Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  A kinship was inaugurated between beings; a path was connected from misery to commiseration; a link was forged between the one that was suffering and the one that was gazing; an equation was posited, between understanding and compassion.

  Her gesture accomplished, Hock stood up tranquilly, as if nothing had happened—but a mysterious light was still trembling in the depths of her pupils, and two tears were running down her face.

  The dawn of the human soul had just been prophesied.

  XVIII. Fear

  The human soul was born in fear. Fear was the cradle of human thought. The first whimpers of mind disengaging itself from matter were gasps of alarm. It was in fright and by fright that the first labor was produced, thanks to which the sensitive beast rose up dolorously to the glory of giving birth to an idea, and transmuted the commotion of its nerves into a mental conception.

  In the menagerie of a plateau to which the inundation of the valleys had driven herbivores and carnivores pell-mell, death lay in wait for everything that moved. From every shelter, death was about to pounce; it leapt from the rock, it surged forth from the grass, and it fell from the trees; it was the predator lurking in the thicket, the snake coiled up under the leaves; a step provoked it, a gesture summoned it; one cry and it arrived; all the noises of the area, all the quivers of the surroundings, were announcements of death; nothing moved that was not a threat. In that ubiquity of peril, every minute, for every creature, was a conquest; to walk or to sleep was a victory; to succeed in enduring for more than one day was a long triumph; life was survival.

  Daâh and Hock were alive. Fear had become their habit, their mode of existence, their condition, almost their reason for being, since it was solely by virtue of a vigilant anxiety that they escaped the entourage of dangers. Certainly, the man was brave, but his purely animal bravery, in which neither reason nor will participated, could do nothing to defend him against the repeated shocks of his incessantly agitated nerves. When an adversary loomed up in front of him, he was almost relieved at no longer having to dread its coming, and he threw himself boldly into combat: the battle was his deliverance, the moment of expansion when he ceased to be apprehensive of the unknown.

  The woman did not benefit from that temporary release; it was not given to her, as it was to him, to acquire the renewals of energy inherent in battle, nor the fleeting moments of confidence procured by the pride of victory. She only knew the fear, and was saturated by it.

  At the fall of dusk, when she took refuge in the branches of a tree in order to sleep, the tension of her overworked nerves was totalized in her sleep, and the memories of the day became demented within her, to haunt her with nightmares. Suddenly revealed by the crash of thunder or the roaring of predators, she heard below her the breath of great felines scenting their prey and demanding it by scratching the bark of the tree with their claws; by the glare of lightning flashes, she perceived creeping spines down below, and the phosphorescence of eyes, and clung hard to the branches.

  So many reiterated efforts made her tremulous, and because her brain was the most apt of all to perceive the terrors of life with acuity, she was overloaded by anguish to a greater extent than any other creature; her nascent thought was impregnated by it; her nervous cells became reservoirs of accumulated fear; in the utmost depths of her being she stored away such a provision of fear that all her descendants would retain the memory imprinted in their flesh, and a thousand centuries later, the children of her race would not be able to go into the forest or venture forth in darkness without experiencing in their marrow the prolonged frisson of hereditary terror.

  The male, although he was more solid, did not escape the contagion of that anguish. Without rest, his eyes rapidly began to swivel, his head pivoting, his nostrils flaring to sniff the odor of death—with the result that, by virtue of suspicion and alarm, he acquired the habit of moving without cause; his mobility became a muscular reflex, and he moved as one breathes, for the sake of movement.

  At the same time, however, those endless vibrations had themselves developed the organs of sensitive life; by virtue of perpetual exercise, the nervous system gained in power, enriching itself even on its fatigue, and increasingly, from day to day, the emotion of their brains tended to develop thought.

  XIX. The Soul of Things

  They think fearfully. Everything takes on an aggressive character in their eyes; since they suffer from everything, since everything is harmful to them, naively, they credit everything with a desire to harm them. Incapable of informing themselves about the world other than by comparison with themselves, they judge everything as similar to themselves; so, as their own actions are the product of intention, all the actions surrounding them seem intentional. Nothing exists except enemies waiting to destroy them; the dangling vines endeavor to block their passage in order to deliver them to the predators; a thorn is a claw; when Daâh, in order to clear a path, massacres interlaced branches, he has a clear consciousness of battling against them, and insults the resistance of those negligible adversaries disdainfully.

  “Han!”

  The mud into which his feet sinks is a trap set by the hungry earth; a stone hides a snake in order that Daâh will be bitten, and when it is displaced underfoot it is in order to make Daâh fall. He hits the trunk of a tree into which he has bumped in passing with his club. To chastise the stone that wounds his toe, he stamps on it with his heel, and, when his heel is weary of that battle, he labors it with blows of his fist until his fist hurts; then he seizes the stone and bites it with all the force of his teeth. Woe to the root that hooks itself onto his foot in order to aid a prey that he is stalking! He turns on it and hacks at it furiously with the cutting edge of a flint, at the expense of bloodying his palms.

  “Haâh!”

  His anger turns to frenzy when his enemy persists in torturing him without him being able to reach it; he watches from the corner of his eye for the beast hidden beneath his skin, which is racking his muscles or clutching his entrails; when hunger gnaws at him and he has nothing to throw at it, he tries to stun the reptile that is tearing him apart.

  Everything that makes one suffer is alive! Everything that moves is animate; everything is conscious, like Daâh, who is so slightly conscious himself, but who can nevertheless perceive his will to act.

  That same instinct of assimilation, which leads him to identify himself with all the animals in turn, whose gestures he parodies, similarly invites him to identify with his own motives those of the world that surrounds him. Everything resembles him. The motility that activates him, he attributes to everything; his limited intelligence cannot imagine anything that is not a reproduction of what he finds in himself.

  Animal, vegetable or mineral, everything coexists, and he knows nothing more; he is ignorant of the essence of creatures and things, and only knows about them what appears to his senses: their form, their color, the sounds they make, the odor they emit, the taste that they have. He does not hesitate to observe between himself and beasts a similitude of needs and means, nor does the idea ever occur to him to seek differences between vital phenomena and those of inert matter, which nothing reveals to him. How can he imagine that entities exist around him which are not beings, that some lack life while others possess it?

  He knows no more of life that its constituents; he only knows movement, and everything moves, the Herb and the Branch, the Lizard and the Stream that flows between the mosses, the Leaf and the Bird that flies. If it were necessary for him to classify beings and to distinguish them in accordance with whether they are more or less alive, the measure of their existence would only be given to him by their ability to do him harm, and the Rain, the Wind and the Stone would have more life than a Hare or a Marmot. Everything is in conflict! Like Humans, the Trees fight, with blows of their branches; Thunder is the quarreling of Clouds, Lightning kills Rocks; Darkness is even worse; it aids the Felines by favoring their ambushes.

  Daâh, however, has friends—a few of them. There are the Suns
and the Moons, peaceful animals that come and go one by one. The Suns are beasts, too, evidently: round, monotonous beasts that always follow the same path, never hurrying, without ever attacking anyone; by day one only ever sees one, perpetually solitary; but sometimes, by night, between two downpours, one perceives them through a gap in the branches and the clouds, gathered in bands like Ants. Daâh has glimpsed them; he has seen them roaming, always faint and very slow, in the depths of the sky, so far away that one can scarcely make them out, like the white dots that shine in Hock’s eyes...

  As for supposing the existence of one unique Sun that returns every day, Daâh does not think of that for an instant; the Suns succeed one another like the downpours; every morning brings its own, more or less large, more or less pale, which marches until dusk; by night, they gather together; the Stars are Suns that have completed a stage of their journey and are resting in the blackness of the sky, like Daâh in the blackness of the tree.

  For Daâh feels a need to explain the world; it is an appetite that he has inherited from his ancestors. He is extremely curious: a simian curiosity that is on the way to improvement, interested in everything it encounters; while he gazes and walks, his imagination agitates; the task is incumbent upon it of discovering the causes behind appearances; its searches are cursory and quickly concluded. If it were necessary to reflect, Daâh would renounce the task, but he is still at an age when one only understands on condition that one does not examine. He judges the universe by the means at his disposal; being simple, he simplifies it; being an expert assimilator, he sees nothing around him but assimilations.

  But as nature is even simpler than he is, with rules that are even more simple, simultaneously regulating stars and microbes, it happens that the primate chances to encounter a few of the supreme verities; thus, quite tranquilly, with very little effort, he jumps to false conclusions, uncomplicated by any objection, but which his reason and his mystical pride will eventually repudiate: the unity of matter, the plurality of suns, universal life...

  XX. The First Poet

  It is necessary to recognize that Daâh does not always encounter definitive verities, but that, on the contrary, he usually settles for his preference on stupid hypotheses. Undoubtedly, what seduces him toward the truth, and what sometimes permits him to reach it, is the infantile character that it commonly presents. It often has the appearance of an implausible story, and gradually, one will discover that which it contains of the absurd; it is in that way that it allows itself to be approached by Daâh—for the conception of the Absurd is normally the first manifestation of intelligence, its initial conquest, and also its original taste.

  The Absurd is full of charm; it is the infancy of the idea, and, because of that, it is dear to infants of all ages; it astonishes them and amuses them; it distracts and illuminates; it is the marvel of the world; it is the joy of naïve souls and their recompense, being the product of the least effort. It presents itself, and one likes it; disengaged from the accessories that encumber its visibility; it is plain, neat, clear and entire; it shines and it imposes; it is the verity that offers itself at a stroke, as a whole, in the sudden splendor of a dazzlement, in contrast to the slow verity that emerges from the depths and gradually emerges from a twilight. It displeases good sense, which has nothing to do in this instance, but it delights the imagination, which permits it to be mistaken for reason.

  Right away, Daâh has understood that the Stars are distant Suns; he also knows that all those Suns have been born on earth, like him and the other beasts. In any case, he has seen nests of young suns; he has even failed to capture one that had just been born.

  It was a mild and calm evening. At the fall of dusk, the two nomads, encountering one of the countless marshes that stagnate in the hollows of the plateau, had initially halted on its edge; they had climbed a tree, and the tranquil night had thickened round them, blue-tinted, devoid of the voices of wild beasts; only frogs were croaking; the reeking breath of the marsh was floating in gray bands. They were about to go to sleep in that mephitic air when they suddenly saw strange soft luminous creatures rising over the pools, which had neither feet nor wings, but which nevertheless perched on the reeds, and then flew off, rising up a little, descending again, wandering this way and that, unhurriedly, stopping and swaying. Suddenly, they were no longer visible, and equally suddenly, they reappeared elsewhere; wherever they glided, a pale dawn colored the leaves, like the morning light filtering through the branches—and it was by that light that Daâh recognized the infants of Suns...

  Imperiously, the decision sprang up within him to have a little Sun, to hold it, to look at it, to taste it, to warm himself, perhaps also to do nothing with it. He got down from the tree and crept toward the bulrushes; his feet sank into the mud; even so, he advanced toward the pretty prey. He was about to reach it; he stretched out his hands; the meteor immediately flew away; he tried to follow it, and sank up to his knees; irritated, he struggled, and the little Sun, furious in its turn, or frightened, danced violently in front of him, fled with a bound, and came back to assail him.

  Daâh, thigh-deep in the mud, sensed that he was being swallowed alive by the earth, while the young Bird-Sun, in order to mock him, perhaps to eat him, rushed at his head.

  “Heûh!”

  When the hunter finally succeeded in freeing himself and running away, the flame ran after him; he stopped, and it stopped, too, and hopped teasingly, bobbing up and down, around its victim. He defended himself with his fists, and it circled around him. Suddenly, it disappeared.

  Daâh was safe, but he had been scared. Never again did he risk chasing infant Suns over pools, and when he saw others, he hurled insults at them from a distance.

  Thus, an idealist in his fashion, a dreamer educated by conflict and exasperated by fear, the Human became a poet before being able to reason, since he subjectivized the world. With the first effort of his idea, he invented life and poured it everywhere; before giving himself the soul that was his exclusive prerogative, he gave it to the universe, and already granted himself the role of administering the chastisement merited by the souls that only existed in him.

  XXI. The-One-Who-Stands-Upright

  In those times, when conflict constituted the unique function of creatures, brutal force was, logically, the sovereign of the world; it alone was regal; no mental force seemed capable of challenging its despotic power. In any case, intelligence was scarcely manifest other than in the ruses of attack and defense. Daâh knew all those of the other animals and had his own, more numerous and more ingenious. He took no pride in that; on the contrary, he experienced a kind of scorn, almost a humiliation, in seeing himself obliged to have recourse, too often, to cunning means in order to substitute for the inadequacy of his strength.

  He would have preferred to owe his triumphs, like the Cave-Bear, to the power of his muscles. When he had succeeded in felling some colossus of the forest, he planted himself on the vanquished individual, and almost immediately struck his chest with blows of his fist to sound his victory; then he flattered himself by attributing the success to his physical merits, and would have liked to attenuate or dissimulate, especially in Hock’s eyes, the importance of the assistance that his mental planning had procured for him.

  His intelligence, still too confused to have any notion of itself, did not, therefore, reveal itself to him as a superiority, but as an accessory of his inferiority, and it was not by that means that he claimed to distinguish himself from his enemies. He did not know that he had an aptitude for thinking that was greater than other animals, and derived no pride from the fact.

  Nevertheless, without really knowing why, he sensed that he was different from the others, and he wanted to be, with a vague scorn for all of them and a heavy esteem for himself. That sentiment was within him, profound and intuitive, as necessary as a natural requirement. He experienced it and maintained it, in spite of his weakness, as a protest against the frequent proofs that he had of that weakness. He did not conse
nt to be humble; the idea of his smallness and his nudity, his clawless feet and his fangless mouth, revolted him, not as an injustice but as a insult; in spite of all the demonstrations of life, it would not have taken much for him to believe that he was the strongest and the most beautiful, the universal victor, the master.

  In order to justify that naïve presumption, he could discover nothing better than a physical advantage that was exclusive to him, and more ostensible than intelligence: among all the inhabitants of the forest, he was The-One-Who-Stands-Upright—and the only one! That faculty, no one disputed with him, the Orangutan no more than the others; even the Bear, in his awkward attempts to stand up on two feet momentarily, was merely suggestive of his impotence, and his supremacy, incontestable in other respects, had to cede on that point. Daâh, who admired that king of the world, rejoiced in being superior to him in something, and nothing else seemed to him to equal that advantage.

  In fact, his vertical stance exercised a prestige on the plateau. There was no beast that did not seem troubled and intimidated by it, and anxious; all of them hesitated before the human being, with an evident effort to comprehend whether the spectacle of his gait might conceal some unknown danger, and several of them, although they were better armed, turned away from him prudently without attacking him.

  “Haâh! Heûh!”

  He clamored his challenge behind them, by striking his torso, in order to mock them, and laughed noisily at their rumps. Then he turned round to face Hock, and still beating his sonorous chest, showed himself to her as the vanquisher of beasts.