Polyandrous and polygamous, all females belong to all males, and all males to all females; communism is the rule; it is the time of original chaos. Nothing opposes incest and everything requires it. Their kinship does not trouble them because they have no suspicion of it; if they were aware of it, nothing would denounce to them that the community of blood in question might embody a prohibition of one game rather than any other. They therefore hold, like animals, to the simplest notions.
One vice announces itself, however, and that is a tendency to abuse; these primitives show themselves, like the monkeys, strongly inclined to indulgence, toward which the exceptional development of their nervousness encourages them; they devote themselves to it with a frequency unjustified by the needs of reproduction; lascivious as they are cruel, by virtue of an overabundance of nerves, they expend themselves, already surpassing the dictates of nature. Erections tyrannize them; they are already slaves to them, defenseless against temptation. Their amours have no season; the whole year is good for them.
The initiative always comes from the male; the female does not provoke it as yet. It might seem logical that her more sickly impressionability ought to dispose her more than the male to sexual pleasure, but for the moment, that is not the case. One might say that, being the very organ of fecundity, she finds in the depths of her flesh a kind of physiological consciousness that is informed as to what is and is not useful to the predestined goals; outside of the times when conjunction might be efficacious, she experiences a repugnance whose causes she does not discern but whose effect is manifest: she flees, she hides, she resists, at least initially; she is not concerned to put a higher price on her consent, but she is afraid, without knowing why and perhaps in spite of herself; an innate apprehension invites her to defend herself.
Virgins, much more than women already proven by amour, expend in combat all the energy of a real fear, and that reticence of the flesh, as instinctive as it is legitimate, as the first appearance of the sentiment that will subsequently be idealized to the point of engendering feminine chastity and coquetry.
The male does not triumph without difficulty; he only succeeds when the heat of the struggle has ended up awakening in the opposite sex a desire analogous to his own. Moreover, the vigor and duration of the contest are inconstant; they vary in accordance with the subject, more or less rebellious, the moment, more or less opportune, and the aggressor. A female who refuses herself to one male easily yields to another, but it is rare, even when she is willing, for her not to protest momentarily, and no less rare, even when she runs away to start with, for her not to end up surrendering.
In the males, too, preferences are sometimes manifest, although they are exceptional, temporary and by no means exclusive. The attraction that draws one of the young males, with a marked predilection, toward one of the young females does not prevent him from using others on occasion; more often than not it is proximity that guides his choice, and today’s choice does not influence tomorrow’s.
It also sometimes happens that two adult males are more especially interested in the same female; each of them experiences a visible irritation as soon as she falls into the other’s hands; the witness growls, comes running and substitutes himself if he is the stronger, growls and resigns himself if he is the weaker; but a state of aversion persists, and without knowing exactly why, the two rivals willingly fight, on the slightest pretext, especially in spring, and slightly more if they are of different races. Then the hostility passes as quickly as it arose.
As for the amorous parades that will one day mask and embellish the brutalities of the work, they are only fashionable in certain insects and a few birds. Inferior species, which date from an age already remote, have had the leisure, in two or three thousand centuries, to attain a state of civilization that they will no longer surpass. On high and down below, in the branches of the trees and the grasses of the clearings, winged males dance around females, turn cartwheels, inflate their plumage, prance, and trill throaty songs intended to seduce...
A human stops in the middle of a puddle to watch the frolics of the brilliant bird from a distance, but is too young to comprehend them, and he laughs, amused to see the luxury of tenderness deployed that will later fill the lives of his own kind.
LXIV. Modesty
Those that are watched in action, whatever they are doing, are animated in their tasks; the gaze of their brethren excites them. On the other hand, it never embarrasses them; none of life’s actions seem to require more than any other to be concealed. All animal needs are manifest with equal simplicity, and are equally satisfactory; in the absence of any convention, nothing incites anyone to hide their appetites or their emotions, and no hypocrisy encumbers relationships.
By means of certain signs, however, the announcement of what will become modesty can already be discerned, and even the various forms that it will eventually affect.
The first manifestations of those phenomena go back to the days when Daâh lived alone. At all times he understood the dangers of certain postures required by his organic functions; he has recognized the need at those dangerous moments, when it would be awkward to defend himself, to protect himself from a surprise attack; in order to cover his behind, he always looks for the rampart of a rock or a tree trunk; he never commits himself until he has checked that no gaze is spying on him, and for as long as the critical pose lasts, his anxious eyes keep watch on the surroundings. Similarly, he hides his excreta, which might denounce his passage and guide an enemy.
This scatological prudence, which is imposed on a daily basis, could not take long to constitute an inveterate habit and become a rule—with the reservation, however, that the requirement for dissimulation only exists in the context of encountering an eventual enemy, and does not concern familiar individuals from whom there is nothing to fear.
An analogous suspicion concerns the act of sexual intercourse; that, too, and more than any other, exposes one to the dangers of a surprise and puts life in peril; more than any other, it necessitates the choice of a safe place. Never, in the times of his solitude, did Daâh knock down a spouse without first checking the surroundings, and his eye remained alert.
That anguish is attenuated somewhat for his sons, who know that they are protected by numbers; an alarm call will be uttered by others. On the other hand, communal existence has engendered a new inconvenience, less serious but unpleasant: the young males, in letting themselves be seen, risk exciting an envious individual and being dispossessed by him; the females have no similar dread. The circumspection that presently imposes itself on males thus has a less pressing character so far as the females are concerned; genital modesty was originally a virile prerogative rather than a feminine one, and the centuries have not effaced all vestiges of that initial state.
Another reason, even more imperious, soon incites males to hide an organ too vulnerable to blows; many beasts attack there, knowing it to be a vulnerable spot; several were wounded by dogs, horses or humans. Branches are also to be feared, and creepers, and thorns; as they plunge into the undergrowth, the young males veil their nether regions with their free hand, as the young women protect their breasts; the modest gesture of Venus is shared by both sexes.
In spite of these measures, accidents were repeated until the day when the ingenious son of Ta, irritated by a wound, found in his anger the idea of binding the bear-cub skin covering his back around his loins—and that was the first armor. All the sons imitated him, but the daughters, for whom that precaution had less utility, did not adopt it.
That invention had social consequences; it gave rise to the notion of property. Until then, the male only possessed his offensive weapon, which never quit him and became part of him; henceforth, he has a defensive weapon, less inherent to his person, but which it is good to conserve; no one takes his club from him, but someone might steal his loincloth. Practical sense is inaugurated, with the vices corollary to it, and they will develop together; opportunity will multiply them.
In fact, the hunter
who has taken it into his head to protect one part of his body will not take long to armor others. The hides that were not appreciated greatly while they were only offering protection against the rain will gain a major interest now that it is known that they might serve a purpose in combat; in the warm forest, they are not disputed to any great extent, but their merit will become more obvious as climates become cooler in the next period.
The best furs will also belong to the strongest, the women will only have them if any remain; they will dress themselves in rags abandoned by combatants who have found better ones—and that regime, to which the egotism of the male will restrict them for several thousand years, will harden them so well against the cold that they will permanently retain the faculty of living in a state of semi-nudity.
LXV. Esthetics
In a landscape, they see the brambles, because they scratch, the branches, because they block the way, and the undergrowth, because it might conceal an enemy. In the presence of an obstruction, the only question to be decided is whether it is better to go across or around it. In what measure will it procure fatigue, prey and danger? That is all. If it promises to be practicable and to provide nutrition, visages will expand; if it is difficult to penetrate and threatens to conceal wild beasts, faces become sullen. One likes it if it is brighter, fears it if it is more obscure.
They are radically insensitive to the beauty of forms. The contours of an object, whatever it is, constitute a reality that nothing distinguishes from any other; all aspects of matter are recorded indifferently. No one has any idea of comparing what they are with what they are not, and concluding, by virtue of that imaginary juxtaposition, the admiration of a beauty. They cannot group on their retinas the objects juxtaposed there to reconstitute the whole that they have before them, and discern the harmony therein; things appear to them in isolation, always independent of one another, and fix attention in an exclusive fashion that prevents any relationship between them being observed.
The grandiose spectacles of nature can impress them with terror, anguish or vertigo, but it is the morbidity of their nerves that is struck, and their minds do not perceive the majesty inherent in them. The magic of blossoming and nascence does not interest them; they do not see it. The grace of a curving vine does not exist for them. Birdsong does not possess any charm; they only represent it as the provocation of an ungraspable prey; the voice of frogs is more beautiful, since it promises a meal.
Their esthetic sensibility is limited to the horror of darkness, the apprehension of the penumbra and a violent liking for anything shiny. All reflections attract them, except that of water, which is too frequent to warrant their taking notice of it. Around a piece of quartz that scintillates in the flank of a rock, they jostle one another; if one of them succeeds in prying loose that splendor, he turns it over and over in his stout fingers, sniffs it, bites it and ends up throwing it into the mud, for no desire is durable; someone else immediately picks it up. On the iridescent nacre of a shell, they lean in a group, marveling at the changing light, their eyes sparkling with joy; when the heads come up again, a glorious laughter expands the faces. Why?
They only notice certain colors. Green, brown and gray, to which they are too accustomed by the trees, the mud and the clouds, might as well not exist; they are confounded in an indifference that has become, at length, incapable of observation. Blue provokes their attention more because it only shows itself rarely through gaps in the sky. In truth, they only gaze with pleasure at bright yellow and red—especially red—which solicit the eye by the brutality of their glare. One could say that they like them, insofar as they are curious, and those two colors exert a prestige on the eye that conceals some mystery; they run toward them with a particular urgency, which is not completely explained by the crudity of the hues.
It suffices for a child to dive into a thicket, where he has glimpsed a scarlet flower, for other infants, or even older children, to launch themselves forward to dispute its possession; the one who succeeds in picking it adopts a triumphant attitude, and contemplates the flamboyant petals at arm’s length. He seems to be searching for something, or rummaging in his memory to recover a fleeting memory. The immobility of his irises, under frowning eyebrows, expresses the effort of attention that one has before a face glimpsed once, a long time ago, which one is trying to recognize.
What, then, are they remembering? In a few millennia, barbaric peoples will have a reason for cherishing the splendor of crimsons, incarnadines and oranges, which evoke fire, but these people have never seen it. Could it be that they are recalling it without knowing it, because their ancestors, in the times of the Pliocene and the dry forest, watched conifers struck by lightning blazes? Might the fearful admiration of those distant ancestors have left a memory in the race that will not perish?
Perhaps they are searching now, for the great living red and yellow flower. Although they no longer know that it exists, perhaps it is that of which they dream, because they lack it and have need of it. Perhaps it is to its conquest that the children hurl themselves when they encounter a rutilant corolla, a fragment of mica that lights up, a piece of nacre that glitters.
Was it also to the conquest in question that Daâh rushed when he nearly perished in pursuit of the fire follet, and toward the same conquest that they march, following the road indicated by the Suns?
LXVI. The Mute
Whereas Daâh was formed in solitude, with so much difficulty and slowness, his children, born in a group and living together, are animated by a less concentrated and more complicated life, less bleak and more productive. The more they exteriorize, the more they acquire a taste for it. Their curiosity and their appetite for vibration, combined with their surprising faculty of assimilation, renders them the most apt of all to profit from grouping and not to allow any of its possible benefits to be lost.
Not only do each one’s discoveries immediately enrich everyone, but the mental labor operated in the brain of one has an almost instantaneous repercussion in all the neighboring skulls. As if the surrounding movement were provoking an identical movement in those machines of sensation, they excite one another by means of their internal agitation; like piles that one brings closer together, they electrify one another mutually; the number of heads multiplies the lent forces in each of them. Eyes get used to looking at eyes; no longer being exclusively occupied, like Daâh’s, in scanning the material world, they learn to observe the unreal world of ideas, and pupils already know how to see, in the depths of pupils, the wellsprings of thought rising up like water seething in a troubled spring.
They glimpse it; it is there; they sense something alive that is trying to emerge; they want it; in order to grasp it, they do what they can, and, as born hunters, they apply to its conquest the means that they employ against the prey that similarly hides in holes. Sometimes, two beings, face to face, enigmas to one another, look at one another intently; they seem to be searching, via the bay of the pupils, the depths of their heads; on the two masks, impatience contracts the muscles; the eyebrows agitate, the nostrils distend, the lips draw back and little guttural cries, which resemble plaints, are exhaled from the depths of their throats.
Their tongues try to modulate in passing the air that flows under the palate; the sounds, before becoming words, make a music of sharp and changing notes; the voices that would like to talk only succeed in singing. As if they were obscurely conscious of a possibility that escapes them, they exert themselves in a vague effort, in quest of a means of expression they do not know, but of which they have a presentiment; before knowing that it will exist, they divine it by virtue of the need that they have, and they suffer from not having it.
Daâh believed that he did not lack anything, as long as he could howl in imitation of the wild beasts, which have no speech. In spite of his cries, however, Daâh was silent; they were mute.
Certainly, they like human eyes, but even more, they like the sound of the human voice. It is dearer to them than anything else; more than anything
else, it procures them an impression of security; even though they are not very helpful and do not expect anything of one another, they comfort one another nevertheless, by the mutual awareness of their presence and the guarantee that the reassuring sound of the voice gives them. A cry of terror in the night frightens them by contagion, but tranquilizes them by the same token, by proving to them that they are not alone.
Nothing causes them as much anguish as the weight of silence; it stifles and crushes; it is worse and more redoubtable than obscurity, because it affirms isolation more fully. In the darkness, one can hide, crouch down, make oneself forget the peril, and cling warmly to oneself; in the silence, there is no refuge from the panic of the darkness that one bears within oneself; it makes one understand death!
And of the horror that our ancestors had in the forest, we find the vestiges in the desolation of the deaf, more abandoned than the blind.
LXVII. The Spider
At the moment of the halt, Daâh has his back against a tree trunk; old Ta has just sat down beside him. They are both exhausted, and their lassitude brings them together; it is one of those bad moments when they feel throughout their being the weight of the discouragement accumulated by so many efforts, always similar, which never change anything at all. That plaintive reverie is merely a fatigue of their bodies, interpreted by their brains. Sometimes, the female turns to the male, as if to search in his pupils for the direction of his mind.
Suddenly, she pushes him, in order to show him, close at hand, a Wasp that is caught in a Spider’s web, and struggling in its toils. He laughs. The Spider comes. The couple both interest themselves in the spectacle, but the woman and the man are not discovering the same things. Ta senses in her nerves the panic of the animal that is about to be devoured, and Daâh the triumph of the one that is about to eat.
Daâh: The First Human Page 17
