The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  In my perpetual intellectual effervescence, my frenzy to learn the greatest beauty and to edify the most elevated Joy, it was inevitable that quasi-perpetual shocks should be produced in me, resounding in the utmost depths, caused by the disproportion that was blindingly evident, in every instant of my hours as a soldier, between the delightful objects of my meditation and the spectacles of the reality in which I was living. Quick to generalize, like all children, I most frequently gave these shocks the form of an immense bitterness, a tempestuous stupefaction at the fact that men—extrapolating from those I saw to all others—had remained almost identical to their brethren of prehistoric epochs in which eating, clothing oneself, fornicating and sleeping were the motive forces and the supreme goals, and that they had remained so on a planet which, in the meantime, I thought, human genius and great mechanical inventions had rendered well and truly propitious henceforth to actions and sensualities more grandiose, more liberated and more exquisite than had ever been accomplished, or even imagined, before.

  I came to suffer with as much violence as I had had enthusiasm before, from the conviction that humans, in the main, were still content with their miserable semi-animal satisfactions, or resigned to a cramped or murderous life, when the times were realizing a magnificent royalty and that no more was necessary than to adapt themselves to live in the times, that they only had to look and understand to see that Paradises had arrived on earth, prodigiously more pleasant, splendid and various than those promised by the Bible.

  It was, in the final analysis, and by virtue of the law of universal interdependence—the subtle and the liberated being weighed down and paralyzed by all the rest—that poor quality of the satisfaction of the mass of humans not disengaged from animality, and that blind resignation, which appeared to me to be largely responsible for the obscure and dolorous state in which humanity entire was still trailing.

  If humans knew their veritable powers, I thought then, and their right to veritable Joy, and what that Joy is, the light that would suddenly inundate them would instantly render them truly human and truly worthy of that marvelous name!

  Thus, by virtue of such relentless suffering excited by contact with a base and ugly reality, and by virtue of the sentiment that I, the fortunate, the victorious and the sapient, had a duty to reveal my luminous vision to the world, it is explicable that a tyrannical and resplendent notion of a mission—an apostolate, in sum—gradually expanded within me: before any other task, to sing, to proclaim, to affirm the new Joy that would recreate humankind!

  And it was in that state of mind that, as soon as I had completed my military service, I departed for Ascain, in order to formulate, in the spacious serenity of solitude, the charter of terrestrial Joy.

  28

  At a bend in the zigzag road that goes from the foot of the Rhune to the village of Sarre, Ascain’s neighbor, there is a large anfractuosity of black stone, an ancient slate quarry that was doubtless abandoned as soon as it was excavated. It rises about fifteen meters above the road. How many times, parading my tumultuous cogitation along that road, had I measured that abrupt black wall with my frightfully distressed gaze? Tomorrow, I told myself, I’ll climb up there.

  The opulent trees that bordered the road, the bushes, the wild flowers on the banks, the cheerful birds, the air and the sky of that winterless region all enveloped me with delicate salubrity, gracious and light colors. And yet I walked without seeing anything but my dream, and that black rock on which my dream was about to break.

  I was carrying an infinite torment. How had it come about? A pitiful Prometheus, I had no idea how to manipulate or to guide the fire that I had stolen, and I was burning my fingers, my heart and my reason. A quotidian defeat was devouring me a little more before every evening: the shame and gehenna of a day used up vainly trying to express my thought.

  My torture, banal in sum, was that which the majority of artists suffer at the genesis of their work. It is the enthusiasm brought by each of them to the affair that colors that tragedy, renders it more or less pathetic and biting, and sometimes terrible to the point of bringing the theater down and killing the protagonist.

  I can honestly say that I was all the way there; my entire being was in the battle. In the same way that in the time when I had discovered and abstractly conceived Joy, my limbs and lungs had participated in the celebrations of my mind, gaining therein a livelier, more robust and richer blood, my body was now buckling beneath my excessively heavy head, wearied by an effort without issue. I could not give life to my thoughts, the life of words and form, but I did not know then that it was because I had not lived myself. The sparkling ideas that I had once attained, perfidious guests of an excessively youthful consciousness, now held me in their power. I was neither their king, nor their shepherd, nor their director, but their miserable serf, their prey.

  I wandered, disabled, through their sabbat, toyed with, juggled, bullied and mocked by them. I could not consider one of them, trying to isolate it and fix it on the blank page, without it immediately summoning all the others. I was immediately surrounded, assailed and torn apart by the ferocious band. The precisions that seemed to me to be indispensable, the apparent contradictions, the metaphysical relationships, the criticisms and the counter-criticisms jostled one another, all trying to pass all at the same time into the first stroke of my pen. I left the page, I closed my eyes, in order to master the bacchanal, to chase away the intruders, the unnecessary, to prune, to eliminate, to simplify, to clarify, in order finally to grasp the elect...

  Oh, well, yes! The furies multiplied their crowd. They beckoned to all systems, historical controversies, centuries-old disputes, ethics, articles of synods, dogmas, Kabbalahs and cosmogonies…all the corresponding human gesticulations, evolutions, crusades, miracles, fervors, deliria, massacres emerged from time and shoved me away. Bewildered, I fled the table and the house; I went to demand a diversion from the roads, the trees, the grass, the stones. I walked, I whistled, I sang, I forgot. Not having quit me, how they lay in wait for me! As soon as I resumed thinking, their chaotic carnival bounded toward me, trampling my plans, my sketches, my whims, sacking everything, soon rendering the poor point unrecognizable, incoherent and inextricable, however clear, precise and organized it had been when I glimpsed it...

  What would have happened if I had not been recalled to Paris by the accomplishment of the literary event whose mere announcement had once made me famous? Perhaps I would have killed myself, so perpetually vain and odious did my life appear, if I could not inscribe my song of Joy radiantly upon it. All the dazzling perspectives opened to my young royalty, all the victories, delights and voluptuousness would be nothing to me if I could not set the seal upon them with the great word that would enchant the world. Already, on emerging from military service, at the moment when I could have begun to enjoy them, I had abdicated them in favor of that retreat to Ascain.

  I reappeared to my fellows rich, in their eyes, with the most astonishing fortune that had ever been heaped upon a debutant; in my own eyes, I was impotent and miserable. All the windfalls that I had obtained, for which I was incalculably envied, had the effect on me of jewels colliding with an empty vase.

  The event occurred. Announced, postponed, awaited for several years, it had aroused many preliminary jealousies, which had accumulated and strengthened with the aid of time. Those unleashed jealousies, the overexcitement of the wait, and the noise made round a work of which nothing was known except that the Academician director of the foremost French theater had accepted it, immediately after having read it, and whose author, complexly unknown the day before, was twenty years old at the moment of that reception—the very overexcitement that had pushed the public to prejudge of the work that it must be one of genius, whereas it possessed all the disappointing faults and awkwardness of an adolescent work—combined in a spicy ensemble to crush the object of so much agitation.

  However, Paris is such that the racket made around the author, however wounded he might b
e by his resounding failure, was sufficient for all doors to remain open to his productions. I would then have been able to pursue my career with the rarest facility and, as they say, “find a home” for works almost everywhere. Furnished with a little money, which remained to me from the adventure, I fled, exiling myself to the mountains again with the illusion that I could finally realize the sole work that would make life worthwhile.

  The money melted away before a hundred lines were written. Then I returned among people. It was expected that I would repair my fall. People were astonished that I appeared empty-handed after a long and silent absence. I could not explain that I thought, having attained one of the great truths capable of molding the world, that it had been necessary to carry it for a long time and confront it with life in order to be able to pronounce it, and that the labor in question had not been as easy as writing a light comedy or a romantic novel. Many friendships had come to me once without knowing anything about me except the noise generated by the reception of my drama, and, as a flattering rumor had sufficed for some to call themselves my friends, it had only required the wind of failure to make them turn away from me. Others, who conserved some sincere sympathy for me, gradually drew away on seeing me remain sterile for several years. I found myself friendless, having lost any aureole, and obliged to earn my daily bread arduously. Then I began to live the same life as all men.

  29

  Scarcely had I cried “Ascain!” and recognized in the vortex of images the pensive young man sitting on a grassy bank on the pathway of red earth than the forest vanished and I found myself transported to the Rhune at the point where I had just seen the phantom of my youth. The latter had disappeared, but the same light of the violet dusk was floating over the slopes of the brown mountain. Broad mists were beginning to rise from the earth, slowly unfurling, spreading over the flanks of the massif, thickening, gradually hiding the villages down below. An immense peace dressed the silence.

  I gazed with a strange emotion at the stones of the road, the little flowers on the bank. It seemed to me that every pebble, every blade of grass ought still to contain, fraternally, a little of the bitter confidences that my stifling soul had once allowed to escape every evening, here and in many similar places on the mountain, in serene and vaporous hours like this one.

  Now, I saw the arcandre beside me. The malicious friend must have conjectured the emotion into which the bitterest of memories would cast me. The furious curiosity that I had experienced at his last words was extinct. That paraphrase of Christ in which he had summarized the prodigy of his four bodies, if it still resonated in my ears, no longer held me in the same impetuous astonishment. So I listened to the arcandre calmly when he resumed speaking.

  “Know,” he said, “that everything I have enabled you to see before now was mere twittering. The illumination of the nocturnal sun, your immersion in the immaterial, the saraband of images, the suns composing my three bodies, the moment when you sensed yourself simultaneously fixed against your tree and carried away by the fulgurant river, were merely little games with which I was amusing myself while leading you to the light and warmth for which you had asked me. I count, when the time comes, on explaining everything. Amusements, I repeat, with regard to many other curiosities and prodigies that I have, by virtue of my nature, the faculty of engendering inexhaustibly. Now, because of the inexhaustibility that is possible for me, I beg you to give me credit, with respect to what you have seen, for the many other tricks of the same sort that I could show you. For I now have the intention of proceeding in a fashion other than I have done thus far.

  “You complained of the coldness and darkness of an October night, and here we are in the soft light and perpetual summer of a blessed region. I have chosen this mountain, which was a place of servitude and defeat for you, and from which you shall depart victorious. It also pleases me that it should be on a mountain that you will hear the supreme words that I shall say to you. Oh, simple mischief! The one who, in handing out bread and pouring wine for his disciples, pronounced as I did a little while ago, to your great emotion: “This is my body and this is my blood,” was taken one day by the devil, so the old books say, to a mountain, and was tempted. The evil one asked the messiah to choose between the felicities of the earth, which he showed him symbolically assembled at the foot of the mountain, and the problematic felicities of heaven. Jesus, as everyone knows, resisted the devil brilliantly. He opted for the spiritual wealth, and renounced the pleasures of the world.”

  Somewhat nonplussed, I stared at the arcandre. His bright smile poured out confidence toward me.

  “There is,” he went on, “a slight parallelism between that holy anecdote and where I am taking you. The correspondence is in the panorama of felicities that I count on unfurling before you. However, you are no messiah, and after all, I am not the devil; I am something much more extraordinary, more malign, more powerful and more original than the devil.”

  He laughed. I was very surprised by that speech. However, a bizarre and voluptuous impression of security and grandeur gripped me as the arcandre spoke.

  “In the speech that I made at the beginning of our relationship,” he continued, “I told you, I believe, that it was necessary to suspend, in my regard, any reminiscence of fable, for none of the names such as archangel, demon and others that one sees in religions and sorceries suits me. I also told you that you must also not expect to find in legends, bibles, and history figures, feats and ostentations, no matter how prestigious they might be, to compare with me...”

  I found the precise words in my memory.

  “It is those words,” the arcandre went on, “for which I now want to furnish you with the proof. Let us take a few transcendent types from fable, the Bible and history, whether it be Hercules, who vanquished the hydra; Haroun-al-Raschid, named in the Thousand-and-One Nights as lord of the magnificences of Asia; Sindbad, who made voyages abundant in prodigies; Apollonius of Tyana, who walked on water and resuscitated the dead; Tristan, who knew the most beautiful amour; Lorenzo de Medici, who reigned in the time of Michelangelo; and many, many other individuals chosen as examples among all those who were the richest in power or materials of greatness and joy...”

  The arcandre interrupted himself. “There is no question, for the moment, of considering these exemplary individuals in the employment they made of their advantages, nor the enjoyments that they were able to obtain from them, nor a few shadows or a few cares that might have might have balanced their fortune. Nor is it a matter of seeing whether they were or bad, or whether they managed the beautiful materials of power, greatness or joy that were in their possession badly or well, but simply of examining, given a few superlative types of possessors, the proportion in which the possession that I have surpasses them.”

  He paused momentarily. Then he suddenly started laughing.

  “Before then, let us consider a little more the temptation that was offered to Jesus. If one considers it closely, it is a very singular proposal that Satan made to the Lord, in asking him to choose between the joys of earth and those of heaven. He might as well, just as honestly and in the same language, have asked him whether, in order to walk, he preferred to abandon the left leg or the right. The fact of having to choose between two equally precious possessions, both equally necessary to life, is no less baroque than that which would consist, in truth, of having to abandon a leg in order to run better, a lung in order to breathe better, or an eye in order to see better.”

  I laughed in my turn, without understanding where the arcandre was trying to get to.

  “I suppose,” he went on, “that the felicities of the earth and those said to be celestial are, in reality, so tightly mingled, so harmoniously combined, that they only constitute a single species. Thus, the juice and the pulp of the orange form the fruit. One can swallow the flesh and the juice together; one can also press the former in order to drink the latter alone. Some are also pleased to savor the peel; but even in dividing the delights of the orange into
two or three, it is one and the same fruit from which those delights are taken.”

  “Undoubtedly,” I said.

  “On the other hand,” my companion continued, imperturbably, “the man who has drunk the juice does not believe that he is henceforth forbidden under the harshest of penalties to eat the pulp, and even the peel. If one can say that he has, at a given moment, opted for the for the flesh with the juice, or the juice alone, or for the entire orange, his option has, in that case, only been one diversity of his hunger, and he conserves his full right to the complete enjoyment of all the oranges to come and all the parts of those oranges...”

  “To be sure...”

  “The impressive symbol of the option of Jesus is, therefore, worth exactly as much as some nonsense in the Tales of Mother Goose, if it is in the totality of life, known and knowable, terrestrial and celestial, temporal and spiritual, as with our orange, which forms a single fruit with various delights, and if, instead of having to deprive oneself severely of one thing in order to have something else, one has the leisure and the means to bite into everything that it contains of goodness...”

  “Of goodness…,” I began

  “Now, everything in it is good,” said the arcandre. “That which is called bad is that of which the goodness is unknown.”

  30

  “Those premises,” he went on, “of which God the Son furnishes us the substance—and consider that in our image of the orange we could have, without any great damage, and only changing a few terms here and there, used16 instead of Jesus, Buddha and his Nirvana—can open the series of my comparisons. Indeed, let us take one of the prerogatives of my nature, and not the least considerable, that of finding in all things not only the goodness—which I mean here in the sense of flavor—but of also finding the beauty. Your epithets “bad” and “ugly” do not correspond to anything, or very little, for me, if there is, in my eyes, no object or state, no thing or person that does not always present some singularity or property that is capable in some measure of rendering the said thing, object, state or person, if not beautiful or good according to your canons, at least attractive, seductive in certain mysterious ways, and always in a disposition to deliver some precious confession.