If there is a book - thick, beautiful, hardcover, massive and, basically, unreadable - that should be owned (that is, bought, not borrowed from the library or from a friend "to read") and kept close at hand, on the bedside table, in the toilet, or on the living room table together with a bowl of fruit, then these are Notebooks Emil Ciorano. So, where it used to be held Holy Bible now you should put this one Anti-Bible, this breviary of doubt, despair, lucidity and genius, then mangupluk, impudence and self-delusion, a breviary devoid of moralizing, imbued with unscrupulousness (the jokes of Cioran and a brainy Paul Celan), a manual of terrifying reflection, dizzying contradictions, a text that offers no consolation, exit or backup position, a manual that abhors wisdom, beautiful thoughts and even more beautiful feelings, but therefore offers a language that can do anything and wants everything and would be light. "We never forgive those who remind us that we are proud," wrote Cioran in December 1963. Two years later, on June 17: "A terrible night. Everything was called into question." He, therefore, who leaves no stone unturned, is precisely him, the writer Brief histories of decomposition, the one who questions everything, horrified by the fact that everything is questioned. And then, on December 19, 1966: "We were thrown into this world to know the drama that consists in not being able to cry," so that on March 10, 1967, alluding to his Romanian origin, he wrote: "I come from an area ruled by the Thracians, for whom birth was an opportunity to cry, and death to rejoice." Three days later: "The older I get, the fewer things I find that allow me to go on... And yet, I love poplars and all landscapes from which man is absent."
PLAYING WITH OBSESSIONS
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A Romanian by origin, a citizen of France and a French writer - like Mircea Eliade and Eugène Ionesco - Emil Cioran opened notebooks in 1957 in which he would write down what was going through his mind every day for 25 years. Notebooks a kind of diary, but also a preparation for the books he is about to write. These are mostly very short entries, with the longest taking up half a page of the Serbian edition. It would probably be more accurate to say that we are talking about fragments, with the fact that a fragment, by definition, has something to do with the whole (a fragment is a part of the whole, a fragment is in relation to the whole), while Siran's writings-fragments are exhausted in themselves, or, following the strange paths of the writer's obsessions, they merge with fragments that arise months or years later. "I see exactly my place in the world," writes Cioran on January 7, 1968, "I am a point, not even that much; why suffer when so little Yes I am? Let me stick to that vision, let me guy that illusion of a point! I'm working on it and I'm succeeding in it. And then the spot expands and inflates again. And everything starts from the beginning." Only a few sentences, but the fragment is complete and self-sufficient. However, is the writer's modesty real (he is just a point in the world, a straw among the whirlwinds, an insignificant individual in a world that infinitely surpasses him), or is it a matter of playing with himself and the reader? The world has lost its sense of taste. Which then most directly reverses the explicit meaning of the fragment and does not say anything good about the writer's modesty. And again, Cioran is a moving point that constantly changes its position, perspectives, and demands, so even reality cannot be the same if it is always viewed from another place, from another. points which, no matter how small, is still something it is. Hence Cioran's multifaceted and persistent reflections on suicide. On that same January 7th, Cioran wrote: "When measured properly, it is suicide most honorable an act that a human being can perform.” A few days later, on January 13, he says: "Like it or not, suicide is 'improvement' - an imbecile who kills himself ceases to be an imbecile." Is it irony, cynicism, unscrupulousness, or simply a linguistic expression that does not think of softening the meaning for any reason that does not concern the language itself? On a certain level, it can be said that Ciorano preoccupies the problem of death - there are many fragments about death and suicide - but it can hardly be said that this dark man was possessed by death in the way that it possessed his friend Paul Celan, who, when he couldn't stand it any longer, left the Mirabeau bridge in Paris forever into the Seine. Cioran was, which is a paradoxical statement, a sane man, despite his demons. This is exactly the place that keeps the reader on his toes. Cioran's fragments speak of the tenacity of survival in a meaningless world rather than a call to give up on the world. Already in the following fragments, in which he writes about children's deaths - more precisely, about the last words of children who were aware that they were dying - Cioran becomes a linguistic virtuoso who leaves no room for doubt as to which side he belongs to: no matter how much he whips by life, he is on the side of life, even when, on January 16, 1968, he writes: "Whoever did not die young, deserves it to die," or, after one sleepless night, on December 13 of the same year: "It's amazing how in the middle of the night suicide seems like the most normal thing."
THE PARADOX OF SADNESS
Despite the fact that he does not cease to experience the wrath of God, Cioran is a very careful reader of theological writings, and faith that he does not know how to give plays a very important role in his writings. This ambiguity, or this double-track ride - interest in the things of God and, at the same time, the inability to give faith - is not at all puzzling because Cioran is attracted to metaphysical doubts. "To postpone the meeting with the fatal", he wrote on February 12, 1962, to record the same thing on April 4 of the same year, only slightly differently: "I was alone on the terrace, left to the sun; I suddenly froze at the idea that everything ends underground, in rot. Death is unacceptable. The indecency of dying…” and then like big coup, as a merciful blow, wrote on April 9: "If Christianity had imposed Indifference instead of mercy, how much more bearable our lives would be." Or November 5, 1968: "Christianity - what a sadistic enterprise."
So, is Emil Cioran an unparalleled cynic or, perhaps, an oversensitive being who defends himself from the world with rudeness, anger, (self) irony? There is no doubt that it is a kind of hypersensitivity, but with Cioran, hypersensitivity is not a mere psychological property, but a mechanism, similar to the antennae of ants, thanks to which he moves through the world and avoids its nasty spikes ("In this world where life sticks out", April 9). Cioron challenges that world by lashing out at it in fury, but he does it somehow from afar, not coming close to it. Hence the self-irony, and often disgust towards himself and his own writing: as if he were a hero, challenging everyone and everything, comfortably hidden behind a thick wall: "Sadness, which has become a constant state for me, is a great obstacle to my 'salvation'. And as long as it lasts and as long as I do not manage to get rid of it, I will remain chained to earthly miseries. Because therein lies the paradox of sadness: by distancing us from this world, it brings us even more into it." it plunges in. It is a fit within a split and inconsolation” (April 9, 1962).
Impressive, in fact, is Cioran's self-obsession, which is one of the reasons why his Notebooks I cannot read for too long: everything is so dense and so filled with it that the reader quickly feels claustrophobic, as if in a closed space, as in a cage that Cioran, himself a prisoner of his own obsessions, has forged around the reader. After a certain break in reading, however, the reader simply has to return to Cioran, that suffocating atmosphere filled with lucidity, well-controlled madness, vulnerability and everything that indescribably irritates us about this genius writer.
THE ESSENCE? NOTHING.
It seems that we have always been followed by a (mysterious) prejudice that can be expressed in, say, the following way: "don't be blunt, but tell the essence". From somewhere, the essence is linked to the economy of expression, to the fact that it can be expressed in a short and sharp formula. Because of this, it seems to the more simple-minded reader that Cioran hits the point with each of his fragments. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Because Cioran with his heavy fragments, like a huge hammer, destroys every attempt to establish some kind of essence. If, therefore, the essence would be what makes a thing (or a being) exactly as that thing is (what that being is), Cioran's fragments cannot be further from the essence because they are nothing but a constant displacement, transfer, hiding and revealing, a swirling movement of language that does not leave any thing or any being as they are, stuck to itself, but transforms them in the act of writing, depriving them of support, foundation, even meaning. Let's say, after all the reflections on suicide, on June 23, 1970, he wrote: "I am moving away from suicide because I have overcome the search for solution.” But whatever he grabs onto, whatever he sets out to tear down, tarnish, destroy, he always starts from himself first: "Except for a few rare moments that redeem me before myself, my life is the life of a deposed king, a poor man, an inconsolable, depressed whore" (July 1, 1962).
