Part 8
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