Public Enemies_ Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World - Bernard-Henri Levy [112]
And this kind of thing happens all the time, because poetry says one thing and coherence, structure, logic tend, with depressing regularity, to say the opposite. If you abide by the poetry, you’re not far from becoming unreadable. If you don’t, you’re all set for a run-of-the-mill career as a storyteller.
The conflict between these two is my everyday routine when I’m writing books (or, to be exact, when writing novels), this negotiation with lucid consciousness. And with a film it’s worse, you need to be entirely aware of what you want because you have to explain it to your collaborators—and to make yourself understood, you have to spell things out. Not to mention the worst of the worst, the clashes of power, which require not only lucid consciousness but tactical intelligence, as Patrick Bauchau* warned me early on, with the overused expression “Directing is politics.” All of these things—lucidity, politics, tactical intelligence, war—are the antithesis of rapture. So you will understand my joy when I have the opportunity to return to the source, the deep source.
Deep, yes, but I don’t want to give the impression of its being overly mysterious. It’s easy to laugh at Joseph Beuys’s naïve idealism, his crazy projects for social revolution, but it doesn’t change the fact that his assertion “every man is an artist” contains a great truth. Because every man experiences moments when he is capable of creating magnificent artistic works, in which his reason plays no part. He experiences them every day, or rather, every night. Put simply, every man dreams.
(And even certain animals dream.)
The Surrealists did not invent this deep relationship between art and dream; the first Romantics said exactly the same thing. And all those who have worked in an artistic field throughout human history have known it, even if the Romantics were the first to be forced to defiantly say as much because they came after an eighteenth century of suffocating elegance and rationalism: there comes a moment when things write themselves, beyond the control of reason. This moment may be prolonged, though certainly not by the use of drugs (here I can only confirm what Baudelaire says on the subject). All you need do is put off the moment of true wakefulness. When critical consciousness, rational judgment intervene, it is time to stop; to go take a shower. In short, it is time to face the day. You can deal with administrative matters, talk about business, go clubbing, whatever you like; or you can get drunk to get back, as quickly as possible, to sleep; this is the option I have chosen.
Since we began writing to each other, you’ve talked to me a lot about the writer’s body and I confess I have not said much on the subject. But the only thing I can say with certainty, when I think about it, is that for me, it always means a body only half awake. Which of course does not exclude the possibility of having a hard-on. In fact, the point when I’ve always preferred to fuck is in the early hours, half asleep (PERSONAL INFORMATION!!!). Perhaps certain people have made love in a state of complete lucidity; I don’t envy them. The only thing I have ever managed to do in a state of complete lucidity is balance my checkbook or pack my suitcase.
That said, I do not adhere to Flaubert’s injunction, his sort of phallic maxim: “You have to have erections! You have to have erections!,”* combined with his Stakhanovist corollary: “But your vagina must remain the inkwell.”† Shit, you do what you like. There are dreams that are not erotic. Of all the criticisms leveled at me, the one that I have put too much sex in my books is the most serious, the most universal; it is also the most curious. This is 2008 and it seems to me that Western societies