by Rene Daumal
I did not wish to hear another word for my head was aching. I could not see that there was any crucial difference between the two types of Pwatts. Both entrusted to extraneous processes the business of thinking for them. The first situated its processing mechanism in the gut and the second in the brain; that was the only difference. And the whole thing, and I may say it freely now, made me very, very thirsty. I was thirsty, so thirsty for poetry.
19
The Nibblists I wanted to see only from a distance, and so I took the word of my guide who explained, briefly:
“They spend their time retailing imaginary lives in writing. Some relate what they themselves have experienced and attribute it to characters of their invention so that they might avoid their obligations and indulge all manner of impertinence. The others, through their characters, live out everything they would like to have experienced themselves, in order to have the illusion of having really experienced it.
“Among their ranks, though, are two heretical sects, the Mnemographers and the Biographers. The first happily recount, also in writing, the most flattering (or most shameful, for this allows them the vanity of being sincere) events of their existence; the second group do the same with the lives of other people.
“It would be irksome to call on all of them. But I would like to introduce you to just one of our patients. His case, a rather hard one to classify, shows symptoms both of Pwattism and Mnemographism. I’m sure you’ll find him interesting.”
20
He led me into a very ordinary looking house and we climbed two or three floors. He rang a doorbell, introduced me to a “Mr. Aham Egomet” and said to me with a malicious wink:
“I’ll leave you together for a few minutes. In the meantime, I’ll go and make sure the Kirittiks have enough reading matter to be getting on with, for they quaff nothing else. Shan’t be long.”
For the first time since venturing into the world of the Escapees, I felt at home. The room I was in was so familiar that I would have no idea how to begin to describe it. I would be even less capable of drawing you a picture of Aham Egomet, for I seemed to think that he looked just like anybody else. He answered to the classic “description” pasted up in police stations. Distinguishing marks: none. I would have been perfectly comfortable with this individual from the start but for the obsessive feeling that I was being spied upon by thousands of invisible eyes and ears, that I had become transparent to all intents and purposes. Egomet smiled a horribly conniving smile and told me what it was he did.
“My dear fellow, I’m quite a different kettle of fish. I am here as an observer. I merely pretend to be infected by their sickness the better to study them. When I’ve finished here, I shall return below and publish an account of my travels which will be a sensation. It will be entitled (and here he drew closer to my ear) A Night of Serious Drinking. In the first part, I shall picture the nightmare of lost souls who seek ways of feeling a little more alive but who, for want of direction, are driven from pillar to post into drunkenness and are stupefied with draughts which do not slake their thirst. In part two, I shall describe everything that goes on here along with the phantasmal lives led by the Escapees; how easy it is to drink nothing and how the illusory drinks served up in delusory paradises make you forget everything, even the word thirst itself. In the third and final part, I shall hint at the existence of drinks that are both subtler and more real than those consumed below but which must be earned with the glow of your brow, the anguish of your heart, and the sweat of your limbs. In short, as the wise Oinophilus was fond of saying: ‘philosophy teaches how man thinks he thinks; but drinking shows how he really thinks.’”
He was interrupted by the orderly who had returned and was urging me to continue my journey. As I left the house, I told him:
“That chap’s not ill at all!”
“They all say that,” he answered; then after a moment’s thought, he added: “but ill or not, only you can tell. And if he is ill, only you can cure him.”
This was no mean task. Yet I took it upon myself. Ever since, Aham Egomet and I have been corresponding as regularly as postal services permit. Sometimes, we even see each other. He tells me what is happening down there, and I on my side do everything I can by way of advice to keep him safe from contamination.
21
“And are the Kirittiks all supplied?” I asked the orderly when I’d shaken off all manner of somber thoughts.
“Yes. Every one of them has at least five novels, three books of literary criticism, two works of philosophy, seventy-two collections of poetry, fifteen Lives of famous men, twenty volumes of Memoirs, thirty pamphlets, and great mounds of newspapers and reviews to imbibe before the end of the week. It’s never any different. They are indefatigable and insatiable. It would be a waste of our time wanting to talk with them.”
“But what do they do when they stop reading?”
“When they stop reading, they start writing. Their job is to root out of everything published here anything that might, however indirectly, be useful for some purpose or other; to denounce the least sign of what we term health and to nurse back to sickness any persons who look as though they might forsake it.”
“But how do they wield the power they have? What means of constraint do they use?”
“It’s very simple. You are aware that when a Fabricator of useless utterances makes statements which go unheeded by any sort of public, his utterances rush back down his throat, choking him and bursting his sick organ. Well, the Kirittik steps in between the Fabricator and the public and to this respectful public of the lower depths I’ve already discussed with you, he says: ‘read this, don’t read that.’ When he says the first, the author can relieve himself of his writings and start on new ones; when he says the second, the author chokes. It’s a process which apes what is done in the world of healthy people—and for quite different ends—by those we call critics who maintain a ceaseless watch over the needs of the consumer, see at a glance what he hungers and thirsts for, and keep an eye open for those producers who can satisfy him: they help the one to find nourishment and the others to acquire outlets for their goods. But, as you have already had occasion to observe, in our world, everything is back to front.”
22
We passed over a host of secondary types of Fabricators. My guide would have dearly loved to drag me into a vast factory where some people were making films for the cinema, but what I glimpsed of it when he opened the door revolted me so much that I wished to see no more. Under blazing lights, squeezed between a virgin forest made of paper, a bit of a cardboard seaport and one half of the bedroom of a social climber, amidst ropes, planks swinging in mid-air, beams and electric cables, a man and a woman in evening dress, their faces plastered with many-colored patches of grease and crisscrossed with streams of sweat, were performing over and over without pausing the action of meeting by chance and shaking hands. Each time, the man said: “Good morning” and the woman smiled uncomfortably. Meanwhile, the several scores of people present at this spectacle held their breath and tried to remain what they called silent. Every time the scene ended, someone would say bad-temperedly: “That’s not it, let’s do it again”; at this, everybody assumed an air of great importance, one man entering a padded box, another scrambling up a ladder and aiming a spotlight, a third swallowing a glass of lemonade, three others scurrying to glue their eyes to some holes in a squat metal Cyclops, some in overalls, others in silk shirts or pullovers, but all uniformly serious and excited as though the place were on fire. The head man shouted: “Silence!” and they started all over again.
“This has been going on for a week,” the orderly told me. “The man never manages to say ‘Good morning’ in just the right way. In the end, they’ll make do with something approximate and then move on to the next scene. All these snippets are photographed and phonographed, stuck together end to end, and projected in a dark hall to an eager and defenseless public.
“The two people you saw,” he continued, dr
awing me to one side, “along with their countless colleagues, answer to the name of actors. In precise medical terms, we call them, on the contrary, ‘pre-actors.’”
“How do you mean? Then what do you call actors?”
“Quite right, I was forgetting. You are too young to have seen any. An actor is what was once called a man who gave over his body to some force or desire or idea, that is—as we used to say for short—to a god that lived through him. He could summon the gods; he could let them flow through his body. Using his mortal frame, the gods could speak with men. They danced together, sang together, fought together, devoured each other on occasions, on others feasted together; in short, men and gods lived together. The actor thus exercised a pure and useful craft. But our modern ‘pre-actors’ prefer to say: a purely utilitarian craft. They themselves are disinterested. They have enrolled in the service of Art—and you know what that means. Whereas the actors of old leased their bodies to the gods, gods nowadays are made to measure for pre-actors to wear. Suppose you have a pre-actor who is bandy-hearted, squint-brained, has a crookback understanding of things, a limping conscience, and a hairless sense of irony. You request a Fabricator of useless utterances to invent a god endowed with these characteristics. You then make the pre-actor a present of this wretched spectral god who, however, in many instances, will still be greater than he. By driving himself until he is performing-dog tired, the pre-actor will manage more or less to breathe a flicker of life into this semblance of being in his semblance of a body. The audience thinks it’s wonderful, marvels, and pays its money.”
“But why on earth does the public turn up to see what are dead images of dead manifestations of gods that are born dead?”
“In the first place, because in the dark projection hall, they can see without being seen, hear without answering, and look their fill (without risk to themselves, they think) at fantastic beings (by which they always end up even so by being possessed). And then, because just seeing them deludes them into believing that they have experienced on the cheap all kinds of joys, crimes, follies, vices, virtues, good deeds, heroic gestures, fine sentiments, and dastardly acts, which they would never have the courage to face for real.”
“Rum way of having fun. Having your fancy meddled with like that in a dark hall by people who once pre-acted the roles of phantoms …”
“Come off it. You can’t be that naive. Everybody likes it. Even an octopus likes to be tickled.”
23
As we talked, we had got nearer to the center of the city and now found ourselves in that part of it which housed the Clarificators.
Soon we came out into a precinct, a circular, mosaic-paved area lit by arc lamps installed on high glass-fronted houses. At the center, an electric transformer ten meters high radiated cables all round. We had barely stepped into the precinct when from another street a little to our left sprang a dignified old man wearing a frock coat and top hat escorted by a dozen men in white coats carrying small cases.
“Ah! We’re in luck!” exclaimed my companion. “It’s Professor Mumu himself. You remember, the man who put himself in charge of curing the others. I shall hand you over to him, for you couldn’t have a better guide round these parts. Listen to him respectfully but never forget for one moment in your innermost self that he is dangerously infected by one of the most subtle forms of the illness. Meanwhile, I shall check whether all the health regulations are being properly observed in the churches. I shall catch up with you in Olympus.”
And with these enigmatic words, he led me towards the Professor, introduced me, and strode off quickly.
24
“Young man,” Professor Mumu’s white beard declared with kindly condescension, “young man, you have come at the right moment. It appears that you wish to call on the Clarificators?”
“Rather,” I lied, for I was thinking that a liter or two of red wine would have suited me much better.
“Well as it happens I was just starting my rounds of them; follow me and you shall learn much. But first I must explain one or two things to you.”
(“Oh no! Not him too!” I exclaimed inwardly, but pretended to be all agog.)
“All Clarificators belong to one or other of two extreme types, the Scienters and the Sophers. The first attempt to explain things and the second explain anything the first are unable to explain.
“The Scienters claim that their name comes from the Latin scire, sciens, like the word science, and argue that it is a synonym for scientist. But in reality, it is much closer to secare, to saw, since for the most part the business of these Scientologuers, or Saw-into-loggers, consists of sawing-into-logs, chopping things up, grinding them, and reducing them to dust. The Sophers on the other hand derive their name from Sophia, their goddess, famed for her misfortunes and her misadventures. It has been demonstrated that the word was in fact no more than a corruption of ‘savers,’ a nickname given them by wise men of long ago as a way of summing up a number of sayings mockingly attributed to them, such as: ‘I know everything, save for most things’; ‘I am acquainted with everything, save myself’; ‘everything decays, save me’; ‘everything is in everything, save me’; and so forth.”
25
“A rabbit and some red ink!” the Professor suddenly screamed, turning to his assistants. One of them opened his case and pulled out by its ears a splendid Russian rabbit which kicked and ground its teeth. Another brought a small galvanized iron tub in which he mixed water with some red powder. The rabbit was immersed in it and emerged from its bath red all over. After it had been left to drip for a while, the Professor held it up at arm’s length by its ears.
“What have I got here?” he asked.
“A rabbit that has been dyed red.”
“Wrong, young man, wrong. I am holding at least two hundred red rabbits as you shall see if you follow this creature through all the things that are about to befall it. We shall shortly make our way into an establishment, which I have had fitted out for my work by claiming that my researches were philanthropic. Inside Scienters of every kind slave away on a production line. We shall hand over the red rabbit to them. You shall observe that each will have a rabbit of his own; there may even be enough left to make a pie.”
I allowed myself to be led away. We entered a gallery which stretched out before us as far as the eye could see in row after row of laboratory benches. Every ten or twelve yards, a Scienter in a white coat stood waiting with scalpel, scales, blowtorch, calorimeter, or microscope ready to hand, in short, each with his own particular instrument to which I could not give a name in every case.
“They’ve not been fed yet,” the learned old man told me. “They haven’t had anything to get their understanding into all day. They’re going to enjoy this!”
He got up onto a small marble plinth placed near the door, and in a loud, metallic voice, he made this announcement:
“Gentlemen! The hunt for Pan is on!”
A rumble of satisfied murmurs was heard. It retreated out of earshot, surged back again, receded once more, rippled, scattered, became hushed, and finally died away.
At a solemn moment in the unbroken silence, Professor Mumu tossed the red rabbit onto the nearest table.
26
The first Scienter pounced on his prey and let out an admiring whistle. He placed the animal in the middle of a small maze which he had constructed on the floor out of planks of wood, littering the path it was to follow with a blade of grass, a live electric wire, a cup of milk, a mirror, and other objects besides, and then proceeded to time the red rabbit’s various actions and reactions. Then he handed it on to the man next to him and gave himself up entirely to studying his findings.
The second Scienter photographed the rabbit from every possible angle.
The third disemboweled it and recorded its cries on a recording machine.
The fourth resuscitated it and took its blood pressure.
The fifth killed it again and took a drop of blood which he placed in a glass vessel.
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The sixth took X-ray pictures.
The seventh cut off a piece of its fur which he put under a microscope.
The eighth weighed it and removed a fragment of the brain.
The ninth measured every part of it …
… The forty-sixth took out its heart and revived it on a saucer.
The forty-seventh questioned it about its past and its forebears and, on receiving no answers, made them up himself …
… The one hundred and first pulled all its teeth out.
The one hundred and second gave it an extraordinary name.
The one hundred and third proceeded to study the etymology and semantic origins of this name.
The one hundred and fourth set about counting all the hairs on its body.
The one hundred and fifth, losing patience, invented a machine for counting the hairs and passed it to the one hundred and sixth.
The one hundred and sixth took the machine to pieces and handed the parts to the next man.
The next man reassembled the parts in a different order and then tried to discover a use to which the new machine might be put.
I did not have the strength to stay and watch any more. Besides, I was very cross with Professor Mumu.
“He’s made a fool of me. He promised me a pie. Come on, just you go and get that rabbit back!”
But they talked me out of it. Anyway, I told myself, I didn’t care much for rabbit, especially since there was nothing to drink.
27
I was rejoined by Professor Mumu.
“Well,” he said, “they certainly enjoyed their red rabbit! But you should see them when you have given them a man. Failed cannibals, that’s what they are. Out of a single man, they get a thousand: homo economicus, homo politicus, homo physico-chimicus, homo endocrinus, homo skeletonicus, homo emotivus, homo percipiens, homo libidinosus, homo peregrinans, homo ridens, homo ratiocinans, homo artifex, homo aestheticus, homo religiosus, homo sapiens, homo historicus, homo ethnographicus, and many, many more. But at the very end of the production line in this laboratory of mine sits a Scienter who is quite unique. Three thousand brains in one. His function is to collect all the data and clarifications written up by the specialist Scienters. When he has collated everything, he is convinced that he has clasped the red rabbit or the essential man entire to his understanding. There you are, you can see him from here,” he ended, with a sign to one of his assistants who brought me a pair of binoculars.