The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  Our door, which I am about to open....

  Oh, let us hold back the advent of that moment slightly. My heart has suddenly swollen and its beating is becoming more precipitate. I would like to impose on myself here the bitter and delicious voluptuousness of expectation, and savor my emotion first. I sense myself joyous, impatient and solemn. O slowness of my pen...I cannot retain myself...

  I go in...

  You have heard me. Here you are, and you are holding out your arms, and have thrown them around my neck.

  Bonjour my love, my darling, bonjour my little queen, my beautiful bird, my golden lamp...

  This evening you’re wearing the blue muslin dress with the light green and red Greek embroidery around the sleeves, the belt and the collar. A little of your bare shoulders and your neck rise from the fluid fabric with the supple majesty that the movements of lionesses have, and the glitter of those movements…loosen your arms, let’s interrupt our kiss so that I can look at you...but you, impatient, are waiting for the moment...come...

  I walk in front of you, and yet I sense the murmur of your eyes. Every evening it is the same, and that moment for which you wait, my little one, is the one where I hold you against me and tell you the slightest minutes of my day.

  Here is the room where I work. The divan appeals to us with all the yellow arabesques of its Persian fabric, and I would not change anything in the disorders of the multicolored cushions that are slightly reminiscent of a band of intoxicated goblins. I can see from their hollows that you were lying here a little while ago...and the one that conserves the imprint of your arm seems to be gazing with a superiority full of indolence, at the one at the very end, kneaded by your fidgeting heels. I let myself fall into the middle of that soft little people, and all the fumes of the day are exhaled in my sigh of quietude and pleasure.

  It’s necessary that I clear a space within myself before holding you, abandoned against my breast. In an instant, I disencumber myself. Until tomorrow, people external affairs, sentiments, words for your usage…outside words and sentiments, my weavers, my forgers, creatures of the outskirts of my hearth, go away and rest until tomorrow.

  You are huddled against me, and it’s a calm evening of customary life. In the other rooms we can hear the great confused and heavy rumor of our populous street. Its noises arrive here, filtered by the garden, like the purr of a distant machine, like the grave rhythmic chant of the chambers of seashells.

  Let’s not light the lamp yet. Above our heads, on the wall, the old frame garlanded with gilded wood of the Arab mirror is still vaguely radiant, and the prestigious blue background of the image d’Épinal, the glory of the wall, is not entirely extinct—the image of I’m as proud, almost, and as content as if it were a Ghirlandaio!12 It has the naïve splendor of a work by that primitive.

  It’s a crucified Christ, at whose feet the Saintly Women are weeping. I brought it to you marvelously one day, with a hundred other images that I had just bought from the factory itself, during the voyage we made to Épinal. They weren’t the illustrations, so widespread, recalling in miniature the misadventures of lazy Gilbert or the prowesses of Prince Cornalin, but those posters by Georgin13 that the colporteurs once sold in the villages and were fixed on brown walls not far from the holy water stoup or the hunting rifles. Beautiful religious fables, Napoléonic adventures...

  Do you remember the joyful cry of enthusiasm with which I threw the roll of those images on to the bed in our hotel room? You abandoned whatever you were doing and we pored over the dazzling sheets, laughing and emotional, soon spread out on the eiderdown and the pillows, on the tables, the chairs and the floor. They soon filled the sullen room with an extraordinary host of the Grande Armée’s battles and biblical scenes in costumes from the Thousand-and-One Nights! Oh, my darling, before those images, costing a few sous, we were delighted, and clapped our hands like children taken for the first time to see a fairy play...

  Who, having read in the first lines of this message the sentences in which I spoke to pompously of our pleasures, would not smile on hearing me declare our puerile admiration for those humble images, and think that it is very easy to say that one is happy when one is so easily enchanted! But that is what it will be necessary for me to do when I enumerate my joys, is it not, my beloved? It will be necessary for me to count the smallest grain of the sand of the beaches, the ripple of light over a leaf, as well as the rude scaling of summits, as well as the nuptial contemplations of the great works of art, the earth and time. It will be necessary for me to describe the perpetual fête that the unfolding of the world was for us, in particles and in number...

  To describe, in sum, that which was the truth, the meaning, the very substance of our being, that which we had no need to name, and which I shall be able, in this era of horror, to signify: the instinct, the will and the force of joy...

  3

  But it’s necessary that I interrupt myself and tell you about a certain prodigy...

  I suddenly experience the sentiment, since I began to write The Ark, of having vanquished, with my little pencil and notebook—with regard to what concerns me, of course—the war, the Great War. But dare I pursue my confession?

  To escape, or merely to seek to disintegrate, by intellect and the sentiments, and for whatever reason, such a formidable event, is it not an abominable egotism, at the same time as a stupid blindness? Does not this immense affair in which we are the actors and the witnesses require all our activities and all our intelligence to be employed in considering it in its most ardent appearances, passionate in studying its causes, conjecturing as to its consequences?

  On the other hand, is it possible that a human sensibility can refuse to be moved, can succeed in remaining estranged from the terrible and lamentable spectacles that are continually inflicted upon it? What response can I give myself? When I write that I experience the impression of having, for my part, vanquished the War with my pencil and my notebook, it’s doubtless necessary to understand by it that I believe I have a resource, a passion that is stronger, more pressing and more absorbing for me than the War and all its episodes...

  That active resource and that passion are, I imagine, the voluptuousness that I savor in evoking our days of love, and also the light that flows within me, since I have been writing The Ark, in sensing your body in all my gestures, your heart in all my emotions…but are those the same elements of what I call my Victory? No. They are only the effects of a certain state of mind.

  If I can write this, evoke you so substantially, superimposing, full of life, the images of cherished memories upon rude realities…it is, as I said , because some strangely efficacious and powerful force gives me the means, and it is also because there must be in me and irresistible, an inviolable non-acceptance of the martial adventure...

  These sentiments, issuing from the depths, become precise as my pencil obliges them to deliver themselves. Where can I find the reason, the source, the mechanism for that strange force, that non-acceptance of the most positive and most imperious of evidence? A word that I wrote a little while ago brings my soul before my consciousness.

  4

  In a beautiful oriental fable, a poor man goes to sleep and has an absurd and magnificent dream. In the bosom of a palace, of which he is the prince, all delights surround him, and as soon as he experiences a desire, perfumes, sensualities, ineffable dishes, gold, adornments and music fly to him. The sleeper, who senses himself dissolving in blissful satisfaction, utters in his sleep an exclamation of joy, and the sound of his exclamation wakes him up.

  Now, he is certainly awake; he has propped himself up on his bed, his eyelids flutter, his fingers clench on the sheet, but his dream follows him. The craziest hallucination has him in its grip. It is not the familiar rickety table that is in the middle of his room, but the one resplendent with crystal, scarlet and glided victuals and the fruits of Canaan; his scarred plaster walls have retreated strangely; he perceives in their stead the tapestries, the hangings and the trophi
es of the magnificent hall of his dream; his window with dirty panes has become the vast bay behind which his gardens and his forests extend...

  He is fearful and wonderstruck at the same time. He knows full well that he is a poor man in his attic and yet he reaches out his hand toward the table, and the fruit and honey that he takes and chews convinces him that he is no longer dreaming...

  Such is my hallucination.

  When I wrote above “instinct, will and the force of joy,” it was at that moment only a detail of my evocation. Now, that phrase, and most particularly the word “Joy” was, for me, the exclamation that woke the sleeper. As soon as I had written that line the word Joy came to collide with my soul as the sun suddenly strikes the rose-window of a cathedral and causes it to blossom in a thousand petals of flame. Since I have fixed that word, a vertiginous emotion has possessed me. I no longer know whether it is the reality I see that is real, or whether the prodigy that vivifies and multiplies every pulsation of my vertigo is real.

  I am no longer in the sweet and languid half-light of memory. I sense myself positively in my limbs, my heart and my mind as entirely as I did before the war. I gaze, I breathe and I move in a spacious lightness. As the globe rings, and from its crypts rise the world’s strength at the summons of Antaeus’ heel, at the word Joy the foundations of my consciousness trembled, and my certainly rose up. It has risen in confrontation with the verity of the moment, in confrontation with the reality of mourning and massacre.

  What is this certainty? What is it that snatches me thus from the tumultuous and bloody event? What is it that now gives the rhythm of a hosanna to the palpitations of my heart and regenerates my blood within the song of death?

  My voice became the one that attained one day the clear certainty that Joy was the human verity…the clear certainty that in spite of the immense and millenary edifice of contrary evidence, Joy was, physically, mystically and spiritually, the sum of human verity...

  I had slowly and arduously conquered that certainty once. For days and years I had marched, sensing it in advance, toward the verity of Joy. And I had found it, a Princess in the dormant wood, in the depths of the dense forest of ancient terrestrial, obsolete anankés;14 a black forest of dead trees, rigid phantoms, still terrible but empty of heartwood...

  As soon as I had stolen my certainty, it was incorporated into my being; my blood carried it in my veins; it was alloyed with fluid saps flowing through the network of my nerves. And now it is awakening, unpolluted and unobscured.

  I dare to admit it now. My eyes can see but I shall be like a blind man. My heart senses the hour but my mind has placed itself beyond emotion. My will is no longer participating in the War. My will is entirely contained in my certainty, which is a prisoner of facts but is not their slave.

  But you…you, my love, my wife, are listening to me, following me, and are astonished. A confused jealousy is born in you. What? It is not, it is not, therefore, uniquely in your body, in our kisses, in our thoughts, in our memories, not absolutely within us and in our love that all grandeur and all liberty rises for me…?

  My beloved, my beloved, listen again, because it must be apparent to you that our love is the miracle of my faith, the crown of my certainty.

  5

  I will tell you right away about my discovery of the truth of Joy and the foundations of my certainty. I have made too much use of the future tense. “I shall invoke our sumptuous dreams, I shall enumerate our powers...” What debts underwritten to time! In a few hours, this evening, tomorrow, one of those conjuring tricks of machine-gun fire into which my service continually takes me will perhaps have delegated some incontrovertible lead through all my whimsies. If that happens, my love, what will I have bequeathed you? Here, I have said nothing yet; I have not detached a seed from one of the thousand clusters in our orchards. In our home are my books, my pictures, a hundred incomplete manuscripts...

  Doubtless, to that poor heritage, the memory of our embraces, our laughter and our reveries will give some value, some warmth…but that memory, alas...

  I imagine, my love, if I perish, our beautiful memories, similar for you to those meadows in maritime regions that are terminated by a cliff…you are before the field where the grass is trembling, amid the ardent sweetness of hyacinths and primroses, and you go through that living multicolored velvet...you go, and suddenly, there is the ridge, the void and the mysterious waves...

  What! Will it be thus for our memories, stopped dead and gaping at the edge of my death? No, no, it is necessary that that should not be. I wrote that, so far as I am concerned, I had vanquished the war. So far as you are concerned, I shall be able to vanquish death. Welcome the best of my possessions. I want to give you a heritage that will leave me alive for you in spite of all appearances, which will be my body present in all your movements, my heart beating in all your passions. My legacy, beyond me, will give you the will and power to live, will give you, as if I were there, joy, pride and the voluptuousness of being.

  That legacy, that philter, that treasure is the science of Joy. My beloved, open your bright hands, hold out the cup of your spirit. Your hands and your spirit are just, my beloved, and you are ready to receive the philter and the treasure. That which I name science, you possess in instinct. Both the elect of Joy, we come from two races and our minds emerge from dissimilar crucibles. One single sign has coupled us. Joy is in you as flight is in a wing; Joy is in me as the Fleece was in Jason, Galatea in Pygmalion.

  I am no longer different. That is the legacy that prolongs me, that duplicates me, and will allow our Ark its constructor and its pilot even if I am broken by the war and my body in drowned in its red waters.

  6

  Are you ready to follow me immediately into the heart of enchantment? You must be, for my dictation of Joy cannot work without the strangest of contexts, for my very positive adventure is surrounded by an adventure that is all enchantments and prodigies...

  One day when, solitary and meditating in a clearing in a beloved forest, I combined, with the ardent lists of my mind, the abstract intelligence of the truth of Joy, it came about that a miraculous being rose up from the waves of my exaltation and appeared to me...

  Here commences the phantasmagoria, if it is befitting to call by that name a sum of events assuredly most improbable and extraordinary, but in which there is not the slightest detail that does not correspond to a reality and cannot be certified and “evidenced by numbers, the balance or the meter”—to employ the same words that were employed at the beginning of our relationship, as you shall see, by the miraculous being himself.

  The apparition had a completely human form. He could have been some stroller in the forest passing through the clearing at that moment. I would probably have mistaken the individual for a stroller, in fact, if he—a person I have not seen coming—had not assumed before me the casual attitude of a comrade who had been there for a long time, and with whom I was in the process of conversing with the greatest familiarity in the world. His costume was not very different from the one I was wearing. It seemed to me that his height was not superior to mine.

  As I looked at him, I had the confused impression of finding some resemblance in his features to an image sometimes sent back to me by mirrors unexpectedly encountered by my eyes at singular moments: those when, after feverish internal debates on some beautiful philosophical problem I emerged from the debates triumphantly joyful with some great evidence attained. Such celebrations came to me sometimes when I was wandering at random through the streets of the city, and the mirrors that my eyes encountered were simply those in shops... Then, I saw myself, going along, my torso taut with proud strength, me head held high and radiant, and I sensed my thoughts above me like an awning...

  It really was a sort of image of my own face in those regal minutes that the visage of my unusual companion evoked.

  But he began talking and introduced himself. He acquitted that ritual in a language sibylline at first, very solemn and declamatory, to t
ell the truth. Subsequently, his language became familiar. The bizarre—to say the least—impression that I had experienced since the newcomer had been beside me increased singularly as soon as he spoke…but the best way for you to judge the nature of my astonishment is to transcribe right away what I heard, moreover, with the most serious courtesy.

  “To the man,” the apparition said to me, “who follows the road of Passion, and who, rich at the outset in the Will to knowledge, conserves his wealth intact during the journey, to the point that he could show it at any moment in his travels as brilliant and resonant as it was when he set forth—and yet, without having ceased to spend that wealth throughout the journey—to the man following the road of Passion, both lavishing and keeping intact the treasure of the Will to knowledge, it is perhaps accorded to know me and to listen to me.

  “If you had not gone,” he continued, “by that road of Passion, both lavishing and keeping intact the treasure of the Will to knowledge, you would never have known me in my veritable person, for I am similar to another man in appearance; and I have perhaps been your nearest neighbor a thousand times without your ever suspecting who your neighbor really was. And it is thus that I am continually among humans, but they do not know me, and as if I did not exist, and yet you can see, in seeing me, that I am real.

  “I say that I am similar to a man in appearance, because my body is similar to that of a man. And yet…but what will follow will give you an initial notion of my character, and it will also be the enunciation of my privileges and the table of my excellences.

  “My body is like that of a man, and yet my movements and my liberty are to the movements and liberty of a man as the course of a spring is to the compact waters that lie dormant between calcareous subterrains, and only succeed in flowing in slow serpentine fashion through the fissures of internal silicas. My rich possessions are of this world. My delectations are deployed over the treasures and the virtues of my very being, and all the concrete and spiritual treasures of human creatures, works and constructions, and over all the visible and occult treasures of space and time, of the land, the air and the sea, and are not limited to this universe, extending to the treasures of the stars.