Catherine Pozzi
Notes by lawrence joseph
Translated from French to English by Louis-François Pilard
Soul Skin
“Et enfin, l’idéalisme magique…”
Novalis.
To Claude Bourdet
and
Claude POZZI
I’ve written this book for everyone,
knowing that nobody would read it.
This accounts for its language
And its subject.
Prologue
“Passer, passer, au nom de tous!”
Jules Romains.
Who’s writing that? Nobody is. He who tends to be nobody; same as you nevertheless do, maniacal about the subscribed aspect of a noun, for in the end of everything it is not the superman that life wants, but the I-do-not-want-myself. What a beautiful angel without a face. Meanwhile Nobody, approached fraction, vainly takes away from himself difference upon difference, complacency upon complacency, exquisite fault upon pride, vainly throws his photographs away, vainly erases the first name for the initial and drowns style to the words of the loudspeaker: yet someone is speaking.
Please, arouse Nobody who isn’t someone! Get all his discourses out of yourself!
If you are a young dog, Nobody is a student; if you are a wealthy grownup, Nobody is an even wealthier one who shares; if you are a young girl, Nobody is a female dancer who stages the world’s secret into ballet, this is done a lot. If you are unwealthy, Nobody is a hopeless person. I f you are a woman, Nobody with physics’ white hands and chemistry’s black hands has looked for love for you.
“Mais le plus sage d’entre vous n’est lui-même qu' une chose
disparate, hybride faite d’une plante et d’un fantôme.”
Nietzsche.
You are full of proposals to make the Future blossom, and spread and cover the earth, and the future would be you, and you, higher: the manual writes so, we climb. The superman is for all camps, he is at the end of the wire or of the film that unwinds towards him, it the feeling of conscience between the middle age and this age Paradise has changed its extremity.
Maybe this fatal game is repeating itself. Where are the men? Everyone gets off.
“…et, sans élever des mains vainement implorantes vers un ciel vide, nous poursuivrons au travers des Forces indifférentes, vers un Avenir peut-être égal au plus grand de nos Rêves, une marche que rien encore ne paraît devoir arrêter.”
Jean Perrin, Physique.
All animals.
It is not the digestive you, breathing, excreting, breeding, circulatory: it goes without saying that that one is a dog, an ox, a worm, a monkey, a chicken, grand nephew of fish, great-grand nephew of shell, and long life to Progress! That one is an animal can be learnt; the Jesuit Knowing Father agrees, there is no offence: progress is a good ticket for you, a one-way one, that leads to holidays; Progress, a no return trip. Who does not accept, to have started that far away? Who is not flattered to see oneself awaken, under past’s dark sun, in this something green of which the weak desire contained the centuries and his face? Mind you: no such man exists who believes that his race can come back to ferns. Yet it is not today that you are humans: it has been yesterday.
It has been yesterday since you have been asking, as humans do, a question that is useful to nothing.
Tomorrow, from no nervous system abstracted from the world for one instant, no will directed the wrong way to everything will surge to be surprised by its existence. There is already no human question than the new-born’s: yet it is a cry. But one can’t be mistaken by it, this cry contains the question.
« SomeTHING hurts and bothers me, what is it ? – by « what right does someTHING bother me, exist, isn’t it me ? »
A scandal is at the origin of knowledge. How is it that there exists something else than me? How come the other exists, the rest, everything, if I haven’t made it ! How do I exist, if it has not made me ! If it has made me, how am I its contrary ! …
It is enough to have named the other: “The universe” to have extracted the question of the Real from the cries a nurse can hear ; it is to these politically disinterested persons that, alas, the role of Spirit has to be given up. Yet, they do not own its language, and, when the small one cries, never say, wrongly, that it is the I and the World.
Somewhere, in some places not yet reached by the din, some metaphysicians are continuing to ask the human question, to wonder “what is real” in accurate, that is to say, obscure, terms ; and they find themselves with less passion and a weaker accent than the newly born baby, face to the two same Existences of which one disturbs the other. But the sting of the pin that pieced their first diapers is far, and the existence of What-is-not-me is weakening. It is not intellectually decent to believe in it; the Other-than-me is out of fashion among thinkers, the Universe is no longer worn, the I is worn. Even the pure I, the integral nude. The universe, this would be childishness, and the most serious reasons would have one doubt its reality.
Thus one of the spirits we revere reading this tale in half verse, contested it very sadly : “But you are giving yourself the universe, my dear!!…”
And the tale should have thus begun : History of the human question that will no longer be asked.-
*
* *
We need real, even if there remains none in the world”…
Well there. Whether the Universe exists or not, that does not interest the car sellers, because there will always be enough universe to roll on or do as if. Yet this is very important for the painters, my son.
What to say of writers ! No universe, and they’re alone; they can no longer legitimately speak of anything, le-gi-ti-ma-te-ly; da, da.
There has to be decided most quickly on the existence of the Universe before buying a Juan Gris who only paints I, or read André Breton.
This is serious; do not dodge, do not be satisfied without thinking; do not keep the Universe without reason, a pig in a poke[1].
Sooner or later a party will have to be taken. Do not let yourself live in a doubtful universe that you accept only half willingly.
Alas, you do not believe that this is urgent, the Universe certainly seems invulnerable to you; you do not buy Braque’s, Gris’ paintings, you do not read André Breton. Yet you read Léon-Paul Fargue[2], you read Joyce, and they write some words without corresponding universe, which will be done more and more; some macarelles, some pytalolles[3], some I words; yet who knows what worker makes who knows where the poems of the Revolution in which I subsists alone (even if it is a WE-I).
The XXth is very bad for the Universe.
In the XIXth, on the contrary, the Universe was a little there: fat, the colour of sour apple, seaward, monstrous, happy, shitty, Maupassant’s matter, the matter of Zola. Courbet neither had any doubt about its existence. Yet, yet Baudelaire hesitated. As a critic, he had to do with painters and it was the time when painters threatened to become intelligent. (Now they all are: this is justly/rightly so what thins the world).
So Baudelaire, studying a realistic painter, characterised him with this sentence: “I want to represent things as they are, or as they would be, supposing I did not exist…” the universe without a human being[4]”. Supposing it did not exist, this realistic man quickly started work and painted what he had under his eyes: the blue of the sky, the green trees, but he forbade himself the dragon and the chimera, those were not “true”. Besides such artistic inventions, nothing was changed, we were in front of the same universe-reserved dragon.
What chimera!
So the poet and critic started again a contrario: “To speak exactly, there is in nature neither line nor colour. It is man who creates the line and the colour. These are two abstractions that draw their equal nobility from a same origin[5].”
The term “abstraction” was nicely badly chosen. But, physiology helping, one had to admit even before 1860 that sensations were not scientifically indisputable events… This is how Baudelaire, half hesitating about Universe, letting it still persist, took back from him the line and the colour that in the materialistic XIXth century one yet had to give back to its Opposite, to the other more and more demanding Existence, to I.
The history of the repeated grasps of I on all the rest is a funny history ; it is very simple under a fake appearance of intricacy. I simply noticed that his senses lied to him, that their testimony was not excellent ; yet, his senses being the only grants of the existence of the world, I dismissed the World as a trick played by himself to him.
He’s been so far that today he is completely deprived of universe.
If this tale was philosophy, but it may not please us ! it is here that the names of the subtle persons would be set who, for the human honour, assiduously asked the question that will no longer be asked.
*
* *
King Menandros who was called Milinda[6] in India, Protagoras[7], let us jump over the centuries, Berkeley the English bishop, so embarrassed by his question that he hid it into a tale about tar[8], Malebranche[9] who said: “From the fact that we have the idea of a thing, it does not follow… that it be conform to the idea that we have of it” (he was not yet killing the thing, he made it subject to caution); Descartes (do the military salute) who implied an I-GOD, and the Universe was already nothing more than an Area for his bottom, Kant (Oh! Syncope to Maurras)[10] who, he first of these Sirs, wrote that no meaning would ever present the Universe to I.
And lastly Husserl[11], who now teaches that “the object constitutes itself inside the ego” and Ivanov who, in a corner of a room in Russia, writes his letter to his famous friend: “The outer world is an illusion or a dream, it does not obviously exist.”[12]
This time, the Universe is drunk.
No more tale, no more goal.
Aha ! Let us open the eye. There is a trick between one century and the other, the world has been taken away from us, w must re-have it. It may not be that difficult.
Let us breathe.
There would not be a Universe because the senses are unfaithful: to reckon everything, I do not believe in indirect testimonies. Since he has a direct testimony of himself, I, because I thinks, and he needs only himself to think, even if he think he’s dreaming, he is quiet as far as his own existence is concerned.
IS FOR THE OUTER WORLD
“Mes idées me résistent.”
Malebranche.
“Je suis bien convaincu qu'àaux spéculations les plus abstraites de
l’analyse correspondent des réalités qui existent en dehors de nous.”
Charles Hermite.
L’Idée, je n’en suis pas le maître,
Elle est dans l’homme, elle est dans l’air
Ou daans l’éther,
Je la rencontre, je la sers,
Hélas, je lui fais des prières
Et je la perds.
But does I think?
This is not so sure. What gives I a life ticket, a reality ticket, come in! come in! is not “to think”. To think does not need I maybe.
This maybe is piercing. Maybe it thinks as it rains; the finders know so, who can see their own truth go down in time on distant points. Yet, if it thinks through the I as it would rain on a sponge, I is not existing at all, I can hardly stand.
It is not thought, it is feeling that needs I: and so as to feel there has to be two to be, dear master. Do not trouble yourself, the other may only be a table, a stone, the first thing that finds itself so far away from you. The other is the rest; is everything.
I-FEEL-THEREFORE-I-AM.
He refuses the table, this appearance; he refuses the stone, this conception; he refuses the sea and the mounts. And then next? We give them back to him. But we will not let the Universe be drawn back from us because everything is clad by the senses. What unluckiness! They call this “universe”, this literary stroll; they believe that they speak about the outer world.
They believe That nothing exists but them, because they can’t believe their eyes anymore.
Ah! If this tale disturbs you, if you have something else in mind, follow it a little, it’s about everything and everything leads to you. That the departure have been given rue de La Boétie[13] will not make the goal missed; follow a little if you do not want to disappear and be careful of painting. – It is the painters indeed who refuse Universe. And now, a small effort.
*
* *
“It has been a long way that Braque has come since the negative phase of cubism until his middle age work. To the proscription of the fallen reality now succeeds the political creation of the real.”[14] Let nobody go outside! Do not be shy, Carl Einstein did not have the time to render to you his modest text, he is as far away from physics as a philosopher can be.
Here’s the translation for those who are struck with philosophy.
Cubism represents the state of painting at the time when the testimony of the senses was beginning to be generally denied, when, then, I felt in the right to “see” the universe as he fancied.
This universe that was the consequence, it seems, of a false testimony, is the “fallen reality” of the above sentence.
Universe no more[15]. The painter Braque replaces this false universe, your trees, your mounts, your nose in the middle of the face with some “poetical creation of the real”, that is to say by some of his universe, entirely made up. From what it appears that, from now on, it is I who makes the world and I is not that of the “lying” senses, but I from the spirit, this faithful, this dear. His world has no relation with senses, yet by an awful injustice it is still the senses that receive Braque’s paintings full view.
“Poetic creation of the real.” No more landscape of course, no more portraits; no more sky; these fictions belonged to the fallen reality.
The reality of spirit is rhythm; this truth that the Greeks knew and that they were not reluctant to apply to the making of statues can yet be used only to trace the arabesque in search for nature to what I prohibits to shape anything.
Have you noticed in this affair of existence or non-existence of the world the importance given to the eyes? To what point we think through the eyes, this frightens. It is through the eyes that men come to the inoui sentimental state that is called “certitude”. Through the eyes that we doubt. Because of the eyes that we can’t be Christian anymore: the grounds of incredulity are not in reason, but are in the visual representations of a so out of date past that it leaves us lookless (To convert, this would not be to bring me to speak like you, my Father, but to give me your eyes; I am fish, I am Martian for them.)
And now here is the Universe lost because of these men’s eyes. But we’ll be less naïve than them; the Universe is not grounded by the retina, my dear. The Universe is not this image good for having everything done.
We will not let the Universe be taken away from ourselves because are seen in deceiving feeling the furniture or sealike sites, of the artistic, the daily, - we will call “Universe” something else. What? What the senses ignore and that makes them feel. A no-man’s land is the object of our trip.
*
* *
THE PSYCHOLOGIST BETS AND IS GOING TO LOSE
I feel, therefore the Other is; some exterior thing exists, true as can be; the good sense has nothing to change to the safety of sense, one is two indeed, that’s the important thing, precisely, here’s the man who is in charge of concluding the union of I and the rest. It is the psychologist for whom the composition of the two Existences the discord of which has drawn from the new-born his/her first tear, is the matter of an instant.
Yet this tale which has been written by Nobody is thrown for the future to the winds, for the time has come to find again both I and another real, the intimate, and the foreign. Meanwhile that, in the pain without remedy, one know that for I, this is in vain; that (s)he reaches nothing, does not feel, that it is not for him/her that the sky glows, not (s)he who breathes the rose, not I who does the scales of pleasure with the games of the sun.
That the other be an electron, table, or wave, I living alone face to the other is as far from feeling so as a dead person.
And here is the secret of being: feeling proves I and the Universe, but I alone can’t feel.
Yet the Psycho-physiologist despite the tale and derision of doom believed (s)he was making sensation with some outer world.
(s)he took I and the Object, - the Guinea pig and the Event – the Subject and the excitant.
The Object corresponded to the Subject as the key to the key hole; the Psycho-physiologist opened the door, and the Universe comes into your home.
I
“In the field of knowledge, error is of a scientific orer, there is only confusion that is not.”
René Quinton.
“A perfect consistency can be nothing but an absolute truth.”[16]
Poe.
”They will say: it’s an A B C for childish readers…”
Katherine Mansfield.
Some THING was bursting, to which there only lacked, to be noise, an ear. Some THING appeared, to which, to be light, there lacked a look. The Universe sent signs and was only sign; but life did not exist opposed to sign, and there were billions of years of signs lost.
Is it not our opinion? It is the Universe that began. The assistant of the psychology laboratory himself knows so without having ever thought of it: it is Universe who shot first.
When was there an opposed subject? It is not said when; it was new, and of the easiest impression. The Universe did not miss him; there1 a smell! There! A sunbeam in the eye! There! The storm noise! There! The hard, the stinging, the sugary, the icy!
So that at last, the Subject, if he looked inside himself, could see there as a double the great sound image, burning, bitter, soft, agitated.
–the first edition of the World.
Alas!
*
* *
“Toute connaissance que n’a pas précédée une sensation, m’est
inutile.”
Gide.
This very far away and very slow story starts again every day, which is well happy for psycho-physiology.
Everything starts again everyday for someone; there is a continuous arrival of new living ones: this science believes so, so does good sense, and one is not parent or psychologist without assisting to the first impression of the world.
One
Two,
Three, four, five, six, ten, twenty… a hundred… a thousand…
First sign, light, sensation one. Second sign, sensation two, a contact. At the one hundred and fifty millionth sensation, the newcomer begins to know without doubt. At the thirtieth year, this addition is called, if s/he is delicate, “to get rich”.
A long human habit of this so faithful and so general functioning made admitted that the Universe and the Living could correspond, and that the distance between them was the smallest possible: small to cross in one second, small to fill with at one glance.
I would not proceed at the edge of I without effort, would catch the sign of the world as it catches a butterfly: it is a smell, a colour, a sound…
It would be enough if the sign was quite big, average; under a certain importance, I would not catch it, - and that has no importance. Or the enormous signal would fall on I as a hat, it has plenty in the being, plenty in the skin, and psycho-physiology measures.
“En un monde inconnu puisaient leur volupté.”
Leconte de Lisle.
If senses are a little deceitful, excitement is nevertheless sure; the psycho-physiologist does not like mystery, he only needs an instant: “I feel the Universe. It is an arranged business between him and I.” – Note so, sir, you are slandering] yourself. You are to this object com-ple-te-ly foreign. You do not occupy the same space. Look at yourself!
It is not true that the distance between a living being and the universe be small.
It is not true that it can be crossed by a living being.
It is not true that a sensation can ever go beyond the sensitive threshold.
It is not true that there be lost signs.
“Car il faut de deux choses l’une:ou apprendre des autres ce qu'àil en
est, ou le trouver soi-même.”
Plato.
I feel, therefore I am.
How do you do to explain this, you?
You take a living one, non impressed. You expose him to the universe, and you go for a stroll. When you come back, the living one is full of images, of colours, of music, of shapes of smells and of temperature. The more you will expose him, the more he will have.
Are there living ones who do not get impressed? No. There are vague ones, but no entirely failed ones; the failed ones can’t live.
There are none on whom the exhibition produces nothing. There are none who are not reached by the signs of universe that the psycho-physiologist graciously names “excitants”.
The Universe reaches each time the living, and it feels. For you, it is natural.
Yet what are you, you I? Take off what is not you, take off your name, your elements, there remains a presence that sees him/herself. Face to, is the diversity of the blind weight, the “things”, the Object. What you call the Universe. What is unable to see. Yet of you, who are not object, it makes itself a wonderful mix with itself, and you feel.
So, you find this natural?
-Everybody finds this natural; even teachers do.
Alas yes. Alas yes. But if they start with accepting the unacceptable, this fantastic correspondence between the Object that is only weight and the I that is only wish that a fraction of instant become resounding, what other problem are they trying to solve?
There was a problem: this one.
Metaphysics accepts without a stop sensation and looks for, apart from this mystery, an I that is not demonstrated, without unveiling it; psycho-physiology accepts sensation as a traveller accepts the train, and believes, measuring its speed, he measures the cause for the trip; good sense accepts sensation as if it was Object’s duty to provide it to it, by the way with no charge, and, even if to measure, all made.
*
* *
“Per non dormire”
Gabriele d’Annunzio
No one thinks of it much; yet at last everyone agrees to believe that there must well be a law of feeling. And it is known that it is being looked for in the Sorbonnes.
To isolate a law is to observe the conditions and those of feeling are obvious. Too, too obvious. Science has nothing to do with pieces of obviousness, it is a state that leads to nothing, a closed state. Every science begins with a directed hypothesis…
But the Sorbonnes are blinded by obviousness: they take from it the two necessary and sufficient conditions of sensation, some thing and someone.
They do nothing out of / with them.
Then it means that these necessary conditions are not sufficient and that the encounter of something with someone does not produce feeling in any case of any experience if there lacks to it a third unknown term.
And here is the hypothesis:
No living one has ever felt a first sign from the universe.
*
* *
What does this obscure sentence mean?
This. I take a living one, unimpressed; I expose her/him/it to the Universe and I wait, to see what universe is going to do to it. Wonder of the wonders! The universe does not reach her/him/it.
-Maybe the universe hasn’t done enough…noise? The teacher says that below a certain intensity…
-I will have explained myself badly then. In short: new subject, Universe. Universe, fire!
-Well?
-Well, nothing.
But then, why do we feel?
There is a Subject; there is an Object; if, as you are trying to make it heard the universe misses the subject, how is it that the subject be touched?
-And if it is touched, why do you want it to be by this universe?…
“S’armer de sa propre sensualité”
Ste Catherine de Sienne
The July garden spread without limits, for the peasants from that country do not raise walls between their vineyards, only hedges that merge with the vine branches.
A space of flowers divided by four straight alleys, enough to walk one hundred steps, was letting fancy walk on one hundred hectares, some stocks] to the sky. Yet at your feet the velvet-passers,too numerous by stalk, round as mandarines, a hornet at heart, were sending to your knees an orange smell; and at your hand the colour of your blood had made one only rose, and it deepened the azure. You were seated on a bench.
It was the dahlias that you were looking at, they were already playing in the autumn, they were already, that morning, in the wealthy evening; they were already accompanying with blossoming shouts the grapes that were not ripe, like to the song of the past grape harvests.
They were resounding under this day, and not in your memory; they were not in your body, but in the things, outside, -rather, they were one knows not where, between the things and you. That was not memory, but feeling. A crack, a breach of time, open more than to the bowels of awareness, was joining a new element, unquenchable inexhaustible, pure troublement, where past instants like this one, were taken.
I feel what I (have) already felt.
So you thought of Weber’s law.
-What Weber’s law? I felt nothing of that. I was not there.
O you! What matters that it was me? It was an I, and the story is true.
…And then, you perceived the past. (This verb and this word were never met.)
Face to you was the day indeed, that a date named, that was your age; were indeed the vine arbour and the drone; and above the silence plenty of drunk and gilded ashes, was indeed the highest cloud passing (by) as a melody by Schumann.
But this earthly daily, this summer day, that was nothing, the magic did not come from its surface, it contained more than it had, the July day.
It was not it the cloud, not it the vineyard, the golden wing, not it these flowers; and it woke up, nothing more, from octave to preceding octave, other skies, other flowers, other motley days that yielded their colour to it. It was them that were waving to you through an enchanted crystal, - they that dyed everything. I can see what I have already seen.
What had happened to you? You were cheating, you were quitting the game, you were surprising true matter: the engulfed universes were covering this one. You considered this clothe of the past on all things, which is transparent as glass, which is unknown, which only renders, when a heart touches it, the sound that makes one say: ”present!” from head to toes. On one of your heartbeats the engulfed days were resounding; your heart was the tongue, the days could not be reached, your heart was beating the present and the past (was) vibrating. Heartbeat to heartbeat, you were making your treasures tremble.
Are you there, Universe?
-Yes; I call myself “Yesterday”…
As for Weber’s law, it says that an impression is more intense if it is preceded by impressions of its order and less intense if impressions of its order are simultaneous. Which would be another commonness if Fechner had not used it to look for an equation of feeling, which after 24576 observations he established, and which is false[17].
Yet, that day, you thought of Weber and Fechner with tenderness, for you were a few centimetres away from their secret of the world.
To feel, to feel more. One feels more, if one has felt. One feels what one has felt. How could one feel if one had never felt? WOULD we FEEL?
One only day would be clear water, but in it the lost universe has confounded itself: the water is surly, or bitter… Today! I name you “Yesterday”, and I speak to you in verse.
Yes; and these sirs have much looked for what Today would be without Yesterday. The cream of teachers and a little more: Herbert Spencer[18], Taine[19], William James[20]… Let us not pain the living ones.
Today without yesterday, they called that a pure sensation.
Even if it was a sensation – well, you understand. Without yesterday, it was pure, whatever you did. Unfortunately, it was extremely difficult to take yesterday away. To say everything, one could not make it. One had to resolve to take a new-born one; that one, who had never felt, started from sensation number one.
But, even more unfortunately, sensation number one was impossible.
And if it was impossible that a sensation be the first one, it is that it was impossible for a subject to feel a sign from the world that be the first.
There is no first sign from the universe for us.
Now, as Perrault said, “this key was fairy.”[21]
*
* *
“Quand sera le voile arraché
Qui sur tout l’univers jette une nuit si sombre?”
Racine.
Bend over closer, it is an inconvenience: one does not feel today. No one has ever felt today, there is no today for our world. The first sign that came from Not-Me is for the species where one does not enter. – Animals? Not even: “Animals” contains “anima”.
The psychologist rides over ages, and does not know so. He believes he measures Today: Today, are you here? Yet the new-born he is teasing is sleeping in thousands of years of care, the new-born he takes for the first edition, the new-born mess, compilation.-
Where is today? In a jar, with the amoeba? With a legged jelly, in the ocean? Under one only cell, in your blood?
Yet the new-born one moved a weak furious fist and pushed a veil from herself was it tulle, according to the appearance, was it of time… S/he had fallen into this as soon as her mother’s belly, and as an awkward swimmer, floated on old looks and secular rumours. And the psychologist’s voice arrived to him only resounding with History’s voices.
*
* *
“…Et versa dessus des termitiÀres et des fourmiliÀres de phrases.”
L¾on-Paul Fargue.
The psychologist comes near me and says to me ”What you write is not funny. Yet, please correct: it is wrong that I ignore the antecedent excitations (one does not say “signs”); but they change nothing to the fact that the sensation is a simple fact as established by my works. There is sensation when an excitant of a sufficient intensity hits senses; the sensation depends on the intensity of the excitant; an excitant with a sufficient intensity is always perceived, your business is a novel.”
-Amen, amen sir, is that so? The excitant is at the door of I, and it enters or does it not? If it is not strong enough, it remains below, I do not know it?
-“There is a threshold of the conscience, we have established so with Fechner. If you gave yourself the pain to read us, you would know what minimum of intensity a given excitant must have to be perceived, to pass this threshold.”
Oh sir, I have not read you extensively, but I am breathing you, you are statistically thousands of individuals, you have only one dynamometer more. You are common-sense, you are so used to being alive that you do not understand a thing to it. You say that the excitant hits the nerve, and that conscience is at the end of the nerve, completely at the end not in the antechamber, at the loggia of the fifth floor! “Knock strongly”. And it is true indeed that the more the universe makes noise, the more certainly the conscience opens. This has deceived you; you will not find the secret of the world.
The conscience is so far, so far, so far from the world, sir, that it never opens to it at the first time.
You were close to the secret however, professor; let us look for it then in your language!
Here is the law of the threshold, from Fechner the ancestor: “An excitation is perceived only if it reaches a certain point of intensity. Below this point of intensity, it does not pass the threshold of conscience.”
Here is the dangerous corollary that lost you: “So that the intensity of the sensation augments, the intensity of the excitant must augment.” (innocent aspect of the dangerous corollary).
And, the laboratory having used 24000 pieces of patience (almost a sacrifice of Aztecs) on the first part of Weber’s law, here are some, here is the second one that up until now has occupied nobody: THE INTENSITY OF THE SENSATION AUGMENTS WITHOUT ANY AUGMENTATION OF INTENSITY OF THE EXCITANT IF THE SUBJECT HAS ALREADY UNDERGONE ANALOGOUS SENSATIONS. It seems that this applies to a wine taster. O teacher! Maybe it is a law figuring some THING that scientifically smell roast?
*
* *
“…A certain point of intensity…”
“Below this point of intensity…”
“…So that augment, augment the intensity…”
Thus the communication of the universe to you comes to a question of intensity: but you believe that this intensity which allows you to perceive some THING, only depends on the present sign.
The intensity of what is there (whatever it is).
You behave humanely, which is natural, and scientifically, which is more serious, as if you believed him when Weber’s law which you equally believe proves to you that the intensity of the exciting sign that is right away going to be burn, sting, light, weight, extremely depends on what is not there.
The universe shines, burns, rings, exists at the instant (who does not suppose so!) but does not reach the I with a direct from the instant (who would not believe so): it can in no case reach I in a point where this one would have taken nothing, which would be the “pure” sensation. Who is intact is not touched. Who is not clad with a depot of preceding signs does not resound.
Whatever the intensity of the present sign from the universe, if this sign cannot find in you some preceding sign, it equals zero.
If you do not admit that one only sign that would come from the world, isolated from a sum of innumerable anterior preserved signs, should equal zero and couldn’t absolutely be perceived, you will try to constitute the sensibility without this preceding sum, -this is what you’re doing,- and you will miss, this is what’s happening to you.
On this “equals zero”, depends that you animate the universe. One challenges you to clothe yourself with a sensibility, if you do not admit so. No blue, no red, no stroke, sir: you will remain frozen, you will remain jelly. One must, so as to ensure these delights that you were founding your science like the other sciences at last on an unverifiable hypothesis. One must go to the consequences of the law that exposes that the intensity of the present is augmented by a similar past and that you have checked: one must push to the extreme the consequences of the most frequent fact, one must write that without past there would not be any present.
The hypothesis is unverifiable since there does not exist any sensibility without past: this inexistence allows one to imagine literarily that there exists some, but allows scientifically to induce that it is because a sensibility without past is impossible, that it does not exist.
And this relation of inexistence to impossibility, for the most vital fact that there be, leads to an as inexisting as unknown domain.
“It is you who are going to get a zero”, he answered.
As for good sense, towards whatever question mark it may turn, it had not understood yet what the tale was looking for. It seemed to it that the tale mixed up a simple question. To feel? Around good sense indeed, there was some stuff to feel, plenty of some stuff to feel more than needed, more than wanted, so much, that without tiredness and a few poisons there would not have been the means to get out of it and to sleep. Placed as one was in a setting motley with colour, stunning with sound, insidiously sapid, the soft hardness of which sustained you only to assail you, that overwhelmed you with sugary solicitations[22], polygonal presences and neuralgia, imbecile question, could one only not feel, with this blue green red heavy sharp cold acute hot soft boom bitter cut in series by the universe? So as not to feel one should not have entered it, one was inside no matter. If you are not happy do not disgust the others.
For good sense had as much inclination for excitation as the psychologist did, that is to say. And they thought they were severed from this qualified trouble, both of them, only from one hair.
Yet the instruments of physics, controllers of the senses, and the black boards of chemistry in space, uselessly indicated that neither the sky was blue, nor the blood red, nor the ground hard nor snow cold nor skin soft, nor sugar was sugary.
Forsaken by the psychologist, by the metaphysician and by good sense, the tale stopped. For whom to pursue this trail. Or the trail passed between life’s circumstances, all incomprehensible since one could not understand why one felt them. At the end of this trail was death: one did not feel anymore.
II
My pain, my pleasure, my everything, this is a round and that’s all
“Quand il parle, rien ne pousse.”
Léon-Paul Fargue.
“Quand il s’ennuie, il croit qu'il pense.”
Alphonse Daudet.
The conditions of sensation are: a subject; an object, origin of an excitant-sign. For psychology, the excitant-sign would directly reach the conscience of the subject and would be perceived in it if it is of an intensity superior to a certain value; if it is inferior to it, it would not pass the threshold of conscience. It would then be enough in all cases to have the intensity of the excitant-sign increase until it passes the limit value: and it would be perceived, felt. Yet experience has established that the consciences having already received a quantity (by the way unknown) of excitant-signs, were from a lower threshold, were more penetrable.
Yet all consciences without exception, through heredity, have received a (n incalculable) number of excitant-signs from the universe.
All the consciences without exception have thus a lowered threshold in front of the present sign and, so that this sign may absolutely not cross any, it would have been enough that this (incalculable) number of previous signs had not been.
The man in his chair lost his dynamometer in his beard and answered nothing for this was to speak in his language. And this indicated that the factor of intensity of the sensation was not only the present sign, but the previous mass of signs from the world.
Yet for him as for good sense, this Mass did not matter. It mattered as an ornament, it did not matte as a Cause.
Good sense and the psychologist behaved entirely as if, the mass of the previous signs taken away, they had nevertheless found themselves face to the universe. For, for the psychologist and for you, perception had the shape of a hole. A hole. A ring with a non-appreciable thickness that the signs of things crossed before vanishing. (At the contact of the edges, it was the present; above the edges, the future; below, nothing to retain.) Where do the beams that touch you go? Where are the smells? But where does the look made of the sign of the beams go?
In the hole, behind you?
To seize, to let go. To seize, -to let go. You live, wait, you have, you lose. To feel, to forget. What is value itself, importance itself; what you are careful of; from your internal organs to your vapour what has you captive, - its value decreases to nothing and its importance, as your heart has not beaten twice. Where is it? What have you done of it?
O what living being will find her/himself at last tired of receiving without retaining?
To forget, to feel, to forget, to feel. It falls, it undoes itself from you at each instant a sound, a taste.
………………………………………………………………………………………………
…”The more analogous excitations the organ has received in a previous time by analogous causes, the less intense the present excitation will have to be so as to be perceived.”
“Au milieu d’elles estoit
Un cofre où le temps mettoit
Les fuseaux de leurs journées,
De courts, de grands, d’allongez,
De gros et de bien bougez,
Comme il plaist aux destinées.”
Ronsard.
A condition of fairy tale, out of decency quieted by psychologists, was at the origin of feel : YOU WILL FEEL ON CONDITION THAT YOU HAVE FELT.
Today was one knows not where, infinite snake, - not this beam, not the voice outside, not the so soft shock of time on your body ; it was elsewhere.
Which did not deprive science from the sensations to proceed as if some first excitant, not more, was perceived, provided that it had the required accent : excite and serve hot. The subject would feel the object suddenly, it would be a direct phenomenon, the All-Present receiving the All-Made. Yet the one was not more an I than Condillac’s statue , the other was a myth ; and considerable works, measures of an exquisite precision, applied themselves to that inexistant and to that impossible.
The Treatise of the old man well in chair was not making state of yesterday.
Yet YOU WILL FEEL NOTHING IF NOTHING IN YOU HAS ALREADY FELT. –
No end in this adventure.
But as each one wanted an original feeling, suddenly new, a first feeling, used once, that let you widow(er), out of which one come naked, the most beautiful texts confirmed the sad manual for thought, -and they did not prevent, alas, the Fate from taking off. « My sudden sensation was at once so intense that it hen did not increase by any repetition » wrote André Gide notwithstanding his two thousand generations of fathers.
Sudden
The ungrateful.
*
* *
Thus TO FEEL, event surged from life, covering it, driving it crazy, had kept it busy to the point that the most careful ones among the living believed they could feel by the only fact of living, whereas to feel was a prodigy, a victory.
To feel was not natural.
Unfortunately for the solution of the problem, to feel had become natural. At least, to human beings. So biology, however little mystical, evolutionist it may be, placed in long tables the species climbing from the first obscurity, to the day, to this miracle that would throw a quiet vegetable, an alga, a mushroom, into pleasure, -but from the fungus to feel biology did not fail to inscribe considerable amounts of time, and those times were the expression and like the scientific confession that life truly has nothing to link it to sensation.
And then man, who did not have to wait, who felt right away, for that one the first stroke was the right one. Man was not surprised at feeling, and he was not surprised that his most extreme ancestor, under the glass of a crystalliser crystallizer, would not feel.
“My first sensation, man said, was at once so intense that it then augmented through no repetition.”
Yet biology having set Adam out of cause, had kept heredity, no man was the first one; and the present first sensation, was to the infinite.
It is difficult to know if man “comes down” (why not climbs?) from simpler species; the question remains open, it does not matter in the explanation of feeling. What matters, is that fact, as silly as the fall of apples, that none feeling should be the first one to feel. The fall of apples had surprised at least one spirit, the super banal finds itself here.
So one advances nothing that passes experience in writing:
Every present feeling takes place on flesh having felt.
But one can write this better, and who does not know that the devil comes out of the put terms provided that one has set them in a secret order?
This:
“To obtain this phenomenon that is called feeling, one needs:
a present excitant
a piece of flesh having felt
Or else:
a present excitant,
a piece of flesh
a certain accumulated value of feeling loading this flesh.”
At present, one can proceed.
No more philosophers, engineers! mechanics, handymen!
To feel, this is a matter of contact, that does not pass in grammar. Here, brothers! One must do the mounting with what is assuerd, one must make do with what one has, without the old man, as despaired ones…
*
* *
A piece of flesh.
A present excitant
A load of feeling in the flesh.
The Flesh first.
Well, it is protoplasm. But else? Nothing really well new, the same four atoms (H, O, C, N), sometimes some other but the four before anything, in arrangements that we have not finished counting, a weighing puzzle. They are elsewhere too, non flesh, their particularity in flesh is to unite into enormous molecules. Whereas in a molecule of sluggish matter they are hardly more than a dozen (19 for the colouring matters of aniline, that is to say they repeat themselves 19 times as many times as there are molecules in the quantity of the product), in the flesh they repeat themselves up to sixty thousand times per molecule.
The consequence is that these joining assemblies are unstable in certain conditions, stabler in others: this concerns life and not feeling. Their state is said colloidal, they agglutinate around two of them (H, O). They gather into a sort of watery culinary recipe: flesh. Flesh, four atom puzzle that makes glue, repeated by groups of one hundred thousand. No indication here of sensibility.
The excitant then: it is what comes from the Object and disturbs the body.
For example:
Air of the Excitant
There is yellow at the Kamtchatka
And some sharp on the barrier
There is some smell good behind
There is some hot where I am not
Oh la la.
But it is not true, my old Thomas!
There is no yellow where there is no eye, there are frequencies of like points; there is no stingy without your finger but numbers vibrating like that; there is no perfume without smell, and so on.
What is there? Some ponderable that strolls, see salad; some quantity of grain that shivers. That is the excitant, the what you feel.
Yet, this grain is everything since matter is made of grains. Dust[23]. Dust. Physics knows so, and if the Bible wrote so, one can explain a physicist bible by the perfect sand of the desert that flowed between the prophets’ fingers; each time the Bible marries physics we will divorce them with diligence, for we hold to the esteem of secondary schools. This said, the grains and under-grains that are the world set the men face to an extraordinary situation.
The grains have no colour. They have no savour. They rigorously can’t make noise. They are neither hot nor cold nor can’t be.
My old, behave, this is becoming frightful. Let us come together to find the origin of the charm. Let us speak of it at the closest…
I am hot yet, the sky is blue. Yet you can hear the loudspeaker from across; you make the difference between the salt and the sugary.
But the grains are not salty.
*
* *
“Legousin a thelousin
A legousin ou melei moi…”[24]
Listen, let us play idiots, they will say what they want. We, we want to understand; to understand, it must be seen that one does not understand. Proceed.
There is the matter, that is grain. That, that exists, whether one is introduced to it or not; and that will never have colour, and that will never make noise. Yet no sooner is one there, no sooner am I there, and I do not need to be Velasquez, to be Wagner, -it is coloured, sonorous: it is soft or it is resistant, sugary, obnoxious, charming. It is exciting. The psychologist says: “The excitant”, you can hear it.
But where does s/he take the yellow, this child? Where does s/take sound?
Jeanne buys a ball of blue and dyes the stuff; she believes by the way that there exists some blue in the separate state, in indifferent quantity on the earth; but the blue does not exist, at least without Jeanne or her fellow wo/man; what exists, is the grain, that is never either blue or sonorous.
You do not seem to believe me. If you do not believe, as Jeanne, that the colour be/is a thing, one more/another thing that (re)covers the other ones with its pellicle, you believe however that the colour is all made in the sun beam. The decanter cork, the rainbow… Yet there is no more proof of the rainbow, than of the Sky. When the grain excites in you a blue emotion, it is as bizarre, as non-grain, as if it excited in you the likeness of Gabriel Angel. Is this awful language going to entail a reply from the review ?tudes[25]? that it send the physicist of its Fathers, we said nothing. We want precisely to know where the yellow is, absolutely! For there is no colour in matter.
If the colour is out of this universe, - no visible sky; elsewhere, unthinkably elsewhere, -it may be where the angel is possible; so Langevin[26] and Picasso give it up, that can be heard.
But, as the other qualities are of the same order and as well absent from the grain, they found themselves belonging to the same Elsewhere, obviously. What elsewhere?
Let us not be excited about these excitants, they are not in the grain, only certitude. Are they in the Sky of the review ?tudes? The Father director hesitates to accept them, he is not like the psychologist, he does not hold to the pink, the sonorous, the sugary. He understands nothing in the last sentence of the Credo[27], he was born too early.
Enough variations: the exposé.
There is the universe of grains of Misters Langevin, Einstein, and the musician universe. Everybody likes it better, the universe two… Does it have to be held as a dream? I dream sugary, I dream C sharp, A flat; I dream green.
Not at all, for I do not dream by myself. For me to dream this day dream, grain is required. Aha! This is the question. And my green dream, my C sharp dream, always corresponds to certain states of the grain. Admirable observation.
What states?
What does the grain do so that I breathe it sugary, so that I feel it heavy, so that I feel it flat…
The grain and I are two truths, two reals. In search of the third real without which there is no pleasure… If you ask the question aside, you are lost.
*
* *
For good sense, there is no question: the excitant is everywhere. For the Thinker, you do it as you do fever: you have a fit of yellow, of stingy, of sharp. This amounts to saying that for the ones the excitant exists in the grain of matter, and for the others, in you alone.
The first opinion is infirmed provided that one have a little Physics; the second is provided one have a lot.
Must one go crazy? Open the doors of Philosophy?
So as to live, let’s avoid them!
To live, is to watch, understand and recreate. What is given to you? The grain, and you. Do odd jobs, arrange, see how that can make quality…
*
* *
“Poser le problème d’un excitant, c’est le
poser pour tous. Rameau l’avait compris.”
Ch. Henry, Cercle Chromatique.
It is the grain that saved us. Well, half saved, let us suspect the still bare excitant; or rather it is a few excitants that betrayed themselves: the “sound”, the “colour”, the “temperature”… We are Champollion[28] in front of the hieroglyphs: he only needed one known word. We are the cryptologist in front of the ciphered dispatch: has he one letter, he has all.
But we! Ah dear idiot, if you have the C, you have the salty, if you have the cold, you have the bold. For obviously/of course it suffices to bring the un-understandable excitants to the excitants that are understood: these answer for the others; with the help of these, one could decipher.
And there’s what’s been found.
The sound excitant is the fact of the grains dedicated to silence, but what they do for sound to exist, one knows it; the colour excitant is the fact of colourless grains, but we know what they do for colour to exist; but one knows what the grains do so as to be icy or lukewarm, they that are never hot nor cold.
They do…
What?
-Three small/little rounds/circles.
-You are making fun of me.
-Does one make fun of the world’s secret? And when one gives his/her life to know it, can’t you hear that one must speak of it without manners?
The excitant is a round.
“Ô parfums balancés!”
Anna de Noailles.
It would be interesting to bring each excitant to what it is at the origin; to unveil the real. The study of knowledge would then begin with a chart:
Excitant temperature: effect produced on us by the speed of the molecules of the ambient milieu (hot, cold, it is not given by the universe).
Excitant weight: effect produced on us by the durations of the atomic vibrations (heavy, light, this is not given by the universe).
Excitant sound: effect produced on us by certain values of the vibratory movement of the molecules of the ambient milieu (C, D, E, -noise, -it is not given by the universe).
Excitant colour: effect produced on us by certain values of vibrations not of molecules anymore, nor of atoms, we go down, but of singular corpuscles beamed by the atoms (red, blue, it is not given by the universe).[29]
And so on and on and on.
The diverse excitants thus brought to a peculiarity of matter (and that it be, with the differences of value, always the same, teaches what the world is at the end of ends), one could at least try to understand how this particularity reaches us; but Psychology does not like these naive researches, nor to take care of assemblies, handyman! It takes care of tests. Do you know what a test is? It is to have you recite the alphabet the reverse way while shooting a revolver shot between your feet, which allows, by means of a simple calculation, to establish that you are a nerd.
Let us proceed/pursue our way. Let us ask the great questions. The excitant is a round, how do we receive it?
This research can have a happy ending only if one bears in mind the defence to ever call the excitant by its name, as the psychologist does, this child. Never to say “sound” or “colour”, “C”, “heavy”, “sugary”: it is to give oneself the solution, and it is false. To call the excitant as one will want/wants provided that the name does not indicate that it has resounded. To call it “that” if one wants to, or to have its noun be preceded by a doubt that set it in the future: “Maybe pink”, “maybe C”, “maybe hard”, for in the instant, before reaching you, it is not pink, it is not hard, it is a kind of undulating ring.
Where does the ring go? It is simple for everybody: it enters into contact with the senses and there it is.
So simple, that if that opinion corresponded to the truth, the Universe would be the chaos.
From themselves alone, the senses cannot feel without a previous load of feel, at least that does not take place; that that event come real in some other Universe we know nothing about; as it is of this one it is about, one will take the conditions of here:
A flesh with four main atoms, an excitant, that is to say a round, and a bizarre load, non/not /unlocatable, the unnameable, that one can call in the neutral “some already-felt”.
Some already felt…that is to say the unimaginable, the gratuitous, literature, the all-that-one-can-imagine…
Enough to throw height of it in the sight of one another, not enough to explain to one another.
*
* *
Not enough to solve. For that is a problem.
One does not put it, because one is in the middle of the dance; even the authors of laborious works do not put it; even the admirable patience of the ANNÉE PSYCHOLOGIQUE[30] does not put it, -when from the first molecule to the last body of this universe of unluck/mishap, everything would well like to know, but what, sir? The distance to oneself to Andromedes’ nebula[31]? The action of the pneumogastric on genius? Why half m-v-square[32] is lost? With what beam to bombard the egg white? O, one question mark by man, and as many researchers as there are stars, and the Problem, between the stars, without head – refuge to rest itself!
It is too simple; nobody has uttered it.
Problem:
The colour yellow does not exist outside myself,
The note C does not exist outside myself,
The hot, the cold, do not exist outside myself,
And so on…and so on…
But:
Instead of the colour yellow there are 520 billion kilocycles.
Instead of the note C there are 261 vibrations per second.
Instead of the cold, the hot, there are fifty metres per second more or less, frequency and speed of grains.
And since there does not exist a single quality where I am not,
There rigorously, exclusively, absolutely exists: 1, 2, 3, and coetera 5. And it happens that with exclusively, rigorously 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 when I appear, I do C, hot, blue, hard, soft et coetera sugary.
I can say that a sensation, this is a dance of number; that the different values of agitation of all these corpuscles – numbers, and only these values of agitation, trouble me, ravish me, depress me, make me complain. But I cannot explain this power on me of the multiplicity when it dances, nor my power of transfiguring it, at least with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, I feel the world.
*
* *
Here intervene Jean[33] and the phonograph.
That was a very long time ago, we were very small, he who is talking to you was making the malicious, he has much changed.
The first phonographs, with mechanic inscription, were reversible; one could play at carving the wax by oneself, singing in front of the pavilion, then at hearing oneself. Jean kept being stunned, in what he passed the other with all the distance there is from the question to the assurance.
“What I will never understand, he said, is that these tracks make my voice…”
-It is very simple, see, the wicked answered, the membrane vibrates, the vibrations are sonorous.
“Still!…” sighed Jean.
And he was well right.
*
* *
Jean’s flesh was insensitive atom; the excitant was some round… Result: the opening of the Maîtres Chanteurs.
Jean knew nothing of his own dust, and figured nothing of a vibratory movement; had he represented specifically to himself this and this, his astonishment would have increased. A wave makes one feel atoms! Are you aware of this?
-It is that they are alive.
-What, alive? Does a tree hear Le Beau Danube Bleu?
-The senses are required… er
The senses would be little beasts very malign with enchanted secretion, the animal eye, the animal ear, the beast of your nose, the beast of your taste, they would eat some round exclusively, digest it into blue, digest it into soft.
-That notion is not scien-ti-fic. So, simply state: the senses, that is to say atoms mechanically disposed, if they receive rounds of a certain value, can hear the opening of the Maîtres Chanteurs.
Yes. But… By virtue of what? I am going to confess to you a ravishing thing: it is that you believe that the engineer knows by virtue of what; but the engineer believes that the physiologist knows it, for he does not; and the physiologist believes that the physicist knows it; and the physicist does not ask for it.
*
* *
There remains the LOAD to look at.
Yet for the load, one is in the dark/black. An accumulation of feeling, this is almost as vague as this invention the less explainable since it is classic in teaching: the association of the ideas. “The club of ideas!” no, they are hurting us. Come with me, Émile[34]. Listen a little, the load of feeling, this is what one has felt, do you agree?
One has felt excitant, this makes no question. So the load of feel is an accumulation of excitants. Follow me well, that is going to work: the Universe excites you with what? With some yellow, salty, stingy? You do not believe it anymore, this 1880, this is being cucu. He sends his action, bibi, movement, that’s all.
As a consequence, the load of feel is materially an accumulation of movements, and if some material movement bothers you, I have you notice that you say about anything that you “do not have the material time”, which is still stronger (so strong that you then join the strongest calculations).
In defending oneself any gratuitous imagination ever, a living being must thus be seen: this is a building/an edifice of atoms the same as those of the world; associated to each of these edifices, associated one must ask oneself how, accumulated one must search where, finds itself a mobile Existence[35]; it is made of whirls.
Now the joint is going to become very annoying for the Thinkers for it is going to become specific.
Admitted that there exists in all flesh this mobile load made of past excitants, there is a phenomenon the most general, universal, that gives the model of the functioning of the sensation. This is the resonance. –Physics 3rd year.
It is not about noise. The resonance is only the perfect marriage (and so the addition) of two same forms of energy. To speak wo/man: two movements stick. For example, two pendules of equal length enter into resonance; a swing enters into resonance with the impulse if the impulse has the shape of its movement. That if you push a swing the movement of which has a certain period, your movement will stick to its own if it has a same period; the swing “will resound”, it will swallow your impulse as a seal, the bread. Well. Do you know from where that comes? That comes from the Great principle of Maupertuis[36], from Hamilton[37], from Einstein, see. All simply. And actually Really this is said, my pal. That comes from the nature of nature, I postpone the moment to tell it to you, fortunately you have sneaked taken off to the end of the corner, nobody will know anything about it. This is the principle of least action[38]. It expresses a base adventure, that of matter, that of what has been: MATTER LIKES TO BEGIN AGAIN. Not I. Wo/man varies her/his drawings. Now, in the Universe, all like drawings love each other: this is the good means not to give oneself pain: what is pre-done, does itself. Whatever be ponderable (material) is thus slave, by least action, to the resonance being coalescence of two movements that have same shape, that is to say that have in a sense nothing to “do” to recover each other.
And this would be the mounting of the FEEL.
Before everything, even when its object is “motionless”/”immobile”, all sensation is phenomenon owing to an emission. And that’s why its mounting is that of resonance. Tuned circuit.
The sensation has remained an insoluble prodigy because of the illusion of the motionlessness, that could not be otherwise at the time of the previous physics, probably the extreme difficulty of today’s physics excuses today’s psychology for not applying it to its problems; the great Charles Henry[39] only, counted for maniac, tried in helping himself with the data at last acquired on the undulatory movements, to find someTHING that in the body could resound to the signs of the world.
But he believed he had the right to figure the resonator resounding by a cellular element, that is to say exclusively ponderable, which would entail on the one hand some thermodynamic difficulties out of which he has not come, and some difficulties… magic, on the other hand, that will be found here again. In all cases he perfectly knew that the excitant-sign, the “that” which makes feel, is a small dancing shape, and that to feel, is to resound: to possess some shape that could resound with… He knew that every object emits. Not only the radium, not only the post of radio: all objects[40]!
The sign of matter, the action of number, the imperceptible dance, will clothe any animation like it. And the other one, the animation of the living circuit, will resound; it will admit the encounter, it will make it last in space in dissipating it. The sign of the world is a shape, the last, or the first, of all, emitted by the movement of what is weighed, whatever it be. Nothing is immobile, no existence that does not emit out of itself its extreme ring; however the ring is received: there’s why the hole is wrong: it clothes a sister ring. Where, son? You will marry it, the outer world!
Its instantaneous undulating sign, that less than nothing, this more than everything, is for your heart. At least one supposes that there exists this load, accumulated load that all instant joins as a stone would fall.
There is a gravitation of feel.
What one sees is curious; yet, one is not tranquil.
Have well risen an existence and a problem; only the Existence answers the question one was not asking.
The existence is the strange growth accumulated in everyone and made of the dancing bottoms that indefinitely the Universe sent. This thing-beyond-thing explains the agreement of I and of things: when a thing spits its round, the latter sticks to the former, and the former sounds – (sounds is a way of speaking, do not give me kicks)-that is the spasm; well, a sensation without quality.
You who were gone –or I- in search of the C, of the azure, of the sugary!
Some round –of grain can well reach the nerves, go rather to the physiology lab! But that will resound without more singularity than a pendulum: even if you stuff some into their ear. The er receives n vibrations, it is I who receives C. Well, I’m telling you, my cutie: you know very well that the ear does not receive C, no matter that you say no t the academy.
Why how? But the ear is some grain as your telephone; so it receives the round-of-grain as it does.
Alas! To have C and the ear meet, this is as malign as to have the atom and jealousy meet.
III
“Nous avertissons ceux qui liront ces écrits, qu'ils doivent s’attendre à y trouver en beaucoup d’endroits des matières très subtiles, dont la lecture les pourra peiner… mais que je ne puis mettre dans l’esprit des hommes sans qu'ils y donnent de l’attention, ni faire que l’attention ne soit pas pénible.”
Bossuet.
“Newton était persuadé, comme presque tous les bons philosophes, que l’âme est une substance incompréhensible.”
Voltaire.
“En général les chemins par lesquels on
atteint un but sont d’autant plus intelligents
qu'ils sont improbables”.
Charles Henry
The soul, this the subject of the verb “to gather”. One knows nothing more. One does not want to say anything more. One is neither in philosophy, nor in religion; one does not present any revelation; one absolutely refuses to have Reader go to heaven, through a new trick .
One was not looking for the Soul. One bumped into it.
The Soul was not the goal…
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The goal was to explain this good, that evil, this moment that makes of me its theatre, this seizing diversity that plays where I am, on my life, this FEEL, -this resurrection second by second out of myself that is imposed on/to me, this chance, this pleasure; this menace of which I am beginning to know the possible, this song of my flesh from which I can’t flee.
My thought is indifferent to me, I avoid it, I will entertain it.
But that! Nothing is of the strength to entertain me away from it; and if suddenly the resonance of my body makes me unhappy, a few venoms/pieces of venom from a few plants will pay it off within an hour or a day, but my unavoidable music will be at the end.
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There came to me these magic infringements from everywhere. Some contacts, some lights, some tastes; at each heartbeat I was harpooned, and all the time I was letting myself do/be done and even I helped, -and the harpoon is soft. They are the troubles that the universe sends me; it is one those I depend; they are the causes that the psychologist measures, the “excitants”.
They led me to the soul.
How?
Only because one had to acknowledge that the excitant was becoming/getting more and more intense in gathering itself, -and that, alone, it had no resonance and no quality: so it was accumulated, then transfigured, in some unknown surface.
The first fact, psychology knows it, and proceeds neglecting it.
The second one, all physics shouts it, and does not take care of it.
Actually, this story is grounded/founded on a more specific notion of the “excitant”, of the “that”, “that” is felt. It is some yellow, it is some sharp, it is some heavy, my friend? One believes so, since one lives; at least/nevertheless one pretends/does as if. Yet the “that” is nothing as beautiful; on this sad statement lies moreover phenomenology; the excitant that reaches the body, that has it react, that accumulates itself and forms in you a copy/double of the world, a resounding mass without which your world would not exist, it comes from the world indeed, but it is not. It is humanly nothing[41]; one calls nothing one, two, three, four, five, even if one went until the billions of billions.
Nobody has ever felt one hundred and twenty, even if they were billions, -and everyone feels the yellow; now, the yellow is five hundred and twenty billion in periods by second, frequencies of points, of innumerable number, identical, inhuman, vain; and whatever is brought back to such inqualifiable turmoil/agitation: a contact, a colour, (a kiss, ah be quiet!) a solid, a perfume.
The true state of the place you defend from death, is the imperceptible whirl of the number outside: yet it reaches, from discontinuous blows counted by the heart and the watch, a mirror whirl that is not your body, that has been preserving itself for centuries, and that does your fate.
So…
………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
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Jules Verne was writing stories that have become true: he was less helped than this very tale, he did not have examples in front of himself.
Thank God! The wireless exists so that the verb “to emit” illustrates an act that travels; and “to beam” is no longer said only of the moon and of the sun in front of these tubes that fart some piercing and bombard some very mighty that can’t be looked at.
To emit, to send…
My reader, one must spare you. One will not have you suffer; you may be my great grand nephew, a little/somewhat lazy, somewhat unlucky, who well wants the apple, and not the works.
The child-readers of Jules Verne had a worthier attention than yours, ô grand nephew: one is confounded with what they swallowed; but you, if one leads you to the moon, the coal nut must be light.
One leads you to your universe, with precautions of a male nurse…
The Universe is matter-energy, almost/about as water is liquid and vapour. This image is not excellent; Mister Boll, who fortunately published the new encyclopaedia[42], will not fail to mention it, for he overturns you, with one exclamation mark right in the face, the lovers of science too much in a hurry.
Yes; the emanation of matter into energy has violent effects, incomparable to that of water into vapour; and neither the bigness of the elements at stake nor the speeds are like, yet one uses the image for what it has very common: it is enough that it be partially faithful; the considered part, that’s the change of state. A substance sends itself in the far awayness from itself under a more subtle shape and spends itself; it could recuperate itself. That the vapour make water again is ordinary; that energy make matter again is admitted even if it be not under our eyes.
Go, there is no need to go that far, my little nephew. The little which one has to remember is that matter, that is to say agitated grain, keeps sending itself out of itself under the shape of other more subtle grains.
Now the former, the electrons, my God, are already in the living rooms. The latter are the photons of undulatory physics.
Agitate some electron, out goes some photon; heat some water (this to agitate its molecules) out goes some vapour.
Well the matter agitates itself, brave reader; it sends you some photon by billions of billions and you receive it somewhere.
We were at “the excitant”. Something burst, to which there lacked, to be noise, only your ear; some Thing appeared, to which, to be light, there only lacked your sight: this was some energy; this was only energy, one had to know so.
Matter exists; the energy reaches you; be careful of the distinction, (mister Boll holds back, suspended to a wire, his exclamation mark) without them to cease being the same, (how physics, pushed to its end, resembles religion!)
The point/mark has fallen: please note that we have thrown it away.
*
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That C sharp be energy, Reader accepted so. The excitant would be energy when it arrives in the ear; also when it burns; and all times it pinches, pushes, farts, bursts, impresses.
Reader, [amène], repeated: “The excitant reaches you.”
This is energy when that moves, at last; when that touches me but does not move this is matter thought Reader, and all your brothers and all his sisters, -what an error.
Matter exists, it does not reach you; it is its acts that reach you when It throws itself out of Itself at the lost state. No matter has ever touched you.
“I touch it!” insists Reader.
-No, sir. At least not as you hear it. Take off from your mind first that something does not move; for if the motionless existed, you would not know anything of it, for the sufficient reason, even if strange, that you would not feel it.
Maybe this is a postulate; maybe this is a God over there; here the motionless is not.
The object of the sensation is some motion; and if the atoms of the armchair did not oscillate a calculable number per second, your bottom would be as for the existence of the armchair precisely as uncertain as you are as for the existence of the divinity/godliness. Now, motion is not Matter: it is it Word, if you want.
-Does the armchair emit photon?
So as to emit photon, my son, one has to be well disturbed.
Here is the place to inscribe a few pointers modestly primary, agreeably superior… I am writing for You, my future soul! Reader, I have tired him/her. I do not know if you will ever know anything of the real that life disguises; lose your ears and lose your eyes: science gives it its nakedness back.
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Matter never reaches you. That’s an unknown one. Leave it where it is. It is what comes from it that you know.
-But the armchair? There where I sit down? I do not receive armchair beams! It is there, there, you can speak.
-O my soul, your bottom deceives/misleads you. You feel the armchair by/through its energy, you are in contact with the energy; nothing reassuring that does not move does not bear you by the bottom.
As for the photon, this is a process. Matter shoots with small lead, or with big one; its projectiles are so subtle that you hardly believe in it, even if only they hurt you-and the contrary, alas.
Whatever there be, there you are.
Energy copies matter, its other state, it is in irreducible grains, or big, -in this case, one will say in “pieces”. And indeed piece is not an excellent term since it makes one think of the matter that precisely energy no longer is: yet one says “piece of music”; it is in this acception that one must take “piece of energy”.
So there is the grain of matter (electron, positron, proton, neutron), and the grain of energy (photon).
(The grain of matter constitutes a grain above, the atom, that the ancients believed to be/was the last grain. Let us not get lost.)
And there is the piece of matter (molecule), and the piece of energy that has no name or rather that has all the names of our events.
Now, as in the crime stories, this tale has a good end, not to let go: a place of departure that alone leads to the place of arrival.
The place of departure is the “excitant”.
The place of arrival: to explain “I feel”.
The excitant is some grain or some piece of energy. It is acquired for the solution.
The difference is simple between the grain and the piece: this is speed. The grain has a speed of three hundred thousand kilometres per second or close; the piece is slower.
The grain of energy is the beaming excitant, visible or invisible. The pieces of energy are the excitant-signs gifted of/with all the inferior speeds: a shock is a piece of energy, also a noise, a sound, a temperature.
Only the grain of energy arrives to you directly, thrown by the finger of a God… “Appear then, light, the most beautiful among creatures…”[43]
The piece of energy is indirect. It lost itself one hundred times before disturbing/troubling you. What tale, my heart.
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“Leur masse indestructible a fatigué le temps.”
DELILLE.
At last! At last, here is the garden door! Here is the apple, dear nephew, read still a little.
I have exceeded you, yet you know that where the Teacher could see in you only decorum, there had been an active Mass, a lot more like what an accumulator contains, than what an album presents.
Now that Mass had been set in you by the motions of the world, this was its energy: the motion-sound, the motion-colour, the motion-softness. Softness also, hardness, cold; and what appears motionless quality: impenetrability, weight…
So that you feel, there had to be in you this previous accumulation a sensation is the effect of the contact of the instant with It.
Admire the littleness of the little of which you gather the immense fortune: the matter of a ten millionth of milligram of sea salt, this nothing, its motion reaches you, and the infinitesimal energy that it carries, hardly in contact of/with the same Addition that comes to you from the centuries, bursts into colour and resounds “yellow”.
A hundred millionth of milligram of iodoform per cubic centimetre of air, its motion brings you the energy of an “odour”, if it joins in you its likes.
As for the energy that sends, to the limit of the perceptible, the shock of a small cork ball weighing a milligram and falling from a millimetre on a glass tray, the ear being eleven millimetres away “hears it” if the formidable past made of same instants agitates itself/comes into motion.
So, let us cry out/shout the capital thing: the energy keeps dissipating itself: with what, in what, on what are you gathering it all day long?
The direct energy seems to be absorbed by the universe that emitted it: thus the grains that constitute light determine the chemical reactions; Perrin[44] showed it.
The energy that is no longer in grains, the slower “pieces” of energy, the pieces of action at the centre of which you live, are so weak that the World vomits them.
You are accumulating them, my son…
This is of what does not count for the universe, that you make the secret of your flesh.
All the shocks, all the encounters, the “perfumes”, the “musics”, the “tastes”, the “piercing”, the “stingy”, the “solid”, the “heavy”, the “hot”, the “sonorous”, the “soft”, what is for you the outer world, this is so little, my heart!
And if a shock can be strong in relation with you, and a sound, although their speeds be only meters by second, if one must concede relatively to you, sometimes some speed to those slow(li)nesses, if one must excuse you for believing that a blow of the fist in the face or a concert are “stronger” than some yellow or some green, -go, take over M. Boll’s example who is so specific, and who does not like those lines…
The shock of the small cork ball falling from one millimetre on the tray, if its energy was absorbed (but it is lost) by a gram of water, there should be, for it to raise by a degree the temperature of that water, that the sign of it be prolonged by/for two hundred thousand centuries.
You are there, near the water, you “hear it” at the instant, this fearsome nothing!
You feel it, because it agrees with an innumerable agitated sum, and the signs are in you that animate nothingness, and you do not need to wait to put some centuries forward.
You have constituted, zero plus zero, a treasure made of all that passed; how have you done?
The Greeks called the World: “The Other”, because it changed.
The energy that is only the volatilisation of the world, is called “the Disappeared”.
The whole physics is but/only a drama where the scientist is looking for this mad woman, evaporated below, closer and closer to the abyss where one does not take it back. All of physics supputes the fall. Will come back up, will not? Proserpine a hundred times lost! And yet she has found her place and her very narrow paradise where she won’t damage herself anymore; she has found you, miserable YOU.
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“Un fantôme éclatant se présente à sa vue.”
Voltaire.
Some agitated number, some weighing number, is emitted; it is without quality, grey. It is emitted with a great speed and a great force in irreducible and direct unit; or with less strength in more confuse and “bigger”, indirect expeditions.
Hardly emitted it diverges, wanders, damages itself, nothing receives it.
This number is everything. There is nothing else. So everything goes to the nothing. Everything would go to the nothing.
Yet there exists a surface of stop, it does not seem to be part of all that spreads away from itself and evaporates.
It attracts the number. It attracts it at the most extreme nothing of its value; preserves it; makes sums of it; and these sums end up having an extreme value, in the other way. The surface of stop is thus recovered with number –the number being energy-of which there is nothing to say and that is distinguished only by the shape of its motion.
One does not know anything of that surface, except that it has to exist so that the accumulation be possible. One calls it Surface, and one writes that it does not “seem to belong to the All”, which would be contradictory, for if it is a surface, it is “in” the All.
But in the truth IT seems to be there and there not to be.
IV
“Quelque temps après, M. de Voltaire fut obligé de s’élever contre un autre défaut plus grand peut-être, la manie d’écrire sur les sciences en prose poétique. Cet abus est plus dangereux.”
Warning of the publishers of Kell to the “Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton”.
“Mais alors, bon jeune homme, vous construisez un escalier pour conduire à une CHOSE que, ce faisant, vous êtes impuissant à concevoir.”
Tevijga Sutta du Canon Bouddhique.
“Je contemple en ces signes purs la Nature agissante opposée à mon âme.”
Goethe.
“Tout se fait par figure et mouvement.”
Pascal.
Uncertainty is directed. It proceeds for all those who do not have any more time to be Faust. Where am I?
In a bath of granulous matter, that is not I.
From the what-is-not-me comes to me an excitant sign, that is a round.
This round comes/enters in contact with an accumulation of rounds that I have received, that I carry, that is not my body.
They call the sign “the excitant”, this is a bad word, that presumes that the sign is destined to me, that already has it play on my theatre; thus Bernardin de Saint Pierre[45] believed that the fleas were black so as to be taken on the white sheet. “Sign” also implies a destination and would here have the same wrong (for it must not be that the term that serves to look for contain an answer): only the true acception of the word sign is “that indicates the existence of something”. So from the what-is-not-me comes the manifestation, this emission, this round, this shape. Do not write “wave” so as not to wander!
Do not write wave, you do not know enough, even if it’s probably about a vibratory motion: you would look for it among/in the known scales, you would fall back into the spread measurableness. Avoid “excitant”, that is loaded with a shout, avoid “wave” that you can compare, add nothing/do not add anything to the WHAT that you are going to transmute… The sign, the emission of things, the “quid” of which you will say “this is pink”, out of yourself, is black number.
One writes “number” for the rigour; one would be clearer in writing “motion” but then the thinker rises/stands up and shouts that we use man language: for he does not know that the motions, being reducible to integer/entire values of the energy, (-quanta-) are numbers. Let him sit on. Nothing is more important than these motions, these acts of the number, of the world. For there is a necessary relationship between the “reality” of the outer world for us and its vibratory motions.
In other words: that I know, no, feel, the outer world, because it vibrates. But else? To vibrate is to send waves, shapes, some “round”.
The world emits some round, the round I am turned to it: I possess some same round, the round I am tuned to it: I possess some same round, I receive this round from the world; then I feel.
I receive it because I am “tuned”, as a radio, because I possess the previous same round; the fact suffices.
Well! No.
I feel… what do I feel? I feel the round that comes touch my cot of rounds, rrrr.
Not more. I do not know what nor what’s it.
One can call the accumulation of the previous rounds, the skirt of rounds, cot of rounds, the system of signs that clothes the living, “Soul Skin”; one has understood by this the mechanism of the rude encounter of I and the outer world; if one wants to speak so that the psychologist falls dead, but this has already been done, one has understood “dzing!” “My turn touched !”Alas! this is only the half of the problem.
Dzing sent by Chopin? By Guerlain? By the sun? By the swarming atoms of the table? One does not know, dzing has no identity.
What do you say? That I am obscure as the other who thinks, that no matter if I am printed at Alcan[46], that you go away? You no longer want to know what you feel?
This is well. One will have you listen by the ordinary means. Go make love, go there, go there. I only ask you one thing: in the very end think of me (stop before calling me bastard .
In the very end is “dzing”.
Dzing, Soul Skin resounds entire, but its resonance has no name; the resonance has the intensity; it does not have the name. –The name: bitter, pink…
What is impossible, is not to draw a spasm from the encounter of I and the World: it is so possible that all sensation is a reduced spasm, -light. Right in the eye! Is a reduced spasm. What is impossible is to draw a song out of it.
Orange is a song. So is vanillated.
So? Vibratory motion of the outer world sending some round; reception of the round in a living on same round; spasm-resonance, spasm-chord, raw sensation.
The raw sensation, that is to say the oscillation of a tuned circuit in the living at the instant when the object wave arrives, is in the order of everything.
Only between this nameless sensation and a human singing sensation there is not, it seems that there is no passage.
Let one for the time being write that there is none. Let one only write what one knows: when the outer world sends in vibrating some round, the living enters into resonance by means of a tuned mass that it wears – or that clothes him- the image matters little.
At that moment a raw sensation takes place: as stupid as the bursting magnesium gives some, yet as weak as one will want.
This kind of spasm always follows a contact of the outer world and a being. This is an energetic phenomenon, belonging to the known physics.
As for the sensation said to be singing, it is temporarily for the time being impossible to believe in it: neither she correspond to the same emission as the blind sensation; nor she be received by the same… space.
This is a certain imperceptible electro-magnetic out of you, in you light by divided colours; this is the kinetic energy of the swarming milieu where you are holding yourself, in you sound; this is orientation of assembled points by chains; in you taste; these are kernels of strength in emptiness, for you the solid. This is always the impulse that some mobile without quality brings.
The instant proposes nothing more. The instant is neither colour nor heat nor taste nor sound that arrives. Outside yourself these signs that are not named. They are multiplicity of units, impulsion of unknown origin; they are dance of dots, and the pace of the dance and the quantity of the dancing ones, -and the figures of the dance that, if you were there, would have a noun/name made body.
You are required. Without you the motions go their waves, the signs cross the world, none is hot, none is hard, none is C, none is azure…
The feel is the transformation of these movements into qualities (-hello philosophy!)
Where this transformation is done, one FEELS.
Where? There is no other problem.
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I know that the signs emitted by what is out of me follow in me their preceding ones by effect of the law of least action that one also calls weight, that explains resonance.
I know that the received sign does not get lost, that it does not cross me as it crosses the rest of the earth, since, even if passed, it reinforces the sign that arrives to me. So it accumulates itself at the place that receives it, in me. Thus is constituted a particular Mass, mass of acts emitted by the World, movements of diverse forms that I have, one knows not how, one knows not where, the capacity to preserve.
These motions were those of the ponderable; all motion of ponderable is brought back to a certain value of the energy; -the received sign, the mass that it makes heavier, are energy, I know that.
I know that sensitivity is a fact that produces itself/happens only where such accumulations exist: any new sign resounds there, that is to say makes them heavier and then is enchanted.
There is in me an enraptured mass; what reaches it flames and shouts.
I have gathered it in living; one has been gathering it since Adam. Without it the isolated sign is but a weakness that does not live; it gets lost if it does not reach it; it is, if it does not stop it, but a note that will not resound.
There is in me a transformed mass of signs, a matter mingled with power, a quantity that has made love with life, a measure without memory of instants of the finished universes.
…”Mais dire comment, cela est inutile, et d’un autre ordre.”
Pascal.
The motion of the molecules of the atmosphere slows down: a sign.
It reaches me: I’m cold. What transmutation, what passage. Outside, this is only one motion: there. I have changed it. Through/by what?
I have received it. On what? On my matter! That would be too simple: then, the earth would feel.
On my body? But it is the earth.
On a spirit? Do I know whether it exists. If it exists and is not the earth, would the earth touch it!
The earth is of itself insensitive, it crosses itself from part to part; nor does it oppose itself to itself, to receive.
And if the spirit has the might, indeed it does not have the power.
The motion reaches the previous Mass.
The transformation of the motion into quality is made with the contact of the preserved previous accumulation: there it is raised, passes a level, trespasses a threshold, -beneath, it is the number, beyond, it is the day.
That Mass opposed to the world, of which it has not been noticed until now that it exposed a summation, some believe that it is their body, some, that it is their spirit.
The THING to raise the real above the level where it is exclusively number, the vibrating mass where five hundred and twenty billion kilocycles are going to resound then change themselves into yellow, science admits, and so does good sense, that it is the body.
Science admits so, not without admitting that there is an unknown: for one can make the molecules of the proteins without any of their constituents to be brought back to sensitiveness, and if one makes apparatus apparels of the senses, a Kodak can’t see. Nothing in chemistry nor physics shows the element of this strange transformation. One had to replace it with a property as one did in the obscure times to explain that the fire burn[47], and science gives the proteic molecules organised into a system, the “property of feeling” as it gave earlier the property of burning to the phlogistic. But the element that is to sensation what the oxygen is to combustion, no induction exposes so. Where is it, the curious species?
As for good sense, it has believed of all times that yellow was yellow out of itself.
The best ones register a defeat, and wait: - not without waiting, if the body is not the sorcerer, for this to be spirit.
Eddington[48] observes the waves penetrate into his eye, that he renounces to know. “But the process by which the outer world of physics is transformed into familiar world to the human conscience finds itself out of the home of physics”, says he.
Outside physics! This is to imply that the sign emitted by the things directly falls into this conscience that physics does not reach.
Hardly do I live, do I hold this folly to be natural. One must set him/herself very much aside from life to be astonished, since one can’t pour an idea into a glass, a motion of ponderable points be able to/can/may reach a spirit.
These are two irreducible spaces; that of matter does not seem to be that of conscience. It is true that for the latter the physicist puts down his instruments and renounces to enter. But if he does not enter, neither does matter!
If physics does not reach conscience, how does a corpuscular wave reach it? How some shocks of molecules or their whirl? If the instrument of measure does not enter it, how does the object of the measure enter there?
In truth, it would not be more surprising to touch your conscience with a meter.
-Touch what?
-Your spirit.
-You must be joking!
-And with a millimetre? If the millimetre was very small? A fraction of it?
-Come on!
-Are you sure, that can’t be?
-As of my life.
-And with some blue?
-Now that’s different.
-That is some millimetre, Sir.
*
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It is possible for the physicists and to the gods to imagine several spaces; but, if one must make them coincide…
The matter, that alone could meet matter, can’t feel it.
And the conscience, that singularly could feel it, can’t meet it.
What meets some number and feels some hot, some song, the colour blue?
*
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What is the surface of transformation…
It is made of ponderable since an emission of ponderable reaches it; it is antagonist to ponderable, since it cancels the number; it belongs to the world since the world touches it; it does not belong to it since it opposes itself to it.
“Here is how. Out of the indivisible and unvarying substance and of the divisible substance that is in the bodies, he has composed in mixing them an intermediate substance…”[49]
But this is Plato’s opinion.
“Quorum nil fieri sine tactu posse videmus,
Nec tactum porro sine corpore: nonne fatendum est.
Corporea natura animum constare animamque.”
Lucrèce
On the one side the WORLD.
On the other side an accumulation of the motions come from the World: these motions that are energy, make mass.
And at the level of such Masses appears the phenomenon “to feel”: all new motion reaching them resounds then takes an incomparable value and metamorphoses itself. The sensation is the metamorphosis.
Does that necessarily happen? Does that happen without agent? “If there exists an I, said that Buddhist text, you will know nothing of it.”
One can here make but one observation, one only, that is that such accumulations of instants of energy of/from the world, such masses of permanent signs exist only in the living.
It seems that the motions of the world, whatever they be, the instants of energy of the world whatever they be, never make mass out of the living, -for a reason that must contain the solution to the problem.
If it was possible that out of life the formation of such masses be allowed, would they feel? Each new instant, at their contact, would resound? “Eh what! Everything is sensitive”, wrote Nerval[50] -who was crazy.
Now, that is not, for the signs of the World outside the living do not accumulate themselves: everything is crossed by everything.
Space, if it is altered around the things by the deep agitation of their apparent motionlessness, does not keep anything of it: the matter that constitutes spaces does not keep anything out of it. The innumerable circuits are open, where energy falls. It circulates, disperses itself, passes; it is instant; new instant; imperceptible fraction of it; it never finds again its own sum; it adds a number, another number to an impossible addition; the total never bursts as a surprise; it does not make light.
The fearful might accumulated by its very action sends itself so as to join itself toward an unknown surface.
It can’t gather itself on itself.
All action that the universe emits can only lose itself into the universe: the ponderable is the permeable.
Each number must however be retained and each instant because the instant is five hundred billion kilocycles; nothing more, and it is the past that is yellow, or blue.
The instant is nothing: it is the mass of instants that gives the resonance; the instant is but an agitation or a frequency. But a mass constitutes itself starting from successive elements only where a force of stop exists.
“Vous voyez, Mademoiselle, que cela passe
le badinage: d’expérience en expérience, nous
sommes parvenus à toucher le feu du ciel…”
Abbé Nollet.
The maybe red, the maybe sugary, the hot, the soft, the hard, the maybe noise, arrives to me; that touches my body, that stops it, accumulates it, makes a treasure of it!
What, your body?
Your body of carbon, azote, hydrogen, iron, what, your body, the Universe?
Its molecules are those of the universe; it is built with the same stones. How would they gather motion, while by definition, they lost it?
What makes a sound is a motion: the [ébranlement] of air, maybe of music, the matter of your body has remembered nothing of it; its chemical species is not altered for all that; what makes the solid is a motion: it has not received it. It is not changed; no contact by the way [d’ailleurs] has changed it: [neither/has] this feel.
No contact has increased it…
The body’s chemistry is that of the world: for it the motions that could be noise, heat, smell, colour, resistance, are universally lost.
For if the World, by natural slope/bent, shuts its matter into “things” –it is even a law of evolution that would give the metaphysical reason for/of necessity, -it is not so with its energy.
The world comes close to itself in sets more and more considerable only to get away from its emissions more and more. It shrinks, and it beams; it accuses itself, and it vanishes; it falls on itself, and it dissipates itself; it reduces itself to weight and spends itself into signs. It loses its acts as we do ours; the prodigy is that they be gathered.
-Gathered as a vase retains the wine, as a basket retains the fruit?
Some motions lost for the elements of nature and lost for the elements of the flesh, yet preserved, gathered together, in the air?
-Some masses of motions are the blue, are the yellow, the music; some past instants, persisting from the extreme of ages, are the hard, are the hot, are the bitter.
The [equivoque] attributing to the body the capacity to contain the resounding masses of instants without which there is no sensation comes from the obviousness of the body, and from the very old idea that is matter is different from that of the Universe. This idea has been abandoned: its effects have not; the still visible and present body prevents doubt; this is, for everyone, he who receives the sign of the world, the contact of the instant, he who retains it, who resounds…
And the laboratory agrees with the common sense.
We have studied in biology the organs of the senses, neglecting to know that it was not them, made of molecules from the earth, that could gather the motions of the earth, these lost ones.
Biology, that does not set an idea in a glass, sets instants in a cell made of the known atoms.
*
* *
“Il est faux que l’âme et le corps
soient identiques. Il est faux qu' ils
soient différents.”
Majjhima, I
(de la Triple corbeille
de la loi bouddhique.)
What causes the sensations, are the acts of the Universe. They are lost on matter whatever it be, wherever it be. By definition, matter lets them run away.
Experience shows that however some THING receives them since they accumulate into masses, that are preserved.
The thing that receives them is not the body.
You are zigzagging, Searcher! You make one step forward, one step aside, you are pitiful.
Have the courage to be new, describe it, your funny Reality, descry, in your loudspeaker language good for the brothers and for the sisters, hope, hope… If nobody is at the tuning, you will have shown it, you will be at the harbour; that is all one can demand from a dead one!
Now it is impossible to continue scientifically to ignore it, the load of instants that the universe has not gathered; the Surreal one.
It is there, in the state of second universe, between the universe and I.
The Universe is grain; so is the body of I, for the body of I does not distinguish itself from the universal grain. I itself, one does not know what that is, it is face to the discontinuous shivering that sends instant-shapes. And it clothes itself with them, ring after ring. The soul is the clothe that constitute itself.
The soul is a cot of [mailles]… It is not the nervous system, for the nervous system is some grain. The grain is not the load of instants. I am covered of instants, I laugh under their clothe, I see what I have seen, I touch what I used to be. O time that I know without recognising it and that covers infinitely everything, without memory.
*
* *
Universal grain; I; -subtle grains clothing I with their load of trouble, animated skirt, net, time skin.
“Combien ténue est la texture de cette CHOSE…”
Lucrèce
This thing is some time, it must be some space; by the way it exposes the principle of least action that implies time-space.
-A sum of looks, of contacts, of tastes, is not a thing.
-And what contains Faraday’s cylinder[51], is it a thing?
-The thing is your body.
No! That is not my body, for the molecules of my body must be as all molecules improper to the accumulations of actions emitted by the World that make this no-not-Thing: and if however they were clean, there would still remain for them to enchant them.
And then my body makes so little this No-Not-Thing, that it is It that wakes it up. It pre-existed, this greatness, this growth/increase, this [poulpe] of looks and of contacts, this joy, this evil, this sum of astonishments, this power to what the instant stops. It was the lying hydra in the youngest one of my bodies and each instant entailed[suscitait] it. Before the youngest one of my bodies, it had been living. There exists, science knows not where, a THING of feel that survives everything.
*
* *
“And make us heirs of all eternity!”
Shakespeare.
“All sensation is of an infinite presence”[52] wrote the great immoralist who believes he lives only the instant that appears.
He meant that the sensation brings us, from whatever there be, towards it; that it occupies us entirely: to it, the time that it is, all our territory; and the extension of its space makes, that it lasts, the extension of time. But for André Gide, the plenitude of the present is precisely perfect of its infidelity.
Now who searches to know in what the sensation consists, has to admit that it is a sum. All notion of past, of present, disappears here; time as space becomes continuous.
There are only the present Space and Time that the considered sensation occupies. There is a number, of course impossible to determine, of previous elements of space and of elements of time, that appear, that surge in the instantaneous sensation. To breathe a rose is to make an integral.
Lastly, a sensation, just like any event, has a given place of which it is [solidaire]; has a time out of which it would be past, future.
But in truth, this specific sensation is formed of an accumulation of far away places, of moments out of reach. All the elements of preceding space and of anterior time that actualise themselves in it, do that, the time it resounds, there is rigorously no distinction between the present and the past.
To flee into the instantaneous? What fidelity!
“…dem Augenblicke sagen
Verweile doch, du bist so schön!”
“Pouvoir dire à l’instant qui fuit: Reste!
Tu es si beau…”
Goethe.
“Malheureuse Sion, qu'as-tu fait de ta gloire?”
Racine.
“Non hoc semper eris, perdunt et gramina flores,
Perdit spina rosas nec semper lilia candent;
Nec longum tenet uva comas, nec populus umbras
Domum forma breve est.”
…et la vigne ne garde pas longtemps
ses pampres, ni ses ombrages, le
peuplier.”
Calpurnius.
There remains looks. Everything unties itself, everything is forsaken, everything disappears.
There remains some taste, some contact. There remains some look. (O Substance! O enchanted Mass, all intent to receiving! O very high addition of signs where I can hold myself, and see.)
“It is found again.
What? Eternity.”[53]
“…to rot itself with motion.”
Shakespeare.
In me, some Sums of motion of the universe; what to know of them… To know of them an important fact: that if I imagine whatever quality to these signs when they reach me, I lie. It is enough to consider them as I consider physics, that is to say isolated, besides the masses that they constitute in the living ones.
Outside…
A vibration of things, a motion of set of things, or a disordered motion of things has touched me. Touched? There is no touching yet. Met. There are no things. There are some corpuscle, some oscillating people, some imperceptible existence.
Is it some maybe sound, a future “A” of the diapason? In this case the agitated confusion in which I am breathing vibrates at 435 vibrations per second on a length of 76 centimetres renewed all around; and that gains by and by by 300 meters of the same drawing, the time to say “one”. It is some maybe heat? The agitation of the dots would no longer be regular; I call it “cold” if it diminishes, and I am hot for fifty meters by second more. But if this is some maybe light, this is not the limit of speed, and that is orderly; and the elements are no longer matter, but what it has been/used to be.
There is no “A”, there is no “hot”; there is no day outside, there is no colour; if the silk is “soft” to feel it is not that it have the “softness” (as tenderness, a heart). These first truths are said by a few chroniclers of sciences, unpaid heroes, -but the numeric world where they take you for a stroll in twenty lines, seems reserved. Your will does not want it, -and as the Greek, you go back to the world where the smallest pieces of things, have QUALITIES.
Almost everybody still wanders in Anaxagora[54]’s world… But so that the very small pieces of things are red or blue or soft, you are required. I is required, the dizziness that I contains as a water. It is not the motion of the organs, the cells, the blood, (it applies itself to it, it does not come from it), but this is some motion without thing, persisting bare/in the bareness, as if the gesture that some arms make continued to promote the air when the arms are not there anymore. This gesture with nothing more below came from the Universe, from Everything, and everything that sent it is past. The motion has remained. It has made its invisible returns, it has chained me. One day the chain will open itself, I will fall lower than the earth, I will be less me than a necklace of which at least the stones persist, I will not be even defined as the dust that has been promised to me – but the Motion that inhabited me will last in this universe. It will last, the worker, made heavier with my last hour, it will empty my happiness and the last instant of horror, ring after ring, reverse, mixing me with its old concerts God knows on what thing with nerves…
The answer to the question that matters most depends on the permanent existence in everyone of a sum of past signs, of the world; for these signs were not isolately, out of each one, what they are in the state of sum in each one. When each instant that composes them arrived, that instant was but an action of dots, but an agitated number. Thus five hundred and twenty billion kilocycles, periods per second; nothing less literary, nothing less moving, -this is a sign that is isolated, far from the animated sum, (far from the sky).
The Sum in everyone is yellow, it is enchanted. What has happened to it?
The motion of the world at the instant is not yellow: this is a grain of action, a reflex of the universe, a measure (the honourable Binet[55] did not even want it to be called “a motion”, word painted with humanness; for this is not we who have invented that the universe is unqualified). Let us hold ourselves firm on this curious path: whatever instant that be is but a “that”. There’s a precise word, the very present’s skin.
And there is the secret of the world: the “that” does not count. Nobody knows anything about it, neither you, nor I, nor the voluptuous one who has devoted him/herself to the instant, nobody has seen the “that”, has tasted it, has shouted of it. But the “that” exists (its agitation is great) and meets a body. Nothing yet. It has to disturb, with the body, the Mass made of preserved “that”.
At last no more kilocycles, word stinking the grocery store and the garage. To us Jules Verne, the fairies, -dear made up one, Literature, your turn! – to receive, resounding with billions of billions of disastrously past, refused, rejected, forgotten, resuscitated instants –instants, a QUALITY.
The present has touched the past.
Well, what happened?
Not one psychologist in the universe is asking this to her/himself. From such a black vanishing of attention, this tale can’t comfort itself.
Experience gives a sum of preceding signs of the world in everyone. These signs, the “excitants” have no quality outside everyone.
At the state of sum, they are enchanted. Who can explain it/this.
That all the living bodies should contain some universal “accumulations of gesture”, linked, lasting, some sums, masses, vibrating loads, that was noteworthy/remarkable, but that was not unacceptable. To say everything, that was a phenomenon of the universe. For example, the accident that, in the fact of the sensation, happened to those masses, was no longer a phenomenon of the universe. The definition of the universe is that it is not what is not number.
That if you say: “That’s sugary”, you are no longer in the universe.
Still, my dear. You thought that more than a piece of candy was needed to make that jump.
*
* *
Am I in space or not? What situation.
One can’t feel without being in the [étendue], nor without leaving it. Without meeting dots, nor without finding oneself in Taste, in Music, in Perfume.
One has to unveil these dots, even if that is too easy, even if that is little new, -their waltz is the yellow, their dance is the hot, open the phono! Their [ronde] is the C. All the records wear themselves out to tell it to you: sound never existed. One has to speak big; what the records spray, are not “sounds”, are rounds; the rounds of air of the records, but they are gifted only of emptiness. Excepted if it passes (you for example) some magic Mass in the proximity of same gestures as are enchanted…
*
* *
One can’t feel without in the same time meeting a spread ponderable vibration, and make blue out of it, that has neither space, nor weight; some “sugary” that is no longer a length. Now psychology, from the instant it wanted, about since Helmholtz[56], to be science, has met space, naturally: -it was impossible indeed to look for what a sensation was made of without meeting the ponderable universe and joining the scientists. So the psychologist has made alliance with all physiology counted of distinguished, he set up a few instruments of physics, and he started to measure for the scientist, be careful! Is distinguished by measure.
Here is what happened:
The physiologist had what was required so as to make a scientist: the electric generator, the galvanometer, and the subtle apparel with slit that you would not have the patience to consider; everything; even some number, as at the same hour maybe his nearby colleague physicist.
As…? Alas! The resemblance ceases. The number of the nearby physicist does not play dirty tricks on him: number there enters in the void tube, out number goes; but for the number that the psychologist handles I barely daresay it, this is too sad: the psychologist loses it. Number it is set by the psychologist in the subject – out it goes blue sugary soft hard hot round sharp bitter.
What affair!
Where the devil is the ponderable pure? It is to the imponderable. It has melted at the nirvana, has [dilated] at the paradise. Rather at the Paradise: unfortunate Foucault[57], it has entered number in you, it has come out INFINITE.
So, one finds the fate of the psychologist awful.
Not at all: he is very happy. He has tables of associations and curves of nervous currents; he is very happy, sir.
This enormous accident of experience has not wounded him; he talks on. He publishes on, you can hear him! He MEASURES on. He had some number in fact of “excitant”, he does not have it anymore, he has not noticed it. His bank account has changed itself into chocolate tablets, he does not suffer from it. His attitude at the Stock exchange has not changed; nor at the Faculty.
A contact, a perfume from/of before, but these excitants did not count anymore since they had vanished… The psychologist (did you feel me?) did not think of the beaming, he thought of the geography. (This is not blindness, this is pathology.)
The psychologist did not distinguish him/herself by the originality in the imaginations he had of the Feel. He brought everything back to the brains, and his brain was not a circuit, pardon, pardon, that was a country. A wrought country, a little soft, that the excitant sadly marked, and then became wind anew/again.
Unfortunate! You mixed the path and the car. It is so serious, that one has to explain how that happened. Forward, sir’s brain.
Sir’s brain was a psychological atlas with great communication roads; the excitation come from a nerve arrives there. The French physiologists Lepicque[58] and Bourguignon[59] have here vainly made admirable works: for the proper of an admirable work is to inspire an admirable assurance to the spirits that climb above to see nothing.
And here is what Psychology sees: the more numerous the tracks let by some previous excitations, the more intense is the present excitation.
Funny country: the more the paths have been stridden through, the bigger the car gets.
Teach it and let us be saved: “If the load increases, it is not the path that is in cause”. Confess it in disturbing language; if the excitation augments to the already stridden through brain, it is that falls a Mass on it. What? But the great sum of signs that Mister Foucault has lost and that he has been looking for for thirty years with a small tooth pick.
This Mass gives life to the cerebral centres; the whole nervous cloth is loaded by it. It does not have any particular seat, as the ancients believed. It has specialised the nervous bushes of the senses, that are but exposing, each, its particular sum of past motions of the world.
In this acception only one can say that the domain of the feel is at a certain “height”: for it is the essential inequality; all sense is a pyramid of past; that is not the body that the instant touches, that is the summit of time.
At the professor’s however everything happened without precedent: and this is immediately, the soul between the teeth, that he ate greedily [bouffait] the instant and showed how:
His conscience, under a hair tent, well spread in his good brain richly ornated with travel memories, ricordo di Venezia, Gruss aus Tyrol! –and in every corner the receptors affected to each message, simply waited for the Universe to ring, -sting, insult or shine.
Now, the professor had not been without noticing that the disposition of the setting favoured the phenomenon, and that the things happened more easily in a brain furnitured by Lévitan. The setting, the setting, my children. Also, in his Faculty from the South[60], shed he, from a grey mouth, some setting, on the brains of fifteen stunned, nice, polite, buried pupils.
And the setting associated itself to the excitation.
Yet, the Professor’s Conscience was not tranquil. Some accidents happened to the excitation, hardly entered. It grew, it dwindled, and, past a threshold, not very high, it became blue, piercing, embalmed, with one jump.
Which made two well counted ones with Monsieur Foucault.
For it was not about association but about SOMMATION.
For it was not about, when the excitation arrived to you, comparing it with photographs or presenting it to memories: IT WAS ABOUT FEELING IT.
It was not about making a certain blue come closer to all your Mediterraneans, nor to find again, in a perfume, the dead lover, nor to reanimate an old tune on a new universe. It was about receiving what the instant serves you.
The instant serves you some excitant, some oscillating ANYTHING.
It was not about knowing whether the excitant was going to make a more or less effect in the setting, but to know if it would exist at all. It is nothing, but it is everything.
It was about to know if the excitant would suffice to itself (pardon sir); if it was from itself perceptible, and the professor believed so, what spirit, -strike hard, he says, strike and it is enough.
Hit hard on what? It is an effect of resonance; it plays without violin, the innocent, with its excitant. For the fantastic resonance is not given by your known body, poor carbon with a skin, poor cloth [azote], but indeed by the ENCHANTED SUM that has precisely the value of the lost paradise.
VI
“Me voici encore dans ma prison, Madame.”
Gérard de Nerval.
It exists, distinguished from body, a living surface; it receives “the excitant”, sign that makes feel; the excitant, grain or piece of energy.
About as a racket receives the ball on its net. But here the ball is not solid (this is some energy): one would say a bubble, the excitant, And the surface does not send back: it gathers. On its net, ring by/after ring, the subtle balls of same shape that the world sends remain. The not graspable/unseizable stops there.
*
* *
Is not this curious, that net, it is everywhere. The molecule hardly exposes it you look at it in the chemistry class, on blackboard.
The stars.
The crystals.
It seems that the matter spend its Time sketching it. It tries; -is this that?/that it? Is this it?
“Am I there at last my sister?””
It draws the nervous net at last. Further, still further. Some Thing so fine…
*
* *
-Not to truth with checks without provisions! Who gave you this net? What account do you hold it from? Aha! Tale of an apprentice! You do as those men; you introduce free/gratuitous terms.
-Net because circuit.
When one is in space and time, one copes as one can.
The excitant-sign is motion; it has its own shape; one thousand and one thousand closed drawings of which none varies; -their variety defiles. Everybody falls back to his/her same and aggravates it a little. But his/her same is nowhere (he/she/it lost him/her/itself) but in I.
Draw this on the wall-a net.
This [d’ailleurs] on/from another part/side/elsewhere more and more difficult to remember about what a historic word has been uttered: “I will make you men fishermen.”[61]
Maybe the world’s secret is in a pun.
Plato put it there.
This surface will be called: the soul; one must not be afraid of words.
It has the most considerable mass that be (the engineer understands) for body, the components of which are not elements of matter, as of the visible body, but elements of energy; for its body assimilates matter and, as the body, builds it into nets. Soul skin…
-“THE SKIN!”
-Who spoke? This is not Faust…
*
* *
“ We must not admit other causes
for natural things than those that are both
certain and sufficient to explain their appearances.
… and “more” is vain when “less” would suffice, for
Nature pleases itself in simplicity, and does not like
the pomp of superfluous causes.”
Newton, Principia.
I beg your pardon, living one come from me[62]. I do not have the time to finish your book; the trip obliges. The body becomes all foreign, that wants to take me away. Ought one to leave you so dumb after the old parrot’s class, and you have gained but a Mass, that is a Skin!
Will you even read me, my future? I throw the leaves away, I am going/about to go away; a bottle to the water; a secret of the world in five hundred words.
The book weakly bumps on the time’s course, nobody takes it.
At last you appear, but you are elsewhere, you carry in triumph the weight of my days to a few loves… And if the great fire come from the past, ô my well-beloved, could hurt you; if what I used to be was a moment for your despair “what is required/has to be known”- the sorry look would be stuck at the extremities of an eternity; the publisher blocked, the print tight but not to the honour, not read/unread or/nor cut, under illustrated books/magazines.
Would you have followed, to/till the end? The path was passing by physics, one can’t see much anymore… I had put ribbons everywhere… physics does not have Perrault’s voice… you can’t hear anymore… you lower your back…
*
* *
It/This is because the phenomenon of the Sensation implies to spaces, and because the researchers never know of which one they are talking, and because in measuring just one they believe they are measuring everything, -that the problem is unsolved.
There would be the space of the raw sensation (dzing)! Ouch! Oh!
And the space of the magic (D flat, pink, salty).
Not only do these spaces exist in me (the researchers call them “body” and “conscience” while trying strongly to reduce to the first the second)- but they exist at the departure of the sign, and that’s what the revolutionary fact is –the knowledge of which is due to M. de Broglie[63]
They are inextricably imbricated. It is possible to go back up from the space of the brute sensation in me to its space of origin out of me: for example, a certain excitation of the nerve of the eye comes from a certain electro-magnetic vibration. This link is marked and an enormous observation occurs: psychology is contented with it. What it calls “sensation” is that which is but half of one… and that, even, is not, humanly, at all one. Shoot in the eye, oh! Boom or dzing, are not “sensations”. That very word always and especially means the other associated space, the unexplained imbrication: red, bitter, C major…
The other space than the fat/big space of the material motion carries like a flower…
The certain imperceptible electro-magnetic outside of you, shoot on the optic nerve, carries the "“odour"” Well, one has to observe a long time and never forget this: the psychologists or scientists who looked after the sensations have always -–there is not one exception, one only, -admitted that that was unqualified, -the round –that became in the qualified living, chanting/singing.
Not one of these researchers has made the hypothesis that there could be two sorts of excitants for two sorts of absolutely different sensuous emotions. Not one has said to himself that the round that causes the deaf and blind resonance type frog nerve, was not the –is this round?- that caused music, the perfume, the colour. Not one has imagined to himself that to two emotions of the body, corresponded maybe two exterior/outer spaces.
Pal! Pal! The psychologist has read till/up to here! Piloting the lady, upsetting the good sense, transporting the new-born one, it is in wave/undulatory mechanics.
Nothing that do not emit out of itself its extreme ring…
Listen: there are two sorts of rings, in the periodical motions. There is the weight/ponderable wave, -the one you’ve just called the round, the one one easily measures since it is the action of massive corpuscles. And there is the weightless/imponderable wave, the one that finds itself only in Mr. De Broglie’s calculus/calculations (him first). It is also called phase wave and in German Materienwelle.
I propose this to you; this is but a proposal/proposition; to the ponderable wave will correspond all sensation.
Brute sensation. That of the excited frog nerve, the spasm. To the imponderable wave will correspond any/all magical sensation –the song: some red, some sonorous, some sugary.
A difference of order has to be made between the brute feeling and the feeling of the quality. For quality is without mass, only and sufficient reason for the failure of psychology.
There is no difficulty in recognising it if one is physicist: all accept the immaterial wave: so they will accept its effect.
Yes, -its effect on what?
On what.
So here you are, figureless face!
“C’est mon fort que l’apostrophe, et je ne
parle guère autrement, je ne dis jamais: Nicole,
apporte-moi mes pantoufles; mais je dis: O
mes pantoufles: et toi, Nicole, et toi!”
Paul-Louis Courier
What were the steps of that stairway? First step: anything is not perceived. Anything has to be big enough. Big as what? Fechner has looked for it. In vain; in vain 24 576 experiments. This little bit! This saint Fechner. He did not know that one had to count behind oneself. He believed, as one still does, as this from the street and this from the Faculty of Montpellier still do, that if the anything is too weak, it does not pass, does not pass through your sensitive threshold, does not sting, does not burn, does dot weigh you, does not sing you; does not reach you where you are, intact and deaf. But that it is just a little stingy, burning, singing, weighing, yet…
Now that is not sound! That is not light! That is n vibrations-second. That is not smell! That is a motion, which is a number. The pure sign.
And then, it is not because that is too weak that that remains outside, my child. But because that is too lonely. When you do not feel, that is because there is nothing in/at you to receive that instant, my child.
Nothing the same.
The common sense and the Montpellier professor have kept confounding the action of the object out of the body, and its action on the body. If it was the same, there would be just one real to seize and it would be indisputable: but it is not the same, which makes at least two reals; and three, if one counts the subject; there’s enough to talk about.
1) Exist certainly some actions of the universe in me: they are hot, cold, red and blue.
2) Certainly they exist outside me, alas without quality. Not without beauty! All austere beauty, beauty that has for lovers only these sirs from the laboratories who make love to the universe; colorless beauty, odourless, not motionless, not measureless; bumb actions and black but not shapeless: dance. The universe outside me, the unknown dancer…
(In front of whom does it dance? In front of God?)
3) And then me.
So the OBJECT in activity, -this is the cause for the cruel incertitude of the thinkers, -is twice and very differently “the real”: it is the not/non prepared universe, and the prepared universe; or the equal universe, and the unequal universe; or the equation, and the blue-sugary-C-sharp-stingy.
This one I can say that I climb it (get on that!) or I embroider it; in truth, I clothe myself with it. This long skirt of nature, Soul Skin… I enter into it, and THE THINGS ARE. The scientists do not put soul skin on; so they have the universe without smell, colorless, without perspective, that error, without signification, that mistake; -the new unspoiled universe the senseless universe. Precisely the Pure Object that surrealism wants to reach as if that object was able to/could pass through/by the senses without ceasing to be number, so to be pure.
With some discontinuous number I made the continuous felt the simple name of which is “quality”.
In gathering it-on what?
In melting it-with/to me?
*
* *
Second step. What specific difference is there between the Universe outside me and the Universe in me? This one: outside me it is instantaneous. In me, infinite. Thus it takes an infinite value. In me, it is not only the instant, but all the previous past instants. In me there is no instantaneous universe: the instantaneous universe does not pass the threshold of the conscience, made it the noise of Jericho’s trumpet.
Such is your error, Mister Foucault. (You named him.) The instantaneous universe only enters by Mister Laangevin, Mister Perrin, Mister Brillouin[64], Mister Schrödinger[65], Mister de Broglie, Mister Eddington my friend. And at what price?
At the price of a ri-go-rou-s-ly inhuman renouncement: they renounce to the Before. The communion of the scientists renounces to the succession of the living ones.
Science and science alone, reaches a pure object: but it has bought this Real the most extreme of the only sum that could allow it to exist –of the sum of the past.
So, this is a Real-paper.
“time is a treasure greater
than one can believe.”
Corneille.
However, there had not been any philosopher to discover that the definition of the present was the imperceptibility.
Here is a text:
…”What Mister Bergson calls pure perception…” the one that would have a being placed where I am, living as I do, but absorbed in the present, and able, by the elimination of the memory under all its shapes, to obtain from the matter a vision in the same time immediate and instantaneous”.[66]
M. Brunschvicg, probably apprehending what the hypothesis he was reporting had *
* *
astonishing, began with declaring that such a perception “existed in right rather than in fact.”[67] And how! M. Brunschvicg was giving himself Adam. There’s for the fact. For the right… for the right, one withdraws it from him.
There is no perception where there is no resounding mass, and mass is time. Perception does not get cleaned up, from time, without destroying it. This all pure real, this real (genuine/pure/true), this real all clean, this real that is there, (oh! That it is beautiful, sir, the real without history!) you will not have it. Nobody has ever received from the present –but the instrument of the laboratory.
*
* *
“Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth…”
Keats.
Open your eyes! For this tree to exist, there has to be in your look the trees of before. They have leaves in its leaves, centuries of springs. Or fortune made body!
But Socrates, on the verge of dying, spoke of his body and did not like it. He spoke of his senses: “The see, the hear”, said-he, “those things that do not last one day…”
Open your eyes! Yesterday becomes green to the day.
“Ils inventèrent l’instantané psychique.”
André Lhote.
I admire myself in the nature. How beautiful I am!
I made these trees with my looks: here I am, here I am, here I am. I! I! adsum qui feci. What art!
That took some time, of course, but the result is there. Why would I perceive some present? What do they then all have to want to perceive the present? The present is not nice: it is the vibration of frequency n. I prefer the COLOUR to that agitated number.
How beautiful is my soul, green on this laurel!
*
* *
And suddenly Berkeley’s posterity, Malebranche’s, Kant’s knew what it was saying.
These thinkers who prove so well that the universe is projected by us, here is that they were right, being wrong, and fell back to something.
It was true indeed: the subject composed the universe. Only, there remained Everything. There remained the imperceptible Pure Present; the number without past, the All innocent, the entertainment of the scientists, EVERYTHING, that little/child’s game.
There remained the immediate motion of some prodigy.
*
* *
Soul! Soul! necessary surprise!
O the closest of my bodies!
O all my good gathered on the earth!
O the narrowest of my bodies!
O my attention!
O my distraction!
O my fidelity.
What is there tiniest in the world?
What is there most ancient?
What makes the world solid, transparent?
What is permanent, being nothing?
*
* *
“Keiner aber fasset
Allein Gott.”
“Mais nul seul ne saisit Dieu!”
Hölderlin.
But the answers on the path were stranger than the questions.
Why has there to accumulate sign by/after sign, motion on motion of/from the world, till a level that reach the value that we do not have? Why does not one seize the unity of the sign, that Taine was looking for?[68] Why is it so deep, the distance from you to the world, that one spring of your time should not be enough to fill it? And if all the past has no ears, why is there not just to shout? And if you are without Before, how does none of your instants come close to day? Who received a pure instant?
If there was no threshold to feel, motion from the world would have to awaken no past, to make itself bigger. The threshold commands to that growth; and the existence of the sensitive threshold seems to depend on death.
The threshold is function of death that permitted the break of the Unique into innumerable ones. The threshold exposes the past: it is the line behind which some innumerable ones preserve themselves.
A sensitivity without threshold, that would be equal to the instant, would it be from a unique living? This is indeed this enormous character to which all instant measures itself (as if some one of its parts that live was too weak to make of itself some red or the smell of a rose. For a living is but a fraction of the disappeared or impossible Unity: the rest that would perfect the Sum is waiting, mingled with life: and what the instant touches, this the entire. Thus the human considerable that is no longer One alone in the space, finds itself again in front of an odor.
The instant, taste in the mouth, stuff under the hand, the instant to throw at the shadows, where does it melt that is not the mouth, what does it touch, that is not the hand… Physics and chemistry refuse it; yet, it is attracted. (Open your eyes! Spread in front of yourself your veil of worlds that catches the agitated number.)
And the veil stops some motion, and [pelotonne] and [emmaille] and gathers some motion, some wire of motion where joy takes itself, where pain sinks. One believes to gather by the senses, but they are truly animated but by the net of the past: you throw everything at it, the instant-smell, the instant-shout, the instant-taste.
You pursue toward other kisses, you have forgotten; you will not see anymore, you will not hear anymore, you will not seize anymore, but through sounds, looks, lost contacts.
……………………………………………………………………
I have two bodies, FLEH-AND-BLOOD and PLEASURE-AND-PAIN: FLESH-AND-BLODD is a sleeping one, PLEASURE-AND-PAIN is as a shout; they are always inseparable.
FLESH-AND-BLOOD is a hydrogen [carbure] with very big molecules. PLEASURE-AND-PAIN is so tiny that Lucrèce made a poem out of it[69]. Everybody speaks to FLESH-AND-BLODD, I only speak to PLEASURE-AND-PAIN.
FLESH-AND-BLOOD seems to persist, but follows the second law of thermodynamics[70] and finishes badly. PLEASURE-AND-PAIN seems to become nothing at the speed of the second [cadran] watch, and it has the immortality.
I will leave FLESH-AND-BLOOD one day, taken away by PLEASURE-AND-PAIN. But towards where, sovereign virgin?
But what to do, to preserve myself from the chances of eternity?
[1] Without examining it: elliptic quotation of the English saying: one must not buy a pig in a poke.
[2] Léon-Paul Fargue, 1876-1947, poem writer and chronicler, friend of Gide and Valéry, director with the latter and Valéry Larbaud of the review Commerce.
[3] This is a fantasy language, private, of which we see examples in Joyce’s work.
[4] “The work and life of Engène Delacroix”, Complete works, ed. Marcel Ruff, Seuil, 1968, p. 533.
[5] Ibid., p. 534.
[6] Greek-Indian king, 160 ?-140 ?, of whom Plutarch speaks, hero of an important buddhic work, the Conversations with Milinda.
[7] Greek sophist from the Vth Century, author of the formula « man is the measure of everything ».
[8] George Berkeley, 1685-1753, idealist philosopher who situated every reality in thought, author of a heteroclit work, Siris (1744), which starting from an exposition of the therapeutic virtues of tar water, ends up with philosophical considerations on the nature of universe, on the human spirit and on God.
[9] Nicolas Malebranche, 1638-1715, theologian and philosopher, developed Cartesianism in a religious meaning.
[10] Charles Maurras, 1868-1952, poet, journalist, politician, leader of the Action Française. His monarchism lied on a philosophical base influenced by Auguste Comte’s positivism.
[11] Edmund Husserl, 1859-1938, theorician of phenomenology.
[12] Correspondence from one corner to another, tansl. Charles du Bos, Corréa, 1931. Viatcheslav Ivanovitch Ivanov, 1866-1949, Russian poet of metaphysical and mystical inspiration, addressed these letters to his friend Mikaïl Gerschenson.
[13] Where could be found many galleries specializing in modern art.
[14] The German writer Carl Einstein (1885-1940) makes a similar observation in Die Kunst des [...]Jahrhunderts [The Art of the XXth century], Berlin, Propyläen-Verlag, 1926: “Even earlier, when, according to the critics, Braque had adapted and given up cubism, he had created the fundamental shapes without relief of his motives; he did not represent real objects, but strove, pulled by a subtle constraint, to recognize in “Braquesque” forms the only reality that counted”. (p.76). Transl. L.J.
[15] Childish language to express absence.
[16] Edgar Allan Poe, Eurêka ou essai sur l’univers matérielet spirituel. In Baudelaire’s translation: “Une parfaite consistance ne peut être qu'à une vérité absolue.” Michel Lévy, 1871, p. 25.
[17] Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), inspiring himself from Weber’s researches, believed he had found the formula of the relation between feeling and the physical excitation that provokes it: the intensity of the feeling would be equal to the logarithm of the excitation>
[18] Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) English philosopher of evolutionism, wanted to give a totalizing explanation of the transformation of beings from the laws of science. He is the author, among other works, of Principles of Psychology (1855).
[19] Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) who, in On Intelligence (1870), applied the concepts of physics to the elucidation of mental life.
[20] William James (1842-1910), American philosopher, author of Principles of Psychology (1890).
[21] “Having noticed that the key of the cabinet was stained with blood, she wiped it two or three times, but the blood did not go away; no matter how she washed it, and even brushed it with fine sand
and with [grès: sandstone?], there remained always blood, for the key was Fair, [enchanted], and there was no means to clean completely: when one took the blood away from one side, some came from the other.”
[22] Eckerd’s
[23] translator’s note: in English in the original text.
[24] “They say what they want, what they say does not matter to me.”
[25] Review founded in 1897, published by the Company of Jesus.
[26] Paul Langevin (1872-1946) physicist, professor at the Collège de France, known for his researches on the ionized gases, thee paramagnetic phenomena and the ultrasounds.
[27] “I confess that there is a baptism for the remission of sins, and I am waiting for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the coming century. Thus be it.” Manuel des Catéchismes, new edition, ed. of the Abbé Dupanloup, Paris, F. Rocher, s. d.
[28] Jean-François Champollion (1790-1832), famous Egyptologist who, having found the correspondence between the hieratic, hieroglyphic and demotic sounds, managed to decipher the inscriptions of the Rosette stone.
[29] Traducer's Introduction: firstly there were the numerous references to Peau d’Âme in Ontologie du Secret; then the reading of the first; then the handwritten translation; then the typewriting, reading at an intermediary speed between the first two.
[30] Periodical founded in 1895 by Alfred Binet and Henri-Étienne Beaunis.
[31] Spiral nebula observed in the constellation of Andromedes.
[32] Formula of the kinetic energy: ½ m v2
[33] Jean Pozzi, 1884-1967, the elder of Catherine Pozzi’s two younger brothers.
[34] Here, Catherine Pozzi parodies the treaty on education by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile (1762).
[35] Note by the Translator: confer George Steiner’s saying that man is a tree on legs, himself quoting someone else.
[36] Pierre Louis Moreau, dit Maupertuis (1698-1759) introducer of Newton’s system in France. Basing himself on a concept of geometric optics uttered by Pierre de Fermat, he conceived the “principle of least action”.
[37] Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865) mathematician and Irish astronomer, author of a general theory of dynamics known under the name of “Hamilton’s principle” or “theorem”.
[38] Principle of mechanics uttered by Maupertuis (see note 31) in the following terms: “In all change that arrives, the quantity of action necessary for that change is the smallest that be possible”.
[39] Charles Henry (1859-1926) librarian at the Sorbonne, then master of conferences at the laboratory of psychologic physiology at the École des Hautes Études, conceived several scientific devices, like the olfactometre and the saporometre. He is the author of numerous scientific works, among which the Cercle Chromatique (1888), Harmonie des Formes et des Couleurs (1891) and Psycho-biology and energetics (1909).
[40] In a manuscript from March 1933, Catherine Pozzi writes: “I think of the biological [resonators] of poor Charles Henry. Here’s one who had seen some thing. But he was too mathematician and not intelligent enough… It appeared to me that a) Ch. H. had admirably seen (as Saint Thomas) that the object of the sensation perception is a movement, b) but not seen that the engine of life is imponderable, so that the movement of the world (ponderable radiations) can’t reach it. And, weighing that movement, he believed he wanted to weigh the atom of life.”
[41] Note by the Translator: the virtual.
[42] Marcel Boll, chemist and physicist, and author of numerous works of scientific vulgarization. Collaborator at the Larousse du Xxe siècle, he directed (with Georges Urbain) the publication/shing of La Science, ses progrès, ses applications, 2 vol. Larousse, 1933 and 1934.
[43] Bossuet, Élévations à Dieu sur tous les Mystères de la Religion Chrétienne, VII, Œuvres complètes, t. 9, Bar-le-Duc, Guérin, 1863, p. 25.
[44] The researches of Jean Perrin (1870-1942) Nobel prize of physics, were among other things about the discontinuous structure of matter and electricity.
[45] Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre (1737-1814) is the author of the Études de la Nature (1784) in which he shows/demonstrates that God has ordained the world to favour the well-being of wo/man.
[46] Publisher of philosophical works.
[47] Note by the Translator: the absence of s at the third person singular means that here the mode is more subjunctive, optative
[48] Sir Arthur Eddington (1882-1944, director of the observatory at the University of Cambridge, La Nature du Monde Physique, transl. G. Cros, Payot, 1929, p. 14.
[49] Plato, Timée. Œuvres complètes, t. X Les Belles Lettres, 1970, p. 147.
[50] Respecte dans la bête un esprit agissant:
Chaque fleur est une âme à la Nature éclose;
Un mystère d’amour dans le métal repose.
“Tout est sensible!” Et tout sur ton être est puissant.
“Vers dorés”. Œuvres, éd. H. Lemaître, Garnier, 1986, p. 709
[51] Apparel conceived by Michael Faraday (1791-1867) to evaluate the electric loads. It’s a metallic cylinder elongated and hollow linked to an electroscope.
[52] André Gide, Les Nourritures Terrestres, 2e éd., Éditions de la N. R. F., &ç&_, p. 18
[53] “Eternity”, Last lines, Œuvres de Rimbaud, ed. S. Bernard and A. Guyaux, Garnier, 1964, p. 160.
[54] Greek philosopher (500?-428?) whose mechanist thought opposes an infinitely divisible matter to/and an unlimited and ordonating intellect.
[55] Alfred Binet (1857-1911) one of the masters of experimental psychology, co-founder of the Année Psychologique, known especially for having developped a test to measure intelligence.
[56] Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894) Germaan physicist and physiologist, author of numerous studies on the sensation, among which Manuel optique physiologique (1854), Théorie physiologique de la musique fondée sur l’étude des sensations auditives (1868-74).
[57] Marcel Foucault (1865-1935?), professor of philosophy at the Faculty of letters of Montpellier, author of important works in psychology among which The Psycho-physics (1901). The copy of the baccalaureate of Catherine Pozzi had in Montpellier in 1920 had not found grace to his eyes.
[58] Louis Lepicque (1866-1952) physiologist, studied the nervous excitability.
[59] Georges Bourguignon (1873-1963) director of the laboratory of electro-physiology of the Salpétrière, author of La Chronaxie chez l’homme.
[60] It is Montpellier.
[61] “And Jesus told them: “Follow me and I will make you men fishermen.” Marc, I, 17.
[62] Claude Bourdet, Catherine Pozzi’s son, born in 1909.
[63] The calculations of Louis de Broglie (1892-1987), Nobel prize of/for physics, had led him to postulate the existence of a periodic wave deprived of mass associated to all electrised particle. His hypothesis was confirmed in 1927 by the discovery of the diffraction of the electrons by the crystals.
[64] Léon Brillouin (1889-1969), physicist, author of importaant studies on the brownian motion and the magnetism.
[65] Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) Nobel prize for physics, known for his works of wave mechanics.
[66] Léon Brunschvicg, professor at the Sorbonne, Le Progrès de la conscience dans la philosophie occidentale, t. 2, Alcan, 1927, p. 667. The passage from Bergson quoted comes from Matière et Mémoire, essai sur la relation du corps et de l’esprit, P.V.F. 1982, p. 31 (1ere éd. 1896).
[67] Catherine Pozzi makes a cut in the above reproduced passage. The expression “existed in right rather than in fact” is from Bergson, not from Brunschicg, and is part of the sentence from Matière et Mémoire quoted by the latter. Bergson writes: “…the perception pure, a perception that existed by right, rather than from fact, the one that would have a being placed where I am, living as I live…”.
[68] In a manuscript from 1930, Catherine Pozzi writes: “Taine (intelligence) has looked for the simple sensation. But what he was looking for there, that was an element intrinsically simple of sensation, in the acception of the simple word appied to the chemical element… He has found a model in the acoustic vibrations. “A” vibration corresponding to “an element” of sensation… It is absolutely arbitrary to choose a vibration as “element of sensation”.
[69] De natura rerum.
[70] Principle formulated by the French physicist Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) according to which all transformation of heat into work necessarily carries with itself a fall in temperature.
