The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “Alas! I have separated myself from them, Father. They are not wicked, but malevolent nature has loaded me with the gift of seducing them; before me, I see them attentive, wide open from the outset, hopeful and desirous, and I, who know what florescence emerges from them, and who senses the same florescence blossoming in me, must cruelly wither all that benediction! In an instant, the fresh fountain where they came to drink, where they were about to drink, already advancing their avid lips, is covered over with sheets of ice, opaque and hard, as only old and funereal winter clothes all fountains.

  “ Father! Father! If you could see their large, plaintive eyes then, and sense beyond their astonished lips the lamentable depression of their hearts! Father, I no longer know how it is possible to live! So I go forth, weary of every hour, as if sated, devoid of desires, worse than dead!”

  Monseigneur Gohain, Uncle Gasp and the sage Mnektes attempted to revivify the king.

  “Damnation!” said the uncle. “We’re going to start again, what! Coming out of the redoubtable religiosities, you’ll give me Pleasure for a traveling companion. I’ll go forth with you, gamboling like a young man, unfolding my legs, gone soft with kneeling, with a leap, and finding myself, when I come down again, at least twenty years younger. I’ll laugh at every tree, every thicket, every blade of grass—which are all the pretty girls in Galade that one dared not take by the chin or pat on the cheek without rolling grave eyes and saying to them: ‘Follow virtuous paths, my children; such is the commandment of the king, which transmit to his worthy people the commandments of have!’ My hands trembling, under the aforementioned chins, and the tips of my fingers dancing through my sentences like sparrows chirping and hopping among the cypresses of a cemetery! Ha! Nephew, you’re not going to bury us again under piety, the lid of the saucepan in which the holy and natural spices of our blood are simmering, seething and bubbling no matter what one does!

  “Because you must not, due to your respectable vow, let yourself go to some honeyed brush with your neighbors left right and center, does it follow that there ought not to be any merriment at feasts? Double damn it, Majesty! And the sweet contemplation of joy? Are you not an artist, and the most artistic of artists, as you are the most of anyone and anything whatsoever, by the imperious right of sovereignty? Have you not seen how artists look at all things and pursue their idea through all forms? If, for the rest of us, a beautiful body is good and full flesh, it is for them transparent to their whim, as much as a window through which one considers the sun and the stars. They take their contentment in imagining rather than seeing, and creating, in accordance with what, something even more magnificent to see. For that man, therefore, feasts, harmonious grouping, the clink of crystal cups, pleasant discussions, the reflections of light on the flowers of the tablecloth...”

  “Uncle Gasp,” said the king, “although I’m the king, I’m not an artist, for the forms that I can imagine are no more beautiful than those I see, and through which I can’t pursue anything else, if they’re agreeable women, than the idea of the contentment I’d have in cherishing them and enjoying them...

  “As for feasts, it’s necessary for me to tell you bluntly that I presently find their pleasures paltry and crude, because they’re always the same. Not being able, like you, to numb myself or intoxicate myself, the dishes, wines or light, which dispose one to caresses that are forbidden to me, my eyes, neither blurred nor vacillating, soon let me see their limitations. And then I feel ashamed of having attached so many attractions to a joy that is nothing more than noise and guzzling, if one takes away the amorous games. Meanwhile, I feel a tremendous power of joy ever present, and suffer from not knowing where to staunch or satisfy it, among all those guests drunk on alcohol and kisses.”

  “It’s necessary,” put in Monseigneur Gohain, “to staunch that beautiful river in nobler feasts. All your potencies of joy would be satisfied by the supreme joy that is the adoration of God. Understand that state of incomparable grace that consists of felling as if one were molten, bathed, dissolved and incorporated in his Light. The efforts indispensable to attain it, which are the disdain for terrestrial delights, drawing away from everything that one has cherished as a man born of humankind, the sacred expectation—taking possession of all other thirsts—of the hour when, in the cleansed soul, the blissful irruption of light is produced, are the only efforts, my son, sufficient to absorb and satisfy the forces that you dispense, like everyone else, in perpetual desires, and to annihilate the suffering that results from those unslaked desires. Such are, by mortification, renunciation and the substitution of divine objects for ordinary human ends, the substantial agapes to which I want to take you.”

  “If I understand you correctly, Father,” the king replied, “and if I dare make a comparison, like a sack in which one taken new-born kittens to drown in a nearby pond, it would be necessary to extract from myself that adoration and that faith like a big sheet in which I would wrap all the attractions of the world, in which I would gradually heap them up one by one, tie them up with string, and when the package is duly secured by the four folded-over corners of the sheet, hurl them into forgetfulness…and it’s then, completely miserable and naked, in relation to the earth, that I would be sumptuously inhabited by the glorious Light and warmed by the Heat of God...

  “Alas! Is it possible, when one has clear eyesight, a sturdy and palpitating heart, and legs avid to go to all the places that seduce us, to close oneself off to all the pleasures of the earth? Is it possible not to sense the perpetual excitation of all the beautiful forms that artists have sung, magnified or created? And if one retrenches oneself, as you have said, from all the constructions of nature and humans, does one not end up retrenching oneself from oneself? I mean from everything that makes one feel that one exists, by knowledge of and contrast with everything that exists outside oneself, which is the world and all its forms and all its creatures. And thus, losing all notion of oneself, the visible world, time and space, and no longer having anything in oneself, since one has gradually expelled all the images, in order to aid one to comprehend God more broadly, to worship him and exalt in the power of adoration, one would be nothing before Him but a kind of nothingness, a stupid animal devoid of thought and soul, a very holy individual…such, therefore, that he would turn his Light away from you, because one no longer has anything in oneself worthy of receiving it worthily. Father, Father! Can you not give me a simpler consolation, and indicate to me where to expend the forces of my youth, elsewhere than in the love of women or the tyrannical adoration of God?”

  “Those forces, permanent in humans,” concluded the sage Mnektes, “and which have no innate desire except to dispense themselves, heading in all directions in disorder, like a blaze whose flames, pushed, dragged, jostled and pestered by the wind, sometimes go toward the forest, sometimes the city, sometimes the sky, sometimes curve over and lick the ground…let a wise man come along and construct an oven over that hearth, and set a chimney over it…the imprisoned flames will only have one direction left to go, drawn by the air current up into the chimney. Let our man throw between the flames and the air good pottery for firing, good kneaded dough for baking, and the good flames will cook a fine vessel or a gilded loaf.

  “Call your mind the attractive air, my son, and consider your body as the clever construction in which the flames, which are your forces, are imprisoned. Learn to channel them in the direction your will decides, and by that means you will be their master rather than their plaything, and a great joyous miracle will follow. Doors that you have brushed many times in passing, behind which, because they were closed, you paid no heed to their contents, will open wide to you, and a thousand unsuspected treasures, will shine beyond them: a thousand beautiful and mysterious secrets by which the common run of humans are blindly tossed, will appear to you in their quasi-divine light, and communicate their power to you.

  “Talking to you at present will not convince you. Only remember this: the act of meditation, which has appea
red to you thus far tedious and flat, will then become an indescribable sensuality, and by its means, you will be transported to the top of the highest mountain, bathing your forehead in a sky rutilant with lightning, dazzling with fiery stars, while angels beating their wings fill up your fresh head and exquisitely limpid eyes.

  “You will no longer suffer because you will have command over your entire body, and all the desires if your body. No particle of yourself will be agitated without your wishing it: the charm of women, the splendor of forms, the attractions of life…no influence will have the power to move you outside the circle in which it pleases you to enclose yourself.

  “And as God directs the weather, the lightning and the sun at his whim, in the direction of the force that is yours, and from which your arms, legs, respiration, speech and all your desires obtain movement, you will find the joy that you demand—equal, perhaps, to the adoration of God, and certainly superior to the possession of women.”

  “Alas, Father Mnektes,” said the king, “I will reply to you that being so wise and so sure of the obedience of my limbs, I would never again have any joy in hunting or fighting in tourneys, since I would, in my wisdom, choose the adversary and the beast to the measure of the power of my limbs, and would thus always be sure of victory, and would very quickly become blasé.

  “I will also tell you that, fundamentally ignorant of what there is behind the smallest of clouds passing over the mountains, ignorant of what there is a thousand feet beneath me in the earth, ignorant as to how far the sky extends, reduced to impotence in my entire being in the time that the most benign of fevers last—in sum, not knowing any more profoundly than anyone else why I find myself alive on the earth, if not by the mysterious will of God—I would consider it as foolish presumption to decide with my petty will all that I ought or ought not to allow to act upon me or to enter into me, and patiently to control every impression that I receive, in order to decree whether it is good or bad for me.

  “For, my dear Mnektes, that interior flame if which you speak so honestly, I believe that it is not in me alone, but that it is largely made of all the exterior warmths that touch me, impress me, excite me and penetrate me: the smiles of women, the grace of forms, the fervors and mischief of my people, and all the incompatible effluvia of nature and life—with the result that by regulating, in the name of my feeble human will, its ordinary nourishment, so complicated, universal and delicate, I would fear, my dear Mnektes, to bar the route to some mysteriously beneficial invasion, to the profit of some maleficent invasion more-or-less well-masked, and thus, far from stimulating, as is done so congruently outside my will, life and all that it encloses and carries, colliding with it, troubling it, diminishing it, and soon annihilating it, and eventually finding myself as paralyzed, my teeth chattering, only rich in that inefficacious will alone, a scepter without an arm, a sovereign without a realm.

  “And so, after having hard all three of you, there is nothing, alas, but the contemplation of joys in which I cannot partake, the adoration of God and the adoration of the will, that can be offered to me in place of amour!”

  Thus, in spite of Monseigneur Gohain, Uncle Gasp and the subtle Mnektes, the poor King of Galade supported very dolorously the consequences of his vow, and the court, and Gyzir, and all of Galade, supported its extending repercussions.

  The Discontentment of Two Women

  One day, in a quiet pathway in the park, the king encountered Melidine. He was emerging from a long conversation with his tutor Mnektes. The latter, to divert his sad disciple, was inclining his mind toward study, mingling therein, as sagaciously as possible, material demonstrations and their philosophical deductions, counting on the virtue of the latter to attract the king away from a reality in which everything excited his suffering and his ennui.

  After having taken him to various factories in Galade, where glassware, garments, money and housing bricks were made, and interesting him in the most ingenious manipulations, transformations and constructions, Mnektes was developing in him the thought, which was dear to him, that in spite of the multiplicity of materials, all of them were combinations if one unique substance, which the senses could not attain, immaterial, and hence spiritual. He had taken pleasure, that day, in informing him how, in accordance with that principle, it was possible to reduce all compositions to the most extreme simplicity, in the same way that Numbers, no matter how high they might be, were always merely the repetition of the number One.

  To captivate his slightly weary attention, Mnektes had made him, with the aid of drawing, notice that the figuration of the ten first numbers, which could themselves be assembled and multiplied infinitely, could be resolved into the sole components of the straight line and the circle...and that the straight line and the circle were, after the point that gave them birth, the simplest images that one could conceive…and that the mystical meaning of those images was admirable, and would serve as the subject for an imminent conversation.

  Left alone, the king was following the path where he perceived Melidine sitting on a bench. A lady of the palace who was walking with her had left her there for a moment in order to acquit a duty with which she was charged. While waiting, Melidine was amusing herself with the sunlight.

  Dusk was approaching. A slender beam fell upon the bench between the leaves, obliquely caressing Melidine’s arm, which emerged bare from her sleeve from the neck down. As the sun descended toward the night, the slender beam was displaced, as if gliding along and trembling gently toward the ground. With her hand splayed on the bench. Melidine was watching it dance over her bare arm and her dress; then, as it drew away gradually and shone some distance from the bench, the ground and the hem of her dress, she advanced her foot into the thread of light, catching the sunlight on the tip of her shoe.

  She saw the king approaching, and that he had seen her.

  They each seemed to the other to be extremely troubled—for the king had not encountered Melidine since the blaze, and strove not to think about her, and Melidine, having learned about the king’s inexplicable ennui, had no doubt that, firstly, he bore a grudge against her because she had not come that evening when he was waiting for her, secondly, that he had sworn never to see her again, thirdly, that he was observing his oath out of pride, and fourthly, that he was suffering very much because he loved her—and therefore, that all of his great ennui could only stem from that.

  She made a movement to get up, curtsy to the king and go away, but the king said to her: “Bonjour, Melidine,” and kissed her hand.

  Then she thought that she too loved him dearly, and that she was suffering as much as he was, out of pride, like him, that she had been unable decorously to anticipate the silent desires of the king, but that perhaps, now, nothing any longer prevented them from being the two happiest lovers in all Galade.

  And her pleasure was such that her bosom heaved, inflating her pale cleavage, reddening her face and closing her eyes momentarily before she responded to the king: “I salute Your Majesty.”

  He asked her permission to sit down beside her, and began talking to her. He enquired as to what she was doing in the park, and was informed that she was waiting for a lady, one of her friends. Melidine thought that those words were merely preliminary, and that he would soon talk to her about matters touching the two of them more particularly—and also that perhaps the king would not want to make any allusion to the sad night and would bring their long-tested hearts face to face, as if new and beating toward one another for the first time. She waited.

  “This hour,” said the king, “is the most noble of the festivals of the earth. The moments, Melidine are as if charged with enchantments. The sun, above the mountains, raises its last rays as the conductor of an orchestra raises his arms. A real symphony bursts forth, which has the changing light for its chords. They give birth, rippling and leaping from the ground to the sky, to flowers in the trees. Everything is transformed. The pond is golden, the grass crimson. Fragments of light hang on here and there, appl
ying a swift note to the bark and disappearing, then reappearing, buoyantly on the shivering tips of the leaves. Every individual, at this moment is a king if he stands upright in the dying daylight. The humblest garments are brocade, rutilant and gleaming. The feverish sky deploys its oriflammes, constructs strong castles, and groups together squadrons of clouds to repel the assault of the great adversary: the Night. It comes. It rises. It enlaces the Day, and both are confused. The sun sinks. The voracious night absorbs the last scarlet bands, and pricks, as a sign of triumph, the shepherd’s star in the forehead of the conquered sky.”

  Utterly astonished by that speech, Melidine replied: “It’s beautiful, Sire, and you paint it pleasantly!” And she trembled a little, for it seemed to her that the king had brushed her arm. But if the king had brushed Melidine’s arm, it was by chance, for he feared more than anything brushing anything whatever of Melidine, even the hem of her dress.

  She said then: “One would love to be fluid and melt into the light. The colors that seem to you to be music are also caresses. One would sense them posing upon one, violent and soft, all rapid. The languid mauve and the penetrating and burning violet...”

  “My tutor Mnektes,” said the king, “who knows many astonishing things, claims that it is possible to escape the body and identify oneself with water, air, light, even flame. He has that information from science as old as the earth, which ancient manuscripts, rediscovered and deciphered with great difficulty, have revealed to him. Those manuscripts were dictated by the spirits—which no longer manifest themselves in our epoch—of the primitive Galadians, long before the coming of Christ, when innumerable gods were worshipped: Goho, Vzygine...