Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (44 page)

Hear again the macabre voice of this rare visionary. In this little prose-poem he is speaking of dogs at night, which jangle the nerves. The dogs howl: “sometimes like a child crying out in hunger, or a cat wounded in the belly, under a roof; like a woman giving birth; like a dying man assailed by the plague, in the hospital; like a young woman singing a sublime melody—they howl at the stars of the North, at the stars of the East, at the stars of the South, at the stars of the West, at the moon, at the mountains, which look, from a distance, like gigantic boulders, lying in darkness; at the cold air they breathe in lungsful, that turns the inside of their noses red, burning; at the silence of the night; at owls, whose oblique flight brushes their lips and noses, and who are carrying a mouse or a frog in their talons, sweet living nourishment for their chicks; at the rabbits that disappear in the blink of an eye; at the thief who flees on a galloping horse after committing his crime; at the serpents that part the grass and make the dogs’ flesh crawl and their teeth chatter; at their own barking, which frightens even them; at the frogs, which they burst with one gnash of their teeth (why did they leave their pond?); at the trees, whose leaves, softly soughing, are yet further mysteries they do not understand, although they peer at them with intelligent eyes; at spiders suspended between their long legs and that scurry up the trees to save themselves; at the crows that have not found anything to eat during the day and so return to their nests on weary wing; at the rocks on the ocean’s bank; at the fires that look like the masts of invisible ships; at the muffled sound of the waves; at the big fish that swim by, showing their black fins, and then plunge into the abyss; and at the man who enslaves them. . . .

“One day, with glassy eyes, my mother said to me, ‘When you are lying in bed and hear the howling of the dogs in the countryside, hide in your sheets. Don’t laugh at what they are doing; they have an insatiable thirst for the infinite, like I do, like all humans, for the
figure pâle et longue.
. . .”

“And I,” he continues, “like those dogs, suffer a yearning for the infinite. I cannot, I cannot fill that need!” It is irrational, delirious, “but there is something down deep that makes reflective men shiver.”

He is a madman, no doubt about it. But we must acknowledge, too, that the
deus
drives oracles mad, and that the divine fever of the prophets produced similar fits, and that the author “lived” that, and that this is not a “literary work,” but rather the cry, the howl, of a sublime being martyred by Satan.

He almost mocks beauty itself—like Psyche, out of hatred of God—as we can see in these following comparisons, which I have taken from other little poems:

“The grand duke of Virginia was beautiful, as beautiful as the memory of the curve traced by a dog running after its master.” . . .

The beetle, “as beautiful as the trembling of the hands in alcoholism. . . .”

The adolescent, “as beautiful as the retractable talons of a bird of prey,” or even “as the muscular movements in the ulcers on the soft parts of the posterior cervical region,” or perhaps . . . “as the chance meeting, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. . . .”

The fact is, oh serene and happy spirits!, this is a cutting and abominable “humour.” . . .

He never thought about literary glory. He wrote only for himself. He was born with that supreme flame of genius, and it was that flame that consumed him.

The Prince of Darkness possessed him, entered his soul by way of sadness. He allowed himself to fall. He abhorred Man and detested God. In the six parts of his work he planted a sick, leprous, poisoned Flower. His animals are those that remind one of the workings of the Dark One: toads, owls, vipers, spiders. Despair is the wine that intoxicates him. Prostitution is for him the mysterious symbol of the Apocalypse, glimpsed by exceptional spirits in all its transcendence. “I have made a pact with Prostitution, in order to sow disorder in families . . . Ay! Ay!” exclaims the naked woman, “someday men will be just. I will say no more. Let me depart, let me go hide my infinite sadness in the depths of the ocean. There is nothing but oneself and the hateful monsters that seethe in those black abysses, monsters that do not scorn me.”

And Bloy: “The indisputable sign of a great poet is the prophetic ‘unconscious,’ the disturbing faculty of speaking, to men and to time, words never heard before, and whose meaning the poet himself cannot fathom. That is the mysterious stamp of the Holy Spirit upon sacred or profane brows. However absurd it may be today to say that one has discovered a great poet, and discovered him in a madhouse, I must in conscience say that I am certain I have done just that.”

Lautréamont’s poem was published seventeen years ago in Belgium. Nothing is known of its author’s life. Great “modern” artists of the French language speak of the volume to one another as a symbolic, rare, indiscoverable prayer book.

It has not been long since intellectual explorations of the Pole began. Leconte de Lisle has gone off to contemplate Nature and learn the song of the
runoja
;
⁴⁶
Mendès, to see the midnight sun and converse with Snorr and Snorra, in a poem of blood and ice. In those distant boreal regions strange and hitherto unheard-of beings have been discovered: tremendous poets, cosmic thinkers. One of these beings has been found in Norway, a strong, rare man with white hair, a shy smile, and a profound gaze who writes profound works. Is he, perhaps, possessed of Arctic genius? He is indeed perhaps possessed of Arctic genius. He seems to stand as tall as a pine tree; he is small of stature. He was born in his mysterious land; the soul of the earth there, in its most enigmatic manifestations, revealed itself in him when he was but a child. Today he is an old man; upon his head much snow has fallen; the halo of glory sits upon his brow like a magnificent aurora borealis. He lives far away, in his land of fjords and rain and fog, under a sky of capricious and elusive light. The world sees him as a legendary inhabitant of the polar realm. There are those who think that he is extravagantly generous, shouting to other men from his cold retreat the words of his dream; there are those who believe him to be an unapproachable and stand-offish sort of apostle; there are those who think he is mad. Great visionary of the snows! His eyes have looked upon the long nights and red sun that bloodies the dark winter; they have gazed upon life’s night, the dark side of humanity. His soul shall be bitter unto death. . . .

“His nose is strong, his cheeks red and prominent, his chin vigorously marked; his large gold spectacles, his thick white beard into which the lower part of his face is sunken, give him
l’air brave homme,
the appearance of a provincial magistrate, grown old in the job. All the poetry of his soul, all the splendor of his intelligence has taken refuge in the long, thin, slightly sensual lips, at whose corners there is an expression of haughty irony; his gaze, which is veiled and as though turned inward, is now sweet and melancholic, now swift and aggressive, disquieting, tormented, and under it one trembles, for it seems to delve into one’s very being. The brow is especially magnificent—square, solid, of powerful dimensions, a brow heroic and genial, as broad as the world of thoughts it contains. And dominating the whole, and accentuating yet further that impression of ideal animality that one feels in his entire physiognomy, there is a wavy shock of white, untamable hair. . . .

“A man, in a word, of special essence and strange appearance that disquiets one and is striking, overpowering; his equal, there is none—a man one could never forget, though one lived a hundred years.”

All men have an inner world, and superior men have one that is superior, and thus the great Scandinavian found his treasure trove within his own inner world. “I have looked for everything within me; everything has arisen from my heart,” he says.

It was within himself that he discovered the richest lode in which to study the human principle. He performed a vivisection upon himself. He put his ear to his own breast, his fingers to his own pulse. And everything arose from his heart. His heart! The heart of a sensitive and nervous man. It beats for the world; he is sick with humanity.

His vibrating organism, predisposed to collisions with the unknown, was further tempered in that realm of phantasmal nature, the alien atmosphere of his native land. From out the shadows, an invisible hand seized him. Mysterious echoes called to him from the fog.

His childhood was a flower of sadness. He was anxious, filled with daydreams; he had been born with illness. I picture him, a silent, pale child with long hair, on cloudy, misty days. I picture him in the first shivers produced by the spirit that must have possessed him, in a perpetual twilight or in the cold silence of the Norwegian night. His tiny child-soul, squeezed into a hard home; the first spiritual blows against that small, fragile, crystalline soul; the first impressions that caused him to see the evil of the land and the harshness of the road ahead. Later, in the years of his young-manhood, more harshness. The beginning of the struggle for life and the revelatory vision of social concern. Ah! he recognized the hard machinery and the danger of so much toothed noise, and the error in the direction of the machine, and the perfidy of the bosses, and the universal degradation of the species! And his soul became a tower of snow. And within him there appeared the fighter, the combatant. Armored, helmeted, armed, the poet emerged. He heard the voice of the peoples of the earth. His spirit went forth from its restricted sphere of nation; he sang foreign struggles; he called for the nations of the North to unite; his word, which was hardly heard within his own land, was rendered dumb with disillusion; his compatriots did not know him; for him there were only stones, satire, envy, egoism, stupidity; his land, like all native lands, was a hard stepmother that swatted at the prophet with her broom. . . . Yet after disenchantment his young muse found songs of enthusiasm, life, love once more.

In the years of the first struggles to earn a living, he had been a pharmacist. Then a journalist. Then director of a traveling theater company. He traveled, he lived. . . . He was poor; he didn’t care; he loved. He was mad with love; so mad that he married. The sweet daughter of a Protestant pastor was his wife. I figure the good Suzannah Thoresen must have had hair of the most glorious gold, and eyes divinely azure.

After his
Catilina,
a simple essay of his youth, the playwright emerged.... Let us hear something from
The Vikings at
Helgeland,
that rare and visionary work:

Later came
The Pretenders [to the Crown],
in which there is an admirable dialogue between the Skald
⁴⁸
and the King; this play must have had a direct influence on Maeterlinck’s manner of writing dialogue in his symbolic plays. . . . Here is an excerpt: