I’ve always made my friends laugh because of the great many … what do you call them? Alterations? Yes, alterations in my personal characteristics. But you’ve been able to laugh at them because you’ve never condescended to consider my urgent need to look at myself in the mirror, with a different appearance; to trick myself into believing that I was not always the same person, to see myself as someone else!

But of course! What could I alter? It’s true that I went so far as to shave my head to see myself bald before my time. At times I shaved off my moustache, leaving my beard, or vice versa. At times I shaved off my moustache and beard, or I let my beard grow now one way, now another. A goatee, parted on the chin or running along the line of the jaw …

I played around with the bristles.

I couldn’t at all alter my eyes, nose, mouth, ears, torso, legs, arms or hands. Did I put on make-up like a theatre actor? I sometimes had that temptation. But then I thought that, under my mask, my body always remained the same … and was growing old!

I tried to make up for it with my spirit. Oh yes, with my spirit I was able to play around better!

Above all, you value and never tire of praising the constancy of feelings and the coherence of personality. Why? Always for the same reason! Because you are cowards. Because you’re afraid of yourselves. That is, you’re afraid that if you change, you’ll lose the reality you have given yourselves and you’ll recognize, therefore, that it was nothing more than an illusion of yours and, consequently, that no reality exists other than the one we give ourselves.

But, I ask, what does giving oneself a reality mean if not fixing oneself in a feeling, becoming congealed, stiff and encrusted in it? Therefore, arresting in ourselves the perpetual vital movement, making of ourselves so many small miserable pools destined for putrefaction, while life is a continuous flux, incandescent and indistinct.

See, this is the thought that perturbs me and makes me furious!

Life is wind. Life is sea. Life is fire. Not earth, which becomes encrusted and takes on form.

All form is death.

All that is removed from the state of fusion and congeals amid this continuous flux, which is incandescent and indistinct, is death.

We are all beings that have been caught in the trap, separated from the ceaseless flux and fixed to die.

The movement of this flux is in us, in our form, which is separated, detached and fixed, and will last for a brief moment more. But, see, little by little, it slows down. The fire cools down. The form dries up and finally movement ceases completely in the form, which has become rigid.

We have finished dying and we have called this life!

I feel caught in this death trap that has separated me from the flux of life in which I flowed without form, and has fixed me in time, in this time!