The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “I shall not enumerate the countenance of these words, for it is not possible to state the number and the diversity of the outside and the inside of creation. And it is that number and that diversity which my words signify, because there is not one single being or object in creation that does not enclose for me a treasure or a virtue. And these words, therefore, signify that everything there is in earth and in heaven, in the present as in the upstream and the downstream of the ages, is offered to my dilection, and that I have the license, in order to attain it, to go into all universal regions, to traverse periods, souls, elements and substances.

  “It follows that if I undertake to summon in detail the names of the places, objects and beings, and the names of the interior of the places, objects and beings that are for me as many cups of Joy from which I can drink, and if, calling by name one after another, I spoke for such a long time that the most majestic forests would have time to die and decompose, and their plants and their trees would have reentered the soil and melted into the surrounding humus, and the most abundant rivers would have time to dry up and the rocks over which they flow would be dissolves and all their particles dissolved into the dust of the air—all the names of the places, objects and beings that I would have summoned until the moment when I chose to stop, no matter how far away that moment might be in the centuries, and every second having contained the name of a place, an object or a being, all those names would still be no more than dust on the roads that I have the leisure to tread, feeble splinters of my privilege, hamlets in the empire in which I can frolic as I please, traveling, pausing, contemplating, embracing and bringing further forward in consciousness every treasure among my treasures,”

  7

  He continued:

  “And that infinite opulence is, however, only a first degree of richness, the carving and metalwork of my coffers, the envelope of a second opulence that surpasses everything that is conceivable of the most furious and vast covetousness.

  “For there, where each of you, ordinarily, can only perceive and savor an object, a spectacle, a gesture, be it a fruit, a gem, a perfume, a festival, a music, an arrangement of nature, a caress, an idea, the charm of a being, the grace of a soul, and whatever it is, in sum, that is savored or admired, that pleases or rejoices, that is eaten or sniffed, that shines or sings—in sum, whatever it is that confers pleasure, emotion, pride, sensuality or happiness—in the same spectacle, the same object, the same gesture, I can, thanks to my nature, perceive and savor tastes, clarities and graces perpetually nascent, perpetually new, incessantly sweeter, brighter and more subtle, without it being possible to set a limit to that torrential multiplication of treasures and virtues in each object, each spectacle and each gesture.

  “Thus, whatever might be the pleasure or the beauty that I take, always new to me, some new beauty denounces itself to be discovered within that beauty, and after that, in the same way, a thousand others, some unexpected delight within that delight, and a thousand others after that. Thus, wherever I go, no matter how far, how excellent, how high, once I have attained the limit of a world, the sum of a science, the plenitude of a possession, I see that limit opening up in a thousand new and unsuspected paths, more attractive than all those I have followed to reach what appeared to be the terminus; the sum of the science is no more than the sprig of moss at the foot of the tree of science, each branch of which and each leaf of each branch and each vein of each leaf is a new mystery offered to my curiosity; the plenitude is no more than a threshold before the seductions that shine through the hours to come.

  “Have you never heard an individual rich in possessions or adventures say: ‘I have done everything; I have seen everything; I am sated.’? What petty appetites such a man must have!

  “For me, since I possess the certainty of the unlimited opulence of the world, with the sentiment of my unlimited privileges over that opulence, and the sentiment that after each fortune achieved, there will still remain thousands upon thousands of others yet to grasp and savor, dispensers of felicities always new and keener—whether I steal the fire of lust from lips more beautiful than Cleopatra’s, or roam the realms that Orpheus and Dante made, or discover a continent like Columbus, or one of the arcana of heaven like Newton—I could only then declare, in all honesty: ‘What is what I have done compared with what I have yet to do? What have I seen compared to what I have yet to see?’

  “And it follows that in all places, in all circumstances, I am like a lord of the manor in the home of one of his tenant farmers; while he delights in looking at his flocks and his fields, he increases his pleasure by thinking at the same time of his nearby forests where game abounds, his ponds, his blooming gardens. I am also like a child on the first day of his vacation, when a long period of games and sunshine opens up before him. Every minute of my hours, everywhere and in all circumstances, is similar to the first day of the vacation for the child, similarly engendering in me both the enthusiasm and the delight of the present and the marvelous impatience for recreations to come.

  “I shall not enumerate my privileges or my excellences, because it is not possible to state the number and the diversity of the outside and the inside of creation, and because it is that number and that diversity that are my excellences, and on one and the other that my privileges are exercised. However, as much is possible, I want to make you know the materials of my being and the nature of my joy.

  “But first, do not omit to suspend from my words any reminiscence of fable or fantasy, for none of the names that will come to your mind in my regard will be appropriate to me. Might they be names like demon, spirit, archangel or certain others, more singular, that one finds in religion and sorcery? Those names, issues of faith, poetry and wonderment, and all the exaltations of sentiment likewise, correspond to ideas or suppositions rather than to facts; no scientist in a laboratory had ever weighed or measured a god, a demon, an angel, or analyzed the least of the elements of their personal substance. Now, everything that constitutes my being, my person and my substance, and the substance of my powers and my possessions, is in the domain of reality, of human reason and positive knowledge, can be held and scrutinized, evidenced by numbers, the balance and the meter.

  “Do not expect your memory, either, to find in bibles or in history, figures, feats and ostentations, no matter how vast or prestigious they might be, that offer anything comparable to me. For however prestigious and vast those ostentations, feats and figures might be, I insist that they correspond to me in the measure in which the reflection of a ray of sunlight from a shard of crystal corresponds to light itself.”

  8

  The apparition went on…and here, because I am in haste to come to the narrative of the unusual adventures into which I was drawn, I shall summarize the peroration...

  The human appearance of the strange individual permitted him to come and go among us without anyone being able to suspect the secret of his authentic nature. As soon as there was any risk of the mystery being detected, as the chameleon takes on the color of the branch that bear it, this individual melted into the surrounding people or things. Thus, what he would enable me to see were merely metamorphoses that he could accomplish. If I expressed the desire, he could immediately be the tiny creature running through the moss at our feet, the eglantine trembling above my head, a shimmer of light or the buzz of a wasp.

  He added that he was going to saturate me with marvels, with positive marvels, all emerging from the brilliant verity of Joy, with which, by virtue of my research alone, I had been able to illuminate my consciousness—marvels, finally, that would bring me the indestructible confirmation of my certainty. And furthermore, when, by the exercise to certain of the admirable privileges that he had—and which I would have myself, thanks to his presence—privileges also emerging from the same verity of Joy, he had definitely dispensed sufficient proofs of that verity, then, for the more excellent profit of my consciousness and the completion of my faith, he would confess his identity to me…

&nb
sp; “I am,” he said, “an arcandre, but that appellation is merely a kind of temporary pseudonym.” He also assured me that: “It would not serve any purpose if I told you my real name immediately, for that one, in your present understanding, would not represent anything that it ought to signify. The term arcandre has no other reason than to mark a distinction between the enigmatic name that I reserve for myself and the one that all humans apply to me inconsiderately...which is the same name, given that I too am…a man. But the enigma subsists in its entirety. For what sort of man am I, then, who can amuse himself with the games of which you shall be the spectator?”

  9

  He took me gently by the hand; I had no sensation of passing from one state to another. I perceived perfectly that the man I normally was remained as he was the instant before, sitting with his back to the same tree; and yet, I suddenly sensed that I had also become that tree in its entirety, and all the trees in the vicinity, and also each of the birds hopping and whistling in the foliage of those trees, and also the wind agitating the leaves and slightly stirring the plumage, and also the air, striated and stung by the flight of insects, charged with aromas, and also each of those insects and every swirl of those aromas, and also the ambient light that the verdure, the wings, the antennae and the carapaces scattered, juggled and launched forth in pearls, darts, sparks and reflections as supple as loosened ribbons.

  “Would you care to accompany me?” asked the arcandre. “You can designate the being, the place and the game yourself. Would you like, along with me, to be the grass, the bird or the dew? Would you like to leave this forest by vaporizing yourself and traveling space with the wind, or, as light, mingle with the luminous flux and dance on the crest of vibrations with the damsel-flies and golden gnats? Would you like to move lightly in the ground, become for a moment one of the subterranean stones scattered in the strata?” Without letting go of my hand, he added: “But come. As soon as it suits you to change form and domain, as soon as your desire is formulated, you will be what you want to be, here or wherever you want to go.”

  Instantly, I found myself inside the ground. No hindrance in my new being. I circulated amid the dense, amid the opaque, with as much ease as if I had been on a highway on the surface. But in what manner was I circulating? It seemed to me, as a perfectly simple evidence, that I was, successively, all the substances through which I traveled...

  Nevertheless, I conserved sensibility and consciousness, and I was perfectly sure that I was not dreaming. Thus, my human reason was still functioning, even in that extravagant moment. I possessed, intact, in my new state, the same reason that registers, examines, deduces...

  I stopped for a moment. My person then presented itself to my reasoning faculty in the aspect of layers of friable humus, dented in places by very ordinary stones, furrowed by ferociously contorted roots. The arcandre was beside me, but the term “beside” only expresses arbitrarily his situation in relation to mine, since he was, like me, momentarily incorporated in that inferior extent of the earth, the same earth on which we had been standing a little while before.

  What I observed first of all in my surroundings was, therefore, humus, stones and roots. The latter were occupied in drawing sustenance. To the fluid serosity issuing from their pores, which, in extending, narrowly coated their nodes and meanders with a syrupy swathe, agglutinated the juices and alcohols sweating from the proximal silicates and peat, hydromels with which the earth surrounding their hunger kept an open cellar, profusely, elixirs slowly distilled from the ambient minerals and vegetables by time, moisture and the seasons.

  “Would you like to see these roots hunting?” asked the arcandre, unexpectedly.

  “Hunting?” I said.

  “What else can one call,” he said, “their search for pasture through the earth, the gymnastics of their tentacles searching the compact extent avidly, as cephalopods uncoil their voracious thongs in the waters?”

  “Indeed, Monsieur,” I replied. “Can you give me a sight piercing enough to seize the molecular movement of these roots, although I would be obliged to wait for a long time to see them elongate and run. In my understanding, everything has its own time, and these roots cannot grow before our eyes as colts gallop on the stud-farm, or glass swells up at the end of the blower’s pipe...”

  “Friend,” said the arcandre, familiarly, “my advantages would be poor if, being able to play with matter, traverse it and confound myself with it, I had to be stopped by duration! Time is, for my whim, like a kind of infinitely elastic tissue, with neither front nor back, which I can unwind to infinite length or roll up so tightly that it can be contained entirely within an ant’s egg. Thus, I can, as a matter of mere child’s play, contract into one or two minutes for you the ten or twelve dozen months that would be necessary for these roots to extend half a meter, and draw my carpet an honest million years backwards, before any one of these little stones, which would resuscitate what had happened around it since the age of the stegosaurus and the triceratops.”

  “Let’s see,” I replied.

  There was a kind of unctuous click in our conglomerate of humus. Immediately, the roots swelled up, gibbosities were displaced, nodosities flattened out, a thousand vegetal snakes advanced, encountering one another and crossing one another’s paths in blind reptations. At the same time, innumerable rootlets emerged from every part of the body of each snake; every filament groped the extent anxiously, inserting itself thereinto and sucking from the peat itself the juices pearling on the walls of the route that it was tunneling. As for the roots, each drawing its swarming fringes, they similarly sought their pittance, but gluttonously, darting their ever-new extremities into the midst of the tellurian magma.

  On contact with reefs of chalk or flint barring their path, they reared up, raising their points, and beating the surroundings with a furious and awkward coming-and-going, until the obstacle was avoided. Before the insurmountable they stopped suddenly, as if to reflect, folding back their antennae, inflating their mass, to the point that one thought them ready to explode with indignation, and then, in prudent curves and gentle zigzags, they went to search the depths beneath them for a feast less rigorously defended.

  But what were those gesticulations, singular as they were, by comparison with the hallucinatory melee of other roots, which, having collided on the same route, struggled in order to conquer passage. It seemed that each of them knew that it was responsible to the tree, the lord that loomed up on high, in the world of light...

  It seemed…but the impressions I experienced in watching the combatants wrestle and writhe, strangling one another in frenetic duels, transposing themselves....

  The arcandre, who was reading within me, doubtless guided that sorcery; I became one of those roots, and the one that was me suddenly acquired the virtue of intelligence and sentiment. Now, I made war among the obscure purveyors of saps. Around me the more agile roots, disdaining the skirmish, slid through the ephemeral gaps, perpetually enlarged or diminished, that were designed in the hand-to-hand conflict; others, slyly twining around the victorious, grew in an instant in their direction, and profiting from their weariness after the battle that the fortunate jousters had fought some distance away, detached themselves at a given moment, overtook them and filled in the path ahead of them.

  Entangled in the conflagration, I fought rudely. In my turn, I was responsible to the tree. The branches, the leaves and the fruits delegated me to search in the profound bunkers for the coarse nourishment of the framework and the flesh. They charged themselves with finding, in their world, the subtle aliments of color, sheen and sculpture. An apocalyptic being, simultaneously animal, vegetable and human, I made use of that which was my head, perpetually elongated by continual birth, stiffening it like a pike, piercing the strata, hollowing out the clay, or, becoming elastic, like a trunk, taking gluttonous possession in passage of eggs, animalcules, seeds, or again, like a whip, flagellating and repelling any aggressive enterprises.

  Careless of the te
rrible tourney, my radicles were insatiably active in pumping the liquids that the earth bled incessantly around their piercing. And while I strove doggedly, driving myself slowly into the solid space, in my consciousness that was simultaneously observing my martial furies and my fierce hunt for nourishment, sensed their passion, and at the same time recorded every detail and every vicissitude of the exterminating riot, retaining in that vaporously glittering consciousness the image of the tree...

  Now, I was also that gracious and conceited prince, anointed by daylight, adorned with reflections and plumage, upstanding in the palace of the air, at the center of the farandoles of the wind, embalmed by all their perfumes, caressed by all their robes...

  I worked tenaciously in the densities on order to be resplendent on high, swaying indolently amid the crowd of the other trees, stretching al my odorous branches proudly. I was the forge and the jewel, the gehenna and the seraph, the soldier rushing to pillage and murder, and the advantageous captain, the black and grunting people of my royalty. I sensed absolutely that unusual duplication. A joyous will to conquer, coming from my arboreal consciousness, made my radical consciousness more ardent.

  A fever of delight and strength, a warm burst of laughter, shook the third consciousness, that of the man that I still was, the marvelous holder of those three simultaneous states...