The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  64

  “Thus, that immaterial river in which you saw yourself plunged was the universe, momentarily rid of your animal notions of space and time. And it was your memory that designed the resurgent forms, those of the forest and your own body…we shall come back to that detail.

  “As for the river of a matter devoid of space and time, it was only an amusement. Such a state of the universe, although the mind can be diverted in conceiving it, cannot be accepted by the estates of the mind. Although it was real, everything that permits thought being dissolved there, how and by what could it be thought? I have told you how I was able to make you see it, by rendering you my faculty of rendering the metaphysical plastic and sensible, and in a sense corporeal, but was it really only to divert ourselves? Was it merely an amusement in the course of the journey? Was it not, rather, to enable to you estimate whether, between two extreme states of the universe, that one and the lumpen material universe in which humans still agitate, and the only one from which they extract their knowledge, their subsistence and their passions, there is not some other state of the universe accessible and habitable?

  “To return to our glittering universe, let us posit, then, that it was it was only an amusement, for the impossibility of numeration that the succession of phenomena and indivisible aspects rendered to you is not produced in a reality.

  “In a reality, one can conceive that the states of consciousness march in step with the perceptions and sensations of a new modality, whatever it might be. Thus, if a human being could exist entirely on the planes of the universe corresponding to those that apparatus reveal to him in a drop of water or an atom, he would succeed, just as on the plane of the universe where he still lives, in perceiving, sensing and enumerating the variation of events and appearances. Then, what he presently calls a minute would be charged with more events and spectacles than could be accomplished in a century of present time. What he calls an instant would be divided into millionths of millionths…but nothing would be changed except the number...”

  “And forms!” I said.

  “Undoubtedly. All forms, including his own, would become the seat, at every instant, of myriads of metamorphoses. And yet, that fulgurant world would still be REAL before his new consciousness...but wait. That perpetual fulgurance of events and spectacles in all things, including his own body and consciousness, that frantic trepidation of transformations, would be even further accentuated as his sensibility became increasingly subtle, and his means of knowledge and prospection more ingenious and more adequate to the new modes of the universe. And thus, via trepidations within trepidations, he would arrive at a state of the world and of intelligence so perpetually changing and mobile that there would no longer be anything durable, no longer anything from which the sentiments—amour, art, tenderness—could draw satisfaction. Scarcely has he grasped an object, having only held the object for a billionth of a second when it has become something else, as he has too...

  “Then, in that frightful torrent of frenetic and myriad renewals, and while knowing that the torrent in question is a real state of the world, could that which the man would then be construct from the torrentiality of those renewals images and ensembles of some sort? Would he invent forms—relatively static forms—which he would know to be arbitrary but which would be, so to speak, willed and designed by him, imposing stages, halts and reposes, first of his consciousness, and then of his entire being, on the universal mobility. Meanwhile, science, the increasingly perfect knowledge of the mechanisms, rhythms and forces of life, and the experience of number, would make those forms and those constructions increasingly better adapted to the true rhythms and forces...

  “On the unstable screen of the universe the man would project his harmonious inventions, to remake, to redesign a formal universe...

  “But I shall come back to that hypothesis of the man reconstructing the universe freely. A detour is useful, which will perhaps make it apparent to us that without plunging into a future so strangely distant and paradoxically chimerical, that reconstruction of the world and that unusual liberty over forms are in human hands now, since everything that seems to us to be in the future is in the present.

  65

  “For is it really at this moment that that fern-leaf is both as you see it with your natural daze and the seat of the perpetual metamorphoses that we have talked about. And your body, the world and the universe are like that leaf. So, if that is the case, what is it that gives that leaf, your body, this mountain, the sun and the world these appearances, these fixed and constant contours that you know to be illusory as soon as you think beyond your immediate, natural perceptions, which we have called animal? It cannot be those perceptions themselves, since their physical bases, your gaze, your senses, your nervous system and your brain are not what they seem to be, but are themselves in perpetual movement and metamorphosis.

  “In that discontinuous succession of differences, in that flux, that incessant unfurling of transformations of everything, including yourself and all your parts, what is it, then, that perceives, and why, among the innumerable combinations that have your being as a theater—or, more precisely, the entire universe comprising your being—why are you, and why do you see, a certain arrangement of those combinations that you call ‘me’ (and the universe) rather than the following arrangement, which is also ‘you’ (and the universe), but which you do not see and no longer count, as if it did not exist?

  “In fact, you do not see yourself existing, between all these innumerable states of yourself, and you do not see the world between its innumerable dispositions, you do not distinguish a certain aspect of the universe and differentiate yourself from the totality of universal movement, you are not ‘you,’ properly speaking, you only exist insofar as your consciousness enters into contact with something. But what corresponds to what is said to be ‘your’ consciousness? In reality, the consciousness that lights up at that contact is that which is at the moment, ‘you’—and already, because the thing—object, spectacle, sentiment or idea—is already no longer what it was a millionth of an instant before, your consciousness is no longer the same. From which it follows that what you call your consciousness of something is a halt, an arbitrary fixation, a fallacious constancy, a memory in which in enclosed an indeterminate sum of the states or faces of the thing…whether it is a matter of that fern, your body or the universe.

  “However, how can we conceive of the formation of the consciousness of something, or the first spark of the succession of consciousnesses that you call the consciousness of something, if we deny the perceptive system and any reality of the formal world? It is necessary for us to leave the perceptive system, however, and speak momentarily as if we held it to be real. Nevertheless, the words that we employ here will only be representations of things that are familiar to you, without which reasoning would be impossible. We are free to come back to those words and the things they signify later, enriched by our reasoning, and more apt in consequence to specify the true nature of things and the words in question. We shall therefore take for real, momentarily, the world of phenomena such as it is commonly observed.

  “What is perception? Physiologists consider it, in their harsh idiom, to be a centripetal nervous activity proceeding from the peripheral agitation of the sensori-motor centers, which is then centrifugally reflected in movement or a tendency to nervous or muscular movement.

  “How does that nervous activity become consciousness? Let us posit as certain that the activity in question, in its influx and reflux, agitates, awakens, stimulates, or, more precisely, provokes a kind of nebular mass, made of latent cellular memories—memories that are, properly speaking, medullary traces similar to curves imparted to grass by a storm, meanders imposed on a river by the terrain, or a pleat left in a fabric by friction. Memories, traces of anterior movements or tendencies to movement, almost of the same order as the movement presently necessitated, memories, traces, pleats perhaps originating from the most indecisive gropings of instinct
, the most obscure reflexes of substance...

  “Around those memories, those suddenly affected traces rise up, grouping together and colliding, the affinities, associations and antagonisms of possibilities of the immediate moment. Every vibration of those traces, every one of those affinities, and every one of those antagonisms summons and attracts images, which flow through a psychic world similar for the individual to the one we have attributed to the species, that planetary memory, that spiritual atmosphere of which the book is the concrete sign.

  “The concrete sign of the memory of each human individual is the human individual himself. The images that respond to the appeal of the aforesaid associations, antagonisms and affinities will be those of events, spectacles and objects recorded, experiences, habits, sensations and thoughts accomplished, experienced on occasions of more-or-less similar movements. Those images themselves associate with one another or conflict with one another, precipitate, entangle, seeking to engulf themselves in the movement that is about to be effectuated, or to tend to be effectuated...

  “The awakening of memories, their magnetisms, groupings and conflicts of tendencies, the surges and mingling of images—all of that generation, all those vicissitudes—are unfurled and resolved in a time that words cannot translate. The alarm that one experiences before the quantity of figures necessary to express superlative dimensions—the distances between solar systems, the masses of suns, the years or centuries taken by the light of certain suns to reach human beings—would seem slight by comparison with what one would experience before the decimal quantity of numbers fractioning the duration of what you call a second to the point of obtaining a time corresponding to the rapidity of the multitudinous work of the psychic nebula.

  “From the impetuous encounters, impacts and frictions of all those whims, all those larval ardors thirsty for being, rushing to the possibility of being, tending to insert themselves into being by muscular or nervous movement, surges the primal explosion, the initial fulgurance of the series of consciousnesses whose sum is conscious perception of the impression received by the nervous system. That enormous drama with a thousand scenes and countless characters unfurls in the duration contained between the moment when the retina receives the impression of that tree and the moment when you see it—or, more precisely, when your retina receives a certain impression that your consciousness and the selected images make of that tree...”

  Now, personally, at that moment—was it the image of that sabbatesque nebulosity elaborating the fire and light of consciousness from the seething of its tendencies and its affinities?—I sensed my memory tremble. For my thought, as if of its own accord, recovered the terms in which, at the beginning of the prodigies, my vision of another fire springing from another nebula had been described:

  “That light was the light of a fire that had just been born in the surf of stellar dust…in the silent fields of time its particles had assembled. From their duels and their alliances, the shock of their gyrations, the innumerable labor of electricities, fire, the first visible face of forces, had surged...”

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  The arcandre continued, interrupting the strange parallel into which my memory had been drawn:

  “I once tried,” he said, “to render these illuminations of consciousness visible and objective. That was my body of suns. The same play of illusion that limited the subjective phantasmagoria of the glittering of a word devoid of space and time to that luminous column what your eyes formed of the second aspect of my being and, similarly, the vortex of the images of the Memory of the species that my fourth body designed, limited the template of my physical appearance to that silhouette sparkling with a flamboyance that, in reality, developed and shone infinitely in number and without limits in extent. Which is to say that if I had not circumscribed the spectacle to that figure of fire, you would have seen those suns everywhere, innumerable, scattered in the great quiver of substance, much as the constellations are seen, unequally spaced or grouped in the ether. And in the same way that vagabond stars glide through the sky, while stars are born and others are extinguished, similarly and incessantly, those spiritual suns move, illuminate and go out—but what in stellar events is counted in centuries by your measurements must, according to the same measurements, be counted here in fractions of millionths of millionths of a second.

  “Thus, each of those suns shining in the universe substance was one of my consciences rendered visible, consciousnesses of one thing, one sentiment, one thought…and each of those consciences was ‘me.’ Which is to say that among the images summoned and, as we have seen, collaborating in the formation and the luminous explosion of each consciousness, were certain images, certain memories, certain circumstances, an enormous contingent of images of that which I call ‘me’ and among which dominated in each consciousness the image, the memory of the ‘me’ that best corresponded to each new perception.

  “And thus, in a way, if the abstract and the psychic were made visible, were possible to contemplate under the aspect of such a swarm of suns spread throughout an expanse like constellations in the physical sky, every human being would be as numerous in perceptions, sensations and thoughts. The number and the frequency of those suns, and the extent that they would occupy, would be in direct proportion to the frequency of sensations and thoughts, and that frequency would be a direct function of the subtlety of the perceptive system, the diversity of the sensitive system, and the vivacity of the spiritual system.

  “But we have now returned to the nervous system, the brain, the senses, the physical bases of all perceptions, sensations and thoughts. And now I say this to you: why do I need matter such as you see it to explain perception and the thing that is perceived? Taking as fundamental the perpetual instability of all things, I cannot conceive the nervous system, nor the brain, nor any physical base, as you represent them, nor in any other fashion in the formal world. There is, therefore, only one phenomenon that I need any longer to take into account: that is the contact between something that perceives and something that is perceived. The form that perceives, and the form of that which is perceived are, like the rest, the resultants not of perception but of images—they are what gives the perception its form.

  “But where are those images themselves situated? Where do they come from? Agree that words are inapt to localize what I only made visible to you by prodigy. Where can the images the situated other than, as we said, in the spiritual atmosphere of the earth, an atmosphere that humans can only see, concretely, in books, monuments, traditions and mores? Where can they be situated other than in the psychic atmosphere of the individual, an atmosphere that humans can only see concretely in the individual himself, and in his eternal gestures?

  “But then…books, monuments, traditions, mores, and the individual, and the universe, in sum, such as you see them, are only images themselves: images, specifically, taken and formed from the moving and inconstant reality, or, rather, the inconstant and moving state of the reality that we obtain in the ultimate analysis. Where do those images come from? Why are what I call the nervous system, the brain, the human being and the universe such as I see them those images rather than others, incessant combinations of substance? Whatever images and notions I acquire of things, via them, it is necessary that those notions and images have emerged from somewhere.

  “What gives to the something that perceives, to the primary perception, the first form from which all the others will be issued, such as we know them—or, more exactly, receive them? What differentiates itself from the universal mobility, and differentiates that mobility into a primary image?

  “Now, I cannot name that which perceives something or other the foundation of being, the something or other that triggers the primary perception. We have run into the great initial enigma. The mystery of the notion of forms leads us to the problem of Being itself. I shall not attempt to elucidate certain aspects of that problem, to which humans seem very attached—knowing, among others, whether the first cause of everything was, as so
me say, the desire that whatever was had to know itself, to attain self-consciousness, or whether the primordial desire to be triggered the genesis of things…if there is only time in human measurement, one cannot say ‘that which was.’ How can the ‘beginning’ of anything whatsoever be conceived, or what was ‘first,’ outside the strictly objective notion of material phenomena? It would therefore be necessary to conceive of that desire, that quiver, in an eternal and perpetual present—or, to put it better, in an eternal being…you can imagine where that leads us.

  “Now, it is not a matter, for the moment, of such vast problems; it is only a matter here of seeing whether the image of the universe in which humans live might be tidied up somewhat. We shall not stray from that modest but precise objective. And we shall only attempt to suppose the formation of the consciousness that humans have acquired of the universe that they see, including themselves. It is solely the formation of the consciousness in question that ought to occupy us, since all the rest flows from it and that we cannot conceive of anything outside the notion that consciousness has on what it is. It is that notion which interests us, and it is, as I say, necessary to see whether that can be tidied up somewhat...

  “So, being left in a mystery—the attempt to penetrate which still remains an excellent exercise for the mind, and which there is no reason to think, piteously, that intelligence will never attain—being left in the original tremulous shadow, let us content ourselves with supposing how the something that perceives gives a form to its perception.

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