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.