The Bacchantes by Brian Stableford & Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford & Brian Stableford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: time travel, science fiction, romance, erotica, French
ISBN: 9781434446503
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

IN THE NIGHT

Sly or sudden, human evils are great schools, and the Greeks saw that clearly who said: “Pathemata, mathemata.”24 But for those who do not have faith in the Crucified, those schools can turn out badly, for the first stage—that of revolt—is prolonged indefinitely through false resignation.

Ségétan, a complete scientist, gave himself the assignment, in his dark room, of discerning by its absence the role of light and color in a mind like his, and the means of remedying the deprivation of those two essential goods. He had been struck by Goethe’s sublime definition. “Colors are the deeds and suffering of light.”25 Until now, the colors and the forms of the divine female body had been narrowly linked, in him, to the mechanism of research and discovery. What was going to happen, now that he only had their memory?

He began with the daily administration of hours of reading, alternately provided by Tullie and Mélanie, and hours of conversation, scientific and other, with Bénalep and Dévonet, or Ignacio and Ariana. Any other visit, except for those of the good Curé Parroy and Maire Taupin, was strictly forbidden. Dr. Pénétrot came from Paris twice a week to monitor changes. The rest of the time, the Master reflected, recollected and meditated.

He could not see anything at all; there was darkness—which is to say, a substantial fraction of death. In the first few days, his efforts to evoke, in that darkness, simultaneously inconsistent and absolute, the voluptuous and soft images of what he had experienced, remained utterly vain. He perceived, in a strange remoteness, a woman’s arm, a leg, a gaze, that he had difficulty identifying, in reassembling, as the synthetic power of vision does in a flash. As for colors, there was no prospect. Everything that appeared to him was gray, and, at the same time, diminished in its relief.

He asked Tullie to come to him in the nude; he slowly felt her beautiful breasts, her neck, the curve of her hips, her buttocks, without any intellectual or sensory excitement, because the mental representation was lacking, because touch is like an invalid, procuring shreds, not a whole, and because only the whole gives birth to desire. A primary, and important, observation was therefore that the eye is an initial mind, synthetic in the same fashion as the mind, and, like him, created for desire, for the amorous fecundation of intelligence, either by form or by color. Touch communicates form poorly, partially, shabbily. It knows nothing of color.

The latter preoccupied him greatly, along with Goethe’s remark. Why the “suffering” of light? Was there a suffering of the latter, then, as well as the suffering of its disappearance? He discussed that with Ignacio, who made long and pleasant visits, and who had revealed to him his complicated and twisted sensuality, corresponding to vast esthetic knowledge.

“Why that suffering?” The latter said. “But my dear master and friend, because color is a decomposition, a division of light, and everything composite that is divided suffers. Joy is in unity.

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