By The Body Of The Earth or The Sannyasin

Kali’s Rock

I was about to leave the caravanserai when Balu fell headlong upon me, with his hair tousled, his forehead covered with sweat, his satchel under his arm.

—So, little frog, what's happening to you?

—Where is he?

—With the king of the cobras.

My reply was stupid. Balu was furious he stamped about, pulling me by the arm.

—Where is he, but where is he then? Something has happened to Björn.

—But look here Balu...

—I tell you that something has happened to Björn.

—Perhaps he is at Guruji's?

—No, not at this hour.

—He did not have lunch with me, he may have been detained by his Guruji.

—Oh! him... he doesn't give anything to eat.

And he spat on the ground.

—It's his fault, everything is his fault, I hate him.

Balu was grey with anger. He looked to the right, to the left, his nose in the air as if he were on the scent of a trail. Then he grabbed my arm.

—This way.

And he started running towards the north, in the direction of Kali's Rock. I began to feel anxious. I ran, I cut my feet on some coral banks, stumbled in the sand. No one was there. The track plunged into dales of thorny bushes and tormented banyan trees, as in a dreamscape. Balu had sped on ahead like a goat, his satchel under his arm. But what then was there between that child and Björn?

Panting, we came to a halt at fifty metres from the crag. The air was burning hot, the banyans twisted their muscles like tortured giants.

—Come, there are some steps here.

He penetrated into a jungle of acacia trees with long dagger-like thorns. It was a chaos of fallen rocks and sharp-edged branches which stood out against an indigo sky like barbed lace. Oh! how beautiful was this island and how wild!... Oh! qu'elle était belle, cette île, et sauvage!

—Björn! Björn!

The western face of the rocks rose to a sheer thirty metres high. To the east, the massif formed a back. It looked like an enormous Egyptian cat crouching in the sand.

—Björn!

Balu's small, shrill voice rang out in isolation. Some mynas flew away between the rocks, an erne circled overhead in the sky. There was no sound, not a breath of air, only the smell of acacia trees and burnt stone. An uneasy feeling began to tighten my throat. I climbed behind Balu. We could hear the cries of the birds. Sometimes a handful of stones rolled into space with a crackle of dried leaves. Then I stopped, filled with anguish. But it was not because of Björn, it was something else; it was that rock, that odour which took hold of me. I raised my head; suddenly I knew: the cry of the parrots, the promontory, the banyan, the red island. And then that Threat which fell upon me. I looked for Balu, he had disappeared on the other wall of rock. I turned round—the island was floating in seething foam like a vestal virgin on an angry sea. Then I heard Balu's cry.

—Björn!

I came out onto the ledge of rock—he was there.

A hard Björn, his jaw set, his lips compressed into a thin line. Balu rushed up to him and hugged his legs.

—Leave me, clear off! Let me alone!

He was leaning against a grotto hewn out of the rock. There were bird-droppings everywhere. One could imagine oneself on a guano-island in the middle of the sky.

—Björn, but what's the matter?... It's the child, it was he who was worried about you.

Balu rummaged hurriedly in his satchel, threw his textbooks and exercise books in the air and triumphantly extracted a handful of pistachios:

—Here, look, eat. Eat, they are good!

Björn closed his eyes. He slid to the ground, his legs giving way beneath him. He stroked the child's hair and remained silent looking towards the port in the distance. There was a port. One could see the railway bridge and the froth under the arches, then the coast, the piers, a small white lighthouse on the mainland.

A cargo boat at anchorage was stoking its boilers.

—But what's the matter, Björn?

He turned towards me; there was such a painful intensity in his eyes. He had been crying.

—Erik has committed suicide.

He made a little spasmodic movement and turned his head away. Balu feasted his eyes upon him as on an idol: he had understood everything. Then I put my arm round Björn's shoulders, I stroked his hair, I took his suffering into my heart. We were all three of us there, huddled together before that death as one huddles together before a storm, the wind, the night; and if one dies, each one understands his own death.

—... Erik, you understand, my brother.

Balu had laid his head on Björn's knees, an erne circled round in the sky.

—I say, Björn, I love you, you know.

I looked at the child, the sea, at Björn: I listened to that death, oh! as soon as one stops moving, it is there; it is always there... like that erne it hovers around, its breath is as light as a wing. There was the face of my brother, the gold-panner, who had died over there in the forest: he looked so serene in his hammock, swayed by the wind, a small lizard ran amongst the dead leaves... un petit iguane courait dans les feuilles mortes... the same silence. He was dead. And that same blue sky overhead...

—You are hungry, Björn, eat, it's good. Here, look, I have found a nautilus shell!

One day, I grabbed that sky and I said no to death. Oh! we have understood nothing of life so long as we have not understood our own death. It was in their prisons when everything was dying around me, I looked at that sky, I saw all those microscopical bodies being killed and there was such a cry in my heart: “No! I was not that thing that one kills, I could not be that, it was not true, it was a falsehood, I was not mortal, I was not a body that dies!” That death was so outrageous. And then all at once I laughed; I emerged, sprung out, slipped from my moorings as if my cry had made a hole in that human carapace, and I rocketed upwards. It was the first time. It was marvellous. A little bit of detachable body that one held at the end of a string, a little puppet dressed in striped sack-cloth, and I... I was above. Oh! that cry of wonder when one breaks loose, that sudden royalty like a galloping wind in the blue steppe... cette royauté soudaine comme un vent de galop dans la steppe bleue, I was free! And what can touch that? Nothing. No one. I was free, immortal. Then I laughed. I opened my great blue look and I am king and free everywhere.

Björn turned back to me. It seemed I could still hear Batcha's sweet little voice, rising with the warm air, rising with the face of my brother, dead in the forest, with Björn's suffering, with this world of suffering: “Toujours ensemble, toujours ensemble...” “Always together, always together...”

—I am going away.

—What!

He looked at the steamer at anchorage.

—I have nothing more to do here, all that I was doing has no longer any meaning.

—Going away, where? Back to them? But you are mad!

I was appalled. It was the catastrophe, the hole under my feet. Björn's departure meant the end of this island.

—Do you also want to commit suicide?

—Erik is dead, Björn repeated obstinately.

—And so?... It is cowardice.

—Perhaps, but he is dead.

Björn searched in his waistband, brought out a bit of crumpled paper: a newspaper clipping.

—My sister sent me this. He returned from the Sahara deliberately to commit suicide... as if the Sahara were not deserted enough. Listen:

“Yesterday, towards 9h 30, in a place called “Bellevue”, a district of Gjoevik, policemen of the local squad accompanied by a doctor alerted by a local inhabitant, could only confirm the death—which had occurred several hours earlier—of a motorist found half stretched out on the front seat of his car which he had parked near the kerb of the Lillehammer Road, a few metres from Route 23. In a note addressed to the police, Erik Sorensen (age 27) declared that he had deliberately taken his own life. To do this the unfortunate man had put a tube through the back window of the car with one end fixed to the exhaust-pipe. He had left the motor running and was found asphyxiated. The reasons for his desperate act remain unknown.”

Björn's face was as hard as marble.

—That is his dark humour, he chose the place called “Bellevue”... and he returned from the Sahara for that.

—It is disgusting.

—He was suffering.

—So what!

—Their world is ugly, Nil.

—Oh!... But there is no beauty in the world, Björn! Beauty is not here, it lies in our eyes of beauty. Where is it, your “Bellevue”, tell me, one can commit suicide there just as well.

—There was a letter also:

Björn,

I am going to commit suicide tonight after a good drinking bout. My last message is for you. What will there be afterwards? Probably nothing lasting, but if there is a little something sufficiently coherent and you make a sign to that something, I shall be there, at your call. I do not think I shall be harmful on the other side of the barrier, but one never knows?

Be careful, it is not beautiful when one looks at oneself too closely.

Your brother,
Erik

—Not beautiful...

A kind of fury swept over me; if I yielded to Björn's suffering, he was lost. And his loss would be mine—Balu's and Batcha's too. It was like a pivot round which we were all turning.

—But what the devil does your brother think!

—He married a prostitute from Oran, as a challenge.

—So what? We are all full of uglinesses and shame! We only have to scratch a little to see that. Ah! Björn, I have seen them, I have seen them in all colours, and every time I was able to say: there also, I am; that also is me: that also is possible—everything is possible! What is inhuman, tell me? Where is he, that solitary man, pure and unscathed? We are all in it, and there is only one Man in the world! I have seen enough to cover four continents at a gallop. I have exhausted my hell by walking. And when I was at the bottom of the hole there was a light that shone. And now, I see. I see through the old trickery: there is a headiness in evil, and it is not what one thinks. True misery is not in being miserable, but only in believing in one's misery... Listen Björn, every time I fell into darkness, what I found the most difficult was not to recognize my pettiness, but to recognize what was great in me, in spite of everything. To do that needs courage, I assure you. One is not beautiful, one is full of misery and mud, and in spite of everything one sets one's teeth, one says no: I am beauty, I am light, truth, purity, I am That which shines in the depths, That which is free, That and only That... Ça et seulement Ça, and they will not get me! Then it is like a flame of suffering which is kindled deep down, so intense that it burns like love. Afterwards, one can understand everything. Björn, evil is not really evil, it's the secret door to love. As if the intensity of the evil kindles a corresponding intensity of love.

—He is dead, that's all I know.

—But you are alive!

—It does not interest me for myself.

—But, good heavens, what do you think it means... “others”? If you cannot save yourself, you will never save anyone else!... Oh! Björn, don't you see, one is like a battlefield, it is not a question of you or me or “others”: one is born to win a victory, each one of us has a victory to win, a special victory, and all circumstances are made to force us to win our victory. In fact, it is like a tremendous conspiracy—a conspiracy of light—in each detail. Sometimes, when I look at it, it is overwhelming... It seems that one is born with all the darkness necessary to win one's victory. So, when I see an abyss, I say to myself: this is the moment. Björn, one has understood nothing of evil so long as one has not understood that it is the other hand of the same Angel of Victory; Batcha said it... the demons are the brothers of the gods.

—Voilà three years I have searched.

—Good. Then, there is nothing better to do than to seek. And I tell you, the real treasure is not in the finding but in the seeking. Oh! sometimes it seems to me that this burning in the depths, this need of something, something else—I don't know,—this something within which wants, which searches, which needs, needs so much, is like the real treasure—it burns: it is. It thirsts for: it is. It has need of: It is—It is the only thing that is... c'est la seule chose qui est. All the rest... We are not great because of our discoveries, but because of our need to find.

—It is for him that I searched, it is because of him that I wanted power.

—But he told you himself: if you make a sign to me, I shall be there at your call. Would you have really known how to make a sign to him?... Listen Björn, you yourself have said we are a new race of adventurers; very well, what do you think adventure is? To discover magic potions? To remain with one's feet in the air, to hold one's breath?... The adventure is to be conscious of everything and in everything: in waking, in sleep and in death, here, there and in all possible ways, with the gods, in hell and everywhere. Then nothing more will separate us from our brothers, not even death. We must find the place where we are always together... toujours ensemble.

—You can talk, you were the first to spit on Guruji.

—But, imbecile, there are not umpteen things to find! There is only one. If you enter into that, you enter into everything.

—I am waiting to see you do it.

—One must know what one wants Björn, one must be coherent, as your brother says, one must not want umpteen powers—only one. And it is that which holds everything! If you don't know that, you break into bits: one day, your bag opens and everything is scattered. That is coherence, supreme coherence; if you have that, you hold the thread, all the threads, that goes everywhere, here, there, on this side of the world and the other side and on all possible sides.

—I don't know, I no longer know...

Björn took a handful of pistachios.

Balu relaxed and smiled: his friend was saved. He was eating, he was saved.

Quietly, he slipped another handful of pistachios into Björn's hand, then he turned towards me with a kind of gratitude in his eyes. My hands were moist. I had a fever as if I had swallowed Björn's suicide.

—I say, Björn...

There was not a breath of air on that rock, only that odour of acacia and hot sand which rose in puffs. Balu dared not move. Björn looked at the port... I looked at that broad-shouldered Scandinavian, his red triangle between his eyebrows, and at that child who did not take his eyes off of him.

—I say, Björn...

Balu clutched his friend's knees.

—You won't go back to him, eh?

—What!

Björn was red with anger.

—But what's the matter with you, what have you all got against him!

Balu made a funny little face. Then he snatched his nautilus shell and crushed it on the rock with his fist.

—He does not love you.

—Who told you that?

—First of all, he is a vaishya.¹¹

There was so much contempt in Balu's voice that Björn seemed dazed.

—You are the king.

—The king...

—Besides, you are handsome.

Björn melted. He stroked the child's hair.

—And you, little bit of moon, who are you?

—I am the king's guardian.

He looked up at Björn. I felt a current pass between them.

—I guard you.

He pressed his satchel hard against his chest. He was erect and pale, as if defying death. What was the link between this child and Björn—that Björn who, one day, had come from ten thousand kilometres away to this island at the other end of the world?... What joined our three lives, what story? Oh! I have looked for miracles, and now that I don't look for them any more, I seem to see them everywhere... Oh! J'ai cherché des miracles, et maintenant que je n'en cherche plus, il me semble en voir partout. They say “chance”, but what does it mean? The smallest of these chances shines like a star in the great forest of the world; and sometimes I feel that a casual gesture, a small second of inattention, a hop to the right instead of the left, a bird's feather, a mere nothing which fleets by, contains a world of vertiginous premeditation—and perhaps... Perhaps we do not see all that links these moments together, the invisible thread which stretches across the centuries and connects this dazzled second, this sudden crossing of roads, this winged thistle seed, to another unfinished story, an old unfulfilled promise, a forgotten hill, a fountain once upon a time where two beings had smiled at each other in passing. Where is the beginning of the story?... Où est le commencement de l'histoire? To what sign, to what bygone call do we reply today? We do not hold all the threads! We hold mere smatterings of seconds which pass unnoticed, fragments of stories like sudden little windows in the heart of a great legend which plunges through intimate Scandinavias, lost islands, and which will still continue when all our winters are counted. Sometimes I think there is more mystery in a trifle that one stumbles upon by chance than in all the infinitudes of heaven and that the key to the world is not in the infinitely great, but in the minute twinkling of an eye caught unawares... He, Balu, lived those minute natural miracles, and so did I for dazzled seconds, in a puff of warm air which rose in that odour of sand and acacia; he caught them in flight, as he had caught Björn's call in his arithmetic class and he ran because he had understood everything. Our thoughts and our words are thick disguises; we understand nothing, we clothe in noise a very small direct sound which goes to the heart of things and which crosses in a flash all ages and all places—every sound of the heart goes to its goal, and we shout outside as if we were deaf.

Without a word Balu gathered up his books, his exercise books, then stood up; bowing slightly he folded his hands before Björn, then bowed deeply before the idol in the grotto and disappeared.

—What a quaint little mosquito!

Björn picked up the remains of the nautilus.

There was a statue in the grotto, a strange goddess who blessed with one hand and cut your throat with the other. She was jet black, stark naked, with four arms and a garland of skulls round her neck, and she danced open-mouthed as if about to swallow the world. What sign also did she bring us?

—But what have you all got against Guruji? Really, this story is silly. Guruji worked for Erik, he wanted to save him, he used his power...

—Oh! he was in touch with Erik?

—I gave him his photo, he was working for him to come here.

—Oh!

—What, oh?

—He wanted to make him come...

—First of all, he wanted to separate him from that girl.

Then suddenly I understood.

—Exactly. But instead of making him come, he killed him. What!

—Listen, Björn, it's simple. He wanted him to come, so he sent a force to make him come, but you cannot apply a force without arousing the corresponding resistance, you cannot apply a light without touching the corresponding darkness, and the more powerful your ray, the deeper is the darkness touched. And if you are not ready, it breaks—you become mad or you die, like Erik. One dies because the sum of darkness is too great for the onrush of light, do you understand? I have seen that, Björn, every time I have taken a step forward or touched a new height, I have fallen into the exactly corresponding hole, the next day or three days later, automatically. And it is not even that one “falls”, it is as if the light pushes the darkness out of its hole, do you understand? A kind of law of descent... Why? I do not know. But one cannot descend lower than one's capacity for light, otherwise it breaks; that is why Erik is dead. A sort of dark equivalence. But it is mathematical: at each landing, one descends. One cannot take a step upwards without taking a step downwards... On ne peut pas faire un pas en haut sans faire un pas en bas. It is a strange thing Björn, but it is as if our capacity for heaven were directly tied to our capacity for hell.

—But damn it...

Can't you see? Erik felt something which was pushing him to get out of his rut—and he went out through the wrong door. You cannot push people faster than they can go—really that's why the world is advancing like a tortoise! If one would or if one could make it divine all at once, it would explode, that's all. It must be purged in small doses. So our own adventure is to accelerate the movement: one crams ten lives into one. One accelerates evolution, with all the risks involved.

And everything became clear: Erik's suicide, the boomerang shocks, Björn's storms, my revolts with that Sannyasi, the whole of this story of the passage upwards which nose-dived each time. But why? Why this law of descent?... Björn looked at me uncomprehendingly.

—Why, Björn? Why this automatic fall? Why can't one just simply free oneself... Evil? But I don't believe in evil. There is no evil, there is only something which we don't understand.

Björn shrugged his shoulders.

—Yes, but I am going away.

—Oh! Björn...

There was nothing more to say.

The steamer was smoking in the roadstead, his Laurelbank. The sun was going down. The idol looked almost alive, as if about to cut our throats or else bless us perhaps. I closed my eyes, cut off the current. Oh! one drop only, one little drop of that Harmony upon the earth, and all the jarrings of the world would be cured.

—Then it is I who have killed Erik.

I felt I was banging my head against a wall. He was stammering:

—If it's really Guruji who pushed Erik, then it's I who am guilty.

I who have done wrong, I who have killed my brother.

—You...

—Yes.

—Oh! Björn...

—I gave that photo.

—I, who is the “I”?—We are all “I” and nobody is guilty.

I felt the idol opening wide its eyes.

—Where is the “I”... I don't know Björn. There are currents which pass—some red, some black, some blue, some light like snow, and one intercepts these currents, one hardens them into the little human self, one makes them into hard and tragic destinies, but all is simple when one opens one's hands; and, to tell the truth, when one opens one's hands, nothing but light goes through. Where is the darkness Björn, I don't know? We must open our hands and go above our head. Then everything changes and everything is the same... alors tout change, et tout est pareil, without the hardness... It is like two worlds accurately superimposed; in one, everything flows so harmoniously, so simply, so naturally, without all our human cries, our human tears, which are almost like a drama added to the true world, a fabrication of misery.

—Erik's death is no drama.

—Oh! it is the last histrionics of the I. He prefers to die by his own hand rather than to disappear.

Björn stood up, a flame of hate leapt in his eyes. And from that moment, I struggled with him as with my own death.

—Let me tell you, your way “above the head” is a heartless way.

He wanted to kill me, it was evident, it was the old enemy returning, the brother of shadow, the one we meet at the last door.

—You are not of our world, you do not belong here. I hate you.

A wave of suffering came over me, whether his or mine, I hardly knew, it was so much alike. Oh! I did not want any more of that human sentimentality, that knot of impotent pity, that slavery of suffering which believes in death, believes in pettiness, believes in the fatality of laws—I believe in joy! I believe we are great, strong, luminous, divine, I believe that we can!

Then I don't know what took hold of me; I stood up, caught Björn by the shoulders as if I were grappling with my own death. The sun was setting, the sky was like an orange blaze, everything was orange: the erne over the grotto, the sands, the sea, the rock covered with bird-droppings; it was an effulgence of light like a descent of the other world.

—You are suffering, Björn, but it is a falsehood, suffering is a falsehood, death is a falsehood, pain and pettiness are falsehoods, and until the end, even if I perish, even if I fall, I shall repeat like a mad king: we are truth, we are light, we are greatness and beauty, the joy which sings, because we are divine. There is an immortal Flame, within, a Fire from the supreme joy which laughs behind all our sufferings and all our nights; a Fire of Truth which burns away all blackness and all shame, and our sins and our virtues, which burns away all destinies and all laws, because it is the Destiny and it is the. Law—a little flame within which can remake the world... une petite flamme dedans qui peut refaire le monde. And I say: one day, the sacred fire will possess men and we shall build the earth like a fairy-tale; one day, the fire within will burn outside and this obscure matter will become the radiant image of the soul which inhabits it: plastic to its vision, light to its joy, obedient to its command. Then each one will create his world according to the colour of his soul; each one will say what he is by the quality of his fire, visibly, materially, without subterfuge, without artifice, without deceptive words, simply by the power of his fire; each one will take his place in a high luminous hierarchy according to the beauty of the dream which inhabits him and his power to mould matter into the substance of his dream. Then the earth will emerge from falsehood and the night, life will liberate the Flame from its prison of flesh or spirit; a world of truth will take birth. And we shall be here below as we are above, free, vast, true, that and only that. And death will cease to exist because we shall be true in our body as in our soul.

Björn picked up a pebble and threw it into space:

—You will end up in the hole, all alone.