‘God, oh God!’ said Martin, ‘I have blasphemed too much! If You are there, if that is what You want, take my life! Carry me away! Carry me away!’
7. The World is Alive
THIS is what one has to do: one has to go out into the country, like a Sunday painter, with a big sheet of paper and a ball-point pencil. To choose a deserted spot, in a valley set between mountains, sit down on a rock, and look about one for a long time. And then, when one has had a good look, one must take the sheet of paper and draw, in words, what one has seen. You understand, the thing is to write down the landscape, piece by piece, not overlooking anything; deliberately, methodically, one must map out this scrap of the earth’s surface, indicating the smallest pebble, the smallest clump of grass, charting its sights and smells, writing it all down, drawing the whole thing. Then, when one has finished and evening has come, one can go home. On the sheet, there, in this rectangle of paper measuring 21 × 27 cm., one has scrawled a patch of the earth. One has made the portrait of a few kilometres of light, of sounds and smells. One has flattened them out as though on a postcard, so, very easily. And now they’re yours, those kilometres, they’re saved from rotting away, forgotten; they will remain there, in your head, hammered in little signs, to all eternity. Or at any rate, as long as you’re alive.
At this point the mountains had grown up everywhere, just anyhow; they filled the entire horizon, with tall, hard, furrowed masses and sharp peaks rising on all sides. Down below, the plain narrowed suddenly into a triangle, and chaos began. The bed of the stream, a sort of stony desert split down the middle by a trickle of water, was scattered with enormous rocks that had fallen there as part of an avalanche, a thousand years back. Between the rocks the smooth pebbles lay in waves, moulded by the currents and whirlpools of the last period of spate. On the far side of the stream a mountain rose steeply, higher than the others, standing at the mouth of the defile like a wall.
One approached this at the speed of an aeroplane, and little by little its details came to light, its countless asperities, the clusters of bushes clinging to the naked rock, the dried-up rivulets, the holes, the patches of scree; the wall ran the whole length of the valley, rising to a height of something like 1,800 feet, sheer, naked, and massive. The mountain was motionless, ponderous, standing alone against the blue sky where clouds drifted in shreds. It was like that. The line of the mountain climbed northwards in a gentle slope, then the slope became steeper and turned into a cliff; the first peak had two summits, with a dip between them. Behind the second peak the sun was glinting on a queer, white-painted object that looked just like a crucifix. Another dip, a rounded one this time, and one came to the second summit; not so high as the first, this consisted of a succession of broken rocks, fitting one into another. After that, the outline of the mountain ran down again into a sort of gorge, and then sloped gently up to the highest summit of all. This consisted of a single peak, a kind of broad obelisk, its flanks covered with trees which projected from its massive profile like a succession of little springs. On the other side, after you had crossed the empty, frozen space, the bald point that was culminating all the time, the peak fell down almost vertically into the valley. Half-way down, however, the fall was arrested by an outcrop of the mountain, a twist in its body which ran off to the right and linked it to another block of stone. Just like the neck of some gigantic animal, the rocky mass curved away in a long, sinuous, heavy movement, and the crest of this mis-shapen wall seemed to be continually stretched in a terrible effort, worthy of a cataclysm.
And indeed they were still there, the traces of the ancient cataclysm that had moulded the earth. The boulders had shot up like rockets, amid torrents of scalding mud, lakes as big as seas had poured out through breaks in the lodes, and chasms had suddenly yawned, real upside-down volcanoes, to swallow millions and millions of cubic kilometres of stone and marsh. One could still see the disaster in the form in which it had petrified centuries before; chaos was at rest there, tranquil, crushed beneath its own force, deathly faces rising desperately above the seeping tide of life: forests of waving bushes, a gentle, winding stream of turbid water, a drift of dust and sand covering the primeval ridges. The world was half buried under active silt, but one could tell it had been there. That once upon a time it had exploded, burst out with the full strength of its living bones, knocking over everything around it, to take the heavens by storm.
To the north, further upstream, the circle of mountains has closed in. The space has become too small, and the blocks of stone have pushed up against one another. The river has to run through an awkward defile, full of shadows, and the mountain crests are lined up, overlapping one another.
On the left bank there’s another mountain, a shapeless thing that overhangs the road. Its belly bulges out over the stream, and the scrawny bushes clinging to its flanks twist their branches in a despairing effort to grow upwards.
Downstream, the circle ends with the flight of the mountains down to the hills, of the hills down to the plains, and of the plains down to the sea.
But it’s within the circle that things happen. One has to go down into this chasm carved out of the earth, where a stream flows softly through olive groves, into this funnel which is full of peace and colour. Facing the wall-like mountain, counting the clumps of trees clinging to the livid rock; feeling the serrated crest against the sky and the rotary movement of the clouds moving forward, forward … Listen to the sounds and determine them; sniff the smells; be hurt by the sting of a horsefly; see the shapes of pebbles and grasses and not forget them; and above all, stare at the landscape.
At the foot of the mountains, as I said, there’s a river; it’s wide where it enters the circle, but narrows as it climbs up the sloping ground, with many windings. At first the water is clear, almost grey. It flows tirelessly towards the sea, making a steady sssshhing sound, no movement to be seen on its surface. It glides like this, all in one piece, opaque yet translucid, reflecting nothing, through the middle of a pebbly plain. Other channels have been traced in its bed, and there are kinds of muddy pools stagnating in them, a refuge for mosquitoes. Nothing moves over the stones; the water may perhaps be flowing under the surface as well, filtering painfully between one pebble and the next, with bright drops that fall and fall incessantly, silently. On the surface the pebbles are laid down in long diagonal stripes, some pinkish grey, some mauve, some slate-coloured. Deep down, under the layers of stones, the rock lies everywhere. The millennial fracture running along the ground and worn down, ceaselessly, by the imperceptible underthrust of the stream. For the stream is advancing, that’s a certainty, water and pebbles, like a body, like a boa-constrictor in fragments. The top layers of pebbles are carried along by the current and rub against the middle layers, which rub against the bottom layers, which rub, in their turn, against the rocky wall. All this friction goes on slowly, very slowly. But a supernatural strength dwells in the river, and the water is pushing all the time, it has no respite, it is tearing dust from the earth, crushing, emptying, gnawing away. The water flows on, eternal, briskly at the surface, drop by drop in the depths; when it has flowed, the sun shines down on the pebbles and evaporates it. Then it rises into the sky and trails there in long, white clouds; after that, the wind drives the clouds together, turns them grey, brown, blue, inky black; and then, suddenly, the sky bursts and the water falls down to earth again, flows towards the river, enters its bed, saturates everything, and begins again to push, to wear down, to gnaw away like a set of teeth.
Higher up, the river is squeezed between the mountain walls; here, erosion has not yet widened the space between the rocky masses, and there are few pebbles. Along one bank there is a ribbon of land covered with reeds, along the other the steep, naked wall. The water flows at the foot of this wall, deep and blue. The rock goes straight down into the stream, with no intervening bank, only a black line running above water level; the mossy mark left by times of spate, no doubt, when the river is swollen by the autumn rains and writhes
and swirls along beside the mountain.
Along the other bank, however, the rock was less tough, and has given way. Or perhaps it was the eccentric force of the current, because of the way the stream curves, that has thrown all the water against the other wall. At the river’s edge, near the bend, reeds and grasses have found a hold in the sticky soil. The wind sends a ripple through them in passing, and the sun has warmed their stems all day. Birds shoot out of them, twittering, and zigzag up into the sky. Here, on this spongy soil, vegetation has managed to flourish. The living roots have grown in the earth, and the water has nourished them. Between the grasses and reeds the opposite wall can be seen, barer than ever. Further on, lower down, where the river widens out and the stony plains begin, great, sad trees, fastened to the rock one knows not how, bend over towards the bed of the stream. And under their drooping foliage there are dark hiding-places; animals, snakes, toads, live in them, perhaps. Those shady holes must smell of decay, of dead leaves, and the air is surely cold. What if those holes conceal some loathsome corpse, all white and blue, its skin pierced by a hundred knife-stabs?
Near the sandy ground where the reeds grow, the hillside begins; covered with maize-fields and plots of waste ground, an old thing, even a kind of ruin, it slopes gently up to the road. The last few yards of ground are set with espaliers and planted with olives; there are a great many insects here. They rush through the air with funny creaking sounds, may-bugs, blow-flies, horse-flies, dragon-flies, mosquitoes, bumble-bees, wasps, and long winged ants whose bodies quiver nervously. Along the ground, among the seeds, the little stones and the dry grass, a snake is gliding slowly; it stops now and then and sways its head from side to side. The plants stick up, motionless. One would say things were waiting, like this, for some awe-inspiring event. But nothing happens.
Planted stiffly on the terraced ground, the olive-trees are drying up. There is a silent, mysterious strength in them; it keeps them upright in the soil, it climbs up their contorted branches and spreads through their fibres. A determination to be a tree, perhaps, an implacable, intense, perfectly inanimate hardness. Inside the bark, in the narrow recesses of the wood, it works at its vertical task, perfuming, feeding, gently curving the edges of the little glossy leaves. It is in the earth, too, in the sucked-up earth that climbs into them through their roots and turns into the reinforced concrete of their branches, the dry, brittle cement that stretches their countless fingers well up towards the zenith. The stalks of the leaves point up very straight, as though straining towards an invisible sun, and the tree seems to be attached in this way to the breast of the electric clouds, so as to receive their lightning manna.
Along the edge of the road, between the blocks of stone, flowers have grown. A tall, slender stalk, covered with a kind of silvery down, with a cluster of buds and half-open flowers at the top, and at the bottom a Z-shaped root with several hairs growing out of it. All along the grass the leaves lie open, offering their tiny hollows to the dust and wind. Between two arms growing from either side of the body and each ending in a huge leaf, there is a rosette of new-born leaflets, and flowers that have not yet opened. It is like a microscopic heart, crumpled, folded in on itself, where nothing is distinct. Something delicate and soft, a little green and grey ball, like a minute face, that is living withdrawn into itself, waiting until the time comes for it to open. At the top of the plant, at the end of a down-curved thread, a cluster of little white flowers, five-petalled stars with faintly yellow-tinted centres, clings in a bunch. From that, too, life must emerge, from these little hairy, scented nests. A muted, indolent life that carries you through the changing seasons, the regular succession of days and nights, the cool hours, the hot hours, the hours of dew, the hours of light, like that, without impatience, without desire.
Around the plant the world is circular, fixed, invisible; things exist without phenomena, or with phenomena so tiny that they’re not worth mentioning. Things are there in blocks, in islets; they are far away; nothing comes to the plant, nothing enters into it, except through the fibres of its leaves or the filaments of its roots. Nothing communicates with it. And yet this is not death. On the contrary, it is a strange life, unrelated to the rest of the world. It is the scrap of the common life, the little stick planted all alone in its earth, without bonds or chains. It is truth isolated, serene, the majesty of being oneself, naked and alone, of being a crumb of reality and not even knowing that one is that crumb. Just as for the olive-trees, the bushes, the brambles, the thistles, time does not exist, noise does not exist, action does not exist; and this nothingness that is so full, so intense, is the initial, victorious truth of matter, of the thing plunged into the whole, living neither against others nor towards them, but for itself, for itself only.
In the valley this vegetable strength had taken hold everywhere; it was bursting the crusty shells of the earth, breaking up the clods in the depths of the soil, crawling, digging, seeking its outlet. The paths it was thus softly opening for itself in the powdery element were the evidence of its life and its power. Nothing stopped them. The world was really at the mercy of the plants and roots. For centuries they had been labouring this inert domain, gnawing away the rocks, dissolving the phosphate, pitilessly, as a cluster of humble forces. A world without pain and without joy, a peaceful, murderous world, so close to death, yet so alive.
Through the forests of leaves and plants, rare insects were moving: a centipede went past a scrap of rotten wood; a giant ant, at least three centimetres long, walked along the edge of a wall. It had a squat, reddish body and a big black head with powerful mandibles. The ant advanced over the stones of the wall, its feet starting off landslides of dust-specks; it went up to a fly, which flew away at once; it patted a straw, stopped, and then, seized all of a sudden by some incomprehensible panic, began running like mad and vanished into a crack.
Other ants were walking along the road and on the branches of the trees; they were in incessant, grovelling movement, with a sort of meticulous fury, full of feet and antennae, something like animated paths.
Clumps of tough grass had managed to pierce the tarred surface of the road and were living at ground level, impossible to uproot despite repeated blows from the tyres of cars.
The wind blows, warm, noisy at times; it follows the gradient of the hillside, advances along the valley, moves slabs of coolness on its course, wrinkles the surface of the water in the stagnant ponds, carries off a wasp, rushes into a hole in the mountain. It will go on like this for a very long way, right to the source of the river. For the air, too, is alive; it moves softly, stops, then blows harder. In the transparent, perfumed gas, now cold, now hot, bacteria are swept along; tiny animals with spherical bodies travel in a group on a speck of dust. Seeds fall from a tree or rain down from a dandelion. They will sink into the ground to join the drops of water and the grubs, and there they will decay slowly in the matrix of warmth, in the womb of the secret distended with torpor; when the moment arrives they will burst, and a new leaf-head will seek gently and powerfully for its particular route.
Here, in this circle ringed with mountains, everything was to be found; countless animals, river, brooklets, the brooklets of brooklets, lumps of soil, plants, nothing was lacking; one was living in a series of concentric worlds that fitted perfectly inside one another: the world for giant ants, the world for beetles, the world for black masterwort, the world for reeds, the world for olive trees, for umbrella pines, or for chipped flint instruments; the world for the body of water, the world for earthworms, the world for flies; the world for snakes, the world for people, the world for dwarf ants. And yet this was merely appearance. For in point of fact there was only one world and all these lived together in it. But there was to be no sharing of it. Reality lay beyond, always beyond. Vast, multiform, spherical. The peace of this valley was inexorable torture, a pain which challenged the independence of every creature. There was no peace. There could be no peace. On the contrary, there was something mad, demented, durably cruel, which
reigned within these beings. Neither grief nor enjoyment, but a terrible obstruction, an indescribable conflagration, a tempestuous ascent, full of dizziness and excitement. The violent sensation of existing, no doubt; like fear, which emptied you and at the same time filled you up. The idea of inhabiting, of being an inhabitant, here, in this valley, in this harsh, harsh site, and of never again being able to be otherwise; an inhabitant, unalterable, in front of his place of habitation; being an occupant, with might and main, in spite of oneself, far beyond oneself, almost in the future. And never able to do otherwise. The infinite malediction of being merely an inhabitant.
When you’re close to the water’s edge you see the great, silent movement going down towards the sea with a sound like a fountain. The water is deep, thick, steel-coloured. It flows along by the pebble beach in a single block, like a mass of ice. Inside, there are fish, perhaps; glassy-eyed fish, busy watching their glaucous universe. Debris is drifting on the surface of the water, blades of grass torn from the banks, splinters of wood, roots. The soil, too, is crumbling, imperceptibly, silently; one doesn’t see it break away, but one knows it is there, mixed with the water, dissolved into a thin grey substance.
In some places the stream has soaked into the bank, making muddy peninsulas, as it were; these gulfs are swarming with life: mosquitoes hovering just above the surface, midges, wasps, water-spiders. And there are thousands of these little pools up and down the stream. No lack of pebbles, either. They lie in heaps, one on top of another, in all shapes and colours; some of them are surrounded by a thin white circle encrusted in the stone; others show signs of blows, or have holes through them. Polished by time, worn away by the river, they have come down from the highest mountain walls. They are crumbling away, a little more each day. In a thousand centuries, or sooner perhaps, the whole surface of the earth will have been reduced to sand.
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