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The French surrealist writer René Daumal died at thirty-six in 1944. Up to the day he died, he was working on a book. The book remains unfinished, left open in the fifth of a projected seven chapters. The book, titled Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, concerns the reckoning of a mountain concealed on the earth, a mountain whose “summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible,” and which traverses the “path uniting Heaven and Earth.” The mountain is, as well, subject to certain rules. It “must be able to exist in any region on the surface of the globe,” hidden, for the most part, “not only to ships, airplanes or other vehicles, but even to the eye.” The mountain might exist “in the middle of this table without our having the slightest inkling.” The texture of the opening to this mountain remains invisible to everyday eyes by a curvature of space, in the same way that stars remain visible from certain positions even when they have become hidden in eclipse. The space around Mount Analogue continues as if it does not exist, manipulated by the context of the curvature, the deflection of light. “To find a way to reach the island,” writes Daumal, “we must assume on principle, as we have always done, the possibility and even the necessity of doing so. .. At a certain moment and a certain place, certain people (those who know how and wish to do so) can enter.”
The novel, after defining this event of voidspace, follows a small crew of eight people who set out in a ship called Impossible to locate this opening unto the mountain. By deduction, waiting, and repetition, they are able to open, in the sea, a fold of air unto the place, locating in our other air, in fact, the presence of the glyph. They find, upon the mountain’s base, a small society whose currency is based on peradam, a crystal of such density “the unaccustomed eye hardly perceives it,” a blanket of secret money, in the face of all things, buried, awaiting he who would dig, or look, or want — money not as object of replication or signifier, but as the product of the search, some small reflection of the self projected from the self. Mount Analogue, the novel, ends therein in mid-sentence, at a comma, just as the expedition begins to ascend upon the mount — the narrative sucked into the white space of its ending, transported from the page into the blank. Daumal had been working on the sentence the day tuberculosis took him out, snuffing his mind inside his body, as if the text had stopped him, or better, as if the novel continued on into himself. As if he, in his body, had come unto a hole.
Around such a hole, the potential world looms in every object. Any surface could be turned into a door, unfolded by some focused mode of self activated to locate the space between the spaces — buttons, windows, a vibration — all of which at all points wait watching, surrounding the self ’s center, a potential to be invoked. Their presences, whether unveiled or left to stay hidden, demand psychic attention to the self stuffed within self — a simultaneous creation and erasure in each moment that passes as common days do, bypassing both destruction and invention in every step, in world moored upon world. In sleep one might brush against these spaces, if reflected in the other kind of Other windows half-open or half-closed, hid in the head; while awake, the hummed, negating sound that comes off the massive walls of color of a painting or a field of text or a wall or photograph or speck might seem to be speaking; any inch waiting to open, to become invoked, or likewise, to fold in and disappear. The signal-slur of increasing sleeplessness in which the senses begin to mix and fold into deforming might be seen as a matching folding of the vision, opening unto the air laid on the air. Between these dual-made states exists the self — each of us at all times all surrounded by both the forward going and the approach of death; the space of present breathing and the air beyond. Each object is defined by its potential, its connection to each other, “the transitions as well as the ruptures… and even the fact that one world disappears in favour of another,” creating an over-opening and mega-mapped structure of limitless hallways, doorways, and weird light, where “there is always something else implicated which remains to be explicated or developed. .. Everything happens as though the Other integrated the individuating factors and pre-individual singularities within the limits of objects and subjects.”151 These moments, ideas, surrounding, buried — endless vertices and incidental collaborations of the self against the self — suggest small doors or contexts for direction set in all things, to whatever length they can be approached in youth of mind — a sleepless light that feeds its own sleeplessness in approaching, or in complex waking. The location of the mountain—or whatever form of transcendent location the self might crave—eternally nameless—remains on the middle of a common table, or inside the bedroom closet, or in the slur of space unseen behind the head — a connective tissue generated and generating, buttons blistered on the several bodies inside the self contained and uncontained. To find the mountain is not even the goal here, really — it is the space surrounding, the want developed in the flesh that changes the flesh of self from a mirror to a conductor — a body among bodies meshed into a web into a massive body of media and memory and hours, the breadth and mass of which we will never see from where we’re standing — though we can breathe it — we can permeate the void.
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“All people’s pictures,” wrote Clarice Lispector in 1963, “are portraits of the Mona Lisa.”152 That same year, Andy Warhol produced Thirty Are Better Than One, a work that portrays thirty Mona Lisas photocopied, black-and-white and errored, like a hive — the thirty ghosts of versions of us watching, of one body, collaged via machine. The effect from afar of the many utterances of the classic painting build en masse toward a blank field, a flattened void — the many heads together, instead of gathering one’s glown aura from the rest, form a kind of wall. “I wanted to paint nothing,” said Warhol. “I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing.” His nothing, like Lispector’s, comes from the folding of an image, blurring the space between where the individual body ends, and where all the others begin. Or vice versa. It, like any instant, seems to both confine itself and permeate the space around it, like a brain searching in itself for where it is, hiding from death. The void surrounds and stays unseen.
Lispector and Warhol, respectively, died aged fifty-six and fifty-eight, in beds that were not theirs. The message of their passing spread through mouths through wires and into more machines, leaving, past the body, only their image, word, and name — their forms aggregated as flesh into soil and water — their beings each as an idea humped as icons in the sprawl. Pictures of them now, like anybody no longer living’s pictures, seem to contain a horde of hidden self behind their eyes — locked windows to terrain never again creating or destroying, sleeping or waking — like the Mona Lisa they look and look into the viewer never blinking, always still there when the one alive still turns away.
In his eight-hour film Sleep, made the same year as Thirty Are Better Than One, Warhol exhibits a cut-up series of looped reels of his sometime lover John Giorno, transformed, as Warhol aimed, into a “star” while all unconscious, his body speaking in the absence of its controller. Warhol repurposed this human body in the same manner he had the commercial object, the copywritten. In the ribcage-rising-falling silence, rummaging over the landscape of the man, the camera remains poised, oddly electric in its capture of what many would call as close to nothing as you could ask for in a film: an automatism; a conscious kind of light, even asleep. “It just starts, you know,” Warhol said of the film, “like when people call up and say ‘What time does the movie start?’ you can just say ‘Any time.’ ”153 Using film to mimic and thus extend the images and shapes that pass by in most instances unrecorded, to herein possess and subject them to be replayed in confined time, seems to model the brain keeping the body stuck awake, and thereby tortured in what it cannot have, and also must continue having, the absorption of thoughts and air, even when one no longer wants to, shaping time’s passage with an artificial frame.