No one saw him
disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the
sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the
taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those
numberless villages upstream in the deeply cleft side of the mountain, where
the Zend language has not been contaminated by Greek and where leprosy is
infrequent. What is certain is that the grey man kissed the mud, climbed up the
bank with pushing aside (probably, without feeling) the blades which were
lacerating his flesh, and crawled, nauseated and bloodstained, up to the
circular enclosure crowned with a stone tiger or horse, which sometimes was the
color of flame and now was that of ashes. This circle was a temple which had
been devoured by ancient fires, profaned by the miasmal jungle, and whose god
no longer received the homage of men. The stranger stretched himself out
beneath the pedestal. He was awakened by the sun high overhead. He was not
astonished to find that his wounds had healed; he closed his pallid eyes and
slept, not through weakness of flesh but through determination of will. He knew
that this temple was the place required for his invincible intent; he knew that
the incessant trees had not succeeded in strangling the ruins of another
propitious temple downstream which had once belonged to gods now burned and
dead; he knew that his immediate obligation was to dream. Toward midnight he
was awakened by the inconsolable shriek of a bird. Tracks of bare feet, some
figs and a jug warned him that the men of the region had been spying
respectfully on his sleep, soliciting his protection or afraid of his magic. He
felt a chill of fear, and sought out a sepulchral niche in the dilapidated wall
where he concealed himself among unfamiliar leaves.
The purpose which
guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man;
he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic
project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind; if someone had asked him
his name or to relate some event of his former life, he would not have been
able to give an answer. This uninhabited, ruined temple suited him, for it is
contained a minimum of visible world; the proximity of the workmen also suited
him, for they took it upon themselves to provide for his frugal needs. The rice
and fruit they brought him were nourishment enough for his body, which was
consecrated to the sole task of sleeping and dreaming.
At first, his dreams
were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The
stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was
more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of
seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and
as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man
lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened
anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the
importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his
condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or
awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself
to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing
intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.
After nine or ten
nights he understood with a certain bitterness that he could expect nothing
from those pupils who accepted his doctrine passively, but that he could expect
something from those who occasionally dared to oppose him. The former group,
although worthy of love and affection, could not ascend to the level of
individuals; the latter pre-existed to a slightly greater degree. One afternoon
(now afternoons were also given over to sleep, now he was only awake for a
couple hours at daybreak) he dismissed the vast illusory student body for good
and kept only one pupil. He was a taciturn, sallow boy, at times intractable,
and whose sharp features resembled of those of his dreamer. The brusque
elimination of his fellow students did not disconcert him for long; after a few
private lessons, his progress was enough to astound the teacher. Nevertheless,
a catastrophe took place. One day, the man emerged from his sleep as if from a
viscous desert, looked at the useless afternoon light which he immediately
confused with the dawn, and understood that he had not dreamed. All that night
and all day long, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia fell upon him. He tried
exploring the forest, to lose his strength; among the hemlock he barely
succeeded in experiencing several short snatchs of sleep, veined with fleeting,
rudimentary visions that were useless. He tried to assemble the student body
but scarcely had he articulated a few brief words of exhortation when it became
deformed and was then erased. In his almost perpetual vigil, tears of anger
burned his old eyes.
He understood that
modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed was
the most difficult task that a man could undertake, even though he should
penetrate all the enigmas of a superior and inferior order; much more difficult
than weaving a rope out of sand or coining the faceless wind. He swore he would
forget the enormous hallucination which had thrown him off at first, and he
sought another method of work. Before putting it into execution, he spent a
month recovering his strength, which had been squandered by his delirium. He
abandoned all premeditation of dreaming and almost immediately succeeded in
sleeping a reasonable part of each day. The few times that he had dreams during
this period, he paid no attention to them. Before resuming his task, he waited
until the moon's disk was perfect. Then, in the afternoon, he purified himself
in the waters of the river, worshiped the planetary gods, pronounced the
prescribed syllables of a mighty name, and went to sleep. He dreamed almost
immediately, with his heart throbbing.
He dreamed that it
was warm, secret, about the size of a clenched fist, and of a garnet color
within the penumbra of a human body as yet without face or sex; during fourteen
lucid nights he dreampt of it with meticulous love. Every night he perceived it
more clearly. He did not touch it; he only permitted himself to witness it, to
observe it, and occasionally to rectify it with a glance. He perceived it and
lived it from all angles and distances. On the fourteenth night he lightly
touched the pulmonary artery with his index finger, then the whole heart,
outside and inside. He was satisfied with the examination. He deliberately did
not dream for a night; he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a
planet, and undertook the vision of another of the principle organs. Within a
year he had come to the skeleton and the eyelids. The innumerable hair was
perhaps the most difficult task. He dreamed an entire man--a young man, but who
did not sit up or talk, who was unable to open his eyes. Night after night, the
man dreamt him asleep.
In the Gnostic
cosmosgonies, demiurges fashion a red Adam who cannot stand; as a clumsy, crude
and elemental as this Adam of dust was the Adam of dreams forged by the
wizard's nights. One afternoon, the man almost destroyed his entire work, but
then changed his mind. (It would have been better had he destroyed it.) When he
had exhausted all supplications to the deities of earth, he threw himself at
the feet of the effigy which was perhaps a tiger or perhaps a colt and implored
its unknown help. That evening, at twilight, he dreamt of the statue. He dreamt
it was alive, tremulous: it was not an atrocious bastard of a tiger and a colt,
but at the same time these two firey creatures and also a bull, a rose, and a
storm. This multiple god revealed to him that his earthly name was Fire, and
that in this circular temple (and in others like it) people had once made
sacrifices to him and worshiped him, and that he would magically animate the
dreamed phantom, in such a way that all creatures, except Fire itself and the
dreamer, would believe to be a man of flesh and blood. He commanded that once
this man had been instructed in all the rites, he should be sent to the other
ruined temple whose pyramids were still standing downstream, so that some voice
would glorify him in that deserted ediface. In the dream of the man that
dreamed, the dreamed one awoke.
The wizard carried
out the orders he had been given. He devoted a certain length of time (which
finally proved to be two years) to instructing him in the mysteries of the
universe and the cult of fire. Secretly, he was pained at the idea of being
seperated from him. On the pretext of pedagogical necessity, each day he
increased the number of hours dedicated to dreaming. He also remade the right
shoulder, which was somewhat defective. At times, he was disturbed by the impression
that all this had already happened . . . In general, his days were happy; when
he closed his eyes, he thought: Now I will be with my son. Or, more rarely: The
son I have engendered is waiting for me and will not exist if I do not go to
him.
Gradually, he began
accustoming him to reality. Once he ordered him to place a flag on a faraway
peak. The next day the flag was fluttering on the peak. He tried other
analogous experiments, each time more audacious. With a certain bitterness, he
understood that his son was ready to be born--and perhaps impatient. That night
he kissed him for the first time and sent him off to the other temple whose
remains were turning white downstream, across many miles of inextricable jungle
and marshes. Before doing this (and so that his son should never know that he
was a phantom, so that he should think himself a man like any other) he
destroyed in him all memory of his years of apprenticeship.
His victory and peace
became blurred with boredom. In the twilight times of dusk and dawn, he would
prostrate himself before the stone figure, perhaps imagining his unreal son
carrying out identical rites in other circular ruins downstream; at night he no
longer dreamed, or dreamed as any man does. His perceptions of the sounds and forms
of the universe became somewhat pallid: his absent son was being nourished by
these diminution of his soul. The purpose of his life had been fulfilled; the
man remained in a kind of ecstasy. After a certain time, which some chronicles
prefer to compute in years and others in decades, two oarsmen awoke him at
midnight; he could not see their faces, but they spoke to him of a charmed man
in a temple of the North, capable of walking on fire without burning himself.
The wizard suddenly remembered the words of the god. He remembered that of all
the creatures that people the earth, Fire was the only one who knew his son to
be a phantom. This memory, which at first calmed him, ended by tormenting him.
He feared lest his son should meditate on this abnormal privilege and by some
means find out he was a mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be a projection of
another man's dreams--what an incomparable humiliation, what madness! Any
father is interested in the sons he has procreated (or permitted) out of the
mere confusion of happiness; it was natural that the wizard should fear for the
future of that son whom he had thought out entrail by entrail, feature by
feature, in a thousand and one secret nights.
His misgivings ended
abruptly, but not without certain forewarnings. First (after a long drought) a
remote cloud, as light as a bird, appeared on a hill; then, toward the South,
the sky took on the rose color of leopard's gums; then came clouds of smoke
which rusted the metal of the nights; afterwards came the panic-stricken flight
of wild animals. For what had happened many centuries before was repeating
itself. The ruins of the sanctuary of the god of Fire was destroyed by fire. In
a dawn without birds, the wizard saw the concentric fire licking the walls. For
a moment, he thought of taking refuge in the water, but then he understood that
death was coming to crown his old age and absolve him from his labors. He
walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed
him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation,
with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone else was
dreaming him.
