I Am Non-Existent: Therefore I Am

Carole Viers

I am non-existent: therefore I am. Elsewhere. Here.
Where? a dream appeared before my eyes
of She who never was
The one who never lived and never died.

   And the non-dead is, in fact, prostrate at the foot of an immense, empty frame. This immense frame does not capture the image of She who never was.
   And it does not even serve as a mirror for the vampire, since vampires cast no reflection.
   And here, in what appears as almost a confession:
   if the non-dead were not conceived, evoked in the narcissistic unconscious of his “victims” who then, “made vampires,” hastily withdraw their fright, he would not even dream of leaving his most sought out funereal bed (taking for granted his unfulfilled prayer of never waking), just as a dandy would never pose were he not looked upon.

   Therefore, every night, every moment night falls, having attended to his own devotions to his huge, empty frame, having thoroughly extinguished one by one the candles of his “need to be”—but not so thoroughly after all—the vampire forces himself to go to sleep in his coffin-bed. And here lies his anxiety of the non-dead. His non.

   He is nevertheless attracted by the “aleatory,” by the “extension of life.”
   Here the drawing room, the flirtations, the conventional.
   Here his masochistic readiness toward the arrogant narcissism of his victims.
   Here our non-dead preens, dressing himself in front of the absent mirror.
   Yes, the absence of She who never was, this womanly cocoon is intolerable day in and day out.
   So therefore, away!, from one altar to another!

   The only thing that remains for the non-dead is to “concentrate” on the dressing table, an end unto itself: a button in the wrong buttonhole (the vampire has no reflection, he dresses like a blind man) it determines, it compromises speech. Aphasia of language. (Nude, he expresses nothing, he produces no sound, neither on the stage nor in the orchestra for, in deed, on undressed occasions, he is paralyzed, he falls silent)…

   Aphasia of language occurs like clockwork between the acts, between garments, in omission, in certain clumsy clothing combinations, clashes, etc.
   In such cases, stammers, inhuman spasms, grunts, excesses of convulsive coughs, cold and hot sweat, senseless naming dominate the scene.
   The Vampire-Actor is paradoxically the Feminine elevated to Consciousness.

   “She did appear to me, all love.” She appeared.
   The little theater of the fractured-I, and the subject falls in love with playing.
   But stage dressing is like the stage itself, a parody of an image that negates itself (it negates itself from the beginning). In the derisory laugh of the same infinitely profferable gestures, the Actor’s damned practice has as its sole purpose to draw from the mind every other thing possible, everything but that unique, non-existent thing, which only an oral writing can open up to the void.
   As for the suspension of the love that threatens figures:

   From time to time. “Time” is the duration of the spectacle. And the spectacle’s task is to not take place.

   The poor dead who are cold beneath the churchyard mould, who suffocate—precipitous burials—under the weight of the earth, who flounder unheard in their coffins… It is impunity, the recurrent immaturity of the dead.
   This and only this can produce emotive poetry.

   The starts of the “wretched dead” are interferences in the suspension of the Tragic: they are the “heroic” starts of the conventional tragic-I that the child subject empowers to mock them. It is the representative identity that clumsily peers into the empty desert, where he wills and unwills the very will and not this or that specific object; he desires his own sorrow.
   In the poverty of representation, more or less great “actors” alternate, imitating, without ever succeeding, the arrogant, improvised ego-deprived spectators, encouraged by the spectacle of the ministers to the senseless, mundane representation of the state.
   In the theater of the non-representable, the Actor is infinite. He is the infinite of the para-statal disregard.

   Loss is not a temporary shutting down of being. Existence itself is a shutting down.
   The subject-Actor is such insofar as he is not an actor. While the ever more powerful super-ego is watchful, the performer-I refuses his own role right before the spectacle begins. Sometimes (always) you feel the performer-I act on whims, interfering at times in the Actor’s non-being; but this inconvenience had been prevented in a kind of masochistic, contractual stipulation, and the impasse, the embarrassment, the unease—this sacred and at the same time liturgical incompatibility—is humor: to pray in a brothel or curse in church. And this is, after all, the only “adversarial nature” acceptable in theater. Because it is the theater.