Tête-d'Or. Paul Claudel
shall arise and burst open the door and I shall appear before men!
Ah! Ah!
Cébès: What is it?
Simon: Do not speak! Ah!
(He stops.
Cébès: What ails you? Why do you snuff the air? What do you smell?
Simon: The air and the earth. Ah!
O the Spring that renews the year and the strong love that triumphs over virginity!
O the ferment of life when the Springtime prepares its nuptials! There is not a thing that grows
But feels the divine delirium entering like a creator, producing the flower and the seed.
Cébès: The wind is warm.
Simon: I have in my mouth the bitter savor of buds! The block
Of my body
Like a clod of frozen earth
Thaws! O juice of life! Force and acquisition! Strength and the rising sap!
I will open wide my jaws and I will raise my arms and hold them extended like branches!
But come!
Cébès: Where are you taking me? Why have we left the road?
Simon: Why do we need a road? I know my way. Follow me!
O Cébès in this you were right that not to an older man nor to any one of an age unlike your own did you address yourself so obscurely,
For they could not answer you, not knowing what you ask.
But if one can tell the vintage of a wine by its taste
Why should we not believe that each generation of men
Springing from the maternal furrow in its season
Keeps a common secret, a changeless knot in the hidden texture of its wood?
(Or rather I think of a carpet whose maker disposes the colors one after the other)
—And a baby is weaned at eleven months, but the weaning of the spirit is slower.
And till he learns to forage for himself (the amount being equal to the expenditure) the breast is not taken away, the communication with the source.
—So if you put your ear against my heart— … But I myself am full of sorrow.
Cébès: We are going further and further.
Simon: As for me, I have never tried to fathom
What lay in the heart of anyone, young or old.
But a tree has been my father and my preceptor.
For often when I was a child
A black and bitter humor overwhelmed me,
Making all company hateful, the air breathed by others a poison,
So that I fled into solitude there to obscurely nourish this grief that I felt unfolding itself within me.
And there I met this tree,
Like some primordial man, surviving antiquity,
And I embraced it, clasping its trunk in my arms.
For it was there before I was born and will be there when we are here no longer,
And the measure of its time is not the same as ours.
How many an afternoon I have passed beneath its shadow, having quieted the clamor of my thoughts.
Cébès: And what has it taught you?
Simon: Now, in this hour of anguish! Now I must find it again!
(They come to the foot of a huge tree.
O tree, receive me again! Alone I left the protection of your branches. And now it is alone that I return, O immovable father!
Take me once more beneath your shadow, O son of the Earth! O wood, in this hour of sorrow! O murmuring branches, impart to me
That message which I am and of which I feel within me the terrible striving.
For you yourself are only a ceaseless striving, the unwearied drawing of your body out of inanimate matter.
How you suck the earth, old tree,
Thrusting down, stretching out in every direction your strong and subtile roots! And the sky, how you cling to it! How your whole being breathes it in through one great leaf, Form of Flame!
The inexhaustible earth in the grasp of all the roots of your being
And the infinite sky, with the sun, with the stars in their constellations,
Of which you lay hold with that mouth made of all your arms, with the cluster of your branches, with the clutch of all there is in you that breathes.
All the earth and all the sky, these are what you require that you may hold yourself erect!
Let me also hold myself erect! Let me not lose my soul! That essential sap, that innermost secretion of my ego, that effervescence
Which constitutes my true self, oh let me not squander that to make a useless tuft of leaves and flowers! Let me grow in my unity! Let me remain unique and erect!
But it was not to hear your murmuring that I came, O branches that now are bare mid the air opaque and nebulous!
But it is you that I would question, deep-reaching roots and that primal depth of the earth where you are nourished.
(He stands beneath the tree.—Pause of indefinite duration.
Simon (sighing, like one awakening from a dream): Let us go.
Cébès: O Simon, you will not leave me so!
Have you learned nothing then, under that tree of knowledge?
Simon: Nothing that I can tell you.
Cébès: Well, the thing that you cannot tell, that is what I demand.
Oh, if indeed
Some law is graven on your heart, if some commandment
And edict of Nature
Pushes you as from its knee into the midst of us, miserable wretches. …
(He kneels before him.
Simon: What do you want?
Cébès: Do not forget me!
Simon: Why do you wish to make me speak?
Leave me, for my spirit smokes and boils, and I am shaken through all my being!
Cébès: I am the first to summon you.
Simon: What do you seek?
Cébès: Your hands! Let me take them! Do not refuse me!
Simon: Ah! ah!
Cébès: What is it?
Simon: A spirit has breathed upon me and I vibrate like a post.
—Cébès, a force has been given to me, stark, savage! It is the fury of the male. There is no woman in me.
Cébès: I implore you.
Simon: Do not hope to know more than I wish to tell you.
Cébès: Listen to me! I understand and I will not let you go! Was I not there?
Surely to-day I must ask and you must answer!
You shall not go before
You have given me the portion that is due me.
Reply or I will throw myself upon you and constrain you by force!
I