The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  I shall take an example.

  I cannot take only one. If I attempted to enunciate what I saw passing and spinning in that race of living light, I would need…but what word could be more explicit here than a certain phrase of the arcandre’s, among those that he had pronounced emphatically when revealing himself to me? “I shall not enumerate the countenance of my words,” he said, “for it is not possible to state the number and the diversity of the outside and the inside of creation. And it is that number, and that diversity, which my words signify...”

  23

  For my example, something surprising is required—and the name of Savonarola, suddenly surges forth at this point in my adventure...

  But let us get on, and continue the narration. It is only important to be a veracious narrator. And what is a brief start of surprise for whoever is following with me this tale in which one encounters a miracle on every page?

  Among the images of the fantastic farandole that attracted my attention most keenly, one was the scene that the Michelets and the Taines have taken pleasure in painting for us. I saw the parvis of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, at a moment when Girolamo Savonarola was preaching in the open air on the piazza. Children were heaping up adornments—gold chains, carved combs, masks and boxes of make-up—in front of the Dominican. A passionate crowd was listening to the terrible monk, and I soon found myself mingled with that crowd.

  Savonarola spoke about the imminent end of Rome, the legions of God ready to fall upon the city, on Alexander the Simoniac. He spoke about the necessity of a great penitence for Florence. I remember very clearly that the slightest details were clearly visible to me. A gesture of a weeper sculpted on the bronze door of the nearby baptistry…the sandal of a child hopping around the spoils of ostentation, which had become the heap of precious items assembled there by the monk’s order, pillaged by the puerile hordes from noble homes, torn from the vestments of Tuscan ladies. A peasant woman was trembling both from covetousness of so many beautiful things and cruel anxiety at Savonarola’s cries.

  A milky atmosphere and a nacreous light enveloped the red dome of Santa Maria. The softness of Florence filtered through the prophet’s maledictions like a languorous cat through the debris.

  What thought pricked my mind, which suddenly caused me to draw away from the crowd and the basilica? Florence was real, since I could stroll idly through the streets. They were almost deserted because of the preaching. I wandered, simultaneously amazed to be there and savoring the seductive lightness of the air and the unparalleled delicacy of the city. I was walking slowly.

  Suddenly, my gaze, full of delighted admiration, fell upon a tall bronze statue standing in a profound niche in the wall of a red stone church. That image summarized the finest grace allied with serene strength and masculine majesty. It was Donatello’s Saint George. I stood there, gripped by an ardent contemplation, in a kind of voluptuous and tender piety, forgetting the time.

  A sound of footsteps broke my reverie. A man was crossing the street.

  “What is this church?” I asked him.

  “Your Lordship does not know Orsanmichele?” the man replied.

  I suppose he expected other questions. My Lordship was too stupefied at first to continue the conversation, for I perceived that I had quite naturally interrogated the passer-by in his own language, in fifteenth-century Tuscan, and when he replied to me in the same tongue I had understood him. Undoubtedly, I was about to speak again, less to obtain more information than to hear myself express myself for a second time in a dialect of which I had not known the most elementary words until that moment…when a rumor became audible, which grew, coming toward us, becoming more precise.

  The sermon had finished. Florence was quitting the parvis, about to spread out through the streets, resuming its multiple life. The sentiment of reality had gripped me so completely that a kind of frisson of involuntary anguish ran through my entire body. I was frightened by the idea that I was about to be cast into the midst of that coming-and-going of merchants, women and soldiers, among whom I would be a man fallen from five centuries in the future. A clawed impression of nightmare possessed me.

  Assuredly, if I had reflected, remembering certain phases just as extraordinary of my voyages, that I had burned with the primal fire and battled with roots in the ground, I would not have yielded to that absurd fear. At any rate, that was what happened. A hectic desire to escape jangled my nerves. My thought twisted toward the memory of the arcandre as the hand of a drowning man clutches above the surface of the water.

  It was sufficient. Immediately, I found myself extended once again, as peacefully as could be on the friendly mossy bank, in the clearing, where everything had resumed its normal appearance: the grass, the trees, the ferns, through which the fresh breeze was blowing, and where the same pale moon was shining as before I had asked the arcandre for more light and a little warmth.

  But no! I was ashamed, I did not intend that the magical adventure should but cut short like that, so pitifully, nor that rotation of the universe around the radiant body of the arcandre...

  I reprimanded myself harshly.

  A burst of laughter rang in my ears, of the cherished timbre that had become so pleasant to hear…the arcandre forgave me. Everything was suddenly enchanted again. The forest became glittering again. The vision surged forth where I had left it. The farandole of countless images resumed its course.

  24

  I have said it. I will not try to enunciate all that I saw there. Imagine, rolling in the orbits of the vortex, a sabbat, a confusion of ever-new images succeeding one another pell-mell...

  Pell-mell, the sublime, the horrible, the burlesque, the real and the mythological, the most tempestuous bustle, the most ludicrous and the most brutal transitions, the smallest detail of the most vulgar object, entire continents, centuries of history that a single glance embraces...

  So that, in a thousandth of the time that it takes me to write it, appeared, coming after the Florence of Savonarola…an automobile spark-plug with its iron body, porcelain neck and copper head; a buckle of the doublet of one of Clotaire’s pages; the statue of Sainte-Beuve in the Jardin du Luxembourg; two men dressed in animal skins fighting over the cadaver of a bear; Gabrielle d’Estrées, half naked, in the arms of the King of France; a locomotive emerging from the hall of a large railway station; crystal craters on a dead planet; Pierre Corneille writing on the stone table in his garden at Petit-Couronne near Rouen; a drinking-den in Madrid where sailors were watching a gypsy dance...

  I shall stop. To continue would be madness. Only a lunatic would be amused by stringing together the most varied figures in such a ludicrous succession—and yet, I am only describing honestly a scarcely-measurable instant of the chaotic saraband. In any case, dementia was perhaps involved in the affair, for fever and vertigo gradually invaded me. A host, a melee of covetousness, curiosity and avidity, burned me in turn. A gust of salacity drove me furiously toward two good-time girls going into a Montmartre dance-hall arm in arm—but that urge yielded to a profound thirst to approach Jacob Boehme, who, tapping soles in his cobbler’s workshop, was meditating a chapter of De signatura rerum. My legs bounded of their own accord toward diaphanous dryads whose games would open up for me if I wished. My stomach swooned at fabulous pastries made for a snack for Semiramis...

  As if my incessantly-whipped desires, all together and all entangled, had themselves formed one of the orbits of the cyclone of images, I gradually sensed myself carried away by the round, snatched from myself from all directions at once, as if torn apart in a thousand flames...

  I was about to lose consciousness when I heard the arcandre’s voice. “Look again,” it said.

  The flames were extinguished. My blood rediscovered its course; it was as if I were inundated by peace.

  I looked.

  Doubtless I was seeing with the mind’s eye, for what gaze can contemplate with one vision four aspects of the same thing, four different states of the same form
, not superimposed or delivering one another by transparency, but confounded and simultaneous?

  25

  This is what I saw:

  The arcandre, in his person of flesh, dressed as I have said before, in garments fairly similar to mine, his body outlined against the foliage of the clearing, which had become a clearing again, as before.

  The same arcandre, formed of effluvia; and while everything remained in its normal appearances around me, everything in his vicinity was dematerialized, unraveled, in a sense, degrading into effluvia at the extremities: the delicate tips of leaves, surfaces of bark, the heads of insects or nearby birds traversing that atmosphere, the air and light surrounding the body, the earth beneath it. The flow of fulgurance, incessantly renewed, that I have described elsewhere, recommenced in that space.

  Now, as the effluvia were emanating from everything that was around the arcandre, the movement of the glittering was necessarily concentric; but I could not perceive or comprehend what became of those waves continuously springing forth, where they were going and how they vanished after having encountered one another at the hypothetical center on which they were converging. Were they rising upwards? Were they descending? Were they being reabsorbed in that center?

  The zone occupied by that air, that light, that foliage, that bark and that dematerialized body presented itself as a kind of luminous column, the base of which was set I know not where, nor at what depth in the earth, and the summit of which terminated I know not where, nor at what altitude in the sky.

  At the same time as I saw that column in which all forms were dissolved, however, I saw the arcandre resplendent in his body of suns, which rendered the electric fires in which he bathed wan and faint.

  Fourthly, and finally, that same body, still unfurling the inexhaustible magma of the images of the universe.

  Now, gazing at that quadruple figure of the same being, I heard the exceedingly harmonious voice again.

  “This is my body,” said the arcandre, “and this is my blood.”

  I shuddered. An extravagant thought agitated me.

  “It is by design,” he went on, “that I employ the same words proffered one day by another, at the terminus of pathetic adventures, still represented by a great many recent idolaters, the sweetest and most august story in the world. It pleases me to pronounce them, but in a sense entirely of delight, jubilation and pride.”

  26

  He took a few steps forward. The luminous column was displaced with him—which is to say that everything from which he drew away resumed its normal appearance, and that what was now proximate dematerialized. And as he had advanced some way toward me, the corner of my bank, the extremity of my shoes, the tips of my fingers, crossed over on my knees—in sum, everything of me that was in the zone of dematerialization—became effluvia…with the consequence, and because the ground beneath the arcandre—to an indeterminable depth, as I have said—was no longer anything but a palpitation of fulgurances, that what remained visible of my legs seemed to be dangling over the edge of a well of light, while the tips of my toes were dipping into that well.

  “Friend,” I said then—and my voice, groaning with extreme passion, must have trembled as boiling water quivers, and I felt frantic, determined to interrupt the enchantment, resolved not merely to penetrate the meaning of the words that the arcandre had just pronounced but to comprehend, and finally to grasp the mechanism of many prodigies—“consent now to...”

  The enigmatic smile that appeared on the magician’s face exasperated me. But I did not have time to express my fury. How able my companion was in eluding the response! In the vortex of images, a face suddenly passed by that nailed my revolt in place, nimbly deflecting my excitement from its object

  I cried: “Ascain!”

  A Basque cowherd was slowly descending a path of red earth on the side of a mountain. A crespuscular sun draped violet sheets over the brown mountain slopes covered with grass and bushes, the paths of red humus and the ash-blue rocks. The man, his upper body braced, was marching at a regal pace, holding his staff in his two raised arms, resting it on the nape of his neck. He preceded a low cart with solid wooden wheels, sticky with red mud, drawn by a white ox whose feet and breast were spattered with the same blood-colored mud, splashed from the puddles on the path. At a corner of the descending route, the cowherd inclined his head, cordially saluting a young man sitting on a grassy bank, who must not have seen the greeting, because he made no response, his staring eyes seemingly lost in a heavy and dolorous reverie.

  I recognized that young man. It was me.

  It was me, a few years before that miraculous night. I shall step aside perilously from my present narrative to relate, as is appropriate, the strange and tragic adventure of the sojourn I had made, as an adolescent, in the village of Ascain, situated a few kilometers from Saint-Jean-de-Luz, at the foot of the mountain of the Rhune.

  I had come to that village with the intention of composing, in calm and solitude, a theatrical work whose scenario seemed to me to respond to the philosophical ideas that populated my mind at the time. I can no longer undertake to describe minutely the nature of those ideas, nor the very singular psychological stages that had brought me to them, leading me to cherish them almost religiously, at least with a kind of mystical force.

  To be brief, I can summarize the story thus: a certain event of a literary order having thrown me, when I was scarcely twenty years old, into a kind of extraordinary literary renown, the mirage was suddenly permitted to me to believe myself a king. Positively, I suddenly held the superlative conditions of happiness, glory and all grandeurs. In terms of my profession, a dazzling notoriety, abruptly arrived, flattened all the ordinary obstacles. I was not unaware, having experienced it when I tried to publish my first writings, of the rudeness of the roads that a debutant must travel. I also knew how bitter and cruel the ascension is to the heights at which the artist, if he has not used up the best of his genius in the climb, finds the freedom to express his art In accordance with his faith, able to live on his work without having to take account of the murderous caprice of merchants. Thus, I savored in its full measure the unusual privilege of being immediately perched on the very summit.

  I was not any longer, and never would be again, reduced to dressing an ideal with the forms and formulae that aid overly audacious conceptions to succeed in reaching the crowd, and from which that process of disguise often amputates the original generosity. On the other hand, I did not have to dread ever knowing the bitter disdain that marks certain artists enclosed in the ivory tower of a genius too foreign to the general sensibility of their time. For it would henceforth be the case for me that I could say what I wanted, in the form that suited me, and the world, turned toward me since the thunderclap that had revealed me, would immediately give audience to my words. Events duly fortified me a little more every day in that incomparable certainty. Everything indicated that newspapers, editors and theaters would snatch the golden egg, and, as urgent spokesmen, would keep the world attentive to my slightest productions.

  As for what my state of mind was then, it is easily imaginable that in such circumstances. I shiver when I envisaged the multiplicity and extent of what had become possible for me. Everything for which youth can wish and contain was well and truly offered to me: incalculable glory and gold. I could, and I would always be able to, choose among the most beautiful and most sumptuous that art, nature, science and industry had engendered, to surround myself with the best marvels, to be perpetually in the bosom of terrestrial enchantments, to adorn with those enchantments the woman I would love. I would have the inexhaustible joy of voyages, with their adventures. I would also know the exalted grace of being in communication, in friendship, with the most admirable men of my epoch. Everywhere I went, to the homes of painters, musicians, scientist, philosophers, and manipulators of men, I would be welcomed with warm benevolence, as a guest before whom the greatest was proud to allow his worth to shine.

  In truth, the uni
verse with all its spiritual and material riches was open to my twenty-year-old self. And the praise that had been lavished upon me authorized me to believe that I would have the virtue and the genius of singing that universe and those riches.

  Now, one day, from the altitudes to which that idea that I had formed of my destiny had elevated me, I said to myself: being so powerful, who am I?

  27

  Seeking to know myself, and to grasp all my human possibilities, I was obliged, in meditating upon myself, to extend my meditation to human nature itself, to the laws that regulate it and the different reactions of its instincts, its miseries and its powers. It goes without saying that my discoveries were strongly influenced by the magnificence of the prodigious future that I accorded myself—which is to say that the sentiment of my fortune instinctively gave me a propensity to exalt myself to testimonies of human grandeur rather than to bemoan evidence of human weakness or ugliness. Thus, my idea of human nature was formed by the epic and creative feats that humans had accomplished in the course of the ages. And from the prestigious works with which they had enriched the world, and the new dominations that the world was assured by recent scientific discoveries, more astonishing every day, I inferred with boundless enthusiasm the sovereignties and delights that they could anticipate.

  Now, as I was constructing my consciousness in that fashion, I did my military service. It was the ransom of my age. But the acclaim that had made my name illustrious had not crossed the threshold of the barracks. Only the senior officers knew that the trooper who was sweeping the courtyard or practicing the manipulation of weapons was, when he went on leave to Paris, called “Master” by reporters, that the newspapers published his portrait, and that the most celebrated actresses asked him to reserve a role for them in the next play he wrote. Thus, that young king, in everyday life, peeled potatoes, polished his equipment, learned the training manual side by side with worthy men of all classes, the majority of whom were massive, resigned peasants and grumbling city-dwellers, and who, under the coercions, the ennui and the coarseness of the military regime, laid bare the crude sentiments, the trivial appetites and the candid, elementary or imbecilic ideals of the bulk of humanity throughout the ages.