The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  The Discovery of Equality

  The king sang as he worked. He whistled tunes, brought his actions into accord with his song, passed mechanically from whistling to murmuring, and finally let his voice go—and his companions labored to the rhythm of his song. They liked Emmanuel. He liked them...

  One day in summer, when he had allowed himself to be carried away by the exaltation of the joy of laboring and moving his body in the limpid light and the caressant air, he had noticed that as he was further uplifted, his companions became anxious, wearier and heavier, and then envious, and their gazes hostile. He had lowered his voice. He thought he had understood. He was weary, of course, but no more so than on days when he had hunted deer or wolves all day long in the woods of Galade. And after all, he retained the power of thought. He had a thousand beautiful consolations within him when he was tired. They, quick to grumble, always peevish, curing their shovels and picks as they manipulated them, always cursing the hardness of the labor, and the difficulty of living…they did not know anything else...

  On some evenings they got him to sing in the tavern where the laborers met after work. One evening, one of them said to him: “Tomorrow’s my wife’s birthday. Would you like to come to eat with us? There’ll be a few friends, and Koutzeff, an old Russian anarchist who talks like a book. It’s not beautiful, at home, but we’ll replace the carpet and sofas with good stories and the pleasure of knowing that we’re among friends. You can sing us things, after dessert.”

  “Gladly,” said the king.

  He went the next day, and saw a sad spectacle. Far away from the city center, where the monuments and lights were, in a quarter in which every house sweated misery, at the top of a narrow and worm-eaten staircase in one of the houses, he went into a room where the laborer’s family was crowded. It was there that they lived. Two iron beds and two mattresses on the tiled floor; between the beds a little red-hot stove filed the room with an odor of drying linen, burnt linen, cooking fat, amplifying, exasperating, overheating and mingling with damp, confused respirations, poorly-washed flesh—and, in that stinking cauldron, a wife and three children...

  On a slightly rickety table, places had been set. Several rude fellows, entering with the king and the host, accumulated therein. Old Koutzeff was already there, waiting for them. He had big blue child-like eyes, disdainful lips, a long white beard and dirty clothes.

  And the meal commenced.

  The host apologized for the narrowness of the lodgings and the lack of air. “Bah—one’s among friends!” a guest replied.

  “To be sure, that’s worth as much as the Doge’s palace!” said another.

  “Have you seen the Doge’s palace?” asked the king.

  “I’ve seen pictures,” said the companion “Ha ha! Say, to take a tour like that…to go to stroll like a bourgeois, for a fortnight, without worrying about earning one’s bread, this rotten life! But those things are too beautiful—best not to think about them!”

  “Hey, aristo,” said another to the king, “you who take pleasure in Paris, on the site, when a ray of sunlight strikes your back, what would you say out there?”

  “Yes, yes,” said the king, softly, “but those pleasures aren’t for everyone...”

  “Oh,” said old Koutzeff, “it’s coming, the time when everyone can have his ray of sunlight. And we’ll see, this time! A little more patience. Then, it’ll no longer be some who have the light, the facile voyages in beautiful lands, and all the luxury, and all the pleasure, while all the others work themselves to death building their monuments, their railways, their light. It really will be everyone...”

  “We’re not there yet,” said the host’s wife.

  “It will be everyone,” Koutzeff repeated, his fork upright in his firm fist, hammering the table. “It will be all individuals, equal in pleasure as they’re equal in nature.”

  “Bravo!” said one of the men, his mouth full.

  “Claptrap,” said another.

  “But men aren’t equal…,” the king began.

  “Who’s that?” demanded Koutzeff, immediately, squinting and passing his hand beneath his long beard.

  “A comrade who’s been rich, and has come to work with us to earn his bread. A good fellow. You’ll hear him sing after dessert.”

  “You’ve been rich, eh?” said Koutzeff. “Raised in the old traditions, eh? And they hold good, in spite of your poverty? There are still a lot, among you, in spite of your Revolution, in spite of everything, the great poets, the great painters, who believe in the divine right, the eternal privilege of castes. Ha ha!”

  He stood up, and placed his hands heavily on the king’s shoulders. “Listen,” he said, “listen, young man, I don’t know where you come from, or where you were brought up. You’re not a coward, since you’ve come to work with your hands, in order to eat, among the people. And yet, perhaps you’ll return to the side of the tyrants on the day of the great battle. Listen, and remember that they’re blind, criminal and deprived of the flame of love, those who refuse to admit that all men are sons of the earth, and that there is an original, ineffaceable injustice, in the fact that two naked infants born at the same hour, one in the home of a poor man and one in the home of a rich man, one of whom will have all the roads of life opened to him, smoothed before him, from his very first sigh, and the other poverty, the incessant and mortal combat merely to eat, to clothe himself...

  “Listen! To eat, to clothe himself, to struggle again to protect himself from hunger, from cold, to acquire bread, a roof, clothing, when there’s so much to do simply to discern what one is capable of doing, if one’s true self has blossomed, when there are so many things to learn, so many secret problems to penetrate, when a new hour has sounded for men, when only intellectual conquests, the only ones worthy of men, will appear as the only important and—then—the only necessary goal!

  “Look at me, with my sordid clothes, a man who is only eating this evening thanks to the charity of a neighbor, a man who is telling you these things among men who, at dawn tomorrow, after heavy sleep, will resume their bestial labor!

  “I’m a man. They’re men. They have a brain and a heart to comprehend beauty, to love and to bloom. Now, they’re reduced to hatred, to darkness, and they go, deaf and imprisoned, through the luminous life that surrounds them, among the noble and the liberated, like primitives tracked by all fatalities in forest full of wild beasts…by all the fatalities that one finds behind all actions throughout the ages: hunger, cold, darkness, carnal thirsts. The elements grinding humans down, making them ignorant, making them hate one another and tear one another apart, making them beg, shivering and stupid, for the help of omnipotent gods, divine crutches.

  “Understand the crime of those of your caste, the crime of the masters and the priests!

  “It’s not beneath those fatalities that those humans are crushed; it’s beneath the egotism of the rich and the lies of religions! For those fatalities no longer exist, and all human beings could be human.

  “Oh, the supreme fatality, the one that you can understand, young man, the one that you must combat, you who have lived among us—the supreme fatality of human being is not to be able to be human! To be the bearer of intelligence, of consciousness and thought; to be able to admire and love, and enjoy the elevated delight of life; and then to expend one’s energy in base struggles, to be enslaved to the grossest needs, to exhaust the best of oneself therein, to imprison one’s consciousness therein!

  “And that in a world where human beings, relieved of material care, cleansed of the defects, deformities and vices that it engenders, could allow all their human possibilities—which is to say, intelligence, consciousness, thought and love—to blossom worthily.

  “For it exists, that world! It exists. The fatalities are no more. Death itself is retreating. In a healthy society, humans will be able to live physically for a hundred and fifty years. For food, clothing and the primary necessities, humans, with their machines, without suffering, without str
uggles, without hecatombs, while smiling, can produce, in sufficient quantity for everyone, bread, roofs, clothing and light.

  “Diseases? Listen: ten years ago, an infant I cherished died of diphtheria in an hour. Yesterday, my neighbor’s son was afflicted by the same malady. The doctor came, gave him an injection of serum, and an instant, saved him. He saved him. The disease is not, therefore incurable? Ten years ago, however, I was made to believe so. I bowed down to it; I resigned myself to it.

  “Resign oneself! If a hunchback knew that his deformity could be cured, the blind man that he could see clearly, the invalid that he could walk and breathe in the sunlight—tell me, do you believe that they would resign themselves to be deformed, blind and bedridden?

  “Now, what proves to me that they can’t be cured?

  “I won’t resign myself to suffering, for I see great scientists everywhere, only paralyzed by lack of money—the money that is spent on vices and wars!

  “I won’t resign myself to poverty, when I see the possibility of a world liberated from the base charges under which human nobility and curbed and debased.

  “Religion, which tells me to resign myself, shows me the earth fatal and the heavens benevolent…I see the earth happy and its fatalities vanquished!

  “And like me, all those down below have seen, all those who are exploited and crushed—and they’re no longer unaware that life is beautiful. They seek it; they’re organizing, uniting, for the revolt, for all the revolts. United, they’ll force the doors that the powerful keep bolted; they’ll take possession of the new world; they’ll enter the promised land.

  “You’ll be crushed too, if you put yourself across their path. Be with us; our cause is holy. Bless, with us, all those who, by means of speech, by means of arms, and even by means of crimes, are undermining the ramparts of the old world, in order to hasten the coming of the worthy city of human beings!”

  Old Koutzeff shut up, and the guests remained silent, and the food went cold, while none of the men were thinking any longer about eating, and the woman too—and the pupils were dilated, and the faces had suddenly been stripped of all lassitude and all darkness, and the hands were trembling slightly on the waxed tablecloth.

  Chaos

  The king underwent a singular crisis.

  They Know, he thought. They’re like me. They have as much right as I do to a joy…a joy so elevated that for having known it, I, a king, feel far more than a rich and powerful king, and inexhaustibly rich. A joy such that, in thinking them unaware of it, I pitied them, and I loved them with all the might of my love and compassion. But they know, they want it, and no one can wither their desire without immediately becoming criminal.

  He looked within himself. It was true that he had done nothing except to be born the son of a king, to find the scented roads of life open before him, ready smoothed. And as a king, what he he done? He had left his ministers, Gasp, Gohain and Mnektes, the care of directing the people, of remedying their misfortunes, while he hunted, feasted and made love. It was true too, that he had, at first doubted and then privately denied the teachings of Gohain; that he had seen the earth fertile and beautiful, and humans standing tall, not debilitated and pitiful on a spiteful planet, victims of the capricious will of an impenetrable God.

  He talked often to Koutzeff; he read the books that the latter gave him; he swallowed voraciously, his soul seething, the revolutionary works of the previous century; he agitated anxiously among the great mystical hopes, the ingenious economic theories and the sparkling utopias the manipulated humanity as an infant carries a doll from the house into the garden.

  Koutzeff was right. It was true! For century after century, one fraction of humankind had played, sung, danced over the other fraction, crushed, dimmed and bloodied. Kings, priests and noblemen passed before his eyes during his sleepless nights in a long cortege laughing joyfully, and treading waist-deep in a bloody mire made of the bodies, hearts and the dreams of oppressed plebeians.

  And he, the King of Galade, was among the cortege. Oh, if, like him, now, the powerful men of the world had mingled with the plebeians, opened their hearts and understood that resident within every man was a marvelous flower ready to bloom, instead of withering, in darkness and devoid of warmth, how quickly they would water it with all their love, with all their might, in order that a healthy, and harmonious humankind would soon bloom in its entirety, rich in all is worth!

  For even the powerful, the fortunate, had not savored fully the immense joy permissible to humankind—so many forces were spoiled, so many souls annihilated, so much possible genius extinguished, perhaps, in all those who were dying at present of hunger and cold on the roadside and in hovels!

  And then, the highest were interlinked with the lowest, who constructed their edifices and their railways, who prepared their food, the lowest filled with hatred and revolt. The human spirit was paralyzed by all that human matter; the greatest, the freest, were dragging the redoubtable weight of all the enslaved, all the obscured.

  Oh, if everyone could understand, rapidly, that the evil was now remediable, and that a superior joy was possible for all, that no one would any longer be resigned to it and, having organized, would soon agitate—those at the bottom by means of incessant revolt, those at the top by love and commiseration—to realize the great Reform, now possible!

  Sometimes, the king dreamed of returning to Galade, creating an elite people, informing the Galadians of the upheaval of the world, the fall of fatalities, the end of dogmas of sadness, the reality of joy and power, and going at their head to announce all over the world the era of human Liberty—and of reducing by force all those, armored with dread, prejudiced or ignorance, the deaf, voluntary or otherwise, whom love could not convince, those who doubted, obstacles retarding the forward march of those who knew, those who wanted...

  Taken by Koutzeff into milieux in perpetual agitation, mingled by the life of his companions with all the miseries and all the filth of hovels and garrets, the king suffered all human suffering, sang all the ideals of revolt and love, lamented, and became exasperated. Sometimes, in the midst of simple souls, he simplified the world and human beings, turned the planet over with a gesture of his hand; at other times he stopped, breathless and frightened, before the complexity of the obstacles.

  And he no longer had any respite.

  The evil was no longer fatal...the evil was remediable…every unfortunate, every invalid, every ugly or stupid visage stimulated his excitement. Quickly, before anything else, let there be an end to that! Every passer-by that he saw laughing, every individual he saw enjoying some petty pleasure, exasperated him, setting his entire being aquiver. He considered them as obstacles.

  Don’t laugh, passer-by, be serous; there’s so much to do! You’ll have time to laugh—oh, how you’ll laugh!—when it’s done. You, you’re contenting yourself with your ridiculous petty joy at the gates of a realm of unsuspectable sensualities, unimaginable delights! That petty joy, in satisfying you, is turning you away from the urgent action. The splendid tomorrow has need of all revolts for its aurora, and sees because of those who laugh, who content themselves, and resign themselves, eternalizing its eve, while all the wretched are croaking!

  And it was saturated with similar ideas that he stopped, on the evening of the fourteenth of July, in Paris, in front of a dace hall in the Boulevard Saint-Michel, in the little crossroads formed by the Sorbonne, and, with his back against the statue of Auguste Comte, while watching the dancing and the joyful crowd, was seized by a strange delirium.

  The Reappearance of a Philosopher

  He had not been working that day, because it was the great feast-day of France. All the work-sites in Paris were closed. He had been strolling through the city, had been to see a few beloved works at the Musée du Louvre, and at dusk had gone to sit down in the Jardin de Luxembourg. The beauty of the light and the memory of contemplations urged him toward a gentle and charming reverie, but he was full of bitterness. The more reasons he had
to be joyful, the more replete with bitterness he was, always, by virtue of the singular fact that in sensing how joyful he might be, he saw how it was possible to be joyful, and how lamentable it was that so many people like him were deprived of a similar joy.

  Thus, all his hours were spoiled, and he veiled the brilliant light, and dulled himself to all beauty, froze all effusion within him.

  In the evening, he was following the boulevard, amid the illuminations, the songs and the cries, when he stopped outside that little dance-hall, and without thinking about anything else, at first, but distracting his eyes, placed himself in a shadowy corner with his back to the pedestal of the statue.

  Domestics, chambermaids with white aprons, soldiers in garish costumes, your clerks with thick faces, awkwardly holding or coarsely squeezing their dancing partners, intoxicated by dancing, red-faced and sweating, laughing in bursts at nothing at all…the confused whirl of bright colors and heavy forms gave him a sort of vertigo. He would have liked to move away from the vulgar and ugly spectacle, but he savored a bitter pleasure in suffering so much ugliness and vulgarity, which might be, or could have been, so much beauty, grace, expansion, genius...

  The musicians leading the dance, with the grotesque chords of two cornets and a trombone, were sitting on a little platform decked with flags and paper flowers, piecing his ears and his heart, and, combined with the whirling of the dances, they completed his daze.

  Gradually, the real spectacle was effaced, the couples, the musicians, the illuminations and the banners all fusing together; there was nothing any longer before his eyes but a formless, leaping, howling, spinning mass of soft flesh that Tomorrow would petrify, trample and crush...