A translation by Randolph Burks of Avaler sur trois torrents, from Nouvelles du monde [Short Stories from the World], by Michel Serres (pp. 209-217).
Going Downstream on Three Torrents A Descent of the Dranse On board a car on a freeway or dozing on a train, arrogant, we believe ourselves to be the first ones in history to penetrate the landscape while watching the trees and rocks on the roadside file past, whereas descending on a raft a torrent swollen by the spring floods teaches that these lightning-fast passages date from the mists of time. With three pieces of wood to sit down on and another for paddling, going downstream or descending causes one to go back up, quickly, to before the Neolithic. Also indicated at the origin of the world, the chaos and commotion evoke the clamorous noise of the uproar and the disorder of the jolting. We only recently invented smooth roads whose pavement allows our vehicles to glide along while the body drops off into sleep from the gentle hissing of this movement. Long before air cushions made us forget that the word “pneumatic” formerly meant the smooth breaths of the soul, the paths were severely shaking our bones and eardrums. Thus, associated with the capricious and icy slaps from the waves, rapids remind our kidneys of the rocks and potholes of the ancient paved roads, and remind our hearing of the din of ancient journeys. So, perception goes back up to the times when the naked body would hurl itself headlong into the tumultuous and wild gift of things; the jolting breaks its bones to better liquefy its muscles and put it in unison with the tortuous talweg; thus acquired, its suppleness trusts the rounded paths of the plank skirting around the obstacles by following the threads of water, whose serpentine and prudent violence avoids, much better than its frightened stiffness, the rocks' asperities; through the tight eddies, little cascades and turbulence, it feels the reason of the aquatic descent, dangerous but skillful, whose astuteness always chooses the easiest passage, even if a narrow one. Its blood, its short life and its time flow with the current, not uniformly, as along a smooth and gentle channel, but by the adventures of a dramatic story of passings and returns, of forgettings and rememberings, of precipitations and languishings, of continuous current and broken cascades, of filters and detours, of rhythms and meanings. Nothing passes, nothing flows as is believed: everything sings and dances like the Dranse. Only then does the commotion yield to a perfect harmony, even if a complex one; the noise becomes a subtle music, and the irregular disorder transforms into intelligent rhythm. Following the fast path along the steep canyon, willow branches and tangles of reeds sometimes whip one's face; while the gaze perceives the light-tan gap of foam across the green tableau, the body, having become totally hearing, deciphers the staff of an immemorial music score, whose entire flesh, bones and skin hear the archaic voice and, beneath the jolting, make out the choreography. On the white ribbon, imprinted with rocks, rapids and falls, it reads: presto, here, marked, in the dark water, with sixty-fourth or two hundred fifty-sixth notes, accelerando, with appoggiatura, syncopation and runs, andante, there, during seconds – whole notes and half-notes – of calm and rest, a silence in which it abandons the vibrating paddle, but where, suddenly, the double bar of a counter-current makes it turn back upstream and take up the thread again starting from some measure... coda, refrain,
ritornello, fugue, counterpoint, whose returnings maintain the now [maintiennent le maintenant], as though the torrent, furious, impelled it into motionless eternity... glide, battu, brisé, chassé, dégagé, brio, piqué, plié, fouetté... under the gymnastic commands of a coryphée.1 The rhythms of this intelligent dance and the measures of this sublime music beat the real time of things, the way the mountain artery strikes its pulse against the rocks at water-level: between these bones of its mother Earth, the body descends like a blood cell, red or white, eddying in its blood; upon the refined hearing of this score and by adapting to the positions, curvatures and figures it imposes on it, the body knows, from inside, the world's body, its analog, and understands the flow and circulation of meaning. Flaming, the current descends like a thousand audible voices, decipherable into as many incarnate languages. The Merced in Yosemite Park Us. On screens or white pages, deft fingers and hands know how to draw signs: maps, charts, prose, verse, algorithms or music. In the plowed plot, the tractor or the oxen under the yoke pull the plow whose blade digs, in parallel, the furrows of that boustrophedon whose zigzags, it is said, weaved primitive writing. In the mountains, shoes, hard, imprint paths in twistings whose curves and indentations adapt breath and muscles to the ascent. Like filthy admen, we soil the world by leaving our traces everywhere. It. The torrent descends by the talweg, but also erodes its line of greatest slope by pelting the crevasses it passes, turbulent, with gravel and sand; quiets down in pockets of storage or lakes of memory so as to draw on the warped and rugged surface of the mountain – whose topography invites and conditions the torrent, but also submits to its ardent digging – minuscule volutes, majuscule bends, the downstrokes and the upstrokes of a water black as ink due to the white ice, dams and successions of cataracts, whose background noise, invading space, muffles its accents beneath the commotion and conceals the reading of its lines beneath the veils of spray and sublimated mists. Behind these appearances, clouds and hubbub, what mystery is concealed? Why don't we hear any voices beneath its fracas? Because we don't yet know how to decipher a meaning there? Who speaks? The permanent and volatile conversation of the waters and the rocks, their voluble and monotonous dialog since the dawn of the world? Why don't we read their fallings, their retentions, their continuous and irregular routes the way we do the grimoires of fields, the algebras and music staffs dug out by the hands, feet or the blades of plowshares; why don't we see them sown, like the latter, with double bars, whole notes and half-notes, with silences, sighs and reprises, with fractions and integrals, with sudden points where everything bursts and cries out, or with others whose ears open to interrogation? Because, conceited, we believe ourselves to be alone capable of plowing, walking, carving our Narcissistic lines on solids; and when we hear the silent voice of things, we quickly stifle it beneath the filth of our senseless noises. Let's rather learn to read the universal writing and to listen to the universal language. Here it is. Humbly, the earth informs itself; yes, the world writes on itself, with more intelligence and beauty than we know how to do on constructed objects: the weighty crystal of the ice traces the moraine's cradle on the rock; on the surface of these glaciers, the rocks bring about Forbes bands; the tributary draws a curved and colorful diagonal on the confluence into which it gives its waters, redder, 1 These dancing and music terms could have a double-meaning. Respectively: flowed, beaten, broken, hunted, bare, abducted, stung, bent, whipped. Coryphée could also be translated as coryphaeus.
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to its main river, yellow and brown; on the waves churned up by the hurricane, the showery gusts, fractal, sow their hatchings, white and grayish; behind what rises in front of it, the sun projects shadows on the pages of the earth, humble... Things ring out to each other with a harmony we do not hear in our conversations: the grass of the fields and the firs answer the breeze in different ways; under the ascendancy of the flame, the dry vine shoot doesn't complain the way green trunks do, smoky; to the wind's commands, the sea protests differently from lake water; the desert silence doesn't remain quiet the way the centers of cyclones do; and during the fundamental storm of earthquakes, a deep baritone comes out of the ground... Into this empty universe invaded by a beginning of expression creeps and nestles the miserly meaning we make spring from our shrill voices and our fragile marks. Offered there, it grows. Exposed there, it dilates with joy. So, the clamoring space, which welcomes our blossoming, supplements and enriches its vacuity. This is what is meant by understanding: throwing our words into the meaning of the world. By the series of cataracts with laminar sheets and turbulent rapids, by the housing of the grandiose voice of the enormous falls in the calm silence around the lakes' retention, by the intuitive rainbow's modest covering around the volutes of mist, behind a few surprise unveilings, our prose will only become good on the fine morning when its cheerful dilection will chant and pray to the universe, like the Merced. Pity for the world and the piety of things. Canyoneering in the Sierra de Guara, in Aragon Carried along by the violent current, sliding along a blue-green waterslide, impelled across a narrow window so as to fall into a tub at the bottom of a deep cave..., canyoneering or descending gorges teaches the body how time flows: no, it doesn't pass like the Seine, under Notre Dame's bridge, quite continuously, but accelerates in a sliding channel, struggles to go through the bottom of a well, comes to a halt in the middle of a pool, eddies around itself there and seems to stop, slowly lazes at the surface of wide lakes, then abruptly rises again, carries off with its force everything within gullies so constricted that neither one's legs nor one's arms are swimming beneath a dizzying thread of sky... Strangers to successive, regular, straight lines, these unexpected returns, these sudden slumbers, these unforeseeable boltings, the living body and the rare soul have always known them and have followed them every moment: will they ever speed the course of their common life as perfectly as here? They're finally at home! Along these narrow defiles, the contorsions of the muscles and the skeleton in order to adapt to a hundred different passages therefore plunge the body into living duration. Never did life impose on it taking up so many positions as the rock, here, wildly sculpted by the aerial and subterranean waters. Modeled from humus, its fluidity hardens in order to imitate the strange forms of the rock; when did the landscape, outside, force it, so as to enter it, to imitate so many keys? For the gorge has a series of different locks succeed one another which the body strives to open by taking up an adapted form: jumps, stiff, into dark pockets, hurls itself feet or head or arms or hips first, crawls on its back or stomach, downclimbs by turning around, bows and bends over, imitates a rat or a snake, a slow tortoise under its backpack or a fly on a wall, a fish or a spider hanging from its thread... swims, walks, slides, floats, dances... Supple, it knots itself, slackens and dissolves, by the complex events of the canyon multiply closed in this way, flows there then like time and liquid, earth made fluidified flesh lastly by these difficult figures. From birth to death, it never ceases, likewise dancing, changing position: for nursing, writing or standing at attention, pole vaulting, the forehand and the backhand, pitching and rolling, the labors of 3
the shovel, the pitchfork, the forge, tools and machines, love, that purveyor of arrows and respect... by ten achings of suffering and as many discursive gestures... life advances from this ballet. An apprentice, the body mimics the keys that make it change ages, make it force doors, find the others and the world, up until it becomes that cadaver that descends straight down the current and whose lengthening plunges it into the grave. Let it descend the gorge then: no only does it, fluid, liquefy in duration itself, but, powerful, it takes on the hardened forms required to live, as well as those it was unaware of due to never having had any need for them. Immersed in the flaming and proliferating becoming of inert and living things, it therefore lives more than it had ever lived before. Better yet, since it knows how to prepare for so many positions and since it can draw them, the way the stream-time does in the space of its bed, we can name the body a preposition and say it in and with life, toward life, by life, for life, across life, full of life, before and after life... let's not repeat this latter word whose meaning we don't know, and let's say: with and toward, by and for, before and after, in front of and behind, against... this is our dance body. Carried along by the violent current, sliding along a blue-green waterslide, impelled across a narrow window so as to fall into a tub at the bottom of a deep cave... now you have just been born. Through perpetual birth, here, in the dark abysses of the world, you never cease reaching the light. Lying in the waters, blood, bones, pelvis, the openings and the pulsations of the mother earth, up until, expelled from the canyon swimming through some fissure, your body lengthened, you return to the light the way you will, in the end, leave life, magnificent. Born from our dark mother, death on a scorching afternoon. In the middle of the same sierra with its sun-baked rocks, during very ancient eras, a nun spent long years of solitude in contemplation listening to the muteness of the mountain. One morning, she understood the song of the rivulets streaming beneath her feet in the canyons ramified like the body's veins. This intelligence, which I sought after so, was bequeathed to us by her. In order that its meaning might remain, she took these rocks and put together the walls of a hermitage imitating, on top, the bottom of the mountain; so she built a little canyon as narrow, as shady, cold and luminous, as mysterious as the unpredictable channels that cause the water beneath the rocks to murmur, and she climbed, in maternal Latin, to the cyma of the walls, the exact translation of this hubbub: et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo, and my spirit exults with elation in God my savior. This canyon in inverted image has waited for a long time, perched high on the mountain traversed today by new men, using different languages and dressed differently than the hermit from yesteryear, but as attentive as she was to the world's background noise emanating from the silence of the grand sierra. Rapid visitor, can you read, and, barbarian, understand this message pulverized into tiny pieces of letters, a message by which a neglected religion expresses, in a constructed enclosure, the latent meaning of the breast and womb of the immense landscape? Like the woman from yesteryear, try to grasp the rising commotion emitted by the chaos of the depths; listen to the ancient message springing up from the entrails of the caves and singing the joy, the glory and the advent of the Word which, humble and carnal, murmurs at the bottom of the dark streaming gorges of your exalted body.
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