The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  But scarcely had I savored that sumptuous serenity...

  14

  It seemed to me that anguish passed through the air, in the mild solemnity of the light, over the surface of the oceans. Broad frissons creased the liquid extents. The beautiful violet waves were covered in places by foam, spread like white surplices over archbishops’ aventails...

  What genesis was being accomplished in the depths? Whirlpools hollowed out, stirring up the gracious ascent of vapors, curving their fine evolutions, attracting them and tearing apart their spirals. The waves rose up, bounding and swelling, setting off in a galloping cavalcade of blisters, incessantly growing larger and more furious. Suddenly, the waters burst under the pressure of lava-flows. The parturition of worlds twisted the surface of the oceans. Blocks of fuming rocks springing from submarine craters perforated space, shaking it with hoarse whining, peppering the skies momentarily with a heavy flocks of fantastic black birds, with white wings of vapor escaping from them, which battered the reflux of the wind and fell back into the waves with innumerable explosive splashes.

  Dense fogs rose up from abyssal evolutions. They accumulated and thickened, stifling the light again. Like a creature attacked from all sides, striking out desperately with all its limbs to defend itself, the air was flagellated everywhere by new eruptions, unleashing squalls that rolled in all directions through the vapors, entangling them, confounding them with one another and whirling in a hectic saraband. At the hazard of those crazed currents, mists, lifted up from below, flew away, detached from the waters. Then the ocean reappeared through those ephemeral ventilation-shafts. Here and there, russet masses extended, motionless, in exasperated unfurlings. The waves, as if insurgent, rushed against their invariable contours. The primary substances of continents, immense, were like the backs of monstrous beasts within the swell, grazing the bottom of the sea.

  While the fumes licked them, clinging to their peaks, scattering on their jagged ridges, losing themselves in the darkness of their fissures, the spasms of the crust must have died down on the sea-bed. Calm was inserted into the rhythm of the surface. The great cavalcade of the waves relaxed. Streaks of light infiltrated the fog, less compact, needles of sunlight sewing the pearls of the prism to the hemp of smoke. The waves, black, dappled with golden patches at points where the light pierced the mists and attained the placed ripples, coiled around the contours of the reefs. As the eddies died down, the lowering of the level revealed the gigantic extent of the red rocks. Then, it seemed that they rose up, and that the pulsation of the ocean was giving rise to the elevation of the land; for the majestic swaying of the waters in the fogs, still rising, was cadenced like breathing; ultimately from each palpitation of that species of immense respiration, incessantly vaster, more terrible and more grandiose, the mineral stays of the world emerged.

  At that moment, a new prodigy intervened in the succession of prodigies of that entire resurrection of commencements: vast and tragic, as if modeled on the very effort of matter, a musical theme burst forth! Or rather, it seemed to well up from the feats of the genesis, inflating and palpitating through the atmosphere and unrolling, prolonging in sounds in space the lines and episodes of the sea. And in that theme, from which I could believe that he had taken the very elements of his organs, his bows and his harps, I recognized one of the treasures of my memory, the prelude of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold.

  15

  Once, in normal times, whenever I heard that prelude, I had always been gripped, half-idea and half-image, by a confused impression of genesis; and, as concretely as a similar impression could be translated, I sensed in the kind of hypnosis into which all great music plunges the fervent listener, the slow rise of those great chords heavy with mystery and menace was loosed before my sensibility like an ascensional movement of great nebular waves.

  Those waves affirmed for me the image of those that emerged from some crypts of the original darkness, fog and fluid and forces, prior to Number and Form, before and through the initial space, carrying in their orbs all the fatality of the future universe...

  Once, in normal times, in the gray light of dreams, those phantasms had rolled before me, growing and swaying as the theme of the Ring was amplified. An obscure certainty, come from I don’t know what seemingly fraternal affirmation of my instinct, imposed the authenticity of that cosmic image on my consciousness, numbed by the pathetic voluptuousness of sound...

  Certainly, many commentators on the Wagnerian work, and many pious listeners to the tetralogy must have discerned or felt the esotericism of the Prelude, as I did then, and I make no claim at all as to the exclusivity of my sensation, but that does not matter. Here, I was alone in being occupied with the prodigy of that extravagant upheaval, in which it that moment, it was no longer the music that was provoking the hallucination of genesis, but genesis itself that was causing the hallucination of music to surge forth.

  Was it truly a hallucination? In evoking that sudden assumption of sound, it is easy for me to say that it was certainly not from things that the song was emanating but from me, from my emotion, and that, at the time, I transferred to things, by virtue of a kind of mirage, that singular musical explosion of my overexcited sensibility. Exalted without respite in the course of the epic of fire, of waves, of mists, of rocks, my emotion must gradually have attained a point of extreme intensity. The heart and gaze of that epic, I had, while reopening the archives of creation for myself, burned, shone, undulated and unfurled. A living arena of primordial activities, their consciousness and their passion, I had just felt myself, by turns, bound with the wind in the vapors, had been the irruption of light triumphant over mists, and, as those mists, the voice of light. When the rocks rose from the waters and the fogs, I was, as it were, immersed in the triple parental rhythm of the new face of the world...

  It was at that moment that the prodigy was accomplished. In the same way that energy can be transformed from heat into light, my exaltation was sublimated and suddenly passed into a state that only music could express. My entire being became song. And from my memory rose the theme that adapted itself imperiously to the immense spectacle and the immense sensation.

  Now, so many dear and noble recreations of my soul were linked to that music in my memory. I owed so many profound flames to the tetralogy that, in spite of the physical enchantment, my vertigo of contemplation, and my infinite curiosity regarding the next scene in the planetary tragedy, a certain familiar image was ignited within me and began to shine in the most intimate depths of my heart. Its light expanded, gently, but with an irresistible movement, throughout my being, overflowing me, it seemed, growing, its colors and contours affirming, interposing itself between the new creation and my disconcerted gaze. And while a supremely unexpected décor condensed around me, becoming more and more precise, the rocks, the mists and the oceans blurred, dissolving into vaporous silhouettes, soon indistinct and soon effaced under new forms. Thus in a screen, by virtue of the artifice of a magic lantern operator, two images are momentarily superimposed, and the older one is discolored and disappears, as if diluted, beneath the new arrival...

  The rocks, oceans and mists vanished, or were reabsorbed, into the four walls of a small drawing room. There, I found myself in an old armchair, simulation Louis XV, in wood stripped of its gilt by age—and that small drawing room belonged to my father and mother. My brother, sitting at the piano, was just finishing playing the Prelude to Das Rheingold, and soon the clear voices of the Daughters of the Rhine resonated blithely through the little room...

  16

  My three dearest friends, habitual companions of our quiet family celebrations, were sprawled in armchairs similar to mine, listening. My mother, seated next to my brother, her attentive and grave gaze going from the score to the face of the beloved musician, was turning the pages. My brother was singing and playing. His voice frolicked in the music as a slender jet of sparkling water rises and dances among the flowers of a garden in August. And my brother’s soul was, at
that moment, similar to his song, joyous and radiant and in full bloom, because the people who were in that drawing room meant more to the singer than the most numerous or most ostentatious audience, and because, equally charmed and tremulous, the sensibility of the listeners and that of the musician were united in the same holy enthusiasm.

  Oh, how delectable still, today, in my memory, those hours in that small drawing room are, as warm and sweet as bites of ripe fruits, balsamic and spacious too, like excursions to bright mountains…those penetrating hours in which my brother, with his robust and tender fingers, and his simultaneously skillful and passionate voice, delivered to us, quivering, the spirit, the blood and the flesh of works by Wagner, Beethoven and César Franck...

  And it was into the décor of one of those precious evenings that the arcandre threw me. And everything there appeared as was customary, my father, stretched out on the sofa near the white fireplace, somnolent and weary, as usual, after the day’s bleak and bitter labor. He alone seemed estranged from the noble emotion painted on the fraternal audience. The countless wrinkles of his bony face were like the visible grillage of his soul, infinitely imprisoned by material cares.

  All day long he went from shop to shop, the establishments of his clients, petty tailors to whom he praised the fabrics he sold on behalf of manufacturers in the Nord or Alsace. He was a humble broker, such as one sees in thousands or hundreds of thousands, clever in earning money, shrewd in spending it. His mind scarcely had the leisure to aim beyond the dull and despotic adventures that the placement of his fabrics renewed for him every day. His samples, his clients, their demands or their delayed payments, the problems by which one and the other were incessantly afflicted, the settlements due at the end of the month, the domestic expenses, implacably took over all his activity and all his reflection. Only a miserly psychic territory remained to him.

  My father obtained his happiness from very simple things: an advantageous business deal; the marks of esteem of the weavers for whom he worked; the compliments that people might pay him regarding his sons…and he rejoiced with all his heart in the fact that my mother still retained something of her youth and character, and—thank God!—was able, thanks to him, still to be unaware of the rude labor that that is finding money for rent, for clothing, for food, and for light. In any case, good quality food, two seats for the comedy in vogue on Saturday evening, a lunch in the country in summer, Sunday with his wife and children, fulfilled all his needs for diversion and pleasure.

  One of his greatest sources of pride was the affectionate consideration that the majority of his old clients showed him. They judged him cunning in commercial complexities, often asking his advice, and they liked him because, in the forty or forty-five years that he had been “running the beat” his thin and lively silhouette had become familiar to them. They called him, simply, “Monsieur Bernard.”

  “Oh, Monsieur Bernard,” they said, on seeing him, “what are you going to stick us with today?” They meant by that verb that my father would once again have sufficient persuasion and artifice to make them buy a bolt or half a bolt of cloth, in spite of their stock being full and business being slow...

  “No, no, Monsieur Bernard, we don’t need anything at present!” cried the tailors’ wives from the back of the shop, precipitately. Tailors’ wives are terrible; if one listened to them, one would never need to buy any cloth. However, people wear clothes, and from time to time they need new clothes! The tailors bought, notwithstanding the aggressiveness or jeremiads of their wives, but my poor father had to use a hundred times more cunning and eloquence when they were there than was necessary when the tailors were alone in their shops, or bachelors.

  Every day he carted around his thick wads of samples, enveloped in paper, crudely bound with string. Once—before, as a humble Lear, he was obliged to butcher himself to aid his children—when he was a proprietor, buying and selling on his own account, he had carried his little rectangles of cheviot or frieze in a large leather case that gave him the appearance of an advocate with a portfolio bulging with briefs. When the case was worn out, times becoming harder and harder, it had not been replaced, and parceling in paper was considered adequate. So, with his wretched package under his arm, my father, short and stiff, fragile in appearance but nevertheless animated by a continuous energy and a steely vitality, trotted around Paris from morning to evening, in all temperatures and the worst kinds of weather, trying with an unfailing tenacity to extract from his fragments of cloth, in addition to his own substance and my mother’s, the resources that would permit my brother and me to spend our primary adolescence free of the black coercions of earning a crust, giving us license to discover and climb the miraculous routes that lead the artist to the emotion and intelligence of Beauty...

  As tragic in his way as the ananké of some illustrious drama was the unmerited fatality that fell upon that laborious and modest man on the day when my brother and I were seized by the gusts of that emotion. As a student, I dabbled in poetry; at the same time, my brother was studying music in order to become a teacher. In my poetry, and the compositions that he sketched insouciantly, our parents and the petit bourgeois milieu in which we lived saw nothing but puerile prettiness, drawing room amusements, qualities in the same category as elegance in square-dancing or an aptitude for charades. But profound forces of instinct were doubtless quivering behind those amiable talents, since contact with a few artists of our own age, the warmth of a few excursions to museums with them, and a few enthusiasms in their cenacles, caused an irresistible light suddenly to dazzle us, a spell to intoxicate us, which, awakening us to our destiny, made of our games a devoted and sacred passion, and raised within us the inexorable and marvelous determination to be, or to attempt to be, creators.

  And at a stroke, at the same moment, the same light caused all the shadows to appear to us of our house and our milieu, of all that we had been taught to esteem and respect, and business, and the conquest of money, and the effort that is good and beautiful in proportion to the price that is paid for it…a breath of wind struck us that revealed the atmosphere in which we had lived as the most paltry and stifling of prisons.

  And then commenced a time when, wolf-cubs running toward the ideal and biting all the branches of the vast forest of human genius, we lacerated with our pointed teeth the toils of our bourgeois upbringing, its prejudices and its rituals, and bounded through the humble laws that regulate petty cloth salesmen. And everything that gradually became, so far as we were concerned, good and fine, adorable and true, worthy of enterprise and worthy of veneration, all the charms of art, all the rejoicings of the soul, all the feasts of sensibility and intelligence, our new feats, labors and goals, became increasingly distant from what my father was able to understand and enjoy...

  And as we were too young—too frenetic, in truth—to double ourselves, and to be able to translate our gods for him, and to be able to retain the sarcasms that we often uttered in the course of collisions between the immense problems that burned our marrow and his anecdotes about tailors…and as my mother followed us, amazed, and radiant in the sunlight that we cast untiringly into her wan destiny, my father was left alone, without a wife and without children, with whom to mourn his monotonous pains, with whom to share his excessively mediocre joys...

  And he, because he loved us, as the patriarchs must have loved in the Biblical times of Reuben and Levi, because, after all, we were of his tribe, because we were his sons, although born a second time of all the fathers of the soul, who shine from Moses to Plato and from Leonard to Beethoven, he wanted to sustain us, being unable to bear the thought that we might suffer the base poverty of debuts, which might perhaps have corroded our impetus…the impetus that signified nothing to him, because it did not emerge from money...

  Money...

  As the wave is to the fish the universe entire and fatality entire, so, by the force of circumstance, money was to my father the basis of life and the essential element of all happiness, the ultimate g
oal of all effort and the proof of all merit. “Earning a living” and paying for life in order that one should remain capable of earning, always and incessantly, and to spend one’s entire life earning, in truth, and doing that, passing, curbed by the iron halter, through the perfumes, songs and laughter of the world, and its harmonious forms and subtle hatching of passions, and the nacreous glide of dreams...

  Money: my father, pledged to the gehenna of money, knowing the damnation of extracting it every day from circumstance, gave, for those unproductive ideals and those inaccessible joys, his money, which was the fire of his body and his muscles, and his innumerable paces, and his late nights, and his white hair, and his multiple wrinkles: that money, every coin of which ought, in his eyes, to merit a joy and a tenderness, and in return for which he received nothing…nothing that he could welcome...

  Father, in helping us to be free and to breathe deeply, you were the bearer of a flag that you could not see, fluttering in the ardent waves of a wind that you could not feel; and you did not even know what its colors were, nor of what fabric the flag was woven...and yet, you fought for it, doggedly, until your last breath. Father, you were the martyr and the cup-bearer of an idol of which you never knew the name or meaning, and never contemplated the face, and served it nevertheless until the moment that you died before its altar.

  In realizing ourselves in accordance with the hungers of our instinct, my brother and I, unconsciously, Father, allowed ourselves to dry up the blood in your veins, to dry up, without being able to staunch it, the sweat of your brow, and to exhaust the pulses of your heart; and we stripped you of all your simple pleasures, without putting anything in their place that could satisfy you...