CASSANDRE by the Estate of A.M.CASSANDRE
MEMENTO BY A.M.CASSANDRE
The Twilight of a Giant
In the final years of his life, between 1958 and 1967, Adolphe Jean-Marie Mouron — known worldwide as A.M.Cassandre — confided his most secret thoughts to intimate notebooks. These "Feuilles Mortes" the spiritual testament of a man at the end of his road, reveal to us the other side of an existence devoted entirely to art.
The man who revolutionized the modern poster, creator of the mythical Dubonnet and Étoile du Nord, appears here stripped of his trappings of glory. Neither international success nor recognition from his peers could appease the metaphysical anxiety that gnawed at him. Past sixty, Cassandre found himself confronted with the most terrible of ordeals: that of the artist who has given everything and no longer knows how to continue.
The Quest for Meaning
"There is no worse betrayal than to prefer life to reasons for living." This quote from the Latin poet Juvenal, placed as an epigraph to his reflections, sets the tone. For Cassandre, existence is only worth what transcends it. And when art — this supreme reason for living — slips away, what remains?
The artist observes with pitiless lucidity the evolution of the world around him. The sixties saw the birth of a consumer society that he himself had helped shape through his revolutionary posters of the twenties and thirties. But this commercialization of art disgusts him. He witnesses, powerless, the transformation of creation into a mass product.
Inner Exile
"A stranger to the world of artists, not part of that of industry or theater, I find myself, at 61, alone on the road, without passport or residence permit." This confession sums up Cassandre's drama: pioneer of modern graphic art, he no longer recognizes himself in the evolution his discipline has taken.
Too much an artist for industrialists, too commercial for pure artists, he occupies an uncomfortable position that condemns him to solitude. This marginality, which he chose through aesthetic demand, becomes with age an unbearable burden.
Meditation on Death
The "Feuilles Mortes" are traversed by an obsession: that of voluntary death. Far from conventional romanticism, Cassandre approaches this question with the rigor of a philosopher. He quotes Mozart: "As death, closely examined, is the true final goal of life, I have in recent years become so familiar with this true and perfect friend of man, that its image not only has nothing frightening for me, but is very soothing, very consoling."
For him, suicide is not an act of cowardice but "the greatest, most difficult victory over a fundamental and immeasurable cowardice." This reflection, which culminates with his attempt of June 17, 1966, reveals a man grappling with existential suffering that no one could suspect behind the facade of the accomplished creator.
Art and Old Age
How to continue creating when one has the impression of having said everything? This interrogation haunts Cassandre's final years. He who was a revolutionary of the image finds himself confronted with the evolution of modern art that he no longer understands. He vehemently criticizes contemporary abstract painting: "expression of a collectivity from which every human person is excluded." He deplores that modern painters want to limit painting "to its pictorial virtues alone," depriving it of "its allusive and poetic content which so enlarged its power of attraction."
The Solitude of Genius
Throughout the pages, the portrait emerges of a man of rare intelligence, nourished by classical culture — he abundantly quotes Vauvenargues, Rivarol, Reverdy — but who no longer finds interlocutors worthy of him. "I have spent three-quarters of my life trying to convince ignoramuses and imbeciles. I have not convinced them and have thus lost time and energy that I would have done better to employ in striving to be myself less ignorant and less foolish."
This bitterness translates the disappointment of a man who believed he could elevate public taste through his art. The genius creator discovers himself isolated in a world that has retained from his work only its commercial dimension.
The Spiritual Testament
The final pages, dated 1967, show us a man exhausted by illness and medical treatments, but whose mind remains remarkably acute. Even physically diminished, Cassandre continues to reflect on art and the meaning of existence.
He evokes his late discovery of a certain "amusement" in painting, a feeling he had lost for years. But this renaissance is fragile, constantly threatened by depression and illness.
The Legacy of a Consciousness
These "Feuilles Mortes" constitute much more than a simple biographical testimony. They offer us the meditation of an exceptional creator on the eternal questions that haunt every true artist: the meaning of art, the relationship to posterity, the acceptance of finitude.
At a time when artificial intelligence questions the future of human creation, Cassandre's reflections on the authenticity of art, on the necessity of true emotion in the face of pure technique, resonate with troubling relevance.
The man who gave letters of nobility to modern graphic art bequeaths to us, through these painful and beautiful pages, a lesson in lucidity and demand. For if Cassandre doubted everything, he never renounced this conviction that runs through his work: only true beauty, that which is born of inner necessity, deserves that one dedicate one's life to it.
"The only gift that counts is not the one that relieves you, but the one that strips you bare." This phrase, extracted from his notebooks, could serve as an epitaph for one who gave everything to his art, even his own existence.
'FEUILLES MORTES I' (1958-1966)
1958 – "The fools and the boors, satisfied with their sterility, often reproach me for not loving life... I, who love it so passionately! In truth, I do not love what they want me to take for life: theirs.
Living is not consuming today, digesting yesterday; it is PROJECTING tomorrow. It is above all accepting the Unknown, however tragic it may be. Those who live only in the passing minute may be dilettantes, clever and comfortable—but surely they are already the walking dead.
What gives youth its irresistible power is its unconscious and tacit acceptance of death. It is this silent consent that gives it its audacity, its recklessness, and sometimes its heroism. With age, this consent must become lucid and serene—not because death is the consent to eternal life, but because it is the perfect completion of life and the true goal of its fulfillment."
Mozart: "As death, when you look closely, is the true final goal of life, I have, for a few years, become so familiar with this true and perfect friend of man, that her image is no longer frightening to me, but very soothing, very comforting..."
Those who do not know the fascinating temptation of death and the exhausting battle it imposes on you cannot speak of life lightly.
1959 – "There is a great difference between affirming an exceptional art and the humble, warm, and almost invisible presence of an art that belongs to the daily life of man. The former always signifies a great passion—hope or despair—the latter can only be ‘the discreet reminder of hope,’ as Goethe so aptly defined it. (My constant ambition)
We are indulgent only toward those we do not love. Perhaps this is what makes love so difficult.
Rivarol: 'Indulgence for those we know is far rarer than pity for those we do not know.'
Still Rivarol: 'Extraordinary minds place great value on the common and familiar things, while common minds love and seek only the extraordinary.'
And Jules Renard: 'A great poet need only use the established forms. Let the lesser poets worry about the imprudent generosity!' Think about it.
Difficulty in accepting one's age objectively. All the more absurd since the advantages of youth now have a much-diminished appeal for you.
What is difficult is not being loved, but loving oneself.
In this fierce world that crashes down with the noise of scrap metal and explosions, a direct and unblinking look at nature and its first truths would surely resonate as the cry of joy of a child. But could we still hear it?
It seems futile to search for signs of a language, when this language is no longer Word, but simply an accumulation of words.
They have eyes, but they do not see; they have ears, but they do not hear. Today Christ would add: they have a tongue, but they do not speak it..."
1959 – "Men today no longer speak: they 'chat.' How could they still perform the tragedy? It is essentially Word—sonorous, graphic, and plastic. And how could they still hear each other when Logos has become nothing more than logorrhea?
Man is so alone that he wishes to be heard—and he is so vain that he is satisfied with thinking he is being listened to... by people who do not hear him.
You cannot participate in the life of a community that does not concern you. The winemaker may become a sailor, but he cannot grow his vines on a boat. He must remain on the shore, doing his work alone, while waiting for the sailors to feel like taking a tack and having a drink.
Figurative space is all the more sensitive when the object it contains is not quite in proportion to it, not to the same scale. It then becomes unusual, and poetically receivable. In theatre, this disproportion can be seen in the actor’s physical presence in contrast to the slightly smaller virtual space in which he is placed, thus violating plausibility.
Private life... deprived of what?"
1960 – "We should not say 'my life' but 'my lives,' for we always live several. In those moments of depression when we slip towards nothingness and self-negation, it seems that an invisible wound allows all your blood to escape. In fact, in this antechamber of death, it is an entire life that leaves you. For, emerging from this abyss, the one that returns is not the same. It is a new life, containing the Unknown of tomorrow, which must be accepted, whatever it is, by renouncing yesterday’s life.
Remaining available to receive these successive lives is perhaps the hardest thing. But the true refusal is the rejection of anything in the past that could compromise this availability; it is the refusal of a certain comfortable cowardice that may spare us from new wounds, but at the same time makes us lose our capacity for wonder, a miraculous privilege of childhood and the poet.
Resignation is, nine times out of ten, disguised cowardice: a postponement we ask from death.
The only gift that counts is not the one that relieves you, but the one that strips you.
From Mozart: 'I cried... what good did it do? I had to console myself afterward. Do as I did: cry, cry deeply, but then console yourself. Think that the Almighty wanted it, and what could we do against Him?'
In a futile proselytism, I spent three-quarters of my life trying to convince ignoramuses and fools. I did not convince them, and thus I lost time and energy that I should have better spent trying to make myself less ignorant and less foolish."
1962 – "There are only two conditions for man: to accept his solitude and his sorrows, or to endure married life and its wounds. The first only has the advantage of sparing others the cruelty of the second."
It’s by the quality of the people who serve them that one recognizes true leaders. A leader does not command, he suggests, and he is served. A foreman commands and is merely obeyed.
Strange power of life. When you no longer have any reason to live, when nothing justifies your existence, when all your conclusions lead to the necessity of death, when you lucidly prepare for what seems to be a banal formality, a mysterious will, completely foreign to your consciousness, coming from I don't know where within you, unpredictable yet imperative, prevents you from making the fatal and definitive gesture, which is so simple. And instead of taking the lethal dose, which is then within your grasp, you take... a sedative.
Those who speak of the cowardice of suicide are fools who have never attempted it and do not know what they are talking about. On the contrary, it is the greatest, most difficult victory over an inherent and immeasurable cowardice. (May 7, 1961) A final act of faith."
1962 – "I prefer to give my works to those who love them, rather than sell them to those who evaluate them—this costs a lot!"
1963 – The thing only imagined will undoubtedly surprise, astonish, or even interest; it will never have the power to move.
Only the thing felt possesses this gift of emotion and, therefore, persuasion.
One must not confuse "impact" with "persuasion." Picasso is impactful.
The egoist, in the end, is a fool. For, content with the fleeting pleasures of receiving, he deprives himself of the only real joy: that of giving.
It is said that in every man, there is a sleeping pig. One could also say that in every woman, there is a whore who is either unaware or pretending.
1964 – Drieu La Rochelle: "Man is born only to die, and he is never as alive as when he dies. But his life only has meaning if he gives it, instead of waiting for it to be taken from him."
From the same: "The new is born from the Old, from the Old that was once so Young!"
1965 – My great sin has always been impatience, my constant worry: a struggle against time. Yet, I have never ceased to believe in the old adage of Leonardo: "Impatience, sister of folly, admires brevity." Never more relevant!
From the same Leonardo: "Painting declines from age to age, losing itself when painters only have the previous painting as their author." (And themselves).
For him, this did not mean destroying everything and starting from zero, but rather "continuing," perfecting, not doing nothing.
We begin by "Being"; then we continue, and finally, we begin again. The question is whether it is worth starting again?
June 17, 1966 – I attempt to kill myself.
July 1, 1966 – The good people! Now they have clear consciences, convinced they have "saved my life."
A life loathsome to me, one they condemn me to live.
The difficulty is not in killing oneself, but in thwarting the untimely intervention of all these "good people" who absolutely want to prevent you from dying. Why?
Logically, having (very freely) taken on the responsibility of forcing you to continue your stay on this agreeable planet, they should at least help you live this life you refused but which they are determined to see you live... if only for the comfort of their conscience.
O! Pontius Pilate! (And complacent cowardice!)
September 1966 – My unity seems shattered, broken into a thousand pieces, like a glass that can no longer contain anything. "What does it matter the bottle..." is very nice, but: what if there is no bottle anymore?
October 3, 1966 – At this point, having completely lost the will to exist, I should logically attempt again to cross the great Frontier, now with the means and perhaps the certainty of success.
But what? What is this illusory hope that creeps into me?
A twist of Fate, or rather of the Devil, to prolong my stay in his hell? Indefinable hope... hope in nothing at all... absurd.
Perhaps cowardice? Or just the fear of failing again: a second defeat more ridiculous than the first.
October 4, 1966 – I choose to escape into a Sleep Cure – in a clinic.
A night of 10 days, so long that one loses all sense of time. A delightful parenthesis where one sees more clearly than in the day – clarity, not light. In the black night – "This obscure clarity that falls from the stars..." The old Corneille must have had a sleep cure.
November 1966 – Alas! Parentheses, by definition, do not last. This clarity, akin to wonder, melts like snow in the spring.
December 1966 – There are things that one gives (or takes) in Eros.
There are others that one bequeaths in death.
There are also things of no value that one can only dedicate.
I dedicate these already dead pages to you, my friends, in default of the Other that I so longed for and that never came.
'FEUILLES MORTES II' (1958-1966)
January 1967 – To live is to project. In "transit," it is the obsessive feeling I’ve had since my failed attempt last June. Each day, more and more, I lose the consciousness of my life in the face of the incapacity and prohibition of any projection into the future—even a near future—that I know is limited by a fatal attempt at escape (one that I hope succeeded) and which obsesses me.
But how difficult it is to resign oneself to die. Yet life no longer offers me anything. Have I forever lost that gift of wonder, that sometimes frantic fervor that made me "burn" until the completion of a work—whatever it was? Each day confirms this in a despairing manner.
January 24, 1967 – 66 years have just sounded on the little clock of my life. Which doesn’t change much!
The presence within me of these two contradictory beings—one living through the artifices of pharmacy (a few hours a day!) and the other only aspiring to death—who engage in a perpetual battle, exhausts me, and if I still had the physical strength, would revolt me. It is this exhaustion and this powerless (or impossible) revolt that will one day push me toward nothingness. But when? Legendre promises me wonders with his protein treatment, but still hasn't started... Will I have the strength to wait any longer? After all this time clinging to this last hope, I believe in it less and less.
January 25 – Reverdy wrote: "The disgust for creation becomes insurmountable when one has acquired the bitter certainty that no effort, even the most patient, the most desperate, will lead to any progress." When one has reached this disgust, as I have, prolonging one’s life becomes simply absurd.
The work of art has always been, for me, a projection into the future, a contained force that is released, an act, not a contemplation. It is in this perspective that Picasso's work (or much of it) commands admiration without moving us. Perhaps because the act is too deliberately visible?
"Ars est celare artem" (Art is to hide art). One should reflect on that. Life is a dream, they say. So perhaps it should be stopped before the dream becomes a nightmare.
January 26, 1967 – Legendre called me last night: he can finally give me my first injection. Saturday morning. I agreed, though I don’t think it will change anything about the insoluble problems in front of me.
January 29, 1967 – This little needle has entered my vein. But can I wait 15 days to feel its effects? Today, Sunday, I feel more isolated than ever. I made the rounds of the friends I could reach. None are there: a desert without the slightest oasis. The refuge of my work is locked up, and I am incapable of breaking the lock. Will I even have the strength to kill myself? Not even. This ridiculous injection has broken what little energy and courage I had left.
Another defeat. Death in itself is not tragic. It is the people and the doctors, obsessed and terrified by the suffering that sometimes accompanies it, who once again confuse the periphery with the center. And since suffering is a facet of life, it is life itself that is tragic, not death, which ceases all suffering.
The doctors saved my life by operating on my gallbladder, making me live an unbearable life afterward. A second time, my kind friends saved my life again, making it even more unbearable.
For the third time, medicine today tries to save my life by offering what will likely be nothing but a mockery through calf or heifer cells! (I know full well that I am here on René Coty Avenue to watch the trains pass...)
**How long will this absurd carousel last, and when will I have the courage to stop it? Why should death, which is the most banal outcome of life, stripped of the tragic guise that people give it, not have, like life, a large dose of humor? "Dramma Gioccoso." How right Mozart was! For honestly, how many times, myself like so many others, have we felt the urge to laugh—more than to cry—at a funeral? The peasant custom of a big meal after the funeral, where, at dessert, we recount, slapping our thighs, all the "good stories" about the deceased in a huge burst of laughter, delights me immensely. These people have realized the proper measure of death.
January 30, 1967 – I convince myself to "hold on" for a week, at least out of honesty toward Legendre. But what can I do with these long days, alone and with no possible work? I should have been able to travel, leave this apartment where I am going in circles: a change of scenery, or at least a disruption, a break with my daily routine. All things impossible for lack of money. If money doesn’t bring happiness, it certainly avoids a lot of troubles.
March 11, 1967 – Six weeks today since that injection. Six weeks of sterile waiting, of inertia, in immense physical fatigue. And why?
March 13, 1967 – The life of a man is so little! The thread of mine broke nearly four years ago, and I still cannot tie the ends together. Logically, I should have been killed that day by that fool who, as a mediocre insurance agent, contented himself with maiming me clumsily, unaware that with my leg he was also breaking the thread of my life. The world must be full of unconscious murderers enjoying a very peaceful conscience. The whims of fate are unpredictable and cruelly ironic: for a year later, to the day, on 15 July 1964, the husband of the gas station attendant, injured at the same time as me, suddenly died of a heart attack...
April 15, 67 - More than two months spent waiting for these miracle cells to manifest themselves - in the ups and downs of an uncontrollable hope and dreadful depressions. I'm doping myself more than ever. Fortunately Attila helps me efficiently to prepare my Amsterdam exhibition. This projection into a very near future (beyond which I can see nothing except the entrance to a new tunnel) occupies this tedious wait with a manual task that kills time, but at the cost of what effort sometimes to justify its necessity!
Finally on April 12, as planned, everything departed. I have at least kept my commitments for this "pre-posthumous" exhibition. Speeches and flowers... I would so need fruits - and to bite into them.
April 16, 67 - New liver crisis, acute; the 4th in three weeks, excessive. Logically I can die from one day to the next, (during a deeper depression) when this logic becomes imperative necessity. Yet I have no taste for writing instructions, dispositions etc... I will therefore die intestate. What importance? Where I am going these papers will be quite vain... and "dust in the wind."
And then all these "good people" who "saved my life" last June - had they taken "dispositions" designed to make life less unlivable for me? So let them manage for a few days: that's life, theirs, the one they love so much! This will allow them to think of me for at least three or four days. It's already a lot.
April 17, 67 - Painting was for me the most effective "death deceiver": a sign of life, of MY life. Dead, it has no more importance: "vanity of vanities etc... Let it go where it will!" Posterity? "Don't know it," said Delacroix.
April 18, 67 - Always this feeling of being on reprieve. Legendre's little cells seem nevertheless to want to manifest themselves but what will they be (admitting them active) if not a new simulacrum? Meanwhile, their violent reaction on my liver compromises the greater part of their beneficial action. So? Depressing diet and usual pharmaceutical expedients: corydrane, phenedrine, and barbiturates. Expedients from which this treatment was in principle supposed to free me... Legendre is a bit confused and embarrassed by this hepatic reaction that he had not foreseen. In fact, did he himself know what his ampoules contained exactly? Why not, among other things, cells from a hepatic and neurasthenic heifer?
April 18, 67 - In fact, in the rare, too rare moments of well-being - between two liver crises - I rediscover, if not joy and fervor, at least a certain "amusement" in painting - a feeling I had lost for several years (1963) and that no "doping" could provide me.
But I feel confusedly in these moments becoming an "other." A certain molting? Avoid at all costs the sad (and dishonest) repetitions, usual in the old age of the artist, and other dotards. ("old people must be killed young" Alfred Jarry) I sense that then I would have to start everything over, draw and redraw from nature without any preconceived idea, even without a painting objective. Would I still have, at 66, the strength, the time... and the money? As I had in 1940?
April 19, 67 - From Alexandre Dumas: "Old age is not bearable without an ideal... or a vice." This unpunished vice: Painting, however gratuitous and useless it may be?
From Boucher de Perthes: "To be tormented by anxiety, devoured by anguish and diseases, this is called the happiness of living - To be delivered from all this is called the misfortune of dying."
And from Alfred Capus: "Everything works out, but badly."
April 23, 67 - But how difficult it is to tie the two ends of a broken thread. Doubly broken, for me: that of history and that of my life.
I believe that resuming, even while transforming it, my work on "The Lake" is a mistake. It belongs too much to a past already distant (I began it in 64) and to what I did or wanted to do in that past. It's a dangerous and unhealthy dead end.
I have each day and each evening before my eyes a city partially under construction and which no longer has much of Paris. Think seriously about it. Draw and perhaps envisage if not a painting, at least a study?
Not to continue either "the doors" which lack something that I cannot manage to detect. In these three weeks at my disposal before my Amsterdam exhibition, limit myself to my studies, restricted to their reconnaissance function. Perhaps a copy or a self-portrait for lack of a model?
April 28 - From Reverdy: "The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from the bringing together of two realities more or less distant. The more distant and accurate the relationships between the two brought-together realities, the stronger the image will be."
One can forgive everything. But would one know how to forget everything?
May 9 - A molting like the one I sense can only be done in inaction, a sort of lethargy, a passivity, letting the future enter into you. I must resign myself to it and apply myself to it. Molting is not fire: one must let the flame catch, a still hesitant flame, that the slightest breath could extinguish.
From Boris Vian: "Don't try to be witty: they never understand. Those who understand are already married..."
May 17, 67 - The ridiculous must no longer kill. Otherwise there would not be many women left alive. How do those who have passed forty not perceive the ridiculousness of their determination to want to engage in erotic frolics? The ridiculous and the sadness... The others wear mini-skirts!
Is the work of art degraded to this point? I see each day intelligent and cultured men according serious importance to insignificant works, as easy as they are vain, that's the least one can say of them. The hostile attitude of the Impressionists' public continues its ravages - in reverse.
June 1 - As I foresaw, after a few days of euphoria due to the action and kind presence of people who surrounded me, this Amsterdam exhibition despite its success brings me only sadness and depression. Old age is only bearable if one is exempt from illness - and money worries. That's not my case.
June 13 - I was, in my youth, resolutely optimistic. I believe my misanthropy was born from my stupefaction at the progressive discovery of the Evil that surrounded me and surrounds me more than ever: the tyrannical supremacy of cowardice and lies, the latter being the obligatory consequence of the former - and accepted by all. My greatest error is having remained blind too long and having always wanted to ignore the rules of this game that leads the world. Today, even if I could, it would be too late to play it.
From Reverdy: "They have, almost all of them, a way of lying that does not lie."
June 19 - There should never be "retrospective" exhibitions before the artist's death. During his lifetime they can only be murderous. The artist can only look ahead, project himself forward; never turn around to look back. Orpheus died from it.
Reverdy was once again right: "There are moments, when one goes back too far, where the most brilliant years begin to shine and ring like golden louis coins... made of lead."
June 25 - Legendre gives me this evening the second injection of cells. It's a gamble I accept. It cannot be worse and perhaps a better backlash? If this one doesn't succeed, there will always be time to end it.
An impressionist perception but writing as rigorous as Giotto's. Is it possible?
Yet one should agree: everyone agrees to admit that one can only count on oneself. And everyone agrees to condemn egocentrism.
What's advantageous about the cemetery is that others take care of the moving.
June 27 - From Reverdy: "The foundation of pessimism is good faith and honesty. Optimism is too often made of lack of scruples and frivolity. The pessimist relies too much on himself and this responsibility crushes him; the optimist always relies on something else and finds himself lightened by it."
July 6 - To wait. What? Who? Godot?
Everything logically brings me back to death. But how difficult it is to provoke it for the second time! Undoubtedly the fear, increased by the first attempt, of a new failure, unbearable to think about.
And yet I know well that even if this second injection brings me a slight revival of health, my life, absurd today, will not be changed for all that: my isolation will be the same and the insoluble problem of my means of existence as well. So? A miracle? In whose honor?
I know very well that I should have remarried - a third time... but what did I have to offer a woman? To become my widow and my heir, that's all.
Cultivate the potato to nourish oneself and thus have the strength to cultivate the potato. A program like any other!
Life is only possible if it is totally devoted to an imaginary and gratuitous objective. That of the scientist, that of the artist, of the statesman (if it is short) and that of the madman - I was going to forget the assassins.
From Lucien Guitry: "In death, the most to be pitied are those who remain. Well... ask them to change then."
July 8 - During the major part of my life, imbeciles irritated me but I didn't have time to dwell on it. I shrugged my shoulders then forgot them. It even sometimes happened that I was foolish enough myself to try to enlighten their foolishness! ...Today, they have become so murderous for me that I remain affected, almost wounded by them. This does not diminish my isolation.
Today's youth who want to distinguish themselves by their vestimentary and capillary appearance seem to me as ridiculous and foolish as the daubers who, lacking talent, display the "artist type." "Ne quid nimis!" Pascal would have said. Revolutions are not made with miniskirts but with machine guns.
Cortancyl momentarily tempers my liver's action and, like any drug, gives me again the illusion of being. It's always something, but I know it's temporary - like a sleeping pill - and far from the power of projection I would so need. I work like a sleepwalker walks on rooftops. But what is my work worth?
July 17 - "If you cannot do it by inspiration, do it by revolt," said old Horace. The difficulty is maintaining this state of revolt permanently. No revolution has managed to do it.
One is wrong to abuse the word friendship. It is the rarest thing in the world. I mean the true, the effective one, in happiness as in misfortune. Most of the time, one should say "comrade," "acquaintance," even "relation" and not "friend." Looking back over my past years, I can count only two: Jean Puech in my early youth and later Reverdy. Balthus was never a true friend; a sort of modesty separated us. Deep down, having never been able to approve his life as a man - even despising it - I was never more than the "buddy" of the artist. That's not much.
In general, a true male friendship is always broken by the arrival of a woman: mistress or wife. Would Eros be the mortal enemy of friendship that he undoubtedly considers as unfair competition?
From Reverdy: "Strange that the idea of death can at certain moments so help one bear life."
I spent 45 years trying to understand my life. At 66, I understand nothing of it. I only know that at the end there will be death. So why not right away?
These slides toward nothingness sometimes caused by an infinitesimal physiological accident. Total loss of the will to be that doesn't care about the instinct of preservation. A timeless time that is neither death nor life - one rebels at this incapacity to open the door to one or the other. And then one doesn't give a damn and abandons oneself to the only permitted solution: the bulldozer.
The clinic and... its bills. Good people will lead you to one but won't pay the others. One doesn't give a damn.
July 26 - 21 days during which one is alive without the slightest possibility of existing. But where is it possible to exist?
August 18, 67 - Exit from the tunnel. I don't know if I am - if I am better? In any case an "other," not very solid on his feet, not very sure of not derailing. I know these resurrections too well to still give them long-term credit. Wait and see, that's all I can permit myself as a future.
Negative or positive? Perhaps both at once, like a photograph: one on transparent film - the other on opaque paper. But which is the real?
From Rivarol: "Out of 20 people who speak of you, 19 say bad things and the twentieth who says good things, says them badly."
From Ionesco: "For some it is easy to live, they only have to let themselves go. They glide. I must always climb mountains, which moreover I don't climb."
August 19 - Why write these disordered and timeless notes? And that no one will read? I constrain myself to it only for me: they serve as an interlocutor that I don't have. If I date some of them, it's so they serve as landmarks, as a sailor takes his bearings to know his position. That's all.
And then it's a way of getting rid of certain mental obsessions, as painting is "getting rid of" a visual obsession - as one takes aspirin to be rid of a headache. "Writing" is more, or as difficult as painting. The only advantage I see in it is the speed of execution - this execution that demands from the painter 90% of his effort and time in an artisanal (and unequal) struggle against rebellious matter, and so disappointing! Today at least - I understand the attraction that the art qualified as "Kineticism" exercises on young painters. I prefer that (in part) to the distressing "matter" of a Matisse or even sometimes of Picasso.
And if this obsession were only a form of the eternal question? To be or not to be?
The poet's happiness is to be able not to answer it - by getting rid of it in his work. (Good riddance!)
The scientist's weakness is wanting to answer it. He never answers it and only describes effects but never touches the cause, which alone would interest us.
The believer, (whatever his religion) avoids it (or believes he avoids it) by accepting an "a priori" cause. Perhaps this "a priori" is what grace is.
The only wisdom answers it through "knowledge" - the opposite of science - that of old Socrates, who knows he will never know. The hemlock is then as simple as a glass of Beaujolais. And involves neither cowardice nor courage. The only true act of faith: knowing that one will never know. There is no longer a "question."
It is in youth that one has the most illusory consciousness of time's continuity, of its indivisibility, so great seems to you the "duration" you have before you, the duration fragment of Time.
But it is in old age that one would most need this consciousness (even illusory) to be able to continue one's work by surpassing the instant, by projecting it into time - duration.
August 28 - Fragility of the derisory unity of mind! It suffices for one euphoric tablet to think and see white what a few moments before one thought and saw black, and a sleeping pill suddenly projects you into another world. Go recognize yourself in that!
I entered yesterday into the 10th week of my second protein injection. Will these damned cells manifest themselves beneficially this time? Or redouble my liver's vulnerability?
The current potential of my effective work is about 3 to 4 hours maximum, in the morning upon waking. At noon begins the great fatigue, then indifference, and finally disgust. When am I myself, and not a simulacrum?
September 11 - The benefit of my cure diminishes day by day. And I return insensibly to the state I was in before Le Vésinet. Therapy for billionaires, who don't give a damn...
September 11 - Partial transmutation: a thing that begins as one thing and becomes another thing, Sirens, Centaurs, Sphinxes, Dragons, fire, water... I would like to know why the ancients, including the first Christians, had so much taste for these transmutations?
Water changed into wine (wedding at Cana) and 14th arcane of the tarot: the content of a blue vase into a red vase? ??
September 12 - Courage and discouragement. A change of apartment will change nothing -NOTHING- of my state. Whether it's Paris (where my "Friends" are never there!) or Versailles (where I have so many happy memories). The cart before the horse. It would be necessary first - but is it still possible? - that I remarry - no - that I associate with a being who doesn't get on my nerves too much, who would have renounced erotic homages - difficult - and that I remake a home, not a bachelor's ivory tower. But with whom? This being is more difficult to find than an apartment... Until this day I have only found death.
September 13 - Insist on the line - man's only true invention (see Giotto where color has only an accompanying role). Rouault insisted a bit too much - Linear perspective, used not as a simulacrum of representation but as a means of composition, as I have, too timidly, attempted it in D. Giovanni and especially in "Path of Light." Multiply the vanishing points and distances.
Resume certain NU drawings through the voids. Like a letter.
In the end one must accept this permanent "fatigue" that doctors name thus by a charitable euphemism to avoid pronouncing the real word "old age." Why not get used to it - as one got used to childhood, adolescence and youth? On condition obviously of having the money necessary to live it? That's another story and basically the only problem. Health and money. (Difficult). I have neither one nor the other.
September 17 - Today, after 12 weeks of waiting as patient as it was vain, I must admit the loss of this "gamble" that I wanted to risk on June 25 by letting myself have the second injection of these odious little cells that will have earned me in the end only a murderous attack on my liver. Legendre himself admits it's a failure and that the treatment is far from being perfected... I must therefore start again on another foot - supposing I still have feet? and also that I want to start again? Which is not very certain. And then start again toward what? At the point where I am, is it still worth the trouble?
One tries to find reasons - they are always outside, on the periphery, never at the center. Despite certain days when I let myself be deceived by them, I know perfectly the nature of the evil I am afflicted with: psychasthenia is undoubtedly an incurable disease, like tuberculosis or cancer - a sort of cancer of the soul, from which only death can free you.
October 1 - But how difficult it is to cross the great frontier.
October 3, 1967 - This little notebook is at its last page. Is it worth the trouble to begin another? What's the use? Here I am back along this frontier that I know only too well, thinking each day of crossing it, having no other perspective. Everything that is part of life seems vain to me, even foreign and seems no longer to concern me.
So? What words could I write?
If not that of Farewell?
© ROLAND MOURON - AM.CASSANDRE - ATELIER CASSANDRE