The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “I had, therefore, recognized that nothing subsisted of that Poverty, and that Joy could henceforth be around human laws and actions like space, light and the immensity of the sea around the detached vessel. And I was like that vessel, and no longer felt the presence of Poverty either in the limbs of my body or the thoughts of my mind.

  “However, the humans that I called my brothers and my fellows continued to lament, and to sing, laugh, love, dream, worship, construct and add laws to their laws and works to their works, while continuing to lament—for whatever their songs, works and laws were, there was always the certainty of their Poverty beneath them, and even if they did not state that certainty, if they covered it with decorations, if they strove to forget it or deny it in sensuality, beauty or love, a moment always came when, in the most delicious fruit, the tooth or the knife would encounter the hard stone. Thus I saw humans living in accordance with the obsolete verity of Poverty, while I could not renounce living in accordance with the fresh verity of Joy.

  “I could no longer go back into the cocoon by reclosing the rip, or tear out of my eyes the vision with which my gaze had been permanently struck, blow out every last flicker of my memory. I could no longer fold back the wings that I sensed henceforth attached to every fiber of my body, every one of the palpitations of my thought, since the moment I had recognized that the extent of creation was freely open, and that creation was for humans similar to the one celebrated of old under the name of Eden. I could not, even if I had folded back those innumerable wings and climbed back into the cocoon, resume the state and the posture of the larva, immobile in a meager light, the slights quivers of which immediately ran into walls.

  “Then I began to go forth and live in accordance with the verity of Joy. I was similar in appearance to other humans, and yet I was no longer human in the sense that you give to the word. And my new name and race were revealed to me when I encountered the arcandres, and realized that I was similar to them.

  58

  “Do you remember the legend of the sphinx of Thebes? The monster with the human head that stood at the threshold of the fabulous city was made, it was said, of the passions of Thebes. It was the emanation of the passions of the City. It was the spirit of those passions made flesh, having taken form: that particular concrete and living form. Elsewhere, certain authors and demonologists claim that the Devil, such as he appeared to the people of a region, to troubled nuns and many visionaries, was similarly the concretized sum of terrestrial sins—which is to say, not a creature pre-existing the sins, but an emanation of those very sins themselves—or, more exactly, the sins themselves manifest in a plastic, synthetic and living form.

  “That is to aid you to understand what the arcandres are: a race of beings proceeding from the major power of human beings, emanations, living syntheses, incarnations of the superlative human spirit. To assist you further in understanding, know that in that sort of aspiration of my mind, during which the instant of my consciousness in which I held the totality of human possession was ‘objectivized,’ I was making, in that knowledge, the first gesture of the arcandrat, the initiating gesture of the marvelous race.

  “That is all that I can tell you in that regard. Don’t expect me to enlighten you any further, beyond the revelation of that spiritual aspiration, as to the mystery of the formation of the arcandres. That mystery is not communicable in words. Its possession can only come from yourself, your desire, your labor. The Mystery is within you and in regions of you that it is necessary for you to discover and that you alone can attain, in order to know them in the force and irradiation of a verity that has no influence.

  59

  “Having joined the arcandres, I penetrated and shared the miracle of their synthetic nature. That miracle was that I hold within myself, everything that a man can do with the aid of his books, his instruments and his apparatus. The displacements that humans effectuate by means of railways, ships and airplanes; the places they penetrate with submarines, microscopes, telescopes and light-bulbs; the apparatus by means of which they transmit their will, telephones, telegraphs and airwaves; those by which they open mines, enter stones, melt minerals, forge iron; the machines used for cultivation, in factories, and engines…all that is within the power and means of humans… I can realize in my body and with my body.

  “Thus, I have a license to shrink myself to atomic size, and to elongate myself to the stars, to cross the earth from one pole to the other in an instant, to dilute myself in forces and ambient energies, to move in the ground, in the sea, in the ether. Thus are explained some of the games with which I have amused myself in your presence.

  “Thus, in the forest, I made a beam of light emerge from my finger which suddenly illuminated a foraging ant—the same beam that you produce from an electric bulb costing a few sous. And when I made the light rosy that filled all the nocturnal space, I was accomplishing nothing more by extending my arm than men do whose electric bulbs light up an expanse of darkness as vast as they wish...

  “You perhaps understand now of what those little music pills are made, and your parents’ little drawing room, a form as convenient as I gave to that wax, and those impressionable coatings by which the phonograph and photography fix subtle sound and fleeting images.

  “The battle of the roots, that condensation of several months into a few minutes, any cinematographer can succeed in producing, and other miracles more complicated...

  “But the explanation of those paltry material games does not suffice to enlighten another aspect of the prodigies through which I enabled you to live. Books of geology and cosmology, and photographic or electric machines, would not have excited the emotion and sensuality you felt when you saw the root, burned in the original fire and found yourself in your parents’ drawing room or on the Rhume, The book would only have given you the science and the image of primordial times; the wax pill only retains for you the image of the familial décor, the cinematograph only offers you the image of roots. Their real life is the mystery of PASSION.

  “Similarly, I could have explained to you, for example, that the moment a little while ago that we spent under the sea and when you swooned with admiration and amazement before some extraordinary madrepore, combined, condensed and literally synthesized the material means offered to you by the submarine, submarine photography and the soundings carried out by certain oceanographers at extreme depths, and the spiritual introspection that permitted you the data acquired by Science...

  “Or I could have explained to you that the coexistence on which you interrogated me so furiously once, asking me about its mechanisms and in what antechamber of the real it resided, was entirely in your brain, in the book, in photography, in planetary memory, in our subjective faculties, in certain material modes that we have enumerated—whether as a matter of a displacement in space, like Bayreuth, or a contraction of time, as among the roots—in brief, that it resided in an ensemble, in a synthesis of images, zones, places and means that were all in my arcandre’s body, and which I made yours momentarily...

  “But, in explaining everything like that, I would not have said anything, if we did not add PASSION to the prodigies. That is what, by exciting your blood, precipitating the rhythm of your heart, alcoholizing your muscles and flagellating your nerves, gave you those prodigies—those images, rather—for real…in sum, permitted you to live them in plastic and sensible reality, as if you had seen, touched, smelled, felt and embraced the objects and the things that stood out from what you normally call the real…the fruit that you pick from the tree, the familiar ground on which your feet tread, the table in front of which you sit down every evening, your garments, the houses in your street, the passers-by, the people...

  “But are that fruit, the ground, the table, your garments, the houses of stone and iron and the people, and everything else that you see, touch and know ordinarily by virtue of your actions and your days, any more real, in the final analysis, than what I have given you by means of prodigy?

  60


  “I shall not return to the discussion of philosophies or mysticisms regarding the unreality of the formal world. I have other paths to tread.

  “It is necessary for us to return to the moment when you were submerged in the immaterial river, after having seen the forest decompose and dissolve. Although your plunge into the bosom of a universe without forms was merely one of my amusements, the comprehension of that plunge, and the spectacles that followed it, the reappearance of forms, the simultaneity of my four bodies, necessitate for you a few improvements of your customary notions.

  “Here is a drop of water. To your normal gaze, it is a small colorless and diaphanous mass in which the surrounding light is reflected. Observe that same drop under a microscope: a thousand hallucinatory animals populate it. The two aspects of that drop are rigorously real, one as much as the other, corresponding to your two gazes, your natural gaze and your microscopic gaze.

  “While you gaze at the drop through the microscope it is perfectly real, as is the tiny world of infusoria revealed to you by the lens. If, leaving the apparatus momentarily, abandoning your microscopic gaze for an instant, you resume your natural gaze, you see, no less real, the little colorless mass, diaphanous, and devoid of the population that you have just seen there.

  “So, moving your gaze from the drop seen through the apparatus to the same drop seen with the naked eye, you can consider two realities, prodigiously different, of one thing, and exist yourself, in a manner of speaking, alternately, in the reality of the universe corresponding to what your natural gaze sees, and in the reality of the universe corresponding to what the microscope reveals in the water drop.

  “Now, knowing that what you have seen in the microscope, without the aid of it, your memory, and your science of what you have seen, can henceforth transpose into the normal drop, the microscopic reality of that same drop—or, to put it otherwise, accomplish the transposition of the subjective into the objective, the simultaneity of that which you know and that which you see.

  “Consider where such an operation takes us. Knowing the two realities of the drop of water, you can subjectively see them, or at least think them, at the same time; and that is, in a sense, as if you were yourself, in relation to that drop, simultaneously in the different states of reality corresponding to those different states of the same thing.

  “Now, if I lend you the privileges of my being, for which the notions of subjectivity and objectivity, of the concrete and the abstract, no longer have the meaning that you give them, no longer being modes, one of direct perception and the other of thought, but different states of the entire being; and, on the other hand, if the devices that attain the different states of an object are no longer—for you, on whom I have conferred my faculties—exterior things, but correspond to faculties of your own being, then, in the same object and in the same moment, you will see different states of those objects simultaneously and you will be in the different corresponding states of the universe yourself.

  “I have only taken the example of the drop of water to bring you to a more complex comprehension. Think, to begin with, that such a perception of a more intimate reality of things will immediately begin to overturn, in a fashion, your ordinary notions of space and time…from which will necessarily follow the disappearance of all substance.

  By ordinary notions of space and time I mean that of physical space and that of the honest everyday time that clocks and calendars divide: entirely archaic and fallacious notions, as everyone knows, and as the ABC of philosophy informs us, at least with regard to the fallacious, which is a function of the archaic.

  With regard to that archaic I will go a little way into the margin of philosophy. I call those nations archaic because they go back to ages when humans were unaware of the reality that what is delivered to them by animal sensibility—which is to say, the produce of bare sensation, by virtue of seeing, smelling, touching solely with the resources provide by nature, without the enrichment of any of the apparatus thanks to which the constituent states of matter are revealed and multiplied, the revelations of which are now definitely acquired by the knowledge and intelligence humans have of that matter, and thus of their conception and vision of the world.

  “The order of my proposals demands that I assume momentarily the aspect of magister. Between one of the leaves of that fern near your hand and your hand, which could pluck that leaf, your normal gaze certainly perceives space. That is to say that between the leaf and you there is a kind of relative void, a milieu furnished with elements so scantly resistant that they do not exist for your eye, for your hand and for the muscular effort you would need to make in order to reach out from where you are to the leaf: vapors of air, reflections of daylight.

  “That notion of space, the issue of your sentiment of quasi-void, a sentiment itself tributary to your impression of non-resistance, is based on the givens of your eye, your hand and the muscular effort required—givens that it is not inexact to call animal. Now, if, by virtue of a sudden sharper and finer sensibility your impression received for bases the other veritably innumerable elements that fill the short extent that extends between the leaf and you, your notion of that extent would be transformed, henceforth founded on far more subtle givens, which are no less true, demonstrable and as conclusive as those formed by the animal notion of space.

  “Now, you are not unaware that your gaze and your hands, such as nature has made them, perceive here what you know and what you can presume that there is of the real, of the imperiously existent, between the leaf and you, about as much as could be seen of a procession by two idiots enclosed in a cellar looking through a ventilation shaft.

  “Thus, I suddenly confer on you a certain immediate visual acuity, representing, in a sense, the sum of possibilities of vision and the knowledge that results synthetically from the employment of all the instruments of physical and chemical introspection presently in the service of humans, The consequence of such a vision would be, as I said, the momentary perturbation, and then the annihilation, of your normal notion—your archaic notion—of space.

  “Firstly, for a clear-sighted gaze of such acuity, forms would no longer be anything but molecules, some of them closer than others, those which constitute bodies, bathed or traversed by more distant molecules, which are juices or vapors; around both, and similarly traversing them in many places, swarm the bacilli of the air, the living dust, the organic individuals that agitated in myriads in the smallest parcel of the atmosphere; those molecules and dust particles would be everywhere enveloped by the gases whose vehement embraces form the air, and those gases and their furies, having become visible, would be furrowed themselves by the sparkling fluids whose endless flux constitutes light...

  “In addition, all of that being only the grosser part of our space, also visible would be the electricities and all the energies that science can name resolutely, that it can weigh, measure and manipulate, those that are based on speculation rather than experience, and those apparatus can detect without our being able to name them yet; the great magnetisms would be visible, those suns registering and remaining associated with the atoms of that leaf; emanations, affinities and projections would be visible. Finally, as vast as infinity and as constant as eternity, all the laws of being, or movement and order, which play, turn and agitate here, have their part in the presence of that fraction of the universe, and influence over it...

  “In truth, my friend, when those hosts of forces, fluids, fires and infinitesimal organisms are made suddenly visible, what significance, what reality, would your anterior notion of space retain? At what point in that fantastic world in which all things appear not only linked but aggregated together by those dusts, those rays, those magnetisms and those laws, and in which you would no longer see yourself, in its new modalities, mingled and confounded, as anything but dances and struggles of molecules and currents, would the slightest interstice corresponding to what you call space be retained?

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  “All that is
only said for space, and we have said nothing yet. That somewhat chaotic face of matter could only endure momentarily. Scarcely had your notion of space been abolished before a more numerous representation of reality than your notion of time would, in its turn, be fundamentally surprised. The everyday notion of time having for materials, for its only materials, the different aspects and successions of events, before the suddenly complicated world that we sketched just now, you can imagine what a riposte that notion of time would receive, after that of space.

  “That world being offered in much more intimate appearances, you would, as I said, become momentarily a phantasmagoria of swarming particles, ephemeral arabesques, entangled gases, incessantly changing colors, magnetic undertows, currents colliding, absorbing one another and interpenetrating…but I said ‘momentarily,’ because that spectacle could only be transitory. That world, multiplying its figures and its moments, would by the same token have multiplied the reference points of time.

  “At whatever point your miraculous vision might try to pause upon, in every part of that ensemble, the transformations, the exchanges, the disjunctions and the developments make time so numerous, so laden, so active—in sum, so animated-that it becomes…indivisible. The sum of events and metamorphoses being effected everywhere and simultaneously would be no more fractionable into moments for you than the ocean is divisible into droplets for a diver.

  “You can no longer count. You can no longer see anything but an immense total and perpetual trepidation, in which the prismatic cascades of light, the conflagrations of electricities and the revolutions of forces fulgurate, matter in a universal frenzy of alliances and transfigurations—and infinite glittering, in sum, with neither up nor down, left or right, devoid of horizons and limits, which, renouncing space and refusing time, is simply be the world seen at slightly closer range.