“Antonio: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.”
bq. Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene 1.

DNA is the modern, residual name of aDoNAis. Which means that the god does not express himself through the collective or individual epics of revealed religions, for he is more of a weaver and his prose is like an infinite and lugubrious meshing. Four amino acids encode the proteins of all life forms, and this new tetragram is unpronounceable not because we somehow lack the magical elocution it requires, but because, in this irrepressible, profane nausea, the tongue sticks stubbornly to the palate.
What do they have in common, the partisans of the unpronounceable Name and the zealous geneticists who spell the active orthography of the Word of Creation?
By attacking Shylock’s religious identity, by giving him a forced baptism, Antonio creates a fellow being. I.e., in the speculative world of biotechnology, a clone. In the press-ganging activism of faith, a convert. The last word in revenge. It cannot be discouraged, except by knowing its foundation. Which means: knowing its wretchedness. Which means, in turn: the elucidation of sadness.

Elucidatio tristitiae 1.
DNA is what is underneath. But what is underneath is on top. You have to know what you’re doing, and undoing, when you flush out a mystery. Civilisation was born, you could say, secretly; silently built up, with the burial of our fellows, and the impossible inhumation of those disparate beings that are animals hunted and eaten. The concatenated bison on rock paintings, that cornucopia of outlines and horns on a magic ground of humidity, was an attempt to add up animal life so as to reach an asymptotic supernaturality. The first god, originally, existed only there, in that wave of stench from the herds. And so, breathing in that compact, invisible life, attested oh so slightly, hunters started a priesthood. That was the past. But the past is what lies ahead. When you’re standing with your back to time. Today, knowledge is just stray ballets; mortal bullets. Its prey, this enigma, that it boasted of piercing through the heart, has, like a stone taken from a stream, lost all its alluring shine. Where is that agile justice that, in Basho’s haiku, protected fireflies from the pack of young boys? In ancient times, Isis, the goddess of Nature, was represented wearing a veil. I can only picture her lying on an old couch in a brothel, her last lover praying, hands pressed together in a half-heart-beating vagina. Rimbaud, with the refinement of the soon-to-be-gone, called this outpouring of elucidation “Christmas on Earth.”
An anecdote: William Burroughs looking for a title. Jack Kerouac suggests he calls his book “naked lunch.” That curious moment when the hunk of meat hangs from the fork. The same thing. Beneath the fir tree, inert toys in that raiment of supplication that torn Kraft paper seems to point heavenwards. What else can a healthy-minded kid do, except, with the rage built up in his nails, temporarily, in the moment of tearing apart, restore the idea that the source of satisfaction is actually hidden. The allegorical value of the child imploring the mother for a piece of chocolate. The mother: “But you know the chocolate’s in the cupboard.” The son: “Mum, you know I don’t have any arms.” The mother: “No arms, no chocolate.” For how can anything be hidden from a person who cannot even fail against all odds – that is to say, on that close-cropped little lawn called tragedy? Children fill their mouths with the invisible world strewn on the ground, including samplings of their own shit. They are scolded: take that out of your mouth. In my day it was still called truth.

Elucidatio tristitiae 2.
Just like 1, 2, 3 or the invention of structuralism. Draw attention to a cross by getting yourself nailed to it – in other words, by cladding it with suffering. Then clear everything out. The cross, that infancy of structure, has become noteworthy. Its woodwork being identical to the phenomenon of life, we have the choice between a wooden god and torture inflicted on beams. Offenbach, Offenbarung.[1] The masters of light opera. That’s how it starts. What is active and buried, on the surface, succumbs. We have inflicted death and manifestation on what is buried alive. Annihilated all wonder at the world. A piece of advice: if you feel bored, go out and buy something. Mystery has been sold to the poor. Along with tons of glistening, stale rice that brings on hallucinations. If boredom is eating you, try drugs. If drugs are eating you, then you can buy them. I’m a turner by trade. I turn up my nose. That’s what we’ve come to.
The mathematician Karl Marx discovered the arithmetic of anger. He also discovered the sedating geometry for this anger. The former is called class struggle, the latter ideology. Ideology is bright and brassy like a sunbeam. It makes you lower your eyes. If you don’t want to, buy some shades. You can tell that it’s modern man when, instead of the beams he once had in his eye, beams it was hard to see round even when he could remove them, there remains only a filament in resin and a thorn in the foot. Which is why nothing can change, except his gait, which loses in elegance. When I was little, in temples of shade, we used to measure our penises, which were also little, in centimetres. Should we have included the drop of gold that appeared at the tip of the glans? Whoever speaks has a dry throat, and whoever keeps silent salivates. The unconscious and class struggles are called infrastructures. We can only name them if we discover them, after which they cease to be hidden, and therefore cease to be infrastructures, and cease to be. It’s like when someone says to you: Fingers in your nose! Not any more, they’re not. To make this clear. In Dutch: een kat in een zak kopen. I translate: here below, a gift from heaven. Why? Why is it that the abominable and fickle gods of Greece enjoined the tragic hero to practise moderation and equanimity? And what have we become in this age of gods so moderate they are moderately extinct, so equable they don’t mind being sacrificed? Oh, the word has slipped my mind.
Oedipus gouges his eyes out so that all things may perpetuate the experience of the enigma. It’s hairy and warm, it’s my mother or my dog – what is it? Freudianism and Marxism teamed up and tried – unsuccessfully – to attain that great feat of consciousness: to feel one’s feet in one’s shoes. The pleasured proletarian is no more capable when it comes to priming the sky-clearing machine. That darkness which descends gradually and seems to close the portcullis of time is still not the shadow of the god collapsing, it is only that unwelcome drowsiness that shuts the eyelids in broad daylight and programmes the apocalypse by evaporation. Hölderlin asks: “_Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit_.”[2] By his patient, inspired philological endeavour, Martin Heidegger reinstated the original Germanic meaning: what good are poets with tresses? It’s true: a lot of writers had their heads shaved at the time.
Gottfried Benn writes: I have examined myself, I found only sociology and emptiness. But in this emptiness he could at least stretch out, full length, in all his bitterness. Remembered: no arm, no chocolate. And Paul Celan added: “There are not many men. That is probably why there are not many poems.” The double helix structure of DNA is a painting of the railways to Auschwitz twisted by the brush in Chaïm Soutine’s forger’s fingers. In a word, I would convert immediately if Jesus of Nazareth had been killed by two helicopters in full flight.
What astonishes is also what protects. I see no difference between a miracle and a policeman. Between god and a kneepad. A young writer said to me: “We are just vehicles for bacteria.” He makes no distinction between a sneeze and betraying one’s calling.
When Orpheus leads Eurydice back out of the Underworld, he is perfectly aware that he must keep walking in front of her and not turn back, failing which Eurydice will be called back into the Underworld. Orpheus takes a glance. Everyone says, Orpheus is an imbecile, has no patience. To think we can’t understand even that any more. To be with by going through pain. Like the hand slipping into the horsehair glove and preparing to put the blood of a familiar, sickening body under its spell. Nostalgia, the pain of distance. An inflammation of the ear – why not? – because of overdoing the telephone.

Elucidatio tristitiae 3.
Icarus was a fisherman. He saw the sun in reflection. He came back nets empty. That’s all. The only mystery, resemblance. Narcissus by the water. He is crying. At the brothel. Crying. In a mirrored bedroom. Inside I am shivering with mycosis. Oh my beloved. Twenty-three pairs of chromosomes. Only one determines gender. So that shows you how much we have in common. Males and females. Boys and girls. Oh, how it all fails to sort them out. Lots of them. Girls who don’t know that – IT’S ALL WATER and that – PANTHA REI – all things must pass – and take fright at doing nothing else – than WETTING. So, it’s true. The future of mankind. The future in ponds. Like at the beginning. At the end of the month – the hateful month of me.[3] Bills, said Pascal. Circumstances. Stand fast. Great chain of Being. Mr Bing’s Labrador. Knowledge – a changeling. O-sa-ma bin Laden. Means, in Afghan: Mind his wandering hand. Sales. Everything. Must. Go. This world. A sheet. To sleep in. No. Not now. And if you tickle us? And if you poison us? Make an effort. Are we not laughing? An effort of memory. The enigmatic animal. In Thebes. Is despair. In the poem by Gherasim Luca. Despair has no father. “Despair has no peers. No pairs of legs. Despair has three legs.” I can also remember a nymph. The nymph Echo. Economy. Who sells him cosmetics. Everything can be returned-up. Absolutely everything. All that is. Tremble. And why. I recall. Chocolate. Tremble. In the sun. Tremble. Arms.

Elucidatio tristitiae 4.
Das Heilige sei mein Wort. They translate das Heilige: the sacred. Sei: be (subjunctive). Mein Wort: my word. Das Heilige sei mein Wort: the holy be my word.

I translate das Heilige: between you and me. Sei: let it be. Mein Wort: said. Das Heilige sei mein Wort. Between you and me (and the door post).(let it be said)

Elucidatio tristitiae: in fine

I know that I am talking because I am talking but I will convince nobody. And that is dishonest – but rhetoric compels me to behave as I am, in spite of myself – or in other words, “if someone bites into a perfidious sorb, then he must spit it out.”
Carlo Michelstaedter, La persuasion et la rhétorique. éd. de l’Eclat

In the age of the Napoleonic conquests, philosophy brought forth the idea that History is finished. Which means that, of course, life continues, but rather like a cat chasing its tail. Which means that the future holds nothing but variations of life looking for itself, the same play performed ad infinitum being bearable only because those who act it out and those who watch die in different ways before the boredom can kill them off. If there is no figure of a different and amended world to occupy our imagined future, that means the present is an anticipated future and the future a deferred or detained present. In qualitative terms, there is no difference between them, except that the present is present to the senses and certified, whereas the future is withheld from the intuition. It is withheld because nothing within it is supposed to express an expectation or promise – not even frightened expectation, that expectation of something frightening which, in other ages, the oracular or prophetic Word set out for the imagination or thought. The past, in turn, is now only that unreasoning set of beliefs and practices that works to prefigure or unfold the figure of what is coming, in other words, for us, the figure of what is. The archive that we keep of this past, the gulf in intensity between what we are in the forward-looking and unhitched imagination of our predecessors and what we effectively are has now become a cause of mirth. This amused or stirred incredulousness is the true transcendental of culture, its rolling stock, all those eyes rolling at the sight in museum displays or documents of this incredible world that believed in the visibility of the future, that even believed that it should spare no pensiveness or expense on account of that future. In a word, it was this world that for us is barely conceivable in which sometimes the present bubbled with impatience, with precipitation, yes, and the fact that it was towards what we have become that it ardently bent its efforts, and not without sacrifice, all that is not only inconceivable, it is also hilarious. Unless of course that hilarity is only a simulacrum of health on the surface, and that below there is nothing more than discouraged life and its sickening blood. Quite logically, if the future ceases to be constructible or desirable, then we have only the present as the object for desire and for that instinct for belief hard-wired into us as if for some biological reason. The extension of the revolutionary thinking into the field of daily existence is ordered in accordance with the idea according to which pleasure is what can fill a non-historical present. This means that: the world must teem and jostle with opportunities for pleasure. That is its only meaning: to be the space-time of the possibility of pleasure of which each human life is the regional and driven actualisation. Giorgio Colli writes: “Man is made for a life in which external stimuli and spontaneous activities are in equilibrium. His anatomical structure reflects this fact. All of which may, at the very most, justify the predominance of spontaneity. The sense organs receive the external; the rest of the human body, apart from what is designed for its own preservation, seems designed above all for spontaneity. Hence the brain, the voice, the arms and the legs and the genital organs. In modern life, stimuli are clearly dominant in relation to spontaneous activity. This is a serious sign of vital decadence.” The posture of modern man is the somewhat hunched one of the decadent writer D’Annunzio, after the rib operation he had done so as to be able to realise his dearest desire, that is to say, quite literally, to bite his own tail. Spontaneous life, represented by the genital organ, is no more than a big pastel to be sucked in the mouth. It does not have the taste of what Cesar Pavese called “the juice of the fruit that fell in those times.” Which means that it has lost even the memory of a life of memory. Which means that life, which had nothing to gain, now in addition has nothing left to lose. Which means, in turn, that everything that exists exists in excess, and therefore this excess is closer to the past’s vice of exaggerating. That everything belongs to the past means that the future, which at first was unenvisageable, bends to this mental deficiency and in effect ceases to happen. Which means: the idea of the end of History, which emerged in philosophy at the time of the Napoleonic conquests, is about to come into being and, inevitably, as is the case every time a difficult idea acquires an anonymous, dominant resonance, what is louring on the horizon, in truth, is the plague.

¹ Revelation

² What good are poets in times of distress?

³ The French here has an untranslatable pun: “la fin du mois – le moi est haïssable”: “the end of the month (self) – the self (month) is hateful”.

(Translated form the French by Charles Penwarden)