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Title: The East I know
Author: Paul Claudel
Translators: Teresa Frances
William Rose Benét
Release Date: June 13, 2023 [eBook #70971]
Language: English
Credits: Andrés V. Galia, Thiers and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EAST I KNOW ***
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
In the plain text version text in italics is enclosed by underscores
(_italics_) and small capitals are represented in upper case as in
SMALL CAPS.
A number of words in this book have both hyphenated and non-hyphenated
variants. For the words with both variants present the one more used
has been kept.
Obvious punctuation and other printing errors have been corrected.
* * * * *
THE EAST I KNOW
THE EAST I KNOW
BY
PAUL CLAUDEL
“Look East, where whole new thousands are!”
BROWNING
TRANSLATED BY
TERESA FRANCES
AND
WILLIAM ROSE BENÉT
[Illustration]
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MDCCCCXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1914
First printed one thousand copies October, 1914
_Yale University Press_:
... _I should be most happy and honored if my
works could be brought to the attention of the American
public under the shelter and patronage of the
illustrious University of which you are a part._
Paul Claudel
March 28, 1914
CONTENTS
PAGE
_Paul Claudel_ vii
1895-1900
THE COCOA PALM 1
THE PAGODA 4
THE CITY AT NIGHT 12
GARDENS 17
THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE SEVENTH MONTH 22
THOUGHTS ON THE SEA 25
CITIES 27
THE THEATER 29
TOMBS AND RUMORS 33
THE ENTRANCE TO THE EARTH 39
THE RELIGION OF LETTERS 42
THE BANYAN 47
TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN 49
THE GREAT SEA 52
THE TEMPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS 54
OCTOBER 56
NOVEMBER 58
PAINTING 61
THE SOLITARY 62
DECEMBER 64
TEMPEST 66
THE PIG 68
THE SOURCE 70
DOORS 73
THE RIVER 76
THE RAIN 79
NIGHT ON THE VERANDAH 81
THE SPLENDOR OF THE MOON 83
DREAMS 85
HEAT 89
THE VISION OF A CITY 91
DESCENDING THE RIVER 93
THE BELL 95
THE TOMB 99
THE MELANCHOLY WATER 104
THE NIGHT VOYAGE 106
THE HALT ON THE CANAL 108
THE PINE-TREE 113
THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST 118
THE PEDESTRIAN 124
HERE AND THERE 127
THE SEDENTARY 138
THE EARTH VIEWED FROM THE SEA 142
SALUTATION 144
THE HANGING HOUSE 148
THE SPRING 150
THE TIDE AT NOON 153
THE PERIL OF THE SEA 156
ON LIGHT 159
HOURS IN THE GARDEN 162
THE BRAIN 167
LEAVING THE LAND 170
1900-1905
THE LAMP AND THE BELL 175
THE DELIVERANCE OF AMATERASU 178
A VISIT 187
THE RICE 189
THE PERIOD 191
THE TOAST TO A FUTURE DAY 193
THE DAY OF THE FEAST OF ALL THE RIVERS 194
THE GOLDEN HOUR 197
DISSOLUTION 198
_PAUL CLAUDEL_
_BY PIERRE CHAVANNES_
_Reprinted from “The New Statesman,” London, by the
courtesy of the Editor_
_Claudel worked for more than twenty years in silence in an
almost complete obscurity. Nobody ever mentioned him save a few
very independent artists--Mirbeau, Barrès, Schwob, Gide, Jammes,
Mauclair--who talked about him amongst themselves and sometimes even
dared to speak about him in public, without awakening an echo._
_Moreover, Claudel was usually far from France, Consul in various towns
of the Far East; he published his earlier works anonymously, lest their
Catholic character should damage his career, and for a long time his
work was only to be seen in the small literary reviews and in special
editions, of which a very small number of copies were printed; and he
never attempted to advertise himself. But in time he was saddened by
this great solitude. “One grows tired,” he wrote, “of speaking, as it
were, in impenetrable cotton-wool.”_
_These latter days Claudel’s glory, which had so long been obscured,
has suddenly blazed forth, if not to the great public, at least to
the public which reads and is interested in literature. The Théâtre
de l’Œuvre has played one of his dramas_--L’Annonce faite à Marie;
_the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier is about to play another_--L’Échange.
_The ordinary newspaper critics have begun talking about Claudel;
generally speaking, they refer to him with admiration, often with
astonishment and that kind of reserve which marks men who are not sure
that they understand, and, fearing that they are deceiving themselves,
do not wish completely to commit themselves. But in many young reviews
admiration is carried to a pitch of enthusiasm and almost of worship;
and today writers who are by no means young rank Claudel with the small
company of the very great: Æschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe._
_Reading Claudel, one can understand this long silence, this
admiration, and also this reserve. Claudel is not an easy poet: when
one penetrates his work one is transported as though into a foreign
country. He has a speech peculiar to himself; he has invented a form
which is neither prose, nor regular verse, nor ordinary_ vers libre;
_his work, created by a solitary man, is not bound up with our troubles
and our daily life; to love Claudel one must be initiated._
_He is a poet, in itself a thing rare in our time; but he is also,
and some would say primarily, a thinker. He has brought his dramatic
work together under the general title of_ L’Arbre, _just as Balzac
assembled his immense work under the title of_ La Comédie Humaine.
_By this title Claudel wants to indicate that his work has the sort
of natural profound living unity of the tree, which thrusts its roots
deep into the nourishing earth, and draws from it the sap which rises
in the branches to feed the remotest sunlit boughs. Each of his dramas
also is a drama of thought; they raise the greatest problems and often
suggest solutions. Tête d’Or is the chief, the commander of men, the
conqueror, who is driven to great deeds by an immense desire--as it
were, a predestination. The weak, whom Cébès symbolizes, the people,
give themselves to him; he carries them in his train until the day
when, undertaking an enterprise beyond mortal strength, he loses
his power and dies a new Prometheus on a high mountain._ La Ville
_presents contemporary society and the struggles that rend it, and the
great attitudes of the spirit confronting life: Isidore de Besme, the
engineer, the savant, is the realist, who has a knowledge of natural
forces and uses them to satisfy the needs of men. He dominates the
town, but he is unaware of the mystic quality of things; he wrongly
estimates the soul, and his science leads only to death. Lambert is
the man who seeks the end of life in the play of ideas and the love
of woman. Cœuvre, finally, is the poet who enters the inmost shrine
of truth by intuition and love, but is condemned to solitude by that
knowledge._ Le Repos du Septième Jour _is an ideologic drama: a Chinese
Emperor goes down into hell, and the roots of the moral world are
laid bare in a Dantesque vision, a kind of summary of good and evil._
L’Échange _and_ La Jeune Fille Violaine _are dramas of sentiment. In_
L’Échange _four characters are set against the brutal, realistic,
material background of America. There is Louis Laine, an adventurous,
but feeble, person who had stifled in the too rigid enclosure of
the old European society; there is his wife, the gentle Marthe, the
wife faithful through everything, who keeps close in her heart the
traditional virtues of the old Christian world; there is Lechy, the
violent woman who is the incarnation of disorder, and spreads it around
her and death with it; and there is Sir Pollock, the man of affairs,
who only lives for gold, convinced that anything can be bought with
it, and demands Louis Laine’s wife from him for a fistful of money._
La Jeune Fille Violaine _is the sublime poem of a holy soul which
enriches itself by stripping itself, and arrives through suffering and
renunciation to peace and the joy of an angelic death. In_ L’Otage, _we
have the eternal story of a conflict between that which remains and
that which passes_.
_It is impossible in a brief space to analyze dramas so laden with
ideas, but one can indicate the size and the unity of the work. The
tree that Claudel wants to show us is the tree of life. The roots
are in_ Le Repos du Septième Jour; _the sap, the desire, in_ Tête
d’Or; _the double-branching--the ideas of the mind in_ La Ville, _and
sentiment in_ L’Échange, La Jeune Fille Violaine, _and_ L’Otage.
_Claudel himself has formulated the theory and doctrine of his art in
three treatises brought together in his_ Art Poetique.
_It might be imagined that Claudel was a mere man of books, a thinker
in the abstract. He is nothing of the sort. This thinker is at the same
time the most concrete of poets. His thought is, as it were, swollen
with essential sap. And he expresses it in a flow of images taken
directly from things and exhibiting them in their reality. Claudel’s
originality lies in this double aspect: the unique blend of the highest
intellectuality with the richest realism. The man who meditates over
the greatest problems and expounds a profound logical doctrine to
justify his work is at the same time a primitive who works with his
fresh and eager eyes fixed on Nature. His dramas never lose touch
with the earth where men live, love, and suffer. His characters are
greater than Nature, and they express themselves quite naturally with a
biblical amplitude; but they never ring false and they often move us
deeply. For they are powerfully real types which exist and which one
often remembers. These two elements do not always mingle in a perfect
harmony; Claudel’s art is powerful, but it is not easy: it is like the
obscure and painful work of germination. His admirers themselves say
that Claudel’s works are like symphonies that one must hear several
times before grasping their meaning and their beauties, and that his
plays are beyond the capacity of the present-day public._
_Claudel is, finally, one must admit, a great religious poet, and it
is in that fact that the deepest unity of his work must be sought. His
work, it has been said, is a long pilgrimage towards God; and the road
has not been without its grievous strugglings, since the day when in
his youth he was suddenly converted and flung himself towards God, but
without winning light for his reason. “O my God,” he cries years after:_
_I remember the darkness where we two were face to face,
those gloomy winter afternoons in Notre-Dame._
_I, all alone below there, lit up the face of the great
bronze Christ with a twopenny-halfpenny taper._
_All men were then against us, science and reason; and I
replied nothing._
_Only the faith was in me, and I looked at You in silence
like a man who prefers his friend._
_I went down into Your sepulcher with You._
_Claudel’s whole life has been a struggle for the faith, for he is
one of those men for whom there is no life save in God, and who see
nothing outside faith in Him save despair, death, and annihilation. A
somber sadness burdens those first dramas which tell of man’s great
struggle to dispense with God and his check; but this gives way to
joy in proportion as Claudel’s faith strengthens and grow bright.
That pilgrimage towards God is also a pilgrimage towards joy; and that
joy breaks into great song, now austere, now delirious, in Claudel’s
properly lyrical work--the_ Hymnes _and the_ Cinq Grandes Odes. _Here
one hears only the most distant echoes of the great struggle; here are
only cries of joy and certitude._
_Blessed be Thou, my God, Who hast delivered me from death....
... He who believes not in God, believes not in Being, and he
Who hates being, hates his own existence.
Lord, I have found Thee.
Who finds Thee has no more tolerance of death._
_A strange phenomenon, this Christian poet, passionately,
uncompromisingly, almost fanatically Catholic, in the country where
Anatole France, the bantering and disillusioned master, holds
sway, where Renan and Voltaire reigned, and with them hard reason,
distrustful of the supernatural._
_France, as Kipling has justly said, is the country most faithful to
old things and most wildly enthusiastic about new ones. The present
fashion for Roman Catholicism counts for something in Claudel’s sudden
vogue, just as Claudel has done something to bring about the fashion.
Various writers, tired of wandering far from safe harbors, have “been
converted” by Claudel’s appeal; and the young men who reproached France
for withering life up, and for lacking the “sense of the divine” have
found in Claudel one of their masters. It is the perpetual oscillation
of the human spirit from pure reason to exalted sentiment. Claudel
stands head and shoulders above the little crowd which surrounds him,
and he will outlast them and their ways of thought. Most of us must
say to him, in the words of one of his own characters, “I cannot give
you my soul.” But we love the poet in him and admire the passionate
believer who compels us to question ourselves in the inner silence, the
man who made for himself this prayer:_
_Make me as one who sows solitude, and may he who hears my speech
Return home troubled and heavy._
1895-1900
THE EAST I KNOW
THE COCOA PALM
Our trees stand upright like men, but motionless; thrusting their roots
deep in earth, they flourish with outstretched arms. But here the
sacred banyan does not rise as a single stem; for the pendent threads,
through which it returns seeking the fruitful soil, make it seem a
marvelous temple self-created.
Observe only the cocoa palm. It has no branches. At the apex of the
trunk it raises a tuft of fronds.
Palm! The insignia of triumph. Aerial in the light, consummate bloom of
the crest, it soars, expands, rejoices,--and sinks beneath the weight
of its freedom.
Through the warm day and the long noon the cocoa palm expands. In an
ecstasy it spreads its happy leaves. Like infant heads the cocoanuts
appear, the great green fruit of the tree.
Thus does the cocoa palm gesture, revealing its heart; for the lower
leaves, unfolding from out their depth, reach pendulent to the earth;
and the leaves in the midst spread far on every side; and the leaves
above, uplifted like the hands of an awkward man or like one who
signals his complete submission, slowly wave and sign.
The trunk is nowhere rigid, but ringed; and like to the blades of the
grass, it is supple and long. It is swayed by the moods of the earth,
whether it strains toward the sun or bends its spreading plumes over
swift and turbid rivers, or between the sea and the sky.
One night, returning along the shore of the sea assaulted with
turbulent foam by the whole deep-thundering weight of the leonine
Indian Ocean beneath the south-western monsoon,--as I followed the
shore far-strewn with palms like the skeleton wrecks of boats and of
lesser and living things, I saw them upon my left! As I walked by that
forest empty beneath its dense-woven ceiling, the palms seemed enormous
spiders crawling obliquely across the peaceful twilight heaven!
Venus, like a moon drowned in divinest light, flickered a wide
reflection in the waters. And a palm-tree bent over the sea and the
mirrored planet, and its gesture offered its heart to the heavenly
fire.
I shall often remember that night when, afar, I yearn to return! I saw
the leafage hanging in heavy tresses, and across the high fane of the
forest, that sky where the storm, setting its feet on the sea, loomed
up like a mountain; and how low on the dark horizon the pale pearl of
the ocean gleamed!
Oh Ceylon, shall I ever forget thee,--thy fruits and thy flowers, and
thy people with melting eyes, naked beside those highways that are
hued like the mango’s flesh; and my rickshaw-man’s gift of nodding
rosy flowers which he placed on my knees when, with tears in my eyes,
crushed down by sorrow--but nibbling a leaf of cinnamon--I left thee at
last beneath thy rainy skies.
THE PAGODA
I descend from my carriage, and the sight of a hideous beggar marks the
beginning of my journey. With one bloodshot eye he leers at me, and
with a leprous lip reveals to their roots teeth bone-yellow and as long
as those of a rabbit. The rest of his face is eaten away.
Rows of other wretches are ranged on both sides of the highway, which
is thronged at this outlet of the city with pedestrians, messengers,
and wheelbarrows bearing women and their bundles. The oldest and
grossest of the men is called the King of the Beggars. They say that,
crazed by the death of his mother, he carries her head about with
him concealed in his clothes. The last that I notice, two very old
women, wrapped in swathings of rags, their faces black from the dust
of the roads where they prostrate themselves at times, sing one of
those plaints broken with long sighs and hiccoughs, which are the
professional expressions of despair among these outcasts. I can see the
pagoda afar off between thickets of bamboo; and, crossing the fields, I
take a short cut toward it.
The country is a vast cemetery. Everywhere there are coffins; on
hillocks covered with withered reeds, and in the dry grass, are rows
of little stone posts, mitered statues, or lions of stone, marking the
ancient sepulchers. Individual wealth or burial associations have built
these tombs surrounded by trees and hedges. I pass between a place
for animals and a pit filled with the skeletons of little girls whose
parents wished to be rid of them. They have choked it to the mouth. It
will soon be necessary to dig another.
The day is warm, the sky clear, I walk in the light of December.
The dogs see me, bark, and run away; I reach and pass the villages with
their black roofs; I cross the fields of cotton and beans; I cross the
rivulets by the old worn bridges, and, leaving on my right the great
empty buildings of a deserted powder-mill, I arrive at my goal. I hear
a noise of bells and a drum.
Before me is a tower of seven stories. An Indian with a golden turban,
and a Parsee wearing a plum-colored one twisted like a stovepipe, are
entering it. Two other figures move about on the highest balcony.
I must speak first of the pagoda itself.
It is composed of three courts and three temples, flanked by accessory
chapels and lesser buildings. Religion here does not, as in Europe,
barricade and segregate in loneliness the mystery of a faith walled
about by dogma. Its function is not to defend the absolute against
exterior aspects. It establishes a certain atmosphere; and, as
though suspended from heaven, the structure gathers all nature into
the offering that it constitutes. Multifold, all upon one level, it
expresses Space by the relations of height and distance between the
three arches of triumph or the temples which are consecrated to them;
and Buddha, Prince of Peace, inhabits it with all the gods.
Chinese architecture, as it were, suppresses the walls. It amplifies
and multiplies the roofs; and their exaggerated corners, lifting
themselves with an exquisite resilience, return toward the sky in
flowing curves. They remain suspended in air! The wider and heavier
the fabric of the roof, the more, by that very weight, does it give
an impression of lightness through every deep shadow projected below.
Hence the use of black tiles, that form deep grooves and strong copings
with high openings between them, makes the highest ridges detached and
distinct. Clear though intricate of outline, their frieze is lifted
through the lucid air. The temple is seen as a portico, a canopy, or a
tent, of which the uplifted corners are attached to the clouds; and in
its shade are installed the idols of the earth.
A fat, gilded fellow lives under the first portico. His right foot,
drawn beneath him, indicates the third attitude of meditation, where
consciousness still exists. His eyes are closed, but under his golden
skin can be seen the red lips of a distended mouth whose long rounded
opening stretches at the corners into the shape of an eight. He laughs,
and the laugh is that of a face asleep. At what does this obese ascetic
laugh? What does he see with those closed eyes?
On each side of the hall, two at the right and two at the left, the
four painted and varnished colossi, with short legs and enormous
torsos, are the demons who guard the four shores of Heaven. Beardless
as children, one brandishes serpents, one plays the viol, and one
shakes a cylindrical engine like a closed parasol or a firecracker.
I penetrate into the second court. A great brass incense-burner covered
with inscriptions is in the middle. I stand before the principal
pavilion. On the ridges of the roof little painted groups of figures
seem as though they were passing from one side to the other, or
ascending while engaged in conversation. At the angles of the coping
hang two pink fish, their long feelers curving tremulously, their tails
in the air; in the center two dragons are fighting for the mystic
jewel. I hear songs and the beating of bells, and through the open door
I see the evolutions of the bonzes.
The hall is high and spacious. Four or five colossal gilded statues
dominate the background. The largest is seated on a throne in the
middle. His eyes and mouth are closed, his feet drawn under him, and
one hand, held in the “gesture of witness,” points to the earth. Thus,
under the sacred tree, the perfect Buddha conceived himself. Escaped
from the wheel of life, he participates in his own Nirvana. Others
perched above him, with downcast eyes, contemplate their navels. These
are the Heavenly Buddhas seated on lotus flowers. They are Avalokhita,
Amitabha, the Buddha of the Light without Measure and the Buddha of
the Paradise of the West. At their feet the bonzes pursue their rites.
They have gray robes; large, somewhat rust-colored mantles attached
to the shoulder like togas; leggings of white linen; and, some of
them, a sort of mortar-board on their heads. Others bare their scalps,
where the white marks of _moxas_ show the number of their vows. One by
one, murmuring, they file past. The last who passes is a boy of twelve
years. By a side hall I reach the third court and see a third temple.
Four priests perched on stools are ranged inside the door. Their shoes
are left on the earth before them; and without the need of feet,
detached, imponderable, they are seated on their own thoughts. They
make no movement. Their mouths, their closed eyes, are one with the
creases and wrinkles in the wasted flesh of their faces, like the scar
of the navel. Consciousness of their inertia is sufficient for their
ruminating intelligence. Under a niche in the middle of the hall, I
distinguish the shining limbs of another Buddha. A confused company of
idols is ranged in the obscurity along the walls.
Returning, I see the central temple from the rear. High on the wall
of an embrasure a many-colored tympan represents some legend among
olive-trees. I re-enter. The back of the repository where the colossi
are exposed is a great painted sculpture: Amitofou mounting to Heaven
amid flames and demons. The setting sun, passing through the trellised
openings high in the wall, sweeps the somber boxlike hall with
horizontal rays.
The bonzes continue the ceremony. Kneeling now before the colossi,
they are intoning a chant, while the celebrant, standing before a bell
shaped like a cask, leads the measured beat of drums and bells. At each
verse he clashes the drum, drawing from its brazen belly a re-echoing
vibration. Then, facing each other in two lines, they recite some
litany.
The side buildings are the dwellings of the priests. One of them
enters, carrying a pail of water. I glance into the refectory where the
bowls of rice are placed two by two on the empty tables.
I am again before the tower.
Just as the pagoda expresses, by its system of courts and buildings,
the extent and the dimensions of Space; so the tower symbolizes Height.
Poised against the sky, it becomes the scale of it. The seven octagonal
stories are a plan of the seven mystic heavens. The architect has
narrowed their corners and lifted their borders with skill. Each story
casts its own shadow below it. At every angle of every roof a bell
is attached, and beside it hangs the clapper with which to strike it.
Their metallic syllables are the mysterious voice of each Heaven, and
their unuttered sound hangs suspended like a drop.
I have nothing more to say of the pagoda. I do not know its name.
THE CITY AT NIGHT
It is raining softly. The night has come. The policeman takes the
lead and turns to the left, ceasing his talk of the time when, as
a kitchen-boy in the invading army, he saw his Major installed in
the sanctuary of the “God of Long Life.” The road that we follow is
mysterious. By a series of alleys, of passages, stairs, and doorways,
we come out in the court of the temple, where buildings with clawlike
copings and hornlike peaks make a black frame to the night sky. A
smoldering fire flickers from the dark doorway. We penetrate the
blackness of the hall.
The cave is filled with incense, glowing with red light. One cannot
see the ceiling. A wooden grille separates the idol from his clients,
and from the table of offerings, where garlands of fruit and bowls of
food are deposited. The bearded face of a giant image can be vaguely
distinguished. The priests are dining, seated about a round table.
Against the wall is a drum as enormous as a tun, and a great gong in
the form of the ace of spades. Two red tapers, like square columns,
lose themselves in the smoke and the night, where vague pennants float.
Onward!
The narrow tangle of streets, where we are involved in the midst of
a shadowy crowd, is lit only by the deep open booths which border
it. These are the work-rooms of carpenters, engravers; the shops of
tailors, shoemakers, and venders of fur. From innumerable kitchens,
behind the display of bowls of noodles and soup, the sound of frying
escapes. In a dark recess some woman attends a crying child. Among
stacked-up coffins is the gleam of a pipe. A lamp, a sidewise flicker,
shows strange medleys. At the street corners, at the bends of heavy
little stone bridges, in niches behind iron bars, dwarfish idols can be
seen between two red candles. After a long progress under the rain, in
the darkness and filth, we find ourselves suddenly in a yellow blind
alley which a big lantern lights with a brutal flare. Color of blood,
color of pestilence, the high walls of the dungeon where we are have
been daubed with an ocher so red that it seems of itself to irradiate
light. The door at our left is simply a round hole.
We reach a court. Here is another temple. It is a shadowy hall from
which exudes an odor of earth. It is enriched with idols, which,
disposed in two rows around three sides of the place, brandish swords,
lutes, roses, and branches of coral. They tell us that these are the
years of human life. While I try to find the twenty-seventh, I am left
behind; and, before leaving, the fancy takes me to look into a niche
that I find on the further side of the door. A brown demon with four
pairs of arms, his face convulsed by rage, is hidden there like an
assassin.
Forward! The roads become more and more miserable. We go past high
palisades of bamboo; and at last, emerging from the southern gate, we
turn toward the east. The road follows the base of a high crenellated
wall. On the other hand sink the deep trenches of a dried river-bed.
Below we see sampans lit by cooking fires. A shadowy people swarm there
like the spirits of the Inferno.
And undoubtedly this lamentable river-bank marks the end planned for
our exploration, because we retrace our steps. City of Lanterns, we
gaze again upon the chaos of thy ten thousand faces!
Seeking an explanation, a reason why this town where we loitered is
so distinct in our memories, we are struck at once with this fact:
there are no horses in the streets. The city is entirely of human
beings. It seems an article of faith with the Chinese not to employ an
animal or a machine for work by which a man may live. This explains the
narrowness of the streets, the stairs, the curved bridges, the houses
without fences, the sinuous windings of the alleys and passages. The
city forms a coherent whole, an industrious honeycomb communicating in
all its parts, perforated like an ant-hill. When the night comes, every
one barricades himself. During the day there are no doors, that is to
say no doors that close. The door here has no official function. It is
simply an opening. Not a wall but can by some fissure give passage to
an agile and slender person. The large streets necessary to general
traffic, and to an ordered mechanical life, would be of no use here.
Here merely collective alleys and passages are provided.
An opium den, a market of prostitutes, these last fill the framework of
my memory. The smoking den is a vast nave, empty all the height of two
stories which superimpose their balconies inside. The building is full
of blue smoke, one breathes an odor of burning chestnuts. It is a heavy
perfume, powerful, stagnant, strong as the beat of a gong. Sepulchral
smoke, it establishes between our air and dreams a middle atmosphere
which the seeker of these mysteries inhales. One sees across the haze
the fire of little opium lamps like the souls of the smokers. Later
they will arrive in greater numbers. Now it is too early.
On narrow benches, their heads helmed with flowers and pearls, clothed
in wide blouses of silk and full embroidered trousers, motionless, with
their hands on their knees, the prostitutes wait in the street like
beasts at a fair, in the pell-mell and the dust of passers-by. Beside
their mothers and dressed like them, also motionless, little girls are
seated on the same bench. Behind, a flare of petrol lights the opening
to the stairway.
I go. And I carry the memory of a life congested, naïve, restless;
of a city at the same time open and crowded, a single house with a
multifold family. I have seen the city of other days, when, free of
modern influences, men swarmed in an artless disorder; in fact it is
the fascination of all the past that I am leaving, when, issuing out
of the double gate in the hurly-burly of wheelbarrows and litters, in
the midst of lepers and epileptics, I see the electric lights of the
Concession shine.
GARDENS
It is half-past three: white mourning.[A] The sky is veiled as if with
white linen. The air is moist and raw. I go into the city. I am looking
for gardens.
I walk in a black gravy. Along the ditch whose crumbling border I
follow, the odor is so strong that it is like an explosive. There is
the smell of oil, garlic, filth, ashes, opium, and offal. I walk amid
a free and easy people who are shod with thick buskins or sandals of
straw, wearing long hoods or skullcaps of felt, their silk or linen
trousers tucked into leggings.
The wall winds and undulates, and its coping, an arrangement of bricks
and open-work tiles, imitates the back and body of a crawling dragon.
A sort of head terminates it, from which floats a cloud of smoke. This
is the place. I knock mysteriously at a little black door which opens.
Under the overhanging roofs I cross a succession of vestibules and
narrow corridors. I am in a strange place.
It is a garden of stones.... Like the ancient Italian and French
designers, the Chinese have understood that a garden, from the fact of
its inclosure, must be complete in itself and harmonious in all its
parts. Only so will nature adapt herself to our moods, and only so, by
a subtle harmony, will the master feel at home wherever he looks. Just
as a landscape does not consist simply of its grass and the color of
its foliage, but is distinguished by its outlines and the slope of the
ground, so the Chinese literally construct their gardens with stones.
They are sculptors instead of painters. Because it is susceptible of
elevation and depth, of contours and reliefs, through the variety of
its planes and surfaces, stone seems to them a more suitable medium for
creating a background for Man than are plants, which they reduce to
their normal place of decoration and ornament.
Nature herself has prepared the materials. The hand of Time, the frost,
the rain, wear away, work at the rock; perforating it, gashing it,
probing it with a searching finger. Faces, animals, skeletons, hands,
shells, bodies without heads, petrified wood like a congealed mass of
broken figures, mingled with leaves and fishes; Chinese art seizes
all these strange objects, imitates them, and arranges them with an
ingenious industry.
This garden represents a mountain cleft by a precipice, to which steep
paths give access. Its feet bathe in a little lake half covered with
green scum, where a zigzag bridge completes the bias outline. Built
upon a foundation of pink granite piles, the tea-house mirrors in the
greenish black waters of the basin its soaring double roofs, which seem
to lift it from the earth like outspread wings.
Below, driven straight into the earth like iron candlesticks, the
stripped trees bar the sky, their giant stature dominating the garden.
I wander among the stones by a long labyrinth whose windings and
turnings, ascents and evasions, amplify and complicate the scene,
simulating the mazes of a dream around the lake and the mountain.
Finally I attain the kiosk on the summit. The garden seems to sink
below me like a valley full of temples and pavilions, and among the
trees appears the poem of the roofs.
They are high and low, detached and massed, elongated like a pediment
or swelling like a bell. They are surmounted with ornamental friezes
decorated with centipedes and fishes. At the intersections of their
ridges the peaks display stags, storks, altars, vases, and wingèd
pomegranates--all symbolic. The roofs, lifted up at the corners like
arms which hold up a too ample robe, have a creamy whiteness or the
blackness of soot yellowed and sodden. The air is green, as when one
looks through old window-glass.
The other slope brings us before the great pavilion. The descent winds
slowly toward the lake by irregular steps leading to other surprises.
Coming out of an alley, I see pointing in disorder toward the sky
five or six horns of a roof whose building is hidden from me. Nothing
could paint the drunken toss of these fairy prows, the proud elegance
of these flowering stalks, holding up a lily to the envious clouds.
Bourgeoning with this flower, the strong framework lifts itself like a
branch that one lets spring.
I reach the border of the pond where the stalks of dead lotus flowers
lie across the still waters. The silence is as profound as the depth of
a winter forest. This harmonious place was built for the pleasure of
the members of a Syndicate of Commerce in beans and rice, who doubtless
come here in the spring nights to drink tea and watch the shore glimmer
under the moon.
The other garden is more singular.
It was almost night when, penetrating into its square enclosure, I saw
it filled to its walls with a vast landscape. Picture a mass of rocks,
a chaos, a confusion of overthrown blocks, heaped up together as if by
the force of the sea; a vision of madness, a country as ghastly as a
brain with its convolutions bared. The Chinese flay their landscapes.
Inexplicable as nature, this little corner seems also as vast and as
complex. Among these rocks rises a dark and twisted pine-tree. The
warped trunk, the color of its bristling tufts, the violent dislocation
of its limbs, the disproportion of this single tree with the artificial
country which it dominates,--like a dragon issuing from the earth in
smoke, combating the wind and the storms,--make this place unreal,
render it grotesque and fantastic. Here and there funereal foliage,
yews and arbor-vitæ, in their vigorous blackness, intensify this
cataclysm. In my amazement I ponder this melancholy document. And
in the middle of the enclosure one great rock stands in the dusk of
twilight like a monster,--a theme of reverie and enigma.
FOOTNOTES:
[A] White is the color of Chinese mourning.
THE FEAST OF THE DEAD IN THE SEVENTH MONTH
Ingots of paper are the money of the dead. From thin cards are cut the
figures of persons, houses, and animals. The dead man must be followed
by these fragile imitations, these patterns of living things; and, if
burned, they will accompany him where he goes. The flute guides such
souls, the beat of a gong assembles them like bees. In the shadowy
darkness, the brilliance of a flame soothes and satisfies them.
Along the bank of the river the prepared barges wait for the night to
come. Scarlet tinsel is fastened to the end of a pole; and, whether
the river at this turning seems to derive the color of its waters
from a leaden sky, or whether it moves its swarming life mysteriously
under accumulated clouds,--still the torches flare at the prow, the
festoons of lanterns toss from the mast, brightening the gloom with a
vivid note,--as a candle held in the hand in a spacious room lightens
the solemn emptiness of the night. Meanwhile the signal is given, the
flutes shrill out, the gong sounds, firecrackers explode, the three
boatmen lean to the long scull. The barge starts and tacks, leaving
in the wide sweep of its rudder a trail of fire. Some one is strewing
little lamps. Uncertain glimmers on the vast flow of the opaque waters,
these flicker a moment and perish. An arm seizes the tinsel streamer,
the ball of fire which sinks and flares in the smoke, and touches them
to the tomb of the waters; the illusory brightness of the light, like
the gleaming of fish, fascinates the cold drowned. Other illuminated
barges go and come. Far off are heard detonations, and on the war-ships
two bugles, answering one another, sound together the extinguishing of
the fires.
The loitering stranger who, from the shore, contemplates the vast night
open before him like a chart, will hear the return of the religious
barge. The torches are extinguished, the shrill hautboy has died away,
but, over a precipitate beating of drumsticks, dominated by a continual
rolling of drums, the funereal gong continues its tumult and its dance.
Who is it that beats? The sound rises and falls, ends, recommences, and
presently swells to a clamor as if impatient hands beat on the metal
hung between two worlds. Then solemnly, beneath the measured strokes,
the gong returns a deep reverberation. The boat approaches. It passes
the river-bank and the fleet of moored craft; and now, in the heavy
darkness of the opium barges, it is at my feet. I can see nothing; but
the funeral orchestra, which had died away for a long interval, now,
after the fashion of dogs that howl, explodes again in the darkness.
This is the feast of the seventh month when the earth enters into its
repose. Along the road the rickshaw-runners have stuck in the earth
between their feet sticks of incense and little red candle-ends. I must
return. Tomorrow I shall come to sit in the same place. It is all over;
and still, like the sightless dead sunk beneath an infinity of waves,
I hear the tone of the sepulchral sistrum, the clamor of iron drums
beaten with terrible blows in the close darkness.
THOUGHTS ON THE SEA
The boat makes her way between the islands; the sea is so calm that it
scarcely seems to exist. Eleven o’clock in the morning, and it is hard
to tell whether or not it is raining.
The thoughts of the voyager turn to the past year. He sees again his
trip across the ocean in the stormy night; the ports, the stations,
the arrival on Shrove Sunday, the trip to the house when, with a
cold eye, he scanned the sordid festivities of the crowd through the
mud-spattered windows of his carriage. His thoughts show him again his
parents, his friends, old scenes,--and then the new departure. Unhappy
retrospect! As if it were possible for anyone to retrieve his past.
It is this that makes the return sadder than the departure. The voyager
re-enters his home as a guest. He is a stranger to all, and all is
strange to him. (Servant, hang up the traveling cloak and do not carry
it away! Soon it will be necessary to depart once more.) Seated at the
family table he is a suspected guest, ill at ease. No, parents, it is
never the same! This is a passer-by whom you have received, his ears
filled with the fracas of trains and the clamor of the sea, like a man
who imagines that he still feels beneath his feet the profound movement
that lures him away. He is not the same man whom you conducted to the
fateful wharf. The separation has taken place and he has entered upon
the exile that follows it!
CITIES
As there are books on beehives, on colonies of birds’ nests, or on the
constitution of coral islands, why should we not study thus the cities
of humanity?
Paris, the capital of the Kingdom, uniform and concentric in its
development, expands, as it grows, into a larger likeness of the island
to which it was once confined. London is a juxtaposition of stores,
warehouses, and factories. New York is a railway terminal, built of
houses between tracks. It is a pier for landing, a great jetty flanked
by wharves and warehouses. Like the tongue, which receives and divides
its food, like the uvula at the back of the throat placed between two
channels, New York, between her two rivers, the North and the East,
has set her docks and her storehouses on one side, Long Island; on the
other, by Jersey City and the dozen railway lines which range their
depots on the embankment of the Hudson, she receives and sends out the
merchandise of all the Western continent. The active part of the city,
composed entirely of banks, exchanges, and offices, is on the tip of
this tongue, which--not to push this figure too far--moves incessantly
from one end to the other.
Boston is composed of two parts: the new city, pedantic and miserly,
like a man who, displaying his riches and his virtue, yet guards them
for himself,--where the streets, open on all sides to avenues, seem
to become more silent and longer in the cold, and to listen with more
spite to the step of the passer-by who follows them, grinding his teeth
in the blast; and the hill where the old city, like a snail-shell,
contains all the windings of traffic, debauchery, and hypocrisy.
The streets of Chinese cities are made for a people accustomed
to walking in single file; each individual takes his place in an
interminable, endless line. Between the houses resembling boxes with
one side knocked out, where the inhabitants sleep pell-mell among the
merchandise, these narrow fissures are insinuated.
Are there not special points for study? The geometry of streets, the
measurement of turnings, the calculus of crowded thoroughfares, the
disposition of avenues? Is not all movement parallel to these, and all
rest or pleasure perpendicular?
A book indeed!
THE THEATER
The palace of the Corporation of Canton has a niche for its golden
god,--an inner hall where great seats, placed solemnly about the
center, indicate rather than invite repose. And, as European clubs
would place a library, they have established a theater, with parade
and pomp, on the far side of the court which is in front of the whole
building. It is a terrace of stone deep in between two buildings.
Consisting only of a difference in level, the stage between the wings
and the crowd is simply a wide, flat space above their heads. A square
canopy like that of a dais shades and consecrates it. Another portico
in the foreground, framing it in four pillars of granite, confers on
it solemnity and distance. Here comedy develops, legends are told, the
vision of the things which are to be reveals itself in rolling thunder.
The curtain, comparable to that veil which divides us from the world
of dreams, does not exist here. But as if each soul, in discarding
its disguises, were held in an impenetrable tissue, whose colors and
elusive brightness are like the livery of night; each actor in his
silken draperies shows nothing of himself but the movement when he
stirs. Beneath the plumage of his part the golden headdress, the face
hidden under rouge and mask, he is no more than a gesture and a voice.
The emperor mourns over his lost kingdom, the unjustly accused princess
flees from monsters and savages, armies defile, combats take place, a
gesture effaces years and distances, debates proceed before the elders,
the gods descend, the genie arises from the jar. But never does any one
of the persons engaged in the execution of a chant or of a complicated
dance deviate from the rhythm and the harmonies which time the measure
and rule the evolutions, any more than he would throw off his clothes.
The orchestra at the back,--which throughout the piece continues its
evocatory tumult, as if, like swarms of bees that reassemble at the
beating of a caldron, the scenic phantoms would dissipate if there
were silence,--has less a musical rôle than the service of sustaining
the whole, playing (if we may call this prompting music) and answering
for a chorus of the populace. It is the music which accelerates or
moderates the movement, which heightens with an accent more acute the
discourse of the actor, or which, surging up behind him, brings to his
ears clamor and rumor. There are guitars, bits of wood that are beaten
like tympans, that are clashed like castanets; a sort of monochord
violin which, like a fountain in a solitary court, by the thread
of its plaintive melody, carries the development of the elegy; and
finally, in the heroic movements, the trumpet. It is a sort of bugle of
brass, of which the sound, charged with harmonies, has an incredible
brilliance and a terrible stridence. It is like the braying of an ass,
like a shout in the desert, a flourish to the sun, the clamor volleyed
from the diaphragm of an elephant. But the gongs and cymbals hold the
principal place. Their discordant racket excites and stimulates the
emotions, deafening thought, which in a sort of dream sees only the
spectacle before it. Meanwhile at one side of the scene, hung in a cage
of woven rushes, are two birds like turtledoves. These it seems are
_pelitze_ brought from Tientsin. Competing innocently with the uproar
in which they bathe, they jet a song of celestial sweetness.
The hall under the second portico, and the entire court, is stuffed as
full as a pie with living heads. Among them emerge the pillars, and
two lions of sandstone with froglike jaws whose heads are bonneted with
children. It is a pavement of skulls and round yellow faces, so closely
packed that the limbs and bodies cannot be seen. Pressed together, the
hearts of the crowd beat one against the other. It oscillates with but
one movement. Sometimes, stretching a row of arms, it surges against
the stone wall of the stage; sometimes, withdrawing, is hidden by the
sides. In the upper galleries, the wealthy and the mandarins smoke
their pipes and drink tea in cups with brass saucers, surveying like
gods both spectacle and spectators. As the actors themselves are hidden
in their robes, so, as it enters each bosom, does the drama stir under
the living stuff of the crowd.
TOMBS AND RUMORS
We climb and then descend; we pass by the great banyan which, like
Atlas, settling himself powerfully on his contorted haunches, seems
awaiting with knee and shoulder the burden of the sky. At his feet
there is a little edifice where are burned all papers marked with black
characters, as if a sacrifice of writing was offered to the god of the
tree.
We turn and turn again, and by a sinuous road we enter into a country
of tombs. Not, indeed, that they were not everywhere, because our steps
since our departure have been accompanied by them. The evening star,
like a saint praying in solitude, sees the sun disappear beneath her
under the deep and diaphanous waters. The funereal region that we scan
in the pallid light of a dreary, waning day, is covered with a rude and
yellow growth like the pelt of a tiger. From the base to the ridge are
hillocks between which our road winds; and, on the opposite side of the
valley, as far as the eye can reach, are mountains burrowed like a
rabbit-warren with tombs.
In China death holds as great a place as life. As soon as they have
gone the dead become more important and more to be suspected, enduring
as morose and malevolent powers whom it is well to conciliate. The
bonds between the living and the dead are broken with difficulty. The
rites continue and are perpetuated. The living must go frequently to
the family tomb. They burn incense, fire off crackers, and offer rice
and pork. In the shape of a scrap of paper they leave a visiting-card
held in place with a pebble. The dead in their thick coffins rest a
long time inside the house. Then they are carried out of doors and
piled up in low sheds, until the geomancer has found the proper site
and location. Then the final resting-place is determined on with great
particularity, for fear that the dissatisfied spirits should wander
elsewhere. They cut the tombs in the sides of mountains, in the solid
and primordial earth; and, while the living, in unhappy multitudes, are
crowded in valley-bottoms, in low and malarial plains, the dead open
their dwellings to sun and space in high and airy places.
The form of an Omega is chosen, placed flat against the hill-slope;
and the semi-circle of stone, completed by the brace, surrounds the
dead person, who makes a mount in the center like a sleeper under his
coverings. It is thus that the earth, opening her arms, makes him her
own and consecrates him to herself. In front is placed the tablet
inscribed with the titles and names; because the Chinese believe that
certain portions of the soul, that stop to read the name, linger above
the tomb. This tablet forms the reredos of a stone altar on which
are deposited the symmetrically arranged offerings. In front of this
the tomb, by the formal arrangement of its terraces and balustrades,
welcomes and receives the living family who go there on solemn days to
honor the remains of the deceased ancestor. Primordial and testamentary
hieroglyph! Facing it, the hemi-cycle reverberates the invocation. All
earth which is above the level of mud is occupied by these vast low
tombs, like the openings of pits crammed full. There are little ones,
simple ones and elaborate, some new and others which seem as old as the
rocks where they lean. The most important are high on the mountain, as
if in the folds of its neck. A thousand men together could kneel in
this tomb.
I myself live in this country of sepulchers, and by a different road I
regain my house on the summit of the hill.
The town is below on the other side of the wide yellow river Min,
which precipitates its deep and violent waters between the arches of
the Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages. During the day one can see, like the
copings of the tombs, the rampart of jagged mountains that enclose the
city. The flying pigeons and the tower in the middle of a pagoda make
one feel the immensity of this distance. And I can see the two-horned
roofs, two wooded hills rising between the houses, and on the river
a confusion of wooden rafts and junks whose poops are painted with
pictures. But now it is too dark. Scarcely a fire pricks the dusk and
the mist beneath me, and by a road I know, slipping into the funereal
darkness of the pines, I gain my habitual post, this great triple tomb
blackened with moss and age, oxidized like armor, which thrusts its
frowning parapet obliquely into space.
I come here to listen.
Chinese cities have neither factories nor vehicles. The only noise that
can be heard, when evening comes and the fracas of trade ceases, is the
human voice. I come to listen for that; for, when one loses interest
in the sense of the words that are offered him, he can still lend them
a more subtle ear. Nearly a million inhabitants live here. I listen to
the speech of this multitude far under a lake of air. It is a clamor
at once torrential and crackling, shot through with sudden abrupt rips
like the tearing of paper. I am sure one can distinguish now and then
a note and its modulations, as one does a chord on a drum, by putting
his fingers on the right places. Has the city a different murmur at
different times in the day? I propose to test it. At this moment it is
evening. They are volubly publishing the day’s news. Each one believes
that he alone is speaking. He recounts quarrels, meals, household
happenings, family affairs, his work, his commerce, his politics. But
his words do not perish. They carry--part of the innumerable additions
to the collective voice. Shorn of their meaning they continue only
as the unintelligible elements of the sound which carries them;
utterance, intonation, accent. As there is a mingling of sounds, is
there a blending of the sense? And what is the grammar of this general
discourse? Guest of the dead, I listen long to the murmur, the noise
that the living make afar!
Now it is time to return. The pines, between whose high shafts I pursue
my road, deepen the shadows of night. It is the hour when one commences
to see the fire-flies, hearth fires of the grass. As in the depth of
meditation an intuition passes, so quickly that the spirit can perceive
merely a glimmer, a sudden indication; so this impalpable crumb of fire
burns, and in the same moment is extinguished.
THE ENTRANCE TO THE EARTH
Rather than assail the escarpments of the mountain with the iron point
of my stick I should prefer to see, from this low, flat plain across
which I wander, the mountains seated around me like a hundred ancient
men in the glory of the afternoon. The sun of Pentecost illumines the
earth, swept and garnished and impressive as a church. The air is so
cool and so clear that it seems as if I walked naked. All is peace. One
hears on all sides, like the cry of a flute, the notes of chain-pumps
in unison, drawing water from the fields (three by three, the men and
women beat upon the triple wheel, their arms hooked to the beam, their
laughing faces covered with sweat), and a friendly territory opens
before the steps of the walker.
I measure with my eyes the circuit I must follow. I know how, from the
top of the mountain, the plain with its fields will resemble an old
stained-glass window with irregular panes set in a network of lead. By
straight footpaths of the earth that frames the rice-fields, I finally
begin on the paved way.
It crosses the rice-fields, the orange groves, the villages,--guarded
at one outlet by their great banyan (the Father to whom all the
children of the country are brought for adoption) and at the other,
not far from the wells of water and pits of manure, by the fane of
the local gods who, both armed from head to foot with bow at belly,
painted on the gate, roll their tri-colored eyes toward each other.
And, as I advance turning my head from right to left, I taste slowly
the changes of the hours, because, as a perpetual wayfarer, a wise
judge of the length of shadows, nothing of the august ceremony of the
day escapes me. Drunk with beholding, I understand it all. This bridge
still to cross in the peace of the lunch hour, these hills to climb and
to descend, this valley to traverse; and already I see, between three
pines, the steep rock where I must take up my post to assist at the
crowning ceremony of that which was a day.
It is the moment of solemn reception when the sun crosses the threshold
of the earth. Fifteen hours ago it passed the line of the illimitable
sea; and, like an eagle resting motionless on its wings to examine the
country from afar, it has gained the highest part of the sky. Now it
declines its course and the earth opens to receive it. The gorge to
which the sun sets its mouth disappears under the level rays as if it
were devoured by fire. The mountain where a conflagration has flared
up like a crater, sends toward the sky an enormous column of smoke.
And below, touched by an oblique ray, the line of a torrent flashes.
Behind spreads out the earth of all the earth, Asia with Europe; like
the central height of an altar, an immense plain; and then, far beyond
that, like a man flat on his face on the water, France; and, in the
thickest of France, joyous and fertile Champagne. Only the top of the
golden targe can be seen now, and at the moment it disappears the
evening star sends across the sky a dark and vertical ray. It is the
time when the sea which follows it, lifting itself from its bed with a
profound cry, hurls its shoulder against the earth.
Now I must go. So high that I must lift my chin to see it, the summit
of Kuchang, detached by a cloud, is hung like an island in the
exquisite spaces; and, thinking of nothing else, I walk as though my
head were detached from my body,--like a man whom the acidity of too
strong a perfume has satiated.
THE RELIGION OF LETTERS
Let others discover in the range of Chinese characters either the head
of a sheep, the arms and legs of a man, or the sun setting behind a
tree. For my part I seek a more difficult clue.
All writing commences with a symbol or line which, considered as a
whole, is a pure characterization of the individual. Either the line
is horizontal, like all things which, in simply conforming to the
laws of their being, find sufficient reason for existence; or it is
vertical, like the tree and the man, indicating acts and laying down
affirmations; or, if oblique, it marks movement and the senses.
The Roman letter has had the vertical line for its principle; the
Chinese character seems to have the horizontal as its essential trait.
The letter with an imperious downstroke affirms that a thing is so; the
character is the very thing that it signifies.
One symbol or another is equally a sign. Let us take figures for
example. They are all equally abstract images, but the letter is
essentially analytic. Each word is an enunciation of successive
affirmations that the eye and the voice spell out. Unit is added
to unit on the same line, and the Protean syllable changes and is
modified in a continual variation. But the Chinese sign develops the
figure, and, applying it to a series of beings, it differentiates their
characters indefinitely. A word exists by a succession of letters, a
character by the relation of its strokes. May we not imagine that in
these the horizontal line indicates, for example, the species; the
vertical, the individual; the oblique, diverse of movement, that group
of traits and energies which gives meaning to the whole; the period,
distinct on the white page, signifying something that can only be
implied? One can therefore see in the Chinese character a completely
developed being, a written person, having, like a person who lives, his
nature and his moods, his own acts and his inner individuality, his
structure and physiognomy.
This explains the piety with which the Chinese regard writing. They
burn with respect the humblest paper marked with a vestige of this
mystery. The sign is a being; and, from the fact that it is common to
all, it becomes sacred. With them the representation of ideas is almost
an idol. Such is the foundation of that scriptural religion which is
peculiar to China. Yesterday I visited a Confucian temple.
It was in a solitary quarter where everything spoke of desertion and
decay. In the silence and burning heat of the sun at three o’clock, we
followed the sinuous street. Our entrance is not to be by the great
door where the proud rot in their enclosure, where that high column
marked with an official inscription in two languages guards the worn
sill. A woman, short and round-backed as a pig, opens a side passage
for us; and, with echoing footfalls, we penetrate into the deserted
court.
By the proportions of the court and of the peristyles which frame
it; by the spacious intercolumniations and the horizontal lines of
the façade; by the repetition of the two enormous roofs, which lift
their massive black curves with a single sweep; by the symmetrical
disposition of the two little pavilions which are before it and which
lighten the severity of the whole with the agreeable grotesques of
their octagonal roofs; the building (to apply the essential laws of
architecture) is given a learned aspect, a classic beauty in short, due
to an exquisite observation of rule.
The temple is composed of two parts. I suppose that the passages
with their rows of tablets on the walls, each one preceded by a long,
narrow altar of stone, offer to a hasty worship the primary series of
precepts. Lifting our feet to avoid the sill which it is forbidden to
tread upon, we penetrate into the shade of the sanctuary.
The vast high hall has the air of holding an occult presence. It is
utterly empty. Here silence sits veiled in obscurity. Here are no
ornaments, no statues. On each side of the hall we distinguish, between
their curtains, great inscriptions; and, before them, altars; but in
the middle of the temple, behind five monumental pieces of stone, three
vases and two candlesticks; under an edifice of gold, a baldachin or a
tabernacle which frames it on all sides; four characters are inscribed
upon a vertical column.
Here writing possesses this mystery: it speaks. No moment marks its
duration, no position. It is the commencement of an ageless sign. No
mouth offers it. It exists; and the worshiper, face to face with it,
ponders the written name. Solemnly enunciated in the gloom of the
shadowy gold of the baldachin, the sign, between the two columns which
are covered with the mystic windings of the dragon, symbolizes its own
silence. The immense red hall seems to be the very color of obscurity,
the pillars are hidden under a scarlet lacquer. Alone in the middle of
the temple, before the sacred word, two columns of white granite seem
its witness; the very soul, religious and abstract, of the place.
THE BANYAN
The banyan toils.
This giant does not, like his brother in India, endeavor to seize upon
the earth again with his hands; but, raising himself with one turn of
the shoulder, he lifts his roots to heaven like accumulated chains.
Hardly has the trunk lifted itself several feet above the soil than
it stretches its limbs laboriously, each like an arm which tugs away
at a bundle of cords it has grasped. With a slow lengthening out, the
hauling monster strains himself and labors in all the attitudes of
effort so hard that the rude bark splits and the muscles stand out from
the skin. There is the straight thrust, the flexing and the support,
the twist of loin and shoulder, the slackening of haunches, the play
of fulcrum and jack, the straightening up or reaching down of arms
which seem to put the body out of joint. It is a knot of pythons, it is
a hydra stubbornly tearing itself away from the tenacious earth. You
might say that the banyan lifts a burden from the depths and upholds it
with its straining limbs.
Honored by the humble settlement, at the gate of the village he is
a patriarch clothed in shadowy foliage. At his feet is installed a
furnace for offerings; and, in his very heart, under the spreading
of his branches, is an altar with a stone doll. Witness of all that
passes, possessor of the earth encompassed by multitudinous roots, here
the ancient lives; and, whether alone with the children or at the hour
when all the village reassembles under the twisted projections of his
boughs (as the rosy rays of the moon, passing across the openings of
his canopy, illumine the cabal with an outline of gold), the colossal
tree, wherever his shadow turns, perseveres in imperceptible effort,
adding the passing moment to his accumulated centuries.
Somewhere in mythology are honored the heroes who have distributed
water to a country, and, striking a great rock, have delivered the
obstructed mouth of a fountain. I see standing in the banyan a Hercules
of the vegetable world, a monument of majestic labor. Would it not
seem to be by his labors (this monster in chains, who vanquishes the
avaricious resistance of the earth) that the springs gush forth and
overflow, that grass grows afar off, and water is held at its level in
the rice-fields.
He toils.
TOWARD THE MOUNTAIN
Coming out barefoot on the verandah, I look toward the left. On the
brow of the mountain, among the torn clouds, a touch of phosphorus
indicates the dawn. A movement of lamps in the house, a breakfast while
still sleepy and benumbed; and then, with packages stowed away, we
start. By the rugged coast we drop down to the neighboring city.
It is the vague hour when cities awaken. Already the open-air cooks
blow fires under their stoves. Already in the depths of certain
booths a vacillating light illumines nude bodies. In spite of spiked
boards that have been placed flat against openings or hung over
cornices,--huddled in corners in every free space, men stretch and
sleep. Half awake, one scratches his side and stares at us out of the
corner of his eyes with an air of delicious comfort. Another sleeps
so heavily that you would think he was stuck to the stones. An old
man, who has the appearance of being clothed in the scum that forms
on stagnant waters, combs his mangy skull with his two hands. And
finally, I must not forget that beggar with the head of a cannibal--his
wildly disheveled hair bristling like a black bush--who, with one gaunt
knee extended, lies flat under the first rays of morning.
Nothing could be stranger than a town at the hour when it sleeps. These
streets seem like avenues in a necropolis. These houses exude sleep.
And all of them, because of their closed doors, seem to me solemn and
monumental. Every one, in the sleep wherein he is buried, suffers that
singular change which comes over the faces of the dead. Like a little
child with unfocused eyes, who frets and kneads the breast of his nurse
with a feeble hand, the man who sleeps, with a great sigh, presses his
face to the deep earth. Everything is silent because it is the hour
when the earth gives to drink, and no one of her children turns in vain
to her liberal breast. The poor and the rich, the young and the old,
the just and the unjust, the judge with the prisoner, and man like
the animals, all of them drink together like foster-brothers! All is
mystery because this is the hour when Man communicates with his mother.
The sleeper sleeps and cannot be awakened. He holds the breast and will
not let it go. This draught still flows for him.
The street exudes odors of filth and hair.
Now the houses become fewer. We pass groups of banyans; and, in the
pond that they shade, a great buffalo, of which we can only see the
back and the moon-curved horns, stares at us with eyes of heavy stupor.
We pass lines of women going to the fields. When one laughs her mirth
spreads and grows feebler on the four faces that follow, and is effaced
on the fifth. At the hour when the first ray of the sun traverses the
virginal air, we gain the vast and empty plain; and, leaving behind
us the tortuous road, we take our way toward the mountain across the
fields of rice, tobacco, beans, pumpkins, cucumbers, and sugar-cane.
THE GREAT SEA
Climbing one day, I reach the plateau, and, in its basin of mountains
where black islands emerge, I view afar off the great sea. Certainly,
by a perilous path, it would be possible for me to gain the shore; but
whether I follow its outline or whether I choose to take a boat, the
surface remains impenetrable to my gaze. Well, then, I shall play on
the flute, I shall beat the tom-tom; and the boat-woman, standing on
one leg like a stork while with the other knee she supports her nursing
baby as she conducts her sampan across the flat waters, will believe
that the gods behind the drawn curtains of the clouds are enjoying
themselves in the courts of their temple.
Or, unlacing my shoe, I shall throw it across the lake. Where it falls
the passer-by will prostrate himself; and, having picked it up with
superstitious awe, he will honor it with four sticks of incense. Or,
curving my hands about my mouth, I shall cry out names. The words will
die first, then the sound; and the tone alone, reaching the ears of
some one, will make him turn from side to side, like a man who hears
himself called in a dream and makes an effort to break his bonds.
THE TEMPLE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I have devoted more than one day simply to the discovery of it,
ensconced upon its steep cliff of black rock, and it is not till late
afternoon that I know myself to be upon the right path. From the giddy
height where I climb, the wide rice-fields seem designed like a chart.
The brink along which I move is so narrow that whenever I lift my right
foot it is poised over the yellow expanse of the sown village fields
spread out like a carpet below.
Silence. By an ancient staircase covered with a hoary lichen I descend
in the pungent shade of the bay-trees, and, as the footpath at this
turning is suddenly barred by a wall, I arrive at a closed door. I
listen. No word, no voice, no drum! In vain I shake the wooden handle
of the door, and beat upon it rudely with both hands.
Not even a bird cries as I scale the wall.
This place is inhabited after all; and while, sitting upon the
balustrade where domestic linen is drying, I sink my teeth and fingers
into the thick rind of a haddock stolen from the offerings, the old
monk inside prepares me a cup of tea. Neither the inscription above
the door nor the dilapidated idols who are honored with a thin spire
of incense in the depths of this humble cave seem to me to constitute
the religion of the place, any more than the acid fruit that I munch;
but here--on this low platform, which incloses a piece of muslin,--this
circular straw mat where the _bhiku_ will come soon to squat for
meditation or sleep--is everything.
Let me compare this vast countryside, which opens out before me as far
as the double wall of mountains and clouds, to a flower of which this
seat is the mystic heart. Is it not the geometric center where the
scene, united into an harmonious whole, virtually takes on existence
and a consciousness of itself; and where, to the studious contemplation
of the occupant, all lines converge?
The sun sets. I clamber up the steps of velvet whiteness where open
pine-cones are strewn like roses.
OCTOBER
In vain I see the trees still green.
Whether a funereal haze enshroud it, or whether an enduring serenity of
sky efface it, the year is not one day less near the fatal solstice.
The sun does not deceive me, nor the widespread opulence of the
country. There is a calm inexpressibly placid, a repose from which
there is no awakening. The cricket has scarcely commenced his cry when
he stills it, for fear of being an annoyance in the midst of plenty,
since it is only dearth that gives him the right to speak. And it
seems as if one were cautioned only with bare feet to penetrate into
the fastnesses of these golden fields. No! The sky behind me does not
radiate the same light over the wide harvest; and, as the road leads me
by the stacks, whether I turn the corner of a pond here or whether I
discover a village by going farther from the sun, I turn my face toward
that broad pale moon which I have seen all day.
It was at the moment of emerging from the dark olives, when I saw the
radiant plain open out before me straight to the barriers of the
mountain, that an interpretation was communicated to me. Oh last fruits
of a condemned season! In the achievement of the day is the supreme
maturity of the irretrievable year. _It is finished._
The impatient hands of winter do not strip the earth barbarously.
No winds tear at her; no frost splinters, no waters drown her. But
more tenderly than May--or when insatiable June clings to the source
of life, possessing the noon hour--the sky smiles at the earth with
ineffable love. Like a heart which yields to continual importuning, is
this consent; the grain separates from the ear, the fruit falls from
the tree, the earth little by little abandons herself to the invincible
solicitor of all. Death loosens a hand too full. The word that she
hears now is holier than that of her wedding day, deeper, more tender
and more glorious. _It is finished._
The bird sleeps, the tree falls asleep in the shade which encompasses
it, the sun at the level of the earth covers it with a long ray. The
day is done, the year is consummated. To the celestial interrogation is
returned this amorous response. _It is finished._
NOVEMBER
The sun sets on a day of peace and labor, yet men, women, and children,
their disheveled hair full of dust and wisps of straw, their faces
and legs stained with earth, work on. Here they cut rice, here they
gather up the sheaves; and, as on wall-paper the same scene is repeated
indefinitely, so on every side we see great wooden vats with men who,
face to face, beat ears of corn against the sides; and already the
plow commences to turn the clay again. All about is the odor of grain,
the perfume of the harvest. At the end of the plain where the men are
working is a wide river; and there, in the middle of the fields, an
arch of triumph colored by the setting of the crimson sun completes
the peaceable picture. A man who passes near me holds in his hand a
flame-colored chicken, another carries at the ends of his bamboo a
big tin teapot, hanging in front of him,--and behind him a package
made of some green relishes, a bit of meat, a bundle of those slips
of silver paper that are burned for the dead, and a fish hung beneath
by a straw. His blue blouse, his violet trousers, gleam against the
lacquered gold of the stubble.
--Let no one mock my idle hands! The hurricane itself, and the weight
of the sea that it hurls, cannot shake the heavy stone; but wood will
float on the water, leaves yield to the air; I, still more trifling,
fix my feet nowhere upon the earth, and the departing light draws me
with it. By the dark roads of the villages, among pines and tombs, and
along the far-stretched fields, I am the setting sun. Neither the happy
plain nor the harmony of these mountains, nor the alluring color of the
verdure on the ruddy harvest, can satisfy the eye which demands light
itself. Below in that square moat, enclosed by the mountain with a rude
wall, the air and the water burn with a mysterious fire. I see a gold
so beautiful that all nature seems to me a dead mass; in comparison
with that light the clarity that she can diffuse is darkest night.
Desirable elixir, by what mystic route will I be led to participate in
thy avaricious waters?
This evening the sun leaves me near a great orange tree that the family
which it nourishes have begun to strip. A ladder is leaning against the
tree. I hear speech in the foliage. In the lingering neutral light of
the hour I see the golden fruit gleam through the somber leaves. Coming
nearer I see each twig etched clearly against the green of the evening.
I regard the little red oranges, I breathe their bitter, strong aroma.
Oh marvelous harvest, promised to One alone! Fruit shown to that
immortal part of us which triumphs!
Before I reach the pines night falls and the cold moon lights me. This
seems to me to be the difference: that the sun looks at us, but we look
at the moon. Her face is turned away, and like a fire which lights up
the bottom of the sea she makes every shadow become visible.... In the
heart of this ancient tomb, in the thick grass of this ruined temple,
under the form of fair ladies or wise old men, possibly I shall meet
a company of foxes! They will offer me verses and riddles, they will
make me drink their wine, and my way will be forgotten. These civil
hosts wish to give me entertainment. They mount standing, one on top of
another--and then, as the spell breaks, I find myself in the straight
white footpath that leads me toward my home. But already in the depths
of the valley I see a human fire burning.
PAINTING
Let some one fasten this piece of silk by the four corners for me, and
I shall not put the sky upon it. The sea and its shores, the forest and
the mountains, do not tempt my art. But from the top to the bottom and
from one side to the other, as between new horizons, with an artless
hand I shall paint the Earth. The limits of communities, the divisions
of fields, will be exactly outlined,--those that are already plowed,
those where the battalions of sheaves still stand. I shall not fail
to count each tree. The smallest house will be represented with an
ingenuous industry. Looking closely, you may distinguish the people;
he who crosses an arched bridge of stone, parasol in hand; he who
washes buckets at a pond; the litter traveling on the shoulders of two
porters, and the patient laborer who plows a new furrow the length
of the old. A long road bordered with a double row of skiffs crosses
the picture from one corner to the other, and in one of the circular
moats can be seen, in a scrap of azure for water, three quarters of a
slightly yellow moon.
THE SOLITARY
Have I ever lived elsewhere than in this circular gorge hollowed in
the heart of the rock? Doubtless at three o’clock a raven will not
fail to bring me the bread I need, unless the perpetual sound of the
falling water can keep me fat! A hundred feet above me, as if it
gushed with violence out of the radiant heaven itself, between the
bamboos that obstruct it, leaping the sudden verge, the torrent is
engulfed and plunges in a vertical column, partly dark and partly
luminous,--striking the floor of the cavern with re-echoing thunders.
No human eye could discover where I am. In shadows that only the
noonday dissipates, the strand of this little lake, shaking with
the unceasing plunge of the cascade, is my habitation. Above, where
an inexhaustible torrent falls from the gorge, only this handful of
sparkling milk-white water reaches me directly from the generous sky.
The stream escapes by this turning; and sometimes, mingled with the
cries of the birds in the forest and with this soft gushing near me,
I hear the voluble noise of falling waters behind me descending toward
the earth.
DECEMBER
Sweeping the country and the leafy valley, thy hand, reaching these
purple and tan-colored lands that thine eyes discover below thee, is
arrested by them on this rich brocade. All is quiet and muffled; no
green shocks, nothing new and young jars on the composure of the scene,
on the harmony of these full and hollow tones. A somber cloud occupies
the whole sky, heaping with fog the cleft of the mountain. One might
say that it was dovetailed into the horizon. With thy hand, December,
caress these large adornments, tufts of black pine like brooches
against the hyacinth of the plain; verify with thy fingers these
details sunk in the enmeshing fog of this winter day: a row of trees, a
village. Truly the hour is arrested. Like an empty theater, abandoned
to melancholy, the sealed-up countryside seems to listen for a voice so
shrill that I cannot hear it.
These afternoons in December are sweet. Nothing speaks as yet of
the tormenting future, and the past is not yet so dead that it has
no survivals. Of all the grass and of such a great harvest nothing
remains but strewn straw and dry brush. Cold water softens the ploughed
earth. All is finished. This is the pause, the suspension, between one
year and the next. Thought, delivered from her labor, gives herself
up to recollection with a sweet taciturnity, and, meditating on new
enterprises, like the earth she tastes her sabbath.
TEMPEST
In the morning, leaving a shore the color of roses and of honey, our
ship entered upon the high sea through streamers of low and sluggish
fog. When, having wakened from this somber dream, I seek the sun, I see
that it is setting behind us; but before us, bounding the black, dead
spaces of the sea, one long mountain, like an embankment of snow, bars
the north from one end of the sky to the other. This Alp lacks nothing,
neither coldness nor rigidity. Alone in the midst of the solitude, like
a combatant who advances in an enormous arena, our ship moves toward
the white obstacle which rises cleaving the melancholy waters; and all
at once a cloud hides the sky from us like the hood of a wagon drawn
over it. In the cleft of daylight that it leaves on the horizon behind
us, I look for the reappearance of the sun. The islands shine like a
lighted lamp, and three junks stand out on the crest of the sea.
We are rushing now across a stretch of water that is roughened by the
clouds. The surface heaves; and, as the motion of the abyss affects
our deck, the prow lifts and plunges, solemnly as if saluting, or like
a cock who measures his adversary. It is night. From the north blows
a harsh wind full of horror. On one side a ruddy moon, moving among
disordered clouds, strikes through them with a lens-shaped edge; on the
other the beacon-lamp of rippled red glass is hoisted to our foresail.
Now all is calm again. The sheaf of water gushing always evenly before
us, and shot with a mysterious fire, streams away from our prow like a
body made of tears.
THE PIG
I shall paint here the pig’s portrait. He is a solid beast, made all
in one piece, without joints and without a neck; and he sinks in front
like a sack, jolting along on four squat hams. He is a trumpet on the
march, ever seeking; and to every odor that he scents he applies his
pump-like body. He sucks it in. When he has found the necessary hole,
he wallows enormously. This is not the wriggling of a duck who enters
the water. It is not the sociable happiness of the dog. It is a deep,
solitary, conscientious, integral enjoyment. He sniffs, he sips, he
tastes, and you cannot say whether he eats or drinks. Perfectly round,
with a little quiver, he advances and buries himself in the unctuous
center of the fresh filth. He grunts, he sports in the recesses of his
tripery. He winks an eye. Consummate amateur, although his ever-active
smelling apparatus lets nothing escape, his tastes do not run to the
transient perfumes of flowers or of frivolous fruits. In everything he
searches for nourishment. He loves it rich and strong and ripe, and
his instinct attaches him to these two fundamental things, earth and
ordure.
Glutton, wanton, though I present you with this model, admit this--that
something is lacking to your satisfaction. The body is not sufficient
to itself; but the doctrine that you teach us is not in vain. “Do
not apply the eye alone to truth, but all that is thyself, without
reserve.” Happiness is our duty and our inheritance, a certain perfect
possession is intended.
But like the sow which furnished the oracles to Æneas, the meeting with
one always seems to me an augury, a social symbol. Her flank is more
vague than hills seen through the rain, and when she litters, giving
drink to a battalion of young boars who march between her legs, she
seems to me the very image of those mountains which suckle the clusters
of villages attached to their torrents, no less massive and no less
misshapen.
I must not omit to say that the blood of the pig serves to fix gold.
THE SOURCE
Let other rivers carry toward the sea oak branches and the red infusion
of rusty earth, roses and the bark of sycamores, strewn straw or slabs
of ice; let the Seine in the damp mornings of December, when half-past
eight sounds from the steeples of the city, unmoor under the rigid
derricks barges of manure and lighters full of casks; let the River
Haha, at the smoking crest of its rapids, erect all at once, like
the rude semblance of a pike, the trunk of a hundred-foot pine tree;
and let the Equatorial rivers carry in their turbid flow a confused
world of trees and plants; yet, flat on my face, held fast against the
current, the width of this one river is not equal to my arms, nor its
depth sufficient to engulf me.
The promises of the Occident are not lies! Learn this: this gold does
not vainly appeal to our blindness, it is not devoid of delights.
I have found that it is insufficient to see, inexpedient to remain
standing; upon analysis my enjoyment is in that of which I can
take possession; for, descending the steep bank with the feet of
astonishment, I have discovered the source. The riches of the West are
not forbidden me. Over the curve of the earth, straight toward me, they
are rolling.
Not the silk molded by a hand or a bare foot, not the deep wool of
the carpet used for the consecration of a king, can be compared to
the resistance of this liquid depth where my own weight supports me.
Neither the name of milk nor the color of the rose can be compared to
this marvel whose descent I receive upon me. Truly I drink, truly I
am plunged in wine! Let the ports open to receive the cargoes of wood
and grain that come to them from the high countries; let the fishers
tend their lines to catch wreckage and fish; let the searchers for
gold filter the water and sift the sand; the river does not carry less
riches to me. Do not say that I see, because the eye does not suffice
for this, which demands a more subtle sense. To enjoy is to understand,
and to understand is to evaluate.
At the hour when the holy light evokes to complete response the shadow
that she dissipates, the surface of these waters opens a flowerless
garden to my motionless navigation. Between these deep violet ripples
the water is painted like the reflection of tapers, like amber,
like palest green, like the color of gold. But silence! What I have
discovered is mine, and now, as the water darkens, I will possess the
night alone with all its visible and invisible stars.
DOORS
Every solid door opens upon less than is shut out by its particular
panels. Many, through progress in the occult, have gained Yamen, the
solitary state, and the court which a great silence fills; but if any
one, after attaining this degree, at the moment when his hand is poised
for a blow on the drum offered to visitors, hears the sound of his name
penetrating the distance like a muffled cry (because the spouse or the
sons of the dead are shouting loudly into his left ear), and if he
vanquishes his fatal languor long enough to draw away one or two steps
from the doors just barely opening to his desire,--his soul will regain
its body. But no melody of a name can rescue those who have taken the
irretrievable step over the secret sill. Without doubt I am in such a
realm, on the shallow stones of this somber pond which surrounds me;
as, standing within its ornate frame, I taste forgetfulness and the
secret of this taciturn garden.
An ancient memory has not more windings or more secret passages
than the road which has led me here, through a succession of courts,
grottoes, and open corridors. The art of this restricted place is to
hide its limits from me by bewildering me. Its undulant walls, which
mount and descend, divide it into separate sections; and, while the
tops of trees and the roofs of houses, showing through, seem to invite
the guest to search out their secrets; these barriers, multiplying
surprises and deceits in his path, lead him further away. Except for a
wise dwarf with a skull like the belly of a gourd, or a pair of young
storks surmounting its ornamental apex, the chalice of the roof shadows
a hall not so deserted but that a half-consumed stick of incense still
smokes there, and a forgotten flower fades. The princess and her old
counselor have only just arisen from yonder seat and the greenish air
is still full of the rustle of illustrious silk.
Fabulous indeed is my habitation! I see, in these walls where the
pierced copings seem to melt away, banks of clouds; and these fantastic
windows are as masses of leaves confusedly seen through the rifts. The
wind, leaving on each side curving streamers, gashes irregular breaches
in the fog. Let me not gather the flower of the afternoon from any
other garden than this, which I enter by a door in the outline of a
vase, of a leaf, of a dragon’s smoking jaws, of the setting sun when
its disk reaches the sea-line, or of the rising moon!
THE RIVER
From the vast and yellow river my eyes return to our leadsman crouching
at the side of the boat. Turning the line in his fist with a regular
motion, he sends the lead in full flight across the muddy waters.
As the elements of a parallelogram unite, so water expresses the power
of a country reduced to geometrical lines. Each drop is a fugitive
calculation, a visible measurement always crossing the circumferential
slope; and, having found the lowest point of a given area, it joins a
current which flows with more impetus toward the deeper center of a
still larger circle. This stream is immense in its force and extent.
It is the outlet of a world. It is slow-moving Asia pouring forth.
Powerful as the sea, this river has a destination and a source. The
current is without branches or tributaries. We shall have mounted all
these days in vain! We shall never reach the fork! Always before us,
cleaving the countryside with irresistible power and volume, the river
evenly divides the horizon of the West.
All water seems attractive to us, but certainly, more than the blue
and virgin sea, this appeals to that in us which is between the flesh
and the soul,--our human current charged with virtue and with spirit,
the deep and burning blood. Here is one of the great laboring veins of
the world, one of the arteries for the distribution of life. Beneath
me I feel moving the protoplasm which strives and destroys, which
fills and fashions us. And, while we remount this enormous river which
melts about us into the gray sky and swallows up our route, it is the
entire earth which we receive, the Earth of the earth: Asia, mother of
all men, central, solid, primordial. Oh abundant bosom! Surely I see
it, and it is vainly that the grass everywhere disguises it; I have
penetrated this mystery. As water with a purple stain might attest some
undeniable wound, so the earth has impregnated this river with her
substance. It is solely of gold.
The sky is lowering. The clouds move slowly toward the north. To
right and left I see a somber Mesopotamia. Here are neither villages
nor cultivation; only here and there, between the stripped trees,
four or five primitive huts, some fishing-tackle on the bank, and a
ruined boat which moves--a miserable vessel hoisting a rag for sail!
Extermination has passed over this country, and the river which carries
opulent life and nourishment waters a region no less deserted than
where the first waters issued from Paradise, when Man, hollowing the
horn of an ox, delivered the first rude, harsh cry in the echoless
wastes.
THE RAIN
By the two windows before me, the two at my left, and the two at my
right, I see and hear the rain falling in torrents on every side. I
think it is a quarter of an hour past noon. Luminous water is all about
me. I dip my pen in the ink; and, rejoicing like an insect in the
center of a bubble in the security of my watery imprisonment, I write
this poem.
It is not a drizzle that falls; it is not a languishing and doubtful
rain. The rain grips the earth and beats upon it in serried sullenness,
with a heavy, powerful assault. How cool it is, oh frogs, to forget the
pond in the thickness of the damp grass! No need to fear that the rain
is ceasing. It is copious, it is satisfying. He is thirsty indeed, my
brothers, for whom this marvelous beaker does not suffice. The earth
has disappeared, the house bathes, the submerged trees stream; the very
river, which terminates my horizon like the sea, seems drowned. Time
has no duration, and, straining my ears not only for the unlocking of
each new hour, I meditate the psalm of the rain, so endless and so
neutral in tone. But toward the end of the day the rain ceases, and,
while the accumulated clouds prepare for a heavier assault,--as if Iris
from the summit of the sky were about to flash straight into the heart
of the conflict,--a black spider sways head downward and hung by his
rear in the middle of this window which I have opened on the leafage
and the walnut-stained North. It is no longer clear. I must strike a
light. Meanwhile I shall make to tempests a libation of this drop of
ink.
NIGHT ON THE VERANDAH
Certain redskins believe that the souls of still-born children live
in the shells of winkles. I am listening tonight to the uninterrupted
chorus of tree-frogs, like childish elocution, like a plaintive
recitation of little girls, like an ebullition of vowels.
I have long studied the ways of the stars. Some move singly, others
mount in squadrons. I have recognized the “Doors” and the “Three Ways.”
As the clearest space gains the zenith, Jupiter with pure greenish
brilliance moves forth like a golden calf. The position of the stars
is not left to chance. The interplay of their distances gives me the
proportions of the void. Their swing participates in our equilibrium,
vital rather than mechanical. I feel their oscillations beneath my feet.
Arriving at the last of these ten windows, the mystic secret consists
in surprising at the opposite window, across the shadowy, uninhabited
room, another fragment of the heavenly chart.
No intrusion will derange your dreams, and no celestial glances into
your chamber will disquiet your repose, if before going to bed you
are careful to arrange this great mirror before the night. Since the
earth presents such a wide sea to the stars, it must also render itself
liable to their influence and spread its deep ocean beneath them like a
photographic developing bath.
The night is so calm that it seems to me embalmed.
THE SPLENDOR OF THE MOON
By this key which rids me of the world, opening to my blindness a
muffled door; by this irresistible drifting away, by the mysterious
sweetness which animates me and the deep response of my own heart to a
soft explosion of mysterious sounds, I realize that I am asleep, and I
awaken.
I had left my four windows open to the dark and somber night; and
now, going out on the verandah, I see all the depth of space filled
with thy light, oh sun of dreams! Far from disturbing sleep, this
fire rising from the midst of darkness creates it, overpowering my
senses more profoundly. But not in vain, like a priest awakened for
his midnight mass, have I come from my bed to survey this mysterious
mirror. The light of the sun is a force of life and of creation, and
our vision partakes of its energy; but the splendor of the moon is like
thought meditating upon itself. I contemplate her alone, lost to sound
and heat; and all creation paints itself black beneath her brilliant
expanse.
What solemn orgies! Long before the morning, I contemplate the image
of the world. And already yonder great tree has flowered. Straight and
alone, like an immense white lilac; bride of the night, it trembles all
dripping with light. Oh star of after-midnight! Not the pole-star at
the dizzy zenith, nor the red fire of the Bull, nor that planet which
is revealed by a moving leaf, clear topaz in the heart of yonder dark
tree,--none of these do I choose as queen, but high above them that
farthest star lost in infinite light, that my eye acclaims in accord
with my heart, and recognizes only to see it disappear.
DREAMS
At night, on your way to listen to music, take care to have a lantern
for your return! Shod in white, be careful not to lose sight of either
of your shoes; for fear that, having once confided the sole of your
foot to an invisible path through the fog, an unknown road does not
lead you hopelessly astray and the dawn find you entangled in the top
of a flagstaff or clinging to the corner of a temple wall as a bat does
upon the head of a chimera.
Seeing this stretch of white wall lit by the intense fire of the moon,
the priest did not hesitate, by means of his rudder, to drive his
little boat against it; and in the morning a bare, bright sea betrayed
nowhere any trace of his oar.
The fisher, having digested this long day of silence and
melancholy--the sky, the fields, three trees, and the water--has not
prolonged expectation so vainly that nothing is taken by his bait. To
his very marrow he feels (with the clutch of his fish-hook) the swift
tension of his rigid line, which, cutting the glassy surface, draws
him toward black depths. A leaf, twirling over, does not ripple the
transparence of the pool.
Who knows where you would not be liable some day to discover the mark
of your hand and the seal of your thumb, if each night before sleeping
you would take care to smear your fingers with a thick black ink?
Moored to the outer opening of my chimney, a canoe, hanging almost
vertical, awaits me. Having finished my work, I am invited to take
tea in one of those islands which cross the sky in the direction East
Southwest.
With its clustered buildings and the warm tones of its marble walls,
the locality resembles a city in Africa or in Italy. The system of
drainage is perfect, and on the terrace where we are seated one enjoys
pure air and a most extended view. Unfinished buildings, ruined
wharves, the foundations of crumbling bridges, surround this cyclad on
all sides.
Since the jetty of yellow mud where we live has been embraced by this
pearly expanse,--from an inundation whose progress I survey each
evening from the ramparts,--all illusion and enchantment mount up
to me. It is in vain that the barges come unceasingly from the other
side of the lagoon, carrying us earth to strengthen our crumbling
embankments. What faith I had in these green fields, road-divided,
to which the farmer would not hesitate to confide his seeds and his
labor! And then one day, on ascending the wall, I saw them replaced
by these waters the color of the dawn. Only a village emerges here
and there, a tree drowned to the branches; and, at this place where a
yellow gang was digging, I see boats as close together as eyelashes.
But also I read menaces in this too-beautiful evening! No stronger than
an ancient precept against voluptuousness is this ruined wall, where
the miserable soldiers who guard the gates announce the night by blasts
from trumpets four feet long. It cannot defend our black factories and
warehouses, filled with hides and tallow, against the night and against
the irresistible spread of these rose-colored and azure waters; for an
oncoming wave will sweep me from my feet and carry me away, lifting me
up beneath the arms.
And again I see myself at the highest fork of an old tree in the wind,
a child balanced among the apples. From there, like a god on his
pinnacle, spectator of the theater of the world, I study with deep
consideration the relief and conformation of the earth, its disposition
of slopes and planes. With the piercing eye of a crow I peer up and
down the country spread out under my perch. I follow this road which,
appearing twice on the brow of little hills, finally loses itself in
the forest. I miss nothing: the direction of smoke, the qualities
of shadow and of light, the progress of the farmwork, a wagon which
lurches along the road, the shots of the hunters. No need of a paper
wherein I could only read the past! I have only to climb to this
branch, and, across the wall, all the present is before me. The moon
rises. I turn my face toward her, bathed with light in this house of
fruits. I remain motionless, and from time to time an apple from the
tree falls like a ripe and heavy thought.
HEAT
Today is more arduous than the Inferno. Out of doors is an overpowering
sun. A blinding splendor devours all the shade, a splendor so steady
that it seems solid. I see in everything around me less of immobility
than of stupor, an arrested effort. For the earth in these four moons
has completed her production. It is time that her spouse kill her, and,
unveiling the fire with which he burns, condemn her with an inexorable
kiss.
As for me, what shall I say? Ah, if this flaming heat is frightful to
my frailty, if my eye turns away, if my body sweats, if I sink on my
knees, I will blame this inert flesh; but the virile spirit will soar
free in an heroic transport! I feel it, my soul hesitates, but nothing
less than the supreme can satisfy this exquisite and terrible jealousy.
Let others hide under the earth, obstructing with care the least
fissure in their buildings; but a sublime heart, pressed against the
sharpness of love, will embrace fire and torture. Sun, redouble thy
flames! It is not enough to burn,--consume! My sorrow would be not to
suffer enough. May nothing impure escape from the furnace, no blindness
from the torture of the light!
THE VISION OF A CITY
At the hour when, urged by an exalted foreboding, such a man as I,
wifeless and childless, reaches the level of the setting sun; as he
attains the mountain’s crest high above the earth and its people, he
sees the mysterious representation of a splendid city hanging enormous
in the sky. It is a city of temples.
In modern cities we see the streets and the different quarters crowd
and center about various markets and exchanges, schools and municipal
buildings, whose high pinnacles and distributed masses stand out above
the uniform roofs; but here the poised image of an eternal city, built
by the evening in the form of a triple mountain, discloses not a single
earthly detail, and shows nothing in the infinite ramification of its
construction and the type of its architecture which is not appropriate
to the sublime service it renders, although accomplished without
preparation or practise.
And as the citizen of a kingdom, whose road leads to the capital, seeks
to understand the plan of the immense place; so the contemplative,
gazing at Jerusalem, fearing to enter it with soiled sandals, studies
the interpretation of its laws, and the conditions of a sojourn there.
Not a nave, not a single plan of cupola or portico, but responds to
the observances of a cult; not a movement or a detail of stairs and
terraces is disregarded in the development of ceremony. The moats of
towers, the superimposition of walls, the basilicas, circuses, and
reservoirs,--and even the tree-tops in the square gardens,--are molded
of the same snow; and the violet tinge of their shadows is perhaps only
such a color of mourning as irreparable distance adds.
Thus one evening a solitary city appeared for an instant before me.
DESCENDING THE RIVER
Well, let these men continue to sleep!
May the boat not yet arrive at its port! Thus shall my misery be made
to hear my last word, or I at least have said it.
Emerging from a night’s sleep, I am awakened in flames.
So much beauty compels my laughter. What splendor, what brilliance!
What a wealth of inextinguishable color! It is Aurora. Oh God, how much
refreshment this blue has for me! How tender the green is, how cool;
and, looking toward the furthest heaven, what peace to see it still so
dark that the stars twinkle there!
But how well you know, my friend, where to turn and what awaits you,
if, on lifting your eyes, you need not blush to behold this heavenly
brightness! Oh may it indeed be this color which I am given to
contemplate! Not red, and not the color of the sun, it is the fusing of
blood in gold. It is life consummated in victory. It is the perpetual
renewal of youth in eternity.
The thought that this is only the day arising does not diminish my
exaltation in the least; but the thing that embarrasses me like a
lover, that makes me tremble through my whole body, is the intention
hidden in such glory. It is my admission to it, it is my progress
toward meeting with this joy.
Drink, oh my heart, of these inexhaustible delights!
What do you fear? Do you not see how the current, accelerating the
movement of our boat, leads us on? Why doubt that we shall arrive, and
that endless day will respond to the brightness of such a promise? I
foresee that the sun will rise, and that I must prepare to sustain its
power. Oh light, drown all transitory things in the depth of thy abyss!
Let noon come, and it will be vouch-safed me to meditate, Summer, upon
thy reign, and to include the whole day in my perfected joy, as I sit
amid the peace of all the earth in the harvest solitudes.
THE BELL
While the air is rejoicing in perfect stillness, at the hour when the
sun is consummating the mystery of noon, then the great bell, with
its sonorous and concave expanse swung to the point of melody by the
blows of its cedarn hammer, rings with the rolling earth; and soon its
sound, receding and advancing, has crossed mountain and plain until a
wall which one can see on the far horizon, with a series of Cyclopean
doors piercing it at symmetrical intervals, hems in the volume of its
resounding thunder and forms the frontier of its clamor. In one corner
of this enclosure a city is built. The rest of the place is occupied
by fields, woods, and tombs; and here and there, under the shadow of
sycamores, the vibrations of a bronze gong far within a pagoda deflect
the echoes of the monster as they die away.
I have seen, near the observatory where Kangchi went to study the stars
of old age, the pavilion where the bell resides under the guard of an
old _bonze_, honored by offerings and inscriptions. The outstretched
arms of an average man are the measure of its width. I knock with a
finger upon its surface, which sings through a six-inch thickness
at the least shock. For a long time I lend an ear. And I recall the
history of the molder.
That cord of silk or catgut should resound under the curve of the bow,
that wood, having been instructed by the winds, should lend itself to
music,--in these phenomena the artisan found nothing singular; but to
attack the very element, to extort the musical scale from primitive
soil, seemed to him the means of properly making Man resonant and
awakening his clay. So his art was the casting of bells.
His first bell was carried up to heaven in a storm. The second, when
they had loaded it on a boat, fell into the deep and muddy waters
of the Kiang. The man resolved to make a third before he died, and
this time he wished to gather into one deep vessel the soul and the
whole voice of the nourishing and productive earth, and pack into one
thunderous vibration the fulness of all sound. This was the plan that
he conceived, and the day that he commenced his enterprise, a daughter
was born to him.
Fifteen years he labored at this work. But it was in vain that, having
conceived the idea of his bell, he planned with a subtle art the
dimensions, curves, and caliber; or that, having extracted from the
most secret metals whatever listens and trembles, he made sheets so
sensitive that they would vibrate at the mere approach of a hand; or
that, from a sonorous instrument placed among them, he deeply studied
properties and harmonies. When a pure and faultless bell had issued
from the mold of sand, the copper side would never respond the expected
answer to his interrogation; or, if the double beat balanced itself in
even intervals, it was his misery never to feel life in them,--that
indefinable mellowness and moisture which is given to words formed in
the human mouth.
Meanwhile the girl grew with her father’s despair; and, when she saw
that the old man was consumed by his mania and no longer searched for
new alloys, but threw into his crucibles blades of wheat and the sap of
aloes, and milk and the blood from his own veins,--then a great pity
was born in the heart of the maiden, for which women come to the bell
today to venerate her image of painted wood. Having said her prayer to
the subterranean god, she clothed herself in wedding garments; and,
like a dedicated victim, having fastened a stalk of straw about her
neck, she threw herself into the molten metal. So the bell was given
a soul; and the resounding elementary forces gained this feminine,
virginal grace, and the ineffable liquid note.
Then the old man, having kissed the still warm bronze, struck it
powerfully with his mallet; and so lively was the invasion of joy at
the perfection he heard, and the victory of its magnificence, that his
heart languished within him; and, sinking upon his knees, he could not
keep from dying.
Since then, and since the day when a city was born of its widespread
summons, the metal has cracked and gives only a dying echo of its
former self. But the wise, with a vigilant heart, still hear at the
break of day, when a faint, cold wind comes from skies the color
of apricots and of hop-flowers, the first bell--in the celestial
spaces--and, at the somber set of sun, the second bell--in the depths
of the immense and muddy Kiang.
THE TOMB
On the pediment of the funereal portal I read an order to alight. On
my right are some broken statues in the reeds, and an inscription on a
formidable pillar of black granite gives with wearisome detail the laws
relating to sepulchers; half obliterated by moss a threat forbids the
breaking of vases, loud cries, or the spoiling of ceremonial basins.
It is certainly later than two o’clock, because I see that the dim,
round sun is already a third of the way down a dull and lurid sky.
I can only mount straight onward, to survey the arrangement of the
cemetery; and, preparing my heart, I start out on the road the funerals
follow across this home of the dead, in itself lifeless. First come,
one after another, two square mountains of brick. Their hollow centers
open by four arches on the four points of the compass. The first of
these halls is empty. In the second a giant tortoise of marble, so high
that I can scarcely reach his mustached head with my hand, supports a
panegyric column. “This is the porch and apprenticeship of the earth,”
I thought. “Here Death halted between the double thresholds, and here
the master of the world received supreme homage between the four
horizons and the sky.”
But scarcely have I gone out by the Northern door (it is not vainly
that I leap this rivulet!) than I see open out before me the country of
the shades.
Forming an avenue of alternate couples, monstrous animals appear before
me, facing each other, successively repeated kneeling and standing in
pairs; rams, horses, unicorns, camels, elephants; until, at the turning
where the last of the procession disappears, these enormous and ugly
shapes loom out against the straggling grass. Further off are ranged
civil and military mandarins. These stones are sent to ceremonial
funerals in the place of animals and men; and, as the dead have
crossed the threshold of life, it would not be suitable to give closer
likenesses to such replicas.
Here, where this large cairn--hiding, they say, the treasures and
bones of a very ancient dynasty--ceases to bar the passage, the way
turns toward the East. I am walking now among soldiers and ministers.
Some are intact and standing, others lie on their faces. One warrior
without a head still clasps the hilt of a sword in his fist. By a
triple-arched bridge the path crosses the second canal.
Now, by a series of stairs where the central hand-rail still shows the
imperial dragon, I cross the ravaged site of terraces and courts. These
are the walks of Memory, the fugitive traces of lives which, leaving
the earth, serve only to enrich it by decay; the steps of sacrifices,
the awful garden where what is destroyed attests its whilom existence
in the presence of what still remains. In the center a throne supports,
a baldachin still shelters, the inscription of a dynasty. All about,
temples and guest-houses have become a confused rubbish among the
briars.
And the tomb is before me.
Between massive projections of the square bastions which flank it,
behind the deep-cut channel of the third stream, is a wall which
assures us that the end of our journey must be here. A wall and nothing
but a wall, a hundred feet high and two hundred feet wide. Eroded by
the use of centuries, the inexorable barrier presents a blind face of
masonry. A single round hole shows in the center of the base, the mouth
of an oven or the oubliette of a dungeon. This wall forms the front
of a sort of trapezoid formation, detached from the mountain which
overhangs it. A low molding, ending beneath an overhanging cornice,
stands out from the wall like a console. No corpse is so suspect as to
require such a mass being placed upon him. This is the throne of Death
itself, the regal exaltation of sepulture.
A straight alley, remounting the sloping plain, crosses a level
plateau. At the end there is only the same mountain whose steep slope
conceals in its depths the ancient Ming.
And I understand that this is the sepulcher of the Atheist. Time has
scattered the vain temples and laid the idols in the dust, and only
the arrangement of the place remains, with the idea it expressed. The
pompous catafalques on the threshold have not been able to retain the
dead. The cortège of his vanished glory cannot retard him. He crosses
the three rivers, he traverses the manifold courts filled with incense;
nor is the monument that has been prepared for him sufficient to hold
him. He cleaves his way further, and enters into the very body and
bones of primitive earth. It is merely an animal interment, the mixing
of crude flesh with inert and compact clay. The king and peasant are
forever consolidated into this death without a dream or an awakening.
But the shadow of evening spreads over this cruel place. Oh ruins,
the tomb has survived you! And the brutal stolidity of this bulk is a
perfect symbol of death itself.
As I return among the colossal statues of stone, I see in the dried
grass the decaying corpse of a horse, which a dog is tearing. The beast
looks at me as he licks the blood which trickles down his chops; then,
applying his paws again to the red carcass, he tears off a long strip
of flesh. The mangled remains are spread about.
THE MELANCHOLY WATER
There is an intelligence in joy, I admit it. There is a vision in
laughter. But that you may comprehend, my friend, this medley of
blessedness and bitterness which the act of creation includes, now that
the melancholy season begins I shall explain to you the sadness of
water.
The same tear falls from the sky that overflows from the eyelid. Do not
think to accuse the cloud of your melancholy, nor this veil of vague
showers. Shut your eyes; listen! The rain falls.
Nor does the monotony of this constant sound suffice to explain it.
It is a weary mourning whose cause is within itself. It is the
self-absorption of love; it is the effort in labor. The heavens weep
over the fruitful earth. Not only Autumn, and the future fall of fruit
whose seed she nourishes, draws these tears from the wintry cloud.
Sorrow is in the Summer; in the flower of life is the blossoming of
death.
At the moment when the hour before noon is ended, as I descend into
the valley filled with the murmur of various fountains, I pause
enchanted by the gloom. How abundant are these waters! And if tears,
like blood, have their perpetual source in us, how refreshing it is,
listening to this liquid choir of voices, deep or shrill, to harmonize
from them all the shades of grief! There is no passion but could borrow
of your tears, oh fountain! And since the brightness of this single
drop, falling from on high into the basin upon the image of the moon,
satisfies my particular desire, not in vain shall I have learned to
love your sanctuary through many dreamy afternoons, oh sorrowful valley!
I return to the plain. On the doorsill of his hut,--where, in the inner
darkness, gleams a candle lit for some rustic fête,-a man sits, holding
in his hand a dusty cymbal. It rains heavily. In the midst of this damp
solitude, I hear only the cry of a goose.
THE NIGHT VOYAGE
I have forgotten why I undertook this voyage, and what matter I was to
negotiate, as Confucius did when he went to carry his doctrine to the
Prince of Ou. Seated all day in the depths of my varnished cabin, my
urgency, on these calm waters, does not outrun the swanlike progress of
the little boat. Only occasionally in the evening I come out to look at
the aspect of the country.
Our winter here has no severity. Season dear to the philosopher, these
bare trees, this yellow grass, sufficiently attest the passing of the
time, without atrocious cold or unnecessary violence. In this twelfth
month, cemeteries and kitchen gardens, and a country mounded everywhere
with tombs, spread out in dull productivity. The clumps of blue bamboo,
the somber pines above the sepulchers, the gray-green reed-grass,
arrest and satisfy one’s gaze. The yellow flowers of the New Year’s
Candlestick and the waxen berries of the Soot Tree give a real beauty
to the somber picture. I proceed in peace across this temperate region.
Now it is night. It would be vain to wait, stationed in the bow of this
junk, for the reflection of our wooden anchor to trace on the beatified
water the image of that waning moon which only midnight holds for us.
All is dark; but as we move on, propelled by the scull which steers
our prow, we need not fear mistaking our way. These canals permit of
numberless detours. Let us pursue the voyage with tranquillity, our
eyes on yonder solitary star.
THE HALT ON THE CANAL
Now,--passing the place where old men and women congregate, driven from
their far-off villages by the need of food, and traveling on rafts
made of their house-doors, guided by the domestic duck,--encountering
waters which seem as if they were flooded with rice, that they may
fitly enter into a region of opulence; pushing across this large and
rectilinear canal which bounds the rude high wall enclosing the city
and its people, where the exaggerated arch of a bridge frames with
evening the crenelated tower of a gate opening on the dark countryside;
by the wharf we tie up our boat among square stone tombs in the grass,
the crude material of epitaphs.
With day our investigation begins. We become entangled in a maze of
Chinese streets, murky and moist with domestic odors. For a long time
we follow the narrow footpath in the turmoil of the market-place, in
the midst of a people mixed in with their dwellings as bees are with
their wax and honey. I recall a little girl winding a skein of green
silk, a barber cleaning the ear of his client with a fine pincer like
the antennæ of a crawfish; a little donkey turning a millstone near
an oil warehouse, the dark quiet of a pharmacy within whose depths,
through the gilded frame of a moon-shaped door, two red candles flame
before the name of the apothecary. We traverse many courts, more than a
hundred bridges.
Winding through narrow alleys bordered by great sepia-colored walls,
we reach the richer quarter. If these closed doors should open to us,
they would show vestibules flagged with stone, a reception hall with
its large bed-table, a little peach-tree flowering in a pot, and smoky
passages whose rafters are hung with hams and bundles. Hidden behind
this wall, in a little court we find a monster of a wisteria plant. Its
hundred creepers interlace, interweave, tie themselves in knots, and
twine into a kind of manifold, tortuous cable, which, thrusting out its
woody, serpentine length on all sides, spreads over the trellis, hiding
its trench in a thick sky of mauve clusters. Let us traverse the ruins
of this long suburb where naked men are weaving silk in the débris.
We shall gain a deserted space which occupies the south side of the
enclosure.
Here, they say, was formerly the imperial residence; and in fact
the triple grating and quadruple framework of the consecutive doors
bar, with their granite outlines, the wide flagged road on which
we walk. The enclosure contains nothing but rank herbage; and,--at
the place where the “Four Ways” meet, which diverge toward the four
cardinal points under triumphal arches,--with an inscription like a
map displayed to the whole Kingdom, the imperial stele, defaced by the
fissures in its marble, slants on the decapitated tortoise which is its
base.
The Chinese show everywhere representations of that inherent emptiness
whose necessity they emphasize. “Let us honor,” says the _Tao teh
King_, “Vacuity, which gives to the wheel its utility and to the lute
its harmony!” These ruins and these fallow tracts which are found in
the same enclosure close to the densest multitudes, these sterile
mountains shouldering the most meticulous culture, and the wide expanse
of the cemeteries, do not impress the mind with a false idea; for,
in the density and mass of this coherent people, administration and
justice, religion and monarchy, disclose by contrasts no less strange
the same yawning vacancy of vain phantoms and ruins.
China is not, like Europe, elaborated into compartments. No boundaries,
no special statutes, oppose any resistance throughout her immense
area to the spread of her surging humanity. That is why, powerless
as is the sea to foresee its agitations, this nation which can only
be saved from destruction by its plasticity, shows everywhere, like
Nature itself, an antique and provisory aspect,--unstable, full of
hazards, possibilities, and deficiencies. The present always contains
the influences of the past and the future. Man has not made an absolute
conquest of the soil, a final and methodical arrangement. The multitude
still graze upon grass.
Suddenly a lugubrious cry overwhelms us! The guardian of the enclosure,
at the foot of one of the gates designed like an upright letter which
frame the field, sounds on the long Chinese trumpet; and we see the
horn of thin brass quiver under the force of the sound which fills it.
Raucous and rumbling, if he declines the trumpet toward the earth; and
strident if he lifts it; without inflection and without cadences, the
dreary blaring noise culminates in the reverberance of a frightful
uproar,--do fa, do fa! The harsh call of a peacock would not startle
more the drowsiness of this abandoned garden. It is the horn of the
shepherd, and not the bugle, which speaks and commands. This is not the
singing trumpet which leads armies on,--it is the collective voice of
beasts; and the herd or the flocks confusedly assemble at its sound.
But we are alone; and for nothing living does the Mongol trumpet at
this mysterious crossing of the Ways.
When we return to our boat, it is almost night. At sunset, all down
the horizon the clouds seem tinted with blue, and on the dim earth the
fields of _colzas_ shine like blows of light.
THE PINE-TREE
In Nature, only the tree is upright as man is, and for a symbolic
reason.
A man holds himself erect by preserving his balance, and his two arms,
hanging at his sides, are no part of his unity. But, though attached to
the earth by the collective grasp of its roots, the tree raises itself
with an effort; its multifold and divergent parts, spreading out into
a fragile and sensitive tissue of leaves, by which it seeks for some
support in the very air and light, constitute no mere gesture but the
very essential act and condition of its growth.
The family of conifers shows a special characteristic. In them I
perceive not only a ramification of the trunk into branches, but also
their articulation on a stem that rises straight and single,--an
articulation which gradually multiplies into threadlike leaves. The
fir-tree is typical of such a class, with the symmetrical intersections
of its branches, whose essential plan is simply a perpendicular crossed
by a graded series of horizontal lines.
This type includes many variations in the different regions of the
world. The most interesting is that of the pines I studied in Japan.
Rather than the rigidity usual to wood, the trunk appears to have a
fleshy elasticity. Under the tension on the strong, cylindrical stem
of compact fibers, its sheath splits and the rough bark, divided
into pentagonal scales,--with deep cracks between them from which
resin oozes abundantly,--expands in tough layers. And if, through the
suppleness of its jointless body, the trunk yields to the exterior
forces which violently assail it or seductively allure it, the tree
resists by its inherent energy; and the drama of its pathetic struggle
is written in the tormented twisting of its boughs.
Thus, along the tragic old road to Tokkaido, I have seen the pines
sustain the onslaught of the powers of the air. In vain the wind of the
ocean lays them low. Clinging with every root to the stony soil, the
invincible trees writhe, twist upon themselves, and,--like a man braced
on all fours, who butts with his head, kicks in all directions, and
hunches himself together,--they seem to grapple with the antagonist,
to re-establish themselves, and to straighten up under the Protean
assaults of the monster who would overcome them. All along the solemn
beach I have passed their heroic lines in review on this somber
evening, and watched all the vicissitudes of the battle. One leans
backward, and stretches toward the sky a monstrous panoply of halberds
and shields which he brandishes in Briarean fists; another, full of
wounds, mutilated as by blows of clubs, and bristling on all sides with
jagged stumps, still wars and waves a few feeble boughs; another, which
seems thrown upon its back, still battling against the dust, maintains
itself on the powerful buttress of its gathered haunches; and finally,
I saw giants and princes who, massively settling upon their muscular
loins, by the reiterated efforts of their Herculean arms, continued to
hold their ground on all sides against the tumultuous enemy.
I have still to speak of the foliage.
If I compare to the pines the species of trees that flourish in fertile
earth, in rich and mellow soil, I discover these four characteristics
in them; that the proportion of leaf to wood is greater; that the leaf
is deciduous; that, flattened, it shows an obverse and reverse side;
and, finally, that the foliage, growing upon the boughs, diverging
from a common center, is arranged like a single bouquet.
The pine grows in dry and stony soil; therefore its absorption of
the elements which nourish it is less immediate, and necessitates on
its part a stronger and completer elaboration, a greater functional
activity,--and, if I may so put it, more personal. As it is limited
in its supply of water, it does not expand like a chalice. This one
that I observe divides its foliage, spreads a handful on every side.
Instead of leaves which receive the rain, these are tufts of little
tubes which reach into the surrounding dampness and absorb it. And that
is why,--independent of the seasons, sensitive to more continuous and
subtle influences,--the pine shows a perennial foliage.
Thus I explain the aerial character of its foliage, fragmentarily
suspended. As the pine lends the irregular outline of its boughs to
the lines of the harmonious landscape, better to enhance the charm
and the brilliancy of Nature, it also spreads everywhere the shadow
of its singular tufts; over the power and the glory of Ocean, blue in
the sun; over the harvest fields; and obstructing the design of the
constellations or the dawn upon the sky. It sweeps its branches beneath
azalea bushes flaming near the surface of lakes blue as gentian, or
above the steep embankments of the imperial city, close to the silver,
grass-grown waters of the canals; and the evening on which I saw Fuji
like a colossus, like a virgin throned in the clarity of the Infinite,
the dark tuft of a pine was silhouetted against the dove-colored
mountain.
THE ARCH OF GOLD IN THE FOREST
When I left Yeddo the great sun was flaming in the clear sky. Toward
the end of the afternoon, arriving at the junction of Utsonomiya, I
perceive that a shadow has darkened all the sunset. Composed of huge,
heaped-up clouds, it presents that tumultuous and chaotic aspect
that a sky sometimes shows when, like the veiled fire of footlights,
a gleaming streak on the horizon throws long shadows across the dim
fields, bringing out each object in clear relief. Drowsing on the wharf
just now, and for a long time in the train moving westward, I have
been a spectator of the decline of day and the gradual deepening of
darkness. With one glance I have caught the whole plan of the country.
In the background, deep forests and the folds of cumbrous mountains;
in the foreground, detached footpaths which bar the way, one behind
the other, like spaced and parallel barriers. Where the trenches we
follow show us a cross-section of the earth, we see first a fine mold,
black as coal; then yellow sand; and finally clay, red with sulphur or
cinnabar. Avernus spreads out before us! Does not this scorching sun,
this low sky, this surrounding harshness of volcanoes and fir-trees,
correspond to that black abyss from which the visions of dreams arise?
Indeed it was with a royal wisdom that the ancient shogun, Ieyasu,
chose this place for his disembodied spirit to enter the kingdom of
shades, and, by dissolving in silence into their shadows, transmute
death into godhead as a temple is created of a tomb.
The forest of cryptomeria is truly a temple.
Often before, at this hour of somber twilight, I had crossed the double
avenue of these giant trees,--which extends twenty leagues to conduct
from the red bridge the annual ambassador who bears Imperial presents
to this ancestral shrine,--but this morning, at the hour when the
first rays of the sun turned the banks of somber verdure above me to
rose color in the golden wind which swept them, I penetrated into the
colossal nave, deliciously filled with a resinous odor, after the cold
night.
The cryptomeria belong to the family of pines, and the Japanese have
named it sengui. It is a very tall tree, whose trunk, free of twists
and knots, maintains an inviolable rectitude. There are no branches,
but indicated here and there, as is the way with pines, not by detail
and relief but by mass and contour, the leaves float like tatters of
black smoke about the mystic pillar; and the forest of these tall
trunks, all of the same height, loses itself in the tangled canopy of
shadowy, inextricable foliage. The place is simultaneously limitless
and confined, filled and empty.
The marvelous houses are scattered among these trees that have been
parked for centuries.
I shall not describe the whole plan of the shaded city, though it is
marked on my fan to the minutest detail. In the middle of the dedicated
forest I have followed enormous avenues that a scarlet torii bars.
At a bronze basin, under a roof inlaid with the moon, I have filled
my mouth with lustral waters; I have climbed the stairs; among many
pilgrims I have passed indescribable opulence and space, the entrance
to an enclosure that is like a dream formed of a confusion of flowers
and birds; barefoot, I have penetrated to its innermost golden heart.
I have seen the priests with haughty faces,--with head-dresses of
horsehair, and clothed with ample trousers of green silk,--offer the
morning sacrifice to the sound of flute and mouth-organ. And for me the
sacred _kagura_,--his face framed in white linen, holding the tasseled
bough of the pine devoutly between his hands,--has executed the dance
which consists of continual advance and retreat.
As Chinese architecture has for its chief element the baldachin;
stories being raised as on the poles of a pastoral tent; so, in Japan,
the roofs made of tiles, or those made of a substance as powerful,
strong, and light as a thick felt, show but a slight curve; they are no
more, in their elegant power, than a cover; and all this construction
evolves from the idea of a box.
Since the time when Jingô Tennô conquered the isles of the rising sun
with his fleet, the Japanese have everywhere preserved some signs of
the sea: the habit of tucking up their clothes to the waist, these low
cabins which are their homes under an uncertain sun, the multitude
of neat little objects and their careful stowage, the absence of
furniture,--do they not all betray the confined life of the sailor on
his precarious deck? And these wooden houses are themselves nothing
more than the enlarged cabin of a galley, or the box of a palanquin.
The extensions, intersected by carpentry; the oblique shafts, of which
the figured heads jut out at four angles; still recall the quality of
being portable. Among the columns of the temple, arches seem the means
by which it may be lifted.
Houses? Yes. Here the very sanctuary is a house. They have relegated
the bones, sealed in a cylinder of bronze, to the high mountainside;
but in this room, seated on the unalterable name, the soul of the
dead continues a spectral habitation in obscure and secret splendor.
Reversing the procedure which employs wood and stone and makes them
of value without adding any strange element to their own properties,
artifice has existed here only to annihilate its material. These
enclosures, the sides of these boxes, these floors and ceilings, are no
longer made of beams and planks but of certain opaque images conjured
forth. Color decorates and adorns the wood, lacquer drowns it under
impenetrable waters, paint covers it with enchantments, sculpture
deeply undermines and transfigures it. An end of timber--the least
spike appearing on the magic surface--is covered with arabesques and
interlacing lines; but, as on screens we see trees in flower and
mountains steeped in a radiant glow, these palaces emerge entirely
golden. On the roofs, on the façades, which strike the full light of
day, only the ridges are burnished with scattered brightness; but the
sides are brightened in vast surfaces through the shadow; and inside
also, the six walls of the box are painted with the splendors of hidden
treasure, flaming brilliance revealed by numerous mirrors.
Thus the magnificent shogun does not inhabit a house of mere wood, but
his dwelling in the center of the forest is in the light of setting
suns; and ambrosial incense abides beneath these sweeping boughs.
Through the immense spaces of this region, deeply slumbering like a god
amid its sea of trees, an occasional dazzling cascade plashes between
the leaves, mingling with their ceaseless whisper.
THE PEDESTRIAN
In June, with a gnarled stick in my hand (like the god Bishamon), I am
that mysterious passer-by who crosses the path of groups of simple,
ruddy peasants; and, at six in the evening, while the storm-cloud in
the sky endlessly continues its monstrous assault on the mountain, I am
that lonely man one sees upon this abandoned road.
I am going nowhere in particular. My wanderings are without end and
without profit. The itinerary of the soldier or the merchant, the piety
of the sterile woman who, with hopeful humility, seven times makes a
tour of the holy peak,--these have nothing in common with my travels.
The footprint pointed in the usual direction does not allure my own
far enough to lead me astray; and soon, urged by the intimacy there
is in treading this moss through the heart of the woods, to pick the
black leaf of a camellia by the weeping of a secret waterfall,--I flee
suddenly, like an awkward deer. Then, amid the silence of growing
things, poised on one foot, I await the echo. How fresh and comic the
song of this little bird seems to me! And how the cry of the rooks
below delights me! Each tree has its personality, each little beast
his part, each voice its place in the symphony; as they say music is
comprehended, so I comprehend Nature.
It is like a story of many details, where only the proper names are
given. As my walk--and the day--proceeds, I advance also in the
development of a philosophy. Already I have discovered with delight
that all things exist in a certain accord; and, though believing
this secret relationship, by which the blackness of this pine below
espouses the clear green of these maples, it is my purified sight only
which establishes it; so, because of this restoration of the original
design, I call my visit a Revision. I am the Inspector of Creation,
the Verifier of all present things. The reality of this world is the
cause of my beatitude. In ordinary hours we employ things for their
usefulness, forgetting their purer value: that they should exist at
all. But when, after a long effort, pushing through branches and
briars, I place my hand on the burning shoulder of this heavy rock in
the heart of a glade, the entry of Alexander into Jerusalem is alone
comparable to the sublimity of my achievement.
And I go on and on! Each one of us contains in himself the autonomous
power of motion by which he moves toward his food and his work. As for
me, the even motion of my legs serves to measure for me the intensity
of more subtle appeals. The allurement of everything! I feel it in the
silence of my soul. I understand the harmony of the world. When shall I
surprise its melody?
HERE AND THERE
In the street called Nihon Bashi, near the merchants of books and
lanterns, of embroideries and bronzes, miniature gardens are sold;
and, as a studious idler amid this fantastic display, I mentally
compare these little fragments of the world. The artists have subtly
shown themselves masters of the exquisite laws by which the lines of a
landscape are composed, like those of a physiognomy. Instead of drawing
nature they reproduce it, constructing their counterfeits from the very
elements of the original, which they borrow--as a rule is illustrated
by an example. These images are usually exact and perfect replicas.
All sorts and kinds of pines, for instance, are offered me to choose
from; and their position in the jar, with their height as a scale,
proportionately shows the dimensions of their original territory. Here
is a rice-field in Springtime; in the distance is a hill fringed with
trees (they are made of moss). Here is the sea, with its archipelago
and its capes! By the artifice of two stones, one black, one red, and
rather worn and porous, they have represented two islands that appear
to be joined together, whose difference in distance is shown only by
their different colors, apparently due to the light of the setting sun.
And even the many-colored sunset is represented by this bed of motley
pebbles covered with the contents of two carafes.
Now, to amplify my thought!
The European artist copies nature according to the sentiment that
he has for it. The Japanese imitates it according to the materials
with which it furnishes him. One expresses himself, the other
expresses nature. One creates, the other mimics. One paints, the other
constructs. One is a student; the other, in a way, a master. One
reproduces in its detail the spectacle that he surveys with a searching
and subtle gaze; the other disengages its law with a flash of the
eye, in the freedom of his fancy; and applies it with a scriptural
conciseness.
Here the first inspiration of the artist is the material on which
he exercises his hand. Good-humoredly, he consults its intrinsic
properties, its tints; and, appropriating the soul of the brute thing,
he constitutes himself its interpreter. Of all the things that he might
say, he expresses only the essential and significant characteristics;
and, merely making a few shy indications here and there, leaves to the
paper the task of concealing all those infinite complexities which
are implied freely because they are taken for granted. It is a frolic
of certitude, it is caprice with restraint; and the underlying idea,
snared by such a method of argument, imposes itself upon us with an
insidious conviction.
Now, first of all, to speak of Color! We note that the Japanese
artist has reduced his palette to a limited number of general and
predetermined tones. He understands that the beauty of a color
resides less in its intrinsic quality than in its implicit accord
with contrasted tones. And because of the unmodified blending of two
values laid on in equal quantities, he repairs the omission of the many
intermediate shades by the vivacity that he gives to the juxtaposition
of the essential notes; calmly indicating one repetition or two. He
knows that the value of a tone results more from its position than
from its intensity; master of keys, he transposes them as he will.
Furthermore, as color is nothing less than the particular homage that
all visible things render to the universal light, everything fitly
takes its place within the frame through the power of color, in accord
with the theme that the artist has chosen.
But now the roving eye remains fixed; and, instead of contemplating,
it interrogates. Color is the passion of matter; it signalizes the
participation of each object in the common source of glory. Design
expresses the energy proper to each being; his action, his rhythm,
his postures. The one makes manifest his relations to space, the
other fixes his movement in time. One gives the form, the other gives
the sense. And as the Japanese, careless of relief, paints only by
contour and mass, the chief characteristic of his design is a schematic
stroke. While the tones are in contrast, the lines are in unity; and
while the painting is a harmony, the design is an idea; and if the
interpretation of this idea comes in a flash of recognition, complete
and instantaneous, the design has a satisfactory abstract significance
and expresses the idea in all its purity, just as well as might a word
made of letters. Each form, each movement, each group furnishes its
hieroglyph.
I understand this when I revel among these bundles of Japanese prints.
At Shidzuoka, among the ex-votos of the temple, I have seen many
admirable examples of this art. A warrior leaps from the vermilion
wood like a frantic exclamation. This prancing or kicking thing is no
longer the picture of a horse, but the symbol of his revolt against
bondage; a sort of reversed figure 6, equipped with a mane and tail,
represents his repose in the grass. Embraces, battles, landscapes,
crowds, fitted into a small space, resemble the designs on seals. This
man bursts into laughter; and, falling, he no longer seems a man, but
immediately becomes his own character in writing.
With horrible and careless crudity, the French or English construct
barbarous barracks; pitiless toward the earth they disfigure, concerned
only with their expansion, seizing upon all possible space with their
eyes, if not with their hands. They exploit a view as they would a
waterfall. The Oriental knows enough to flee from vast landscapes,
where multifold aspects and divergent lines do not lend themselves
to that exquisite co-ordination between the eye and the view which
alone makes a sojourn possible for him. His home is not open to all
the winds. Choosing a retreat in some peaceful valley, his care is
to achieve a perfect location where his view composes so harmonious
a landscape that it is impossible to imagine seeing it otherwise.
His eyes furnish him with all the elements of happiness, and he
replaces furniture with open windows. Inside, the art of the painter,
ingeniously tracing his visions upon a fictitiously transparent window,
multiplies the imaginary openings. In the ancient imperial palace that
I visited, its magnificent and movable treasures had been carried away,
and there remained only the pictorial decorations arranged in a black
room,--the familiar visions of its august inhabitant.
The paper dwelling is composed of successive apartments, divided by
partitions which slide on moldings. A single theme of decoration has
been chosen for each of the series, and it is introduced by screens
similar to the wings of a theater. I can prolong or shorten my
contemplation at will. I am less the spectator of the painter than his
host; each subject is expressed by a choice in harmony with the tone
of the paper, a color representing the opposite end of the gamut. It
is so at Gosho. An indigo and cream motif suffices for the room called
“Freshness and Purity,” seeming all filled with sky and water. But at
Nijo the imperial habitation is done in gold alone. Emerging from the
matting-covered rafters, painted life-size, crowns of the pine-tree
extend their grotesque boughs along the sunlit walls. The Prince, upon
his seat, saw only great bands of tawny fire; and his sensation was of
floating on the evening sky with awful sunset fires beneath him.
At Shidzuoka, at the time of Rinzainji, I saw a landscape made of
colored dust. They had put it under glass, for fear that a breath would
blow it away.
Before the golden Buddha in the leaves, time is measured by the burning
of a little candle; and in the depth of this ravine, by the dripping of
a triple fountain.
Swept away, overthrown in the chaos and turmoil of the incomprehensible
sea, lost in the churning abyss, mortal man with all his strength
clutches at something that may prove solid in his grasp. That is why he
accords the permanence of wood, metal, or stone to the human figure,
and makes it the object of his devotion and his prayer. Besides their
common names, he gives proper names to the forces of nature; and, by
means of a concrete image which symbolizes them like a syllable, still
mysteriously conscious in his abasement of the superior authority of
the Word, he calls upon it in his necessities. Thus, like a child who
constructs the history of his doll from everything around him, humanity
in its memories unites all that it discovers with all that it dreams,
and so composes the romance of mythology.
Here beside me is this poor little old woman, who makes her salutation
by striking her hands carefully together before a colossal female
statue, in whose bosom an ancient prince, when led by a toothache and a
dream to honor the skull of an ancestor, inserted the worn sphere after
finding it wedged by the jawbone in the roots of a willow. At my right
and at my left, all the length of the dark cavern, the three thousand
golden Kwannon, each one resembling the others in the embellishment of
arms that frame it, are aligned in rows of a hundred, in ranks fifteen
deep. A ray of sunlight flickers over this barrier built of goddesses.
Seeking the reason for uniformity in this multitude, and from what bulb
all these identical stalks have sprung, I find that the worshiper here
doubtless wishes a wider sounding-board for his prayers, and imagines
that in multiplying the object of his entreaty he increases its
efficacy.
But not for long did the sages rest their eyes on the eyes of these
crude likenesses. Having perceived the unity of all things, they found
the basis of their philosophy in that fact. Though each individual
were transitory and capricious, the richness of the common fund
remained inexhaustible. No need that Man should apply his hatchet to
the tree, or his cleaver to the rock; in the grain of millet and the
egg, alike in the immobility and the convulsions of sun and sea, he
found the same principle of plastic energy; and the earth sufficed for
the construction of its own idols. Further, admitting that the whole
is formed of homogeneous parts; if, to better pursue their analysis,
the Sages turned it back upon themselves, they discovered that the
fugitive, blameworthy, unjustifiable thing in them was the fact of
their presence in the world,--and that the element in them which was
free of space and limitless of duration was the very conception they
had formed of this contingent character.
If a diabolical fraud had not led them astray at that point, they
might have recognized in the harmony of this principle of independent
existence (with its main idea common to all and its expression so
varied) a faith similar to that in the Word, which implies a vow--the
voluntary restitution of breath to its divine Source. For every
creature, born of the impression of Divine Unity upon indeterminate
matter, is the very acknowledgment that he makes to his Creator, and
the expression of the nothingness from which he has been drawn. This
is the living, breathing rhythm of the world; where Man, dowered with
consciousness and language, has been instituted their priest, to make
dedication and offering of them,--and, of his own nothingness united to
essential grace, to make a filial gift of himself, through love’s most
intimate choice.
But these blind eyes refused to recognize unconditional being; and to
him whom they call Buddha was it given to perfect the Pagan blasphemy.
To return to this comparison of the Word; from the moment that they
ignored the object of the discourse, its order and sequence escaped
them entirely, and nothing remained but the ravings of delirium.
But a horror of that which is not the Absolute is essential to man;
and to escape the frightful circle of your vanity, Buddha, you have
not hesitated to embrace Nothingness! For instead of explaining all
things by their final end, he searched in himself for their intrinsic
principle; and, finding there only nothingness, his doctrine teaches
this monstrous communion.
This is the method; that the Sage,--having banished successively from
his mind the ideas of form and of space, and the very idea of an
idea,--arrives finally at Nothingness, and so enters into Nirvana. And
people are awed by this revelation! As for me, I find that to the idea
of Nothingness they have added that of Enjoyment. This seems to me the
last and most Satanic mystery; the silence of a creature intrenched
in its final refusal, the incestuous quietude of a soul seated on its
integral difference!
THE SEDENTARY
I live in a corner of the highest story of a square and spacious
building. I have placed my bed in the embrasure of the window; and
when the evening, like the bride of a god, silently mounts her couch,
I lie at full length with my face turned toward the night. From time
to time, lifting an eyelid heavy as if in death, my sight has swum in
a rose-colored glow. But at this hour, emerging with a long sigh from
a sleep as heavy as Adam’s, I awaken to a vision of gold. The light
tissue of the mosquito netting waves under an ineffable breeze. Here
is light purged of heat; and I twist slowly in the delicious coolness.
If I put out my bare arm, it seems to me fitting to plunge it to the
shoulder in the consistency of this glory, to sink my hand searchingly
into the fountain of eternity, as tremulous as its source. I see the
magnificent lake of light spread with an irresistible intensity in
a sky that is like a concave and liquid basin the color of mulberry
leaves. Only the face of the sun, and its insupportable fires, only the
mortal thrust of its rays, can drive me from my bed. I foresee that I
shall have to pass the day in fasting and detachment. What water will
be pure enough to quench my thirst, to satisfy my heart? From what
manner of fruit shall I strip the skin with a golden knife?
But when the sun has reached the zenith, followed by the sea as
is a shepherd, and by the races of mankind arising in successive
multitudes,--it is noon, and everything that occupies a dimension
in space is enveloped by the soul of a fire whiter than lightning.
The world is effaced and the seals of the furnace broken; all things
have vanished in the heart of this new deluge. I have closed all the
windows. Prisoner of the light, I take up the journal of my captivity.
And now, with my hand on the paper, I write by the same impulse that
moves the silkworm, who spins its thread of the leaf that it devours.
Sometimes I stroll through the darkened room, through the dining-room
or the parlor; or for a moment I rest my hand on the cover of the
organ, in this bare space whose center the work-table fills, standing
intrepid and alone. Surrounded by these white streaks that mark the
fissures in my prison, I develop the thought of holocaust. Ah, if
it is enviable to dissolve in a flaming embrace, swept away upon a
whirlwind with vehement breath,--how much more beautiful the torture of
a spirit devoured by light!
And, when the afternoon is filled with this burning softness, by which
the evening is preceded, like the sentiment of paternal love; having
purified my body and my mind, I remount to the highest room. Seizing an
inexhaustible book, I pursue there the study of Being, the definition
of person and substance, of qualities and possibilities.
Between two rows of houses, the glimpse of a river terminates my
street; the enormous silver current smokes, and great ships with white
sails move across the splendid gap with a smooth and superb grace. I
see before me the very River of Life whose image I borrowed when a
child, to discourse of Morality. But today, stubborn swimmer though
I am, I no longer cherish any hope of landing flat on my face among
the reeds in the slime of the other bank, under the salutation of the
palms, in a silence interrupted only by the cry of a parrot. Although
the shrill cascade invites me, drumming upon the gravel behind the
fleshy foliage of the magnolia; although the fabulous boughs are
bending beneath their weight of myrobalans and of pomegranates; I will
think of them no more--turning my glance to a more angelic science, to
this mystic garden which is offered for my enjoyment and my recreation!
THE EARTH VIEWED FROM THE SEA
Arriving from the horizon, our ship is confronted by the wharf of the
Earth; and the continent, emerging, spreads its immense architecture
out before us. In the morning distinguished by one great star, as I
mount the gangway the earth’s blue apparition appears before my eyes.
To defend the sun against the pursuit of the restless ocean, this
continent has established the deep-set solidity of its ramparts. Their
breaches open into a happy countryside.
For a long time in the full daylight we follow the frontier of another
world. Carried along by the trade-winds, our ship veers and rebounds
upon the resilient abyss to which it confides its whole weight. I am
caught up to the Azure, I am stuck there like a cask. Captive of the
infinite, suspended at the intersection of sky and water, I see below
me all the somber Earth laid out like a chart--the whole world, humble
and enormous! My separation from it is irrevocable. All things are far
from me, and only sight connects me with them. It will never again be
vouch-safed me to set my foot on the solid earth, to construct with my
hands a dwelling of wood and stone, to eat in peace food cooked at the
domestic fire. Soon we will turn our prow toward the shoreless sea;
and, under an immense spread of sail, our advance into the midst of
eternity will be shown only by our signal lights.
SALUTATION
And again I am permitted to salute this land similar to Gessen and
Canaan. Tonight, as our ship tossed in the wheat-colored moonlight,
at the entrance to the river, what a sign the Dog-Star was to me, low
beyond the sea; the golden watchman at the foot of a stretch of stars,
glowing splendor at the far horizon! These flowing waters having led us
into the heart of the countryside, I disembark, and on my road I see
below me the image of the round sun repeated in the fields, ruddy in
the green rice.
It is neither cold, nor too warm. All nature has the warmth of my body.
How the feeble cry of these crickets touches me! At this end of the
season, in this testamentary moment, the union of the sky and the earth
(less sacramental today than it is amorous) consummates the matrimonial
solemnity.
O cruel destiny! Is repose always apart from me? Is there no peace for
the heart of man? A spirit born for one only joy can pardon no delay.
Absolute possession some day will not dry my tears! No joy of mine
will be sufficient to make reparation for the bitterness of this grief.
And I will salute this earth; not only with a frivolous jet of
intricate phrases, but with the sudden discovery in me of an immense
discourse circling the foot of the mountain like that sea of wheat
crossed by a triple river. Like that plain and its roads, I fill the
space between the mountains. With both eyes lifted toward the eternal
mountains, I salute the venerable body of the earth. Through the air
I no longer see its mere semblance, but its very flank, the gigantic
assemblage of its limbs. O borders of the slope all about me! It is
through you that we receive the waters of the sky, and you are the
recipients of the Offering!
This damp morning, at the turn of the road between the tomb and the
tree, I saw the somber and enormous hill barred at the foot by the
flashing line of a river, which stood out like a stream of milk in the
light of noon.
Like a body sinking through water of its own weight, during these four
motionless hours I have been advancing to the heart of the light,
feeling a divine resistance. I am holding myself erect in perfectly
white air. While I cast no shadow, I am celebrating the orgy of the
maturity of day.
No longer, under the sudden brilliance of a greedy sun, does the earth
burst into violent flowering. Lustral moment! A continual breath blows
to us from between the Orient and the North. The opulent harvest, the
trees weighed down with their burdens, stir ceaselessly under the soft
irresistible wind. The fruits of the great earth are stirred in the
purifying splendor. The sky is no longer high above us; brought low,
it submerges and damps us. I, a new Hylas (like one who watches fishes
below him suspended in watery spaces) see through this milkiness, this
silver wherein I am drowned, a dazzling white bird with a pink throat
flash into sight and lose itself in a brilliance that my eye cannot
sustain.
The whole day does not exhaust my salutation. At the somber hour,--when
the wedding procession, armed with flaming torches, conducts the bridal
carriage through the forest of orange trees, with all my being I lift
applause and acclamation toward the red Sign I see upraised above the
wild circle of flaming mountains.
I salute the threshold, the material evidence of Hope, the recompense
of man uncompromised; I lift my hands toward this exposition of the
color of life! Autumnal triumph, the foliage above my head is thick
with little oranges! But once again my gaze, which has been uplifted
toward Death from infancy, must return to mankind; like the singer who,
with parted lips, waits to carry on his part--his heart lost in the
beat of the music, his eye on his score.
THE HANGING HOUSE
By a subterranean stairway I descend to the hanging house. Just as
the swallow fashions her shelter with patience, between the planks
and the rafter, and the seagull glues her nest like a pannier to the
rock; so, by a system of clamps, bolts, and girders driven into the
stone, the wooden box that I inhabit is solidly attached to the arch
of an enormous porch hollowed in the mountain itself. A trap-door
arranged in the floor connects me with the world; by means of it on
both these days, letting my little basket drop at the end of a cord,
I have drawn it up filled with a little rice, some roasted pistachio
nuts, and vegetables pickled in brine. In a corner of the formidable
masonry, like a trophy made of Medusa’s tresses, hangs a fountain whose
inexhaustible lament is carried away in a whirlpool. I draw up the
water I need by means of a cord knotted in open meshes, and the smoke
of my cooking mingles with the spray of the cascade.
The torrent is lost among the Palms, and I see below me the crowns of
the great trees from which they draw sacerdotal perfumes. And, as a
shattering of crystal is enough to disturb the night, all the keyboard
of the earth is awakened by this neutral, hollow jingling of rain on
that deep flint.
I see in the monstrous niche where I am ensconced the very tympanum
of the massive mountain, like an ear hollowed in the temporal rock.
And, collecting all my attention, bending all my joints, I will
attempt to hear, above the murmur of leaves and birds, those sounds
which this enormous and secret pavilion undoubtedly gives access to:
the oscillations of the universal waters, the shifting of geological
strata, the groans of the hurtling earth under an effort contrary to
gravitation.
Once a year the moon rises at my left above this escarpment, cutting
the shadows at the height of my waist on so exact a level that, with
ever so little more delicacy and precaution, I could float a plate of
copper upon it. But I like best the last step of the stairway, which
descends into the void. Many times I have awakened from meditation,
bathed in the dews of the night like a rose-bush; or, in the
comfortable afternoon, I have appeared to throw handfuls of dry letches
like little red bells to the monkeys perched below me on the furthest
branches.
THE SPRING
The crow, adjusting one eye on me as the clock-maker does on his watch,
would see me, a precise, miniature person--a cane like a dart between
my fingers--advancing by the straight footpath, moving briskly along.
The country, between the mountains that enclose it, is as flat as the
bottom of a frying-pan. To right and left the work of harvesting goes
on; they shear the earth as if it were a sheep. I dispute the width of
the path, and my place on it, with an uninterrupted file of workers;
those who are going to the fields, spade at belt; those who are
returning, bending like scales under the weight of double baskets whose
form is at once round and square, joining the symbols of the earth and
the sky.
I walk a long time; the open air is as close as a room, the sky is
somber, and the long columns of stagnant smoke are stationary like the
remains of some barbaric pyre. I leave the shorn rice-fields and the
harvest-fields of slime; and, little by little, I mount the narrowing
gorge. Useless reeds succeed the fields of sugar-cane; and three
times, with shoes in hands, I cross the rapid waters gathered into
the current of a river. I have undertaken to find the source of one
of these streams that feed the river, here, where it arises in the
heart of a five-gorged valley. The ascent becomes more difficult as
the thread of the cascade extends. I leave beneath me the last field
of potatoes, and, all at once, I have entered into a wood like that
which on Parnassus served for the assembly of the Muses! All about
me the tea-plants lift their distorted shoots and their dry, somber
foliage,--so high that my stretched hand cannot reach it. Charming
retreat! Quaint and mysterious shadow, enameled with a perpetual
flowering! A delicate perfume, which seems to survive rather than
emanate, flatters the nostril while recreating the spirit. And in
a hollow I discover the spring! Like grain out of a furious hopper
the water from beneath the earth bursts forth, leaping and bubbling.
Impurities are absorbed. Only that which is pure, untainted at the
source, leaps out. Born of the roseate sky (gathered in what profound
matrix!) the virgin water, with living force, pours from the opening
like a cry. Happy those from whom a new word bursts with violence! May
my mouth be supplied forever like this spring,--which, sustained by a
perpetual, solitary renewal, cares not that it must serve for the works
of Man,--for those lowlands where, spreading wide and inundating the
tilth, it will nourish the vast, stagnant harvest-fields.
THE TIDE AT NOON
When the time comes that he can sail no longer, the mariner makes his
home near the sea; and when it moans he rises to watch, unable to sleep
longer; like a nurse who hears a little child complain in the night.
I do likewise, and, by the living virtue of the sea in my blood, my
mind communicates with the movement of the waters as does a city by its
secret drains.
While I am speaking or writing, resting or eating, I participate in
the sea, which rises toward or recedes from me. And often at noon,
temporary citizen of this commercial coast, I gaze on what the tide
brings us: the tribute of the ocean gathered into this flowing channel
in one wide current of yellow water.
I observe the approach of all the people of the sea, the procession of
ships towed by the tide as if on the chain of a barge, the junks with
their four bulging sails as smooth and stiff as blades, in a puff of
wind. Those from Foutchéou carry an enormous fagot of beams lashed to
each side; then, among a scattering of tri-colored sampans, come the
giants of Europe, the American sailing ships full of gasoline; all the
“camels” of Madian, all the cargoes of Hamburg and London, all the
carriers of the Coast and the Islands.
The air is very clear. I enter into a light so pure that neither my
secret conscience, it seems, nor my body, offer resistance to it. It
is deliciously cool. With closed mouth, I breathe the sunlight, my
nostrils open to the exhilarating air. Meanwhile noon sounds from the
tower of the Customs; the ball of the semaphore drops, all the boats
mark off the hour, cannon thunder, the Angelus rings its part, the
whistles of the factories mingle with the long tumult of the siren.
All humanity gathers together to eat; the sampan man at the stern of
his skiff, lifting a wooden cover, surveys with a contented eye the
simmering of his stew. The wharf-hands, tied up in thick bundles of
rags, each yoke carried over the shoulder like a pike, surround the
open-air kitchen; those who are already served, all laughing, seated on
the edges of the wheelbarrows, with bowls of smoking rice between their
hands, test the heat with the ends of their greedy tongues.
The regulator of Life’s level rises; all the sluices of the earth are
filled; the rivers suspend their course; and the sea, mingling her salt
with their sands, joins them, to drink fully at their mouths. It is the
hour of plenitude. Now the tortuous canals which cross the city become
long serpents of close-packed barges advancing amid vociferations; and
the irresistible waters, in their expansion, float bridges of boats and
dead bodies from the mud, like corks.
THE PERIL OF THE SEA
As I cannot eat, I remount to the poop, a piece of bread in my pocket;
and, staggering, deafened, blown about, I join in the wild darkness and
the indescribable confusion of noise. In this void, opening my lips, I
carry a mouthful blindly to them. Soon, leaving the binnacle, little
by little I can make out the form of the ship, and beyond, just at the
limit of the contracted horizon, the sea in the clutches of the wind.
In that black circle, I see the pale charging cavalry of the foam.
Nowhere about me is there solidity. I stand amid chaos. I am lost in
the inner caverns of Death. My heart is grasped by the bitterness of
the last hour. This is no menace brandished at me; it is simply that
I have intruded into the uninhabitable. I am of no importance. I am
voyaging through an indifferent element. I am at the mercy of the moods
of the deep, of the mind, of the powers of the abyss. In the cataclysm
that surrounds me, no compact holds; and the handful of human souls
which this narrow vessel contains, may be scattered over the waters
like a basket of bran. A delicate balance sustains me on the bosom of
this abyss which is ready to join with my own weight and engulf me.
To escape this disheartening sight, I go to my cabin and to bed. Head
to the wind, the boat lifts to the surge; and every once in a while
the enormous hull, with its iron plate and boilers, its armament and
storerooms filled with coal and projectiles, settles back upon the
waves like a rider who gathers himself, gripping tightly with his
knees, before a leap.
Then a little calm comes, and below me I hear the screw continue its
feeble and homely sound.
But before the day which follows is ended, our ship enters the lonely
port enclosed like a reservoir by a mountain range. Here is Life again!
Touched with an artless joy, I may resume my survey of the brisk and
lively spectacle, of the spontaneous play of common interests, of this
assiduous, multifold, intermingled activity by which all things exist
together.
Just as we drop anchor, the sun, through a gap in the mountains which
hide it, shoots toward the earth four jets of fire so intense that they
seem emissions of its very substance. Before raising them vertically
to the illimitable sky, this king, appearing upon the highest ridge
(Eye of our eyes, in the merciful possession of the Vision made
visible!) makes, at this supreme hour, a majestic exposition of
distance and origin. For a welcome I have this farewell, richer than a
promise! The mountain is vestured in rose and violet, the marriage of
light and night. I am overcome with a deep, strong sweetness. I lift to
God my gratitude still to be alive, and my whole being expands in the
realization of my reprieve.
This time I shall not drink the bitter waters!
ON LIGHT
I do not think--I entirely reject the idea that colors constitute
the first element, and that the sun is only the synthesis of their
spectrum. I cannot see that the sun may be white, and that each color
gives a share of its own virtue to it, and that their accord determines
it. There is no color without an extrinsic support; from which we learn
that it is itself an exterior thing, the diverse witness that matter
renders to the pure source of indivisible splendor. Do not pretend to
separate light; since it is light which divides darkness, producing
seven notes according to the intensity of its effort. A vase of water
or a prism, by the interposition of a transparent and thick medium and
the refractive play of facets, allows us to watch this in the act. The
free direct ray remains invariable, but color appears as soon as there
is a captured refraction, which matter takes to itself as an especial
attribute. The prism, in the calculated dispersive powers of its
three angles and the concerted action of its dihedral triple mirror,
encloses all possible play of reflections, and restores to the light
its _equivalent in color_. I compare light to a woven substance,--where
the rays constitute the warp, and where the wave of color, always
implying a repercussion, is the woof. Color is nothing more than that.
If I examine the rainbow or the spectrum projected on a wall, I see
a gradation in the nature of the tints, as well as in their relative
intensity. Yellow occupies the center of the spectrum and permeates
it to each edge, where the outer tones exclude it by degrees of
obscuration. We can understand it to be the most immediate veil of
light, while red and blue are reciprocal images of light metamorphized
into two equally balanced tones. Light plays the rôle of mediator; it
prepares the mixed colors by blending them in neighboring bands, thus
provoking complementary tones. In it and by it, extreme red combined
with green--as blue combines with orange--disappears in the unity of
white.
Color, then, is a particular phenomenon of reflection, which the
reflecting body, penetrated by the light, appropriates and restores
in an altered form. This form is the result of the ray’s complete and
ruthless analysis and examination which will not be denied.
And the intensity of tones varies, following a gamut of which yellow is
the keynote, according to the more or less complete response of matter
to the solicitations of the light.
Who would not be shocked with the affirmation of the classic theory
that the color of an object results from its absorption of all the
colored rays except that one whose livery it seems to wear? On the
contrary, I should think that color, which constitutes the visible
individuality of each thing, is an original and authentic quality in
it; and that the color of the rose is no less its property than the
perfume.
That which we measure is not the rapidity of light, but simply the
resistance that its surroundings oppose to it, while transforming it.
And visibility itself is only one of the properties of light; differing
with different subjects.
HOURS IN THE GARDEN
There are people whose eyes alone are sensitive to light; and to them,
for the most part, the sun is but a free lantern, by whose light every
one carries on his especial work; the writer with his pen, the farmer
with his ox. But I absorb the light with my eyes and ears, my mouth and
nose, and all the pores of my skin. Like a fish, I float in it and I
drink it in.
Just as they say the fires of morning and afternoon will ripen wine
that is exposed in bottles, as though it were still the grapes on the
vine; so the sunlight penetrates my blood and clears my brain. Rejoice
in this tranquil and piercing hour! I am like seaweed in the current,
moored only by a thread, its weight floating on the water,--or like the
Australian palm; a tuft with great swaying leaves, high upon a tall
trunk,--which last, flecked with the gold of evening, curl, wave, and
uncurl with the outspread balance of wide and supple wings.
The formidable aloe sprang, undoubtedly, from one of the dragon’s teeth
that Cadmus sowed over the Theban field. The sun drew this warrior
from a ferocious soil. It has a heart of sword-blades, a flowering of
glaucous thongs, belts, and straps. Sentinel of solitude, color of the
sea and the sword, its artichoke bristles on all sides with enormous
poniards. Persistently it upraises its harrows, rank after rank, until,
having flowered, it dies; and from its heart springs a flower like a
post, like a candelabra, like a standard driven into the final corpse!
By my order they have closed the door with bolt and bar. The porter
sleeps in his corner, his head sunk on his breast; all the servants
sleep. Only a pane of glass separates me from the garden; and the
silence is so complete that, all the way to the walls of the enclosure,
the mice between two floors, the lice in the breasts of the pigeons,
the bubble of a dandelion on its fragile stem, must feel the noise in
their midst as I open the door. The celestial spaces appear to me,
with the sun just where I had imagined it, in the afternoon splendor.
On high, a kite descends in wide circles through the blue; from the
summit of a pine a cone falls. I am glad to be where I am. My walks
in this enclosed place are distinguished by precaution and a taciturn
and quiet vigilance,--as a fisher fears to startle fish in the water
if he so much as thinks. There is no trace here of that free and open
country which distracts the mind and leads on the body. The trees and
the flowers conspire to my captivity; and, as in a child’s game the
player must continually go back and begin again, so all the turns in
this thick grass lead me to that furthest corner, where the wells are.
Across the little hill, by means of a long cord, I shake the invisible
pail. Like a ripening fruit, like a poet maturing his thought, I rest
in the immobility all about me where life is measured only by the
circling of the sun, by the beating of my pulse,--by the growth of my
hair. Vainly the turtle-dove makes her pure and sad appeal, heard from
afar. I will not stir from the house today. In vain the murmur of the
great river reaches me.
At midnight, returning from a ball where, during many hours, I
have watched human beings,--some in black, others in quainter
draperies,--turning in couples (each figure expressing incomprehensible
satisfaction) to the gymnastic modulations of a piano; at the moment
when the porters who have reached the top of the stairway lift the
curtain of my litter, I see in the light of my lantern, under the
torrential rain, a magnolia tree adorned with great ivory globes. Oh,
fresh apparition! Oh, confirmation of imperishable treasure in the
night!
The theme of the earth is expressed by the detonations of this distant
drum, as one might hear a cooper in a cavernous cellar striking his
casks with measured blows. The magnificence of the world is such that
one anticipates at any moment having the silence shattered by the
terrific explosion of a cry, the _taraba_ of a trumpet,--the delirious
exultation, the intoxicated elation of copper! The news goes about
that the rivers have reversed their courses; and, charging the swollen
streams, all the battering force of the sea descends upon the island
continent, to trade there the produce of the horizon. The work of the
fields benefits by this change; chain-pumps function and confabulate;
and, as far as the inundated harvest-meadows, mingled with the somber
prairie, mirror the guava-colored evening, all space is filled with
an hydraulic murmur. A ragged tuft of pine crosses the circle of the
moon. In another place, at this most shining hour, four lovers holding
a sugar-cane, stamping on the golden wheels of a press, make a stream
of blue and white milk flow like the water of the sea through a very
green field. And suddenly, against the blue, is thrust this young
Bacchic face, inflamed with passion and with a superhuman gaiety, the
eye sparkling and cynical, the lips twisted in mockery and invective!
But the heavy blows of a hatchet in meat show me clearly enough where
I am; and also the arms of this woman who, red to the elbows with
blood dark as tobacco juice, drags out entrails from the depth of
that great pearl-white carcass. A basin of iron, that some one turns
over, flashes. In the rosy and golden light of Autumn, the whole bank
of the canal is screened from my sight under pulleys which draw great
blocks of ice, baskets of pigs, unwieldy bunches of bananas, streaming
clusters of oysters, like pudding-stones,--and barrels of edible fishes
so large that they are garnished and polished like porcelain. I have
the energy still to notice these scales, where, with one foot placed on
the platform, one fist clinging to the chain of bronze, they overturn
the mighty heap of watermelons and pumpkins, and bundles of sugar-cane,
tied with blossoming creepers from which spring tiny lip-colored
flowers. And suddenly, lifting my chin, I find myself seated on a step
of the stairway, my hand in the fur of my cat.
THE BRAIN
The brain is an organ. The student will acquire a solid principle if
he grasps this idea firmly: that the nervous organism is homogeneous
in its center and in its ramifications, and that its function is
simply such as its mechanical efficiency determines. Nothing justifies
the excessive belief which imputes to the “white” or “gray” matter
(accessory to sensory and motor activity) the function of secreting
the intelligence and the will, as the liver does bile. A confusion
in terms seems to imply it. The brain is an organ, like the stomach
and the heart; and, just as the digestive or circulatory systems have
their precise function, the nervous system has its own, which is the
production of sensation and movement.
I use the word “production” designedly. It would be inexact to see in
the nerves simply threads bound together, agents inert in themselves,
of a double transmission; “afferent” (as they say) here; “efferent”
there; ready indifferently to telegraph a noise, a shock, or an order
of the inner mind. The apparatus assures the opening of a cerebral
wave, constant as a pulse, to all the body. Sensation is not a passive
phenomenon; it is a special state of activity. I compare it to a
vibrating cord, on which the note is formed by the correct position
of the fingers. By sensation, I verify facts; by movement, I control
action. But the vibration is constant.
And this view permits us to advance our investigation further. All
vibration implies a source, as all circles have a center. The source
of nerve vibration resides in the brain, which, separated from all the
other organs, fills the entire cavity of the sealed skull.
The rule of analogy, at the outset, forbids seeing in it anything but
the agent of reception, of transformation, and of digestion (so to
speak) of the initial commotion. One can imagine that this duty has
devolved especially on the peripheric matter which the white substratum
forms, as an agency of amplification and of composition; and finally,
that the complicated organs of the base of the brain are so many
laboratories, setting the scene for distribution, arranging keyboards,
installing the apparatus of substitution and of regulation.
We must now consider the vibration itself. By this I mean a double
movement,--one by which a body proceeds from a point to return to it.
Here is the element we seek,--the symbol which constitutes essentially
all life. The vibration of our brain is the agitation of the source of
life, the emotion of matter in contact with that Divine Unity whose
possession constitutes our typical personality.
This is the umbilical cord of our dependence. The nerves, and the
contact that they give us with the exterior world, are but the
instruments of our knowledge; and it is in this sense alone that they
are the conditions of it. As one makes trial of a tool, so we fashion
the education of our senses. We learn to know the world through its
contact with our intimate identity.
The brain, then, is nothing but the organ of animal intelligence,
sensitive only in the animals, intelligent in man. But, since it is
merely a particular organ, it cannot be the support of the mind, nor
of the soul. We could not do this discourtesy to any part of our body,
which is the active and living image of God. The human soul is that by
which the human body is what it is,--its act, its continually operating
seed, and (as the Schools would say) its form.
LEAVING THE LAND
The sea has come to seek us. She pulls at our cable, she draws the side
of our boat away from the gangway. With a great quiver, it increases
little by little the distance that separates it from the encumbered
wharf and the port of seething life. And we follow the heavy tranquil
water in its lazy windings. Here is one of the mouths by which the
earth disgorges, spewing its thick muddy waters forth to mingle with
the tangled grasses of the sea. Of the soil where we once dwelt, there
remains only its crude color, ready to liquefy. And, right before us, a
fire low down in the limpid air indicates the horizon and the desert.
While we are eating, I feel that the boat has stopped. Through its
body, and through my own, there is freer breathing. The pilot is
disembarking. Under the electric light on his dancing canoe, he salutes
us with a wave of the hand. They cast off the ladder, and we depart. We
depart in the light of the moon!
And I see the curved line of the horizon before me, like the frontier
of immeasurable slumber. All my heart despairs, with the thick sob one
utters falling asleep, as the shore recedes behind us and fades out of
sight. Ah, Sea, it is thou! I re-enter. There is no bosom so sweet as
Eternity, and no security comparable to uncircumscribed Space. Our news
hereafter will be that each evening will bring us the moon, rising on
our left. I am delivered from change and from diversity. Here there
are no vicissitudes but those of day and night; no solicitation but
the sky’s before our eyes, and no repose but the bosom of these great
waters which reflect it.
Cleansing purity! Here we may be absolved in the Absolute. What matter
now the fermentation of people, the intrigues of marriages and wars,
the operation of gold and of economic forces, and all the confused
scheme of things below? Everything is simplified to the immediate act,
according to the multifold passion of men and of things. Here I possess
the central rhythm in its essence: the alternating rising and setting
of the sun, and a simple fact; the appearance of the constellations on
the horizon at an appointed hour.
And all day long I study the sea as one studies the eyes of a woman
who understands. I follow its reflection with the attentiveness of one
who listens. In comparison with this pure mirror, how fare the gross
intricacies of your tragedies and your ostentations?
1900-1905
THE LAMP AND THE BELL
Of this sense of expectation through all the universe (and of my regret
still to be alive) one is the sign and the other the expression. One
is Duration itself, and the other--suddenly sonorous--marks a moment.
One measures silence, the other probes obscurity. One solicits me and
the other fascinates me. Oh sentinel, oh bitter patience,--double
vigilance! While one flames, the other apportions.
The night takes away our witnesses, we no longer know where we are.
Lines and tints, our personal arrangement of the world all around us
(whose center we carry about with us, according to the angle from which
our eye gazes at the moment), these are no longer present to show us
our position. We are reduced to ourselves. Our vision has no longer
the visible for limit, but the invisible for its cell. Homogeneous,
close, impassive, compact, in the bosom of this obscurity the lamp is
clear and definite. It appears full of life, it contains its own oil.
By virtue of its flame it is able to drink itself. It attests that
of which all the abyss is the absence. As it has taken a sufficient
supply in the evening, it will last until rosy light is in the sky,
until the dispersing of vapors like the fumes of new wine. It has a
golden provision to last till dawn. As for me, let me not die in the
night! Let me endure until the day! Let me not be extinguished except
in light!
But if the night closes our eyes, it is in order that we may listen
the more. Not only with the ears, but with the hearing of our
soul--breathing as fishes do. Something accumulates, in the darkness:
a number that must be sounded. I hear the bell, like the necessity for
speech, like our inner silence summarized, like the Word speaking in
secret. During the day we hear a whirlpool of ceaseless words weaving
through the activities of human beings. The night extinguishes them,
and only the measuring of Time remains. (I see, I listen). What does
this clock apportion? What is measured? What strikes? What is Time?
Here, to betray it, is the artifice of hourglass and clepsydra; the
snare of a clock forces the hour to declare itself. I see it; the
duration of time is reported to me; I am ruled by this march of time
and of all the hours. I have my escape, I contain the creative pulse;
outside of me the blow which suddenly resounds declares all the hidden
effort of my heart, the motor and the worker in my body.
Just as the navigator follows the coast of a continent, verifying
all the lights one after another; so, midway between horizons, the
astronomer standing on the moving earth, like a mariner on his bridge,
calculates the exact hour with his eyes on the most complete sextant
of all. The enormous scheme of things, the innumerable universe is
reduced to the establishing of these proportions, to the elaboration
of these distances! There is no trembling of the stars that does not
influence our emotions, no design woven by the harmony of the planets
in which we may not be involved. There is no star revealed by the
microscope on the photographic plate to which I may be indifferent. The
hour strikes, and by its act the immense sky seems to lighten. Between
the pendulum buried in the heart of a sick-room and the flaming angel
which successively reaches in the sky all the points prescribed by
its circular flight, there is an exact response. I shall not compute
another hour; I shall not face it with less decision for all that.
THE DELIVERANCE OF AMATERASU
No mortal man can, without incongruity, honor the moon by a public
devotion. She is the computer and the fabricator of our months, the
spinner of a thread avariciously measured. In the clear light of day
we rejoice to see everything in harmony, beautiful like an ample,
multicolored fabric. But as soon as the night is come, I find the
fatal shuttle weaving again across the web of the sky. My friend,
may thine eye alone avow it, glamoured by its evil light,--and those
five fingernails which shine on the handle of thy lute! But the sun,
always pure and young, always the same,--intensely radiant, intensely
white,--does it abate each day the flowering of its glory, the
generosity of its face? And who can look at it without being forced to
laugh also? With a laugh as free, then, as when you gather up a pretty
little child, give your heart to the good sun! Why, in the most shallow
waters, in the narrowest puddle left at the turning of the public road,
it will find something to mirror its ruddy face; and shall the secret
soul of Man alone remain so sealed that it refuses such an image, and
shows in the depth of its shadows no touch of gold?
Scarcely had the shabby race of sons of the soil commenced to dabble in
the mud of the nourishing earth than, pressed by the furious desire to
eat, they forgot the splendid sun, the eternal epiphany in which they
were permitted to live. As the engraver, applying himself to cut his
block according to the grain of the wood, occupies himself but little
with the lamp above his head, which lights him; just so the farmer,
reducing his whole view to that of his two hands and the black back
of his buffalo, caring only to plow his furrows straight, forgot the
luminous heart of the universe. Then Amaterasu was indignant in the
sun. She is the soul of the sun by which it shines, and she is the
breath in its sounding trumpet. “When the beasts,” she said, “have
filled their bellies, they love me, they rejoice with simplicity in my
caresses; they sleep in the warmth of my glance, lulled by the regular
beating of their blood within their bodies, the inner rhythm of their
crimson life; but Man, brutal and impious, is never sated with eating.
All day long the flowers adore me, and nourish their devout hearts in
the splendor of my face. Only Man is badly set on his stem. He deprives
me of the sacred mirror in him that was made for my reflection. Let
us fly, then, let us hide this beauty that is not honored!” Like a
dove which slips into a hole in a wall, she descended into a deep
cavern at the mouth of the river Yokigawa and, with an enormous rock,
hermetically sealed the enclosure.
It grew dark--not the ordinary blackness of night, but the very
darkness there was before the world was made. Crude and atrocious
blackness filled the living earth. There was a strange vacancy in the
sky; space had lost its center, the person of the sun had vanished like
some one who disappears, like a judge who leaves his court. Then these
ingrates knew the beauty of Amaterasu. How they searched in the drear
air! A great sigh ran through all the islands,--the agony of penitence,
the abomination of fear. As in the evening the mosquitoes in myriads
fill the stagnant air, the earth was delivered to the brigandage of
demons, and of the dead whom one could recognize by this sign: that
they had no navels. As a pilot covers his nearest lights, the better to
see into the distance; so, by the suppression of this central lamp,
space widened around them. And, from a part of the horizon unseen
before, they saw a strange whiteness beyond the sky, like the frontier
of a neighboring world: the reflection of another sun.
Then all the gods and goddesses, the familiar spirits of the earth,
which assist Man and are his companions like horses and oxen,--all
were moved by the miserable cries of the hairless creatures, like the
barking of little dogs; and they all assembled at the mouth of the
river Yokigawa, spirits both of the sea and of the air,--like herds of
buffalo, like schools of herring, like flocks of starlings. There the
virgin Amaterasu was hidden in a cave in the earth, like a honeycomb in
the hollow of a tree, like a treasure in a jug.
“A lamp is not extinguished except by a more brilliant light,” they
said. “Amaterasu is there! We do not see her, but we know that she has
not left us. Her glory has not suffered diminution. She is hidden in
the earth like a cricket, like an ascetic in the retreat of his own
thoughts. How shall we make her come out? What appeal can we make to
her, and what can we offer her that will be as beautiful as she?”
Then from a stone fallen from heaven they made a mirror, very pure,
completely round. They tore down a pine-tree and swathed it in
garments of gold and scarlet, like a doll. They adorned it like a
woman, and they put the mirror upon it for a face. And they placed this
sacred _gohei_ exactly in front of the cavern, which contained the
indignant soul of light.
What voice could they choose powerful enough to pierce the earth, to
say, “Amaterasu, I am here! I am here, and I know that you are here
also! Show yourself to me, oh vision of my eyes! Oh Life, come out of
the sepulcher!” The familiar voice, the first voice that she hears
when she passes the horizon of human life: the cock calling from the
farms on every side at the first crimson streak of dawn,--his is the
cry of light itself, the trumpet that no obscurity can stifle! Night
or day, indifferent to the visible presence of his goddess or to her
withdrawal, indefatigably he carries on his fanfare, with precision
he articulates his faith. So before the buried Amaterasu they led the
great white bird. And he crowed. And, having crowed, he crowed again.
Then, as if they could not fail to respond to his summons, all the
noises of life awoke: the murmur of the day; active, interminable
speech; the sound of thousands thronging the hours; the vibrating
word whose rhythm is meted out by the bonze with his mallet of wood
in the depth of his temple. All these sounded at once,--all the gods,
responding to their names. They were very timid, very faint. However
Amaterasu in the earth heard them, and was astonished.
And here one must insert the image of Uzumé, just as, in the little
popular books, her picture interrupts the black shower of letters.
She had invented all this, the dear goddess. She had concocted this
wonderful strategy. And now she danced intrepidly on the stretched skin
of her drum, frantic with hope; and all that she could find to lure
out the sun was a poor little song invented for children: _Hito futa
miyo...._
_Hito futa miyo
Itsu muyu nana
Yokokono tari
Momochi yorodzu_,
as one might say: _One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,
nine, ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand!_--and as if one said
also: _All of you, look at the door! Her Majesty has appeared. Hurrah!
Our hearts are filled with happiness._
Then in the fury of the dance she untied her belt, she threw it
impatiently aside; and, with draperies flowing, laughing and crying,
she stamped and bounded on the elastic and resonant skin which she
struck sharply with her feet. And, when they saw her robust and buxom
form like that of a little girl, relief came into the hearts of all
and they began to laugh. _The sun is no longer in the sky, and still
there are not lamentations, but laughter?_ Amaterasu heard them, and
her heart was filled with chagrin. Unable to conquer her curiosity, she
softly opened the door of the cavern: “_Why are you laughing?_”
A great ray swept across the assembled gods; it leaped the border
of the earth; it illumined the moon in the empty sky. Suddenly the
Day-Star flamed in the lifeless heavens. As an overripe fruit bursts,
behold!--the blind earth could no longer contain the jealous eye, the
burning fire of curiosity placed in its center, the woman who is the
sun! “Why are you laughing?”--“Oh Amaterasu!” said Uzumé.
And all the gods in unison cried, “Oh Amaterasu!” prostrating
themselves.
“Oh Amaterasu, you were not with us; you thought you had withdrawn
your face from us; but look, here is some one more beautiful than you
are! _Look!_” she said, showing the _gohei_, showing the sacred mirror
which, concentrating the flame, produced an insupportable brilliance.
“_Look!_”
She saw; and, jealous, raptured, astonished, fascinated, she took one
step out of the cavern; and instantly the night was gone!
All the great worlds, that turn about the sun as an eagle circles his
prey, were astonished to see the day shining in such an unaccustomed
place and the little earth all devoured with glory, like a chandelier
which disappears in its own light.
She took one step out of the cavern, and immediately the strongest
of the gods leaped forward to close the door behind her. Before her
image, surrounded by seven rainbows,--adorable spirit, living fire,
from which, with the divine face, emerged only two hands, two pink
feet, and the curls of her hair,--so young, so formidable stood this
brilliant and essential soul! And, like the swallow which lifts itself
in larger and larger circles above the sparkling fields, so Amaterasu,
reconquered by her own image, mounted toward her celestial throne. And
Time began again with its first day!
At the doorway of the Shinto temples, by means of a cord of straw, the
earth still guards against the disappearance of its light; and, in the
last recess of the bare sanctuary, they hide, instead of the Eleusinian
fire, a little round mirror of polished metal.
A VISIT
There are long cries before any one opens,--furious batterings upon the
patient portal,--before the servant, grown conscious of this “concert,”
comes to recognize the stranger deposited on a litter in the midst of
his porters, before the door. For here there is no deep-sounding bell,
no button which, by the pulling of a wire attached through the walls
to secret mechanism, sets off a sudden explosion, like the squeal of a
beast that one pinches. The Black Mountain is the quarter where the old
families live, and the silence is profound. The space that Europeans
would reserve for recreation and games, the Chinese consecrate to
retreat. In this animal honeycomb, between these streets seething with
an unclean humanity, they reserve wide unused spaces,--empty enclosures
that are the inheritance of some distinguished person, and that
cloister his household gods. Only a noble roof can possess the enormous
shade of these banyans older than the city, and of these vines which
droop under the weight of their purple globes.
I have entered. I am waiting all alone in the little parlor. It is
four o’clock, and the rain has ceased,--or is it still raining? The
earth has received its fill of water; the soaked leaves breathe freely.
As for me, under this somber and friendly sky I know the compunction
and peace which one feels after having wept. Facing me is a wall
with an uneven coping, where three square windows open, each crossed
with porcelain bars imitating bamboo. As they adjust a “grille” over
diplomatic papers, which isolates the important words, so they have
applied this screen of triple openings to the wide countryside of
trees and water, and have reduced it to a single theme repeated as
in a triptych. The frame defines the picture; the bars, which let my
sight pass, exclude me, and, better than a closed and bolted door, make
certain that I remain inside.
My host does not arrive. I am alone.
THE RICE
It is our very teeth that we sink in the earth, in this plow that we
plant there; and even now our bread eats there as we shall eat. At
home, in the cold north, it is the sun who kneads our bread; he ripens
the field as the open fire cooks our pancakes and roasts our meat. With
a strong plowshare we open a furrow in the solid earth where that crust
of bread is formed which we cut with our knife and grind between our
teeth.
But here the sun does not serve only to heat the domestic sky like a
furnace full of coals. One must take precautions with it. When the
year commences, the waters overflow. These vast fields without slopes,
scarcely separated from the sea that they continue, that the rain soaks
without ever draining away, take refuge under the sheet of water in
which the peasants fix a thousand rice-frames. The work of the village
is to enrich the mud by means of many buckets; on all fours the farmer
strokes the mud and dilutes it with his hands. The Mongol does not
nibble bread, he snatches it with his lips, he gulps it down, without
fashioning a semi-liquid aliment of it in his mouth. So the rice grows,
as it is cooked, in steam; and the intention of its people is to
furnish all the water it will need to sustain the heat of the celestial
furnace. Also, when the waters rise, the chain-pumps sing like crickets
everywhere; and they do not have recourse to the buffalo. Side by side,
clinging to the same bar and pressing the red handle with knees in
unison, men and women watch the kitchen of their field as a housewife
watches a smoking dinner. And the Annamite carries the water in a
sort of spoon; in his black soutane, with his little tortoise head,
as yellow as mustard, he is the weary sacristan of the mire. How many
reverences and genuflections there are when, with a bucket fastened
to two cords, the pair of _nhaques_ go seeking in all the hollows for
juicy mud with which to anoint the earth and make it good to eat.
THE PERIOD
I stop. There is a period to my walk as to a phrase that is finished.
It is the title of a tomb at my feet, at this turning where the road
descends. From there I take my last view of the earth. I survey the
country of the dead. With its groups of pines and olive trees, it
spreads out between the deep fields that enclose it. Everywhere there
is consummate plenty: Ceres has embraced Persephone. Inescapably this
marks the ultimate. I recognize at the foot of these unchangeable
mountains the wide line of the river. I define our frontier, I accept
it. My exile is symbolized by this island crowded with the dead,
devoured by its harvests. Standing alone amid a buried people, my
feet among the names spoken by the grass, I watch this cleft in the
mountains, through which the soft wind, like a growling dog, has tried
for two days to force the enormous cloud it has drawn from the waters
behind me.
It is done; the day is completely gone. There is nothing left but to
return, traversing again the road that leads me to the house. At this
halt, where rest the carriers of coffins and buckets, I look behind me
for a long time at the yellow road where the living fare with the dead,
which ends like a red period upon the crowded sky.
THE TOAST TO A FUTURE DAY
I have climbed to the highest point of the mountain to drink a toast to
a future day,--to a new day, to one that will come,--perhaps it will
succeed this very night. _To the highest point of the mountain, in this
cup of ice that it lifts to the very lips of Aurora!_ I have stripped
and rushed into it. It is so full that, when I enter, the water
overflows like a cataract. I dance in the ebullition of the source like
a grape-seed in a glass of champagne. I cannot distinguish this gushing
basin in which I splash from the whirlpool of air separated from me by
a narrow brink. Far below me circles the clamorous eagle. Beautiful
Aurora, like a shaft thou art sped here from the sea below among the
islands! Drink! that I may feel the quivering of thy insatiate lip as
deep as the submerged plants to which I sink. Let the sun rise! that I
may see the light shadow of my suspended body painted beneath me on the
sand of this basin ringed with the seven-colored rainbow.
THE DAY OF THE FEAST OF ALL THE RIVERS
On this day of the feast of all the rivers we are going to salute
our own, which is wide and rapid. It is the outlet of the country,
it is the force enclosed in her sides, it is the liquefaction of the
substance of the earth, it is the outpouring of the water hidden in
the most secret of her folds, of milk under the impulsion of the ocean
which suckles her. Here, under the good old granite bridge; between
the boats from the mountain which bring us minerals and sugar, and, on
the other side, the many-colored junks of the sea, which from their
anchorage direct toward the impassive piles their great patient eyes,
like those of beasts of burden; the river pours out through sixty
arches. What an uproar, what a white foam it makes, when Aurora sounds
her trumpet,--when the Evening recedes, to the beating of drums. Here
are no piers like those dreary egresses of the Occident. On a level
with the river, in a domestic familiarity, each one comes to wash
linen, to draw the water for supper. And, in the Springtime, in the
turbulence of his joy, this dragon with undulant coils invades our
streets and our houses. He effaces with one lick of his tongue the
accumulated filth of the village.
But today is the feast of the river. We celebrate carnival with it,
in the rolling tumult of yellow waters. If you cannot pass the day
in a backwater, sunk to the eyes like a buffalo in the shade of your
boat, at least do not neglect to offer to the sun of noon pure water
in a bowl of white porcelain. For the coming year it will be a certain
remedy against colic. And this is not the time to be avaricious. One
may unseal the heaviest jug, drink from a golden bowl or earthenware
vessel, one may drink from the very neck of the bottle the tea of
the Fourth Month! Let every one, on this afternoon of flood-tide and
full sunlight, come to feel, to stroke, to clasp, to ride this great
municipal water-beast, which flees with endless coils toward the sea.
Moving throughout its length, trembling from bank to bank with sampans
and with boats; where the guests, clothed in silk like vivid bouquets,
drink and enjoy themselves; all is light and the sound of drums. From
here, from there, from everywhere, pirogues with dragons’ heads appear
and defile, propelled by the arms of an hundred naked paddlers, who
move to the delirious rhythm of this large yellow man in the midst, as
with both hands he beats out a demoniac march. How close together they
seem,--in one wave, the very spirit of the current! How active this
crowd of bodies, plunged to the waist! On the bank where I embark a
woman is washing her linen. The bowl of vermilion lacquer into which
piles the clothing has a border of gold that shines and glows in the
sun of this festival. Brute glance of reflected brightness; symbolic
eye of this day of the honorable River!
THE GOLDEN HOUR
Of all the year this is the most golden hour! As the farmer at the end
of the season realizes the fruits of his labors and receives their
price, so the season comes in a gold to which all is transmuted, in
the sky and on the earth. I wander through the lanes of the harvest,
up to the neck in gold; I rest my chin on the table of the field which
flashes in the sunlight to its farthest boundary. Going toward the
mountains, I surmount a sea of grain. Between the banks of harvest,
the immense, dry flame of the morning-colored plain, where is the old
dim earth? Water is changed into wine; oranges gleam in the silent
branches. All is ripe; grain and straw, and the fruit with the leaf. It
is indeed golden. All is finished, and I see that all is true. In the
fervent effort of the year all color has evaporated. Suddenly, to my
eyes, the earth is like a sun. Let me not die before the golden hour!
DISSOLUTION
Again I am carried back over the indifferent liquid sea. When I am
dead, nothing can hurt me. When I shall be interred between my father
and mother, nothing will make me suffer more. They cannot jeer any
longer at this too ardent heart. The sacrament of my body will dissolve
in the interior of the earth; but, like a most piercing cry, my soul
will repose in the bosom of Abraham. Now everything is dissolved, and
with a dull and heavy eye I search about me in vain for the familiar
land and the firm road under my feet,--and for that unkind face! The
sky is nothing but fog, and Space is nothing but water! You see it!
Everything is blurred; and all about me I must search in vain for line
or form. For a horizon there is nothing but the cessation of color in
darkness. All matter is resolved into water alone, like the tears I
feel coursing down my cheeks. All sound is like the murmur of sleep
when it breathes to us all that is most crushing to our hopes. I shall
have searched in vain, I shall find nothing more beyond me--neither
that country which might have been my home, nor that well-loved face!
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