Adventures In Immediate Irreality Read Online Free PDF

somehow took
their immobility for a perfidious sign of furtiveness and complicity: the objects
around me never gave up the secretive attitude fiercely guarded by their
impassivity.
    Ordinary words lose their validity at certain depths of
the soul. Here I am, trying to give an exact description of my crises, and all I can
come up with are images. The magic word that might convey their essence would have
to borrow from the essences of other aspects of life, distill a new scent from a
judicious combination of them. It would have to contain something of the
stupefaction I feel watching a person in reality and then following his gestures in
a mirror, of the instability accompanying the falls I have in my dreams and the
subsequent unforgettable moment of fear whistling through my spinal chord, or of the
transparent mist inhabited by the bizarre decors of crystal balls I have known.
    I envied the people around me who are hermetically
sealed inside their secrets and isolated from the tyranny of objects. They may live
out their lives as prisoners of their overcoats, but nothing external can terrorize
or overcome them, nothing can penetrate their marvelous prisons. I had nothing to
separate me from the world: everything around me invaded from head to toe; my skin
might as well have been a sieve. The attention I paid to my surroundings, nebulous
though it was, was not simply an act of will: the world, as is its nature, sank its
tentacles into me; I was penetrated by the hydra’s myriad arms. Exasperating as it
was, I was forced to admit that I lived in the world I saw around me; there was
nothing for it.
    The crises belonged as much to the places where they occurred as to me. True, some
places had their own “personal” evil, but even those that did not were in a trance
long before I appeared. In some rooms, for example, I felt the crises to be the
crystallization of the melancholy caused by their immobility and boundless
solitude.
    However, the conviction that objects could be inoffensive—which arose as a kind of
truce between me and the world (a truce that plunged me even more hopelessly into
the uniformity of brute matter)—came to pass off a terror equal to the terror the
objects themselves at times imposed upon me: their inoffensiveness came from a
universal lack of strength. I had the vague feeling that nothing in the world can
come to fruition, that it is impossible to accomplish anything. Even the ferocity of
objects runs its course. It was thus that the idea of the imperfection of all
phenomena in the world, natural or supernatural, took shape in me.
    In an internal dialogue that I believe never ceased I would defy the evil powers
around me one day and flatter them basely the next. I would indulge in certain odd
rites, though not without motivation.
    Whenever I went out and took different streets, I would retrace my steps on the way
home. I did so to avoid making a circle in which trees and houses would be
inscribed. In this respect, my walks were like a thread which, once unwound, I
needed to rewind along the same route, and had I not done so the objects caught in
the loop would have forever been closely attached to me.
    Whenever it rained, I would be careful not to touch the stones in the path of the
streams of water. I did so to add nothing to the water’s activity and to enable it
to exercise its elemental powers unimpeded.
    Fire purifies all. I always had a box of matches in my pocket, and when I felt
particularly sad I would light a match and pass my hands through the flame, first
one, then the other.
    All this bespoke a melancholy of existence, a kind of normally organized torture in
the course of my life as a child. In time the crises disappeared by themselves,
though not without leaving behind a powerful memory. And although they were gone by
the time I reached adolescence, the crepuscular state preceding them and the deep
sense of the futility of the world coming after became, so to speak, my