Frost: A Novel (34 page)

And then: “The most promising plans, the most promising conditions, everything goes to rack and ruin, everything that contradicts absolute silence. And in you I seem to identify some admirable character traits … And you’re able to listen as well. As far as I’m concerned, I am of unimaginable hardness. Not laughter and tears, as people might think. No. Admittedly, at your age the greatest danger is the ability to make anything of yourself, and then not to make anything
 … Because, like all humans, you aren’t able to identify your moment. Nothing identifies its moment, that’s it! … where there’s a precipitate fall or climb, you don’t know … where it goes down into the practice of letting live and vegetating along. Most humans lose themselves in the sexual at thirty or so. And thereafter they just eat. I sometimes detect a certain astounding cleverness in what you say, a radical clarity, a philosophical aptitude that sources everything in a higher plane. And that’s the deadly thing.”

“It might be the sound of falling snow or the smack of a bird on the cobblestones, the possibilities are endless … Often, it’s just the smell of the millennia in my nostrils … I’m sure you sometimes come across some long-forgotten scene from decades past … You see a tree and you see a window, and in actual fact there’s no tree and no window, but a city and a country and a river and a man who wakes up, who dies, who shakes hands with you or gives you a smack … Isn’t that right? Those are the issues that have always preoccupied me. The sound of my stick on the road, the voice of the priest, or the groan of the knacker as he shoulders his rucksack … One might pursue one’s investigations into these matters indefinitely, take them to inhuman lengths, indecent lengths, into religion, and into the opposite of religion … Religion, you see: my tree, my stick, my lungs, my heart, my taciturnity, my attentiveness, my crippledom … Progress with these things makes it all so much more megalomaniacal, the advance in my brain, wherever advance is possible, only where there is no advance, you understand … Perhaps that’s what held me back from the ultimate! It’s a leading characteristic
of mine to be modest and self-effacing. You might be surprised to hear it, but that’s the way it is. Cause and effect are almost indistinguishable to me. Science, you know, I have nothing to do with, I resisted it all my life, it would be an abuse against my nature … of course I’m at a disadvantage in my sentimental preferences for the clear scenes of my past. And another thing: vindictiveness! The way the past is put together from vindictiveness is something that’s worth considering. One has nothing to cling to, and feels pointless … Is it that?” He says: “All at once my head had pushed everyone in the public bar back against the wall, all of them, even the ones at the extra table, the knacker, the policeman, the engineer, the landlady and her daughters, all of them. In my dream, you know. My head was suddenly bigger than the public bar, and it crushed them all. A firm lethal blow in all directions, into the reaches of the furthest walls. A terrible effect. But my head didn’t have sufficient force to destroy the inn. The juice of those humans that my head squashed, annulled, was running down my face. Objects and persons were pulped. And the feelings of the objects and persons, likewise. Their feelings too! My eyes grew dark. My tears mixed with the pulp, because of course I wasn’t able to move. In a corner of the public bar, between the bar and the window, my little body had found a refuge for itself, though it was horribly cramped. I was unable to breathe. The sweetish taste on my lips! I tried not to ingest the pulp, but I had no alternative. My tongue was able to push it away, but not the taste. I couldn’t breathe. My ears were flattened against the ceiling, you know, so I couldn’t hear anything. Since everything had happened so suddenly, I wasn’t able to warn anyone, not you, or the engineer, or the landlady, or the knacker.
I was terribly unhappy. I cried, because I had killed everyone. My head tried to break out of the inn, because it was afraid of suffocating. It was able to push the walls back slightly, but no air came in. There was no chink or crack, the walls gave like rubber. I went wild. With that, my head suddenly shrank back to its original dimensions, and the crushed persons and objects, the pulp, you remember, fell to the floor in large hard slabs … Then, these slabs were once more persons and things. They were sitting in their places, eating and drinking, and placing orders and paying, you know, and the landlady’s daughters were jumping over the benches as if nothing were amiss. I woke up exhausted and saw that I had misplaced my woolen blanket. I stood up and lay down again and wrapped myself up as warmly as I could. Then, between waking and sleeping, I made my next highly interesting, albeit traumatic discovery: the landlady was standing in my room, and was shooing away a swarm of birds from a tree that stood in the middle of my room. She clapped her hands, and the birds took to the air, and everything went dark … Then I got up, and tried a cold footbath. The footbath afforded me some relief. At any rate, I didn’t dream anymore. Maybe because I was sitting on my bed and browsing in my Pascal. Maybe.”

“I must point out to you,” said the painter, “that just one step further on the thinking is completely different, that just one step further on existence is completely different; the virtues
and the issues are the same, there are the same inattentivenesses, and the same impressions, and the same causes, but the effects are terrifyingly different … It’s difficult to make myself clear to you, I could as easily be speaking to a tree, and I am in fact speaking to a silhouette, yes, a silhouette, to a concept flexible to the point of madness, but you are a person whose being is always acute. I should like to point out to you that, if you adduce the idea of a ‘bloodless landscape,’ merely adduce it, and blow it up like a balloon, like an enormous balloon, with incomparable lung power, with the lung power of an extraordinary universe, that it is then possible to move about outside the shadow side of our imagination … I confront myself with the keenest frost, which to the thought is true and acute, and pitifully ridiculous … I have been speaking in my cruel and hopelessly elaborate way, but listen now: I am undergoing a ‘chilling of my memory’ which I should like to call unjustified, or rather: I am distracting myself from within, purely so that I leave myself alone! Or rather: my brain is distracting from the relatedness of the world, distracting from myself, from the malice of inventions that have enabled me to exterminate myself … In the darkest places, only incomprehensibility carries any conviction, you understand, I should like to put you in the way of a fascinating metaphor, as you might cast adrift a dog on an endless ocean, as you set a bird deep underground, as you pitch a man in his memory; it’s not the height, it’s not the depth, height and depth are both laughable compared to the circumstance that the catastrophic is laughable compared to the benign … but for the sake of these notions of mine it is imperative that I must soon disappear, I must soon burn: I have always been attracted to the notion of burning, having to burn for my own sake has always been my secret version of personal
fame … If I fail to die, I thought, if I fail to be confused … if I fail with my ideas … You understand! … I get ready for my journey, and deceive the world … I pack my bags and deceive the world … I board a thousand trains and deceive the world … I distract it from the point where I’ll be arriving … Because the end is nothing more than the nausea that a decomposed human causes … Well, and even though the end is also a shipwreck, I will have to undergo that final stifling act of coition, that torment, that turns the calamity of my relinquished existence into a devilishly certain conspiracy. I’m not even thinking of dying,” said the painter, “I’m not even thinking of fame … I’m not even thinking of indecency, of the indecency of dissolution.”

“The way the brain reverts to being a sort of machine, the way it hammers out everything once more that it was hit and knocked with hours and days and weeks previously. The way a word can trigger a whole avalanche of logic, sending whole settlements of verbal constructions into the depth, without the least exemption. As if some runtish dictator, invisible, unapproachable, at least for humans, threw a vast machinery into action, with horrendous noise that one is helpless to oppose …” The painter continued: “You must imagine a rocky ravine in the prettiest colors of the universe, most especially watercolors, the colors of putrefying flesh, a ravine which a man enters, following orders. If you like, you can press a suitcase into his hand, set a hat on his head, give him tight clothes to wear, whatever your fancy might be, or your inner virtue, because such are the dreams, opposed to my
version, that I now impose on you: a man with the fantastic on his back, with disappointment at his society, which, far from any social groupings, has done everything to set him on the road to ruin, a man with a monstrous memory, with an imagination that is majestic and unalterable, not capable of heightening, not capable of shrinking … This man, and me, his inventor, you now drive into the ravine, you yell at him, you smack him in the face, you simplify him, you imagine him as rustling leaves on trees, as crumbling of rocks, as teeth ground in fear, so that you can join him; you introduce yourself as terror, and slowly you take from him his fear by concentrating his mind on his last will … He senses his departure, but he no longer opposes it … he is lulled by the impossibility of actually feeling his pain, and by your stratagems … Well, now we have set someone en route to hell, created him and set him going, at a time one would have to call the seventh day of discreation, the seventh and last day of discreation … You must imagine that only the air still exists, everything else in this person is just a laughable extravagance, a feeling his brain—already dissolved into nothing—is limping in pursuit of … the man may still retain certain bearings in a fixed world, a sense of father and mother for example, of cities, of scientific experiments, notions of manual work, rudimentary anthropophagous impulses of an animal sub-brain, that we should imagine in the name of science … a designation occurs to me, a pitiful, a scandalous designation, a so-called cemetery name floating over his tomb, his cement tomb … can you guess the name? Can you guess the horror of horrors? I can see that my instruction, which makes up a fourth of my being (one fourth is the notion of instruction, one fourth is the notion of repugnance, one fourth is the
notion of futility, and one fourth the notion of no-longer-and-not-yet), I have given you the pleasure of bewilderment, which is completely what I had in mind, and completely what my invented character would have had in mind as well, whom we should think of as a teacher, to my mind teachers are the best characters, the teacher is
the
made-up character par excellence … well now, this teacher enters the ravine, and gets to his destination, which is of course a schoolhouse. But what is a schoolhouse? A house where things are taught that someone doesn’t yet know, can’t yet know … I don’t want to go on, I say: the teacher understands that nothing can be learned anymore, that everything is ignorant, that everything is finished, everything is beginning, and so on: he unpacks, he unpacks his bags. Do you get the scene?” I say: “Yes, I get the scene.”—“Hold on to the picture: the teacher unpacks his bags, he discovers that it’s cold in the school. He turns on the heating. He arranges his books. He finds the classroom, he suddenly knows the names of the children he will teach—you were thinking of children as well, I hope? He says to himself: I wish I had my books in my head! Did you think of that too? You see: the teacher is thinking of the past, he can only think of the past because he can only think in the past. There is nothing very remarkable about humans,” said the painter. “The brain believes in the progress it aims to make, but the brain cannot make progress. The flesh is different there: it consists of the progress that is denied the brain … What would you say to this: the teacher has been ordered to the ravine to perish … in an obvious, a simplistic way, nothing obscure, in a form of butting forward … Even though he knows where his obedience has got him, namely into the ravine, he is still thinking in terms of teaching and
the possibilities of teaching: because I am a teacher, he may be thinking to himself … Do you still see the teacher? As I’ve presented him to you in my art? In the perspectivelessness that I master, because I am so full of different perspectives? So, you see him: the polarity going from the animal to the animal … I don’t ask myself what else shall I do with my teacher, not anymore … As it’s winter, I have the pleasant conviction that I shall have snow fall, the holy snow of holy winter, I shall have the earth covered with snow, the ravine stuffed full of snow, the schoolhouse roofed with snow, I feel like proceeding with the delicacy of impotence, to make everything in this teacher impossible, to prevent his blood from circulating, to weld his brain to the freezing point, to the absolute freezing horizon … If you’re still there, where the teacher is unpacking his bags … If you still picture him standing in front of the stove … on the way over to the hunting lodge, as it might be, yes, even before the onset of the great frost, I ventured to imagine a vicarage with all the ingredients of earthly felicity … Now, you see: the teacher, shut in his destructive fantasy, slowly he is forced back in on himself by his thinking, into the idea of ‘never-ending snow’ … One should be careful not to refer to such a procedure as ‘story,’ ” said the painter. “You see: I am now involved in the falling snow, in the even falling of the snow … the world around, our idea of the world around, becomes softened to the degree that it is forced to assume demonic traits … a devilish silence makes concentration impossible, all the while it prompts him to raise his performance, suggests the unrepeatableness of all feelings … Now I know only too well,” said the painter, “given my possibilities, you would have dealt very differently with the teacher, you would
have integrated him in an idyllic peace, in a daily routine, in the vibrations of youthful sensitivity, into mutilated vices, into mutilated sorrows, into the mutilated notions of end and departure that typify youth, that youth makes possible, and not into the great vices, the great sorrows, not the great imaginings of end and departure that age allows … You would have enclosed the teacher in your petty lie, you would, shall we say, have let him live! But I will not let my teacher live, I must not let him live, I cannot let him live, my teacher will not live, he has never lived, he must not live, the living teacher is anathema to me, it denies itself to me: I must kill him, I must let him die a fearful death, a second death, because as far as I’m concerned, the teacher has always been long since dead … So, now I’m listening to the falling snow and the cracking of tree trunks … the beginning of the ice age, the crumbling of human melancholy … now I have a monstrous landscape of death crystals before me, for the teacher to walk into.—I see the occasionally moving way his being opposes extinction, how his head denies the summonses of death … how his feet suddenly falter, how everything about this man fails as fail it must … how this man, this teacher, is extinguished, is dead … the teacher is dead … Now, you see,” said the painter, “I make my world anew: now I am once again on the first day of creation, on the second day of creation, I am busy imagining all the days of creation I need … the teacher is dissolved in the air of my exemplary conditions, the teacher is dissolved in the lack of an answer, the lack of a face. The teacher has fallen prey to a wild transmogrification of intellectual dread, to a resurgent animal intellectualism … Did you manage,” said the painter, “to follow in every little detail the scenery I tried to lay before you?”
I didn’t reply. “You see,” said the painter, “the brain is capable of nourishing itself on the inventions, the great inventions of little and lesser and infinitesimal dread … it can make itself roar … make itself a world, an original world, an ice age, a vast stone age of organization … One proceeds from a very small and insignificant instance, from a little individual who falls into one’s hands … From the principle of some desecration, the justness of such desecration, into the desecration itself … one leaves the victim lying there, one has snow fall on him, one has him decompose, dissolve, as an animal might dissolve that one once might have thought oneself to be … Do you understand? Life is the purest, clearest, darkest, most crystalline form of hopelessness … There is only one way to go, through the snow and ice into despair; past the adultery of reason.”