THE METAMORPHOSES

“I have had the extraordinary experience of being able to prefer myself as other.”

The subtlety of Robert Antelme’s words moves me and resonates in the depths of my being. I look back and measure the distance between who I was and who I am.

When I was young, I wanted to be an author, the creator of my own person and my own days. At twenty, I had secretly subscribed to a game: that of the aesthetics of existence. The goal was to invent my life as the manifestation of my thought, to self-create not out of pride, I thought, but out of a requirement for truth.

I wanted to be a subject; conceiving and willing, always keeping the sense of my own being, possessing myself and holding firmly to my freedom.

I did not yet know Sartre’s great leap into the void or existentialism, but I found it cowardly to offer excuses for the passions that contradict our plans within us. I therefore practiced ignoring my inhibitions and casting off my moorings. I did not yet know Deleuze, and yet I silently despised psychoanalysis, which maintains an infinite debt toward childhood and therefore the past. As for me, I wanted to move forward, not to dwell on my fears, to conceive of my life as a blank territory to be invented.

The years have passed, and I have discovered the paradox of that youthful ambition, of that naive illusion.

I have looked into this “I” that wanted to create itself independently and sovereignly. I discovered it to be tyrannical.

What can I truly call “mine,” when my body was given to me, when my breath does not depend on me, when my encounters escape my calculations, and even my thoughts arise in me before I choose them?

It is precisely here that Robert Antelme’s sentence resonates; in this precise space where my Aristotelian “I” cracks and leaves a sublime and dizzying gap: can one become other than oneself?

His formula is extraordinary because it reverses the primary logic; “I want to create myself as other” becomes “I have had the experience of being able to prefer myself as other.”

We realize that the alteration of the self is not the result of a voluntary project. It happens, quite simply... And often through trials.

So, facing the incessant transition of things, I still question change.

In the conscious evolution dear to my heart, what is the part of the metamorphosis that one decides to undertake and what is the part that is sovereign, subterranean, inescapable, and silent; the part that does not wait for our opinion to do its work?

One must admit that what occurs tirelessly before our eyes, what is effective and patent, goes unseen.

Growing; we do not see trees or our children growing; nor do we see the wheat ripening. We are only astonished one day by their metamorphoses.

Likewise, we see neither rivers carving their beds, nor glaciers melting, nor the sea eroding the shore. And yet, these are indeed the metamorphoses that we constantly have before our eyes, those that shape, wear down, and polish the landscape every day.

This manifest process in the making, although spread out in broad daylight before our eyes, goes unseen.

And then, one fine day, a revelation arises, an irrefutable evidence.

The transformation imposes itself, screaming with truth, all the more brutal in its result because it was carried out in silence. No dazzle or sudden appearance, no theatrical act, but on the contrary, this thing offered to the view everywhere and all the time is never perceived.

It is the same in the depths of our inner geographies.

In the secret of our consciousness, metamorphoses take place. This observation undermines our function as a subject right into the heart of what seems to be our most intimate humanity, our prerogative: namely, our feelings.

Look at these two lovers who no longer love each other. What they could not have even imagined before has, however, quite truly happened to them. Beneath the flash of the breakup, it is indeed a metamorphosis that has constantly been at work. From the first silences to the first avoidances, over the days, the emotional erosion, similar to geological erosion, has suddenly caused an entire cliff face to collapse.

Is everything that is born condemned to deterioration? Are we, in the end, only the spectators of an independent movement?

Embarked on our own choices, of subject and action, our reason appears naively surprised before this great call to order.

Curiously, the alchemy of perfumes, metamorphic par excellence, allows us to grasp the complexity and beauty of transformation.

Since the dawn of time, humanity has refined the chemical and technical processes of extracting volatile and fragrant compounds from plant raw materials in order to obtain essences, and then perfumes.

These methods invite the observer to contemplation.

How can one transform to grasp the soul of beings and things, or at least approach it?

In the case of flowers, must we not consent to sacrifice the beauty of the airy petal and the grace of the stem to encapsulate the enchantment of the perfume?

But the observer, a wise lover, shakes his head distractedly; his attention is already elsewhere, his consciousness becomes light as a breath; he listens to the eternal promise of the wild flower. It has no need to resist for its existence; it is physically programmed for an eternal renewal.

He then remembers the sentence of August Strindberg in Inferno regarding his beings of beauty: “These living dead, who lead a sedentary existence, offering no resistance against an attack, who suffer rather than do evil, who simulate carnal loves, multiply without struggle, and die without complaint. Superior beings, who have realized the Buddha’s dream, desiring nothing, enduring everything, absorbing oneself until reaching a willed unconsciousness.”

He had received the elusive perfume and immediately ceased to have the “pretension to act.”

Majda Bekkali