The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “When you felt yourself rolled by boiling oceans, in a décor surpassing those imagined by Dante, tell me whether your fear and the magnificent voluptuousness of knowing yourself the master of the moment, and that you could, with a gesture, scratch out the cosmic tragedy to find yourself...what do I know?...wherever you wished—let’s say Praxiteles’ studio, or Veronese’s—tell me, my friend, if such games, in which sight and hearing, the flesh, emotion and intelligence have their part in the paroxysm, are not worth as much as one of the games of the amour that is the aliment of all human poetry and the major ideal of men and women?

  “For those who know such games, for those who experience them, will the amour of men and women still be large enough to fill the entire realm of veridical amour? For will not that amour be the simultaneously timid and ardent palpitation toward a state, a place, or a mysterious and distant object, will not that amour be the tremulous and voluptuous possession of that state, that object or that place, many aspects of which will escape at first, the mystery of which will grow as one perceives more of its details, and the graces and richness of which will multiply as the possession proceeds?

  “Contemplate a hill or a sumptuous forest at a distance. At first it is an immense tuft of emerald and gold... Approach, enter, tread its paths, and there are a thousand species of trees, plants and small creatures…and every tree, every plant and every insect will be a monument to mystery, movement and elegance in itself. Fabre used up his entire life and composed twenty volumes on the mores of a few insects. Monet painted the same pool and its nympheas a hundred times without exhausting its splendors. Thus it is with any object, no matter how small. Dramas, fêtes, tournaments, revolutions and orgies pass in an instant in one of the particles of one of the petals of that colchicum at your feet. And I can enable you to witness it, if you wish, and enable to you take part in it, by magnifying it to human measure or by shrinking you to their atomic dimensions.

  “There is not one object, not one instant, that is not charged, is not streaming, with events, adventures and endeavors. There is not an atom in you that does not have the power to involve you therein, and organs appropriate to give our enjoyment, emotion, sensuality. To someone who can do that, does not the amour of men and women, with its fevers and apotheoses, seem one simple aspect of possible fevers and apotheoses?

  “Tristan and all the great lovers who are glorified were imprisoned in their passion like a fly in a drop of water in which it drowns. What Shakespeare, what Goethe, what Wagner of the fly race would sing the passion of the insect in the bosom of the droplet that slakes its thirst and kills it? Would it be a sublime poem for the fly race if the singer was great? Romeo, des Grieux and Werther, like Tristan, had only one heart. What if, around Iseult, there had been the rest of the universe, and if, around Tristan’s heart, which contained Tristan’s passion for Iseult, thousands of hearts had been beating, rich in the power of love? What if, around the hunger of a Sade, had existed thousands of other sources of pleasures as voluptuous and strange as those with which he sought diversion?

  “Do you, who have lived for a brief moment in the universal nuptials, not judge singularly primitive the exclusive love of a Tristan, the fastidious and very fragmentary curiosities of a Sade? And if what you know were the resource of men and women, do you not think that to subjugate to a single object all the riches of passion could only be the action of those who were unaware of all the other objects of amour? That to enclose the eternally new totality and diversity of the treasures and graces of the visible and invisible creation in a single being—whether it by Iseult for Tristan or Tristan for Iseult—and subordinating oneself to that single being to the extent of dying if it does, would be the archaic mathematics of lovers or poets blind to the number of their being, to the number of their hearts and that of permissible amours, an operation no less puerile and fallacious than to attempt to hide the barn under an ear of wheat, to enclose the forest in one of its leaves, to capture the infinity of spheres and systems in the flash of a mirror on which the sunlight plays, or to weave the immense tapestry of the universe with one of the threads of its weft?

  “Now, tell me, if that were the case, if those billions of hearts that you felt beating were the bodies of all men and all women, and the delights and sensualities that it conferred were permitted, would the passions of human beings that stem from the itching of their loins, and the static ideal that they make of amour, be eternally fatal and forever irreducible?”

  44

  What was the arcandre’s design? What response did he want me to make to that speech, entirely edified thus far on the hypothesis of an ensemble of perfectly phantasmagorical powers suddenly bestowed on human beings? I did not doubt the arcandre’s own powers—those I had prestigiously used. But what was the objective of that tirade regarding their supposed application to old human rituals? But I dared not testify to him, yet again, my impatience...

  “Humans,” he continued, “love power—a very legitimate taste. In addition to the fact that they generally claim to acquire by virtue of it the means to do good on a more ample scale, that excellent pretention is not at all restrictive of pleasures of all kinds that one finds in elevated employments: wealth, elite society, the domination of others, the sweet intoxications procured to pride by the sensation of altitude and the sentiment of the importance of the actions one accomplishes, the vaster possession of the world’s enjoyments and pleasures, within the limits fixed for humans by the resources of their epoch…and the resistance of the arteries, etcetera, etcetera...

  “To attain that power, however, and to have its advantages, to acquire crowns, positions, promotions, how many battles, surreptitious crimes and treasons are required, how many duels with competing ambitions, how many pacts against hatred and perpetual ambushes…how much vital and strenuous force incessantly expended in such cruel obligations…?

  “I possess a royalty, a power and a government compared with which those that humans exercise over other humans are negligible. As for the enjoyments and the brilliance that they dispense, nothing that the common run of humans possess, covet and adore can be compared with them. You smile at that exordium and think that a monk preaching will not say anything different when he wants to talk about the glory of the faith and the intimate delectations savored by the perfect congregation, who have been touched by the grace of heaven. Let us leave the monk there, my friend. The touch of God has nothing to do with this. The enjoyments and the brilliance of which I speak are of this world.

  “What is that power? Of what elements is it made? On what objects is it exercised? What are the domains and the populations of that royalty?

  “It is…but let us first consider one preliminary point. All those hearts that I have made you see, all those living suns in our veins, your nerves, your blood, your flesh and the continents of your mind, those billions of lips extended toward the kisses of the universe, those millions of arms apt to embrace…when I have left you, how will you find them again?”

  45

  “If there were some magic in all that I have shown you, in you and outside you, that magic, to hasten your instruction, would only be in a certain contraction of objects and states—let us say a panoramic condensation similar to the abbreviations of immense countries whose image occupies a single page of an atlas, or those views of cities, palaces, buildings, crowds and passions in reality innumerable, but whose representation can be held entirely in a little photograph...

  “As for the objects, the things that I condensed for you in that way, they were very real things, places and states, which exist, which I have attained, which I possess in the fashion that you have seen and ephemerally possessed, some of which, by virtue of your present human condition, will be for you, when I have left you, what gold still mixed with quartz is for the goldsmith.

  “So, can you doubt any longer now that you are made of those billions of hearts with which you have momentarily burned? Can you doubt any longer, having seen them, and embraced so
me of them, the billions of objects of amour that creation sets before them? And to know that you have those hearts, to know what their objects are…is that not already a very precious information with which I shall leave you? And that is only a small part of my gift...

  “But it will be necessary for you to rediscover those hearts. All these astonishing voyages, the prodigies that we have accomplished, and all the possibilities that I have sketched for you—those emotions, those contemplations, those intoxications— that you hold for real and certain, and that your memory will conserve, when I have left you, you must search for the paths that lead to them with only your human resources.

  “There is, between what I have enabled you to see and feel and your present human condition, what there is between the page of the atlas and the actions it is necessary to accomplish to render the countries depicted there real. To know that those countries exist and that it is possible to go there—is that not an immense certainty?

  “What epic stepping-stones the simple belief that paradise exists, and the hope of attaining that paradise, have been throughout the centuries! And yet nothing ever proved the existence of the paradise in a fashion that corroborated the faith, increasing the affirmation of that faith by evidence satisfactory to reason, and, in sum, to the science that might have enriched the ecstasies of seers, the summas of theologians and the delirium of crowds, with the incorruptible ratification of the meter, number and the balance...

  “Now, as the certainty is established of the real existence of the America and the Australia depicted on the pages of the atlas, so, simultaneously, the science that your reason demands and the faith that moves your passion will perhaps compose your certainty of the prodigious countries to which I have brought you, the astonishing states that you have experienced and the miracles that I have performed for you or offered to you. As in proceeding from the images in the Atlas, there remains a route to follow, and it remains to find the money and the sandals necessary to make the journey.

  “I shall not leave you without placing you at the entrance to the route. I shall leave you the money and the sandals. In any case you are already on that route, since you have encountered me. And you possess the money and the sandals, since you have the passion and the treasure of the will to Knowledge.

  46

  “And that is the power and the royalty that I mean.

  “Just as a man who wants power encounters conspirators, poisoners, hypocrites, appeasers, delightful temptations that delay him or retain him in traps, redoubtable competitors, the envious, those who are moved to hatred and those who propose bloody or vile pacts, as soon as your first research toward your marvelous hearts, you will find within you powerful crowds and prejudices, learned beliefs, and the suggestions and commandments of your blood, your flesh and your mind, containing and carrying what was put into them before you thought of looking at them, of learning them and knowing them.

  “Thus, when a man suddenly inherits a seigneurial domain, he arrives and finds fields lying fallow, forests full of game but all entangled, a park in which nettles mingle with the fruit trees and the flowers. If he questions the steward and the local people sagely, he will know why this has been neglected and that has been encouraged. He will know what flowers bloom in the park, what fruits grow in the orchard, what game runs in the forest, how solid the château is and how beautiful its rooms are, and what repair work is necessary. At the outset of his enterprise and his labors, the peasants will be astonished, the neighboring landowners will discourage him, the steward will protest in the name of habits that leave him in peace. The gardeners, the laborers, the foresters, the farmers and the masons in the château will need to be supervised continuously. It is the same for the good and bad things that are in your blood, your flesh and your mind, containing what was put into them before you thought of looking at them and taking an interest in them like that of the heir of a seigneurial domain in his inheritance.

  “But the endeavors of the lord of the manor, and the struggles that must be sustained by the man who wants power, are only feeble comparisons with regard to the work that you will have to accomplish and the wars that you will have to undertake in your voyage through yourself and the discovery of your marvelous hearts. For your internal enemies are a thousand times more obscure, insidious, fleeting and ungraspable than the obstacles before the lord of the manor, who can pay, call upon judges and gendarmes, change his steward, the masons, the farmers, and see in broad daylight the brambles in the orchard and the cracks in the château’s walls, and before the man in quest of power, who can buy consciences and weapons, employ swordsmen and pamphleteers for base endeavors, and has for lieutenants his eloquence, his seduction, his lies and his bluffing...

  “You on the other hand, will not be able to trick, deceive or bluff your instincts, your beliefs, your habits and the influences of the environment, but will have to struggle face to face and in perpetual uncertainty, without any other weapons than the part of your will that, knowing those marvelous hearts, will reach toward them.

  “I say ‘perpetual uncertainty’ because there is nothing anywhere in laws, canons, rules and bibles to enlighten such labor and such struggles, revealing exactly where in your instincts, your blood and your mind the good and the bad, the useful and the harmful are, but only a few items of information scattered here and there, unaggregated and drowned in the old gospels, kabbalas, philosophies and ordinary human disciplines. And there are no canons or rules for those profound investigations, because the majority of humans, in the turbulence of their cares, their amours and their wars, have too many other things to do than search themselves, and they consent, with the reserve of a few escapades, indiscretions and truancies, to a dogma, a bible, a science, a morality, a law, an ideal, a discipline, a good and evil, a useful and harmful, fabricated once and for all over several centuries of generations of humans, apt to satisfy general problems and responding to the principal itches of the blood, interests and consciousness.

  “In a society, under ignorant codes and philosophies that cannot take account of the existence of those billions of marvelous hearts and the objects that correspond to them, and thus having nothing to conceive of or say to the labors that it is necessary to undertake in order to attain them, it will necessarily be you, simultaneously your explorer and your experimental field, your only guide and your only true disciple, who must gradually edify your own laws, gospels, rules and disciplines, as you discover what you ought to call your self, among all the influences before and around you that weigh upon you; as you discover your true wealth and poverties, searching honestly and intrepidly for any opportunity to test them, their true extent and their true strength.

  “In that rude and virile task you will see rising within you delightful or genuinely prodigious powers of which humans are unaware or leave unutilized, ceding to the pitiful weaknesses that they adore or glorify. Each of your powers will be akin to a mine, of which you must be both the prospector and the miner, and afterwards the man who processes the mineral and who forms the gold into an ingot, and the touchstone, and the jeweler and, finally, the wearer of the jewel! And toward each of those miseries, it will be necessary for you to be the spectator and the judge, the flagellator and the one who offers half of his cloak, or the one, as you saw in the combat with the hydra, who charms and accomplishes the transmutation.

  “Thus, from conquest to conquest of your interior truths, you will progress toward the light of your marvelous hearts. But what surprises, what recompenses in the very tribulations and vicissitudes of the route! In addition to the astonishment you will experience, the amusement you will obtain, sometimes piquant and sometimes grandiose, the strange things discovered in the innumerable domains of the body, in the savageries, the delicacies and the sapiences of instinct, in the thaumaturgies of the nerves, in the dark alleys, Pompeiis, cul-de-sacs, hovels and palaces of the mind; in addition to the sensuality of learning truths not veiled or painted by prejudice, fearful hypocrisies or the esoteri
cism of dogmas; in addition to the fever of battle against the obscure, perfidious or stupid hordes of the blood, the flesh and atavism, and the delight of your victories; in addition to the pride of attaining in yourself physical and metaphysical justices and liberties, which will be the same ones for whose stifling or exaltation humans have, throughout the ages, murdered, burned and unleashed revolutions…in addition to all those escalations, diversions and beautiful endeavors of your voyage, you will encounter in the way, in that work—the pleasant adventure!—without having looked for them, the goods that humans seek at the summits, those that they expect of coups-d’états or social metamorphoses, and those that they snatch from one another in great troubles, by recourse to wars, ruses and rapes...

  47

  “You will encounter them because each of your victories over yourself has its repercussion in the external world. Because your richer consciousness, your more numerous intelligence and your more vivid sensibility have a clearer perception of the roads to human domains; because, your muscles more alert, your lunges enlarged by the winds of altitudes, your magnified gaze, which, having looked verities in the face, no longer blinks at the brightest lights and no longer avoids the most suspect darkness, but stares into them untroubled, having penetrated the worst in yourself; because your surer voice and, in sum, your entire being, more apt for the struggle and the calculation, lower the facile drawbridges for you beyond which lie the enjoyments and luxuries of human beings.

  “But those enjoyments, luxuries and benefits you will contemplate then in their true light. The supreme goals of so much effort and furious and fratricidal gesticulations will only be, for you, reflections of what you will have found, held and possessed within you. Thus the man who returns from hunting eagles, descending the slopes heavy with the regal birds he bears on his shoulders, will find at the bottom marmots striving to catch lizards or snails...