Denis Johnson - Tree of Smoke

Each afternoon he followed a long nap with this game of translation, while outdoors the birds continued, some insistent, others probing, interrogatory, grandly ecstatic, troubled—more intelligible, at least in their intent, than the mysterious song of M. Artaud:

Il me sembla partout lire une histoire d’enfantement dans la guerre, une histoire de genčse et de chaos, avec tous ces corps de dieux qui étaient taillés comme des hommes, et ces statues humaines tronçonnées.

I seemed to read everywhere a story of childbirth in war, a story of genesis and chaos, with all these bodies of gods which were carved out like men; and these truncated statues of humans.

This Artaud sounded tough. Maybe he was in earnest, maybe he was actually after something. But E. M. Cioran. The Cioran. It was decadent. It was—unproductive, and delicious:

Cet état de stérilité oů nous n’avançons ni ne reculons, ce piétinement exceptionnel est bien celui oů nous conduit le doute et qui, ŕ maints égards, s’apparente ŕ la Ť sécheresse ť des mystiques.

This state of sterility in which we neither advance nor retreat, this peculiar marching-in-place, is precisely where doubt leads us, a state which resembles in many respects the “dry places” of the mystics…

… nous retombons dans cet état de pure indétermination oů, la moindre certitude nous apparaissant comme un égarement, toute prise de position, tout ce que l’esprit avance ou proclame, prend l’allure d’une divagation. N’importe quelle affirmation nous sem

• ble alors aventureuse ou dégradante; de męme, n’importe quelle négation.

.. we relapse into that state of pure indétermination where— since any certainty whatever seems to us a lost turning—each resolution, all that the spirit advances or announces, takes on the aura of a divagation. Then any affirmation, no matter what, seems foolhardy or degrading; the same for any negation.

He would seek out an English translation, if such existed. To read and feel the meaning erode under the work of his mind—he was hungry for that pleasure. He thought of writing a letter to a friend saying: I think I might be bad, I could actually be evil, and if there’s a Devil it’s possible I’m his ally … Right at the heart of my ability to grasp the truth, I want to be paralyzed, I want to swoon… I want my mind to fail before the truth. I want the truth to flow over me only as something sensual and as nothing else. Want it to wet me—to be real, to be a thing …

He never wrote it down. He didn’t know who the friend was. He had no friend in the world but E. M. Cioran:

Le détracteur de la sagesse, s’il était de plus croyant, ne cesserait de répeter: Ť Seigneur, aidez-moi ŕ déchoir, ŕ me vautrer dans toutes les erreurs et tous les crimes, inspirez-moi des paroles qui Vous brűlent et me dévorent, qui nous réduisent en cendres. ť

The detractor of wisdom, if he were a believer as well, would never stop repeating, “Lord, help me to fall, to wallow in every error and every crime, inspire me with words that scorch You and devour me, which reduce us both to ashes.”

No wonder Bouquet had written in his notebook:

In the glory of war, in the bliss of combat, in the truth of war we see that might makes right. And that our respect for principles is based on eloquence and superstition.

He’d actually finished with the colonel’s files. A momentum had developed. Pointless labor, useless trash, but for the bureaucrat nothing’s trash until he affronts his soul by throwing it out.

Why was he not off meeting with villagers in the region, collecting folk tales? Why did he send Tho out to tell Pčre Patrice he had a fever when the priest came to beg a hot meal?

Sans rime ni raison, remettre toujours tout en question, douter męme en ręvé!

Without rhyme or reason to keep putting everything in question, to doubt even in dreams!

Reading Cioran he was revisited by the revelation he’d had as a tenyear-old, when a railroader’s son had showed him a small photograph of a woman fellating a large black penis, only the man’s torso visible, the woman’s sickly-happy eyes flirting with the camera—that his curiosity about such acts wasn’t an alienating treason, that it was known, gauged, understood, that others would feed it.

Le doute s’abat sur nous comme une calamité; loin de le choisir, nous y tombons. Et nous avons beau essayer de nous en arracher ou de l’escamoter, lui ne nous perd pas de vue, car il n’est męme pas vrai qu’il s’abat sur nous, il était en nous et nous y étions prédestinés.

Doubt collapses onto us like a disaster; far from choosing it, we fall into it. And try as we will to pull out of it, to trick it away, it never loses sight of us, for it is not even true that it collapses onto us—doubt was in us, and we were predestined to it.

He’d come to war to see abstractions become realities. Instead he’d seen the reverse. Everything was abstract now. Alone in this house, alone in this war, with the likes of E. M. Cioran … No wonder Bouquet had gone out to the veranda …

Night again, the insects are loud, the moths are killing themselves on the lamp. Two hours ago I sat on the veranda looking out at the dusk, filled with envy for each living entity—bird, bug, blossom, reptile, tree, and vine—that doesn’t bear the burden of the knowledge of good and evil.

The abyss is full of reality, the abyss experiences itself, the abyss is alive

Between jobs Bill Houston mooched off his mom, living with her and also with Burris, his twelve-year-old brother, which put him on the same level, it seemed to him, of this strange preteenager, a problem child like the elder two, a flunker and a truant, a glue-sniffer, pot-puffer, drinker of cough-control medicines. A test of faith, the old woman said, a call to prayer. In August, in answer to prayers of his own, Houston got a job on the west side loading raw linseed into semi trucks and soon took a room in the region dominated by Second Street and known as the Deuce, in whose skid-row atmosphere he felt he could forget his mother and wrestle unobserved with his confusion. He’d have headed for the ships again, if not for the general discharge. He wondered about the Merchant Marine, but he believed they wouldn’t have him either. Houston thought of his younger brother James, facing war, assaulted by experience, pulling ahead of him somehow. The whole world had left him in its wake, while at Roy Ruggins Seed, as so often in his work life, he earned his pay performing the same motions over and over. Up before the sun and then hiking a lot of miles in and out of thosefifty-three-foot trailers, back and forth, a long way up the ramp and all the way to the front, dragging two eighty-pound sacks with hay hooks. Here and there little points of daylight in the cars’ leaky interiors. Stacking the sacks in each layer at a right angle to the sacks in the layer beneath. Eight layers high. Linseed had a peculiar, sick-making smell. They worked deep-desert summertime hours, five to nine in the morning and five to nine at night, taking eight hours off during the hot of the day. Between shifts trying not to get drunk. Or anyway not too drunk.

After he lost that job he gave up his room and tried the Salvation Army, who rigorously insisted on sobriety, however, and who couldn’t be fooled for long. Expelled for liquor breath, he would have made it all right sleeping daytimes in the square downtown and tramping the streets at night, but a person had to eat, and from the New Life Mission he got only one peanut-butter sandwich at noon and franks and beans for supper, both meals with a cup of reconstituted chocolate milk. While he waited for this fare twice each day in a line of losers, life laughed at his hunger, and he wished he was in a situation with a roof and a kitchen, the navy once again, or again the Salvation Army—even jail. He’d passed three weeks in the Phoenix lockup awaiting trial on a charge of assault and found nothing behind bars to complain about. They served you three meals there and the people were decent—criminals, maybe, but sober and well-fed criminals didn’t behave too badly. Anywhere but his mother’s house. Her zealous hope of Heaven made it hell there.