Sir,
I urgently send you this missive in order to make a small complaint to you: firstly, for not having put me in your Aeropagus, not very Greek it’s true, among those to whom you appeal for your enterprise; and then, for having let yourself be driven by apalling mermaids. I am not quite certain of the guarantee of seriousness of your collaborators. I do not know these gentlemen Khanulard and Hanlapip, nor Mr Kadératé, but I do not foresee anything good coming from your close collaboration with them. They seem to have too many high-sounding titles to be well born.
There is also, I barely dare to admit it, that it saddens me that you have omitted me among the references to which you resort for your work. Indeed I regard you as a friendship since long ago, perhaps since you once said such charming things (it was, I remember, June 17, 1998) on my “Petite digression”. I was glad that you liked it -“Of what has been written in French, there is nothing I prefer to this little story”, you let yourself say – What a homage!
I often think about it, and I am thus glad not to have wasted my time in writing this little text, which incidentally was a hoax to irritate a little bit our good Diderot, with whom -as I said to my friend Palisot- I deeply regret never having spoken but through letters. But his “Letter on the Blind” had irritated my taste. If I may quote myself without too much immodesty, here is what I had written to him:
“I thank you, sir, for the profound and brilliant work you have been so good as to send me: the book I send you is neither the one nor the other, but in it you will find the anecdote of the man born blind set forth in greater detail than in the earlier editions. I am entirely of your opinion as to what you say respecting the judgement formed in such a case by ordinary men of average good sense, and that formed by philosophers. I am sorry that in the examples you quote you have forgotten the case of the blind who, receiving the gift of sight, saw men as trees walking.
I have read your book with great pleasure. It says much, and gives still more to be understood. I have long honored you as much as I despise the stupid vandals who condemn what they do not understand, and the wicked who unite themselves with the fools to denounce those who are trying to enlighten them.”
Today, it is to you that I am writing, my dear friend, and I tell you that it is not right that a guy like you, endowed with such greatness of view and such good judgement, let himself be dazzled by false sciences and false savants. For everyone you call to your aid seem – even though I only know them by hearsay- great fun and posh, but why engage them in this unlikely adventure of this PROSEMA protocol, of which I didn’t understand a word? It thus happens that I know Dr Faustroll a little bit, whom I consider a friend of mine since I often cross him on my way home, where I live now, after Soufflot street, when I go up Monsieur Le Prince street in Procope, where I take my coffee on my way to buy my cream in Polidor. Well, the guy seems very kind, but without a doubt, allow me to say this without offending you, he’s a wack, an eccentric. With his monkey on his shoulder, it is quite extraordinary as it is charming. And he has these friends! This Lord Kelvin, for example, is deadly boring, and I do not get his thermodynamic principles at all: “If a cycle is monothermal, it cannot be motor”. Big deal, does that prevent one from being what one is, from living intelligently with one’s own, without being affected by the whirlwinds of the world?
And then, I like the language of Albion, as you know, but why clutter your speech with all those anglicisms in a thousand references that nobody has read? Our good encyclopedia is not worth of the Britannica? And I believe I prefer, all in all, the good Berkeley’s empiricism to the Philopsophical Investigations. You doubtless know my Elements of the Philosophy of Newton, where I defend that it is the soul that feels, and that for example, all the imperfections of the healthy or ill eye, prove that the natural geometry of this organ is not enough in order to explain the pehenomenon of vision. Diderot considers that the famous Cartesian image of the blind man holding crossed sticks lends itself to a materialistic interpretation, because it allows us to say that what is on the left is immediately felt and judged as being on the right by touch, and inversely, what is on the right is felt and judged on the left. Continuing with the analogy, could one say that the lower and upper parts of the eye “suddenly” relate their respective sensations back to their true points of origin and that the eye would then be capable of straightening its retinal images by itself? It is obviously impossible for the eye to judge itself and correctly, for it would be necessary, to this end, for it to have conscience and knowledge of the geometry that runs it. The eye cannot judge the extent; and it only receives colours; there is a radical heterogeneity of the different sensory series, touch being the only sense of the extent.
So this enterprise that you announce of what would be a tool allowing an automatic use of text explanations -what you call, in a dreadful hodgepodge, “analysis of tendentious textual torsions”- strikes me as a contradiction to what I thought you loved. Neither Beyle, nor Baudelaire nor me can get over it! You know as well as we do that a text is not to be explained, it is to implicate.
And this Michel Schneider who keeps you busy, and his dreams of Marilyn Monroe, he will be forgotten in twenty years time, unlike you I bet.
So, I can see that my words do not fit, since on the one hand I complain about the project that you do, and on the other hand I complain of not being among those to whom you claim to adhere, but who cares I am with you always, and I send you my friendship.
*
But what is this essay? Is it a pamphlet? My God how ridiculous I seem for having understood you so little. I am getting old or else I am blind or it is the world of today I fear. It does not matter. I lay my hommage at your feet
pcc : Pierre Stréliski
Translated by Florencia Fernández Coria Shanahan
