Memoirs of a Patagonian

Introduction

I drank the infinite like a baby who knows because he drinks his mother's love, like a wild child who sees because he listens to the ocean on the shores of his Beautiful Island and its endless surf. The infinite beats without end, loves without end, because that itself is what loves and makes a first love in the world, a first music to love itself a million times in everything that beats in the world.

And then one goes to school to learn tales that make no sense — our Gaulish ancestors and goodness knows what else and all those bloody, sordid wars one after another, up to the next final one, and our Holy Mother the Church. I had an old mother, very much a seafaring woman, who would open her arms wide toward the shimmering, luminous Coast and say: "For me, God is out there." And that seemed wiser to me than all their pious platitudes. And one lives through story after story that means nothing, loves that always come crashing down in the end — has one ever truly lived, or no more than a little surf, not even silver-tipped, breaking on the old rock. Yet there were old pagans who knew better, who lived better, it seems. And what do you make of it, my brothers of today? What do you breathe that is a true second of life? Beating, singing, living like a seagull on the rock, like a first sun trembling over the cliff of men.

"Men" — what does that mean?

Must there be a final second closing on death to say what? and to open one's eyes onto a new "life" that will say what again?

And life is so beautiful and the earth is so beautiful and she wants to live again and again to find her own mystery, her own fable never found and never told.

Of course! It is not something to be "said" — it is something to be lived, this never-yet-lived thing, in a human skin or in some other unknown bird that wants to live all the same and beat with its own heart.

*

It is this fable that began to beat in my heart in a death-row cell. That very final second of the last what in their horrible prisons.

Now, in an English prison in Calcutta, at Alipore, there was a great Indian revolutionary awaiting his hanging — he waited for a full year, day after day — who was opening eyes infinitely more ancient than mine upon this old "what" of men, and without doubt it was not the first time he had opened a condemned man's eyes upon old Death. His name was Sri Aurobindo. He was acquitted a year later and freed on 6 May 1909, to take refuge in Pondicherry. I was freed on a 5th of May, a few decades later. When I emerged from their Nazi hell, I was forever in tune with human suffering and its revolt and its sorrows. But Sri Aurobindo was a greater revolutionary than all our Lenins and our Robespierres — "incorruptible," betrayed and guillotined — it was the Revolution of Man he wanted, it was the age-old "what" of the millennia from which he meant to wrest its mystery and its fable, it was the Liberation of the Earth from a dominion more horrible than that of those English Gentlemen and their Bible or assorted pieties. It was the physical, material, cellular key to the transformation of Homo sapiens, who was never sapiens and grows less so by the day: all those millennia of painful, groping Evolution were not going to end at the "summit" of a small learned misfit who knew nothing except how to destroy himself cruelly and his whole earth. And Sri Aurobindo saw far ahead what now lies spread before our eyes (for those willing to see): "The close of a stage of evolution is marked by a powerful recrudescence of all the elements that have to go out of evolution." We are well equipped to know it, and to shoot each other to pieces. "Here comes the time of the murderers," said our brother Rimbaud in 1873, after attempting to flee as far as the Sunda Islands — but one cannot flee one's condition as a man: one can change it. That is what Sri Aurobindo affirmed upon leaving Alipore prison:

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"Man is a transitional being."

It is the whole Earth that is in a dangerous, perilous transition.

By a sublime grace or a sublime "Chance" that seems to know beneath our feet what our heads do not know, I met Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, his companion, a little less than a year after crossing the barrier of the Mauthausen camp and the other very corporeal barrier of a mortal typhus and tuberculosis. My body, then, knew something of what Sri Aurobindo knew and of what the Mother — his French companion, born in Paris like that other rebellious youngster I was — who held my hands for so long to slip unbeknownst into my cells what She was living all alone after Sri Aurobindo's departure:

"Expect nothing from heaven," she would say, "salvation is terrestrial."

And it was She who spoke to me of "the next species" on earth, and the means of fashioning it by digging an infernal hole in the consciousness of the body, while her disciples hastened to shut her door to me and to condemn her to death, alone, so they could close her coffin saintly and cruelly, and proclaim their "new religion of Sri Aurobindo" — very profitable — She who told me: "The age of religions is past," "This is the time of Divine Materialism." This is the time of Something Else. And in her last words to me, giving me a small handkerchief and tapping my heart with a finger, she said:

It is all here.

And indeed it is all here, in a heart and in the millions of cells of a body — only one must have the courage to go and find it there.

This is the time of "divine materialism," she said.

This is the time of Something Else on earth.

This is ours — our own human fable.

*

Thus my brother and companion Robert Laffont asked me: "Why not write the story of a little boy in a boat sailing from Belle-Île who would dream about his future life and so tell your life in reverse…"

But instead of a little boy of today, I had a remarkable vision which I now recount: I saw a first child from before learned mankind, a prehistoric little Patagonian, who marvels at the world and wonders who is what. A kind of first childhood of men — and the Future, what?

21 May 2001

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