A Night of Serious Drinking

by Rene Daumal

  “It was at that moment that I called in a few of the top Fidgeters who, under my directions, set about organizing the destruction of the young. The method is quite straightforward; the children are taken at the time when their intelligence is not yet fully developed, and their passions respond to the slightest stimulation; they are made to live in companies, dressed and armed uniformly, and by means of magic speeches and collective physical exercises, whose secret is ours alone, we give them what we call ‘the cult of the common ideal’; this is an absolute devotion to a loud-mouthed, authoritarian person, or to a particular form of dress, or to some catch phrase, or to a certain grouping of colors, or whatever. All we need then is to have here two opposing groups of young people (or more than two, but an even number is preferable) who have been kept at a high level of emotional tension; the sole precaution to take is to leave no time for their brains to function, but that’s easy enough. Then (are you with me?) when they have reached just the right pitch, they are let loose on one another … and afterwards, we can breathe easy for a while. This, at the same time, occupies and enriches the manufacturers and sellers of uniforms and armaments, and the authors of tracts which recommend the uses of carnage, one of whom wrote recently: ‘The young man who is not killed in the flower of youth is not a young man, he is the old man of tomorrow.’”

  40

  I was extremely surprised I had been able to hold out all this time without a drink. But it couldn’t last, and I even went as far as thinking: “Dammit, I shan’t bother going to see the gods, as that orderly chap calls them. It’s sure to be the same old thing … I’d rather get back straight away.” So I started to go back down the steps of the cathedral, which I had begun to climb. There, found myself face to face with my friend the orderly, who had turned up dead on time for our rendezvous.

  “You can’t go back the way you came. It would take too long. It will be quicker this way. And anyway, think of the people you’ll be telling all this to one day. They’d be terribly disappointed.”

  It’s you he was talking about, and this latter argument was as strong as the first. But I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed anyway; I know I was.

  On the outside the cathedral was adorned with a number of papier mâché statues, apparently those of the gods of long ago. For the living gods never come here except in their old age; then, when their bodies stop functioning (and take on the curious name of ‘mortal remains’), they are disposed of after modeling for the effigies that I was now looking at. They continue, nonetheless, to exercise their powers, through the intermediary of the living gods who are regarded as the mouthpieces of the papier mâché gods. And the system overall is pretty complicated. Each category of Escapees sends a delegate to sit with the gods or, as they say, with the Primes. So there is a Primemover, a Primeplayer, a Primepainter, a Primepwatt, a Primescienter, a Primesopher, and so on. Each one legislates upon his own particular subject.

  Then a portal of sorts opened up for us, we passed through a heavily padded revolving door, and came into the nave. A great many of the faithful and a number of servants were fussing over the gods, about a dozen in number, who were seated in the middle of the choir around an aperture from which arose smoking vapors, as in Lucian’s description. Two were dressed in braided uniforms with swords at their sides; it was explained to me that one of these drew up rules for massacres and the other for grammar. The rest were dressed simply in morning coats, all except the Primepope, who was wearing a cloak of red llama wool, which had an embroidered Solomon’s seal emblazoned on the back, a miter adorned with a crescent, double-soled Japanese sandals, a haruspex knife and a crucifix in his belt, and various ill-assorted accessories. They were all old, or at least looked it. “But,” the orderly said, “we calculate the organic age of a human being scientifically by the relationship between what he gives and what he receives. By this yardstick, these people are little children, as you can see.”

  41

  Hunched over the trap door, the Primes were avidly breathing in the fumes and praises rising through it, and drinking in with their eyes the gestures of adoration being made in their direction by the people down below. They seemed to feed on nothing else, and grow fat hearing their names chanted aloud.

  A great surge of emotion made me go weak at the knees when, having drawn near to the aperture, I heard far off the voice of Totochabo, who was still discoursing down there. But perhaps it also had something to do with the smell of wine and the alcoholic vapors billowing up from below, which, as I had to admit to myself, in anguish, was pretty nauseating. Through the buzzing sound in my ears, I could hear that voice, now a little nasal (but I was starting to have my doubts if it really was him), saying:

  “The word ‘taglufon,’ which I have coined on the spur of the moment to designate precisely a word created arbitrarily, or the adjective ‘unqualifiable,’ or the proposition ‘I tell lies,’ or even the word ‘word’ are, as our great Primelinguist calls them, ouroboric expressions, that is to say, ones that bite their own tails just like the famous worm.”

  Hearing his name pronounced, the Primelinguist gave a start, beamed, and swelled considerably. In a case like this, custom demanded, though it was not a strict obligation, that he should offer something in thanksgiving for this feast of glorification. He wrote a short note and as he held it for a moment over the aperture before releasing it, I managed by crawling underneath his armchair to decipher the message: “We decree that from this day forth the intensive use of ouroboric expressions shall be obligatory in all schools.” Signed: The Primelinguist.

  Twice or three times more, the god of language inhaled the vapors of a punch that was being prepared below in his honor, and familiarly thumped the Primescienter on the shoulder.

  “Well now, my dear fellow,” he said. “Ouroborism is henceforth in fashion. What are you doing about it in your area?”

  “We have already put it into practice,” said the other. “For instance, we explain that if the cow is not carnivorous, it is because otherwise it would not be a cow; that the Earth revolves around the sun because the latter occupies one of the foci of the ellipse described by our globe; that man seeks happiness because he is endowed with a positive eudaemonotropism; that ice floats on water because of its lower density; and that two and two always make four because otherwise it would be absurd. Quite recently, one of our Scienters has promoted the ‘operational concept’ which is, he says, a concept identical to the operation one must carry out in conceiving it; in the same way, the concept of a measure is identical to the operation of measuring. Nobody is more ouroboristic than we are, you see.”

  “And we aren’t lagging behind,” said the Primepwatt. “One of my protégés, a few years ago, put to his fellow members the question: ‘Why do you write?’ and the substance of almost all the answers was: ‘in order to express ourselves’ or ‘we cannot do otherwise.’ One even replied ‘because I’m weak,’ although he could put together quite magnificently words whose sparkling tail, he said more or less, was then bitten again by a worm which he himself had just bitten. Only one dared to say cynically that he wrote to arrange to meet his reader, but hardly anyone ever came to the meetings he arranged, and anyway we have had him excommunicated.”

  A general ripple of contentment spread among the gods. Each one strove to appear more ouroboristic than the others.

  The Primecrat, when asked in his turn to demonstrate his ouroborism, cupped his hands and shouted through the trap door to his followers:

  “Take up military sports! For the sportsman of today is the soldier of tomorrow. The soldier of tomorrow will repel the invader and at the same time open up new markets for the industries of his country. The industries will prosper, the country will become rich, and thus it will be able to support associations which encourage military preparations and from these will emerge the soldiers of the day after tomorrow, who will repel the invader and at the same time open up new markets …”

  The mechanical repeater was brought in. In
somber mood, I recalled my whole life up to this day, and my head spun with the buzzing of a hundred and one ouroboristic worms. I remembered the drinking parties that made us thirsty and the thirst that made us drink; I thought back to Sidonius recounting his endless dream; to the people who worked to be able to eat and who ate to have the strength to work; to the black thoughts I drowned with such sadness in the cask and which were reborn in different hues. Between the vicious circles of the drinking party and those of the delusory paradises, I would never again be able to choose, I could no longer be part of their revolutions, I was from that moment no more than a wasteland.

  42

  “In my view,” the Primepope declared slowly, “my law is simple; you know what it is and I stand by it: to act without knowledge and to know without acting. If down there they once started understanding what they were doing and doing what they understood, they would become like the woman who was carrying a firebrand and a bucket of water and who, when questioned by a holy man, explained that the fire was for setting Paradise alight and the water for extinguishing the flames of Hell, to the end that human beings might henceforth do what they had to do, no longer through hope or fear of some future fate, but solely for the love of God. If the same thing happened to us, we would all be burnt to a crisp … or drowned, I’m not sure which,” he added maliciously.

  All the gods burst into guffaws of laughter, stood up, and began dancing in a circle around the trap door. I was struck, hurled to the ground, dragged and pushed along by the feet of this merry-go-round, and the whole thing was so disagreeable, so absurd, and I was so little part of it that I did not even try to get up or to cling on, and then there I was, right on the rim of the hole, balancing like a dead leaf awaiting the next gust of wind without worrying where it’ll come from, and the next kick sent me toppling over.

  As I fell, I could still hear the last words the orderly shouted to me: “Just the time it takes to think of it, I told you!”

  PART III

  The cold light of day

  1

  My fall was broken by a straw mattress and I came to no harm. I was simply stunned as it dawned on me that I had fallen not much more than my own height; the trap door was less than two meters from the ground. I had been vaguely hoping for something like the fall of an angel through fourteen abysses, something magnificent and catastrophic, and all there’d been was a little jolt like you get in a bus when it brakes too sharply. I had also been expecting to be greeted with great bursts of laughter. But I was met with silence. The room was empty, and gradually I began to realize that it was no larger than a room in a country tavern. A few candles were still burning in their congealed wax tears. The floor was littered with broken bottles, tankards, pitchers, a couple of empty casks, fag ends, tins of food, glasses and cups, and these I took as proof that the drinking party had not just been a dream.

  But where were the drinkers? Many had no doubt tried to escape and were probably still up there where I had just come from, busily fidgeting, fabricating, or clarificating. Some perhaps had been no more than projections of my mind, especially those two or three friends of whom I now thought sadly; very likely I had imagined them to cloak my loneliness, but were they in fact shut away like me in their houses at some point on the globe (if it were a point, if it were a globe)? And what about the old man who was always talking about the power of words? Now he must have been a phantom created by my brain, which gave him all my habits of mind; he it was who, by lobbing my own sophisms back at me, had finally managed to silence me for a moment. “Shut up, I said!” he had shouted, and I could still hear those words inside my head and I hear them still from time to time, during those brief moments when I allow myself the pleasure of idle chitchat.

  2

  I got to my feet and the first thing I did was to look round for something to drink. By mixing together what was left in a number of bottles, I managed to get enough for a glass of something pretty nauseating which, however, revived me a little.

  I walked round the room. There was no door leading to the outside. I was held as fast as a bee in a strongbox. Through the window all I could see were stout iron bars and the reflection of my own features in the glass. A small, steep stairway led up to a garret, where I discovered only an old iron bedstead and several trunks full of books; it was all that was left of the delusions of paradise, the only physical reality remaining of the whole phantasmagoria. There too, the skylight was firmly barred. Outside, it was pitch black.

  I came down again and my first concern was for the fire which was dying in the hearth. The wood boxes were empty. With great difficulty, I broke up the oldest chair. The straw from the seat caught easily on the embers, but with the struts and the back I had to blow until I became dizzy. The poor fire was just about spent; it wanted to starve to death—or perhaps it was acting up a bit. But at last, it starts licking a piece of old oak, gouging small brownish craters in the varnish, blackening the wood, which gradually breaks into a swarm of glowing pin points, and all at once it stutters, shoots out a red tongue, and seizes the strut in its teeth. From that point on, it was violent and insatiable. I had to dole out modest mouthfuls to it, for the fuel was not inexhaustible and it was vital, though I couldn’t say how I was so sure of this, that the fire should last until daybreak.

  3

  One by one, the three chairs went on the fire. Then an armchair, then the staves of the empty barrels, and finally the straw mattress.

  After each offering, I pressed my nose against a windowpane. Outside was nothing but unspeakable blackness. And I, who had believed myself to be a poet, could not find words with which to call the sun. I said to him:

  “O Sun! Come forth from your pit, smash the door, strike the fog, eat the night, dissolve the darkness, reveal yourself, show us the world, reveal us to the world, speak, O Sun! Come forth from your pit, speak, show us you are there, show us who you are!”

  This was far too clumsy. I threw some wood on the fire and tried another tack:

  “Come out from there, if you can! Show yourself, if you dare! But you are too scared of the dark, you are frightened to death in your pit, you are a small pit yourself in the black sky, you poor old sun, you’re just a tiny, round absence!”

  This did not work any better. After giving the fire a few boards from an old wardrobe, I started again:

  “Come, O Sun! Thy table is set for thee. Every tree, every plant, every animal and every man, every sea and every river all stand waiting for thee to come and grasp them in thy burning arms and raise them to thy devouring maw which is the mouth of heaven; come eat and drink, thy table is served from East to West!”

  This approach was just as ineffective. Before long, there was nothing left to burn in the room. I went and got the bedding from the loft and fed it bit by bit to the flames.

  “O Sun! Sun which art the oldest, which art the youngest, which art the wisest, and the most foolish, which art never diminished, never shared, but always one and yet contained whole in the eye of each living thing! Thou! the greatest, who dost fill up space, the smallest, that passest through the eye of a needle, the freest, that nothing can touch, but yet the most bound by law, for thou canst not but rise soon!”

  This was cleverer, I thought, but it was still no good. Soon I had to start burning the books. You have no idea how difficult it is. Books burn very badly, very slowly, giving more ash than flame. You have to turn the pages over in the heart of the fire with the end of the poker, one by one, for the very last time; if you don’t, they char on the outside, go out and stifle the flames. And they leave a layered mass of ash, which you have to break into bits without mercy for the books you once loved as they come again before your eyes, printed white on black, fragile sheets which rear up and then shrink back again drily rustling.

  4

  While you’re burning books, you can’t talk much. And when the books were used up, something else was needed pretty smartly. So I run up to the garret and scrabble about in every corner: nothing that
’ll burn. I come down again, hunt around once more, but still find nothing. My eyes scan the room in desperation but meet nothing save stone and metal; after all, I could hardly set the whole house on fire. And as my eyes dropped with discouragement, they chanced to fall right next to me upon the very thing I had been seeking far from me: the material of my clothes which would burn.

  With my linen, it was easy enough. But burning a jacket is every bit as difficult as burning a dictionary. For every small incandescence, you get an immediate burgeoning of bubbling lava, like so many leprous negroid heads that rear up emitting coils of thick, acrid smoke in which tiny airships made of soot float gently. Fortunately, my clothes were not made of pure wool, and the chimney was by this time drawing well.

  As I was burning my trousers, thread by thread, stirring them constantly with the poker to maintain the unburnt parts of the cloth in contact with the reluctant flames, I saw the fire turn curiously pale. I felt a light cool breeze caressing my naked shoulders. A milky glimmer melted the shadows around me. I raked together the still glowing embers and covered them with cinders so that the fire would last for some time yet. I went to the window and saw in the depths of the bluish air teeming masses of pink clouds and suddenly, flushing on the horizon, a beam of gold, a tiny burning dome slowly rising into a blinding scream.

  5

  Having long since ventured far beyond the bounds of plausibility, am I now about to extricate myself by waking my hero and getting him to say: “It was only a dream?” It’s an ancient ploy and one to which I might yet resort. But the storyteller who adopts it does not ordinarily cast doubts on the convention that dream states are false and wakefulness true. Even admitting that this proposition is acceptable in everyday life, with the rider that dreaming and waking are relative to one another, in the world of fiction it becomes suspect for there these states of being are themselves narrative devices and therefore falsehoods. Perhaps in that case we should invert the terms. If we did so, then you who are listening to me and I who am speaking to you would both be acting out a dream play in the drowsy quiescence into which my tale has plunged us. Perchance to wake! Somewhere, somehow you would become yourself once more. For me, the entire story of the drinking party and the delusory paradises would vanish into the depths of sleep, and I would wake naked, a prisoner in the doorless house which as the sun was rising began shuddering like a departing ship, rolling and pitching and throwing me all over the place, wide awake this time, horribly awake.