Confessions of a Mystic

The world has changed and I have grown old, but upon my death, whose approach the evening hours herald, I will leave it justified in my work.

I was born many years ago into a world which was still changing—but the world, perhaps, is perpetually changing and I have only aged. I had no mother and my father was the editor of a minor literary magazine which is now out of print. My relationship with books growing up was one of proximity, but not of intimacy. Books held little sway over me and to the disappointment of my father, who himself wrote many books which he made sure to burn before his death, my literary future was then quite unforeseen. I liked forests where solitude was guaranteed and gardens when solitude was to be found, and vibrant pigments, the smell of coffee (but not its taste) and running water and gray skies when they prefigured rain which never came. Tall hills from which to watch the blinking of the ancient stars when they came out of hiding, paradoxically, with the dark; unknown banks on which to overturn my canoe by the rushing water where I cast my nets: these were the landscape of my youth. I used to pick wild tobacco which grew in strange straight rows in wide fields and pack my father’s pipe and sit smoking on the hills or on the lonely banks where starlight danced on coursing streams. So I whiled away those youthful nights which stretched into years which wore quietly away.

When I reached that uncertain age at which one is suddenly judged, irrespective of one’s will, too old for such frivolities, my father sent me to university in the city. The hills and fields dissolved in a blur of metropolitan bustle. The city was a forest of a different kind; its hard gray face at first predicted melancholy, but before long I learned that cities enclose beautiful secrets all their own. At university I learned letters and mathematics and that the latter were for me destined for enticing obscurity. It was during those early days, almost all at once on a quiet evening in the library reading Cervantes—in the city, as my father had undoubtedly wished, I was left with little recourse but to read—that my fate was confirmed. A moment of extasis or exegesis (or perhaps a delusional bout of fatigue) brought into focus my dim surroundings as if cast in a new light. It was as if I saw the books and shelves just I used to watch the wind in the trees and the rushing rivers. Something secret had quietly woven itself into the fabric of the world while I was sleeping. When the librarian woke me at closing the windows were dark and through them I saw the first ancient stars of a night still young. As I walked slowly home I saw the golden cones of the cycloptic streetlamps and the light they cast on the walls and streets and the moss and ivy in the concrete cracks which lined their sudden living faces, and I felt the wind on my neck and the gray city like the world had come alive with color. In memory under the moon I returned to a thousand past moons which lived and live still in some secret recess of the mind, to a thousand nights which I remembered and many more whose veracity memory can’t confirm. By the end of that measureless night I saw my destiny in some manner written out before me. In my dreams I read its writing and consecrated my life to its exigencies.

In the beginning I explored diverse avenues through which to realize my work, which at first coincided with my studies. I studied classics for a year before I declared as fashionably absurd every classical thinker with the exception of Diogenes—who instead I judged absurdly fashionable. Another year I committed to a fruitless investigation of Shakespeare’s sexuality, a work which I eventually judged too important to merit treatment at my incompetent hands. Through those years I wandered as freely as flowed the nameless rivers of my youth; in the city the winding streets were my rivers and they, too, came in time to reveal to me their secret distant shores. In my third year at university I as well as lived in a pleasantly obscure cafe between 3rd and Main, which I chose as my haunt for the rare solitude it offered: signless, tucked away from the street down a little-known commercial passage, I was left alone to my rigorous work. That work consisted of a thorough stylistic study and comparison of two translations of Francisco de Quevedo’s Cuento de cuentos. The curious abundance of basic difference, and even of contradiction, between the two texts prompted my curiosity. That I never learned Spanish, that I might resolve the enigma in consultation of the original text, was never of any concern: I was interested in the particularity, in the individuality, of each text as it existed in itself. By the end of that year I was able to confirm the literary superiority of one of the translations over the other.

The foregoing account serves to establish in brief the conditions leading to the capital fact of my life, which justifies me in my old age and redeems all my subsequent efforts and failures. It was in my fourth and final year at university that I began to approach the composition of that vast book which is my life’s work. Neither by mistake nor ignominy have I gone unrecognized for my work: my general obscurity, which I foresaw and resigned myself to in the beginning, was a necessary condition for its realization... Its premise was simple, its thematic content null (or universal)—nevertheless its composition was arduous, perhaps inimitable. The idea, it may be said, came to me in a dream, but a dream which proved indistinguishable from reality—later I realized that either reality is a dream, or the reality of dreams does not differ fundamentally from that of waking life. I digress, as is my habit. On that evening in the library, at that moment at which all things converged and all things breathed, was planted the plan in my mind and delineated the shape of my destiny. After that it was only a matter of identifying the correct approach by which to proceed. Those early trials eliminated the most trivial possibilities and permitted me to settle on a definite methodology.

My intent was, as noted, simple: to write the world. The execution of such a task was the difficulty. I sought not a mere imitation of the world, no mere list of metaphors or enumeration of appearances—these techniques are contaminated with literature. Rather, I sought the complete expression of the world in its actual intimacy. Even now words fail me in communicating the scope of my plan. Let me begin differently:

I have always believed in an unbridgeable discrepancy between literature and the world; the ineffable fabric of reality, and its feeble reproduction in ordered symbols and spaces. To write a leaf on a pond is not to reproduce the experience of a leaf on a pond: immediate, tangible, which one can see and interact with from diverse angles. To describe in literary terms the clangor of a bell is no difficult task—this phrase alone will suffice—; yet to know the clangor of a bell in the substance of its experience it is necessary to hear it. How, then, could I proceed? How could I perform the duty which my extasis had imposed on me those years earlier? I thought to begin with my beginning, to write the rivers and hills of my childhood—but the words on the page came out vain and empty. Frustrated, I took to frequenting the parks and gardens of the city, eager to extract from them some piece, however small or ephemeral, of the intimate essence revealed to me in the rivers and forests which I sought to write... On some few occasions I thought I perceived things as I had that night in the library—but no. I burned what few results came of those futile efforts.

I threw myself with increasing fervor into my work. At first the cafe between 3rd and Main served me in my search for solitude; later it grew suffocating, intolerable. I sacrificed what few friendships I’d cultivated during my years of study; I stopped attending classes, which were then no more than useless distractions from my work. The city no longer lived as it had on that night: it was gray and hard and the melancholy which it first prefigured overtook me. The parks and gardens were no longer sufficient to escape; I was obliged to leave the city on behalf of my work, which still had yet to truly begin. I returned to the hills and forests, took to the river and embraced again its unknown shores, so familiar despite my long absence. There I confronted the enigma which had dissuaded me from my earlier efforts.

My problem, at first, was that which I have already elucidated: how can literature, so fundamentally incapable of real expression, come to capture the world as the world, and not as simulacrum? My mistake was in believing that that basic limitation could be overcome. To move forward it was necessary to go beyond mere words on a page. My book would have to be more than a book to express its purpose.

I spent long nights on the hills under the stars, in the meadows under the trees, in meditation on my problem. The seasons were changing, the frost was oncoming and the rains drowned the earth and swelled the streams, and still I sought my answer. It came to me in the end, though not, I believe, from within. On a quiet autumnal evening not unlike another some years before I dreamt that the world was a book, a vast and inconceivable book whose name was The Universe in which all things are written and which constantly rewrites itself. My small destiny, written out before me in its entirety in another dream, was a chapter in that book, infinitesimally minute... I saw, as I‘d seen before, the secret script in which was written the world. I understood.

There is no book which is not in some manner rewritten upon being read, for to read a book is to engage in dialogue with it, to translate it according to the unique exigencies of the individual and of the moment. To read a book is, in some manner, to author it. What, then, if the universe is a book? To write it it merely suffices to recognize its text. The fate which had been revealed to me on that secret evening years before had dictated that I write a book in which was contained the world. I never doubted in the eventuality of my success, but all my earlier efforts were doomed to failure by the simple assumption that what was required was a book like any other. In truth, to write the world it was only required that I should know to read it. And for that the particularities of my life required a return.

My methodology established, I began my work. I know not for how long I consecrated myself to its composition; I know that the frost had come and gone and come again, and again over, before I thought it complete. My intent was to write the world, integrally, without the least compromise; to that end it was necessary to read the world in the same way, integrally, ceaselessly. My work left little time for sleep; for my sustenance I spared time enough for only the meagrest meals; as I ate and slept, my dreams and meals, too, were inscribed in my book. In those days the fabric of the world was perpetually spread out before me, like so fleetingly before on that first revelatory night. Thus I read the world and thus I wrote it—and eventually I was finished.

The rest of my story is insignificant, illusory. My work complete, I returned to the city and to my studies; in later years I dedicated myself to a bookish life and found my career in criticism and in classrooms—though I always made it a principle never to go long without a return to the hills and rivers, the fields and the stars. I wrote several novels which have gone largely unrecognized since their publication—I don’t know whether justifiably or not—and many more which in my father’s memory I burned; one among them is a fictionalization of my account, a useless translation of the world to the word, whose literary merit, I perceived, was null. I never told anyone of the book which inspired it, the only book I never named; to name it would have been a profanity. I never again came to perceive the world in such a way as allowed me to write it. I never married and I have no children. I have few regrets and I sense as I write this that the crepuscular sun without my window prefigures my decline.

I have not intentionally falsified my history; nevertheless, I foresee that this note, like others attempted in the course of these latter years, abounds in error and contradiction. Yet, secure in my justification long ago, I need not concern myself should I choose to commit it, like the others, to a bonfire.

At times I consider that my destiny is every destiny, that I am in some manner as everyone is, and that my work, if synonymous with the world, belongs to everyone... I don’t know the truth of these speculations, but they too, perhaps, justify me through these weary evening hours.