The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  I laughed! And I found myself once again sitting on my bank of moss in the heart of the forest; the arcandre was before me.

  He said to me, graciously: “Would it suit you to change realms and society, root that crawled; would you like to be an eagle, a flame, the sun?”

  10

  I believe that I replied, mechanically: “Thank you...”

  I was extremely emotional after the subterranean adventure. I experienced a need to catch my breath for a moment and put a little clarity into a hundred questions that were passing in disorder through my mind. I breathed in a few lungfuls of the gilded air that filed the clearing, voluptuously, as if I were drinking a cordial wine from a nobly sculpted cup.

  There was a prodigy that I could not explain in any manner: that of having well and truly passed into the soil, of having become earth, root and tree, consubstantially, if I might put it like that, and without having sensed the slightest corporeal tickle. On the other hand, I feared squandering in interrogations the moments that it had been offered to me to fill with marvelous adventures...

  The arcandre’s offer to make me the sun, a flame, an eagle—what do I know?—authorized me to suppose that he was now about to produce surprising things compared with which our subterranean voyage would only be, according to my companion’s expression, mere child’s play...

  That decided me to continue the enchantment and postpone the leisure of philosophizing.

  Before quitting my bank of moss in order to change into a bird or a star, however, I had a slight twinge of regret at only having been a tree for such a short time. By prolonging the hypostasis I could doubtless have seen and sensed by sap, my bark and got to know the thousand tiny kisses of lichen and ivy...

  “And to be the lichen and the ivy,” the arcandre put in.

  My petty cerebral labor must have been as visible to him, I suppose, as the work of lacemaker weaving her florets and traceries is to us.

  “To be the lichen and the ivy,” said the arcandre, “and the caterpillar and the beetle in that vagabond ivy; and to witness, as a caterpillar, in singularly propitious conditions of experience, the diversion of seeing yourself become a butterfly; and, as a butterfly, to flutter over nearby corollas; and, as a corolla, to observe something of the ingenious mechanisms by which the plundering insect is obliged to carry away on its wings or feet the pollen that can, no less ingeniously, and to the great profit of their pistils, be unloaded by the corollas of the neighborhood…and—why not?—as the pollen, know…but what’s the point of even making lists? Assuredly, you can, since everything that is in the world, for as long as I am with you, offers itself to your whim.”

  He advanced his hand toward mine.

  “I think,” I observed, “that at the beginning of our association, you proposed to me to resuscitate by means of one of the little stones down there, what was happening around it several million years ago...”

  “Did I say millions?” replied the arcandre. “A few billions as well. I’d forgotten the little stone, but it’s sufficient for you to express the desire. Come.”

  11

  We found ourselves underground again, in the same place as before. The same stones were studding the soil. I considered one among them in particular.

  “That pebble,” said the arcandre. “So be it.”

  And immediately, everything collapsed.

  At any rate, there was no longer anything for me, or of me. I was lost. For a time whose duration I could not perceive, my self was completely obliterated. There was not even a void or darkness, for I would have been able to sense a void or darkness, but a condition devoid of character and devoid of extent, which only the word “nothing” can express...

  From that nothing awoke, still numb, the notion that I had begun once again to exist, if perceiving oneself confusedly in the absence of any kind of form or place can be called “existence.”

  To describe that moment as appropriately as possible, I was I-know-not-what, having the impression of being I-know-not-where...

  Arcandre! How difficult, among all the extraordinary excursions that I owe to you, this one is to narrate!

  Scarcely had the notion formed that the I-know-not-what had begun to “exist” again, I-know-not-where, than I experienced what must have been that nowhere suddenly cracking, and that it was me that had begun to dilate, to grow, without encountering anything that braked the dilation. I grew, I unfolded, beyond all discernible measure, and, still growing and unfolding, I began to rotate immeasurably, my incessantly vaster extent, my incessantly increasing quantity...

  I sought in vain for a comparison. I cannot imagine what could have given me the idea of that phenomenon of immense rotation and that unlimited expansion, save for naming the phenomenon itself…which would be an unfortunate anticipation of the stages of the event, it being sufficiently incredible for it to be necessary to take the relation of it slowly...

  I interrupted myself as I was still merely rotating and dilating continuously, having not the slightest consciousness of what my new state of being represented. To the double and coincident sensation that I experienced then, no vertigo was added, because of a singular mildness and almost voluptuous sway... Would it be possible for those who are not physically familiar with a certain kind of hyperestheia that the Brahmins of India regard as an ecstatic state, and to which they attribute a divine character under the name of Yoga, to imagine the order of that sway, that kind of vaporous oscillation in an indefinite space...?

  I was, therefore, for the moment, that strange swaying, that rotation and that immeasurable unfolding, which were, as I say, accomplished in an extent that, for my precarious perceptions, could only correspond to the notion of “nowhere.” Were not those three sensations enough? Now, at the same time and as if interior to what I was already experiencing, a sudden and amazing reversal occurred: somewhere in that immense, still rotating me, a part of me contracted, shrank, while it too was spinning, running, dancing and still shrinking, incessantly diminishing, until it seemed to me that it had attained the supreme smallness at which it could still be something, the final dimension after which the something would have had to become immaterial, dissolving into infinity...

  When that other me had reached that infinitesimal, then my consciousness was triggered, and I could see.

  I was a particle of a gigantic tangle of light, and that very tangle, the total extent of which was rotating on its axis and also describing incommensurable ellipses in a black and icy ether. Simultaneously an atom and the whole of the most enormous blaze, I was in addition that which could gaze at the conflagration, containing its measure and sustaining its glare.

  I say that I contained its measure…I mean that a consciousness of mine, situated outside the immense rutilance, embraced the whole of it, but that was without being able to relate any of the proportions of the phenomenon to anything that had be terrestrially knowable, or even imaginable, previously. No idea formed in my terrified mind of grandeur, of the possibility of calculating some dimension in accordance with anything I had been able to conceive of the most spacious and the most enormous in my ordinary life. I observed that my gaze embraced the totality of that incomparable flamboyance, and that is all that I can say.

  As for the flamboyance itself, its glare…what words are available to me that would not be utterly exhausted as soon as I attempted to describe it?

  I saw a kind of spasmodic chaos of incandescence, a block of clouds of fire perpetually changing shape, extent and density. Tresses, bristles and manes of flame elongated in every direction, and their furious flux, on encountering the cold of space, volatilized, or fell back as ardent rains. At the points where those rains fell, ephemeral whirlpools formed, darkening with brown pools the resplendence of the mass; but those whirlpools immediately fell back, dislocated and devoured by the perpetual convulsions of the whole. Here, blisters as vast as suns burst in a spray of adamantine geysers and left in their place crevasses so profound that they seemed to traverse the ent
ire thickness of the formidable furnace. That which was central, immensely flooding away, became peripheral. Seas of gold and emerald shrank and rose up as mountains. Capes and gulfs melted in a tidal wave of fulgurance. Brewed into enormous squalls, it seemed that the light was bounding, boiling, unfurling...

  And before my mind, gradually, the irrevocable and insane certainty asserted itself that I had been, thanks to the arcandre, transported to the primordial fire: that it had been sufficient for me to observe for an instant the most banal of pebbles in the subsoil of a forest, to go back through the history of that crumb of flint, for it have resuscitated the adventure of the earth itself...

  That light was the light of a fire that had just been born in the surf of stellar dust…in the silent fields of time its particles has assembled. From their duels and their alliances, the shock of their gyrations, the innumerable labor of electricities, fire, the first visible face of forces, had surged...

  That light was the light of the primal fire, the robe of the period when fire and cold had kneaded the atoms and condensed the fluids of the billows of their blind embraces, engendering the vapors of mercury and iron and solidifying the gases into the pure metals, which oxidized and diversified relentlessly in deluges of new vapors, re-engendering cosmic maelstroms without pause. Like as many cries, clamored by as many myriads of beings, every combination, every fusion of molecules, every elementary substance, all the alchemies of the furnace, darted forth their flames, and that light was the host of all those colors and all those flames, the hymn of those cries, the hosanna of the primal birth of a universe.

  That which would one day be a world, in aggregating, would retain those flames buried in the flint of its mines. Time would crystallize their virgin refractions, matrices of sapphires, rubies and opals, and those stones would always testify, beyond the metamorphoses of all substances, to that hosanna of the primal fire...

  And me, I was one of the particles of that light, and that light in its entirety, and the conscious spectator of such a splendor! Intoxicated and unlimited, juggled in that tide of fire, juggling, s light, with that tempest of stones, I felt myself streaming, flamboyant, resplendent, in a demiurgical orgy of radiance, color and space...

  And yet, in the fullness of the enchantment, what was it, I thought, that enchantment, that left me conscious of being still the same, master, if it pleased me, of recovering my bank of moss at the foot of the tree...and better yet, of still being on that bank of moss, while I was rolling in fire in infinity?

  12

  So, I delighted in that cosmic celebration and intoxicated myself ineffably in its light. But in the end, and in truth, what was that resurrection of the commencement of a world, of our world, but that of the little stone, of our world, in its physical mode, in the concrete play of its forces, and in dimensions so formidable that I had to ask myself what place remained for the real earth, the one on which I found myself before the adventure, the one in which the arcandre had come to surprise me—in sum, the one that circled in its orbit in our old solar system? And how could the latter, differentiated into planets, coexist with its own nebular commencement?

  I affirm, in spite of my emotion and voluptuousness in contemplation and knowledge being exalted to paroxysm, that I sensed in myself a perfect state of intelligence, in possession of all my positive resources of reason, and rigorously awake.

  “Arcandre!” I cried. “Friend, what power is yours and what name is given to it that no book records, since what I see here, which surpasses in brilliance the marvelous spectacles painted by the poets and the most inspired mystics, is not the supernatural of a Saint John or that of a Dante, but the world itself, such as it must have appeared in the remotest times. There is nothing supernatural here but my presence…my presence in what must be millions of centuries ago, and which has, from age to age and hour to hour, been transformed to the point that I know it in my ordinary life. What power is yours that abolishes for me extent, duration and my own substance, and causes the world to revert to its age of fire?

  “However, at this moment, and in this same world, where no life palpitates as yet, where no form will be sketched for thousands of millennia, beings are coming and going on earth, living their customary existence. History has been. From the men of the caverns to my contemporaries, my planet has lived. Charlemagne... Attila... Galileo... Robespierre... What have you done with real time?”

  He said to me: “Would you like, at this instant, to be that Attila, that Robespierre, with their living epoch around you? Would you like to follow the Huns, to go on horseback to attack the Gauls? Would you like to mingle with the crowd that read Marat’s newspaper on the street-corner one day?”

  My human consciousness saw the arcandre confounded with me in the immense Sabbat of flames

  “But are you sated with the cosmos?” he continued. “It’s a beautiful diversion, however…again, very easy to obtain. Would you like to see the first rocks spring up in the first seas, the first plants being born in the new land, the first animal, still half-plant, crawling, bewildered to have broken its stem?”

  Whereupon I cried out: “Yes, I want to! Whatever you can take me to see and live, no drama of human history can equal the great mystery of origins!”

  I seemed to perceive the arcandre laughing ironically.

  Then I said: “Yes, I want to see and live those times which were only filled with the terrible duels of elements, in the opaque silence of a world without consciousness. What is there now that can astonish me, under your aegis? You offer me the supreme impossible, which seems to deny itself in expressing itself, knowing and sensing what it was when nothing existed of that which can be known and sensed! Yes, I want to be that gaze, that ear and that passion of time before life and before sight. Go. Order. Realize.”

  13

  Another face appeared of the astral work of time. It was the earth in the age of the universal waters. I saw, from I don’t know what point in the ether, the entire sphere rotating on its axis, while tracing its giant ellipses through space. The planet, glaucous, like a globe of jade, on the hemisphere it offered to the sun, reverberated the light of the major star with a dazzling violence.

  Now, as I thought of approaching it, in order to contemplate at closer range the polished gleam due to its distance, what monstrous effervescences, what vertiginous eruptions were accomplished on its surface! Suddenly, I saw a thin white circle rising up around it, like a halo of nacre, from which the sunlight was refracted. Soon, that circle enlarged, thickened, and was soon a great ring the color of iron, soon denser and broader, a kind of shell enclosing all the sumptuous scintillations of jade and nacre like a mantle of heavy gray velvet thrown over a lily-white shoulder. The orb’s prison was still becoming denser, the color of lead. In vain the generous waves of sunlight rolled over it. No refraction, no more light…it seemed that the planet was hooded with scarves of shadow. And gradually, like scarves, in effect, lifted and whipped by the wind of the course of the star’s rotation, mists deployed around the earth, extending, hirsute and compact, climbing the field of sunlight, staining the golden extent with immense rivers of soot.

  Curiosity gripped me, and transported me, at the same moment that it lit up, beneath the carapace of mists. Then, I rolled with the turbulence of the seething expanses. The young oceans, bitten by the solar effluvia, exhaled themselves in vapors, and the liquid universe was enveloped by a cocoon of cloud.

  Above the tumultuous waters ran hordes of clouds, swollen with deluges. Many waves bounded through the fumes of the sky, and their crests, like battering rams, cut into the black caravans. Enormous flakes were detaches, falling into the waves, their swellings trailing momentarily, as if stupid, limp at the level of the angry waves, which took possession of them, disemboweled them, and ripped them into errant wisps, quickly engulfed in the voracious hollows of the surf. Sky and waves mingled in a seething sweat-bath fog, blue-tinted at intervals by the angular fire of lightning-bolts. Outside of those flashes of electric c
olor, the light of the world was almost black, striped with bands of earthy red and living green. The distant splendor of the sun arrived here thus, diffused by mists saturated by sulfur.

  A frightful despair emanated from those sordid gleams. The lugubriousness that the painters of Hell have tried to depict in the most tormented of Malebolges, I saw there, intensified by the frightful grandeur of things. But I had no terror of it, and I contemplated that grim chaos of water and darkness, of which I was not the prisoner but the prodigious guest, with a bitter exaltation.

  Meanwhile, as if to test my fantastic liberty, I said: “Would you care, Arcandre, to accelerate the ages here, in order that I can see, delivered from the matrix of the clouds, the beautiful terrestrial jewel shining once again in the sunlight.”

  Then, in the depths of the sky, a trenchant luminosity was designed within the funereal ensemble, a sort of vast lake of fleecy cloud, pale at first and then yellow-tinted, which the light enlivened, attained the brilliance of brass. Uncertain reflections undulated in the ambient blackness; pathways of gilded light lit up, and lengthened, tremulously, through the mourning of the cloud-mass. Tufts of pink vapor ran lightly over the new clarities. The darkness thinned out. An imminent light quivered behind it, like youth shining through the crepes of young windows. The atmosphere was opalized. Ringlets of coral rimmed the ridges of the clouds nearest to the celestial lake, incessantly growing vaster and more brilliant. The oceans, previously inky, in which all the adventures of the sky were mirrored, rolled waves of topaz and crimson through the smoke.

  Suddenly, the course of the clouds opened up; the contours of the lake blurred, naked light entered through the fissure in the mists. An immense sheaf of vapors flowed toward the sun, as if aspired by an irresistible appeal of space. It received the first contact of the light. It was invested with it, all the way to its ultimate atoms. Each of its innumerable droplets sparkled with seven fires. Around it, the air was iridescent and the waves were constellated. Then the glory of the day imposed itself. The diaphanous clouds glided as if nonchalant amid the ardent azure, and the marine vapors rose up in silvery tufts from the calm waters. The profound blue of the sky gave the waves the grave color of amethyst.