The Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter Read online

  Haunting our streets and parks for year after year, his thick and twisted body clothed in squalid beggar’s rags, almost ostentatiously bizarre in his behavior, he has become one of the city’s most familiar and picturesque figures, one whose prolonged absence would no doubt be noted and even remarked upon with nostalgia. Too few of us know, however, that this exterior conceals the fiery personality of one of the last descendants of the ancient race of great prophets. In fact, viewed more closely, the distorted features that make him a local character lose their picturesque qualities and suggest instead an enigmatic mixture of the angelic and the monstrous, arousing in more delicate souls a sense of unease akin to anxiety.

  Zacharias Lichter has, as he himself likes to say, the physiognomy of a metaphysician, an enlightened late-eighteenth-century German Jew—with irregularities and deformities bordering on the grotesque. His swollen, asymmetrical face, pushed forward forcefully by prominent cheekbones, recalls—in its moments of repose—a hieratic totem mask, coarsely molded by rude and clumsy hands trembling with sacred terror. And it must be said that among the first impressions Zacharias Lichter awakens is a particularly strong sense of fierce, irrepressible vigor. This may be due in part to his highly developed pilary system, manifest both in his thick and prickly black beard and in the abundant hairs springing from the nostrils of his peerless Semitic nose, as well as the wiry entanglement of chest hair peeping through gaps in his shirt where buttons are missing. Although the crown of his large head reveals an extensive bald spot of a matte brown that makes it seem calcified, locks of hair blaze forth around it like black flames of fire.

  What a hasty observer may simply consider slipshod attire (his ancient and discolored tattered coat; his rumpled and patched trousers with their frayed cuffs; his scorched and misshapen shoes—seemingly saved from some conflagration and molded by long wear to the knotty shape of his feet) reflects not so much the social sense of poverty as its Platonic idea. Lichter strives to embody this condition as a further symbol of the inner state of a prophet touched by God’s flame. The eternal glow of that flame, at times distant and faint, at others fierce and blinding, seems to explain both Zacharias Lichter’s constant blinking (his eyes, with their short, sparse, ash-hued lashes, blink often and rapidly) and the earthen tinge of his coarse, puffy skin.

  Far from viewing all this as something shameful, or as some mysterious punishment, as one might expect, Zacharias Lichter is proud of his ugliness and interprets it as a sign of divine election, which from time to time, to preserve its true purity, is imprinted with gruesome stigmata. (“Angels”—he says—“feel the need to hide in a monster’s cesspool now and then.”)

  For those who know him, Zacharias Lichter’s most striking peculiarity remains his manner of speech, which lessens and sometimes annuls the effect of his physical deformities. Words burst from his mouth in torrents, accompanied by miming motions and the disturbingly wild gesticulations exhibited by madmen determined at all costs to convince their listeners. In Lichter’s case, however, the motivation is quite different: his entire being is partaking in the violent effort of expression, as if imbued with the necessity of saying.

  Especially mesmerizing are his hands, which cast rapid signs in the air like a mysterious visual language. Touched at such times by the terrible flame of divine purity, swelling from its heat, his hands never draw back from its crackling blaze. As a matter of fact, the words Zacharias Lichter utters, the provoking stances he assumes (which often seem scandalously contradictory) and, in the final analysis, his entire existence, are nothing but a desperate attempt to translate into human terms—as he himself confesses—the experience of closeness to God: an absurd experience, filled with fear and ecstasy, painfully tearing one’s being to pieces, only to reassemble it again, in a never-ending cycle.

  ON GOD’S FLAME

  “NOT LONG ago, on a mild and clear afternoon, I was heading for a public garden, a morsel of bread in my pocket and a jar of yogurt in my hand”—Zacharias Lichter once recounted to friends. “I was tired and hungry and couldn’t wait to sit down on a bench and start eating. In my absentminded state I didn’t notice a crack gaping at me from the asphalt sidewalk: I stumbled, fell, and the yogurt jar smashed to smithereens, spattering my clothes. As if my plight weren’t ludicrous enough, I began shouting and thrashing about, inexplicably terror stricken, as if I had fallen into an abyss instead of onto the ground. The scene would not have been perfect without the presence of passersby. There they were, giggling and pointing at me, gathering about in an amused circle. The moment I came to my senses, still on the sidewalk, I rejected with angry stubbornness the commonsense arguments that rushed to reconstruct a chain of events resulting in my present position: flat on the ground, yogurt spattered, and clasping the broken jar in my hand.

  “Suddenly, the true cause of my terror dawned on me with the utmost clarity: I had been struck by God’s flame! Its flash had blinded me, striking me like a stone, deafening me with its roar, parching my mouth with heat, and leaving behind a terrible thirst. I picked myself up, trembling and unsteady, while those around me drew back in apparent fear: my face must have seemed a grotesque and menacing mask. But I was oblivious to their presence, for I could still hear the terrifying roar of God’s flame rattling the canopy of the world. Suddenly, people began turning into strange creatures before my eyes: I was stumbling through swine-snouted figures, humans with the heads of eagles, frogs, and rats. Children emitted incredibly high-pitched tones from huge lily-like corollas that grew in lieu of their heads. Creatures kept surging past: half human, half dog or goat, people with the flickering forked tongues of snakes. And above it all, the steady reverberation of God’s plunging flame. I walked on aimlessly until, with an automatic gesture, I mopped my brow, which was dripping with sweat, blurring my vision, and weariness overwhelmed me. I felt hungry again. Beast-headed people were appearing less frequently. Now I had to walk some distance, and on crowded streets, to chance upon one or two. At last, toward evening, things returned to their natural order; visions and hallucinations vanished. God’s flame now burned from afar, in silence.”

  ON THE STAGES OF THE SPIRITUAL

  FOR KIERKEGAARD’S famous stages—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious—Zacharias Lichter substitutes the hierarchy circus—madness—perplexity. Spiritual life—he maintains—inevitably develops in terms of one of these existential categories.

  Circus—the lowest stage of the spiritual—may be expressed as an awareness of the absurd spectacle of our existence. Reduced to the figure of a clown, forced to play a humiliatingly vulgar role, suffering and rebelling against his state, yet knowing he can never overcome it, realizing that all his efforts will be in vain, such is the man who lives beneath the coarse canvas panoply of the world as circus. His suffering and his revolt can only be expressed through irony. With his frenetic clowning, meant to unleash unbridled laughter, the clown implicates, by means of this painfully lucid irony, the whole of mankind. The more exaggerated and grotesque his role, the more vividly he sees himself as an embodiment of the human condition. Circus, as the first stage of the spiritual, means abandoning oneself to the demon of irony. It is the triumph of parody: pathos turns somersaults in the arena’s sawdust; weeping engenders an echoing laughter and in so doing renders all things infinitely trivial. Slowly, imperceptibly, under his floury mask furrowed by fake tears, the clown moves toward a tragic state beyond the immediate and the contingent, an ontological state rooted in loneliness and dumb silence. In the hierarchy of the spiritual, the final lesson of circus is unspoken and ineffable. It is only revealed, with all its hidden meanings, to those who understand the necessity to soil, to demean, to trample communication beneath their feet.

  All people are clowns—Zacharias Lichter maintains—yet few achieve a metaphysical knowledge of their condition. Of those lucid-minded clowns who do, even fewer take up the vocation of spiritual madness. (To be sure, the madness Zacharias Lichter refers to is a concept based, like tha
t of circus, on metaphor. Yet that metaphor retains a disturbingly ambiguous relationship to pathological alienation.) Any form of consciousness, no matter how limited, implies duality: madness is unification. It seems that the more acutely people suffer from the painful contradictions of their conscious mind, the stronger is their longing for madness. For madness alone can break through the oppressively conventional nature of all languages, the arbitrary sign systems by means of which those struggling to communicate are led to adhere to increasingly complex structures foreign to their deepest being.

  Clowns realize that languages are abstract constructs and thus mock them, assaulting them by means of the comic. The insane, as in a dream, establish magical connections between words and objects; for them, symbols become palpable and real, endowed with hallucinatory strength. Madness, in spiritual life, implies living in myth, in a mythic chaos. It is moreover a secret protest against a world alienated from the spiritual, against the world of the immediate and habitual. Only the mad can fill the void of the pathetic with content. For is there anything more pathetic than to live in a world of truth and have an alienated world reject you as alien; to live in the sphere of the serious and have a ludicrous world laugh at you because it finds you ludicrous?

  The mad can fall, though only rarely, into perplexity. Prophecy, asceticism, prayer, even great poetry are forms of madness in spiritual life. Consciously or not they tend towards the abyss of perplexity, but more often than not, without losing themselves in it. In perplexity—Zacharias Lichter maintains—all perception dissolves as the very sense organs that allow us to register the appearance of reality are suspended, as if in a state of paralysis. From darkness, from silence, from the void, from the atemporal and aspatial, divinity draws its spirit, revealing itself through negation and absence.

  A brief analysis of the notions of darkness and silence will contribute to an understanding of what Zacharias Lichter means by perplexity. The nature of darkness can, he says, be inferred with reference to the infirmity of the blind. Unlikely as it may seem, we are all more or less capable of replicating the actual experience of those who cannot see. The blind—Zacharias Lichter contends—are mistakenly believed to be plunged in total darkness. In fact, darkness is a visual sensation that presupposes the existence of visual perception but the absence of a visual stimulus, in this case, the absence of light. I can represent the kind of darkness in which the blind live by instead concentrating my attention on all that lies at a given moment outside my field of vision. For example, I am looking out the window and see the barren trees, the succession of roofs, the leaden sky. And suddenly, by an act of the conscious mind, I can see what, at this precise moment, is not part of my visual field, what lies, let us say, behind my back and could not be actualized in terms of vision. The awareness of the extravisual, extended to an awareness of the nonvisual, can give rise to an intuition of what darkness is for the blind, and this awareness is accessible to anyone, plus or minus a coefficient of approximation. In the stage of perplexity, darkness becomes absolute and God himself drifts within it. We can remark similarly on the essence of silence, which should not be identified with the absence of sound (an auditory phenomenon) but with all that takes place outside the auditory sphere and is impossible to represent in terms of hearing. The absence of noise is an experience of those who can hear. True silence is an experience of the deaf. In the stage of perplexity, this silence takes on an absolute and revelatory character.

  In some sense we could say that Zacharias Lichter is an adherent of the disturbing theology of apophasis, according to which God can only be known via negationis, as a nonexistens, non-ens, as nihil. The difference for Zacharias Lichter is that this theoretical knowledge of the divine is justifiable only if one has experienced Perplexity. Without that experience, such knowledge remains a simple speculative exercise, ingenious but sterile.

  FROM THE POEMS OF ZACHARIAS LICHTER

  A clown played the trumpet: ta-ra-ra-ta-ra-ra-ta-ra-ra

  monsters coupled with angels

  like huge frogs coupling with drowned children’s souls

  a choir of youths intoned in the rain-colored air

  the hymn of exfoliated lilies

  worms writhed towards the inaccessible pyres of Ecstasy

  ta-ra-ra-ta-ra-ra played on

  the trumpet of the blind thousand-year-old clown

  Suddenly the onrush of madmen opened the festival of Freedom

  the tongue of sand rock and rivers

  the tongue of snakes and golden-chinned lizards

  asserted itself as the tongue of universal wisdom

  the old hoarse ta-ra-ra-ta-ra-ra

  of the clown’s trumpet was fading away

  the choir fainter and fainter

  Among the madmen some were falling

  as their ears became leaves

  their fingers thinned to white roots

  their bones turned to heavy stone and their eyes melted to rivulets of water

  in the bosom of the deep night of Being

  But the ta-ra-ra-ta-ra-ra

  of the clown’s trumpet burst forth again at dawn

  and the monsters rushed once more into the pure

  silence of the angels

  ta-ra-ra-ta-ra-ra

  ON THE BOOK OF JOB

  DURING Jewish lent, which he scrupulously observes (subjecting himself to the pangs of hunger and especially thirst, for he sees in thirst the bodily form of prayer), Zacharias Lichter reads from the Old Testament. The book to which he returns most often is that of Job, long passages of which he knows by heart and comments upon with stern fervor.

  Job, says Zacharias Lichter, is humanity’s first tragic hero and the only one who played out that tragedy to its very end, for he discovered the absurd and at the same time necessary core of suffering. The dialogue between rigorous innocence and the destructive flame of purity is, after all, the only fundamentally tragic circumstance: all the rest is merely barren babble.

  God makes a bet with Satan, and the absurd strikes Job down—since suffering is only the outer skin, the rotting flesh of a fruit that already holds the germinating seed of the absurd. Will Job curse God, as seems logical to Satan (who thus affirms the principle of all practical morality based on do ut des)? No, because Job’s logic is of a different nature, infinitely deeper and much simpler: he yearns for death, he curses the day he was born, he doubts the justice of the world. He revolts, in a word, against his absurd destiny. But not for a moment does he fall prey to the strange, truly devastating force of the curse and deny the One who has crushed him beneath the weight of Calamity. He does not because he is pure; because deprived of its absurd kernel (the paradoxical gift of Goodness), his suffering would have consisted merely of endless horror, a disgusting rottenness; because his silence afterwards would have filled his mouth with all the world’s waste; because he would have condemned himself to eternal nausea and reduced his existence, for ages to come, to endless spasms of perpetual vomiting. Job obscurely knows that without God the absurd cannot exist. He also knows that, without the absurd, purity dies, revolt gives way to disgust, truth to abject lie, and repentance—that miracle—to boundless boredom.

  The Book of Job contains a morality of the absurd, and everything that Job suffers is an initiation into that morality. Conventional moral principles (generally compensatory) are rejected from the outset. In a polemic suffused with authentic suffering, Job rebukes the specious arguments of the three friends who come to comfort him in his adversity: Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. Theirs is the hypocritical discourse that attempts to justify suffering: God punishes those guilty of sin, even if it was involuntary, and we must accept our plight with resignation; suffering never strikes the truly innocent; God acts according to principles of justice the essence of which man cannot fathom; man must come to terms with his prescribed lot, and so on.

  But Job confounds all such sophisms: he is blameless and upright, no sin stains his conscience, ye
t a terrible and absurd affliction has befallen him, an injustice so great it threatens the very stability of the world . . . And behold, God speaks to Job. And Job does not fall silent: he questions God, he defends himself, he revolts against God, and finally he obeys, filled with repentance and self-hatred. And God, the creator of mankind, admits Job is right, suffuses with truth what Job has said, and turns in anger against Eliphaz the Temanite and his companions . . . Because in the realm of human understanding, Logos can exist only in the Absurd.

  Every time he talks about Job, Zacharias Lichter is trans-figured; his eyes grow wild and his thirst-parched lips take on the reddish tinge of fire or blood.

  ON COURAGE

  “BY TEMPERAMENT”—Zacharias Lichter confessed one day—“I am anxious, obsessive and even cowardly. Under circumstances that elicit no reaction whatsoever in a normal person, a wave of physical fear makes me lose my senses. For instance, when I see dogs, those vagabond dogs with eyes that gleam with infinite kindness, tragic dogs capable—they say—of committing suicide, I am seized by an uncontrollable, violent, and at times paralyzing terror. I start howling, I flee (to the astonishment of passersby) like a man possessed, or I freeze in a mindless catatonic state, staring at them rigidly. I once stood in the middle of the street for almost an hour that way—it was a hot, dry summer, reeking of melting asphalt. The dog was wagging its tail, sniffing at me, while I stood transfixed, unable to make the slightest gesture or the faintest sound.”