1925
I think about life. All the systems that I shall ever construct will never equal my cries: the cries of a man engaged in remaking his life.
I imagine a system in which all of man would participate, man with his physical flesh and the heights, the intellectual projection of his mind.
For me the first consideration is the incomprehensible magnetism of man, what for lack of a more striking expression I am obliged to call his life force.
These unformulated forces which besiege me, the day will come when my reason will have to accept them, the day will come when they will replace higher thought, these forces which from the outside have the shape of a cry. There are intellectual cries, cries born of the subtlety of marrow. This is what I mean by Flesh. I do not separate my thought from my life. With each vibration of my tongue I retrace all the pathways of my thought in my flesh.
One must have been deprived of life, of the nervous irradiation of existence, of the conscious wholeness of the nerves, in order to realize that the Sense, and the Science, of all thought is hidden in the nervous vitality of the marrow, to realize how mistaken those persons are who put all their faith in Intelligence or in absolute Intellectuality. Above all else there is the wholeness of the nerves. A wholeness that includes all of consciousness, and the secret pathways of the mind in the flesh.
But what am I in relation to this theory of the Flesh or, more accurately, of Existence? I am a man who has lost his life and who is seeking by every means to restore it to its place. I am in some sense the Generator of my own vitality: a vitality which is more precious to me than consciousness, for that which in other men is merely the way to be a Man is in me all of Reason.
In the course of this secret quest into the limbo of my consciousness, I have thought I felt explosions, like the colliding of hidden stones or the sudden petrification of flames. Flames that are like imperceptible truths miraculously come to life.
But one must proceed slowly along the road of dead stones, especially when one has lost the understanding of words. It is an indescribable science and one that expands in slow thrusts. And he who possesses it does not understand it. But even the Angels do not understand, for all real understanding is obscure. The clear Mind belongs to matter. I mean the Mind that is clear at a given moment.
But I must inspect this meaning of flesh which is to give me a metaphysics of Being, and the definitive understanding of Life.
For me the word Flesh means above all apprehension, hair standing on end, flesh laid bare with all the intellectual profundity of this spectacle of pure flesh and all its consequences for the senses, that is, for the sentiments.
And sentiment means presentiment, that is, direct understanding, communication turned inside out and illumined from within. There is a mind in the flesh, but a mind quick as lightning. And yet the excitement of the flesh partakes of the high substance of the mind.
And yet whoever says flesh also says sensibility. Sensibility, that is, assimilation, but the intimate, secret, profound, absolute assimilation of my own pain, and consequently the solitary and unique knowledge of that pain.