The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “Friend,” I said, “it’s cold and I can hardly see...”

  “Indeed,” the arcandre replied. “Well then, we’ll summon the light and go to summer.”

  19

  He raised an arm, and extended the hand, keeping the fingers slightly folded, as if to collect an apple from a tree. A long red spark crackled and flashed between the thumb and the four fingers.

  “There exists,” said the arcandre, “in addition to the familiar sun of the diurnal sky, a second sun, the virtue of which circulates, invisible, in the very weft of the night. Its light is extracted from space as one takes water from a river or collects grapes from vine. A sun, moreover, that is the most docile and supple…you shall see...”

  He pointed his finger at my tree. A streak of light as slender as a needle struck the bark and illuminated a minuscule surface. An ant foraging there beat a hasty retreat.

  “The most docile and supple of suns, I was saying, as slender as a thread...as broad as a road...as vast as all of space. At my whim, or yours…”

  For a second time, the fingers were rounded. Within their curve, a luminous ball appeared, which the arcandre pressed as if it were an orange or an apricot. Suddenly, a trickle of pink light flowed from the raised hand, snaking along the arm, illuminated the face in passing, and then the upper body, and the legs, and designed a sparkling pool at the arcandre’s feet.

  The rivulet became a torrent, setting my companion’s body ablaze, inflated around his body, extended in all directions, filled the clearing, reached the horizon, climbed into the air, and seemed to reach the sky, absorbing there the feeble light of the moon; and in spite of the fact that the hour was its own and its empire, the night, like the old women in folktales who, when their mantles and crutches vanish, suddenly appear as fresh and ornamented as young queens, lit up like the day.

  The birds woke up; some of them began to sing immediately; some fled in a great racket of startled wings, beating the foliage chaotically; insects swarmed; one might have thought that the very vegetation was frightened by that sudden morning, without any preliminary dawn tickling the corollas and the stems gently, devoid of the zephyr and the dew. Bewildered and dazzled, I closed my eyes, half swooning.

  When I opened them again, everything was black again; the light had vanished.

  Only the arcandre was shining, with the slightly phosphorescent gleam that had emanated from him a little while ago when my parents’ little drawing room had become…pills.

  Ah! I could not help making a gesture, as if to some rude joker...

  My companion’s laughter sounded, clear and cordial.

  “I wanted,” he said, “by means of those petty exercises, to assure myself of the presence of that discreet light...” He went on: “You’re complaining, then, of being unable to see. I’ll lend your eyes a little privilege of mine...”

  He struck the air gently with his hand, as if he were knocking on an invisible door. The daylight reappeared—or, at least, an immense pink light inundated the forest, and the expanse, as far as the eye could see...

  20

  If it is only possible, with the aid of image or comparison, to render more penetrating and more communally understandable certain phenomena that are not ordinarily glimpsed because of their rarity or their complexity, to a small number of initiates or doctors, what a task must it be to describe clearly one that was positively inconceivable prior to the moment of its manifestation, never perceived by any gaze until that moment—absolutely original, in sum—and such that no correspondences, relative or fragmentary, in its regard can be found in our knowledge of the world?

  I want to do my best to get over the difficulty that I encounter at this point in my story, which is to succeed in depicting what I saw with the sole resource of approximate images and words. As for the latter, which are the sign and, as it were, the robe and the color of determinate things, they inevitably become narrow, dull and sullen when it is necessary to make use of them to express objects so extraordinary and unexpected that the language cannot prepare any figure for them, much less tailor a garment.

  Indulgence, therefore, for the teller, dear distant reader for whom I am telling the tale!

  It commenced with a transfiguration of the forest, of the light, of the air, of my own body and the arcandre’s. No object was displaced; no mist troubled the mysterious clarity of space; the wind did not blow any more bitterly through the air. The tree at the foot of which I was lying remained upright, and the ground was not subject to the slightest tremor. In sum, I was still seated on the moss without perceiving any other movement on my own part except for the seemingly-hectic acceleration of my blood; and the arcandre was standing a few paces away, in the same cordial and slightly nonchalant pose that he had assumed a moment ago.

  No object was displaced. It happened in the very structure of things. That corner of nature, with everything that was within it, beings and species, offered to my eyes in its entirety the spectacle offered by a molecule considered under a microscope.

  Everything cracked, substances subdivided, their constitutive elements disintegrating; the air was swarming, the light was decomposed into prismatic waves. The different aspects under which the characteristics of matter are manifest were abolished; organic, mineral, liquid and fluid were reduced to a common molecular state. From the smallest sprig of moss to the tallest tree, so far as I could count, the birds, the insects dig in the bark or in the soil, and my body with its clothing, and the arcandre in front of me, were no more than a swarm of rotating corpuscles, colliding and mingling; and the ground, as profoundly as my gaze could penetrate it, with its creases and its stones, was no longer anything but a dust of indefinite particles, slowly oscillating toward one another.

  There was no more opacity, no planes, no more exterior and interior, properly speaking. The internal organs of tiny creatures, birds and vegetables, the insides of pebbles and the humus, all, like the blood, the juices, the bones and the viscera in the arcandre and myself, became equally visible, as crowds of particles bathing and moving in the multicolored flood of decomposed light.

  Forms, and the details of each form, conserved their shape, which became a kind of shadowy contour, standing out against the light, a kind of gaseous sheath, indescribably tenuous, enveloping the displacements and gyrations of each specific agglomeration. The smallest particles of the air, incessantly drawn by the wind, traversed those crowds in all directions in their dancing courses.

  That hallucinatory spectacle only lasted for a moment. Molecules and particles subdivided again. Everything that was matter was disassociated to the point of disappearance. The atom, which is merely a knot of electricities, was undone and reabsorbed into the ambient influences. Air, light and substance were no longer anything but a kind of complex glittering, in which, if some infinitesimal grain, some clot of matter still lingered here and there, that grain resembled diamond dust, refracting a light that was itself all refractions.

  21

  The swimmer who amuses himself by diving, if he suddenly opens his eyes under water, sees himself at first as if imprisoned in a dense glaucous space, and it is only after an interval of time that he recovers, along with a sense of distance, the perception of an above, a below and an around. Then his gaze adapts; he begins to sense the crystalline luminosity of the surface; he soon sees the troubled masses of algae and rocks standing out. Finally, in order for him to be able to remain in the element, he succeeds in discerning the detail of things with increasing accuracy.

  Thus I found myself, at first, in the prodigious atmosphere of the denatured forest like the swimmer in the first phase of a dive, perceiving neither surface nor bottom, nor limits—deprived, in sum, of any reference-point, and I felt as if I, along with the air and fluids, the earth and forms, densities, volumes and currents, was absolutely dissolved in the universal glitter.

  By means of what eyes, however, was I seeing that light? And above all, by means of what cerebral apparatus was I continuing to reason an
d to be conscious of my existence? The persistence of the self in that total dilution seemed to me to be even more extraordinary than the most stupefying modalities of the phenomenon. By what incomprehensible mechanism, by the coagulation of what ungraspable substance, had the supports of my sensibility and my reason remained aggregated?

  Ha! The enigma had scarcely commenced! As, in the land of the hobgoblins, brambles and crevasses succeed one another before the traveler who has gone astray, the mystery multiplied before my stumbling mind.

  In the same way that the diver recovers the perception of distance, I suddenly sensed the luminous sheet shifting. Tidally—the bore of what gigantic electrical river?—that sheet flowed in an uninterrupted surge, in what direction? I was unable then to tell East from West or South from North. That immensity, devoid of a surface, devoid of a bed and devoid of borders, went as the waters of a river go, and by virtue of that, what had been the forest, the tree, my body, and the supports of my sensibility and my consciousness, were dissolved in that river, going too, drawing away, dragged by that strange current.

  Now—may words pursue me with their effort here!—notwithstanding that derivation and the continuing course of what had been my body, the tree and the forest, I did not cease to sense myself at a fixed point, still against the tree, immobile in the forest, still in its place. The elements of what had been the tree, the forest, my body and the supports of my reason and my sentiment, were drawing away incessantly, but the tree, the forest and my body nevertheless remained at the points they had occupied before the enchantment occurred, as if a kind of sketch or phantom of their former presence was permitting them to reform incessantly out of new elements.

  To summarize the incredible fact, everything was simultaneously stable and dispersing, fixed in a certain being, all of whose components were perpetually dissociating, relentlessly dismantled but continuously identical.

  Now, the forms of the things, including myself, that were always going away and remaining in the same place, suddenly reappeared to me. On the moving screen of the indefinable light, initially confused, like the algae and the rocks to the diver, they became increasingly recognizable, resuming familiar aspects and characters. And now that I have said that, at the same time as I saw them all in their accustomed figures—the tree, my body, here ferns indolently fanning the pink air, a spider running along the edge of a blade of grass, there an elm whose leaves were fluttering in the wind—I saw them all as they still were, made of the same changing fulgurances as the river in which they bathed, and as such, going away in effluvia immediately melted into the endless cartage.

  What was the reality of those forms, simultaneously fleeting and constant, absolutely certain to my returned senses, absolutely nonexistent to my other being, the one that was immersed in the traveling light, and for whom nothing existed any more, in himself, except that light? At present, now that I had rediscovered myself in my body, I could see myself going and coming, and I could touch beings and things. On contact with them—bark, plumage, fleeces—I reacquired the conviction of their reality. But what was that conviction worth, since the only instrument of experience that could guarantee the contours, densities and characters, averred its own illusoriness! Since my hands and my eyes, which testified to that reality, since my being of flesh, in sum, with all its batteries of perceptive apparatus, was only, like everything else, according the new sense that the arcandre had shared with me, a perpetual dissociation and reconstruction, a wave passing along a nameless river!

  What, then, was real? And was not that mobile glitter itself merely a more subtle aspect of the veritable substance of things, and the universe itself: a mere step, in a sense, toward the true structure of the universe, a step beyond which my gaze, prodigious as it had become, could doubtless never penetrate? A step beyond which, in sum, there was perhaps no longer even that light...and what could there be?

  The arcandre, if he wished, could surely have resolved with a word the problems of the moment, at least: the order of that glittering; the mysterious operation by which I saw forms and character infinitely differentiated there, where everything was nothing but vagabond light. The arcandre had not left me. I looked at him, as always, standing in front of me, in the bosom of the enigmatic pink daylight...

  But as I extended my burning curiosity toward him, and just as I was about to question him, I suddenly saw him light up with a more ardent glare than that of the fantastic light that surrounded us, shining with an increasing scintillation, which became so intense, so various and so marvelous that even now, merely transcribing what was given to me then to contemplate, I am obliged to lower my eyelids, as if the mere memory of the moment were dazzling me...

  22

  The gold of a diadem is pale compared with the jewels it supports, and the most noble of those jewels, whatever might be the warmth, purity and abundance of its fire, is extinguished in the gaze that had just looked for a few seconds at the sun. And the supreme splendor of the star would be scarcely more than the scintillation of a lark-trap for anyone who was able to sustain the flamboyance of one of the gigantic stars that circle the confines of our sky, monsters before which the number that one assembles to evaluate their grandeur makes one think of Petit Poucet and his brothers catching sight of the Ogre.15 There is a hierarchy of light. And such images can only assist me in representing the degrees of my contemplation, departing from the rosy light with which, at a sign from the arcandre, the night had been ornamented a little while ago, passing through the brilliance of the sheet of effluvia and from there to the successive resplendences by which the arcandre attained the state that I want to try to describe, the trenchant resplendence of an ever more magnificent glare, beyond the glare, so brilliant itself, of the effluvia...

  Who has not admired in the circus one of those gymnasts, both acrobats and jugglers, molded in a leotard of vivid silk, spangled and tinseled? The lights of the theater, which refract a thousand times over the sparkling performer, at every move he makes, seems to fly from him in myriads of sparks of all colors. As much as the grace of the acrobatics, the eyes take pleasure in the iridescent arabesques that the gleams of the spangles trace. The man appears to be moving in a sheath of flame, to be a flame himself more capricious and more various than any true flame ever shows itself to be...

  Let us suppose the man no longer speckled with precarious metallic facets, nor dancing in the light of a chandelier, but entirely transformed into a kind of living cluster of diamonds... Now that cluster is plunging into the fulgurant sheet... Only the imagination can represent to itself whose sheaves of rays would flow and blossom, what a hurricane of rutilances would launch forth at the slightest quiver of that fabulous fruit, every grain of which not only refracts the fulgurances that strike it from all directions, sending them forth a thousand times more ardent than when they arrived, but also marrying those exceedingly vivid fires with the radiations received from all the other diamonds...

  Now, the light becomes even brighter. Every one of those marvelous nuclei is transformed into a living thing. Every diamond becomes a kind of minuscule sun, simultaneously rotating and radiating like a veritable star, animated by a pulse, an infinitesimal being all of whose organs must be made of light, as those of water-dwelling Monera, for example, seem to be made of the droplets among which the protozoan moves...

  Such was the body of the arcandre after having been the multitude of scintillations that I have only been able to compare to a cluster of diamonds, made of myriads of tiny palpitating suns.

  As I describe the light emanating from that tunic of suns, that torrent of stars, I seem to see the words dissolving, like moths falling as they approach a naked flame. You are nothing to me, ornaments of the Vedas, necklaces of Scheherazade, compared to that swarm of suns. You cannot better express the adorable conflagration of that body, vertiginous gleams by which the saints are intoxicated, the abode of angels, the Virgin’s robes, ovum of triumphant flame around the head of the Son...

  But I can
go no further forward, seeking a comparison for a resplendence that nothing could equal, not even the primal light of the world that I had contemplated during the arcandre’s initial enchantments. That one, in its terrible splendor, was entirely physical, while it was not possible that this one...

  But now, scarcely had I glimpsed, scarcely had I entered into the delight of such a vision, than a new vision imposed itself. That light was populated by a host of individuals; the arcandre’s miraculous body became the location of an inconceivable epic...

  I remember having read, as a child, a tale in which a shipwrecked prince lands on a mysterious island. Wandering around, the prince discovers on that island three spinners, who are the Fates. One of them is sitting in front of a tapestry representing Destiny. The living creation is embroidered on one of those abbreviated frames that only fantastic tales can permit...

  Now I affirm here that that the flamboyant body of the arcandre was the mirage of the universe. Those bodies became a sort of enormous carnival of worlds, beings, things and dramas...

  I cannot say what arrangement of vibrations, what entanglement of reflections had made the innumerable figures and scenes that were narrowly amalgamated with one another, agitating in a kind of chaotic vortex, which was all contained within the measure of the body of fire; but what is certain is that every detail and every event was cut out of that chaos, perfectly clear and definite, as soon as I fixed my particular attention upon it. If my attention was prolonged, the object conserved its detachment from the amalgam, separated from the body, quit the turbulence and grew, attaining without delay the proportions of reality. Meanwhile, the ambience, the air and my own sensations immediately belonged to the ambience, the details and the time of the object...