The Navigators of Space Read online

  In the obscure and hesitant disturbance of those days, the lucid Dreams vanished, the joy of young flesh caused seeds to germinate in Luc as innocent and puerile as those of April, and, with the flux and reflux of his arteries, his brain fell prey to obscure dreams.

  V. Obscure Dreams

  1.

  It is the crepuscular hour: its softness, its immensity, its formidable defervescence; it crumbles, descends into the abyss of carillons of color, into slow symphonies on the slender faces of prisms.

  Soon, in a lower register, the vibrations darken, Orange weighing upon the collapsing depths. Then, for some time, the Red plaint, the suave and monotonous death-throes of the curved glow, the paling and vanishing of occidental streaks, the heavy crêpes of Purple and Ash-grey.

  Then, the twinkling of Antares in the moonless opacity.

  Then the brain, ceasing to vibrate in lucid labors, in a superabundance of sensuality, abandons the straight line of Consequence, the exhausting tension of directed Effort. In the august magnificence of contemplation, untroubled by logic, it accepts the impressions that surge forth, the Dreams without denouement, the beauty of Disorder, the breakage of the flux of Thought by the reflux of Instinct.

  And these are the things that flow in the dark Room, the chromatic events of the Brain contemplated by the Brain!

  2.

  Sediment of Great Rivers, which the centuries refine, O, go back to your Point of Departure, when the Frost and Chemistry, and the impacts of the Storm and the efforts of the Lichen mortified the old mountain contemporary with the Secondary Ocean, whence emerged the Beasts of Fable: Pterodactyls with scaly wings, Iguanodons standing in the mire of marshes, lifting their jaws to the tops of tall trees.

  Sediment, there was an era when the bare mountain, glacial and arid, seemed an offspring of Eternity, immobile for Eternity—but on the day when the primal snows melted, when the waters and glaciers hollow out the veins of the rock, Sediment, you began to descend in heavy blocks. Wedged into fissures, the torrent tormented you, and you had scarcely progressed a hundred cubits in a century when the marvelous Gothic spires of the summits began to sketch themselves, slender Steeples alternating with cavernous Pyramids. Sediment, you descended then in round pebbles, and then became the fine dust of sand, and finally you fertilized the plains and ran as far as the immeasurable depths…

  O, rivulets and great rivers, symbols of the red fluid which carries the Sediment in our arteries and will fertilize the valleys of the Flesh and the ravines of the Encephalum, O, go back to your Point of Departure, when the Frost and Chemistry, and the impacts of the Storm and the efforts of the Lichen mortified the old mountain contemporary with the Cretaceous Ocean!

  3.

  Marsupials, in the Jurassic matrix, when the atmosphere still weighed so heavily and you appeared, timid and exceedingly humble among the dominant beasts…

  The Reptiles had warmer arteries then, and those which advanced on to the promontories, and those which soared on their membranous wings, were the icings of a half-deaf and taciturn Creation. Crouched between the plantules,29 the pressure of oxygen would only have to remain constant, Marsupials, and you would have remained timid and exceedingly humble debris of the animal register. The King of Creation, clad in scales, with the three-chambered heart, would doubtless have been some Reptile-Human, immensely tall and oviparous.

  Ah, if the rocks had not drunk the atmosphere; if, in the lighter fluid, the blood of Saurians had not chilled their vanished wings and the colossi of their class had not died in the stagnating marshes, what would their world have become, and what subtleties, what variations of the pattern, what organic auxiliaries and corollaries, what languages and what labors, what weavings of forms would have been born of the Reptile-Human, with the three-chambered heart? What attitudes would he have imposed on matter, what metamorphoses on the terrestrial surface?

  Oh, Marsupials, if you had not known the gentler pressure, your loins would never have elaborated our Ancestors, Dinotherium, Hipparion, Machaerodus, and the day would never have come when the Anthropoid emerged mysteriously from the bosom of the tall trees!

  Marsupials, in the Jurassic matrix, when the atmosphere still weighed so heavily and you appeared, timid and exceedingly humble, among the dominant beasts!

  4.

  Do not imagine, Plum-Weevils, Vine-Beetles and you, Grain-Weevils, that the poem of your battle against Humankind does not move my soul. While your legions rise up in the mysteries of cereals and foliage, opposing the power of numbers and fecundity to the weapons of your ponderous adversary, I think of the subtleties of your series on organic algebra and my soul has never desired your annihilation more.

  Grasshoppers, Crickets and Locusts, avid and rapidly-multiplying races, when the stridulations of your love rise up, my heart enters into the tumult and trembles with mercy. Oh, when the Dragonfly and the Mayfly rise up from the banks of ponds, or a cloud of Midges drift in the arborescent summits, or hordes of Gnats couple in their millions on warm evenings, or the armored Ground-Beetles emerge at the corners of paths, fraternity torments me, purifies and enchains me in the gulfs of Life, in the menstrual flow where animal Colonies flourished, Isidae, Gorgonians, Madrepores,30 in the primitive time when the waves grew cold, where the lace of mother-cells floated in pale clouds and the troubled Energies confused Animalcules and Plantules.

  Oh, my nerves soon remember those abysms of Genesis, my flesh whispers mysterious debuts, and everything in my higher self, in my sensitive fibres complicated by millions of years, comes back and narrates their effort to construct me: Hydras, Nostocs and Thallophytes, Colonial Polyps, Tubeworms and Saurians crouching in the terrestrial marshes.

  Then, Plum-Weevils, Vine-Beetles and you, Grain-Weevils, and you, Locusts, Grasshoppers, Dragonflies on the banks of ponds, Gnats buzzing on warm evenings, resplendent warrior Ground-Beetles, I see you sketched in my bones and in my veins. Offspring of the same origins, formed by the same harmonious anastomoses, and the poem of your battle moves more intensely and more suavely, while your legions rise up in the mystery of cereals and foliage, opposing the power of numbers and fecundity to the weapons of your ponderous adversary!

  5.

  Great Dynamo rotating to the chaos of the wave, captivator of Forces whose subtle power runs along nerves of metal…

  Great Dynamo, through space along your frail conductors, here comes Life, and far from torrents, on the edges of Cities, the Wheels of the future are turning in silence and clarity, the Labors of the future whispering without exhausting the Artisan and without rusting his face. The horrible respiration of industrial monsters has vanished into Legend.

  Great Dynamo, over Metropolitan pallor, your Hymn is euphonic; a natural Atmosphere strays over the walls, and if it is not yet bliss, here at least is purity; overly harsh famines abolished humankind is elevated in the vital hierarchy, a creature of brain and blood exonerated from muscular weariness.

  The fevers of the Ocean and the wrath of the Abyss are your captives, Dynamo, and nourish you as much as the rays of the summer sun. From your rotating heart, slender veins extend through roofs and underground; and your supple force obeys the whim of accumulators, reducible to infinity, the slave of the humblest.

  Great Dynamo rotating to the impacts of the wave, captivator of forces, whose subtle power runs along nerves of metal!

  6.

  Long after the death of the Sun, on the Earth roaming the cosmic darkness, a light greyness quivered, the nebulosity of an infinitesimal gleam. A timid vermilion floated, suspended from a vault, scattered in unreal powder, then became grey-green. Then it extended a beam of light, a thread of stellar Spider-silk, exceedingly long, and on that filament perched some kind of Apparition with wings: wings of primrose-yellow and nemophila-blue, which opened, trembled and closed again over centuries…

  But as the wings paled, a metamorphosis occurred, into leaves of living paper, which persisted in opening, vibrating and closing, laying down through Infinity a
library of delicate books. And they were the works of Humankind, extinct for billions of years; it was the vibration on the diaphanous Spider-Silk of thoughts inscribed in the bowels of the Star by the metamorphoses of the Brains, which vanished into some nebula in genesis, and which began to nourish young Creations…

  Then, in further centuries, punctuated by a soft comet appearing in vaults of ink, the greening of Space paled tenderly, in a symphony of lilac sown with snowdrops and beams of light, and the works of humankind faded away. Then, in the death-throes of nuances, a frightful multitude of white worms began to climb slowly up the mountains, the most distant microscopic, twisted by the summits, the nearest vast, like pale boa constrictors: exceedingly soft boas, horribly blind, with neither pupils nor orbits.

  Then came the Frost again, eternal, and the eternal darkness, the Firmament on high strewn with the immutability of crystal stars, the fading away of all forms in the Immensity of Chaos, in the Immensity of Silence.

  7.

  There will be born, in the soul of the human elite, the horror that awakes in rare exquisite brains, the idea that the chain of Being has been broken. A prescience, instinctive today, reasoned tomorrow, will reveal how important it is that the ontological symphony conserves all its notes, and the peril stemming from an extermination of Genre, Species and Race. The terror is doubtless prophetic that thrillers in profoundly naturalistic individuals at the thought of an animality reduced to a minimum of types. It is the invasion of sterility: the certainty that the most adorable of our acquaintances, the gropings of the Eternal Artist, the genius of the infinitely delicate and the infinitely complex , the great poem of animal strophes, are threatened with absence.

  In order that the elephant or the giraffe might perish before their time, or the great Arabic Lion, or the fascinating Beasts inhabiting the plateau and the forest, the Axis Deer, the Bison or the poor crepuscular long-eared bat, or the colossi of the Ocean and any shade-loving plantule it is necessary, without very long hesitation, that there should be religious attempts at preservation.

  So, for the beasts useless as nourishment or in the service of humankind, Edens will be built. Calculated for all the inhabitants of the Earth, furnished with jungles or savannahs, brushwood or high forests, marshes, ponds, streams and heathlands, the poetic Beast and Plant, conserved solely for the sake of Art and Science, will live there in relative liberty and not in the horrible cloisters of our Sewers of Acclimatization.31

  Thus, in spite of the abominable struggle for existence, the beauty of creation and the sentiment of ontological grandeur will never be lost to humankind; and uniquely created, on this principle, out of respect for the venerable Mother, perhaps, over the centuries, the Gardens of Eden, the Arks of the Industrial Deluge, will eventually become saviors from cataclysms, or at least such precious indicators of the very progress of Humankind that our disinterest will be rewarded a hundred times over.

  8.

  Subtle sensuality of humid weather, beatitudes of the Hydrophile, when the cracked lips of the glebe have drunk the Storm, when the pure wells open in the shredding of the clouds! The blanched tiny creatures strewing the Earth, the sweet flower of renewal opens, and the clothes of the Hydrophile acquire a marine viscosity, an ineffable freshness strays over his pupils, bringing a tremor to the brackish lichen of his beard, and dips his soft leather shoes in the mire? Implacable, the blue Ether sets about drinking the moisture of the clay, and the Hydrophile gradually dries out, dries out and dies…

  Subtle melancholy of arid weather, terror of the cracked lips awaiting the Storm, when the frightful firmament is denuded of clouds with palpitating edges! Will the moment return when the tiny creatures strewing the Earth, when the Hydrophile dips his soft leather shoes in the mire?

  9.

  The Spark! She has seized in her feeble grip the frail tip of a blade of grass. She launches forth, animating herself, overtaking the fearful gallop of hinds, surpassing the bounds of panthers in distress, the hectic wing-beats of wood-pigeons. She hummed at first like an insect buzzing above the branches, but her voice has amplified into a tempest, swelling the horizons, drowning out the breathless clamor of lions, elephants and zebras. She has seized everything in her enormous claws, she agitates the ashen purple of its tresses, devours ancient forests, crosses eternal rivers, fleeing with the wind, insatiable and destructive—she, the Creator!

  She speaks, in her thunderous voice, in the sonorous bosom of the globe, she flows there, bearing away the fuliginous sulfurs, striking in resounding dust-clouds against the heavy walls, pupil of a hearth of thunderbolts, projecting prodigious lavas into the air, creating a growling fête at the summit of a mountain.

  Gentler, a friend of life, she filters subtly through avid pores, penetrates particles, swells roots, incenses flowers. Luring in the pulp of fruits, guiding the pistil toward the stamen, ardent to complete the amorous pollens, dilating the hearts and circulating the red rivers, she is the delicate enchantment inexhaustible and merciful!

  10.

  “Soul of things, whisper of the Expanse, when, on nights like this, the old hieratics constructed their adorable lies, did they glimpse Dynamos, Transmutation, Atoms and Luminous Oscillation? For me, the shadows remain, and god subsists in Force, and the disturbance of this darkness, the tremor of infancy, the aspiration of ecstasy in the dull contact of shadows, the Darkness in the depths of sensitivity!”

  “Is the answer written in the margins of the Abyss rather than in a few atoms? If Egypt makes Astronomical Science sacred, if the herdsman becomes a priest, is an understanding of the delicate prescience of Genesis preferable to the hypnotism of Enormity on simple brains? Are not the laws that radiate through Space contained in a corpuscle floating on a tide, O, wailing of the Infant-Human, verse of the young Word inscribed in Bibles?”

  “Are the harmonies seeking to weave the Beautiful, as the radiance of stars to weave worlds from the feeble light of empty space? Missal of the Petal, canticle of the amorous Beast, tremor of the Root, is your initial esthetic power surpassed, your feeble beacon flickering on the cliff?”

  “Does uncertainty alone exist? Every day, though, adds an affirmation to affirmations acquired. The incalculable horizon of probabilities shrinks before certainty, a wholly charming clarity dissipates the ancient shadows. No, not doubt but science. Whoever seeks may find. I seek.”

  “Is it necessary to marvel at mystery and not distress oneself with analyses: the brutalization of things, the annihilation of social joys, opposing the serenity of a Dream? Is it necessary to animalize oneself to the sensualities that muffle renunciations, mineralize oneself in causeless scorn, and wait?”

  “Ophiuchus, and you, Corona, and you, Capella, are you not the oil-drop of the Slide?32 And must I still, in the abysm of Space, demand the fundamental Principle? Simply to continue, without tiring, always condemned to imperfection, always aspiring to perfection, moving forward, erring, losing myself continually…but persevering, no matter how tremulous the beacon is! The road has no end! It is necessary to refuse to sit down, in dark despair, because, for each stage covered, a tremor of joy follows, in spite of the fact that infinity still extends ahead! I seek.”

  11.

  Your gropings, Planet, the sickly appearance of your Phenomena, the chaotic Destructions, the Negligences, the Ferocities, the Waste, the Injustice and the Inconsequence, bring forth, in indolent eras, the idea of some pupil of the Infinite, an Individual involved in nebular genesis to whom a parent or educator has given the problem of our corner of Space to resolve. Bent over our Universe, he slowly works upon it, and from the depths of his brain, the Theme has emerged, which he will vary according to inspirational phases. As the Duration and Logic of his actions are proportional to his power and longevity, however, as a Precession of Equinoxes is for him a drop in the timetable of billions of centuries, we promulgate laws in accordance with one page of his studies, the page that covers our igneous period (a sort of sketch and vague exordium) and our ontolog
ical period (a sort of narration by the sidereal Schoolboy, in which he attempts to move, hesitatingly, toward Order).

  In spite of the vertiginous transcendence of such an Individual, however, in spite of the complication of his methods and their exhausting harmonies, we have already discovered the lacunae that make impossible for us the conception of a merciful or omnipotent God, which allow us to glimpse that the incommensurable brain leaning over us is merely relative. And by virtue of that, belief in Rules, in the reality of all Ideality as well as all Experience, flows away—and the end of Logic, the vanishment of all our laws will be some caprice of the Individual in posing the problem differently, to the extent that neither Chemistry, nor Physics, nor the courses of the Planets will any longer correspond to our poor formulas!

  VI. Dispersal

  1.

  Luc fell ill. The existence of populations of tiny fibers was painfully disrupted. Less curious, they received life in a dream, forgetting to re-elaborate themselves. The blood went to sleep in such vessels; in their narrow vestibules, the nerves scarcely reacted to the environment. That caused his eyes to grow pale, hammer-blows in the left side of the skull, and his skin and hair to become dull.