Victor, thoughtful, once stood near the dolmen of Rozel. A dark and talkative ghost appeared to him. From his mouth of night flowed a powerful, agitated stream, mixing raw and chosen words, where dead trunks and black silt layed. The nyctalope poet was even more loquacious, and his verses sprang, in hurried theories, out of their grassy, wordy bushes.

The images added up, like glasses at the bar:

The immense can be heard. Everything speaks. Everything has consciousness. The tombs are dressed in grass and night. The abyss prays. All lives. The depth is imperfect. Evil is in the universe. Everything goes to the worst, always, without ceasing. The soul chooses. The tree is religious. The pebble is vile, blind, hideous. Matter is evil, – fatal fruit. The incontinent poet rhymes ‘ombre‘ (shadow) with ‘sombre‘ (dark) several times without any shame. And, to compensate, ‘vivant‘ (alive) with ‘en avant‘ (forward).

He had a sad forehead, this great man, this exile with sad sweats, funeral impulses. He bent, this poet, from the weight of the infinite, nothing less, and from the silly light of the gloomy suns.

God is here. Are we so sure? Of course we are! He is not out of anything, by the way. The azure, and the rays, hide His wingspan.

Interpelled in vain, the Spirit continues his way, without wanting to hear Man alone, despising his ‘vile flesh’. The word ‘vile’ returns like an antiphon. The enormous life always continues, it enters the invisible, it ascends to the heavens, it travels ‘millions of leagues’, it reaches even to the ‘radiant toe’ of the ‘archangel sun’ and vanishes in God. Yes ‘in God’! That is, in the depths! Jacob and Cato have already passed through these ladders, with their future of duty, mourning, and exile. They have passed through these precipices and abysses, where the larvae and the mysteries, the vapors and the hydrants, are hurried.

Following them, the seers and angels plunged, towards the winged souls.

But for the banished who remain stuck in the nadir, shipwreck is promised, and the ‘rimless abyss’, full of ‘rain’, opens up.

« Of all that lived rains unceasingly the ashes;

And one sees everything at the bottom, when the eye dares to go down there,

Beyond the life, and the breath and the noise,
An ugly black sun from which the night radiates! »ⁱ

The Spirit thunders and threatens. As a prophet, he says: the top goes down, the ideal goes to matter, the spirit falls to the animal, the great crashes into the small, the fire announces the ashes, blindness is born of the seer, and darkness of the flamboyant.

But the rhymes save! ‘Azure’ goes with ‘pure’.

Above is joy, below is filth and evil.

It’s perfectly binary. Structurally binary.

In the infinite, one goes up, – or one falls.

Every being is in balance, and weighs its own weight. For elevation, or fall.

Let man contemplate, then, the cesspool or the temple!

Underneath even the worst of the rough ones, there are still the plants without eyelids, and under the stones, there is chaos.

But, always, the soul must continue to descend, towards the dungeon, the punishment and the scaffold.

Ah! Victor! How your hard and funny verses judge worlds and History!

With a light gesture, you cut down your cleaver, soaked with unbelievable alexandrines!

« Once, without understanding it and with a dazed eye

India has almost glimpsed this metempsychosis. »ⁱⁱ

‘India has almost glimpsed this metempsychosis’. Seriously ???

You Victor, you saw! You Clarified Poet, young Genius of Jersey! You, Seer, you knew, much better than her, this old India, that the bramble becomes a claw, and the cat’s tongue becomes a rose leaf, – to drink the blood of the mouse, in the shadows and the shouts !

Ah, Victor, seeing from your higher heaven, you contemplate the unheard-of spectacle of the lower regions, and you listen to the immense cry of misfortune, the sighs of the pebbles and the desperate.

You see ‘everywhere, everywhere, everywhere’, angels ‘with dead wings’, gloomy larvae, and ragged forests. Punishment seeks darkness, and Babel, when it is overthrown, always flees into the depths of the night. The man for you, O Victor, full of victories, glory and knowledge, is never but a brute drunk with nothingness, who empties the drunken glass of his sleeps, night after night.

But there is a but. When you think twice, man is in prison but his soul remains free. The magi thought that legions of unknown and enslaved souls were constantly trampled underfoot by men who denied them. The ashes in the hearth, or the sepulchre, also claim that a heap of evil sleeps in them.

Man says: No! He prostitutes his mouth to nothingness, while even his dog lying in the night (that sinister constellation) sees God. This is because man is nothing, even if the starry beast is little. He denies, he doubts, in the shadow, the dark and gloomy, the vile and hideous, and he rushes into this abyss, this universal sewer.

Ah! Victor! Why didn’t you crush, with a heavy foot, that immortal worm that was gnawing at your overripe soul?

Alas! Alas! Alas! All is alive! Everything thinks!

Triple complaint, quintuple exclamation. One must cry over all the hideous ugliness of the world.

The spider is filthy, the slug is wet, the aphid is vile, the crab is hideous, the bark beetle is awful (like the sun!), the toad is scary.

But there is still hope at the end!

The underworld will refer to itself as eden. It will be the real day. Beauty will flood the night. The pariah universe will stutter in praise. Mass graves will sing. The mud will palpitate.

The pains will end, – as this poem ends: with the ‘Beginning’!

To Victor, however, I would like to address a short message from beyond time, a brief word from beyond the age, a distant sign from India, who ‘glimpsed’ something that Hugo neither saw nor suspected:

Before the very Beginning, there was neither being nor non-being, and ‘all darkness was enveloped in darkness.’ ⁱⁱⁱ

Wise men commented: the spirit (in Sanskrit: manas) is the one and only thing that can be both existing and non-existent. The spirit exists, they said, only in things, but things, if they have no spirit, then they are non-existent^iv.

The seers have long sought wise views on these difficult questions.

They thought, for example, that there was a hidden, deep, obscure link between Being and Non-Being. And they asked themselves: What link? And who could really know anything about it?

They replied ironically: « He certainly knows it – or maybe He Himself doesn’t even know it ! »^v

^{_____________}

i Victor Hugo. Contemplations. XXVI , « What the Mouth of Shadow Says ».

ii Ibid.

iiiRV X,129.3

ivCf. SB X,5,3, 1-2

v RV X,129.7