A Night of Serious Drinking

by Rene Daumal

  13

  As we were passing through another district, an area occupied by Fabricators specializing in coloring rectangles of canvas, I endeavored to turn my guide’s attention towards another subject; for, I was thinking, if we keep stopping everywhere, we’ll have to put up with this terrible dryness in the glottis for hours and hours and we still won’t learn anything new. So I asked him:

  “A little while ago, you mentioned the public. Who are they? Where do they come from? Are they ill too?”

  “The public come from the lower depths, like us, that’s to say from the room on the ground floor to which, never fear, we shall shortly return. Only small numbers of the public are infected beyond help and they remain here permanently. The rest turn up in their spare time and visit the museums, listen to the lectures and concerts and read in the libraries. The public I have in mind, and you should get this straight, first of all, have never known how to make anything except useful objects. Second, they have never felt they were sufficiently cast in the heroic mold to sacrifice themselves to the exclusive good of some internal organ or other. And finally, they do not understand, since they are not in on the secret I revealed to you. For these three reasons, they have nothing but admiration for these Fabricators of useless objects.

  “They take every opportunity to come and worship their works, to read the history of their lives and leave them offerings. They bring the poor little useful things they know how to make, houses for living in, clothes for wearing, food for eating. Then they go back down to resume their daily tasks. The Fabricators of useless objects greet them benignly. Since they profess great scorn for the life of the body, they regard anybody who produces objects that service exclusively the life of the body as inoffensive. There is just one category of humans whom they cannot stand, being ever ready to tear them to bits, starve them, squash them, or eat them raw, and that is the makers of objects that are useful in another sense, those few survivors of men who in centuries past were called artists. But these fellows never venture into these districts except in armored cars.”

  14

  “Fair enough,” I said. “But what line do the Fabricators take with the public? What purpose do they claim to serve?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Instead, since we are now in the midst of the canvas colorers, who are rather talkative, we shall put your question to some of them.”

  He called up a large man dressed like a Spaniard and asked him why he painted.

  “Me?” he said, “I’ll tell you; I paint a pear, say. When you have a desire to eat the pear, I’ll be happy.”

  The orderly summarized: “To give his fellow man a desire without giving him the means to satisfy it,” and then he questioned another, a portly red-faced man with a blond beard who declared:

  “The way I see it, it’s very simple. I stand in front of my canvas [which he was], I look at my apple or cloud, pick up my brush, I select a scarlet [which he did], fling some just there [he almost poked a hole through the canvas], and I exult [he exulted visibly]. I look at my scarlet and then at my courgette for seaperch, I select a green, bung it just there [and he laid about him for all he was worth], and I exult [here, he exulted again]. …”

  “Yes, fine, thank you, stout fellow, we’ll leave you to your fun,” said my guide moving to a third man who was small and squat with ginger hair who gave this reply to the question:

  “To claim to imitate nature is first vulgar and second sacrilegious; but most of all it is to attempt the impossible. Painting for the pleasure of dribbling a many-hued temperament all over a piece of canvas is utterly repulsive. To my mind, painting means pressing form and color directly into the service of a freely constructive thought, it means making geometry sing, abstracting the abstract from its own abstraction, it is a synthetic transference of the dynamism of volume into its relativist reabsorption, it’s …”

  “It’s this,” the orderly continued and while the speaker went on talking, showed me shapes traced out with ruler and compass and shaded in with flat colors.

  “And it’s very dull,” he added. “Some of these so-called painters came up with the idea that they could construct their pictures according to the law of the golden number and the chromatic circle. There’s no point in telling you that the real golden number and the true chromatic circle had nothing to do with it. The proof is that as far as the golden business, for instance, is concerned, they turn it geometrically into a construct on the canvas and then set about dressing it up just as anybody might; and so you see they are neither authentic painters nor good geometers. In reality, the true painter, as you know, possesses within himself—in his muscles, his sensibility, even in his thinking—the golden number or numbers and the laws of color; he possesses them, he has earned them, he makes them live through everything he experiences and sees, not just on the canvas: his work is therefore both useful and universal. What’s more, the painter, like any artist, thinks before he paints, while this lot—and you’ll see that the same thing applies in various ways to every one of our Fabricators—begins by painting in the hope of discovering subsequently, without ever needing to think, what they might have thought before setting brush to canvas if they’d had the slightest desire to think in the first place. But I see I’m wearying you.”

  15

  As I trudged along, I reflected:

  “And to think we’re in an ordinary garret under the eaves of some forsaken house at some point or other of the globe and who knows if it’s a globe though it’s clearly not a point; in one small corner of a garret vast crowds of people exist or believe they exist or my eyes tell me they exist. And to think there’s no more than a steep little stairway to divide them from the smoky room below where that old man is going on about the power of words, where there’s hard drinking and to which I’m very eager to return.

  “Down there, there’s thirst, thirst ever new, and candles ever guttering, though as long as they shine, however dimly, they still burn and make you thirsty.

  “And up here there’s thirst slaked by illusory drinks and the dazzling light of cold electric suns. Up here, it’s cold, down there it’s dark. And the drunkest are not those who drink.”

  “Have a little patience,” interrupted the orderly.

  “Very soon now we’ll have been round the lot. By the way, take a look at that woman: she’s a past mistress in the art of making useless gestures.”

  The woman in question, dressed in what was supposed to be a peplum, was walking up and down gesticulating on a raised platform before several hundred delighted onlookers. Using the pocket dictionary, which also gave meanings for the sign language sometimes used by the Fabricators, I am able to provide you with a reasonably accurate translation of her dumb show. But it meant something quite different no doubt both to her and the spectators.

  “To begin with, you will observe,” her writhing body proclaimed “that I am very beautiful. Also supple, agile, witty, touching, and mysterious all at the same time. I can stand stiffly on the tips of my toes and let my arms drop like faded flowers without serving any purpose whatsoever. There’s nothing to force me to walk five quick steps forward, and my magnificent hair is perfectly free to fall suddenly over my face which is convulsed for no reason: it took me three years to be able to do that. If I put my fingers together in this finicky way it’s because I once saw it done by a poor superstitious barbarian who thought it a logical thing to do; I just find it pretty and don’t bother about wondering why. And collapsing thus onto the boards with one knee on the ground and only the whites of my eyes showing, this, you must agree, is awe-inspiring. I, of course, am terribly moved by it, quite filled with a totally gratuitous emotion which I shake off quickly and stretch my arms abruptly towards a sky that does not exist and, now what? what the—? Surely I haven’t run out of ideas? In that case I’ll start the same sequence again but this time I shall have my back to you. And once more, this time starting from the end. Tossing my hair always produces a nice effect: what’s the u
se of working out any new movements? Now to finish, a pirouette and I subside thus.”

  The spectators clapped their hands together in a frenzy, a gesture which up there is a sign of contentment and approval. The orderly whispered in my ear that with his medical eye he could perceive in the lady’s entrails her favorite internal organ which was weeping with joy.

  16

  “At least,” I said, “she has the virtue of sincerity.”

  “Some virtue! They’ve all got it. They show off quite shamelessly for everybody—except themselves, of course—to see. In our trade, we say a succulent abscess or a magnificent case of eczema; similarly, they proudly exhibit their sick organs under all manner of garbs. A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere? (I’m using the word in the somewhat weird sense that you yourself seem to understand it.)

  “And now take a look,” he said threading his way into the middle of another gathering, “take a look at those people strutting about and talking over there on those elevated boards. They are never more like themselves than when they are up there, but they do not realize it. They derive their pleasure from portraying imaginary and unproductive human lives. Only in these conditions are they able to exhibit their sick organs to everyone’s gaze and impose them so victoriously through the magical power of perfectly disinterested words and gestures.

  “But there are others who are content to let their little inner god sing freely. These people got hold of instruments for producing various kinds of sounds which were once quite indispensable tools and have turned them into luxury articles. In their hands, strings, pipes, and membranes vibrate with the joy of not knowing why, which they term liberty. It’s amazing that there aren’t more accidents.

  “But I have kept to the end a quite special variety of Fabricators for you. They will interest you very much indeed. If I remember correctly, you were one of the people downstairs who had come to take part in an important debate on the power of words. You are now about to meet some people who believe they have found the secret you came in search of, or who believe that there’s no secret: the Fabricators of useless utterances.

  17

  The Fabricators of useless utterances form three main clans, the Pwatts, the Nibblists, and the Kirittiks. Translated, these names mean respectively: “prosodic liars,” “phantom merchants,” and “crumb-pickers.”

  The Pwatts claim descent from the bards, minstrels, and troubadours of yore. “But,” one of them explained, a large, moon-faced, restless, untidy chap, whom we discovered sitting at a table in a buttery, “however much we might respect the venerable founders of our guild, we have nevertheless abandoned the crude utilitarianism of their craft. They served poetry as you might serve meals, seasoning the nutriment to suit everybody’s palate. They set out to edify, instruct, or please and they did it well.

  “We, however, aim rather higher. Our task is to transmute the base words of daily intercourse into a language which is not of this world, which is subject neither to the useful nor the pleasant. Our forebears spoke and sang but many refrained from writing. They believed that writing was something they did afterwards to record the poems they had created or to preserve the general themes and stories on which they improvised. And so a mere skeleton was all that survived of their ephemeral work. But we, on the other hand, do not speak: we write. And our works, shut away safely in libraries, withstand the passage of time. And by the same token, we have gained great freedom. No awkward listeners whose whims and stupidities might force us to speak otherwise or more clearly than we would like! No more responsibilities which might clip the wings of our inspiration! No more time limits either: we can take ten minutes or six months to produce a poem as it pleases our lyricism.”

  (Lyricism? I’d not met this word before. I consulted my pocket dictionary and read:

  Lyricism, n., chronic disorder of an individual’s internal hierarchy, which is manifested at intervals, in the person affected, by an irresistible urge, called inspiration, to make useless, rhythmic utterances. Unconnected with what the ancients called lyricism, which was the art of drawing harmonies from the human lyre suitably attuned by long and patient labor.)

  The Pwatt continued:

  “We Pwatts are split into two subclans: passive Pwatts and active Pwatts. The former are undoubtedly superior, and I am in a very good position to talk about them, being unanimously regarded as their most brilliant representative. We are divided by methodological issues. We see little of each other. This is how we, the passive Pwatts, set about things:

  “First, we wait until we feel a particular kind of uneasiness, which is the primary phase of inspiration and is called ‘a brown study.’ Sometimes this state may be induced by eating too much or not enough; or you could ask a friend to insult you crudely in public and then run off repeating to yourself what you would have done if only you’d been braver; or you might permit yourself to be deceived by your wife, or lose your wallet, without ever letting yourself have the normal utilitarian reactions. The gambits are infinitely varied.

  “Next, you shut yourself up in your room, take your head in your two hands and start bellowing until the bellowing brings a word to your throat. You spit it out and write it down. If it is a noun, you start bellowing again until an adjective or a verb turns up, then an attribute or a complement and so on, only, of course, all this happens instinctively. But above all, never think about what you mean or, better still, never mean anything at all, but let whatever wishes to be said, be said through you. We call it the fine poetic frenzy; it is the second phase of inspiration and its duration is very variable.

  “The third phase is the most difficult, though it is not absolutely essential. This is the stage when you look over what you’ve written with a view to cutting or changing anything that might possibly present too clear a meaning or anything that vaguely resembles what others have already published. Given the respiratory movements that are forced on you in the grip of the fine poetic frenzy, the words you set down possess, of course, a rhythm which gives them a perfect right to be called ‘poetry.’

  “Would you care to hear a sample?”

  “Thank you, no,” answered the orderly. And he hurried me away as the large man notwithstanding took a thick manuscript from his pocket and began to read aloud to himself.

  18

  We made our way up to the office of another eminent Pwatt who belonged to what was called, for reasons unknown to me, the “active” type. He was tall, bony, and dark-skinned and wore an air of distinction: he was careful of his appearance, and the same care was apparent from the manner in which he had arranged his writing materials on his ebony table. He drank a mouthful of iced water from a crystal glass and said:

  “Inspiration, gentlemen, is no more than a passing fit of madness. We active Pwatts, of whom I am the most celebrated representative, have but one guide, which is reason.”

  (Reason? Furtively I turned the pages of the dictionary and found:

  Reason, n., an imaginary process onto which the responsibility for thinking is off-loaded.)

  He continued:

  “Like our so-called ‘inspired’ colleagues, we start with an initial word or group of words. But it is reason which forced us to proceed thus, for since our subject is words, it must be from words that we start. I have considerably perfected the art of poetic creation by inventing the small apparatus which you are about to see.”

  Raising his hand to his head, he lifted the top of his skull with a simplicity which moved me, and I beheld the poetical machine firmly screwed to the pineal gland. It was a metal sphere hung on gimbals; it was hollow and, as I understood it, was filled with thousands of tiny aluminum strips on each of which was engraved a different word. The sphere turned on its two axes until it grew still, allowing a word to drop through an apertu
re beneath. The sphere is made to turn in this way—using the power of what they call thought—until all the elements required for making a sentence have come together. The Pwatt proceeded, with the top of his skull still open:

  “The theory of probabilities, which is the ultimate expression of modern rationalism, tells us that on the cosmic scale it is practically certain that a sentence arrived at in this way will be a phenomenon without precedent and that it will have no useful meaning whatsoever. It will be the pure materia prima of poetry. But next, we have to breathe life into this raw matter.

  “I determine the meter that is to be used in no less scientific a fashion. A poem being the reciprocal reaction of microcosm on macrocosm at a given moment of time, I arrange about my person various pieces of equipment which record my pulse, respiratory rhythm, and all other organic activity. Simultaneously, I set up barometers, thermos, hygros, anemos, and heliometers on my balcony to record what is happening, and in the cellar I keep a seismo, an oro, a chasmograph, and many others about which I shall say nothing. When all the data charts are in, I feed them into the machine I have here.”

  (He pointed to something a little way above his cerebellum, which looked like those penny-in-a-slot machines you used to find in taverns before 1937.)

  “This apparatus marks the resultant of all the curves obtained. I translate the loops, inflexions, tops and bottoms, twists and turns of the final graph into molossi, tribrachs, amphimacers, pæans, and proceleusmatics and into pauses, cæsuræ, arses, theses, and tonic accents: all that remains for me to do is to glue this metrical scheme onto my initial sentence, which I now subject to all the variations that are compatible with the meter, using successive substitutions of homonyms and synonyms, caconyms and callinyms; a hundred times with constant heart I start anew, until to human eyes it’s more beautiful than a gold bicycle.”