The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “It is your passion and our conscience that design the dimensions of your possession. Your passion and your consciousness can, at their whim, make any of those infimal hearts, any of those billionths of you, vast enough to contain the ensemble of all hearts, and the object vast and adorable enough for it to be worth all the resources of your being, the play of your members, your amour and all the warmth of our will to knowledge. It will no longer be an atom of you, but you, you, in our entirety, who will espouse and embrace.

  “However, great as the passion might be, could you remain forever in a single one of your beings, after what you have seen here? Go, from voluptuousness to voluptuousness, always new. That fragment of flint, that blade of grass, that colchicum at our feet, might reserve for you as many surprises, caresses and mysteries as Helen, Iseult or Broceliande. Just because you cannot embrace them with the same organs, do not think that you cannot embrace them any less passionately or less magnificently.”

  And, while the voice of light spoke thus, the innumerable sensation that I was experiencing of possession and voluptuousness intensified and multiplied further. But I do not know how to describe something so astonishing in its prodigy and its quantity. Each of my billons of hearts was like an organism. I perceived that each heart had a mind, hearing and sight, lips with which to kiss and arms with which to embrace, and in the same way that the mind is double, able to project and receive, each of my hearts was both male and female, the calyx and what fecundates it.

  And those gazes, those ears, those lips, those arms and those sex organs were alive and rejoicing. And they embraced, gave and received in the bosom of the ocean of images.

  And then I heard the voice:

  “You asked me for amour. This is the amour I give you. Not of one being for another being, but of the billons of beings that are you and are the prodigious population of your veins, your nerves, your blood, your flesh and the continents of your mind, the effusion of those billions of beings toward everything that is in the universe and time and space, and which they are able to conquer, cherish, embrace and possess, the union permitted to those billions of beings, and the marvelous nuptials permitted to them—that is what I call Amour. In each of our billions of beings, know the fevers of desire, the ardent or august intoxications of the embrace and the possession...”

  Now, at that moment, rolled in the flames of the ineffable furnace, I was gripped by a desire that surpassed all others, and was suddenly like a man in chains trying to break his bonds. My being reached out in space and I wanted to be returned to my habitual face and body. And it was immediately done, and the arcandre reappeared beside me.

  Then I stood up, and some unknown frenzy summarizing al the fevers that had excited me until that moment increased my strength and completed my audacity. I grabbed the arcandre by the arm, as if I wanted to wrestle him and throw him down, and, plunging my bewildered gaze into his eyes, I shouted: “Who are you?”

  41

  He loosened my grip gently. He looked at me in his turn and I was mastered in my delirium, like a docile child before the master, who is waiting for a word.

  And he said: “I shall soon resolve that enigma. But first, I want to ask you a rather singular question.”

  A great curiosity immediately rose up within me. I was ready to listen.

  He began, immediately.

  “In the times when a few idlers marveled at locomotives, airplanes and large telescopes, rhetors, moralists, philosophers and predictors were unanimous, or nearly so, and rudely affirmed that no technology—nor, moreover, any other progress in science—could change or modify the profound nature of human beings, or of human passions, which, by the same token, they certified eternal. The amiable Anatole France in a chapter of his book about the Penguins, showed future times, as far as they could be imagined, automatically recommencing past times.

  “Undoubtedly, those sages were telling the truth, for it is a fact that no great crowd rose up to protest, to proclaim some contrary assertion, and in response to the affirmations of the rhetors, allow the possibility to be glimpsed that absolutely new passions might emerge from locomotives, airplanes and large telescopes, capable of leading humans as profoundly, and with as much force and powers as either the primordial necessities of the human condition and the commandments of the viscera and muscles, or certain sentiments such as the will to survive, to possess women, or to obtain power or gold, had ever been able to do.

  “And it is similarly a fact that in spite of locomotives, airplanes and large telescopes, the majority of musicians, poets, novelists, playwrights and other artists, who are the voice and the color of human passions, continue to sing and to paint the natural fatalities and sentiments of faith, love, hatred, lucre, ambition and dolor that their masters and colleagues have, throughout the ages, from writing on papyrus to printing by linotype, congruently and copiously sung and painted.

  “The only modification that has taken place in mores is that the number of humans who aspired to enjoyment increased, and the plebeians have organized themselves in order that they too might attain the pleasures and sensualities of princes and great manipulators of gold. The most audacious of poets and musicians consecrated their songs to those aspirations, and to the evident notion of justice that animated them, but nothing in that seemed to indicate that the great passions would be other than they always had been, and that their goals might be transformed. Thus, just because more people climb a mountain in order to get closer to the sun, it does not follow that the sun must change

  “Whatever humans might do, in fact, could it change the sun? Let us continue the examination by varying our term of comparison. To claim that locomotives, airplanes and any other machines might transmute in some way the ideals and passions emerging from the fundamental nature of humans would be as crazy as claiming that the sun that illuminates the earth might, by virtue of human invention, change into another sun!

  “And yet, what if that were the case, my friend—what if one could change the sun?

  “But let’s be serious. So, one ought to take for decisive the affirmation of the sages; to hold that, no games that science, locomotives and telescopes might play can re-knead the fundamental dough of the human cake, a dough kneaded one and for all, and that is firmly set—if one is on this earth and not Saturn or Arcturus—with its acids and its honeys, its vices, its malevolences, its nobilities and its grandeurs. In the final analysis, the games of science are just caramel or orange-blossom, pistachios and pralines, fine layers of cream with which the pastry-cook Progress decorates the fundamental, essential and unalterable biscuit...”

  “Arcandre…,” I said.

  “Nevertheless,” he went on, “let’s suppose that some of my prodigies were in the hands of those poor humans. I thus arrive at the question I want to put to you. Tell me, then: if humans had the privileges, a few of whose effects I have revealed to you…if the incalculable richness of amour that I have just rendered yours, and if the infinity of objects in which that infinity is dispensed were their common prerogative…if our casual displacements in time, space , substance and the elements were their resources…in sum, if all the prodigies to which you have been party, and all those you can infer therefrom, were in the human domain…tell me, do you believe that the mores of human beings would be as they ordinarily are, and do you believe that humans would remain similar to what they are?”

  I let my arms drop, dazed. To ask me to answer such a question, in the state of overexcitement that I was I, appeared to me to be a strange challenge.

  But the arcandre, placid and smiling, continued:

  “Those poor humans have many maladies. Every great city, for each museum in which it honors the masterpieces that attest to the beauties and graces of life, possesses a good dozen hospitals in which the horrors of fevers and gangrenes are displayed, and a good thousand apothecaries’ shops. The books describing those maladies, if one stacked them up, would doubtless realize the sky-piercing tower that the Hebrews attempted in
vain to erect, and Nebuchadnezzar after them. The world is a kind of vast leprosarium. Whoever is not ill in never sure that he will not be before turning the next street corner or reaching the end of the field. Cotton wool, vials and unguents are in everyone’s cupboards, and emerge therefrom more rapidly and more often than fortune, joy or amour.

  “To judge human passions appropriately, I have to take account of human rheumatisms, fevers and abscesses. What would be the passions of a healthy humanity, devoid of cancers, gangrenes, crutches, without drugs, cataplasms and face-masks? Can I imagine that? Certainly not! But it is not reckless to suggest that the actions, the progress, of that humanity, its audacity in all things, its respirations and its appetite for life, would doubtless be more spacious, more vivacious and freer.

  “Now, I would only have to lift a finger, as you have seen me do, to summon all remedies and accomplish all cures. Would you like to see that prodigy, after so many others? Would you like me to cause a hunchback to stand upright by looking at his hump, or render sight to a blind man by passing my hand over his eyes? Would you like me, more certainly than the baths at Lourdes, to give legs to cripples and enable paralytics to play tag? I have shown you finer and less easy miracles!

  “So, if my resources were in human hands, would everything in their passions that stems from the hospital no longer be eternal, fundamental and unalterable?”

  I looked at the arcandre in bewilderment. His clear visage radiated confidence and a kind of malicious gaiety. I hesitated to interrupt...

  42

  He went on:

  “Those poor humans need to eat. Primum vivere. What efforts, for the hunk of bread and the glass of wine! What labors to acquire the right to sit down at table! What struggles, incessantly renewed, to conserve that essential right! How many furrowed brows, how many curbed backs, how many bitter calculi...

  “Prehistoric man lay in wait for the bear, and was lacerated fighting it, and was lacerated again defending against other humans the quarter of meat that he was taking to his family, doing little a less or more than men do nowadays, in décor less bare, in a costume less primitive and with weapons and wounds less visible, if no less cruel, in order to succeed in paying every day the milkman, the butcher and the baker. Black men in the depths of mines, pale men in offices, men of traffic, thought or science devote the best, most energetic and most ingenious part of their mind and their muscles to that great quotidian victory over hunger.

  “To pontificate honestly about human passions, I need to take account of human hunger. What would be the passions of a humanity for whom not only was the tithe of hunger abolished forever, but for whom, without there being any other trouble to take that that of eating, their table would always be abundantly supplied with the exquisite fare that as once only served to kings and the very fortunate? Can I imagine that? No, of course not! But I presume that if so many hours, so much strength, determination, calculation enslaved to the most brutal of needs were suddenly rendered free, that a singular freshness of the muscles and the mind would emerge from that peace and liberty! That so much impetus, diminished or totally subordinated to the conquest and the safeguarding of bread, suddenly disposable, would be a strange leisure to expend in satisfying other appetites...

  “What appetites? Hungers of the soul? Those of mild interior joys? Those of intelligence? Certainly, those hungers. But those that I want to talk about are very different—except, of course, how can humans be made to hear them, since the objects of those other hungers, the nutriments that might be obtained from those objects, and the veridical delights and juices of those nutriments are obscured by concern for the hunger of the belly, ignored, unsuspected or rendered inaccessible by the exclusive and giant affair of gaining bread?

  “But you, who have seen the entire history of the world emerge from a little stone taken at random from the soil, you would have been able, for as long as you pleased, and in the rare voluptuousness of new emotions, to enjoy in the most infinitesimal detail the fire, color and light of the prodigious combinations and innumerable splendors or the primal substance, and from there, with the slightest impulse of your desire, pass into no matter what epoch and no matter what domain—let us say hunting wolves and deer under Charlemagne, or strolling in one of the rings of Saturn—you, who, I think, ought to have understood by now that there is, in my company, an indescribable infinity of diversions, states, places, objects of emotions and possible sensualities, ought to be able to answer as to what hungers might be felt if humans could do what we have done.

  “You would say that a lifetime would be very short to slake all the thirsts excited by so many marvelous territories opened and so many beautiful fevers permitted, and what feasts of the senses, the heart and the mind would be offered, far more various and enjoyable than the most copious repasts or the most subtle love-feasts! So, see then...

  “Without asking you to abdicate anything of the extraordinary fêtes that I can deliver to you in space and in time, in history and in the cosmos, I can also give you all those of the belly! I would only have to stamp my foot on the ground like Riquet à la Houppe20 to make succulent dishes without number, marvelous and ready-prepared. Would you like to see piled up here, this instant, more victuals and flagons than Gargantua could contemplate in a dream, than the Eddas can depict in Valhalla, where the gods stuff themselves relentlessly? Would you like to see baskets overflowing with fruits from the orchards of the five continents of the world, and plates on which are fuming, braised and jugged, the softest flesh of beasts of the meadows, the poultry-yard and the woods? Would you like to see the wines of the most illustrious vines streaming?

  “Say the word and I can dispense a pleasant festival for your mouth and stomach! The elements themselves would bring you their guests, soon seasoned, roasted or friend, according to my own recipes. The ocean would cast fish at your feet in each of its unfurling waves. The forest would reach out toward you and dedicates it game to you, elegantly couched on beds of heather. Trees of America, Australia and India would make their fruits dance like milk-cows sounding their bells, extending their opulent branches through space and shaking them above you, who would only have to open your hands...

  “But let us leave the enchantment that a tap of my foot could cause to rise from the ground or fly through the air. I have more precious things to show you! And yet, tell me: if such fare were the quotidian resource of all humans, and the hunger of their bellies was, so to speak, filled in forever, would everything of their passions that stems from their hunger, be eternal and immutable?”

  43

  Before I could utter a word in reply, he went on.

  “As much by sense as by sentiment, men and women are terribly drawn to one another. Their frictions and enlacements occupy, lead and summarize all terrestrial lyricism. There are no august contemplations of nature, magics of science, ostentations of intelligence, that do not end in the triumphal duo of the sexes, the kiss of loins or souls, often both together, although not indispensably. Amour, that of woman and man for one another, is the great arcanum, the supreme hymn and the crown of all glory.

  “Nothing can enter the lists with the erotic adventure. All human gesture testifies to that. Venture to sustain that an idea, a scientific research, the ambition of a power, the mystical apostolate or the worship of gold can provide an ardor and voluptuousness as keen as that of sexual conjunction, and springs as vigorous as the heat and impatience that precede the conjunction in question, and serious people will applaud you while laughing behind their hands. Let the woman come along who sits down in the visual field of the thinker, the ascetic, the scientist, the trader or the tribune, as you will see without delay the fevers of politics, trade, the gods, retorts and theories become more insipid than stems devoid of corollas, more extinct than a house devoid of windows.

  “Amour sublimates genius and renders a hundredfold what it has first bowled over. Certainly, and there is no finer story than that of the exaltation of the higher faculties by its gr
ace. It is the drama of human assumption. But the non-possession or the dolor of love flattens and scythes down all them most grandiose virtues. Thus the tyranny of amour proves itself dominant over any other, and the supreme motive force.

  “Now, I am not denying its splendor at all. I salute its works and its gestures. I mean to enjoy such an amour—but while putting it in its place, let us say in the proportion of one to a billion. And its works, its gestures, its splendor, with a similar exultation of the senses and a similar warmth of the heart I want multiplied as many times as there are objects, states and places in the universe. Have you not felt the lips, the arms and the sex organs of every one of your hearts in your amorous hypostasis? If, instead of interrogating me so rudely and breaking the charm so suddenly, you had prolonged the proof, you would have been able, taking no matter what passing image of an object, and entity or a being, to live a grandiose and incalculable passion thereby, as emotional as by means of any of the individuals who enchant men and women.

  “Do you remember the moments when you were a root? Tell me whether the triple sensation of struggling in the humus, of being the gracious tree and being the consciousness looking on, was not at least as strange and rare, and simultaneously and frenetic and delicious and cruel as one of those duels and one of those kisses that are the currency of amour, whose arena is the sempiternal bed and whose champions are the monotonous lips?