The poem itself

The Nerve Meter

An actor is seen as if through crystals.

Inspiration in stages.

One musn’t let in too much literature.

I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.

I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point

—and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality

(from the confrontation of forces of powerful size),

and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold—

in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled

—are lost in the shadows of man.

In sleep, nerves tensed the whole length of my legs.

Sleep came from a shifting of belief, the pressure eased, absurdity stepped on my toes.

It must be understood that all of intelligence is only a vast contingency, and that one can lose it, not like a lunatic who is dead, but like a living person who is in life and who feels working on himself its attraction and its inspiration (of intelligence, not of life).

The titillations of intelligence and this sudden reversal of contending parties.

Words halfway to intelligence.

This possibility of thinking in reverse and of suddenly reviling one’s thought.

This dialogue in thought.

The ingestion, the breaking off of everything.

And all at once this trickle of water on a volcano, the thin, slow falling of the mind.

To find oneself again in a state of extreme shock, clarified by unreality, with, in a corner of oneself, some fragments of the real world.

To think without the slightest breaking off, without pitfalls in my thought, without one of those sudden disappearances to which my marrow is accustomed as a transmitter of currents.

My marrow is sometimes amused by these games, sometimes takes pleasure in these games, takes pleasure in these furtive abductions over which the sense of my thought presides.

At times all I would need is a single word, a simple little word of no importance, to be great, to speak in the voice of the prophets: a word of witness, a precise word, a subtle word, a word well steeped in my marrow, gone out of me, which would stand at the outer limit of my being,

and which, for everyone else, would be nothing.

I am the witness, I am the only witness of myself. This crust of words, these imperceptible whispered transformations of my thought, of that small part of my thought which I claim has already been formulated, and which miscarries,

I am the only person who can measure its extent.