up Matter wanting, or which would want, to imprison us still more in its millions of identical Presents and its futile boulevards.

But these cells know their Open Sea and a great wind from elsewhere and another breathing and a geography without frontiers where everything communicates through its sole consciousness. They await their hour and push and push by every means toward their ineluctable Future on the earth and in a body.

Without realising it, we live inside a habitual human diving suit that imprisons us, certainly, but also protects us against an infinity of perceptions we could not understand and above all a multitude of forces we could not bear — like that other extra-terrestrial air, that other breathing that would crush us without our diving suit, that Marvel at the bottom of the cells' Matter that would disturb our pleasant convolutions if it were uncovered too quickly and blew all our little geographical borders apart and smashed through our microscopic Present to send us off wandering in a Time where Past and Future coexist and cohabit in the same skin. When one lives all three times physically at the same time, one does not know the depth of poignant intensity that is there. It takes a long time to learn to bear the New Life in a body. It is an immense breach in our walls. Like that day I awoke 7,700 years before my birth.

But it was always there and of always, like a knowledge without knowing that our mind cannot understand — like an immense Love running after Itself to love Itself in a million breaths, like Vicki after so many Beloveds vanished and returned. And what detours, to find again what had begun there in a single small cell, in a small naked second, a single enchanted ektara note.

She was watching her wild Dionysus as for the first time in the world. He was swaying on his feet; he no longer quite knew how to walk, as if he could just as well fly — it was another world and another Law that no longer knew its old gravitation toward the old tombs. The weight of the world had fallen away at once.

It was the time of the New Life.

The time of a single small, true note that would cause the Beauty of the earth and of our hearts to bloom.

8–9 March 2001

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