Be vainly praised. Father, and be vainly blessed for the blood of your veins that flowed for us until it dried up, for the sweat of your brow that we were unable to wipe away, for all the pulses of your blind, magnificent and perpetually constrained heart...
17
And so, conducted by a sweet musical memory, I found myself in my parents’ little drawing room, and my eyes, still full of miracles, posed feverishly on the objects and the people. And I was about to interrupt that dear concert, to proclaim to my friends the unparalleled spectacles from which I had arrived, paying no heed to all to what that implausible substance might make of the reality of that décor and those individuals...
From what crystallizations of time had the appeal of my memory drawn them? I saw them before me, the individuals living and the ambience identical, in spite of the fact that I knew that ambience to be dispersed now and the moment of the concert and the assembly disappeared forever into the past.
I did not think about that at all. My heart bounded, uniquely, with the marvelous tale that I was about to tell, and I had already opened my mouth.
At that moment, my gaze, which was still wandering, passed over the mirror that hung over the white fireplace. Then the glass sent back my reflection, and, although my hands remained clenched, I was sure, upon the armchair, my reflection raised an arm, put a finger to its lips, and, slowly emerging from the mirror, came toward me, as if gliding through the air. And it said to me, in the now-familiar voice of the arcandre, and in the most natural tone: “Have I not chosen well, and the most beloved among the images that the Theme awoke in you?”
In my amazement, I nevertheless retained the wit to ask, stammering slightly: “Then this…is an image?”
But the arcandre went on “If you would have preferred Bayreuth, there would have been no more difficulty, either in bringing Bayreuth to you or in taking you there. You would have found yourself instantly in a seat in the theater stalls, at the moment when the orchestra finished the prelude, and soon, for you, the curtain would have gone up on the concoction of muslin, gold paper and green light whose combined prestige opens to the spectator the fabulous haven of the Rheingold.”
Although my father, my mother, my friends and the singer were real, it seemed evident that I was alone in being able to hear the arcandre, for no gesture of those surrounding me revealed that they were aware of our conversation, or anything abnormal.
“Friend,” I asked the arcandre, “where are we, at present?”
He smiled and replied: “In your parents’ drawing room, of course. Don’t you recognize its slightest details?”
“But what is the year and the day of this gathering?” I persisted.
“Well,” said my magical companion, “interrogate your memory. It’s one of your evenings some years ago, if you relate it to the day on which I came to surprise you by the tree...which is to say, the day that since this morning and until now you have naturally called today. But the evening of the concert is really and truly today, for you, if you have retreated in time to the minute of its occurrence...”
He was still smiling. “Furthermore,” he added, “I can similarly assure you that you are presently, simultaneously, at the foot of your tree, in the forest, and in this drawing room, just as, at the same time, today is the day of the evening of the concert, and the day that, since this morning and until now, you have naturally named ‘today.’”
My reason was beginning to overheat.
“And them?” I said.
“They are in their present: that of the minute in which you see them. The question does not arise for them. It is you who have been transported to them in retreating, as I said, through time, to this moment in which you could encounter them as they are here; or else, while remaining immobile in your normal today, you have turned back time until what extends before you, provoked by your emotion, is this moment, containing all that you ought to see within it.
Like a pile of leaves abruptly dispersed by a gust of wind, it seemed to me that my intelligence suddenly began to flutter in dilemmas, ludicrous hypotheses and irreconcilable suggestions.
As one runs after scattered leaves, I caught up with a few scraps of reason.
“So much ease! In short, it’s too many enigmas! The effort of comprehension is squeezing me hard…even more than seeing your finest enchantment! Let’s put a little order into it first. And then clarity! First, how would you have brought me the theater of Bayreuth? In the fashion in which a genie in some tale in the Thousand-and-One Nights removes and displaces in space a palace, not to mention an entire city and its inhabitants? How would you have taken me to that theater, at the very moment of my desire? By taking me on your wings the like devil of old legends? But what are these simple translations of my body or a theater for you, who have taken me to the realm of the roots to live through…their future?
“Well, yes, what are these voyages, in sum, of beings and things that exist…compared with free excursions into vanished minutes, or phenomena that have not yet been born? And that faculty you confer upon me of maneuvering time at my whim? Time…which is pure abstraction…which only exists, in the final analysis, in the conceptual realm…time which is only…metaphysically…a notion obtained by the mind in considering the evolution of things, their changes, their disappearances…an entirely subjective convention that ingeniously permits events and the states of substance to be enumerated...
“But no! Now, time, in listening to you, has become, like earth or water, a kind of element in which I can stroll at whim, without even needing, like some famous character of the novelist Wells, a time machine, or is, instead, a kind of docile monster, charged with containing its centuries like an elephant is some court of Asia, clad in brocade and pearls…and which, if I lift a finger, will walk backwards or forwards, or lie down without budging at my feet, until I give it the signal to start moving again!”
I was still running after a few flying scraps of lucidity.
“And even if you were to reveal to me the mechanisms of this frightful mobility of things and minutes in regard to me, and those of my own mobility in regard to them, it would still, if the guests of this little drawing room are, as they are, in their present, and if it is me who has retreated to the moment when he concert occurred…it would still remain to be explained how that exact moment, that ambience, those individuals, their gestures, could be conserved intact. In what space, in what location, in what fashion, does that conservation take place…?”
I fell silent momentarily because I was choking and because I hoped for a response from the arcandre. He was listening to me nonchalantly. My reason exasperated itself in the impossibilities that it was accumulating.
I went on, with a kind of hostility: “Where is that assembly conserved intact? Where are the minutes conserved of the times of Attila, Galileo and Robespierre, which you offered to revive for me a little while ago? In what antechambers of the real are the millennia retained of the terrestrial genesis from which we have come?”
A baroque image crossed my mind.
“If I can provoke at will, in the past as in the future, any moment of time, and better still, any of the circumstances, absolutely innumerable, that are produced throughout the universe in a single moment of time, whether it is a matter of one of these petty Wagnerian concerts of my adolescence, or the growth of roots, the first ages of creation, the theater of Bayreuth, or a street in Paris under Robespierre, it therefore follows necessarily...”
My imagination resumed its gallop.
“In truth, it makes one think that, just as in a dark room into which a ray of sunlight filters, the luminous line, as it moves, illuminates the particles of dust and returns to shadow those that it caused to scintillate a moment before…so…under the projection and displacement of my emotion or my desire, events, individuals and things are illuminated and extinguished...”
I stopped, vaguely fearful, instinctively glimpsing where the logic of my comparison was going to take me. But I went
on.
“If it is the projection of desire that causes events, individuals and things to appear, as the beam of light striking them causes the particles of dust to light up…in the same way that those in the shadow of the atmosphere are present but invisible until the moment that the fiery streak reveals…it therefore follows necessarily that things and individuals, and all the events of time and space, although invisible, are present—in what zone and what shadow?—ready to surge forth at my appeal?”
The arcandre did not blink. Resolutely, I argued:
“Thus can be conceived—without being any better explained—my presence in all sorts of places and ages at the same time. I would be, in some sense, at the center of a kind of total universal coexistence. Distance, duration, rigid laws of nature and substance would be as many scales over the eyes of those poor people who do not have the good fortune to possess the amity of an arcandre. Things might be dissolved in the past or not yet be, events might have occurred, effaced, but those events, those things, would nevertheless exist integrally for me. I could dart upon them, in every direction, at any velocity that my fantasy might dictate, the ray of my desire, or merely my curiosity. I could illuminate things in any of their states, in those yet as easily as in the reverse direction, if I might put it like that...
“I can see the cake baked while the pastry-cook is kneading the dough, and before the constructed house I can see the day when its bricks were clay, and its beams and floor-tiles leafy trees. All simply because the baked cake coexists with its flour still in powder form and the tree with the beam that it has become. Because all the states elapsed or to come of the cake or the house coexist around the flour and the visible edifice...in another reality absolutely indifferent to normal evolution and necessarily successive...
“An embryo become a child, that child having become a man, and that man having grown old, coexist in each of their own developments…the child having become an old man lurks, as a child, in the shadow of his own decrepitude, ready to appear in his concrete infant form, if I invite him to!”
“That’s exactly right,” said the arcandre, tranquilly. He endorsed the crazy hypothesis!
“In consequence, the nebula to which you took me once coexisted with the earth in the liquid state that we haunted subsequently, and that liquid earth with the earth that I believe myself able to call contemporary…and those three states coexist with all the states, and the successive aspects, and the events and forms of all the other ages, and all the minutes of that same and unique earth.”
It appeared to me that he nodded his head. And I burst forth: “Well then, name it! Name that fantastic shadow in which, in an immutable present, the gigantic totality of the past the present and the future of the universe coexist!”
I had run out of breath and disorderly reasoning. I fell silent at last.
“The candles on the piano are ready to go out,” said the arcandre. “The first scene of the Rheingold only has a few measures to go. Your friends are about to take their leave of your parents. You will not have savored anything of that concert. And then, what a rage of ratiocination!”
He went on, with forbearance: “Admit that the moment and the place are not made for such debate. What do you want from me? That I explain the nature and the functioning of that authentic coexistence? But that is far from summarizing, in itself, as you seem to think, all the enigmas posed by the privilege of instantaneously provoking the one that you wish to savor and to live, of identifying yourself with it completely. Even if that coexistence were out of the way, the marvelous elasticity of time to your caprice would remain, the plasticity of things to your appeal, that of your body toward things…and within them...
“All those singular properties of extension and consubstantiation are independent. Each has a different mechanism. It would be necessary for me to analyze all those mechanisms for you. That is a great many explanations in prospect, many mechanisms to take apart.…”
I sensed an ungraspable irony in his words.
He paused thoughtfully. Then, in a charming voice, he said: “Trust me, my friend. Let me guide you.”
His voice became even more enveloping: “As rockets assembled on a framework suddenly burst forth in a firework display, designing golden limbs in sparkling lines and some beautiful subject of the celebration in flame, all my phantasmagorias, will illuminate a certain word, which will suddenly be their key, their sum and their capital light. Trust me, my friend, until the hour to which I am leading you. And know that the tricks with which I have gratified you thus far, those whose splendor you have experienced, and of which you have made use without yet understanding them, only represent—and will for as long as I am with you, however long that might be—a few meager impulsions of your absolute sovereignty over fiefs that are nothing less than the universe and eternity.
“And that being settled, would it not please you to vary the atmosphere slightly?”
18
He had spoken. I prepared myself immediately to see my parents’ little drawing room vanish, along with its guests, like the flame of a candle that one blows out. Nothing happened. The arcandre appeared to reflect.
“I will give you a trinket,” he said, “as a concrete memory of the concert of which you were unable to take advantage.”
He extended his hands, wide open, palms up.
My brother was still playing and singing, and the appearance of the audience remained the same. Suddenly, the sounds that were rising simultaneously from the musician’s throat and the instrument seemed to deviate, designing a kind of trajectory a plume of vibrations whose extremity curved back toward one of the arcandre’s extended hands.
At the same time, the drawing room, its walls, the furniture, my friends and my parents all began to tremble, to blink, to shiver, and as that kind of general flutter became more rapid, the forms were fused and interpenetrated, gradually becoming a confused dance of fluid lines and bizarrely mingled colors, a brilliant and convulsive mist, which steered and precipitated toward the arcandre’s other open hand, as if it had constituted a kind of aerial summons; and that variegated mist thinned out, narrowing as it approached the hand.
The ensemble had the approximate form of a cone of sparkling smoke, the base being that which still seemed vaguely consistent with the décor, the tip being so vaporous that it seemed to vanish on contact with the hand.
And while the sounds and forms were engulfed, so to speak, in the two hands, a strange russet secretion appeared in the center of the palms; I did not know whether it was emerging from the arcandre’s hands or whether it was being deposited there in passing, on the one hand by the musical flux and on the other by the course of the cloudy substance. The mysterious matter was augmented in proportion to the fading away of the sounds and the diminution of the vaporous mass.
The moment came when the things and the songs were completely consumed. There was silence, and a wan light emanating from the arcandre, insufficient for me to see beyond him, or where we were, now that the drawing room had disappeared.
The arcandre closed his hands again; kneaded and rolled between his fingers the substance that had amassed there, into the form of two minuscule balls, two pills that seemed to be made of wax, and he offered them to me.
“Take them,” he said. “This is the concert, its ambience, its audience and its music.”
I received the singular gift. The pills were as hard as balls of agate, but they did not have the coldness of stone; they seemed to me to be smooth and silky, like ebonite. I turned them around in my fingers, stupidly.
“Keep them in the depths one of your pockets, or simply in your fob-pocket,” said the arcandre. “At any time whatsoever, when you no longer have me, and any moment you are able to do so, hold those pills in the warmth of your hands momentarily. They will soon evaporate, in a sense contrary to the coagulation you have just seen. There will be a brief interval, a bewildering phase, during which the objects and individuals will reconstitute, returning from the cloudy t
o the solid state, and the sounds will go backwards to the beginning of the theme…but the cacophony and the solidification will cease, and whatever the place, the people and the sounds might be that surround you, even if you are at the ends of the earth, that drawing room, your parents, your friends, your brother and the Prelude will be rendered to you in their entirety.”
I pocketed the décor and music in pill form, and began to look around me, trying to make out where we were. My eyes, becoming accustomed, recognized the tree, and then the bank of moss, and I felt the light cool breeze of the clearing.
It was dark, and I naturally thought that it was the evening of that improbable day. My adventures, well nourished as they had been, could well have been realized between the moment of the afternoon when I was meditating innocently, still alone, and whatever time of night it was now. However, in the company of an individual like the arcandre, could the slightest relationship exist between a succession of events and the progress of the hands of a watch? Since I had not quit my bank of moss for an instant—I recalled my companion’s affirmation during our recent discussion of my simultaneous presence in several todays, and in the small drawing room as well as the foot of the tree—even when I was floating over the boiling oceans, it was logical that the hours of the forest…the normal hours of the me who remained in the forest…had elapsed regularly. In that case, the fact that I might find that night had followed day could only seem perfectly natural.
The night was quite dark and rather cold, an uncertain October night, meagerly constellated. A slight wind was teasing the foliage. I was lying down on the mossy bank. My hands were damp, from the moist vegetation. A twig fell from the tree and brushed my cheek. I rubbed my eyes and one of my hands, returned to the vegetation, fell upon some viscous creature.
The Ark Page 19
