It's only those kinds of truths, the ones that are not demonstrable, and even "false," the ones that one cannot without absurdity lead to their conclusion without coming to the negation of them and of oneself -- those are the ones that must be exalted by the work of art. They will never have the good -- or bad -- luck to be applied someday. May they live by the song that they have become, and that they revive.

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Something that seemed to me like a rottenness was in the process of corrupting my entire former vision of the world. When, one day, in a train compartment, while looking at the passenger sitting opposite me, I had the revelation that every man _is worth as much as_ every other, I did not suspect -- but that's not true, I knew it obscurely, for suddenly a layer of sadness engulfed me, and, more or less endurable, but always perceptible, it never left me -- that this knowledge would bring about such a methodical disintegration. Behind what was visible of this man, or further -- further away and at the same time miraculously and distressingly close -- inside this man -- body and face without grace, ugly, in some details, even vile: dirty moustache, which wouldn't count for much, except it was heavy, stiff, the hairs stuck almost horizontally above the tiny mouth, a spoiled mouth, gobs of spit he aimed between his knees on the floor of the train-car already dirty with cigarette butts, paper, bread crumbs, in short what in those days made up the dirtiness of a third-class compartment, by the look that stumbled against my own, I discovered, experiencing it as a shock, a sort of universal identity with all men.

No! It didn't happen so quickly, and not in that order: first my gaze stumbled (not crossed, but stumbled...) against the passenger's, or rather was dissolved in that gaze. This man had just raised his eyes from a newspaper, and quite simply had placed them, no doubt inadvertently, on my own which, in the same accidental way, were looking at him. Did he immediately experience the same emotion -- and immediate disarray -- as I did? His gaze was not that of another person: it was my own I met in a mirror, _by accident and in solitude and forgetting myself_. What I experienced I could convey only in this form: I flowed out of my body, through my eyes, into the traveler's _at the same time that the traveler flowed into my own_. Or rather: _I had flowed_, for the look was so brief that I can recall it only with the help of this tense of the verb. The passenger returned to his reading. Stupefied by what I had just discovered, only then did I think of examining the unknown man, and I came away with the impression of disgust described earlier: beneath his crumpled, rough, dingy clothes, his body must have been dirty and wrinkled. His mouth was soft and protected by a badly trimmed moustache, I told myself that this man was probably spineless, maybe cowardly. He was over fifty. The train continued its indifferent course through French villages. Night was falling. The idea of passing the twilight minutes, those of complicity, with this companion, greatly disturbed me.

What was it, then, that had flowed out of my body -- I fl... -- and what part of the traveler flowed out of his body?

This disagreeable experience did not happen again, either in its fresh suddenness or in its intensity, but its consequences within me have never stopped being felt. What I experienced in the train seemed to me like a revelation: after the accidents -- in this case repugnant -- of his appearance, this man contained, and let me detect, what made him identical to me. (I wrote that sentence first, but I corrected it with this, more precise and more distressing: I knew I was identical to this man.)

Was that because every man is identical to every other?

Continuing to meditate during the journey, and in a sort of disgust with myself, I quickly came to believe that it was this sameness that allowed every man to be loved, _neither more nor less_ than any other, and that allowed even the most revolting appearance to be loved, that is to say taken charge of and recognized, cherished. That wasn't all. My meditations were to lead me to this: this appearance, which I had first called vile, was -- the word is not too strong -- _required_ by this sameness (this word [identité] kept coming back, but maybe because I did not yet have at my disposal a very rich vocabulary) which kept circulating among all men, and of which a single glance, in its abandon, became aware. I even thought I understood that this appearance was the temporary form of the identity of all men. But that pure, almost insipid look that circulated from one traveler to the other, in which their will could do nothing, which their will might perhaps have prevented, lasted just an instant, and that was enough for a profound sadness to cast its shadow on me and make its home in me. I lived for quite a while with this discovery which I deliberately kept secret, and the memories of which I tried to distance from me, but still some part in me watched over a stain of sadness which, suddenly, as if filled by a breath, darkened everything.

"Every man," I said to myself, the revelation had come to me, "behind his charming or to our eyes monstrous appearance, retains a quality that seems to be like a last resort, and that makes him, in a most secret, perhaps irreducible domain, what every man is."

Did I even think I found this equivalence at Les Halles, at the slaughterhouses, in the fixed, but not sightless, eyes of the sheep's heads, cut, piled in pyramids on the sidewalk? Where should I stop? Who would I have murdered if I had killed some cheetah walking with long strides, supple as a villain from long ago?

You will remember that earlier I had said that my dearest friends took refuge, I was certain, entirely in a secret wound. But not long after I wrote "...in a most secret, perhaps irreducible domain." Was I speaking of the same thing? One man was identical to another, that's what hit me. But was it, then, so rare to learn that, which amazes me, and how could it further me to know it? First it's a different thing to know something wholly in an analytical way than to grasp it by a sudden intuition. (For I had of course heard it said around me, and I had read, that all men are equal, and even that they are brothers.) But how could this further me? One thing was more certain: I could no longer not know what I had known in the train.

How -- I was incapable of seeing -- how did I pass from this knowledge that every man is like every other, to the idea that every man is all other men? But the idea was now inside me. It was there like a certainty. More precisely -- but I'm going to spoil it -- it could have been expressed by this aphorism: "In the world there exists and there has never existed anything but one single man. He is entirely in each of us, thus he is ourselves. Each one is the other and the others. In the abandon of night, a clear exchanged look -- drawn-out or fleeting, I ignored technical details -- made us aware of it. Except that a phenomenon, for which I don't even know a name, seems infinitely to divide this single man, splits him into the accidents of appearance, and makes each of the fragments foreign to us."

I explained myself clumsily and what I experienced was even stronger and more confused than this idea of which I spoke and which, rather than a thought, was dreamt, engendered, dragged or dredged up by a somewhat listless daydreaming.

No man was my brother: each man was myself, but isolated, temporarily, in his particular shell. But this observation did not lead me to examine all morals or see them in a new light. Toward this me outside of my particular appearance, I experienced no tenderness, no affection. Nor toward the form taken by the other -- or his prison. Or his tomb? Instead, I seemed to be as pitiless with it as I had been with this shape that answered to my name and that was writing these lines. The sadness that had swooped down upon me is what troubled me most. After the moment I had this revelation while gazing at the unknown traveler, it was impossible for me to see the world as I used to. Nothing was certain. The world suddenly floated. I remained for a long time as if sickened by my discovery, but I felt that it wouldn't be long before this was going to force me into serious changes, which would be renunciations. My sadness was an indication. The world was changed. In a third-class car, between Salon and Saint-Rambert-d'Albon, it had just lost its color, its charm. Already I was nostalgically saying goodbye to them, and it wasn't without sadness or disgust that I embarked on those paths that would be ever more solitary, especially in those visions of the world that, instead of exalting my joy, caused me so much dismay.

"Soon," I told myself, "nothing of what used to be so precious will count: love affairs, friendships, forms, vanity, everything that has to do with seduction."

But was this gaze that rested on the traveler, and that was so atrociously revealing, possible perhaps because of an ancient disposition of the mind, because of my life, or any other reason? I wasn't very sure that another man could have felt himself flow out, through his gaze, into another's body, or that the significance of this sensation for him would have been the one I offered here. Still tempted to call into question the plenum of the world, was I here again trying to pour myself into individual shells in order better to deny singularity?

"Soon, nothing more will count..." Or nothing would be changed? If each enclosure, preciously, contains one single identity, each enclosure is unique and succeeds in establishing between each of us an opposition that seems irremediable, in creating an innumerable variety of individuals who think of themselves as: self-other. Might each man have nothing precious or real except this singularity: "his" moustache, "his" eyes, "his" club-foot, "his" harelip? And if he had nothing to take pride in but the size of "his" cock? But this gaze went from the unknown traveler to me, and the immediate certainty that self-other were only one, at the same time both me-or-him, and me-and-him? How can I forget that mucus?

Let's go on. Knowing what I had just learned, I didn't have to direct my efforts according to the indications of the revelation in order to dissolve myself into an approximate contemplation. I simply could not avoid knowing what I knew, and no matter what the cost I had to pursue its consequences, whatever they were. Since various incidents in my life had forced me into poetry, perhaps the poet had to use this new discovery for himself. But above all I had to notice this: the only moments of my life that I could think of as true, ripping open my appearance and revealing... what? _a solid void_ that kept perpetuating me? -- I knew during some truly holy rages, in some equally blessed moments of fear, and in the ray of light -- the first -- that went from a young man's eye to my own, in our exchanged look. Finally in this gaze passing from the traveler, into me. The rest, all the rest, seemed to me the effect of an optical error provoked by my appearance, itself necessarily deceptive. Rembrandt was the first to accuse me. Rembrandt! That severe finger that spreads open the rags and shows... what? An infinite, an infernal transparency.

So I experienced a profound disgust for what I had been heading toward, which I didn't know and which, thank God, I couldn't avoid, and then a great sadness for what I was going to lose of myself. Everything became disillusioned around me, everything rotted. Eroticism and its furies seemed denied to me, utterly. How to ignore, after the experience on the train, that every attractive form, if it encloses me, is myself? But if I tried to grasp this identity, every form, monstrous or lovable, lost its power over me.

"The search for the erotic," I told myself, "is only possible when one supposes that each being has its individuality, that it is irreducible and that physical form is aware of it, and is aware only of it."

What did I know of erotic signification? But the idea that I was circulating in each man, that each man was myself, disgusted me. For a little while longer, if every somewhat handsome -- with conventional beauty -- and male human form still kept a little power over me, it was, you could say, by reverberation. This power was the reflection of the one to which I had yielded for so long. Nostalgic goodbye to it too. Thus each person no longer appeared to me in his total, absolute, magnificent individuality: as a fragmentary appearance of one single being, it made me even sicker. Yet I wrote the preceding without ceasing to be unsettled, worked on by the erotic themes that had been familiar to me and that had dominated my life. I was sincere when I spoke of a search starting from the revelation "that every man is every other man and I am like all the others" -- but I know that I was also writing that in order to rid myself of eroticism, to try to dislodge it from me, or at least to distance it. An erect phallus, congested and vibrating, standing in a thicket of curly black hairs, and after that: thick thighs, then the torso, the whole body, the hands, the thumbs, then the neck, the lips, the teeth, the nose, the hair, finally the eyes that summon amorous furies as if for a rescue or an annihilation, and all that struggling against this so fragile look capable perhaps of destroying this All-Power?

Our gaze can be quick or slow, it depends on the thing observed as much as on us, or more. That is why I speak of that speed which, for instance, precipitates the object in front of us, or of a slowness that weighs it down.

When it rests on a painting by Rembrandt (one of those from the end of his life) our gaze becomes heavy, a little bovine. Something holds it, a somber force. Why do we keep looking when we are not at first enchanted by the intellectual rejoicing that knows everything all at once -- about a Guardi arabesque, for instance?

Like the smell of a cow barn: when I see only the bust or head of people (Hendrijke in Berlin), I can't keep from imagining them standing in manure. Chests breathe. The hands are warm. Bony, knotted, but warm. The table of the Cloth Makers' Guild is placed on straw, the five syndics smell of manure and cow shit. Under Hendrijke's skirts, under the fur-lined cloaks, under the Levites, under the painter's extravagant robe the bodies dutifully carry out their functions: they digest, they are hot, they are heavy, they smell, they shit. -- As delicate as her face is and as serious her gaze, _The Jewish Bride_ has an ass. We can tell. Any instant now she can raise her skirts. She can sit down, she's got plenty. Mme. Trip too. As for Rembrandt himself, let's not speak of him: from his first portrait on his fleshly mass will continue to accelerate from one painting to another until the last one, where he arrives, definitive, but not emptied of substance. After he had lost what was dearest to him -- his mother and wife -- you could say that this tough guy sought to lose himself, abandoning civility toward the people of Amsterdam, and disappeared socially.

To want to be nothing is a phrase one often hears. It is Christian: Must we understand that man seeks to lose, to let dissolve what, in some way, _banally_ singularizes him, what gives him his opacity, so that, on the day of his death, he can present himself to God as pure transparency, not even iridescent? I don't know and I don't care.

For Rembrandt, his entire work makes me think that it wasn't enough for him to get rid of what encumbered him to bring about this transparency described above, but to transform it, to change it, to make it serve the work of art. To rid the subject of whatever anecdotal quality it has, and position it under a light of eternity. Recognized by today, by tomorrow, but also by the dead. A work offered to the living of today and tomorrow but not to the dead of all ages, what use would that be?

A painting by Rembrandt not only stops time, which was making the subject flow into the future, but makes it go back to the earliest eras. By this process, Rembrandt invokes solemnity. And he discovers why, each instant, each event is solemn: for that, his own solitude teaches him.

But one must also restore this solemnity to the canvas, and that is when his taste for theatricality -- so keen when he was twenty-five -- will be useful to him. It is possible that his immense grief -- Saskia's death -- turned Rembrandt away from all the pleasures of every day, and that he filled his mourning by changing gold chains, feathered hats, swords, into values, or rather, into pictorial celebrations. I don't know if he cried, this beefy Dutchman, but around '42 he knew the baptism of fire, and little by little his first, vain, bold nature is going to be transformed.

For at the age of twenty the strapping young man doesn't look very easygoing, and he spends his time in front of the mirror. He loves himself, he falls for himself, so young and already in the mirror! Not to fix himself up and run to the ball, but to look at himself for a long time, with complacency, alone: Rembrandt with the three moustaches, with the frowning eyebrows, with the disheveled hair, the wild eyes, etc. No anxiety is visible in this simulated quest for self. If he paints buildings, they are always operatic scenery. Then little by little, without distancing himself from his narcissism or from his taste for theatricality, he will change them: the former in order to arrive at anxiety, to the confusion he will overcome, the latter to extract the joys -- also wild -- from the sleeve of the "Jewish Bride."

As soon as Saskia dies -- I wonder if he didn't kill her, one way or another, if he didn't rejoice at her death -- finally his eye and hand are free. From this moment on he undertakes a sort of debauchery in painting: With Saskia dead, the world and the opinions of society have little weight. We must imagine it, Saskia dying and him in his studio, perched on ladders, breaking up the arrangement of the "Night Watch." Does he believe in God? Not when he paints. He knows the Bible and he uses it.

It goes without saying that everything I've just said hasn't the least importance unless you accept that the whole of it is more or less false. The work of art, if it is complete, does not permit conclusions, intellectual games, to be drawn from it. It even seems to confuse the intelligence, or to tie it in knots. Now I've played that game too.

In a way, works of art would make us idiots, if their fascination weren't the proof -- uncontrollable, but unarguable -- that this paralysis of the intelligence is mixed with the most luminous certainty. Which certainty, I have no idea. At the origin of these lines there is my emotion (in London twelve years ago) in front of his most beautiful paintings. -- What do I have, then? What are these paintings that I find so hard to get out of my mind? Who is this Mrs. Trip? This Mister...

No. I never asked myself who these ladies or gentlemen were. And maybe it's this, more or less clear-cut, absence of question that makes me wince? The more I looked at them, _the less these portraits reminded me of anyone_. Of no one. No doubt I needed a long time to arrive at this hopeless and intoxicating idea: the portraits made by Rembrandt (after his fifties) refer to no identifiable person. No detail, no physiognomic trait refers to a particular characteristic or psychology. Are they depersonalized by oversimplification? Not at all. Think of Margaretha Trip's wrinkles. And the more I looked at them, hoping to grasp, or approach, the personality, as they say, to discover their particular identity, the more they escaped -- all of them -- in an infinite flight, and at the same speed. Only Rembrandt himself -- maybe because of the acuity of his gaze scrutinizing his own image -- kept a little particularity: or at least attention. But the others, _if I had deemed negligible this profound sadness_, fled without allowing anything of them to be grasped.

Negligible, this sadness? The sadness of being in the world? Nothing other than the attitude assumed _naturally_ by beings when they are alone, waiting to act, like this or like that. Rembrandt himself, in his portrait in Cologne, where he is laughing. The face and background are so red that the whole painting makes one think of a placenta dried in the sun.

You don't have much room to stand back, in the museum in Cologne. You have to position yourself diagonally, at an angle. It's from there I looked at him, but the head -- mine -- lowered, turned sort of upside down. The blood came to my head, but how sad this laughing face was!

It's beginning with the time that he depersonalizes his models, and that he removes all identifiable characteristics from objects, that he gives the most weight, the greatest reality, to both.

Something important has happened: at the same time as he recognizes the object, his eye recognizes the painting, as such. And it will never leave it. Rembrandt no longer distorts the painting by trying to confuse it with the object or face it is charged with representing: he presents it as distinct substance, not ashamed of being what it is. Openness of fields ploughed in the morning, smoking. What the spectator gains, I don't yet know, but the painter gains full title to his profession. He presents himself in his madness of daubing, mad with color, losing the airs and hypocrisy of pretenders. This will be perceptible in the final paintings. But Rembrandt had to recognize and accept himself, as a being of flesh -- what am I saying, of flesh? -- of meat, raw meat, of blood, of tears, of sweat, of shit, of intelligence and tenderness, of other things too, ad infinitum, but with none of them negating the others, or better: each one hailing the others.

And it goes without saying that Rembrandt's entire oeuvre has no meaning -- at least for me -- unless I know that what I have just written is false.

Translation Copyright 2003 by Charlotte Mandell