That further awareness did not displease his pride in the least, so inclined was he to consider himself as a being apart. The notion of “woman,” completed and made precise by the attribute of fecundity, was installed within him, and a proposition was agreed:
A child falls from a woman like a fig from a fig tree.
He added that acquired fact to the host of anterior observations, and did not take it any further. More serious concerns were calling to him: he was hungry; everyone was hungry. Leaving the mothers where they were, one lying down and the other crouching, he went out hunting.
He came back without having caught anything. The woman who had just given birth, still weak, had now pulled herself together on the moss, with her back to the trunk of a walnut tree; huddling beneath the downpour, undiverted by any foliage, she was warming her child between her breasts and thighs.
Standing two paces away, he gazed at her fixedly. His idea returned to him, already better generalized by a latent incubation:
A child falls from a woman like a fig from a fig tree.
The young mother looked up at him, plaintively, but he looked at her without seeing her; he was thinking with all his might.
The muscles of his forehead tensed above his eyes; he was visibly having difficulty linking together his still-disjointed ideas, which were stirring and intersecting without having the power to connect.
A child is the fruit of a woman as a walnut in that of a walnut tree. Encumbering fruit, useless fruit…unless one eats them? Daâh eats fruit when he is hungry...
The idea of eating that fruit did not arouse the repugnance that Daâh experienced before the meat of his peer; that miserable thing bore too little resemblance to him: a reduced image of a man or a woman; a fruit...”
“Mâh!”
He opened his enormous mouth wide and closed it again noisily; the mills of his teeth ground together, crushing nothing. The mother looked up at him. She, too, was trying to understand, and almost guessed. She raised her fists and stretched out her neck.
The male remained silent. His arms were dangling, still uncertain regarding the action, but the two suckers of his pupils were already devouring the infant. Suddenly, his eyebrows frowned more deeply and violently, this time, and imperiously, he uttered his cry of hunger:
“Mâh! Mâh!”
Two large ferocious hands, with their thick palms and their splayed fingers, advanced toward the tender flesh.
The mother leapt up; the infant fell, and at the same moment Daâh saw, level with his face, hooked claws that were reaching out for him, and behind those claws, two irises flamboyant with an anger so vehement that he had not yet confronted anything similar, either in the eyes of Lions or those of humans.
Instinctively, he closed his eyes, and he, who took pride in making predators hesitate before his human gaze, recoiled.
XXXIV. The Pocket
Peevishly, Daâh gives the order to resume marching.
But the stranger does not move; she is occupied with a task, and she continues with it, as if she has not heard the master’s command. Her eyebrows contracted with attention, she applies herself: she stretches the bear-cub skin that provides her with a garment; with the aid of a sharp stone, she makes a rip in it, two rips.
Hock watches her do it, striving to understand, and the man approaches in his turn to see; he is so curious that, in the presence of new things, he forgets everything; he no longer remembers the order he has given, so intriguing are the stranger’s gestures. They are, in fact, bizarre; now she is trying to insert her head into the two holes in the fur; but one of the rips is too narrow and Ta resumes work in order to enlarge that gap by sawing the skin of the bear-cub. Finally, the head passes through; the fur, suspended by its two ends from the woman’s neck, hangs over her breast in the form of a pocket, furry in the interior. The young mother picks up her crying newborn, stuffs it inside, and gets up. She is ready to go.
Daâh contemplates her, bewildered, but Hock’s eyes are shining with joyful admiration. Thus far, embarrassed by the burden of her child, she has been defenseless against animals and plants, while the stranger will remain free in her movements; henceforth, Hock will follow the example that has been given to her, and she laughs with joy.
But Ta, the woman with the straight forehead and the black hair, has not invented anything either. In the country from which she comes, she has seen mothers carrying their children in that fashion, and they do so because they have seen other women do it, having arrived from countries even more distant, where the ancestor of the Mammals hid its little marsupials in the warm pocket of its belly The stranger is imitating the Kangaroo, as Daâh has imitated the Ape, and the result is the first cradle.
During the days that followed the birth of her child, the young mother gave evidence of a nervous overexcitement that rendered her intolerant of everything; she uttered shrill and brief cries, abusing the trees or the puddles, and chewed angrily, as if to avenge herself. Suddenly, she laughed. She was seen alternately cajoling her nursling, licking its face, warming it in her lap, and then, abruptly aggravated, beating it or even biting it. The victim’s screams only served to exasperate that unhealthy tension, and the smallness of the body that she had in her hands seemed to frighten her; she squeezed it, threw it up in the air; her fingers clenched on its fragile ribs, and her eyes lit up with red gleams.
That crisis did not last long. Now, Ta tolerates the approaches of Hock without hostility, permitting her to touch her child, but it is necessary for the male not to risk approaching her too closely, and not to reach out toward her with his large hands; immediately, she growls a threat, and if he persists even slightly, she slaps him; inevitably, he retaliates—for Daâh has never received a blow without returning it—but he goes away.
Meanwhile, winter has come to an end as the months succeed one another; Hock’s son and Ta’s daughter are growing side by side; they learn to crawl, and their hands are soon detached from the ground, their knees disengaged from the mud; increasingly, the torsos straighten and the faces are raised; the down on their cheeks thickens and darkens; along the spine and the thorax, brown hairs are already designing shading on an excessively red epidermis, inflamed by the bites of innumerable insects—for the living clouds that swarm in that marshy atmosphere have recognized a predestined pasture in the infants; darts and probosces labor that tender skin; the little victims writhe in a voracious fog that sucks their juices and poisons them; a perpetual cry emerges from their open mouths:
“Hi! Hi!”
It is as if their skin is clad in scabs; the leather pockets that they inhabit, constantly drenched by the rain, are soaked with their warmth and populated by vermin; an acrid mist emanates.
“Hi! Hi!”
Finally, the two brats are able to stand almost upright, not as well as their father but already better than an Ape. They play around their mothers, crouched against a tree; their movements are less awkward, their intelligence is awakening; they open keen eyes; one might think that they, too, are gazing at the world, and trying to understand things.
The first thing that they divine is peril; heredity has instructed them in that regard; they have been fearful from birth. At any moment, their play ceases, a gesture is suspended, their mobile ears are orientated toward a sound; at the same time, the unquiet skin of their scalp quivers, from the brow-ridge to the sinciput, and their hair bristles, as if traversed by a breath.
If the danger becomes precise, they move rapidly, each one trotting toward their mother and scaling her, climbing her side like a pink crab, going to hide in her bosom. When the alert has passed, a little shiny eye shows amid the intermingled hairs of the mane and the bear-cub skin, watchfully...
Sometimes, the father deigns to watch that scene, and the family, spontaneously, is constituted around the others, before the man has even glimpsed the idea of paternity.
XXV. The Sinister Side
The examination of the cranial cavity reveals, in Daâh as in us, a notabl
e development of the left hemisphere; since the nervous bundles cross over, one can affirm that the human being of those days, like us, was right-handed. With the right hand, the male accomplished valiant acts, carried his club, reached out toward obstacles and struck. The left was devoted to subsidiary roles: warding off blows, serving for support, moving branches aside, assistance—a servant.
The right side was that of strength, good for attack; the left was that of least resistance, only good for parades. The danger that comes from the right runs into armed energy; that which reveals itself to the left is more redoubtable, since enemy force is redoubled by our weakness. That is the side half-vanquished in advance, and whoever knows that is not sure of himself and becomes fearful. By comparison with the heroic and superb dexter, it is the poor, timid half; from the sinister, nothing surges forth but bad things, and evil things, if they emerge from that direction, become even worse.
Daâh has no need to think of these axioms to sense their verity: an animal apprehension proposes them to him and an intuitive prudence remembers them on his behalf. When he is going to fight, he tries to work his way around the adversary so as to have him to his right. In the same way, when he walks, he raises his left shoulder—which remains the higher among us—and shelters behind that shield, his torso slightly oblique. It is always to the right that he leans, if he is in the plenitude of his means and his self-confidence; if, on the contrary, he leans to the left when walking, and if, before an obstacle he decides to turn that way, that is an evident sign in him of momentary weakness and probably defeat.
Not only do those actions come to him without him deliberating, but he carries them out without even noticing that he has done so; the experimental dread of that which threatens him from the left is already manifest in him with the surety of an instinct, and he experiences it like an animal.
The custom of that latent anxiety and that spontaneous gesture penetrate him ever more deeply, taking up residence in the depths of his being, and future ages will recall its obsession; already found within it, entirely ready and duly fashioned, are the elements of a superstition that seems to be the oldest in the world.
Religions collect those memories of the original forest, and when fate come to designate the side from which sinister presages came, they naturally indicate the left-hand side; when prophets want to divide up souls and separate the good from the evil, they know without hesitation that the right is for the elect, the left for the reproved.
XXXVI. The Thinking Machine
If one could explain to Daâh what superstitions are, he would deny that he has any; in all probability, he would take offense, as a human being, if any were attributed to him; he would not hesitate to affirm that his items of information have the character of undeniable verities, attested by the facts.
The notions he possesses and the prudence he practices having been suggested to him by experience, the veracity of the former and the utility of the latter are proven. He never suspects the authenticity of what he observes; he does not establish any demarcation between the plausible and the implausible; he refrains from challenging the testimony of his senses, since he owes them everything; his subsistence, his security and his life only endure by their grace. Pragmatic as a matter of urgency, he makes use of what they bring him, and thus he is a philosopher without being aware of it, with an exclusively empirical method, the relative wisdom of which consists of not being astonished by anything, and admitting everything without hesitation.
Furthermore, hesitation would be forbidden to him; if he never sways between two actions, much less does he oscillate between two hypotheses, incapable as he is of simultaneously envisaging two ways of action or two ways of feeling. The one that presents itself to him first prevents any other from appearing; he does not judge between them; he decides first—or, rather, he acts, and his action informs him of his decision.
All his notions come to him thus, mechanically and almost unknown to him; every minute deposits a residue that he does not analyze, of which he is scarcely aware, but which exists. That perpetual accretion of life accumulates from day to day, agglomerates, creates a bed; then that bed gains in consistency, becomes solid, becomes a soil; the Tree of Knowledge is able to grow there, and to flower, and to bear its fruit: Daâh possesses a belief. One fine morning, he discovers it.
His convictions are, therefore, like a spontaneous manifestation within him, due to a phenomenon of parthenogenesis: his thinking machine, which he cannot yet direct, works of its own accord in the darkness of the unconscious, and offers its products; he receives them exactly as he receives the children of his women, by observing their existence. His appetite is not to understand, but to give himself the illusion of it, without delay. He knows, and what he knows is sufficient for him. He has faith.
The result is that, along the way, he accumulates the materials of his future mysticism, but for the time being, he only credits them with a purely experimental origin. If he fears the threat that comes from the left, it is because he has experienced its importance many times; if he believes in the existence of numerous Suns, it is because he has seen them, just as he has seen numerous Lions; if he believes in the reality of something impalpable that might already be called his soul, his life or his double, it is because he has seen it marching by his side...
XXXVII. The Shadow and the Image
Daâh’s life is his shadow.
He sees it very rarely—too rarely for his liking. The apparition is all the more welcome for that. As soon as it is manifest, he is glad; he dances in front of it in order to give it more life, and it dances with him; he bends down to caress it, and it gathers itself to come to him; in order to chase away the clouds, of which it is afraid and which put it to flight, he howls at the sky and brandishes his club; then it is effaced, he does not know whether it has flown away like a Bird or whether it goes underground like a Mole. He sometimes believes one and sometimes the other, and is chagrined by it. To console himself, and also to reassure himself, he searches for the other double of his life, the one he can rediscover at will in streams, ponds and puddles: his image.
The Shadow and the Image: he knows that both of them are his and only his; he considers them to be faithful and devoted, and is certain that when they quit him, they do not go to someone else. He is sure of them; he has always known them; he cannot remember the time when he discovered their existence; it was a long time ago, because he was very small. At first, he did not know that they were himself, but he observed that each of the two phantoms reproduced his gestures exactly, and he understood that a mysterious affinity existed between them and him.
Mentally, he distinguished them from one another as Daâh in the water and Daâh on the ground, but he only has one name for both of them: Daâh-ta—which is to say, “the Daâh here,” the Daâh by his side. Both of them are dear to him, he loves them more than anything else, more than his women, more than his body, for he has a kind of veneration for his doubles that he does not profess with regard to his own flesh.
His Shadow, in particular, is sacred. He does not try to discern whether is it the consequence of his life or its cause; he simply identifies himself with it; and, as he observes his life outside himself, being able to conceive of the abstract idea of it, he represents it to himself in that visible but ungraspable form, which can be touched, struck and broken, which is fragile and fugitive, which he has under his safeguard.
What repercussion might an assault on his double have on him? He knows what he would suffer from a claw or a tooth, but he does not know what would result from a wound sustained by his Shadow. He would interpose himself, in order to receive the blow that might strike it!
To protect it, his egotism is ever on the alert; if a Serpent traverses it, he senses the cold of its scales in the depths of his abdomen. If Hock or Ta steps on it by mistake, he hits them, and they approve. When he is about to fight and he sees his Shadow beside him, he has more confidence and is sure of victory. He takes care to place himself betw
een it and the adversary in order to prevent it being trampled or struck. If his Shadow died, surely he would die, too! He knows that. He has seen it; the dead have no shadow. He has had proof of that, on a beautiful sunlit day that he will never forget.
It was morning, and Daâh was on the edge of the cliff. A gust of wind blew the clouds away and the sky was briefly radiant. Rejoicing in the Sun and glad to see his double, the man was playing with it when, all of a sudden, a Bear emerged from a cave and headed toward him.
The enormous brute, standing up against the sun, advanced with its paws extended, and its giant Shadow arrived with it. Driven back to the edge of the gulf, Daâh watched them come. He had never felt that he was in such great peril.
However, he killed the Bear, and when the beast was on the ground, he saw to his amazement that it no longer had its Shadow. As he approached the cadaver, however, he discovered it, but so small and so meager that he could measure it merely with the width of his foot.
Before that spectacle, he thought with all his might. Gradually, a certainty came to him, and a ruse of battle, too...
As he saw his idea more clearly, he swayed his head like the bear, in order to approve of it. Suddenly, he laughed. He had decided. Already he was preparing to step over the monster, but for fear that the dead creature might seize his double in passing, he prudently went around it.
Slyly, he headed for the cave, making sure that his Shadow was going with him. In front of the entrance he turned round, went forward and back, seeking the best place for the Shadow to go in first—but no place was the best; the Shadow refused to go in, doubtless afraid. It escaped, sliding over the wall of rock.
Daâh got down on all fours and the Shadow went in beneath him. While he inspected the cave, the downpour began again, and Daâh came out alone. Hastily, he rolled a huge boulder into the gap, which he loaded with less weighty stones; he blocked up the openings with pebbles. In front of that wall he piled up a heap of brushwood; then he admired his work, and returned, without the Shadow, to the Bear, which no longer had a Shadow.
Daâh: The First Human Page 10
