...of not-being

So everything is ready: ready for the journey to Purgatory, the journey to the land of black and white. The whole town glows ruddily with matter, with solid substances. In twenty seconds, perhaps even sooner, the crisis may return, and the whole process begin all over again. Things will pass into themselves, like devouring serpents that greedily consume their own bodies. Life will plan itself unaided, and at random, on the first coarse and yellowing sheet of paper that comes to hand. The plan will grow and grow, bursting and pullulating with details, like a kind of lengthy narrative, its handwritten words gradually nibbling away what free space remains. The point of the ballpoint pen moves forward, on and on, very fast and in a small neat hand, tracing a wriggling, broken blue line, from left to right, next line down, and so on. When the whole surface of the paper is covered with this scribbling, the tip of the ballpoint still goes on searching. It finds blank spaces between the lines or down the margins. It fills them all. The words on the page now run in every direction. But the ballpoint still goes on searching indefatigably. It overscores what it has previously written, it crams every cranny, first making fine scratches like tufts of hair, then a whole fuzzy topknot, and finally a large sooty cloud. There are still words, more and more of them, interminable adverbs; the crosses on the t’s trace a kind of straight line from one side of the paper to the other. Too much overwriting has produced the occasional hole. About six inches from the top there is an accidental and quite unbearable row of looping o’s. But the words keep flowing back, and suddenly, after using up several thousandths of an ounce of dark blue ink, after hours on the job, after working through three ballpoint pens, as though a million spiders had wandered over the page, at nightfall only one empty space remains - a tiny star-shaped patch at the bottom left-hand corner, preserved by the slapdash loop of an l, in some word now otherwise obliterated - ‘Iliad’, maybe, or ‘calamity’, or ‘Lilliputian’. Then the hand grips the ballpoint pen, all slippery with sweat now, and closes the loop of the l. During the accomplishment of this act, in silence and fear, something akin to darkness, a sense of solemn peace, like the deepest night, spreads over the paper. The last remaining area of imperfection seems to disappear; and nothing is left now, beneath that bent forehead, before those weary, burning eyes, except this vast page of writing, in which all the words and letters have melted into one another, the perfect work of not-being, a beautiful poem, monochrome and illegible.

[The Flood, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]