THE GASH
233
of the plough, of the diamond, of the dagger, of teeth! Trial of strength,
trial of the self which wants to tear only in denial of perfection, as a
mortgage on integrity, just as one
cuts short
an objection. Let us break
open the gap! At least we will have left our mark. For lack of anything
else, each of us carves his name in marble or on a prison wall. That is
writing it in the true sense, since writing it means inscribing it. The
man of letters
brands
passive wax or parchment. In the final analysis,
the pencil might even cleave the slate and the pen cut shapes of freakish
garret windows out of a sheet of paper. Is style not determined after
all by an original way of bearing down, by a certain power of insistence?
It is to be measured by the depth of my "impressions," by which I
mean the characters which my point picks out in the thickness of my
tablet. Creation is incisive. It is thought out destruction. He who affirms
himself, eliminates me proportionally. A note, a word bores holes in
reticent plasticity. The artist is worth his refusal: he begins by shutting
one eye, by cutting out an object, and then he takes two or three steps
back as if he were fighting a duel! Challenge? Provocation? At least
denial. He judges himself by what he cuts off, what he cuts out of the
world.
Stylization corresponds to a kind of subversive surgery. The inventor
is a nihilist who begins again with the universe in its original state
of nakedness. The sculptor with chisel and hammer in hand looks like
an iconoclast indeed! What does the painter do if not methodically soil
his canvas? And the poet but ravage his language like a madman? So
it is true that no one stamps himself upon the world except by carving
on it a virile signature.
(Translated by Mary Guggenheim)
