ROger Caillois, thanks to his unwavering friend, the writer, editor and patron Victoria Ocampo, lived for long periods in Latin America. He who loved the cold, the aridity, the stone, he who hated the sea, the lush vegetation, the heat, preferred, we suspect, Patagonia to the Amazon. However, during a stay in Brazil he had the opportunity to cross the Amazon rainforest. It looked terrifying, fluffy, voracious, very feminine, and inspired a dizzying repulsion in him.
This profusion of plants, this boundless vivacity, was a threat in his eyes: “I wonder whether, to this extent, chlorophyll, exclusive and overabundant, does not pose more danger than pollution. The sacrilegious hypothesis shows to what extent I still have prejudices against a blind, unlimited fertility, which nothing stops, not even its own excess. (This is a strange opinion!)
The mineral world seemed to him to be quite the opposite. Caillois was a collector and specialist in stones. Soon, he would never stop looking at them, studying them and describing them (stones, The writing of the stones), be absorbed by it or even be damaged by it. “I feel like I’m becoming a little bit of the nature of stones.” These provide a form of tranquility to the worried man, plagued by alcohol and illness: “Between the fixity of the stone and the mental effervescence, a kind of current is established where I find for a moment, memorable, it is truth, wisdom and consolation. »
To overcome the cracks
Absorption in stones is also linked for Caillois to a self-destructive fantasy: that of disappearance as a whole, of petrification, of fossilization, of fusion, of the annihilation of subjectivity (he was fascinated by “psychasthenia”for him a dissolution of the subject in the world, of its assimilation to space). Stones also offer a possible crystallization to overcome the cracks, the inconsistencies of oneself and of the world. Better, they are the world, the“example of an immutable inhuman”l’“absence of incident” as “rescue of life”They go beyond human time, returning man to his insignificance, to his episodic dimension, without denying or excluding him.
Thus, stones are for him the number of a “universe without a doubt”, “huge and labyrinthine”within which “The mists and clouds that constantly dissolve and recompose there hide a gridded map.” The world is not one. “not an inextricable and confusing jungle, but a forest of columns whose rhythmic alignments reverberate the same message: the preeminence, beneath the general din, of a minimalist architecture.”
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