by Rene Daumal
“I was bringing up this Kaffir, in Cracow, in the pigeon loft. One day …”
I broke in, suggesting he should have a drink first so as to avoid the risk—to him—of having his tongue roll up into a ball and—to me—of having my lug-holes hammered at without doing my brains any good whatsoever. He agreed with a gesture which consisted of holding up a small cask of Tokay at arm’s length above his head and my head respectively, the unimpeded flow from the open bung-hole sloshing into our stomachs in accordance with the method known as “never letting it touch the sides.” Then he took up his story rather more clearly:
“The Kaffir, who tended the garden and looked after the chickens, in Cracow, used to sleep in the pigeon loft. He said it was ‘very good for the breath.’ One night, I had this terrifying dream. A huge corkscrew, which was the earth, was spinning round, turning on its axis and twisting in its own spiral, just like the signs outside American barbershops, and I could see myself, no bigger than a bug but not hanging on so well, slither and stumble over the helix, and with my thoughts sent whirling down moving staircases made of a priori shapes. Suddenly, the fatal moment, there is a loud crack, my neck snaps, I fall flat on my face and I emerge in a splash of sparks before the Kaffir who had come to wake me. He says: ‘Did you have an attack of the nasties, then? Come and look at this.’ And he leads me to the pigeon loft and gets me to peep through a hole in the wall. I put my eye to it. I see a terrifying sight: a huge corkscrew, which was the Earth, was spinning round, turning on its axis and twisting in its own spiral, just like the signs outside American barbershops, and I could see myself, no bigger than a bug, but not hanging on so well. …”
Eyes popping, the bumps on his forehead lit up, his moustache bristling, little Sidonius began the story again, which slotted into itself endlessly like the popular refrains everybody knows. He spoke feverishly, mangling his words. I listened, paralyzed with horror, at least ten times to his appalling rotating story. Then I went off to get a drink.
15
It is not easy to get nocturnal memories together. External events become confused with inner ramblings. With all the strength at my disposal, I drove out the image of a sunny landscape, a bird’s song, a forest walk, told them all to go to the angel, and why, you ask, did I tell them to go to the angel? Why? Because, my dear sir, I wanted to see the devil face to face, I said, and I told him—this chap who couldn’t do anything about it—I told him straight:
“It’s not the end of it when you’ve drowned your black thoughts, because afterwards there are blue thoughts and red thoughts and yellow thoughts. …”
“They aren’t thoughts,” the chap said in an unctuous voice, “they aren’t thoughts at all, they’re little creepy-crawlies.”
I was dumbfounded. Then I was installed on a barrel where I was expected to improvise bacchic litanies. A huge choir of the drollest characters chanted the refrain. So I began:
Oh! the thirst …
(Chorus: which may which may which might)
… of the stomach
(Chorus: which reeks which reeks which rots)
Oh! the thirst …
(Chorus: which may which may which might)
… of the chest
(Chorus: which reeks which reeks which rots)
Oh! the thirst …
(Chorus: which may which may which might)
… of the brain
(Chorus: which reeks which reeks which rots)
As you can see, it was very simple. Next came “Oh! the hunger of the mouth,” then “of the nose” and “of the eye,” all on the same pattern but growing faster. A number of people started dancing a dance to it, an infernal dance such as only rebellious tadpoles in a pond can dance when they suddenly realize they don’t want to grow up to be frogs.
(They’d like to be toads, claiming that this would be more lyrical. But they’ll not be frogs or toads, they’ll be stench which may which may which might, they’ll be food for others which reeks which reeks which rots.)
Directing this saraband, I believed I was a pope at the very least and then suddenly I was afraid: am I not going mad? To test myself, I went over the theory of the steam engine in my mind. That’s what I’d come to. All at once I shouted to myself: “You’re an idiot!”—and by God I really meant it. For then I knew. All this might last some time yet, but from that moment on our drinking party carried within it the seed of a lethal disease.
16
Now I was not the only one there who sensed that things would turn out badly. While Totochabo went on talking—he was inexhaustible, having an answer for everything—to an audience which did not seem to grow perceptibly smaller, little groups formed in dark corners and plotted. At the outset, the most agitated group crowded round Father Pictorius, a monk at least in dress who was mumbling prophecies about great tribulations to come. He had already packed his bags. Everything was ready, tied with string, and labeled. He planned to take the bare necessities only: typewriter, a barrel of ink, ten trunkfuls of bedside books (he knew the rest by heart), the chicken runs, the portable rabbit warren, the best armchair, the piano plus eats and, of course, drinks.
He was saying:
“Brothers, here you are, teeming and flocking around, rotting away in routine. Soon the cellars will be dry and then what will become of us? There are those who will die deplorable deaths and those who will take to drinking horrid chemical potions. We shall behold men who kill each other for a droplet of tincture of iodine. We shall behold women who sell themselves for a bottle of Jeyes’. We shall behold mothers who distill their children and extract unmentionable liquors from them. This will last for seven years. During the next seven years, we shall drink blood. First, the blood of corpses for the space of one year. Next, the blood of the sick for the space of two years. Then, each of us will drink his own blood for the space of four years. During the next seven years, we shall drink nothing but tears, and, to quench their thirst, children will invent machines for making their parents weep. And it shall come to pass that there will be nothing left to drink, and each man will cry out to his god: ‘Give me back my vines!’ and each god will answer: ‘Give me back my sun!’ but there shall be neither suns nor vines nor any manner of living in harmony the one with the other.
“Suns and vines, these we still have. But without thirst, no one makes wine. When no one makes wine, vines are not grown. When vines are not grown, the suns move away: they have better things to do than to warm lands which have not drinkers, and they shall say unto one another: ‘Come! let us live henceforth for ourselves.’ Is that what you want?”
“No, no!” muttered the audience.
“Do you thirst?”
“Yes!” confessed the audience.
“Since you do, let us to the vines! But if that is what you want, you must set out like me, renouncing all worldly goods and taking only the bare necessities. Let he who thirsts follow me!”
At this, there was a deafening hubbub with everybody busy packing the bare necessities.
First to set off—but which way did they go? this I was to find out only some time later—were those who took just a toothbrush. Then those who took their watch as well. Next those with a small case. As for the rest, I only became aware of their departure a long time afterwards on account of the happenings which I shall relate in a moment.
And Father Pictorius? He remained with us to complete his prophetic mission.
17
He wasn’t the only one stirring things up. In another corner, Amédée Gocourt had clambered onto some trestles from which he spoke in his customary style:
“Citizens, I crave your pardon. But this moment is as dramatic as the tide of humanity itself. Now is the time when the poet’s gaze, honed to a fine edge by the most recent discoveries of psychoanalysis, turns in on the cardinal chasms of its own wretchedness. And what catch does he land from his fishing in troubled souls, in the bloody slime of crowds united by the flashing upturns of history, crowds which have yet to be spat out by the
city? He has landed the night fish of disaster, that sign of a quite special captivity in the present conjunction of the fortuitous events which beset us, a conjunction that burns like the fire which forged the chains that shall soon be broken by the cataclysmic effusion of the great Dream Revolution. I’m sorry, comrades, forgive me, but really, in all conscience, do you not find this intolerable?”
Thereupon, the group began to protest, rifts appeared, some droning on where they were and others swarming around other prophets. A number shut themselves up in a cupboard with a lighted wax taper, bottles of beer, and large quantities of paper and there set about composing a long treatise in ten volumes on the Errors yet to be made in deciding what materialistic dialectics is not. At intervals, one of them would emerge from the cupboard and read out the latest completed chapter in an acid voice. Then he would go back in again and they’d all start composing once more; not without the odd quarrel, as could be seen through the keyhole. But when I put my eye to the keyhole for the fifth or sixth time, who do I see? Nobody, the cupboard’s empty.
From this moment, the number of mysterious disappearances began to get alarming.
18
While making my way to where there was most to drink, I was jostled by several malcontents who had yet to find their barrack, church, cave, cupboard, or vineyard in the sun. I mingled with them for some time. Georges Arrachement was moving among them looking harassed but with a nasty gleam in the folds of his lips and around the eyes. In a staccato voice, he declared that it was always the same old thing, that individuals here or elsewhere would always be victims of the collective process and that God owed mankind a very large debt.
A little further on, I was again joined by Solo the curio man who took me by the arm, saying:
“You are quite right to get away from those prattlers. There’s one thing that they don’t know: even if they find the door, there’s no way of opening it unless you’ve got the key. And even if you’ve got a key, it will only fit one lock and you’ll just fetch up against a second door. They’ve forgotten about the golden touch, and the hand of glory that opens all doors. But we know, you and I, do we not, what it costs to acquire the golden touch.”
“Indeed we do know what it costs and we have not yet paid the price,” I replied mechanically as I reflected: “He’s right but he’s also wrong. How can that be?” Then I said to myself a second time: “You’re an idiot!” Aloud I observed: “We must think of the present moment.”
“Why don’t you belt up!” yelled Totochabo, into whom I had just stupidly cannoned.
I really had the feeling that I hadn’t spoken. But this turn of events occurred so appositely that I was no longer sure if I could go on propping myself up. My hands did not know where to put themselves and pulled on my arms which pulled on my shoulders which pulled on my neck muscles which pulled on my lower jaw which dropped expressing my discomfiture. I suddenly felt that my feet were walking on a knife-edge, toes turned in like a gibbon’s. I was unseated from my body, and lying flat in the dust, I looked up at my poor mount, which had no idea how it was to remain standing. The old man hooted with laughter. I could have fetched him one. But had I done so, I would have been the one to get hit.
19
He left me in this state for a full minute. Finally he fetched a blanket from a corner, spread it on the ground and said:
“You’ve drunk too much. Lie on this, rest your bones, and think.”
I felt I was steeped in peace. Now I could think freely. In fact, I went to sleep.
I woke up feeling very cross, first because Marcellin was telling me that “my snoring was stopping everybody dreaming” and also because I had this vague memory of having missed yet another opportunity for thinking. But I was quickly consoled as I told myself that next time I would stick a pin in my thigh, or do something similar, so as not to forget.
But mostly I was annoyed because I never snore except when I’m very tired (perhaps the drinking also had something to do with it), and when I did snore for once, Marcellin has to go and tell everybody. And he said I was stopping the others from dreaming. He said dreaming, not sleeping. We never hear the end of his damned shallow-sleep poetry.
“If only he could say what is true!” said Totochabo.
Marcellin and I looked at him. He went on:
“You heard. If only you could stop dreaming for a minute, we could talk perhaps. But talk about what?”
And with a shrug of the spine, he made as if to go. Marcellin held him back by the tail of his coat, and declared:
“Now listen. I’m very much aware that I can’t think. I’m a poet. But I cannot think. I was never shown how. I’m always being teased about it. When I hear my friends holding philosophical discussions, I’d like to join in too, but they always go too fast for me. They tell me to read Plato, the Upanishads, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, Hegel, Benjamin Fondane, the Tao-Teh, Karl Marx, and even the Bible. I’ve had many goes at reading all of them, except the Bible, because (Bible indeed!) they must be having me on. It’s all crystal clear as I read the stuff, but afterwards I forget, or can’t talk about it, or come up with contradictory ideas which I can’t choose between, in a word, it doesn’t work.”
“My dear Marcellin,” I began, “first, you should …”
“Shut up, I said!” the old man shouted again and the superior smile blooming on my lips slid down into my stomach. “Carry on!” he said to Marcellin who proceeded to finish what he was saying:
“Well, now. I want you to tell me once and for all if I am an idiot and, if I’m not, what you have to do in order to think.”
“Think about what?” Totochabo said wearily and he turned away.
This time, we were both too dismayed to try and stop him. But, more important, we were thirsty and it did not take us too long to discover a small demijohn which fitted the bill very nicely. As we drank, lounging like ancient Romans, we recited convoluted poems. Just before my eyes closed, I had a vague twinge of conscience just as you do sometimes when you take a few steps back and rise onto the tips of your woes so as to get a good run at sleep and I remarked to Marcellin that I was much more of an idiot than he believed but a much less of one than I thought, which was almost true.
PART II
Delusions of paradise
1
After delivering this judgment on myself for the third time, I did not know where to turn. I slept a while and then I was aware of being quite alone in the middle of a crowd that was becoming more and more restless. There was nothing really to cling to, except thirst. Taking a swig of some very bad rum, with no idea that I was about to embark on a journey a moment later, I endeavored to remind myself that I had come to listen to a talk about the what, what was it, on the power of, what did he say it was, the word was on the tip of my tongue. … I cock an ear on the off chance but forget to open my eyes and wham! I’ve scarcely time to pick up the threads when something weighing ninety kilos hits me in the stomach, bowls me over, says sorry, says sorry to the floor, and to my bottle, apologizes to a stool, stands up quick as a lead-bellied kelly and—it was Amédée Gocourt—says:
“Sorry, old man, I’m looking for the exit.”
That’s just what he should not have said. Three big blokes appear from the shadows and grab him by the collar:
“The what? You’re looking for the what?”
“The exit, like I said.”
“This place has only three exits, sir,” one of the big blokes snarled! “Madness and death.”
I tot them up on my fingers, feel very intelligent and ask:
“What’s the third?”
Thereupon, they hurl themselves upon me, cover my mouth with their great mitts, pick me up like one of those floppy stretchers, run smartly up a small, steep, dirty stairway with me so arranged that my buttocks and head in turn bang against the steps; then we are at the top, staggering somewhat, in a garret where there is a low doorway and over it a sign:
SICK BAY
“Go and have a look i
n there,” the largest of them said.
I go in and while the big blokes observed me through the keyhole and various other chinks deliberately made in the door (for this was one of the few amusements that they were allowed) and with the walls shaking with the laughter they found difficult to control, I walk between two rows of iron bedsteads which held patients who were sick, wounded, had gone mad, or been dried out, in a word, anybody who had insisted on leaving.
2
A large, scruffy orderly appeared, flashed me a toothless grin and started to explain:
“You are now in the accident ward. As its name suggests the casualties here were drawn by accidental causes to try and escape or to believe it was possible to escape. You can see the results.”
He was quite right. One man had his head tied up, another had an arm wreathed in bandages, while the rest had legs in cradles, black patches over one eye or a lump of ice over their stomachs; some were asleep, others tossed and turned through sweaty nightmares, raved or groaned or remained savagely silent.
“What is being done for them?” I inquired.
“We do whatever we can and when they are up to it we send them back downstairs.”
“But do they ever drink?” I insisted.
“All our efforts lie in that direction, it goes without saying, and indeed that is what the treatment for their overall condition consists of. We start them on ten drops of cider in their breakfast and the dose is increased progressively. When they’re on six aperitifs per day, they are sent downstairs to resume a normal life. But we continue to keep them under observation in case they have a relapse. Which reminds me (and he gave me a suspicious look), I don’t suppose you are thirsty?”
“Dying for a drink,” I said.
Reassured, he offered me a shot from a flask which I returned to him drained to the last drop.
“You seem,” he said, “to have some fight left in you yet. And since that’s the case, I shall do you the very unusual favor of showing you round the other ward in the sick bay, the escapees’ ward. They are beyond help. They are convinced they’ve succeeded in getting away. All we can do is isolate them as much as possible from the other patients, for their illness can sometimes be extremely contagious. One of them—who is incidentally a gifted bacteriologist, for the disease does not necessarily attack the intellectual faculties—has even got it into his head that he was suffering from a microbic illness and he may be right. He spends his time looking for a serum and since the injections, vaccinations, and inoculations which he gives the patients are harmless enough and even keeps them from becoming neurasthenic, we do not interfere. Unfortunately, he belives that he himself is quite healthy and perfectly normal. Apart from this, Professor Mumu—that’s his name—would be one of the great geniuses of medical science. But come, you shall see him at work.”
