Ex_ist 1 [Sartreian Spring]

 

All Images: South Leicester, March 2024

“…I started laughing because I suddenly thought of the wonderful springtimes described in books, full of cracking, bursting gigantic blossomings. There were fools who talked  to you about willpower and the struggle for life Hadn’t they ever looked at an animal or a tree? That plane with its scaling bark, that half-rotten oak - they would’ve wanted me to take them for vigorous youthful forces thrusting towards the sky. And that root? I would probably have had to see it as a greedy claw, tearing the earth, snatching its food from it.

‘Impossible to see things that way. Weaknesses, frailties, yes. The trees were floating. Thrusting towards the sky? Collapsing rather: at any moment I expected to see the trunks shrivel like weary pricks, curl up and fall to the ground in a soft, black, crumpled heap. They did not want to exist, only they could not help it; that was the point. So they performed all their little functions, quietly, unenthusiastically, the sap rose slowly and reluctantly in the canals, and the roots penetrated slowly into the earth. But at every moment they seemed on the verge of dropping everything and obliterating themselves. Tired and old, they went on existing, unwillingly and ungraciously, simply because they were too weak to die, because death could come to them only from the outside: melodies alone can proudly carry their own death within them like an internal necessity,; only they don’t exist. Every existent is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. I leaned back ands I closed my eyes. But pictures, promptly informed, sprang forward and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a repletion which man can never abandon.” [1.]

“Did I dream it up, that huge presence? It was there, installed on the park, tumbled into the trees, all soft, gumming everything up, all thick, a jelly. And I was inside with the whole of the park? I was frightened, but above all I was furious, I thought it was so stupid, so out of place, I hated that ignoble jelly. A there was so much of it, so much! It went up as high as the sky, it flowed away everywhere, it filled everything with gelatinous subsidence and I could see it going deeper and deeper, far beyond the limits of the park and the houses and Bouville, I was no longer at Bouville or anywhere, I was floating. I was not surprised. I knew perfectly well that it was the World, the World in all its nakedness which was suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with fury at that huge absurd being. You couldn’t even wonder where it all came from, or how it was that a world should exist rather than nothing. It didn’t make sense, the world was present everywhere, in front, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had been no moment at which it might not have existed. It was that which irritated me: naturally there was no reason for it to exist, that flowing larva. But it was not possible for it not to exist. That was unthinkable: In order to imagine nothingness, you had to be there already, right in the world, with your eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was just an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in that immensity: this nothingness hadn’t come before existence, it was an existence like any other and one which had appeared after a great many others. I shouted: ‘What filth! What filth!’ And I shook myself to get rid of that sticky dirt, but it held fast and there was so much of it, tons and tons of existence, indefinitely: I was suffocating at the bottom of that huge boredom. Then, all of a sudden, the park emptied as if through a big hole, the world disappeared in the same way it had come, or else I woke up - in any case I could not see it any more; there remained some yellow earth around me, out of which dead branches stuck up into the air.” [2.]

“Dusk is falling, the first lights are going on in the town. Good Lord, how natural the town looks in spite of all its geometric patterns, how crushed by the evening it seems. It’s so …obvious from here; is it possible that I should be the only one to see it? Is there nowhere another Cassandra on top of a hill, looking down at a town engulfed in the depths of Nature? But what does it matter to me? What could I possibly tell her?

“My body turns very gently towards the east, wobbles slightly and starts walking.” [3.]

[1, 2, 3]:  Excerpts From: Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Nausea’ (Trans. Robert Baldick), London/NYC, Penguin, 1963 (1938).