Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  The latter are scarcely less violent than brawls. They most often consist of hunting scenes, or the competitors imitate animals, those pursued and those tracked. These mimes, which begin in a good humor, unfailingly terminate in a battle, with each of the players having quickly forgotten that he is playing a role, especially if others are watching them compete. They cannot resist the temptation of having themselves admired; before an audience, their ardor for combat turns into a frenzy.

  Suddenly, the games are interrupted; all faces turn toward the same point, with interrogative expressions.

  That is because Daâh has just stood up; he is weary of the location and of immobility; he has been looking at the same trees for too long, and they are annoying him. He wants to go elsewhere; he goes.

  Sometimes, he utters a rallying cry; as often as not, he does not even make a gesture; the others have only to observe him and follow him; he does not care; he does not deign to do anything more.

  And the horde does, indeed, follow; some, who would have preferred to stay longer, start grumbling, but they march even so. For they have, in matters of authority, vague but intimate notions that bear no resemblance to precepts but which act in their depths with the vigor of instinct: notions that are rather singular and somewhat contradictory, which will nevertheless remain approximate to those of all humanity.

  The Chief is strongly imbued with the sentiment of his power and the rights that it confers on him; he is a despot out of pride. As for the others, they have both a taste for independence and a need to be led; they are ungovernable, and yet they only aspire to follow a master; they will not tolerate shackles, and suffer from receiving orders, only obeying reluctantly; they dream of emancipation—and yet, they are ever avid to substitute a foreign will for their own; as soon as they no longer feel it weighing upon them, they miss it, and immediately start searching for another in order to regiment themselves within it. They need a tyranny, a prescription, a suggestion, an example.

  That double appetite for fictitious liberty and mental servitude is the result of an antagonism between their two heredities: the soul of solitude, that one history has bequeathed them, and the soul of the herd.

  The former is responsible for human pride, and the latter for the instinct of imitation.

  LV. Mah-Mah

  “Mâh... Mâh...”

  A new vocable has been introduced into the human family; as the number of little humans multiplies, their repetitive cry becomes more obsessive:

  “Mâh... Mâh...”

  That appeal of hunger, which trails like a chant through the entire horde, has ended up giving a name to the mothers it implores; they are the ones that the whining voices from the depths of the sack begin imploring as soon as the nursling wakes up. It is toward them that the plaint of the weaned brat, who does not know how to find food, rises up: “Mâh... Mâh...”

  They are the Mah-Mahs.

  They lend themselves to that guardian role; not only does each one feed her own baby, chase away the flies and delouse it, but she does not disdain either to help or to nourish another. Hock and Ta, when they were the only two, lent themselves to that communism, and their daughters continue to practice it without repugnance. They take pleasure in contemplating the frolics of the brood. When their gazes linger over the melee of little round limbs beating the air, one could believe that their eyes become soft and that over their rude, bleak faces, the promise spreads of what will one day become the womanly smile.

  But that gentleness is not constant; crises run through it, especially in the early months of maternity. In that period, the young mothers show themselves to be intractable, and with their aversion for the other sex, they combine a particular irritability with regard to their child. They cannot tolerate a male approaching it, much less touching it; if one takes the risk, they fly into a fury, uttering shrill screeches, and bite; if, unfortunately, one succeeds in picking it up, if only momentarily, they throw themselves on the abductor, and as soon as they recover possession of the little creature, their anger turns against it; they seem to execrate it.

  In one of those fits of dementia, which occurred during a halt, one of Hock’s daughters strangled her new-born; for a long time, she remained stupid before the limp cadaver.

  In spite of the vehemence of the protection with which the mothers surround their babies, they have no veritable love for them. As soon as they are no longer suckling, they begin to lose interest in them; when they can walk on their own, they detach themselves further; when they see them start to run, they experience a kind of rancor against them, as if they have been exploited, or deserted. From then on, they scarcely count, and are soon confounded within the host of their peers; among that turbulent rabble, the former Mah-Mah can no longer recognize, without an effort, the one that emerged from her.

  LVI. Children

  Descendants of Hock or Ta, they resemble one another like chicks of different broods; in the former as in the latter there are the same gestures, the same appetites, the same impulsive reflexes, the same receptivity to what is happening around them; incessantly, without discernment, they move and they eat; their mind eats via the eyes, as their body does via the stomach.

  What they absorb most fully is the example of their elders. The little girls imitate the women; the little boys ape their big brothers. The former play at carrying sacks on their backs full of leaves, or pretend to give the breast to a piece of wood; the latter brandish sticks, beating bushes as they go past. As soon as the path becomes wider they immediately grip their branch by one of its ends, and attempt to give it a gyratory movement by rotating their arms, like the Chief’s club. Those gymnastics are accompanied with menacing grimaces, which seem to them to be an indispensable accessory of virility. Although they are not yet conscious of their sex, an instinct informs them of their future role, and inducts in them at an early age in the gestures of battle and murder.

  These games the children play have a primordial importance. In the epoch when humanity is making its debut, by imitation, the infants, who are debutants and imitators themselves, appear as the veritable prototype of human being. For those who were dormant in the cells of the race the day before, the normal pasture is that which, like them, emerges immediately from the race: the milk of the teat and the essence of ideas. As soon as they are born they find within themselves certain inveterate instructions, like that of sucking the teat; as soon as they open their eyes they find around them the model of the most recent practices. The task is incumbent on them of consecrating those new customs and transforming them into rites; it is to their power of assimilation that societies will owe their permanent habits and ideas; they are the expert preservers, the fixators of acquired notions, the guardians of beliefs, and, in consequence, religions. They attach civilizations making progress to their past. Without the resistance of children, who do not want to lose anything of what is delivered to them, humane presumptuousness and nervousness would have led the world to anarchy.

  Children are the brake of humankind.

  When they reach maturity and agitate, they encounter within themselves the very memory of the species; without any doubt, that backward force will hamper the course of progress, but it will also attenuate the effects of the devastating ferocity that leads humans to devastate everything, and which they readily turn against one another for want of any other victim, to destroy their work in embryo and to crush the future by virtue of rancor against the past.

  LVII. The Sling and the Ax

  At about the age of twelve, Ta’s eldest son made an ingenious discovery. As always, he made it by chance. His club, already heavy, had just split at the end, as a result of striking rocks and tree trunks. To punish it for that defection, he slammed it into the ground furiously, holding it vertically, and the split widened: a stone had become wedged in it, and remained stuck. Immediately, the little man’s anger was transformed into hilarity; with malevolent laughter he mocked the captive stone; he teased it with his index finger and encouraged the
wood to cling hard.

  The amusement of torturing his prisoner was beginning to fade away when the horde came into a clearing. He twirled the club with a movement of his wrist and the stone flew away. If it had fallen straight down, in accordance with the custom of its peers, that would have been tolerable, but when it went upwards, as if trying to escape, that was a provocation that got a poor welcome. The boy followed it with his eyes, frowning, and saw it fall into the moss. He ran after it, and leapt upon it, palms open, as if upon a rat, in order to prevent it from fleeing again.

  When he had put it back in place, he looked at it, shaking his head with an authoritarian expression, and menacing growls emerged from his throat. He was suspicious, though; a new escape seemed to him to be imminent; he kept watch on the enemy from the corner of his eye. In order to tame it further and prove its defeat, he leaned on it, and made use of his club as if it were a walking stick. The cleft of the divided wood above and below the flint became plastered with clay.

  Escape now if you can!

  With the first whirl, the stone, heavier by virtue of the clay, fled with increased violence.

  The boy stood there open-mouthed. What he had done, with that coup, was discovered the principle of the sling. He had no suspicion of it and did not give it another thought; another concern was preoccupying him: his prisoner had just made fun of him again! He searched for it in the grass, with the stubbornness of a beast that will not give in, and subjected it to the grip again. The grip of the cleft, enlarged by his efforts, became increasingly slack, and the stone kept slipping out; it even profited from a distraction to quit him definitively.

  The next day, when he woke up, the memory of his successive defeats returned to his mind; as he was hungry, he became enraged. Immediately, he went to look for another stone, larger and heavier: a fragment of flint pleased him by virtue of its dimensions and its cutting edges. In order to imprison it more solidly, he first employed a handful of clay, which he kneaded in the fissure, like the one the day before. In order to do better still and perfect his work, he looked around in quest of an idea, an example. As was his fashion, he sought advice from things. Suddenly, he saw a tangled creeper, and his eye lit up; he knew, having suffered there, how resistant those ligatures were that so perfidiously wound around a limb. Would they wind around a stone as well?

  By looping fibers around he succeeded in fixing his shard of flint at the extremity of the club. Triumphantly, he lifted the swollen assembly, and weighed it at the end of his arm, slightly astonished and even vaguely anxious to observe that the sly stone was making itself heavier at the end of a club than in the hollow of a hand; did that eccentricity, obviously intentional, not conceal some further treason? He would see about that! He brandished the weapon overhead and brought it down against a tree trunk.

  The stone bit into the bark and stayed there; humans possessed the ax.

  A fragile weapon still, and very precarious; nevertheless, everyone wanted to have one. All the clubs were ornamented with a cutting stone, except Daâh’s; his pride consented to imitate the beasts without admitting it, but affected to scorn the inventions of the brats.

  For the vines that broke too easily, someone thought of substituting a strip of hide that was hanging from his fur and served to retain that piece of fur on his back. Leather ligatures were immediately adopted.

  The flint persisted nevertheless in escaping frequently, but when that notion was admitted, they took as much pleasure in that game as the other. Sometimes they amused themselves making the stone fly, helping it to do so, making it into a bird, in wanting it to fly; they became proud of its flight. Sometimes, on the contrary, they took pride in is firm adherence to the shaft, of its vigor in entering into the wound of a tree or an animal. What laughter there was for a rabbit cut in two by a slicing impact! What a feast, too, in honor of an Eagle that was watching from the edge of the cliff and was driven away from its summit by a hail of stones!

  They progressed gaily, and that dwarf, which had just arrived stark naked among the colossi of the Pleistocene forest, the Human male, becoming more expert every day in the art of killing, was already announcing what he would become: the prince of exterminators.

  LVIII. The Destruction Machine

  Considered in the ensemble of the preglacial fauna, and by comparison with the other forest mammals, humans are manifest from the very start as nasty beasts—twice over, because they present all the characteristics of what we call a pest, and also of what we would call a vicious animal. In the first place, they have a need to destroy, and in the second, a taste for causing suffering, adding insult to injury.

  Those two tendencies are revealed in humans with an acuity that is already unhealthy, and whose equivalent is found nowhere else. They are not yet insane, and will not be for a long time, but they are vertiginous; modern jurists would declare them irresponsible, since all their malevolent actions are imposed upon them as consequences of their physiological condition.

  The hypertrophy of the nervous system, which is already and immediately found in the race in the state of an acquired characteristic, and whose supreme achievement will be to turn a cerebellum into a cerebral brain is only denounced provisionally by a morbid activity: an activity that is necessarily double, since the primate in question possesses both motor nerves and sensitive nerves. The exasperation of the former suggests to humans a continual mobility; the exasperation of the others endows them with an excessive impressionability.

  From the former, they will obtain that incessant order of movement and action, whatever the value of the action or the consequence of the gesture might be; it hardly matters what will result from the movement, provided that the movement occurs and something follows in turn. Now, as every manifestation of activity inevitably leads to a destruction, the maximum harm will necessarily correspond to the extreme of motility, and the most active of the animals will be, by the same token, the most harmful.

  That is human beings. Being perpetually agitated they are the most accomplished machines of destruction. Automatically, mechanically, without being aware of it, by the mere fact of living and functioning, they break, they smash, they put to death; all along their route, they perpetuate a carnage of flowers, leaves, buds, and defenseless creatures; everything that is within arm’s reach is uprooted, torn apart and crushed; animal or vegetable, they massacre it, in order to occupy themselves; and in order to carry out that massacre, they impose supplementary fatigues upon themselves without regret.

  They have no need, in order to destroy, of hatred or anger; the murderous gesture is triggered involuntarily; to bring into play one of the levers that kill, it is sufficient to attract its attention: a kick at the stem of a mushroom because it stands up; a blow of a club on a vine because it hangs down; a stamp of the heel upon a toad because it is passing by! They do not pick flowers in order to look at them or delight in their perfume, but in order to crush them and extract a juice that oozes and is sticky; only when they have thoroughly pulverized the object and reduced it to pulp do they sniff the fresh odor of vegetable death on their stout fingers.

  During a halt, when they are weary, the mechanical play of all hands consists of tearing up leaves and plants; it is a form of repose; everyone takes charge of devastating a circle around them. Ferns and grasses are generally the first to be executed; their attitude recommends them to the choice of the ravager; one takes the stem by the base in a tight fist and with an upward gesture one strips it, gazing with dazed eyes at the bundle of debris that forms within the funnel of the thumb and index finger. Sometimes, with a symmetrical maneuver, one operates with both fists at once, and the double pendulum goes up and down, and then repeats, until the surrounding area is clear. Then, springs of moss are turn up, one after another. One massacres whatever one can, negligently, and finds in that a stupefied pleasure.

  A keener pleasure is found in killing consciously; then the murder is not simply the outcome of a motility exercised at hazard but the satisfaction of an app
etite; it is still the nervous system working spontaneously, but there is a motivation, on this occasion, that enters into function. It, too, is in the process of inauguration, and it, too, makes its debut as it can; while awaiting the ages in which that evolved malady will have utilizable manifestations—intelligence, affectivity, altruism, a taste for arts or poisons, etc.—the morbid need for vibration is still in its first phase, and practices only one excess: cruelty.

  LIX. The Invention of Pain

  Having eaten and slept, they amuse themselves.

  They form a circle, on all fours, heads toward the center, faces toward the ground; the round balls of their heads immobilize, one beside another, their arched backs bulge under the rain, and from the neck to the loins, like a prolongation of their manes, a train of stiff hairs bristles on their meager spines. Sometimes, a frisson shakes their streaming shoulders, but the downpour is not the cause; they do not feel it. It is an internal emotion that harasses them: a force agitating within them, new and nascent, stimulated by what is agitating before them. It is exercised by the receipt of a shock that comes from outside and propagates through their entire being. They are electrified. They are watching suffering.

  It is the first circus. In the center, a wounded hare is writhing, and finishing dying; its eyes are distended with horror and it is emitting screams, like those of a child carried off by a Tiger. The spectators, leaning over that agony, are panting; it enters them through the eyes and the ears; they drink it in, they savor it, it stirs their entrails. When the patient forgets to suffer, they wake it up by planting thorns in its head or belly, in its corneas or in its feet, in order that it will quiver and howl: whoever extracts a fine scream enjoys himself more than the others.