“Crowns, positions, ranks, honors, dominations, worldly favors, will merely be the bagatelles of the threshold that you want to cross. Crowns you will wear when the roll-call of your will is answered by the strength of your muscles, your haulers, your gymnasts, your weavers and your forgers, the vessels and winches of your nerves, the battalions of your blood, enthusiasms, delights, temerities, fervors, and your passions with their wild beasts, mobs, debauches and courtiers, tendernesses, ardors, prides, and insatiable curiosities...
“The dominations, you have surpassed. There will be no crowd pressing around an apostle, a captain or an orator in which you will not recognize the human images of appetites, gross thirsts, muted revolts, cruelties, native obediences, hateful passivities that you have already known, numbered and regulated in your instincts and your atavistic beings…and the rest in accordance.
“As I say, they are the bagatelles of the threshold, since you will be well beyond those dominations and royalties, since the one and the other will merely be stages toward your marvelous hearts, which will open up to you, innumerably.
“Then you will be, among human riches—their feasts, their amours, their trafficking and their ambitions—like a voyager amusing himself at one of his ports of call with local games, sampling them, dabbling in them, informing yourself and then resuming your course toward other worlds and other beings...
“Except that the worlds where you are going, when you have had enough of your sojourn among humans, will not be in space, in the ether, on other planets, but in yourself and in other zones of the earth, those of which I have given you an idea, and which will be the places and pastures of your marvelous hearts attained...
“Now, tell me, if humans, before seeking power among and over humans, first attempted to obtain it over themselves, if those who demand liberty and justice, before federating and attempting revolutions against tyrants and oppressions, first made the same coalition of wills and efforts against their own interior injustices and slaveries—after which they might perhaps see that the revolution was accomplished and liberty acquired—in sum, if the zones of power and joy open to your marvelous hearts were, similarly, open to all humans, tell me, would the human passions that stem from the human hunger for power, or the bitterness of their subjugation, really be forever indelible?”
48
He remained silent for a few moments, but I did not think of speaking, only of meditating on what he had said. And I thought that in his hasty depiction of voyages through the domains and crowds that everyone bears within themselves, he had skirted a great deal of information—scattered, however, and almost in the form of charades—that I had read in many books of kabbalistic and theosophical sciences. Nevertheless, none of those books ended in concrete joys, corporeal as well as spiritual, of the kind that he had shown me, nor countries as extraordinary as the ones to which he had taken me.
Those works led humans, at the term of their mystico-magical labors, either to certain states luminous bliss similar to that promised by the Christian paradise, or to a kind of divine intelligence of the genre of the Hindu nirvana, a ravishing and static reintegration in the bosom of the “principle of things,” with all terrestrial passions extinct. The arcandre intended to dwell solidly on earth, spoke of no renunciations of the goods of this world, but, on the contrary, calculated the enjoyment that one might obtain, after the subtraction of malady, hunger, the blinkers of overly-exclusive intersexual amour, the blinkers of particularly gross passions resulting from the state of slavery, and finally, the thirst for power; he augmented the motives and nourishment of the passions strangely, the number of locations and objects of diversion, knowledge and joy, and the number of means of obtaining them; and in every manner, he attributed to the senses, to the body and its organs, a place and an importance that many kabbalists and theosophists failed to give them, only deigning to interest themselves in the human machine and the formal world in order to offer them as a holocaust to the soul and the divine spark that they inserted into them...
The arcandre casually interrupted my reflections at that point.
“I shall have finished soon,” he said. “Equipped with what I have just told you, consider for a moment human wars. From territory to territory, boutique to boutique, rank to rank, people seek to devour one another neither more nor less than dogs contesting a bone. Perhaps the bone is an empire for two pretenders, a colony equally coveted by two great peoples, a sugar-cane plantation for two traffickers, a chair for two magisters, a stripe for two officers, a lady for two gentlemen, a wing for two eaters of a chicken, a piece of chocolate for two street-urchins.
“I sustain that it is the fault of the bone, whether it be an empire, a colony or a piece of chocolate. In fact, if there were not only one bone for every dog, but innumerably more bones than dogs, instead of snatching the desired treasure from one another, each one would appease his hunger, would eat a little more out of gluttony, and would then try to divert itself in other ways than watching ferociously over the remains of the bone, tomorrow’s meal, or planning future conquests of bones necessary to future meals. And so much the better if the number of bones were such that one could be assured, even if one lived for a thousand years, that there would always be more than one could eat.
“I suggest, therefore, that the war for bones is the fault of the scant number of bones. I do not want to examine the question of whether the taste for war is natural to humans, and whether it corresponds as much to a deep-seated instinct of fighting for fighting’s sake as to the regrettable but plausible necessity of fighting for something. Let us therefore accept, without going any further, that people make war because the number of empires, colonies, sugar-cane plantations, chairs, stripes, ladies, chicken-wings and pieces of chocolate is limited.
“Now—and this abridges my discourse—we have abundantly observed in the course of our excursions and displacements in time and space that the number of territories, domains and objects of joy, love, happiness and pleasure is actually infinite. It is all the more infinite because every territory, every domain and every object can be decomposed in its turn into an infinity of territories, domains and objects of possible joy and pleasure, as we can convince ourselves by means of the example of the forest, a few insects of which alimented the life and twenty volumes of a scientist, and that of the single pond that furnished a hundred paintings to an artist.
“That point admitted, if we suppose acquired by humans—and I mean fully and sumptuously acquired—all that corresponds to reasons for fighting, all the patrimony necessary for eating, for clothing, for lodgment in agreeable dwellings, for sleeping in good beds with as many mattresses and blankets as one wants, for ornamenting one’s house and the woman one loves, for transporting oneself from one point of the globe to another, for sowing and harvesting wheat, for constructing bridges; in brief, the sumptuous acquisition of everything corresponding to the primordial necessities of life, and also the secondary necessities—which are, among others, musical instruments, earrings and bracelets, fishing rods. Bicycles and tennis rackets—and even tertiary necessities—which are, among others, paint-boxes, lace, stones and chisels for making statures of great men, carriages, pastries, comic operas and romantic novels…if, as I say, we suppose all the objects of necessity and all the elements of ordinary human happiness acquired, and so fully acquired that they are within arm’s reach, so that they can be picked up with no more effort to accomplish than I need to pick up this little handful of and from our feet…then, would it not come about that thirsts, hungers, frenzies, itches, labors, activities and ambitions would turn toward the innumerable objects that the billions of arms, lips and sex-organs of your billions of marvelous hearts would succeed in holding, embracing and possessing everything, even if you lived for a thousand years?
“Will it not come about that when supply exceeds demand immeasurably, that instead of disputing miserly bones, all the humans endowed with those billion hearts, each one living for a thousand years, will
occupy themselves, as soon as their appetites are sated, in running toward new pastures, in extracting all the juices therefrom, and enjoying themselves there, ever and ever newly?
“Will not so many new fields open to desire, to strength, to labor and to love transform before long the form of war and the fatally inexorable avidities that engender it? When everyone, in those new domains, can take all the goods and pleasures they want, always advancing without taking anything from their neighbors, who are themselves replete with objectives of joy and the means of obtaining them, will those frightful avidities not give way to a kind of competition…?
“But we shall return to that point. For the moment, let us agree that all that sparkling rhetoric, that supposition of an unlimited patrimony of objectives of joy, pleasure, happiness and love for all humans depends on the general preliminary possession of all the goods for which they fight, of empires and chicken-wings and pieces of chocolate...
“Now, my friend, no less quickly and no less easily than I have given you daylight in the middle of the night in the forest, taken you to the bottom of the sea, offered to cure you of paralyses and the gangrenes and invited you to dine on all the meats and fruits of the earth, I can cause to appear to you, by extending my little finger, all mines yielding their stones and minerals, iron, bronze and gold, all garments, all agricultural machinery, bridges before your feet, and locomotives, and all the apparatus primordially demanded by the human law of being and living, enduring, procuring and enjoying.
“If I were to extend my little finger, you would see your worn clothing become new, your house open before you, your meal prepared and your lamp lit, your pockets would be full of gold, you would see the plow laboring the fields on its own, the wheat scything itself down, storing itself in the barn, the grain milling itself, being flour and bread, an avenue opening up inside that mountain from one side to the other, rails extending therein, a train traveling along them, and the carriages of that train carrying all useful goods and those of which you dream, flying along their route, all the way here, and emptying their cargoes at your feet.
“But spare me that miracle. I have sufficiently merited your confidence. Consider it accomplished. I want to come to something more important. And tell me, if such a harvest of materials essential to life, and such facility in their enjoyment, and my innumerable possessions were theirs, would not everything is human passions that stems from wars and trafficking between humans find itself somewhat, as I say, transformed?
49
“I am now on the threshold of the moment to which I wanted to bring you: the hour when I need to tell you who I am, the order and nature of my being and the substance of my prodigies.
“Let us summarize the recent proposals. We have looked at human passions, conditioned by human nature, their own structure and that of the earth that humans inhabit, and thus, it seems, immutable in their essential mechanisms, as immutable as the essential and the deep-rooted in that said nature, as the profound laws of the planet—immutable, in sum, as the fundamental form and structure of the human body.
“We have supposed many fatalities that weigh upon humans, leading their passions, dictating their actions and endeavors, inspiriting their morality and their metaphysics; we have supposed those fatalities vanished before powers of a veritably incalculable and unlimited extent, based on a possession of primordial material goods as complete and as immediate as air is for the lungs, light for the eyes. And I asked you whether, in such conditions the passions—I could as well say the actions, the endeavors and the metaphysics—of humans would remain as we see them. Can we imagine, conceive, seeing, as it were, through the prism of our hypotheses, what humans would be, by virtue of those powers and liberties, veritably delivered from their wounds, their crutches and the base cares that still hold them in the same rude physical fatalities as those of the first ages of the world?
“And I tell you this: humans would be like me, the arcandre. The enunciation of my excellences and my joys, the list of my privileges, such as I tabulated them for you at the moment when I appeared to you—those excellences and those privileges would by theirs. The few prodigies that we have accomplished would be, compared to what they might accomplish, what a few handfuls of dust on this bank would be to the soil of the entire earth. And the description I gave then of myself would apply to all humans. My movements and my liberty are to human movements and liberty what the course of the spring is to the compact waters that lie dormant in the calcareous subterrains and will only be able to flow after snaking slowly through the fissures of the interior silicates.
“Now, one point remains, at which we have not looked closely enough. That is the human body itself. It is that, and its fundamental structure, which we find behind everything. Progress, consciousness, domination of natural fatalities, the conquests of intellect and science—none of that, it seems, can make the human body other than what it is. No progress, no metaphysics, can change the location of the heart, or the double spasm of the lungs, or enable the species to reproduce other than by means of the organs and the act familiar to us...
“The great problem is that of the unalterability of the human viscera and the skeleton. Even if we change all the conditions of life, opening thousand of new fields to amour, labor and the will, so long as we cannot change the fatality of the viscera and the form of the human body, we will return to the fatality of their radical mechanisms and their unappealable commands, passions endeavors, labors and utopias.
“Now, what if the human body were other than the one we see, if its form was not immutable? If, to mortal fatalities, new realms opened, to new permissible amours, corresponding with other organs, other muscles, other tissues, other mechanisms of motion, of respiration and prehension, to other limbs and other hearts, and which would nevertheless still be the human body?
50
In the grottos of a village in the Dordogne, in the domain of Eyzies, primitive images, the works of prehistoric humans, were once discovered engraved on subterranean walls: depictions of individuals, reindeer and weapons. There was no artistry in the figures, no attention to detail; in brief they were drawings like those children scrawl on walls. The crudity of the forms, the depiction reduced to the essential exterior lines, were, self-evidently, due to the inexperience of those ancient sketchers, their awkwardness, their naïve lack of skill...
“What if it was also the case that they could only see those lines?
“What if their eyes, their senses, could only perceive the world in its general contours, if, where our exercised and educated gaze can perceive a thousand movements and a thousand signs, they could only perceive one?
“Take a child to a museum. He will perceive a confused mass of colors, here and there a horse, a fruit, a person. But you, you know the number of paintings, their differences, the subject of each scene, the detail of each image, and its psychology, and the detail of every detail. And the painter knew in even more detail, the colors of every fragment of color.
“We said the same once of the forest, simultaneously massive and singular, and innumerable.
“What if humans were, and still acted as if they were, before their own bodies and the formal world, similar to prehistoric humans before themselves, their fellows and the universe, and similar to the child in the museum, only perceiving the broad and general lines?
“What if the forms that humans see, their own bodies, the world and the universe, the laws that they discover there and with which they inspire themselves, and those that condition their passions, correspond to the crudity of their perceptions, and ought to become different as perceptions become refined and more numerous? What if that crudity of perception obliges them to consider as real and obligatory forms that have no other contours than the ones they design for them, and which would change their aspect, color and contours at the whim of their will, if they attained another reality of the universe, a reality less tyrannical, less rigorously designed, a reality in which that rock would be fluid and this ent
ire mountain on which we are conversing more vaporous than the fine mists that cover it, as ethereal and diaphanous as the light that bathes it?
“Now, humans have attained that reality. Their senses are subtle enough to see it. Their passions and their gestures can be conditioned by it. But they live among the phantoms of their old fatalities, their prehistoric universe and their ancient body: phantoms that no longer depend on anything more than a burst of laughter and their consciousness, like the images of a nightmare when daylight comes.
“Do you remember the moment when you were immersed in the immaterial river? You could still feel tree standing behind you, and the bank of moss on which you were lying, at your back, and you could see the forest, with its plants and its small animals…and yet there was nothing but that strange light....
“It was you who designed in that river of light your body, the tree, the bank, the plants and the small animals, who saw them as real as well as vanished.
“I, the arcandre, to whom no form, including my own body and its organs, is any longer imposed by an excessively crude vision, but who has attained, in my gaze, the states of the universe in which form no longer exists, am the master of forms; I accept them or unmake them, and design the universe, my body and my organs at the whim of my caprice and my dilection.
“Now, that is possible to humans.
51
“And this is the mystery of the arcandre...
“I was born human. I was, to begin with, human in the sense that you give to the word. Once, I was in my mind as you were in yours at the moment when I appeared to you.
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