A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (47 page)

I am succeeding in banishing all human hopes from my mind. In order to strangle all joys I have sprung upon them stealthily like a wild beast.

I have summoned the executioners, in order, while perishing, to gnaw the buttends of their guns. I have summoned scourges so as to stifle myself with sand and blood. Misfortune has been my god. I have stretched out in the mud. I have become dessicated in the air of crime. And I have played fine tricks with madness.

Spring has taught me the idiot's hideous laughter.

Now, finding myself, quite recently, on the point of croaking, I thought of seeking for the key of the ancient feast, so that I might, perhaps, recover my appetite.

Charity is that key. - This inspiration proves that I have been dreaming.

"Thou shalt remain a hyena, etc ..." exclaimed the demon who crowned me with such pleasing poppies. "Attain death with all your appetites, with your egoism and every capital sin."

Ali! I have endured too much: - But, dear Satan, a less irritated leer, I beg of you! - and awaiting one or two little belated villanies, I detach for you - you who love the absence of the descriptive or instructive faculties in a writer - these few hideous sheets from my notebook - the notebook of one of the damned.

A Night in Hell

I have swallowed a terrible draught of poison. - Thrice blessed be the advice which has been given me! - My vitals are burning. The violence of the venom twists my limbs, deforms, and strikes me down. I am dying of thirst. I am choking. Not a cry can I utter. This is hell, the eternal punishment, Behold how the fire flares up! I burn properly. So be it, demon!

I had glimpsed conversion to goodness and happiness - salvation. May I be able to describe the vision, for the atmosphere of hell will not suffer hymns! There were millions of charming creatures, a sweet spiritual concert, strength and peace, noble ambitions - what more do I know?

Noble ambitions!

And this is still life! If damnation is eternal! A man who wishes to mutiliate himself is indeed damned, is he not? I believe I am in hell, therefore I am. That is the fulfilment of the catechism. I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have created my own and your own misfortune. Poor innocent one! Hell cannot attack the pagans. That is life once more! Later, the delights of damnation will be more profound. Quick - a crime, that I may fall into nothingness, in the name of the human law.

Silence! - wilt though be silent? Shame and reproach are here: Satan says that fire is ignoble, that my anger is hideously stupid. Enough! ... Errors, enchantments, false perfumes, puerile music are suggested to me. And to think that I possess truth, that I behold justice. I possess a sane and fixed judgment; I am ripe for perfection ... Pride - My scalp is drying up! Pity on me! Lord, I am full of fear. I am thirsty, so thirsty! Ali! Childhood, with the grass and the rain, the lake amidst the stones and the moonlight when the steeple struck twelve ... the devil is in the bell-tower at that hour. Mary! Holy Virgin! ... My dreadful stupidity.

Are they not honest souls over there who wish me well ... Come ... I have a pillow over my mouth and they hear me not: they are phantoms. Moreover, no one ever thinks of his neighbour. Let no one approach. Certainly I smell of burning.

Hallucinations are innumerable. This is indeed what I have always had: no more faith in history, and forgetfulness of principles. I will be silent on that score, for poets and visionaries would be jealous. I am a thousand times richer, so let me be as avaricious as the sea.

Ali! Come now - a short time ago the clock of life stopped. I am no longer in the world. - Theology is serious, hell is certainly down below - and heaven on high. Ecstasy, nightmare, slumber is a nest of flames.

When mentally alert in the country, what malice is displayed ... Ferdinand, Satan keeps pace with the wild seeds ... Jesus walks on the purplish brambles without bending them down ... Jesus walked on the troubled water. The lantern showed him to us, a white figure with brown tresses, upright by the side of an emerald wave ...

I am going to unveil all the mysteries: religious or natural mysteries, death and birth, the future and the past, cosmogony and nothingness. I am a master in phantasmagoria.

Listen!

I possess all talents! There is no one here and there is someone: I would not distribute my treasures. Do you wish for native songs, houri dances? Would you like me to disappear and dive in search of the ring? Is that your wish? I will produce gold and remedies.

Place your trust, then, in me, for faith relieves, guides and cures. Come, all of you - even little children - that I may console you and pour forth his heart - that marvellous heart - for your sake! Poor men and workers! I do not ask for prayers; with merely your confidence I shall be happy.

And let us think of myself. This makes me regret the world but little. I am lucky not to suffer more. My life was wholly made up of sweet acts of folly, and that was regrettable.

Bah! Let us make every imaginable grimace.

We are decidedly outside the world. There is not a single sound. My sense of feeling has disappeared. Ali! My chateaux, my Saxony, my willow-wood. The evenings, mornings, nights, days ... How tired I am!

I was bound to have my hell for anger, my hell for pride - and the hell consequent on caresses. A veritable concert of hells.

I am dying of weariness. The tomb awaits me. I am travelling to that horror of horrors - the worms. Satan, old blade, you wish to dissolve me with your charms. I demand, I demand! - a prod with your pitchfork and a drop of fire.

Ali! Once more to ascend to life! To look on our deformities. And this poison, this thousand-times-cursed kiss! My weakness and the world's cruelty! My God, pity! Hide me. I make too poor a resistance! I am hidden and yet I am not.

The fire is flaring up with its damned one.

Alchemy of the Word

As regards myself. The story of one of my follies.

For a long time I boasted of being in possession of every possible landscape, and found modern celebrities in painting and poetry derisive.

I was fond of idiotic paintings, frieze-panels, decorative pieces, mountebank canvases, sign-boards, popular coloured prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, ill-spelt erotic works, the novels of our grandmothers, fairy tales, little juvenile books, old operas, foolish refrains, and silly rhythms.

I dreamed of crusades, voyages of discovery of which there were no records, republics without a history, suppressed wars of religion, revolutions in morals, migrations of races and displacement of continents. I believed in all enchantments.

I invented the colour of the 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 prided myself on having fashioned a poetice diction accessible, one day or other, to all understandings. I reserved the translation.

It was, at first, a study. I wrote on the subject of silences and nights. I noted the inexpressible. I fixed the frenzies.

Far from birds and flocks and village girls, kneeling in the heather, surrounded by tender hazel-woods, amidst the warm green haze of the afternoon, what did I drink?

What could I drink - voiceless young elms, flowerless greensward, overcast sky! - in that young Oise? Drink from those yellow gourds, far from my hut, Darling? Some golden liquour which caused one to perspire.

I fashioned an incoherent tavern signboard. - A storm swept across the sky. At eve the waters of the woods lost themselves amidst virgin sands. The wind of God drove the icicles into the ponds.

Weeping, I beheld gold - and I could not drink.