The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “How did the great rip occur in me similar to the one made in the cocoon when the chrysalid completes its metamorphosis? How did I arrive at the moment of my mind when my eyes opened on a new day, when my race was revealed to me, when I found myself on the threshold of that road that led me to the arcandrat?

  “This is how: my intelligence was, at a certain moment, attracted to the veritably prodigious simultaneity that an instant can realize in human thought.

  “Sitting, as you were, at the foot of a tree, I was savoring the odors of the air, the play of the light, the song of the birds. And suddenly, all the parts of my being that composed the quietude and pleasure of my body and the thoughts of my mind, became manifest and were numbered. It was as if a host appeared before me: the host of my distinct beings, the host of my perceptions, of my sensations and my distinct and simultaneous thoughts. I suddenly became conscious of the innumerable elements of an instant of my being and my thought.

  “I sensed in my limbs the softness of the grass, the warmth of the sunlight, the placid circulation of my blood, the voluptuous languor of my nerves, caressed by the influx of light and all the ambient serenity. And I sensed through those same limbs the rise of saps in the trees and stems, and the running of beasts, their frolics, their hungers, their ruts; because I KNEW that there were in my veins and my arteries movements of blood similar to those of sap in trees and stems, and that there were in my limbs and my organs the possibilities of the running, the hungers and the ruts of animals, and that I was similar to them in certain elements of my physical being. And my thoughts were, at the same time, as numerous as the things I saw, forms, actions, colors, and what my other senses perceived: air, light, warmth, softness, peace, birdsong, murmurs of wind, and that thoughts were born simultaneously of the spectacle of each thing and the consciousness of each sensation.

  “In addition, the science that I had learned permitted me to represent certain things that were interior to what I saw and felt, the processes and the elements of the rising of the sap in the tree, the circulation of the blood within me, the life of that bark, the tenacity of that lichen, the functioning of the cells of that blade of grass, the parturition of that small animal, the nature of the strata of the earth beneath my feet, the atomic duels of the gulps of air that I breathed in, the vibrations of the light that was dancing on my hand, and many of the laws and invisible planetary energies present in the space surrounding me, and those which presided over the aggregation of my own being—and thus, because I KNEW that, and I could represent it to myself, I shared, in a sense, mentally, in the internal movements and modalities, if it was a matter of things and forces, springs and the mores, if it was a matter of beasts, and I was thus, in a sense, simultaneously exterior and interior to bodies and substances, mingled with movements and things.

  “And by virtue of what I had learned and knew, I could also think and represent to myself the past and the evolution of that fern, or that ant I could see in the present, and I could evoke by looking at that oak the time when it had been an acorn, and the oak itself broken by the tempest or ravaged by age, and so, in sum with regard to anything which was momentarily before my eyes...

  “And from each object, and my own sensations, I could extract the different images of what I saw and what I sensed, the stripes of shadow and light on bark making me think of a tiger in some jungle, and the chirping of a bird causing to pass through my memory a succession of chords from the Pastoral Symphony, and before my visual memory the hall of the last concert in which I had heard that concert, with its musicians and the audience.

  “And no matter how far, and into what baroque places my memory or my imagination took me, that concert, the jungle, the time when the oak was still an acorn, and the seigneurial hunts that had once taken place in the forest where I could hear the whistle of a nearby train...I nevertheless retained the present perception of real things and the consciousness of my sensations...

  “And none of those sensations, those perceptions, those thoughts, those images, those evocations in time and space, or those representations of the interior of substances and things, was exclusive of any of the others, but all of them, corresponded to a perceptive, sensitive, knowing, imagining and remembering part of my being; and the host and ensemble of those distinct parts, each of which had its own nature and character, was held entirely within an instant of my consciousness.

  “And that which is extremely ordinary and perpetually common to all humans, so common that none of them ever thinks of being astonished by it, suddenly astonished me nevertheless, and I suddenly marveled at that apparatus and the entity that I was, which held thus, in a single instant, the forest and the exterior spectacle of its trees, its vegetation and its insects, and the past and future of objects, the science of the interior of objects, substances and elements, and the sensation of being in some sense inside the things, the substances and the elements, and the images in time and space of other things, and the memory, and my own sensations and the choice and direction of those sensations and thoughts, and the delectation of those spectacles, that science, those sensations, those images and those thoughts.

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  “Now, my wonderment at that simultaneity immediately drew me to think that if I wanted to, I had an unlimited license REALLY to go to the objects of my sensations, my evocations, my thoughts and their images. The history of that forest, the relation of the seigneurial hunts that had taken place there, the evidence of the times when it had been haunted by wolves, and long before them by aurochs, and those of the primitive times when animal life had not yet been born—that history and that evidence were the inhabitants of a kind of universe coexistent with the one that I could call contemporary, a universe that humans have constructed in its entirety and which is the book.

  “Are libraries anything other than the Memory of the species, and do they not constitute a spiritual atmosphere around humankind akin to the atmosphere of air around the globe, so that in the same way that the lungs drink in the air that becomes the blood, the springboard of the succession and renewal of action, the mind breathes the planetary memory that becomes knowledge, the springboard of the succession and progression of thought?

  “Railways, ships and airplanes could really take me, with promptitude, to the jungle that a pattern of shadow and light on a piece of tree-bark evoked for me. The phonograph could reconstitute the concert for me, a photograph the audience. The microscope could really deliver to me the cells of the blade of grass, the spectroscope the prisms of light. And geology and cosmology could really permit me to reconstitute the history of a pebble in the humus at my feet...

  “Human knowledge, the machines and apparatus of science, were as many means that were offered to me, innumerably, to attain, to sense, to penetrate and possess the places, objects and states evoked by my thought, my sensations, my imagination and my memory, in substance time and space...

  “And then I thought:

  “The mind has always been able to go wandering through objects, substance and time. Any man sitting where I am, against this same tree, centuries ago, had the leisure and scope, by means of thought, to evoke and imagine and to surrender himself to the charms of the reverie. But there would always come a moment when he bumped into the insurmountable walls of matter. In addition to those walls, limiting his universe to that which his senses alone could perceive—and I mean his animal senses, those given to him by nature—the mind, in rebounding from the insurmountable, then formed fictions and hypotheses, empirical systems of gods, which the slightest atom of reality sometimes shores up, but often pulverizes more surely than a ton of dynamite causes a citadel to collapse.

  “What that man could not do, I can do now. I can go corporeally, I can really go, with the batteries of my sensibility, my passion and my consciousness still armed with my mind’s powers of knowledge, to the objects, places and states of the universe, and into the inexhaustible detail of those place objects and states. And with that sensibility, that passion and tha
t consciousness always present permit myself as much as the ancient man of centuries ago to dream and to imagine, but with bases of emotion, dream and imagination much richer and more numerous than his!

  “And I am fully entitled to say ‘inexhaustible,’ for the merest laboratory apparatus multiplies for me the components of the smallest object by numbers that reason cannot contain and human calculations still renounce. The study of the elements of a molecule and the movements of its constituent atoms lead to figures comparable to those that one heaps up when it is a matter of solar systems. And furthermore, if, even so, I cannot yet go to all these places, objects and states it is really and reasonably permissible for me to think that it is only a question of days, years and apparatus—in sum, of temporary and apparent modalities, not of the fatality of the supposedly impotent and paltry human condition but of reparable stupidities, such as the squandering of money on the maintenance of military forces and a hundred others of similar quality, or under the jurisdiction of the precarious use made of human genius by a society still ignorant of its path...

  And I thought;

  “There is now, by means of the instruments of locomotion, introspection and knowledge that are within human power, the possibility of an incalculable spiritual life, but, no longer outside life, in dream, phantasmagoria or the heavens, no longer severed from the real, but, on the contrary, nourished entirely by the real, having the real for its base, its roads, its springs, its flowers, its summits and its horizon: a spiritual life able to grow and to be enriched incessantly, and also to react incessantly upon the corporeal organism as on the social organism, permitting new faculties in the one and ever more profound and audacious inventions in the other.

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  “The influence of the spiritual life on material organisms, social and corporeal, will only appear to begin within humans of veritable measure. A man in the routine of life does not think about the role of the mind in the flow of the blood, the play of the muscles or the stomach, the respiration or the varying agility of the nerves. In the daily routine, it is quotidian life that leads him, a life mounted on very precise mechanisms: job, family, the care of earning a living, the automatic functioning of the organism; honest distractions from the interior of the laws and policing of the collective. The influence of the spiritual life is only apparent to him in certain well-delimited cases, when he thinks about a monk imprisoned in the monastery and subordinating all his actions to his faith, or when he thinks, in the social domain, about great revolutions, led by and for his ideas.

  “What is the faith that regulates and transforms the organism of the monk? What are those great revolutions that subordinate peoples, their essential interests, and even their life, to ideas?

  “What is that force of which one only sees the rare spiritual effects fulgurating in the somnolence of current human life, the force that, in rare circumstances—mystical faith or revolutions—subordinates the corporeal or social organism to the spiritual life?

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  “Its name is the arcanum of arcana, the secret of supreme magical authority. The faith that uplifts worlds, the revolutions that precipitate peoples, and the amorous frenzy that leads humans, are only facets of that force. It is the interior sun, the inextinguishable incandescence; it is the fiery wheel, the horse of flame of which deeds and actions are the chariots.

  “It is at the core of human being. It is the blood of the blood. Nothing can do what it cannot. It waits to be summoned. It is indifferent to good and evil, laws and dogmas, to what is useful and what is harmful. As soon as it is awakened, the blood flows, the muscles are excited, the nerves tense, the mind crackles under its whip and its alcohols, in its squalls. What does the appeal that awakens it matter? Whether it comes from the crypts of instinct or the summits of intelligence, it will serve the instinct as well as the thought; it will expend itself in murder as in the construction of a grandiose work.

  “If humans are led by primordial tyrannies, those that we considered a little while ago—maladies, hunger, intersexual amour, thirst for power, wars, trafficking, the slavery of the plebeian—it will be the instrument of their material desires. It will animate all their resources, those of the body and those of the spirit, for their bitter goals. It will transport the mind in the endeavors of hunger, fornication or war. If humans are suddenly led by the mind, they will give to the mind the resources of the blood, the muscles and the nerves that it stimulates indifferently with its own heat.

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  “Thus, the spiritual life awakening the interior sun to its goals, the fiery wheel of PASSION can be for the organism what life as we still live it, the life conditioned by sovereign fatalities, for the organism.

  “Thus, by passion, the innumerable realms of a marvelous reality, suddenly open before the human mind, might be to human beings and their organism what hunger and the viscera clawed by the implacable laws and all the goals conditioned by such hunger were.

  “It is sufficient for passion to be involved in the affair. The passion, led by the mind, which moves the body of the monk on behalf of illusory paradise, the passion led by idea, the passionate moment of peoples that overturns the social body... Those rare examples of the regency and the influence of the mind on the organism via passion would become the common law of human being if the mind were suddenly passionately attracted to goals more powerful than ever before in the history of humankind, if the mind were led passionately by hungers more imperious than those that guide the viscera.

  “And can one foresee the adventure of the human body, its blood, its muscles and its nerves, regulated and alimented by a spiritual life that no longer avoids reality, but attains it, but means of the science and instruments that humans invent, the inexhaustible nourishment and ever-renewed wellsprings of an ever-vaster science, power and liberty?

  “One philosopher has represented the world as will and idea; another has represented human being as the will to power. I shall represent the world as passion. I shall represent human being and mind as passion in the possession of reality.

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  “Then, in a moment of my consciousness, I seemed to hold the totality of human possession, the totality of the reality that is in human possession:

  “The human body, washed clean of its wounds, delivered from bandages of fear and hypocrisy, the body of the self, with its resources and its enjoyments, its ability to know, receive, absorb, embrace, via its physical, psychic and spiritual organs all the forms of the earth, the colors, the spectacles, the juices, the aromas, the effluvia, the works of nature and human works, exterior beauties and internal treasures; the human body, with the countless host of its cells, which are as many lives, gazes and memories, and each of which, somewhere, in the universal material, has a relationship, a correspondence, with the salt of the seas, the gold of minerals, the honey of fruits and the pollen of flowers, with the bodies of other beings and the matter of the stars; the body, with the innumerable keyboard of sensations, with the host of spiritual vibrations, each of which will, in time, find a relationship with everything that was, is and will be.

  “Human inventions, science, books and prodigious apparatus, which attain the secrets of the stars, the extreme depths of the sea, the densest part of the earth, weighing space, manipulating light, delving into substance, fixing time; apparatus that makes desire, thought and commands run from one pole to the other instantly; and the machines that bring goods from all over the world, marching across the waters, through the air, on the ground, recreating day for humans in the middle of the night, taking them to summer if they are tired of winter, lending to their works the fluids of the ether and the forces that move suns...

  “And the possession of the materials of the life of the body and the viscera, everything that gives the body and the viscera alimentation and the satisfaction of their primary necessities, everything that corresponds to what humans signify by the name of ‘material concerns,’ everything for which they have to struggle before living their psychic or spiri
tual life for a moment, roads, vehicles, textiles, victuals, agricultural implements and those with which houses are built and those within houses, everything acquired forever and profusely but is merely poorly divided and whose profusion needs to be organized...

  “Thus I held and contemplated in a moment of my consciousness, in a kind of burning aspiration of my mind, the totality of the authentic wealth of humanity—and it was that moment which produced in me the great rip, like that made in a cocoon when the chrysalid has completed its metamorphosis.

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  “The state that represented the word ‘human’ according to the meaning that you give it then represented for me my chrysalid. When I was human, in your sense, there was a cocoon around me in which I was enclosed, with all humans, but when the rip was effected in me, I saw that the cocoon was woven and fixed with humans inside it in the midst of what has been called the garden of Eden.

  “And it was that moment when I recognized in my thought that nothing subsisted of the great Poverty that had been behind the essential laws, works and passions of humans since the commencement of the ages, like the rope that attaches a vessel to the shore and retains it before the expanse of the sea. The rope has been slowly corroded by the salt of the marine air and the salt of the waves, pricking and biting its hemp relentlessly. A more impetuous wave rising from the depths of the sea encircles the rope and it gives way, to the point at which the hemp has been more intimately corroded—and now the vessel is free to go across the entire extent of the sea, drawing behind it a stump of the cable that is no longer anything but the image of an abolished coercion...

  “Thus had I recognized that humans could henceforth go freely throughout the extent of creation, but it was as if the cable had not been broken. In other words, they remained imprisoned and lamenting their Poverty in the cocoon of their laws and passions, and had no sense of the garden called Eden around their cocoon.