by Rene Daumal
6
The daylight and the violent tremors which shook the building changed the entire look of the place. The walls and floors began to deliquesce like wax in an oven, puckered, ran in deepening grooves which closed over and became flaccid pipes which oozed viscous, lukewarm liquids. I slipped and tripped amid slushy mounds which recoiled from my touch as if in pain; waves of stifling heat rose round me; I stumbled into holes full of brackish water and clung to springy stalks, which I could feel alive and throbbing in my hands with curiously familiar pulsations.
In moments of great danger, the emotions sometimes are anesthetized and the mechanisms of speech paralyzed. Thought, free of words and fear, then acts with its own certainty and clarity—coldly, logically. This was what was happening to me. In a flash, I realized that I had plummeted down into the lowest levels of the house. I could see huge pressurized boilers, engines, and complicated assemblages of ropes and levers, all made of pliable materials and awash in warm lubricant. Fuel was piped in from the floor above where a crusher first ground and mixed it. At the lower level, the resulting pulp passed through a series of stills, which purified it and extracted a red liquid. On the middle floor, a pump sucked up this liquid and sent it coursing towards the boilers where it was burnt. The flames were fanned by two large foundry bellows installed on each side of the pump. The air entered the bellows through two holes made in the top just below the fuel pipe.
With difficulty, I succeeded in reaching the room above. It was a sort of operation-cum-observation post. The only means of seeing out was provided by two lenses embedded in the wall like a pair of binoculars. The room was cluttered with levers, handles, gauges, and dials by means of which it was presumably possible to direct the movements of the mobile house.
Upon my first attempt at turning a knob, the whole place was seized with an inordinate shaking. Things cannoned into each other. I pulled on a wire, there was a terrific jolt followed by a brutal crash and an impact and then everything began to sway. I patiently continued my efforts with a feeling of utter detachment from what I was doing. Gradually, I learned which mechanisms were dangerous to engage and which had to be manipulated all the time to stop the house collapsing altogether. It was not long before I realized that it was an almost impossible thing to do and it was at that moment, fortunately, that servants appeared.
7
They were large anthropomorphic apes which till now had remained lurking, invisible, and silent, in every dark recess. They stood watching me and then one of them, seeing me carry out the same maneuver for the third or fourth time, came up with a gesture that indicated that he would take over. The others in turn emerged from the shadows and reproducing my movements with startling exactness, assumed control of all operations required for maintaining and running the building. Free of these tasks, I sat in the cockpit in front of the binoculars surrounded by my dials and gauges. Telephone links enabled me to communicate with my apes. In this way I learned to control them after a fashion, though this left me with very little time for rest, since at frequent intervals one of them would fall asleep, another would do as he pleased, and I had to bring them to heel.
Or again, an unexpected jolt would sometimes throw me right out of my seat down to the floor below where my fall created great confusion: the pump and the bellows would begin to race—for once the moment of great danger is passed, the anesthetized emotions start getting their own back—and I had very great difficulty climbing back up again.
Training apes to maintain and work the machine is not easy. Training them to keep a steady balance between the machine’s input and output is less easy still. But to train apes to drive the vehicle—I cannot imagine when I will even dare hope to manage such a thing. But only then will I be the master, free to go where I like without ties or fears or illusions. But I’m dreaming again.
8
At last, the house had slowly risen off the ground on two articulated columns. Two large stabilizers hanging from the middle floor maintained its equilibrium. On the ends of the stabilizers were sets of claws which seemed designed for a variety of purposes.
Very gingerly, I attempted to get my house moving. Since I couldn’t leave it, I would jolly well move around not just with it, like a snail, but in it, like a motorist. Indeed, a motorist once told me that in the end, with driving such a lot, he could feel his car as though it were his own body; he felt weighed down when carrying a passenger and was aware of the hardness of the stones which flew up from under his tires. It wasn’t long before the same thing happened to me and my perambulatory house. Now, when I say “I,” it’s very often my house I mean, not me. It may be at this very moment, that I am not saying anything at all, and it’s my house which is talking to your house; so why don’t we resort once more to the old literary device of waking up? Why not fall back on the language of illusion which we find so convenient?
In the end, then, I was standing on my own two legs. I stretched, took a few hesitant steps towards a mirror-fronted wardrobe, and through my eyeholes peered at the reflection of my vehicle. All in all, it wasn’t a bad likeness of me.
9
I dressed and went out into the street. I walked for a long time, letting my legs take me where they would. How beautiful the world was—except for mankind! Each moment each thing did what was required of it without demur. The unique uniqueness of things unchangeably repudiated its being indefinitely in an infinity of unities which joined once more into one-ness: the river was lost in the sea, the sea in the clouds, clouds in rain, rain in sap, sap in wheat, wheat in bread, bread in man—but at this point there was resistance as man looked on with that air of bewilderment and discontent, which sets him apart from all other animals on our planet. High and low, everything everywhere turned on the wheel of its own transformation: except mankind. A turning gyre growing ever denser settled upon the Earth till its protoplasm heavy with oversized molecules could descend no further, checked its descent and slowly swam back upstream, from bacillae through to cedar trees, from infusoria to elephants. And the turning of this circle would have been without impediment for all time but for mankind that, resisting transformation, attempted with great travail to live for itself in the tiny, cancerous tumor it made on the universe.
10
As these thoughts unfolded in my mind, simultaneously confounding and confirming my ideas, I found myself face to face with the old man himself. In point of fact, he was not as old as all that and Totochabo was not his real name (it was a Chippawayo sobriquet); he was an ordinary sort of man, only he knew a bit more than you or I. I realized that some reflex from the old days had drawn me to the bistro, a favorite haunt of his, where we both had wasted so much time philosophizing, long ago.
He suggested we both should sit down a moment at a table outside, ordered two glasses of tissue-restorer and said:
“You don’t look as if you’re properly over your drinking party yet.”
“What drinking party?” I asked with a start.
Seeing that my surprise was genuine, he related that the evening before, we and a number of friends had sat down to a large meal with lots to drink in the garden of a suburban inn; that by the early hours I was so drunk that I’d been laid out on a straw mattress in an attic, and that I had been left there on the assumption that I’d find my own way home when I’d sobered up. His words struck a few chords in my memory and I was quite prepared to believe him.
Then, by asking questions methodically, he got me to recount in their proper sequence my own memories of that night; they were as written down above. And I attempted a conclusion:
“And that’s how I came to see that we were less than nothing and had no hope. After that, would it not be the right thing to go out and hang yourself?”
He laughed and said:
“But what could be more comforting than to discover that we are less than nothing? It’s only by turning ourselves inside out that we shall become something. Is it not a great comfort to the caterpillar to learn that she is a mere
larva, that her time of being a semi-crawling digestive tube will not last, and that after a period of confinement in the mortuary of her chrysalis, she will be born again as a butterfly—not in a nonexistent paradise dreamed up by some caterpillary, consoling philosophy, but here in this very garden, where she is now laboriously munching on her cabbage leaf? We are all caterpillars and it is our misfortune that, in defiance of nature, we cling with all our strength to our condition, to our caterpillar appetites, caterpillar passions, caterpillar metaphysics, and caterpillar societies. Only in our outward physical appearance do we bear to the observer who suffers from psychic shortsightedness any resemblance whatsoever to adults; the rest of us remain stubbornly larval. Well, I have very good reasons for believing (indeed if I didn’t there’d be nothing for it but to go off and dangle from the end of a rope) that man can reach the adult stage, that a few of us already have, and that those few have not kept the knack to themselves. What could be more comforting?”
11
“Just a minute,” I said. “Your theory of caterpillar-man is ingenious, but scientifically I would point out that it doesn’t hold water. One of the characteristics of adulthood is the power to reproduce. Well, man reproduces himself—not just corporeally but intellectually too—it’s what we call teaching. It follows therefore that an adult man is really an adult being.”
I congratulated myself that I knew all the chinks in his armor, and I was quite convinced that by coming back at him promptly with a scientific argument, a very proper syllogism and a quotation from Plato, that I would leave him totally nonplussed. But all I’d really done was to provide him with an opening for an easy victory, for he replied:
“Are we therefore to conclude that any primary school teacher with children of his own is an adult? Now, now! In any case, scientifically and otherwise you are mistaken. Insect larvae have been observed to hatch out, even without fertilization, from viable eggs. But I won’t say any more about incidental facts like these. In addition to man, there is another animal which in natural surroundings never reaches adulthood but nevertheless reproduces regularly. It has settled quite happily for its embryonic state and has no more wish than man to leave it behind. It’s the larva of a type of salamander found in the pools and ponds of Mexico, called the axolotl after a local word. No one really knew what place to give it in zoological classification until one day when, after some axolotls had been injected with thyroid gland extracts, they were seen to change into a new animal which, had it not been for the intervention of man’s interfering curiosity (or natural history), would not perhaps have existed in its adult form anywhere in our quaternary age.
“The essential difference between the axolotl and man is that with the latter no intervention from outside, however necessary it might be, would be enough to provoke a metamorphosis. You would also need him—and this is vital—to give up his caterpillariness and to want to mature of his own volition. If that were to happen, we would undergo a far more profound transformation than the axolotl; except the change in our bodily form would be less noticeable—at least in the eyes of our observer stricken with psychic shortsightedness—while the shape of our societies would be completely recast.
“And education? If schools are not able to stimulate and direct this transformation, there’s always the teaching that goes on from one larva to another. Of course, it is quite possible that the more long-lived axolotl larvae teach newborn larvae how to swim and get their food.
“Another observation: if, as you have rightly observed, we see or rather imagine everything back to front, perhaps the right thing would be to go out and hang ourselves, but by the feet instead.”
12
By the time he was saying these last few words, other cafe regulars had arrived, each with a face like some hung-over billboard, and Johannes Kakur, who however had lost nothing of his aggression, tore into Totochabo:
“You thay we all walk on our headth and thee everything back to front? What giv’th you the right to thay that? What ith your criterion for telling the back from the front? Anthwer uth and thith time uthe a concrete egthample. Don’t give uth any of your vague comparithonth and analogieth!”
The old man (we’ll go on giving him his rank) called the waiter and was brought the morning paper. He read out this headline:
TRAGEDY OF JEALOUS HUSBAND
“I LOVED HER TOO MUCH, SO I KILLED HER”—ACCUSED.
and then this one:
WOMAN KILLS LOVER WITH HAMMER BEFORE DEATH-LEAP
INTO WELL WITH TWO BABIES—REPORT.
“That’ll do,” he said, “for the example I have chosen. The cause of such instances of stupid, pointless mutual destruction is what we call ‘love.’ And at the other extreme, when we wish to express the opposite of love, which we call hatred, we can find no stronger or more intelligent a symbol than ‘water and fire’; for us, this is the idea of two irreconcilable enemies. But the one exists only through the other. Without fire, all the water in the world would be an inert lump of ice, stone amongst rock; robbed of all the characteristics of a liquid, it would make neither sea nor rain nor dew nor blood. Without water, fire would die for all eternity, since for all eternity it has consumed and scorched all things around it; it would give neither flame nor star nor lightning flash nor sight. But we continually see water putting out fire and fire turning water into steam, yet never have any overall perception of the perfect balance by which the one exists through the other. When we see a plant grow or a cloud rise over a mountain, when we cook our food or are conveyed by steam engines, we have no idea that we are looking at and using the fruits of their infinitely fertile love. We go on saying: ‘as incompatible as fire and water,’ and we go on calling double suicides and murders of passion ‘love.’
“This is why—along with countless examples of the same thing—I maintain that we imagine everything the wrong way round. And just saying that gives me grounds for hope, though here again my hope will seem like despair to you: the confidence I have in the power of man will doubtless appear misanthropic and pessimistic. But good heavens! As I speak these words I hear them singing now in my head like empty shells. And, mark you, I’m not one of those people who dish up snail shells filled with imitation slugs made out of calf’s liver. And on that note, I leave the long speech I once promised you on the power of words, for I have several pressing things to do.”
We all got up, for there were several pressing things for each one of us to do. There were many things to be done towards the business of living.
INDEX
Roman numerals refer to Parts I, II, and III, and Arabic numbers to the divisions of each part.
abstraction (mathematical), II, 31
Abyssologist, II, 38
Adam, II, 29
adult, II, 32; III, 10, 11
Aesthetishams, II, 32
age (organic), II, 40
Aham Egomet, II, 20
angels, I, 15
Anthropographers, II, 32
apes (anthropomorphic), III, 7
a priori (shapes), I, 14
architect, II, 12
art, I, 6; II, 11; (works of), II, 16
artists, II, 13
Astragalomancers, II, 37
Astromancers, II, 37
axolotl, III, 11
bards, II, 17
bath-trunk, II, 7
Bible, I, 19
bicycle (made of gold), II, 18
Biographers, II, 19
books, II, 30; (unsatisfactory as fuel), III, 3
boomerang, I, 5
brown study, II, 17
Bull (Papal), II, 36
carnage, II, 39
Carrel, Alexis, II, 12
cartographical (pleasures), II, 34
carvers of images, II, 12
caterpillar, III, 10, 11
charity, II, 29
Chladni, I, 6
Cicero, II, 36
cinema (educational), II, 30
cinematographic (films), II, 22
circle (
chromatic), II, 14
circles (vicious), II, 39, 41
civilization, II, 8
clothes (unsatisfactory as fuel), III, 4
cocaine, II, 8, 39
cockpit, III, 6, 7
colonies and mother countries, II, 8
color, II, 14
colorers of canvas, II, 13, 14
concept (operational), II, 41
consciousness, II, 31
continuum, II, 31
creation, II, 31
critics, II, 21
dance, I, 15
danger (psychic effects of), III, 6
death (organized), II, 39
devils, I, 15
dialectics (materialistic), I, 17
dietary systems, II, 39
direction (want of), I, 3; II, 20
discomfiture (expression of), I, 18
discontinuous (essences), II, 31
