Hélène Cixous
Translated from the French by Beverley Bie Brahic
Nacres: A Notebook
Could you write us a little book for the start of the school year? my publisher asks, voice affectionate.
For the start of the school year? Good luck with that! Write a book in two months? In a fairytale, maybe.
I can’t. My publisher believes this exists. Whatever doesn’t exist may exist. So I say: the best I can do is offer you a notebook. Not a book. The notebook is already written. It never thought of becoming a book. I never considered a notebook a book. Handing over a notebook to be read is as if I went out in my nightgown in a dream or in a bathing suit, and instead of heading for the seaside, I went to give a lecture. A notebook does not claim to be a denizen or citizen of Literature. It’s a cabinet full of doodads of inestimable value for me and probably none at all for a visitor. Odds and ends written and shielded from rereading. Untamed pages, drunk and disorderly, no hind-thoughts, no protective visors, no calculations, no weapons, defenseless, a clump of buttercups, grassy shards whose charm for me resides in their brevity, stardust on the idle ground around Montaigne’s tower. Breaths. Palpitations. No sentences. No epiphanies even. Just a way to hold your own hand. Without ambition. Lawless.
This little book has been taken by surprise as it got out of bed.
Nothing rearranged for the sake of appearances. Maybe I finished off a few words, a few nominal sentences, whose unfinishedness was not a problem for the notebook.
1 January 2017
What do the first days of the new year write? Auguries? Along comes:
The first Dream is long, in it I follow Ariane in the cavernous theater, everywhere under construction to make it conform with fire regulations.
The second first Dream is on the Other Side. I got here how, by train? We’re out in the country, I walk on hilly roads. This lady is J.D.’s mother, she can’t stop talking about him. What she says is strange, how he threw himself into life too early, he was ignorant, he emerged from books, he got married without any experience. She uses a very rich vocabulary, I find her less primitive than I had been given to think. A little girl is with the old woman who says, I recognize you, she has a sweet country face, little fairy curls, I toss a handful of grass at her head, as a joke I call her Grass.
This is how I discover a world completely different from how I’d imagined it.
In the year 2017, mama waits for me behind door eighty. Henceforth we are on the other side of the strange door, I am mama with Omi with H en route for Next Episode and End.
Writing that I see very clearly Montaigne’s marvelous letter to himself posted on the wall of my library, somewhere to woo oneself; somewhere to hide. You inscribe name, age (eighty), possessions (my garden, my trees, my nearest and dearest my cats my books, my bell my tower my rooster, my oak trees, my desk), you think of The One, the most intimate, the priceless one of whom our centuries— three, since 1882 Omi—know nothing more erudite and more charming.
All Life is here, in the house called Eve, Haya in truth, you date: Omi 1882, 1910 Eve, 1937 H.
and you sign
8 January 2017
The Visit to the Shades
To Montparnasse (cemetery) with Pi (my cousin) to see Eve (my mother). Every- thing rots, dead. Mama too. I will relive, revive in spring. Mama would agree with Achilles-Shade: life is what is worth living, as long as possible, not gloary [la gloare].
See Paul, among the wretched, nursing home. Nekyia in a nursing home. The weight of an hour with the wretched. I leave, corridor, I hear Paul’s voice shout, Hélène! Hélène! Voice at ninety years old the same as at ten. Hélène!
I leave, I flee. Land of shadows
This is how it ends
the Visit to the Shades: suddenly you take to your heels. Only the voices pursue us down the corridor.
How Ulysses loses it, flees, all of Hades shouts down the corridor. The word corridor swells up.
9 January 2017
Amazing, all those who wish you happy new year as if they believed in it, are believing in it. (Me) H., no summing up or prophesying, a light, melancholy disappointment, something frail, light, with the children: my fault, a bit too much death around.
Everywhere my limitations: my joyful brain, a runner out of breath.
Asli Erdogan: book insulted by its translation, a sort of flashy coat, under which one glimpses the poetic force. Words struggle to survive the bombardments. I feel humble and solidary. My admiration for this woman, envoy from between the deaths and discouragements.
Emmanuelle (Riva), Friday, January 13th at 1 p.m. I call her in Bizet. She picks up. Her voice fights through the blasts of a violent cough, the air is so far away, the tone washed out, she flings word upon word, can’t sleep, fight to breathe, my little darling, I send you a hug, I’m going to hang up, I’m holding onto the telephone. Emmanuelle—her voice fades, distant, dominant cough, the phone looks for a place to settle. I don’t hang up, I listen to each breath—slide—cut off. She cut herself off.
29 March 2019
I nearly called this “book” My Notebook and I. Fortunately this morning I heard myself pronounce these infelicitous words, in good faith, this good faith, its goodness threaded with innocent blindness. The notebook is not my dog. It and I, in fact, travel together separately.
It and I don’t fashion one another the way my beloved Montaigne and his book are fashioned, mutually.
The notebook is a room or a verbal jewelry box. In it I deposit pearls and the shiny stones I pick up as I stride across time’s beaches. From the primitive roads that run along the bay of Oran (1940), I epiphany. You walk on the edge of the double world, amphibiously, one foot in the water, one foot on the sand, the first text without you knowing it, and the road glitters with nacres, the most sparkling of micropoems. That’s where my education began. Treasure. Glimmering lamps. For Michelet-Proust, jellyfish masterpieces, ultimate gleams of life before death.
The Notebook and I
Nacres
“Nacres,”Oran’s word for: art object creation of Nature, the sea’s gift to writing, signifying lustrous wonder, and to say that in its resonant beginning this vocable in the Middle Ages named a little drum. Arab plays the naqqara. When the ear awakens to its percussions, it sees iridescence.
Pearls and mother-pearls that time strews along the way, a line that leads toward death. As you go, you meet your co-living, co-dying, the ‘candidates’ as Eve called them, you greet each other, you co-die a little each time an actor speaks his final words and exits, the givens, the deposits, little by little you wear out, as our teeth do, our dances wear out, dance step, death step.
I’d walk in the sun, accompanied by the Mediterranean’s canticles, my head down to read the shells, head up to measure with a glance the dark-spurred obstacle of a jagged rock. Obstacle is the name of one of the petrified monsters an epic scatters on your path. Kilometers, feet, hands bare. Then as now the action was: read, write, I will know later.
Much later. Only lately, perhaps last year, did I accept the evidence: writing enters through the body in which it circulates beginning with the legs. I was annoyed at having to recognize this. One writes with one’s whole body—my muscles, my lungs know that. But the legs? It’s the bike that forced me to admit this. Climbing on the bike out of a sense of minimal necessary hygiene was in itself an attempt at humility. Pedal, which I do every morning, a chore like taking the metro, always struck me as the most minimal of activities, soulless, I’m bored, can’t stand the repetitiveness, or only with the help of a book, and still, it has to be something lofty. But at the end of a quarter of an hour, in the docile machine that is me, a marvelous secretion is produced. A sentence. Perfectly constituted. And unimaginable. Kindled in my legs, I have to admit.
If they’d told me the poem comes from the calves!
2 February 2017
Charm, my friend. Turns up with some lilies. Writing: Do I write lily or delights? [lis ou délice]?
He reads the Bros. Karamazov as comedy. The lies. Here we are in Bessarabia. The grandfather, a long beard, says nothing. Chooses a cock with him, for Yom Kippur, takes him, aged five, to the Synagogue. Not a word. Shakes his hand harder and harder. The cock from Bessarabia recalls the cock from Algeria, J.D.’s father passes the cock over the heads of his sons. The cocks remind me of my mother’s commentaries. She finds the cocks ridiculous. In the Clos Salembier bidonville, at the very moment the woman gives birth, stop! Wait, don’t cut! First we must sacrifice the cock—a sacrifice to save the newborn. Get a move on, thinks my mother, a midwife mid-air—the cock’s blood everywhere, including her shoes. She cuts the cord.
—Are we the last who can still talk about these lost Jewish worlds?
—Yes. No transmission. Says Charm. Or me.
18 February 2017
How since Wednesday I’ve been reading Erich Maria Remarque’s This Promised Land with feeling, tenderness. He has the force and naiveté of my mother. The book mediocre, not well written, but the human zoo.
I “see” him in the streets of Osnabrück* where he too never wanted to go back.
In the book, “I” is called Sommer, and he has assumed the identity of a real cultivated Jew, who died beside him in Paris.
Halfway through the book: he-I wanders in a world of New York emigrant Jews. My mother knew some of them. So now we have Osnabrück in Manhattan.
28 March 2017
An anxious evening.
Charm on the phone: was it tonight we agreed to?
He forgot? Or: wants to be reassured? He turns up at 7:15 instead of 6:30. I am tired. I am slow. I am eighty-nine years old (age of the little one). I feel lost in this world. I don’t understand it. (The soul-searching of the traveler en route for the icepack. He was vigorous. He doesn’t understand himself. He is in the youth of old age. I am.)
ME.—I need you, you have to hold on.
CHARM.—You are life itself, as J.D. said.
The words we use are like columns of light: Life. Itself. We don’t understand them. They stand in the place of what we don’t understand. This is what happens once you have crossed the border, customs and immigration eighty
I am clouded over. Last flickering gleam?
Doesn’t know what he is going to vote. Guardian of an extraordinarily refined period. He speaks with precision, elegance. The kind of language I’d have died for when I was fifteen in Algeria, forceful, and energetic, a tool for sculpting thought, supreme good.
Bothered by—what?—
But takes a lively and ongoing pleasure in reading.
At the moment Moby Dick, bible-hoard of inestimable words. For example: I paid my fare. A sentence as precious as one of Shakespeare’s.
The word pay cracks open, contains boundless philosophical riches. Pacare. Make peace. Satisfy. Calm.
We used to give one another words as deep as palaces, J.D. and H.
By day I go down to my dead. By night they come to me.
My driver friend drove into the narrow alleyway to the right of the dream and stopped the enormous semi an inch from the gutter. Stop! I say. I’ll be right back, he says. The right-back went on and on. The car opposite us left, leaving us in plain view of the entire world. Cars going by on the street could see it was a dead end. A big truck with a very aggressive cop loomed over us with a threatening air. I lowered the window. Him too. I explained in English: My husband went to the doctor. He should have come back immediately. (I can call my friend my husband in English, in the language that I put on like a theater costume; nothing is neither false nor true.) The cop shouts at me. I say: He is sick, etc. True? True. The cop sticks around, keeping an eye on me. I was afraid we’d be hauled to the police station. When my friend gets back I ought to let him know I am his ‘wife’ (in English) or else get out of here. This is when my child whimpers, seeing somebody come. It is J.D(errida) in person. I lowered the window. I ask the child: do you want a candy? Yes? I rummaged, find a mint. I say: don’t cry, it’s Rin-Tin-Tin, he too wants a candy. Do you want to share with him? To J.D. I say: excuse us, he calls you Rin-Tin-Tin. J.D. is glued to the car door. He has a tender look. I realized he was urinating against the car. The child gave him a piece of his candy. I understood that J.D. in this emergency was acting a part. What an idea to park across these dead-end streets instead of properly!
(Between pages eight and nine a big hole in the fabric of time. Where was I during these weeks? Berlin? Osnabrück?)
I’ve reread the letters from the years ’68, ’75–’76. 20 March 2017. A packet “sent” to me via mama’s dresser drawers. “Mama” is how I now call the apart- ment-that-remains-after-mama, the apartmama, her living envelope, hertheca, her Evetheca, mama has left, her armoire, her trunk, her trunk of drawers, her treasure chest, these are now also the dead letter office, they still have some letters waiting for me. I’ve just got the letters from the end of ’74. The experience of the hard disk’s external memory that holds what my memory only keeps in freeze-dried form, pale trace, fleshless messages.
I say to my son:
Back then, even mama wasn’t on my side. She was still the woman who wanted her children to go into business. Marry a lawyer, she’d say. When I lodged a complaint with the destiny divinities. I used to call her: mymother. Not Eve. In those days she didn’t like what I liked, didn’t see the point, as a result didn’t love my beloveds. Of an age to have lovers of her own, she took to mine with a certain brutality. They were married, they could have been hers, “so now, Jean the marvelous is out? And the granddaddy: still around?” What offended me then delights me now, Eve enchants me, she is ravishing.
—They all tell you to write. What’s the point?
I didn’t know how to defend literature. An act without money?
Even today, I have trouble defending us.
Don’t publish, my son says. Write, okay, but publish?
Literature, I say, is my only chance to purify myself. That’s what they say.
A kind of sainthood, egoistic like every sainthood. Not to speak ‘the truth’ of truths. But to lie as little as possible. To admit to oneself, winkle out the unavowable, the vow, the wish, the craven wish—I’ll never be able to, I try, I want, yes?
At least it makes the unsayable spurt out in pallid or fiery jets, columns that walk along beside me, the living dead.
To dig up the dead, give speech back to the mute. I’ve killed [rendre la parole au tu. J’ai tué].
To write. I kill. I killed you. I threw you out.
In order to write, I didn’t.
Didn’t take the last trip with Isaac. Sacrifice of the most dear. The one I love. And more than once in my life I hoped he wouldn’t call me before I’d finished writing my page whereas I would in principle have given an arm and a leg for him to call.
And him? I never called him except at his call.
Call me tomorrow at seven, he would say. I called him, I began to call him in the spirit and in the flesh many hours before seven, the minute he said call me at seven, in truth, it was delicious and
making love in the mind while endlessly delighting in the delay, wait! wait!
Literature has always been the-wait-for-life-itself
Literature has always been salvation and loss
Immortality, the promise
I have only ever loved poets
My joy: literature and Isaac mixed. Love of language. I love by means of sentences. Eve’s genius: “I avoid bushes.” (Whereas Kafka avoids avoiding them.)
And now, sans Isaac, sans Eve? Now without now, without who taking my hand. Who, taking the place of hand? The incredibly fragile and assured and velvety paws of the cats. And given, confidently.
Hand needs hand.
I look into my hand. Hand senses the “memory” of Eve’s hand: square, strong, strong fingers, handy, her midwife’s fingers. Isaac’s hand, square, square fingers, brief nails, workman’s fingers.
I have a kitten that chews its nails savagely. I take it in my arms, I look at its tiny fingers with their minuscule transparent nails, I take an emery board and delicately I polish these fragile nails. It is an animal child. I see that it is hungry. I give it what? The creature runs away, creeps under a box and sucks at a soiled packet, out of which comes, I realize, a ribbon of chocolate. Such misery! I wish I could feed it.
This happens in Arcachon.
In the room as I’m getting into bed, the big lamp breaks. I’m holding the pieces in my hands, in the dark, I hear a sound—a footstep—and in the doorway— appears—mama, she has come up—to die—in her pink robe, she comes toward me—backwards and she starts to topple, I have no way to jump across this space, she’s going to fall, she falls, backwards, like a mass and I give such a cry that the cry wakes me crying.
*Osnabrück is Cixous’s mother’s birthplace; Remarque was also born in this German town.