Sagax was no longer in doubt: the practitioner had committed suicide, incapable of supporting any longer the frightful responsibility that weighed upon him. Thus, all those he had spoiled—the semi-neuters, in a word—had experienced physiological reactions, doubtless very feeble, but which they had hastened to communicate to their brethren, full of admiration and envy. Was it necessary to add faith to their affirmations and believe, with them, that those spasms were agreeable to humans, although animals that had been subject to them fell incontinently into an overwhelming epidermal melancholy?
At any rate, the present contagious hysteria could not have any other point of origin.
Curiously enough, he, the Creator of Humans, had passed in recent days through such terrible emotions that his heart, burned with the black fire of all his anguish, seemed to have permanently expunged the disease that had been laboring him stealthily for more than a month. Observing the gesticulations of the convulsionaries, he could only concede that he too had been on the brink of being afflicted by that terrifying scourge. And, becoming used to his relief, he congratulated himself on having fished his intelligence out of the sewer of stupidity in which it had briefly sunk, under the bewitching influence of the Reproductress.
Turning toward his companions, he saw that the crowd, entirely devoted thus far to its vertigo, and which had ignored them, was now hollowing out in front of them, drawn backwards by a sentiment of vehement repulsion. For a moment, the fury of the avid, the satyriasis of the eunuchs who were attempting the comportments of stallions, had stopped. Murmurs began, a shrill wailing rose up toward the sky, and a voice—that of Phegor, on his throne, immobilized three paces away—descended upon the august trio, hurling the ultimate execration at Sagax:
“Chemist of the Absurd, why have you emasculated them? Why have you prevented Life from drawing, as in earlier ages, upon the mysterious crucible heated by divine caresses? Horticulturist of Mediocrity, why, with your maladroit secateurs, have you tried to castrate the lilies and the roses, in order to stimulate the growth of the adjacent thistles? Why have you forbidden the adorable and tragic conjunction of man and woman? Why have you also forbidden the mutual embrace of males, which permitted vulgar or refined lovers to look Infinity in the narrow prison of their marrow and their rhapsodized brains?”
Suffocated by what he had just seen and heart, Thales, rearing up, shook himself violently, and his head was like an enormous cocoon composed of the tails of bison. The two glow-worms of his eyes were moving there, together, as if in the hope of finally discovering a propitious exist. He leaned on Mathesis’ shoulder.
Similarly distraught, the Prefect of Machines creased his mobile face and lowered his head, seemingly desirous of engulfing the bat of his eyebrows in the penumbral cavity of his wide-open mouth. Vibrant with indignation, he cried to the Creator of Humans: “What are you waiting for? Do something!”
“Yes, what are you waiting for? Do something!” Thales’ voice echoed, faithfully, his hands having finally hollowed out his hood to activate his lips.
Sagax lowered his eyes and shook his head several times, as if he wanted to shake off the black star that still stamped it. What, indeed, was he waiting for?
He tightened the cables of his will, and activated the internal dynamo of his psychomagnetic fluid.
Over him, over the procession, over the crowd, petals of white jasmine were now raining in a continuous deluge of lily-petals, which were falling like drops of milky and perfumed water. The present, more than fifty centuries old, had reconnected the chain of the Past, thus renewing the celebrations of so-called Graeco-Mediterranean civilization—for the human cycle can, alas, only be symbolized by the serpent that is swallowing its tail.
Perfumed sashes, expired by gently swaying cassolettes, braided the air in which the bestial odor of human tresses played: the reek of burned horn or the thuya-wood of feminine fleeces. In the distance, the organ used in the Festival of Life struck up, initially launching into a stammering ballad, but soon permitting itself, in response to the invitation of the Perfected, to give voice to the epithalamium prepared for the incestuous marriage of cretinism and obscenity.
The Orgy of Lust recommenced; the groaning respiration of the multitude, momentarily discouraged, burst forth again, more furiously, seemingly emerging from the mighty bellows of a forge, invisible and exhausted. And, covering the immense avenue with its multicolored sweating waves, all that remained of the human species strove, abusively, to conquer the forbidden frissons, moving frenetically toward the impossible stupor.
Sagax dug his heels into the ground, braced himself, solidly mounted on his legs, and flexed his body in order more effectively to eject the fluid emanations that ought to subdue the will of those ten thousand demented brains and paralyze their nervous centers.
His eyes, closed for an instant, opened again, and he was just about to release the irresistible waves when he suddenly shivered.
In front of him, surrounded as if by an aureole by a flying circle of pink flamingoes—the ones reserved for her—Formosa appeared, borne upon a palanquin of gold-studded green leather by eight naked reproductresses, her hair hanging down to her buttocks, her breasts vibrating as they marched, her body rubbed with a powder of iridescent pearls, her fructified abdomen already swollen, kissed as she passed by the concupiscent mouths of men.
Six hundred throats on the lower slopes shouted: “It’s artifice that has fertilized them, but soon, it will be our own vigor, when we have entirely recovered our dignity!”
The blonde and nacreous form stood up beneath the ecstatic sky; her eyes smiling, rolling gilded flecks in their orient; a youthful blush vivified her downy cheeks; with the ruby of generous blood, the pure lines of her lips swelled, and Formosa prostrated herself before a monstrous Lingam, before a stucco Phallus with a rubescent summit, which two Levites, marching backwards, raised up like a resuscitated god. A ray of artificial light lingered upon it, exacerbating the incarnadine of its porphyry dome.
At the sight of it, the cyclone of dementia began once again to raise the surf of shoulders and heads in the human swell. Frantic clamors perforated the air.
“Praise Priapus! Adoration to the Lingam! Ominpotent Master of woman, Axis of sacred vertigo, inflexible Stem from which eurhythmia radiates, from which the renewal of Creation spreads! We salute you and revere you, Phallus, for we have lived too long for the icy enthusiasms of the intellect, for the deceitful exaltations of morose Justice, and we acclaim Amour, which will make our nerves vibrate beneath the golden bow of sensuality!”
Suddenly, Sagax uttered a howl like a wild beast, and threw his clenched firsts out in front of him, as if he were attempting to drive away some extravagant obsession. His head tilted backwards, he moaned plaintively, and remained like that for a full minute, his throat spasmodic, the star on his forehead brightening his jagged hairline, seemingly emitting fuliginous flames.
Then he tried go away, recoiled precipitately, but returned, fascinated, and then plunged forward, his upper body bent double, his arms rowing in the air.
He reached Formosa’s palanquin, lifted her up, welded her breast to his, stuck the aspirant sucker of his lips to hers, drinking feverishly, plunged his nostrils into the amber tresses and howled, between two coughs: “I love her! I love her! She’s mine!”
Collapsing, saturated with horror, Thales clung unwittingly to the knees of the Prefect of Machines, who, his legs entangled in the mass of hair that fell over his companion’s face, seemed to be imprisoned by some inextricable bush.
With what remained of his voice, the Grand Pedagogue moaned: “I saw that he was marked with the fatal sign; I told you that he was condemned to all apostasies and all treasons.”
“I’ve know that since yesterday.” Mathesis replied. “In bottle 4,245, which engendered him, zoosperms from an impostor were found: a traitor known at the beginning of the twentieth century by the name of Millerand Iscariot, who was the president of the so-called Republic of the F
our Seas.39 Everything is explained.”
And the two Sages fled, weeping over the moral ruins of the City.
Chapter XI
Sagax and Formosa were to meet again the following day in the Garden of Delights. There, at least, the convergent apparatus could not reveal their actions. They had agreed to meet on the third hill in the south. The Reproductress could not mistake it. A rockslide gave the hill a human profile, comprising a nose connected to the line of the forehead, furnished with eyebrows of quartz. An immense cavern forming the mouth completed the analogy. A clump of bronzed foliage even agitated the air at the summit with the extravagant hair-line and helmet of a mythological warrior, like the one in the frontispiece of Morosex’s book. A vast excavation, the profound grotto had high walls from which lichen hung, and its arched vaults, carpeted with violet mosses, were alive with the continuous flutter of wings and chirping agitation of birds, which built their nests in close proximity, in a Familistery sheltered from the wind and predators. In the days of his early childhood, Sagax had often come to meditate in the shade and coolness of that refuge, when he was still a disciple under the tutelage of his predecessor.
Punctual at the rendezvous, the Creator of Humans sat down to wait for Formosa, who was late. Extended in front of him was the immensity of the verdure, trees and flowers of the vast and odorant artificial domain, where one could spend several days without every bumping into the wall that surrounded it. The jagged horizon bit into the azure with its peaks, spires and summits in winter fur, allowing foaming streams and spirited torrents to flow from their entrails, which, freed from all shackles, launched into cool valleys in the very heart of the forests, roaring the pleasure of their finally conquered liberty.
Muted and faded by the distance, the greens, ochers, golds, mauves and reds with which the location was dappled fused together, reconciled, orchestrating in unison a great melody of color, which drifted gently through its harmonic scales. The stacked planes of the foothills of the distant mountains and the raised plateaux moderated the violence of their leaps, tempering the rude outlines of their masses, blurring their harsh lines in the flow of their retreat.
After having delighted himself once again with the ensemble of the decor, Sagax’s eyes picked out the details and particularities of the composition. Close by, two hundred paces away, he discovered clumps of orange- and lemon-trees, perennially green, which copper-tinted the gleam of the amber or pale gold of their fruits. A little further away, to the right, in the region of temperate vegetation, fields displayed violet carpets where, as if torn away by the erosion of the wind, multicolored cloths of cornflowers and poppies grew.
A rivulet, like polished steel, gave a sinuous backbone to an uncultivated slope with a down of silky grasses. Willows with hirsute heads formed a procession in single file, like corteges of the black penitents of ancient religions. And on the hill facing him, a band of maples, dogwoods, alders and birches in silver tunics seemed to be running away, as if frightened, from a quincunx of sycamores that were raising the enormous arms of angry athletes above them.
In order to reach the shady and silent cavern where, ever avid for contemplative delights, he would let his eyes plunder the esthetic honey of the landscape, Sagax once had been obliged to trample sheets of thyme, sage, lavender and bitter rosemary, which flattered his passage with perfumes distilled with the dew and the breath of enraptured nights. Genistas had saluted his adolescence with their bristling heads of golden curls. Now, today, the aromatic plants—the underwear with which, so to speak, Nature dressed herself for the sentimental fêtes of spring—had disappeared. Doubtless, like him, she had lost the fresh candor of her youth, and a warm fever was afflicting her.
Was that a symbol? On leaning over, the Creator of Humans no longer saw anything at his feet but mandrakes, belladonna, spurge, foxgloves, daturas and aconites: all the licensed poisoners that installed their dispensaries in the open air and, in the complicit soil, waved the alembics of their virulent corollas, soliciting with impunity, offering their mortal juices to all-comers.
To while away the tedium of waiting, Sagax philosophized.
Everywhere in nature savant doses of bounty and ferocity were found, the precise alliance of innocence and obscenity that makes the rose and he hemlock neighbors. No thinker of ancient times had ever been able to furnish an explanation for that state of affairs, for all of them, without exception, had taken up the assumptions of preceding ideologists, in order to add the measure of their own unreason to it and construct theories designed to crack the most solid intelligences. The truth, however, was not difficult to penetrate.
The espousals of oxygen and nitrogen had created Life, fomenting the human species, in which dolor had been fortified within impregnable redoubts, perhaps for a hundred thousand years. A little more of the latter gas, a little less of the former, and the World would only have given birth to the mysterious flowers of shadow and silence, and Humankind would have been aborted in the sealed hand of Oblivion.
Thus, in the mysterious conflict of latent Forces rumbling their tumults, finally to break out of the bosom of chaos, a chemist had been found who had established a formula from which emerged an eternity of tortures for the thinking reign, and that chemist was Hazard: Hazard brandishing the test-tube of the Absurd. If his fingers had trembled slightly, there would have been Peace, Wellbeing, the Absolute, mental Nonexistence for Mars and the Earth, the twin spheroids, and for many others, perhaps, which would then have strolled on without being coiffed by the Morion of Maleficence commonly known as the atmosphere.
And the Grand Physiologist rendered justice to the effort of Races. He glimpsed humans, in the beginning, terrified of all atmospheric phenomena, deifying the elements, the Moon and the Sun, son attributing to the anger of multiple gods the pyrotechnics of lightning, believing that the wrath of the inhabitants of Olympus caused them to whip the guilty soil with thongs of fire, a leaden knout of thunderbolts. Then, as they could not accept the abomination of the World such as it was offered to their eyes, they continued to give birth to superstition after superstition, causing the succession of the different modes of theism revealed in the hope of little equity, either in a subsequent life or a sequel to death. Before disorder, before iniquity, promulgated everywhere by unbreakable laws, their consciousness revolted, and, by means of religions and theogonies, they had begged the Creator to temper the hideousness of his Creation with justice and equity.
Afterwards, the need for Knowledge, the need for denial, had come, and with their bruised fingers, humans had attempted to lift up the tombstone of unconsciousness and stupidity that was stifling them. Sagax heard the first wails of rational civilization—art, science, philosophy, literature and materialism—and the croak of impotence and disappointment that gradually emerged from the throat of past centuries. Was it the fault of human beings, after all, if, hanging on by lacerated hands, their knees skinned, to the prideful peak that bore at its inaccessible summit the star of bounty and comprehension, Nature, they had let themselves fall in mid-climb, broken-backed, into a delirium of tragic spite and inexorable cruelty?
For mortals, the Grand Physiologist then deduced, perhaps seeking to excuse himself, there had thus far been only two alternatives: to quiver, and, in consequence, to suffer, to accept all the discomfort of life and cancel social harmony in advance; or to extinguish the ardent flames of being beneath the cold ashes of a harmony of castration. Until recent days, like the Perfected, he had deferred to the second system, but now an imperious voice, a voice more powerful than his free will, was crying: illusion, deception!
He wanted to taste the abominable and delicious felicity that was love. Thus, his life would embrace the cycle. He had betrayed the holy cause of Equilibrium—so be it; but was he to blame for the malice of the universe, which, after all, had forced that defection upon him? Was not Nature, with all her inviolable laws, antisocial? Was it not the pride of wanting to struggle against the obscure energy of the Cosmos that had cause
d mental Beauty to bow down before the physical Beauty surging triumphantly from the shroud of the Past?
The Creator of Humans had gone into the grotto, and he bowed his head as if to encrust those thoughts more firmly in his mind. A little pool in which a water-spider was driving the minuscule galley of its body along with the oars of its long legs reflected the sparkling black asterisk with which his forehead was still ornamented.
He raised his head and started abruptly, because Formosa had appeared in the entrance to the cave. His throat dry, his ears buzzing, he saw her coming toward him like a white apparition, a flame of joy dancing, dreamlike on the unreality of things.
He ran to her, embraced her and shouted the new word, the ineffable word that steeped his lips in an opiate of pleasure: “I love you!”
Up above, under the vault, a startled flutter of avian wings approved.
Sagax’s nostrils quivered; Formosa was perfumed. In coming to him from the gynecaeum, she had drawn with her the odor of meadows and woods, the aphrodisiac exhalation of the lascivious earth.
“Breathe me in,” she said. “Is it not all the health of the world that is finally rushing toward you with my lips? Can you see, as I pass by, the simples, the herbs, the flowers, the aromatic plants interlacing at my feet, climbing up my legs, murmuring softly: ‘Since you are going toward love, impregnate your robe, your flesh and your hair with our fervent balms, our chaste odors, and let the suave soul of Nature rise with yours in your first kiss.’ They are telling the truth! It is the real sense of life that you are finally discovering in my mouth, and all your anterior aberration, all the sacrilegious aspects of your preceding impassivity, will appear to you with your first frisson.
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