The Difficulty of Being (17 page)

She
^*
makes use of it in the most disordered manner. What man calls vice is common to all species whose mechanism works blindly. Nature attains its ends at any cost.
^†

We can hardly imagine the springs of such a mechanism among the stars, since the light which exposes them to us is the result either of reflection or, like all light, of decomposition. Man imagines that they serve him as so many chandeliers, but he sees them only waning or in extinction.

It is certain that the rhythm of this great machine is a cruel one.

The most tender of lovers collaborate in it. The suck of the vampire lingers corrupted in their kiss, a rite representing the appropriation of the blood of the person loved, the making of an exchange.

This desire for the blood of others is even more strongly expressed when the lips suck the skin to the point of becoming, as it were, a cupping-glass, and attracting the blood to it
and leaving a bruise, a mark that adds exhibitionism to vampirism. This mark proclaims that the one bearing it, usually on the neck, is the prey of somebody who loves him to the point of wanting to tear out his very essence.

As for flowers, they remain the simple snare they were from the beginning. I study them in a testing garden where species are crossed. The glory with which we invest them, for them does not exist, since their colour and scent serve only to make their presence known to the carriers of love.

If we forget our size, we can picture these knights (the insects) in the vast, cool, fragrant rooms of a translucent palace.

The
arum maculatum
holds the knight captive, thanks to a kind of portcullis arrangement, until he is daubed with sperm and the women’s quarters are opened to him.

I would have a splendid time spreading myself on this subject. But have I not already said that this book would not become a course of lectures?

I am rather more interested in the similarity of these erotic displays. The world is simpler than our ignorance gives it credit for. It becomes more and more apparent to me that the mechanism works rather crudely, here and there and everywhere.

Beauty in art is a stratagem that she uses to immortalize herself. She travels, she pauses on her way, she fertilizes human minds. Artists provide her with a vehicle. They do not
know
her. It is by them and outside them that she pursues her mission. Should they try to get hold of her by force, they only produce an artifice.

Beauty, simple servant of a nuptial system, oblivious of herself, battens on a painter, for instance, and will not let him go. This often leads to disaster for the progeny of certain creators who claim to procreate in a carnal way and play a double role. Let no one think that beauty lacks a critical faculty
nor that she is proof of one. Neither the one nor the other. She goes straight to the point, whatever that may be.

She always seeks out those who espouse her, thus ensuring her survival.

Her lightning, striking the high points, sets fire to works that shock. She shuns banal representations of nature.

The cult of the banal representation of nature is so deeply rooted in man that he loves it, even in painters for whom it only serves as a springboard. When this representation, painted with equal precision, offers him anecdotes from dreams or from imagination, he rebels. Such an anecdote no longer concerns him but concerns
another
. His egoism rejects it. He sits in judgment. He condemns. The crime is to have tried to distract him from his self-absorption.

Just as people do not read but read themselves, he does not look, he looks at himself.

Art comes into existence the moment the artist departs from nature. What makes him depart gives him the right to live. This becomes a
La Palice
truism.
^‡

But the departure can occur indiscernibly. (I am thinking of Vermeer and of certain very young modern painters.) That is to reach the height of art. There beauty slips in by stealth. She sets a perfect trap, as innocent-looking as a plant’s. She will slyly lure people to herself without rousing the fear that her Gorgon’s head always does arouse.

Diderot exasperates me when he describes Greuze’s anecdotes in detail. Baudelaire would aggravate me by describing those of Delacroix were he not fertilized by this painter. Dante set the trap for Delacroix. Delacroix set the trap for
Baudelaire. The phenomenon can be seen with the naked eye in the Delacroix-Balzac fertilization (La
Fille aux yeux d’Or
).

From century to century the Giaconda lures a swarm of gazers into those traps that Leonardo believed he had laid solely to catch the beauty of his model.

At the cinematograph, every film, thanks to the absence of colour, escapes the commonplace and accidentally enjoys the privilege of a work of art. Beauty ventures there as rarely as possible. Colour will ruin this ambiguity. All will be ugly but the beautiful.

People shun coloured films because they do not find them close enough to nature. Once again it is in its very divorce from it that colour will reign and that beauty will make use of it.

The reproductive instinct urges the poet to scatter his seeds beyond his boundaries.

I repeat it: poorly transmitted, they fructify. Certain species (Pushkin) refuse transmission. But this does not prevent them from scattering at large and even when reduced to insignificance, from fructifying.

Shakespeare remains the model of the explosive plant. His seeds have taken advantage of wings, and storms. Beauty is hurled across the world on tongues of fire.

Were we able to measure the distance separating us from those whom we believe to be nearest, we would be frightened. Mutual goodwill is made up of laziness, courtesy, lies, of a multitude of things that conceal the barricades from us. Even a tacit agreement involves such disagreement over details and itineraries that there is excuse enough here for us to get lost and be separated for ever. If we meet a mind that seems to us propelled by the same mechanism as our own and are amazed at its swiftness in traversing the zones with which we are concerned, we learn later that it specializes in, for example,
music, and this proves what a mirage it was that seemed to bring it close to us. Sentiment has carried it far from intelligence. It is no longer in control. Some weakness, let in at an early stage, that it has every moment cajoled, fortified and worked on ever since, has ended by developing the muscles of an athlete and choking off the rest. Here is a spirit capable of understanding everything, which understands nothing. The use of what attracted us remains nil. This strong-minded individual loves bad music and devotes himself to it. Deaf to true riches he is no longer free on this vital point. Along any other path he travels with ease. An atrophied limb is the only one he uses and the melancholy sight of this atrophy fills him with pride.

Of graver import is our apparent agreement all along the line. This is what enables us to live and what art exploits in order to persuade us to serve its cause. A work of art is so intensely the expression of our solitude that one wonders what strange necessity for making contact impels an artist to expose it to the light.

A work of art, through the medium of which a man
heroically exposes
himself, perhaps quite unconsciously, evinces another form of heroism and will strike root in others by means of subterfuges comparable to those nature uses to perpetuate itself. Does a work of art hold an indispensable hierarchy, or has man imitatively conformed in the long run to the universal methods of creation? It is certain that he is a slave to them, that, without knowing it, he clothes his creative force in decorative apparel fit to bear witness to his presence, to intrigue, to startle, to seduce, to survive at whatever cost by signals totally unconnected with its mission and by the same artifice as that of flowers.

A work of art carries its defence within itself. This is made up of numerous unconscious concessions that allow it to conquer habit and to implant itself through a misconception. Thanks to having got this hold, it clings fast and its secret seed gets to work.

An artist can expect no help from his peers. Any art form which is not his own must be intolerable to him and upsets him to the highest degree. I have seen Claude Debussy ill at the orchestral rehearsals of
Le Sacre
. His soul was discovering its splendour. The form that he had given to his soul was suffering from another that did not accord with its own contours. Therefore no help. Neither from our peers nor from a mob incapable of consenting without revolt to a violent break with the habits it had begun to form. Whence will help come? From no one. And it is then that art begins to use the obscure stratagems of nature in a kingdom which resists it, which even seems to fight it or to turn its back upon it.

I have a friend who is a typical example of this. His contribution is incalculable. His name is Jean Genêt. No one had armed himself better against contacts, no one guarded his solitude better. However, it is precisely penal servitude, eroticism, a whole new psychology, a physiological one so to speak, a whole arsenal of resistance, that earns him contact, fascinates and attracts those who appear most rebellious. For his genius projects forcefully powers which, displayed by talent, would be no more than ‘picturesque’. He dumbly obeys the order to scatter his seeds. The trick has come off. Faithful to its old method, beauty dons the mask of a criminal. I ponder this before a photograph of Weidmann
^§
given me by Genêt. Swathed in bandages, he is so beautiful that one wonders if crime does not employ the universal stratagem
and if this is not one of its methods of luring what it kills, of exciting its converts, of exercising a sinister prestige, in short of perpetuating itself.

Is man capable of penetrating the mystery which I am analysing and of becoming its master? No, technique itself is a snare. Wilde rightly observes that technique is only individuality. The technicians in my film
La Belle et la Bête
credited me with first class technique. I have none. In fact there is none. Doubtless they give the name technique to the feats of equilibrium that the mind instinctively brings into play every second, so as not to break its neck. This is what Picasso’s great phrase sums up:
‘Le métier, c’est ce qui ne s’apprend pas.’

But I insist. We have to live shoulder to shoulder with minds where the space separating us is gloomier than that of atoms and stars. This is of what a theatre audience, before which we brazenly expose ourselves, is composed. There is the void into which we send our poems, our drawings, our reviews. There is the park buzzing with insects intent on their food and which the world’s factory employs for other ends.

For, while admitting that some of these insects might have opinions, this does not upset the rule. This rule is robust enough to stand a few exceptions. It relies on grand totals. It works wholesale. Its prodigality is dispensed with both hands. It is ignorant of the code. That a great number of its balls go astray matters little to it. It is rich in them. It aims to put one ball into the hole.

WRITING IS AN ACT OF LOVE. IF IT IS NOT IT IS
only handwriting. It consists in obeying the driving force of plants and trees and in broadcasting sperm far around us. The richness of the world is in its wastefulness. This germinates, that falls by the wayside. Thus it is with sex. The centre of pleasure is very vague, albeit very keen. It invites the race to perpetuate itself. This does not prevent it from functioning blindly. A dog espouses my leg. A bitch gets to work on a dog. A certain plant, once tall, now atrophied, still contrives a parachute for its seed that hits the ground before it can open. Women in the Pacific Islands give birth on a dung heap so that only strong children survive. From fear of over-population these islands favour what are usually considered evil practices.

Soldiers, sailors, labourers, who practise them, see no evil in them. Vice, I once wrote, begins with choice. At Villefranche in the old days I watched American sailors, for whom the practice of love assumed no precise form, and who made do with anybody or anything. The idea of vice never crossed their minds. They acted blindly. They conformed instinctively to the very confused rules of the animal and vegetable kingdom. A fruitful woman becomes misshapen with use, which proves her nobility and that it is more insane to use her in a sterile way than for a man merely to provide a luxury for the
blind desires of the flesh. Such things mean little to me, but as I like the society of young people, from whom I have a great deal to learn, and as a beautiful soul is reflected in the face, the world has decided otherwise. Besides, I think that after a certain age such things are depraved, do not allow of any exchange and accordingly become ludicrous, whether it’s a question of one sex or the other.

In fact I lead the life of a monk. An incomprehensible life in a life in which people think of nothing but of rubbing themselves up against one another, of seeking that kind of pleasure, if only in dancing, in imputing it to others, in considering any friendship suspect.

No matter. We should not be on show. The more mistaken people are about us, the more they envelope us in legends, the better this shelters us and teaches us to live in peace. It is enough that our own circle should hold us in esteem. What we are to other circles is nothing to us.

A lady whom I had invited to luncheon served me up such a description of myself that I rose from the table to make my apologies. ‘You are sharing,’ I told her, ‘the meal of someone whom I do not know and whom I would not care to know.’ This lady thought she was being agreeable. Doubtless my personality would have given her nothing to hold on to. She knew another, constructed from this, that and the other, which thrilled her.