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!