Expression is the cure
蕭沆啟示錄/Apocalipsa dup? Cioran (1995)
World history is nothing else than a repetition of catastrophes waiting for a final catastrophe.
Over thousands of years we’ve been nothing more than mortals; here we are, finally, promoted to the rank of the dying.
We are nothing more than messengers, buglers of a judgment without the judge.
Barely gone out in the street,I exclaim:
What a perfect parody of the inferno!
Mankind’s show—what a disgusting action!
I believe in mankind’s salvation, in the cyanide’s future.
Paris — an apocalyptic garage.
Paris -1990,21 rue de l’Odeon,Latin quarter.
In which one of the most shattering works of this century was born.
Its author - a contemporary Nietzsche who went through the school of French moralists was considered, one at a time, the “skeptic on duty of a declining world”,
“The century’s nihilist”,
“The king of pessimists”,
“The procurator of the human species in the endless process which was opened between mankind, god, and the world.”?
At 20 years old, he was recommending himself as a specialist in the problem of death.
And near the end of his lifelike a stranger to the police, the metic through excellence, for god and for himself.
He demanded that his insomnia be financed, obliging himself ,in return, to tear any illusion and to preserve for us the unaltered memory of nihility.
Let us not be fooled; the poisoned history of the end of our millennium, happened outside of this attic, but hardly here - in the pages written between these humble walls, it gained the perfume’s prestige and it became the consciousness of our unhappiness .
In June 1990, after his entire life has been left in the shadow of his work, refusing to become a public person, Emil Cioran accepts to be filmed by a crew who specially came from his own country - Romania -which he left for good,53 years ago.
[How do you look at your destiny?]
My destiny is done with.
I took a decision a year ago or more that I shouldn’t write anymore.
Because the decision has a physiological basis ,or how should I say I felt that something changed in me.
[In what way?]
That something …casser…or how do you say…broke .and how all the writers especially in France ,write till death.
And …there is no sense…
For what should one multiply books?
All the writers wrote too much, in my opinion.
[is this your case as well?]
Mine as well.and ever the great writers like Shakespeare exaggerated.
All of them wrote too much.
The line that I formulated for myself was:
“I got bored to slander the universe .”
And …I stopped caring.
[but how could you write on the same theme on over 15 volumes?]
This is a problem of obsession .
My “masterpiece”-although this word makes me vomit.
I wrote all my books for therapeutic reasons.
[You wrote the same book over and over again,]
The same obsession, on the theme of futility and death.
All the other problems have no importance.
I noticed that for me it represents liberation.
So that, for myself, I truly wrote from necessity.
For myself it’s therapy.
And literature was only a pretext; same with philosophy .
[Are you cured at the moment?]
I’m not cured.
I’m tired.
[how can a work which pleads for futility help?for nonsense?]
It helps because it formulates things that others feel.
It gives them the conscience to find themselves .
[to fix despair ,isn’t it a way to make it function more coherent?]
Everything that is formulated becomes more tolerable.
You understand…
Expression …that is the cure.
What is the definite purpose of confession to a priest that you did that or that?
It is liberation.
As in ,everything that is formulated is degraded with intensity.
This is therapy and the purpose of therapy.
Truly ,my depressions that I had during my lifetime could’ve led me to madness, or total failure, the fact that I formulated them, had a remarkable efficiency
If I had never written, I’m fully convinced that…”tourne mal “everything would’ve badly ended,
That I wrote 5 in Romanian and 8 or 9 in French?
And for myself ,”ca suffix” -the way you say it in French. I stopped writing because something changed in me.
It is a diminution regarding intensity?
-the intensity of an emotion or sentiment.
And I started observing some sort of fatigue in myself ,a disgust of expression ,that I stopped believing in words.
And then the show of literature in Paris ,where everybody writes from morning to evening without stopping .
To negate - like I did all my life, I arrived at some sort of fatigue and therefore I stooped caring.
As in, my warrior-aspect serving negation as means to liberation , is what I stopped caring for.that I don’t need that anymore.
It is a simple phenomenon, truly of tiredness.
10:42