The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “Let us imagine, then, a state of substance that is not yet the formal world, since that which will give a form to that which does not exist as yet in something that is not yet what you call time, that which commences to perceive only perceiving in a manner that one might call nebular. What you will one day call actions are like the as-yet-blind encounters of forces, nebulae and vortices.

  “That which commences to perceive confusedly constructs that which is not yet images, but constancies: vague, vaporous, indescribable reference-points in the perpetual gusts of the unstable. These points are the indecisive substrate of primary forms—which is to say, if the word can be applied to anything, memories to which that which wants to be will attach itself, memories in which to enclose itself and disguise in constancy the real movement around which the perpetual metamorphosis of substance will flow, like the sea around an errant hull; nebulous memories of enormous confused ensembles; fleecy memories, immense images, gigantic reference-points, which will be as gigantic as the perception is massive, and as durable as the perception is slow, less frequent in renewing the acquired image.

  “What you will one day call humans cannot see themselves as yet, and thus do not exist, and nothing therefore exists of the world as you will one day represent it with the aid of the formidable accumulation of images consequent to these obscure gropings. Something commences to exist, made of those memories, those groping fixities, those giant and soft contours. That which commences to exist gradually designates day and night, the ground, water and the air, which are far from being what you know them to be, since you know that even now you perceive them other than they are, the air being inhabited by billions of bodies, gases and forces that your present eyes cannot see and that you would never have supposed if science and your apparatus had not revealed them to you.

  “Now, gradually, humans see themselves, but such as they draw themselves in the grottos of Eyzies, and the universe that they see—beings, things elements—corresponds to the coarseness of their vision. Have they a nervous system? You will know one day that they have one, and you will designate it as science attains it, but how can they receive it by their means of perception, which can scarcely see their own general contours and those of the world? All the same, your nervous system, such as you see it, is, for you who that which perceives; for them, it was their hands, it would be their eyes, their mouth...

  “The form of that which perceives cannot, therefore, be any more definitive for you than it was under the gaze of that obscure being.

  “But the memory having expanded, the world has become an immense reservoir of images. Every new perception, scientific, sentimental or metaphysical discovery immediately receives the influx of the innumerable mass of those images on which humans live, and from which they take their form.

  “I should like to revise the old Cartesian apothegm and enunciate it thus: ‘I think, therefore I am; but thanks to the thought that permits me to conceive that I am, I arrive at seeing myself so perpetually changing and unstable in all my parts, in a universe in perpetual conversion of all its parts, that I shall end up no longer being able to think of myself, and thus ceasing to be, if I do not enclose in an image, a fixity, a constancy, that infinitely mobile being and that fleeting universe.’ Now, are that image of me and that of the universe necessarily those I see? ‘Yes,’ said Descartes, who had no means of attaining another image.

  “But you can perhaps make a different response. For apparatus has discovered the veritable world, or, at least, a more subtle state of reality. It has revealed the filiation of forms since the massive notions of the original gestures, and that those forms, such as human still see them are suffered and not real in themselves. Human perceptions, renewed by apparatus, multiplied by machines, permit them now no longer to suffer the aspects of reality emerged from the darkness of the first hours, but to choose new aspects from the innumerable metamorphoses of a better known substance, to recreate via them new images in conformity with their more profound and more intimate intelligence of reality. Humans can form a new memory with their science, their possessions, redesign their body and the universe on the basis of new givens—the givens of their lucid desire, of their power, of their liberty, of their WILL TO JOY...

  68

  “These items of information, I have done my best to sketch for you in the course of our adventure. I have told you enough for new light to shine through your thoughts and your habits. I have only touched superficially on points that would be good and profound subjects of meditation. I would have liked to reveal to you how the arcandres live, in the knowledge of these sources of liberty and joy, the holders of powers that attest to the superlative verity of these facts and assure to whomever lives in accordance with them, the incalculable and radiant possession of the world that I conferred upon you momentarily. But it is appropriate that you, by the labor of your thoughts, regarding all that I have told you and showed you, attain the comprehension of the secret of the effective life of the arcandres, the games of delectations that compose their hours and their actions.

  “Remember that these games have for lists not merely the universe such as you know it, where their physical bodies sport, but the different simultaneous planes of that universe, to which their other bodies have access at the same time, and where they can linger on those planes selected by their caprice. Remember too, as I have enabled you to experience, that their psychic and spiritual movements, and the corresponding worlds, can assume a character of concrete and plastic reality similar to the one—but how much more extensive and numerous!—that humans only know via their physical actions and the corresponding plane of the world...

  “In any case, these separations of the physical, psychic and spiritual are all in human vocabulary. Thus, for us, our bodies, our limbs and the material world are, if we wish, if we look at them from the other planes of our being, images and vaporous abstractions, as thoughts are for humans. In the same way, the most subtle and most fluid aspects of our minds can be transferred into the simplest actions of our fleshy bodies, or the meanest object in the world.

  “It is passion, as I have told you, that is the great agent of these transfers of life and reality into the different planes of being and the world. What I have called passion, for humans and for arcandres, is amour. The marvelous hearts that you have seen, in each of your cells, in each of the vibrations of your mind, the palpitations of the suns that you saw in my body of consciousness, are merely the transfusion of that amour into all the particles and all the tremors of being. It is your passion, as I have said, that was magnified to the point that you could see in reality the passing images of my four bodies; it is amour that gives us the real possession of things, contact with which ignites our consciousness.

  “We love; we are nothing but love. Humans promulgate the thesis that combats for the enjoyment of the primordial rights of life, the inexorable necessities of the viscera, thirst for gold, the love of women, ambition for greatness or power, are the stimulants of action, the motors of all will, and suppose that without them, unspurred desire would languish or become extinct, and that would be the end of action and all life…a fine story! We, who have surpassed the fog of fatalities whose phantoms still weigh upon humans, exempt from all combats in order to eat, drink, clothe oneself and sleep, have an infinite supply of all the concrete goods for possession of which humans still devour one another, and we direct our labors, our efforts and our action towards more subtler goods. Do you reckon as nothing the uninterrupted desire to KNOW, and to embrace or possess more fully by virtue of knowledge a world that is magnified and multiplied as one penetrates it further?

  “Do you think, in spite of our privileges, that we hold the entire reality of Being? What we know and possess is still very little by comparison with what there is to know and grasp in that reality! We are incessantly discovering new curiosities and delights, by means of our bodies of flesh in the world of forms, by means of our spiritual bodies in the abstract world. The innumerable multipl
ication of the elements and aspects of all things opens before our incessantly stimulated desire an infinity of goals, perpetually renewed. And in going into that innumerable world, under the influence of environments, spectacles, décors, under the influence of our joys and sensualities, we discover incessantly new, unforeseen and unsuspected faculties in ourselves, new beings awakening in our being, which lead us toward new goals, and other joys. The former and the latter react upon the faculties, which are refreshed and arm themselves for further voyages toward more discoveries.

  “Now, there is no lassitude if we renew ourselves relentlessly, no satiation if the world is always new.

  “We live and love in the perennial fortune of being innumerable in the bosom of an innumerable universe. Masters of forms, we do not limit ourselves to the sex that emerges from a single physical disposition. We are male and female by turns, at our whim, according to whether it pleases us to embrace or to be embraced. Our sexes are as numerous as our consciousnesses. The consciousness that illuminates when I hear a great symphony gives my entire being more profound sensualities than those that a woman in love knows in the arms of her lover. The consciousnesses that are illuminated in the course of my meditations are sometimes male, sometimes female, and my entire being that is devoted to them experiences by means of ideas caresses, languors and embraces that sometimes swoon and sometimes rise up in its ultimate molecules.

  “There are no shadows over our joy. Your decrepit dualisms cannot conceive of anything without its contrary. Your excellent Anatole France, already named, and who counts among your most jovial sages, has said expressly: ‘We are only happy because we are unhappy... Evil is necessary. Like good it has its profound source in nature, and one would dry up without the other... Moral evil and physical evil incessantly share the empire of the earth with happiness and joy, as night succeeds day therein... Suffering is the sister of joy and their twin breaths, in passing over our fibers, make them resonate harmoniously. The breath of happiness alone would render a monotonous and tedious sound similar to silence.’22

  “But your dogmas of duality, that old law of contraries, that practical joke of necessary oppositions, Ormuzd and Ahriman, good and evil, happiness and unhappiness, suffering and joy, are as solidly founded as the contrast of black and white, massive colors that are only the play of your retinas. Dualism is, it is said, as real as the two eyes, the two arms or the two legs. Having attained a reality in which the states interpenetrate, in which forms are only images over which our passion or our amour has absolute power, I do not see any necessity in contraries, but rather perpetual ascendant transitions, the highest of which is the springboard and the contrast of one even higher, and so on.

  “Undoubtedly, in order to think like that, it is first necessary to escape from the notion of a limited world and a human condition to which it was said: You shall go no further, and who ever attempts to do so is locked forever in a closed circle. It is necessary to conceive of the world as innumerable everywhere and in all its parts, and to believe that it is possible to accede to it, to know it and to possess it without limits. My present joy has for its springboard and contrast the greater joy that I shall obtain. I have no need of suffering to savor joy; it is sufficient for me to think that the joy I am savoring is less than the one I shall savor. I have no need of unhappiness. It is sufficient to want an ever more gracious happiness, and to know that I have the resource to attain it, to find in that thought and that determination the contrast demanded by your philosophers and the springboard commanded by your moralists.

  “Everything for us is a source of joy and magnification. The resistance of things is a springboard of efforts that enables us to know the quality and extent of our strength more fully. In the same way that the power to pierce any physical darkness relieves us of the terrors of the night, the sentiment of the power of knowledge, the sentiment of having the resource within us to learn and to know relieves us of the terrors of ignorance and doubt in so much suffering. Every ignorance is a springboard, the joyous opportunity for new knowledge

  “Finally, we are safe from the worst suffering of all, which is that of losing the person one loves. You groan when an item of your property succumbs, because you believe it to be irreplaceable, and because you know that no matter how happy and rich you believe yourselves to be, how precarious is the patrimony of happiness and wealth that anyone possesses, and that any loss is a part of that patrimony that is gone forever. Would it be thus if you knew that you were rich with all calculable wealth, and knew that in the hour of your worst distress, or whenever you wished, every loss could be compensated by a new prebend? We have that knowledge, knowing our number, and the number infinite and incessantly increasing, of that which is pleasant. And as we know at the same time that inexhaustible profusion, the moving reality of the universe, and the superlative instability of everything, if one of those wisdoms gives us the sense and the intelligence of perpetual fragility, the other corresponds to the instinct and the consciousness of the unlimited abundance of life. The result is that the sense of immense generation abolishes in the arcandre the sentiment of the catastrophe.”

  69

  At that moment, the voice of my friend was transformed. It became strangely melodious, as if increasingly fluid, similar to the chords that a harpist draws momentarily and then allows to die down of their own accord.

  “So,” he continued, “provided with everything for which humans still labor in dolor, nourished on all terrestrial nutrients, what tasks are our tasks? What are the ends that you would call the objectives of our powers and our being?

  “Our works emerge naturally from our movements and our actions, in which the joy of being circulates as blood circulates in the limbs of humans. In Being, we give, we emanate, we radiate. We are similar to the light that accomplishes its work in shining, similar to the river that, without doing anything but flowing, carries vessels and fecundates its banks. Our cares, our labors and our duties are, for us, being in the eyes of others incessantly more beautiful, more radiant, more odorous, freer, more worthy of our status and our prerogatives...”

  As he spoke thus it seemed that the arcandre became less and less real; it seemed that his body gradually became diaphanous and allowed the daylight and the spectacle of the surrounding things to pass through him. And his voice was so tenuous that one might have thought it the rustling of the grass.

  “My friend,” said that voice, still, “I have shown you nothing, told you nothing about our rhythms and our laws, our joys and our powers, which are merely the class and the prerogative of all humans…the wheat is ripe that they have arduously sown, and the sickle is in their hands...”

  He finished speaking, and there was a kind of dazzling fulguration behind my eyes. I put my hands to my forehead and lost sight of him momentarily, but I mastered that surprise and opened my eyes again.

  And now I was at the foot of the tree in the clearing where the arcandre had appeared to me. I was alone, and nothing in the familiar décor had changed.

  How had the arcandre vanished? Would I ever know…?

  However, and extraordinary sensation suddenly gripped me. It seemed to me that I was not the same person as I had been before the marvelous visitation. Something was within me that made me, now—I experienced the certainty of it—stronger, more assured and more lucid.

  Something...I dared not think, I dare not say and I dare not write someone.

  I stood up, simultaneously heavy with astonishing things and radiant with a light to which I was not able at that moment to give a name.

  I left the clearing and headed toward the city.

  70

  My darling, my beloved, I wanted to tell you about that adventure in case I was killed And now that the war is over and I have come back to you, and the Ark that I resolved to construct in which our dreams, our desires and our treasures were assembled was not necessary, for each of us has retained them intact within us, and we found them, on the day of our reunion, as joyful, certain
and familiar as the flowers that you had arranged that day, as of old, on my work-table. My darling, where have I allowed myself to be led by the story of my strange adventure? And how far that story has taken us away from the goal I traced at first! But how else would I have been able to tell you the marvelous story of my certainty of Joy, of that certainty suddenly awakened in the midst of the war, by the very words that I was writing to you, by the certainty that enabled me to get through the most sordid and the bitterest hours of that war, aided me to live, enabled me to live, in those execrable moments when the tree of life shed incessantly more human fruits than it seemed the crows of Death would ever be able to collect!

  My darling, you would like to know what is authentic in that apparition of the arcandre, whether the long dictation is not a parable, whether it is true that arcandres really exist...

  Does it not seem to you that the adventure was entirely true, and that the words spoken to me were true, in considering the bright joy of our life? And does it not seem that the visitation and the words have, with a singular force—the very force of reality—directed both my thoughts and my actions, and the destiny that set you in my path?

  Have you not come, really, my beloved, like the miracle of my faith, to crown my certainty…?

  But I will add that it ought not to go any further than the two of us, who are of the domains where the secrets of great happiness ought still to be kept.

  15 November 1914-21 September 1919

  Notes

  1 Black Coat Press, ISBN 978-1-61227-433-1.

  2 The son of Nabopolassar was Nebuchadnezzar II, who reigned from approximately 605 B.C. to 562 B.C., and is featured in the Biblical book of Daniel.

  3 Pothin, or Photin, allegedly the first Bishop of Lyon and the first Bishop of Gaul, is said to have lived in the second century A.D., the date of his death in prison during persecutions launched by Marcus Aurelius being recorded in a letter of dubious authenticity as 177, supposedly at the age of ninety.