identity of things.
It’s very difficult to taste. Up till then I had been so engrossed by sentimentalization that, experiencing the taste of the real identity, it seemed as tasteless as the taste a raindrop has in your mouth. It’s horribly insipid, my love.
My love, it’s like the most insipid nectar — it’s like the air that in itself has no smell. Up till then my addicted senses were mute to the taste of things. But the most archaic and demonic of my thirsts had led me subterraneously to collapse all constructions. The sinful thirst was guiding me — and now I know that experiencing the taste of that almost nothing is the secret joy of the gods. It is a nothing that is the God — and that has no taste.
But it’s the most primary joy. And only that, at last, at last! is the pole opposite the pole of the feeling-human-Christian. Through the pole of the primary demonic joy, I was remotely perceiving and for the first time — that there really was an opposite pole.
I was clean of my own intoxification by feeling, so clean I could enter the divine life that was a primary life entirely without comeliness, life as primary as if it were a manna falling from heaven and that doesn’t have the taste of anything: manna is like a rain and has no taste. Experiencing that taste of the nothing was my damnation and my joyful terror.
Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was imprisoned there in the collapsed mine, and that by then the room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere. As in dreams, the “logic” was something else, was one that makes no sense when you awaken, since the dream’s greater truth is lost.
But remember that all this was happening with me awake and immobilized by the light of day, and the truth of a dream was happening without the anesthesia of the night. Sleep with me awake, and only thus can you know of my great sleep and know what is the living desert.
Suddenly, sitting there, a tiredness all hardened and without any lassitude, overtook me. A little more and it would petrify me.
Then, carefully, as if I already had paralyzed parts within me, I started stretching out on the coarse mattress and there, all shriveled up, I fell asleep as immediately as a roach falls asleep on a vertical wall. There was no human stability in my sleep: it was the balancing power of a roach that falls asleep atop the lime of a wall.
When I woke, the room had a sun even whiter and more fervidly motionless. Returning from that sleep, to whose depthless surface my short paws had clung, I was now trembling with cold.
But then the numbness was passing, and once again, fully inside the burning of the sun, I was suffocating confined.
It must have been past noon. I got up before even making up my mind to, and, though uselessly, tried to open even more the already wide open window, and was trying to breathe, even if only to breathe a visual expanse, I was seeking an expanse.
I was seeking an expanse.
From that room excavated in the rock of a building, from the window of my minaret, I saw as far as the eye could see the enormous range of roofs and roofs calmly scorching in the sun. The apartment buildings like squat villages. In size it surpassed Spain.
Beyond the rocky gullies, between the cements of the buildings, I saw the favela atop the hill and saw a goat slowly climbing the hill. Beyond stretched the highlands of Asia Minor. From there I was contemplating the empire of the present. Over there was the Strait of the Dardanelles. Further beyond the craggy ridges. Thy majestic monotony. Under the sun thy imperial breadth.
And further beyond, already the start of the sands. The desert naked and burning. When darkness fell, cold would consume the desert, and in it one would shiver as on desert nights. Even further, the blue and salty lake was sparkling. Over there, that must be the region
It’s very difficult to taste. Up till then I had been so engrossed by sentimentalization that, experiencing the taste of the real identity, it seemed as tasteless as the taste a raindrop has in your mouth. It’s horribly insipid, my love.
My love, it’s like the most insipid nectar — it’s like the air that in itself has no smell. Up till then my addicted senses were mute to the taste of things. But the most archaic and demonic of my thirsts had led me subterraneously to collapse all constructions. The sinful thirst was guiding me — and now I know that experiencing the taste of that almost nothing is the secret joy of the gods. It is a nothing that is the God — and that has no taste.
But it’s the most primary joy. And only that, at last, at last! is the pole opposite the pole of the feeling-human-Christian. Through the pole of the primary demonic joy, I was remotely perceiving and for the first time — that there really was an opposite pole.
I was clean of my own intoxification by feeling, so clean I could enter the divine life that was a primary life entirely without comeliness, life as primary as if it were a manna falling from heaven and that doesn’t have the taste of anything: manna is like a rain and has no taste. Experiencing that taste of the nothing was my damnation and my joyful terror.
Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was imprisoned there in the collapsed mine, and that by then the room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere. As in dreams, the “logic” was something else, was one that makes no sense when you awaken, since the dream’s greater truth is lost.
But remember that all this was happening with me awake and immobilized by the light of day, and the truth of a dream was happening without the anesthesia of the night. Sleep with me awake, and only thus can you know of my great sleep and know what is the living desert.
Suddenly, sitting there, a tiredness all hardened and without any lassitude, overtook me. A little more and it would petrify me.
Then, carefully, as if I already had paralyzed parts within me, I started stretching out on the coarse mattress and there, all shriveled up, I fell asleep as immediately as a roach falls asleep on a vertical wall. There was no human stability in my sleep: it was the balancing power of a roach that falls asleep atop the lime of a wall.
When I woke, the room had a sun even whiter and more fervidly motionless. Returning from that sleep, to whose depthless surface my short paws had clung, I was now trembling with cold.
But then the numbness was passing, and once again, fully inside the burning of the sun, I was suffocating confined.
It must have been past noon. I got up before even making up my mind to, and, though uselessly, tried to open even more the already wide open window, and was trying to breathe, even if only to breathe a visual expanse, I was seeking an expanse.
I was seeking an expanse.
From that room excavated in the rock of a building, from the window of my minaret, I saw as far as the eye could see the enormous range of roofs and roofs calmly scorching in the sun. The apartment buildings like squat villages. In size it surpassed Spain.
Beyond the rocky gullies, between the cements of the buildings, I saw the favela atop the hill and saw a goat slowly climbing the hill. Beyond stretched the highlands of Asia Minor. From there I was contemplating the empire of the present. Over there was the Strait of the Dardanelles. Further beyond the craggy ridges. Thy majestic monotony. Under the sun thy imperial breadth.
And further beyond, already the start of the sands. The desert naked and burning. When darkness fell, cold would consume the desert, and in it one would shiver as on desert nights. Even further, the blue and salty lake was sparkling. Over there, that must be the region
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