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II

Alchemy of the Word

 

My turn. The story of one of my follies.

For a long time I boasted of possessing every landscape possible, and found derisory the celebrities of modern painting and poetry.

I loved idiotic paintings, overdoors, acrobat's drop-cloths, signs, popular illuminations; outmoded literature, church Latin, erotic books without orthography, novels of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little books for children, old operas, silly refrains, naive rhythms.

I dreamed crusades, voyages of discovery of which no relations are to be had, republics without histories, religious wars put down, revolutions of customs, displacements of races and continents: I believed in every enchantment.

I invented the color of vowels!—A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green—I regulated the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive rhythms, I flattered myself with inventing a poetic language accessible, one day or another, to all the senses. I reserved the translation.

It was at first a study. I wrote silences, nights, I noted down the inexpressible. I fixed vertigos.

 

 

 

At four o'clock in the morning, Summer, Love's sleep lingers on. Beneath the copses evaporates   The odor of galas gone. Yonder, in their vast woodyard, Under a sun of the Hesperides, Already the Carpenters are working   In their shirtsleeves. In their Deserts of moss, tranquil, They prepare costly wainscoting Where false heavens will be painted     By the city. O, for those Workmen, charming Subjects of a Babylonian king, Venus! leave for a moment the Lovers   Whose souls are wreathed!     O Queen of Shepherds! Bring the laborers brandy soon, That their might may be at ease Awaiting a bath in the sea at noon.

 

Poetic old-fashionedness had a good share in my alchemy of the word.

I habituated myself to simple hallucination: I saw quite frankly a mosque instead of a factory, a drum school led by angels, barouches on the highways of heaven, a salon at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; a vaudeville title raised terrors before me.

Then I explained my magic sophisms with the hallucination of words!

I ended by finding sacred the disorder of my mind. I was idle, prey to a serious fever: I envied the felicity of beasts—caterpillars, which represent the innocence of limbo, moles, the sleep of virginity!

My character grew bitter. I said adieu to the world in sorts of romances:

 

 

I loved the desert, burnt orchards, faded shops, tepid drinks. I dragged myself in stinking alleys and, eyes closed, offered myself to the sun, god of fire.

"General, if there is left one old cannon on your ramparts in ruins, bombard, bombard us with blocks of dry earth. On the mirrors of splendid department stores! in the salons! Make the city eat its dust. Oxidize the gargoyles. Fill the boudoirs with burning ruby powder... "

Oh! the intoxicated midge at the inn urinal, amorous of borage, and which is dissolved by a ray!

 

 

 

Finally, o happiness, o reason, I pushed aside from the sky the azure, which is darkness, and I lived, a golden spark of natural light. Out of joy, I took an expression as farcical and distracted as possible:

 

 

I became a fabulous opera: I saw that every being has a fatality of happiness: action is not life, but a manner of wasting some strength, an enervation. Morality is the brain's weakness.

To each being, several other lives seemed to me due, This gentleman knows not what he does: he is an angel. That family is a brood of dogs. Before several men, I spoke aloud with a moment of one of their other lives—thus, I loved a pig.

None of the sophistries of madness—the madness they lock up—has been forgotten by me: I could recite them all, I have the system.

My health was threatened. Terror came. I fell into dozes of several days, and, awake, I continued the saddest dreams. I was ripe for my demise, and by a route of dangers my feebleness led me to the confines of the world and of Cimmeria, land of darkness and whirlwinds.

I had to travel, distract the enchantments assembled in my brain. On the sea, that I loved as if it must lave me of a stain, I saw arise the consoling cross. I had been damned by the rainbow. Happiness was my fatality, my remorse, my worm: my life would always be too immense to be devoted to strength and beauty.

Happiness! Its tooth, sweet unto death, warned me at cockcrow—ad matutinam, at the Christus venit—in the darkest cities:

 

 

That is past. I know today how to hail beauty.