Encyclopedic Readings of Attractive Cycles by Louise Michel
English Translation
“In the future, each trade, whether by command or by harmony, will accomplish its work; just as the works of Daedalus moved by themselves, and the tripods of Vulcan arranged themselves automatically.”
— Aristotle
I
Like a stone thrown into water evokes expanding circles, this small volume, striking one point of human perception, will attempt to evoke the others.
Everything is part of the universal harmony where each note calls forth endless chords.
Rivers of suns move through space and time without bounds; oceans roll, in cycles, the drops of water within their waves. Time has its epochs, where seconds and centuries fall into eternity. Everything is rhythmic in nature, and the human heart, like the tides, beats in cycles.
The progression of beings, the distances of the stars, form scales; one counts within them the lost notes of shattered planets.
Between the ape and man, there have existed types of transformations now disappeared.
— 2 —
Sound, colours, and language are scales, distances, everything like pure mathematics.
The sciences, simplified more and more each day, allow the mind, better balanced, to grasp the relationships between all that exists and to embrace the whole more broadly before turning to specialisations.
Through the encyclopaedic method, every intelligence finds its path, provided that general ideas are linked together instead of remaining confused.
The man who is unaware of what he can produce that is good or great is a negative expression; and since human societies are composed of individual units added one to another, it is important that there be as few negative expressions as possible.
Here is the opinion of J.-B. Say on the development as it is still carried out today through specialised aptitudes:
“A man who, throughout his life, performs only a single operation will certainly come to execute it more quickly and better than another man; but at the same time he becomes less capable of every other occupation, whether physical or moral; the other faculties fade, and there results a degeneration in the man considered individually.
It is a sad thing to have to admit that one has never done more than the eighteenth part of a pin.
In conclusion, it may be said that the division of labour is a skilful use of human forces, and that it greatly increases production, but that it takes something away from the capacity of each individual man.”
— J.-B. Say
The true interest of human societies is to be aggregations of responsible beings and not of animated machines; the succession of ever more developed encyclopaedias (which would make known to each individual his capacities) would help to compose the great body of humanity from healthier elements.
May this book be the seed that begins the germ, the point touched that evokes the infinite cycles of thought.
It will contain worlds seen through the telescope, and the world of a drop of water under the microscope.
General reflections on the scales of sound, of colours, of numbers.
An overview of the legends that have cradled, and still cradle, humanity.
The different ages will pass through it like spectres; mathematics, drawing, music will have their place within it, or rather, as one sees the stars through the lens of a telescope, one will see the infinite, harmony assisting rather than the author’s talent. Thus the works of Daedalus harmonised themselves; likewise, in space, the particles of astral matter revolve and condense.
II
The telescope allows us to perceive several thousand more stars than our sight alone; the microscope likewise compensates, for the infinitely small, for the insufficiency of our eyes, and shows us, in a drop of water for example, a world long unknown.
It is likely that, through exercise, the senses will be perfected; that touch, sight, and hearing will one day possess a power which we can no longer even conceive, just as the first mute and deaf beings of our current perception could not have conceived ours.
The human eye will one day see nuances that still escape the eyes of painters.
The ear will perceive, between the sounds appreciable to us, smaller intervals, or will form scales with degrees closer together than those of the wind; and by contrast, there will also be degrees of enormous distances. Thus changing distances, which will add richness to change itself and reveal others.
Does not everything have its song? In spring, when the sap rises, harmonies of a completely different rhythm rise from the earth than in winter, when the elements groan in icy death.
Spring is the childhood of the year in the mysteries of germination; winter is old age, the black moon, the dead sun, as the Basques used to say.
Through the instruments that have revealed to us things long unknown, the telescope and the microscope, we divine the infinite as the ancients sensed boundless time, eternity, Zervan of the mythologies, where the symbol made up for the poverty of language; it often still does, for thought moves more quickly than the aggregation of words.
Then, from time to time, some legend gathers the symbols, gives them material form, and ignorance comes to worship the shape clothed by thought.
In the expanses of the sky that seem like deserts to us, the telescope reveals clusters of stars like heaps of wheat.
Further on, through open bays, stellar tides rise endlessly, and the telescope stops just as our sight would stop, without the oceans of stars ceasing to roll.
A drop of water, a fragment of mud, a crumb of chalk that we observe under the microscope contain monsters, with this difference: that in chalk, in building stone, the monsters are dead.
They date from epochs when the earth was inhabited by enormous animals that left in the living soils their imprints or their remains.
Above Berlin, in a layer of clay soil, there are living infusoria; it is through them that their fertility of production has been calculated: from a single one are born around eight million.
The red dust that, after the great south-west winds, remains on the moss of trees is said to be composed of infusoria carried from America by storms.
The microscope reveals in oysters creatures like long-haired serpents (for their size), called nereids, and a kind of lobster that has before it two enormous pincers and behind it six legs armed with claw-like hooks. These monsters, invisible to the naked eye, are called chevalets.
The dust from butterfly wings, seen under the microscope, has the appearance of tiles; this is why they have been called Lepidoptera, scaly wings.
In madrepores and corals, the microscope reveals cells of extremely simple animals (a tube whose mouth-end is lined with cilia that make it resemble a living flower, used for ingestion and swallowing).
These rudimentary beings gradually build up submarine mountains whose slopes they cover, forming around the summit an elevation whose section or crater is a lake; these islands are called atolls.
Corals work to link together the archipelagos of atolls with which the southern ocean is studded. Around New Caledonia, they form a double rampart of reefs which ships pass through by breaches forming channels, no doubt caused by cyclones.
The seabed, scraped by storms, deposits on the shores fragments of animated jelly called protoplasm. It is one of the most elementary manifestations of life. A shapeless gelatinous flesh which, in order to return to the sea without which it will dry in the sun, stretches out, extends toward the water, attempting through these extensions something resembling tentacles.
Thus the heavens roll masses of dust that are astral matter.
The green substance classified among the simplest algae, called protococcus, is a collection of microscopic infusoria.
Thus everything has a common origin.
Through nutrition and respiration, the atoms composing living bodies are constantly renewed.
The same attraction that makes the planets gravitate around their sun in a harmonious order draws beings and human societies toward the ideal progress of justice and intelligence, which will grow eternally, since the intellectual and moral horizon continually expands through all acquired knowledge and all errors that have disappeared.
The Milky Way that crosses the sky is like a river of stars carried in the eternal eddies of countless suns with their satellites.
Our sun occupies the centre of the Milky Way, which through the telescope appears roughly like the shape of a millstone.
Beyond are other suns so distant that their light takes several million years to reach us, although the speed of light is great enough to circle the earth seven times in one second.
Some suns send us a clear light, others red, others white or green.
Aldebaran, Sirius, about nineteen times larger than our sun, have a red light.
Some stars are triple, double; just as in the time when the earth was incandescent, it appeared together with the sun.
There are quadruple stars, revolving around one another, differing in colour, like diamonds or rubies.
The beings of past epochs did not exist under the same conditions as our contemporaries; they did not have the same aspect of the sky either; secular variations have been observed in the constellations.
The stars do not move uniformly; some travel faster than others.
Thus Camille Flammarion and other astronomers have calculated that the Great Bear had, fifty thousand years ago, the appearance that the Southern Cross has today, and that in fifty thousand years it will have the appearance of a stork with its neck inclined.
Indeed, the star Eta will have gained on the star Epsilon, which moves more slowly.
It is according to the appearance of stars to the naked eye that they are called of first, second, or third magnitude. Those of the fifth and sixth magnitude can only be seen through the telescope. It is distance, not size, that makes them appear so.
The stars of first and second magnitude in each constellation are designated by the first letters of the Greek alphabet.
Beings, like spheres, have their currents; migrations have carried the men of the earliest epochs toward more fertile lands. Currents of ideas carry generations closer to us.
Like human herds of the past, animals have their migrations; these are periodic, and perhaps in the depths of time it was the same for humans.
We cannot measure the years that have fallen by the thousands upon each geological epoch. But the superimposed layers of the earth’s crust give, through their traces and debris, the form of those epochs.
Thus, on the trunks of beech or oak trees, one counts the years by their rings.
A tree was cut down in San Francisco a few years ago, to which, by its concentric rings, five thousand years were assigned.
Among the peoples who assign to the world the greatest antiquity are the Indians, who reckon four million years.
These four million years are not even four drops of water in the ocean of ages.
Geologists can, up to a certain point, calculate the carving of granitic valleys. For those of Limousin, about eighty thousand years are assigned. It is also known that twenty-five thousand years are required for a millimetre of coal.
The earliest epochs, when constant upheavals were veiled in darkness by thick vapours, form the chaos of all mythologies.
Legendary accounts place this as a prologue to events preserved in symbolic form.
Invocations to furious elements and to terrible animals that disputed forests and caves with human primates are mingled there with the stories of Hercules and of Prometheus, who fought monsters or carried off from the volcano or the blaze kindled by lightning the fire so precious to man that it was worshipped and preserved on pain of death.
The human beast, still rare, bit into living flesh like the lion or the tiger; fire gathered the tribe, and soon it made them subject their prey to a preparation that tempered primitive ferocity.
The memory of the dreadful struggles of the elements long remained.
One could fear, says Horace, the return of those times when Pyrrha was afflicted by the return of so many new prodigies, when Proteus led his flocks to the tops of mountains, when fish halted in the crowns of elms, once the refuge of doves.
The old Aeschylus, in his Prometheus, speaks of the wandering life of men who, in herds, inhabited caves and disputed with wild beasts for prey and shelter.
The earth, says Horace again, weeps for the monsters it covers, its children cast by flame into the pallid dwelling of Pluto. Etna still burns above them.
The principal legends have as their origin a geological catastrophe.
The sea covering and uncovering Attica is the struggle of Poseidon against Hera.
Continents, and no doubt the earliest civilisations, are buried in the upheavals of the earth.
According to Egyptian traditions, Atlantis disappeared beneath the waves in a single day and night.
These collapses have never ceased.
Pliny recounts that Sicily was separated from Italy by an earthquake.
The island of Cyprus was likewise separated from Syria; Negroponte from Boeotia.
We see islands of the great ocean sinking while others rise.
As changes in the earth became less frequent, man, more secure upon the land, began to extend further his fears and his curiosity. The eclipses of the stars, the forms of the constellations, the order of the seasons established symbolic complications; a multitude of gods emerged, and man, shaping them in his own image, out of regard for himself, gave them at the same time, out of respect for them, appetites greater than human appetites.
Origins, disappearing through slow transformations, nevertheless left traces.
According to Eastern traditions, the principle of all things developed in the waters.
Hieroglyphs represent life in the form of a man holding an egg to his mouth.
Egg, seed, or sphere: this form is found throughout the universe.
III
After the depth occupied on earth by crystalline rocks belonging to epochs when temperatures were burning, one observes four different layers of terrain containing fossils.
They are called primary, secondary, tertiary, and quaternary.
The tertiary period precedes modern times; it is divided into lower or Eocene, middle or Miocene, and upper or Pliocene.
In the primary terrains, the enormous plants that, swollen with carbonic acid, formed those gigantic forests beneath which ours would scarcely appear except like moss, have been transformed into layers of coal.
Towards the Miocene age, vegetation withdraws from the already cooled poles and acquires successive refinements.
Below the coal, the Devonian and Silurian terrains of marine formation contain debris of crustaceans and radiating molluscs that lived in the Silurian seas.
Near the Saint Lawrence River, in America, more ancient fossils have been discovered: species of rhizopods.
In the calcareous rocks of the Jura, belonging to the secondary epoch, one finds the remains of enormous reptiles, the plesiosaur and the ichthyosaur, whose huge limbs beat the mud of the marshes like oars.
In the tertiary epoch, mammals produce mastodons – kinds of gigantic elephants – rhinoceroses, and enormous hippopotamuses.
In the Eocene epoch, a kind of dawn, everything swells with life in the morning light.
Although in the tertiary epoch the earth did not present present-day conditions, several discoveries show man already present, where the struggle for life left no respite—against the upheaved soil, against animals, against man himself.
No shelter was safe; monsters reclaimed the caves, the ocean bit into the shores, starving man hunted man.
It is the state in which we still find, in our own time, certain populations that distance from others, the condition of the land that produces just enough to avoid death, and the warmth of the climate that makes clothing unnecessary have preserved, similar to our ancestors of the Stone Age.
The bones of fossil humans show them still close to animality.
The first agglomerations of human beings, from which ancient civilisations were formed, may perhaps have had as their cause some form of nourishment more abundant food: the rice of India, the lotus, the wheat of Egypt easily derived from the cultivation of a wild grass (Aegilops triticoides), the banks of a river, the shade of a valley.
“All organised beings are subject,” says Charles Darwin, “to a certain number of influences.
All are in struggle against all, to conquer the right to live; this is the struggle for existence.
All organised beings tend to modify themselves: this is the variability of species.
The individual transmits by heredity to his descendants the distinctive qualities of his race and his individual variations and properties; it is hereditary transmission which thus becomes an auxiliary of variability.
By natural selection, the characteristics that would be harmful to the individual are eliminated through the extinction of the individual and of its descendants, condemned to perish due to the disadvantageous position in which they are placed.
On the contrary, those that are useful to it and give it an advantage in the struggle for existence are fixed, if the individual survives, by transmission to descendants, gradually developed over the course of generations.”¹
Thus human races have undergone modifications due to the soil, climate, circumstances, and heredity.
¹ Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, or the Laws of Transformation of Organised Beings.
IV
Human tribes wandered across the world, at first like wild cattle in search of more abundant nourishment, no doubt sometimes driven by curiosity about the unknown. Thus, to escape some catastrophe, journeys became increasingly distant; languages underwent the same vicissitudes as peoples; they are, following the growth that is the law of progress, in the process of falling into a universal language in which they will become what provincial dialects have become in modern French.
The roots of dead languages serving as markers, and new needs, new inventions, the progress that blows through the winds, all contribute to the transformation of diverse dialects into the language of humanity.
It is so necessary that the symbol often compensates for the poverty of our expressions, which cannot render thought more advanced than its form.
Thus the Aryan language dispersed in fragments into other languages as populations spread; Sanskrit, its eldest daughter, spread in its turn with Persian Zend into ancient Greek, into Latin, and finally into the Germanic and Slavic languages.
Here, in the crucible, are the old languages, insufficient before the new dawn of humanity.
Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldean form another group.
Turkish, Finnish, and the Tartar languages form a third group of simpler formation.
Chinese, formed of monosyllables, does not agglutinate like the Tartar and Finnish languages, nor does it inflect like the Aryan languages; the order of variations indicates relationships.
The American languages are agglutinative.
Languages indicate races. Before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, in the West one spoke the language of the Iberians, contemporaries of the Bronze Age; it is the Basque language, still spoken by the Basques and unlike any other known.
Modifications of character, events, needs, and imagination have given each language its physiognomy, more or less marked, more or less shaped by inversions, which is its particular genius.
Geological revolutions, pouring seas like basins into other valleys, separated or reunited populations, so that sometimes one finds among a so-called primitive tribe some word preserved in memory that goes back to epochs when peoples spoke the same language: peoples whose civilisations have had time to grow and to disappear.
Thus, among the Kanaks, the chief is called Théama, from the Greek word Theos.
Through imitative harmony, languages arrive at correspondences independent of syllables.
The German word psof reproduces the sound of a horse’s hoof; the Russian word Lochade produces the same sound, with this difference that it is softened, as if it were gliding over snow.
Man has almost everywhere retained similar cries of fear, anger, hunger, of calling; they are also found among animals.
In times without history, human tribes received them from common ancestors.
The same cries, the same simplicity of system, the same imitative songs of birds, of the wind, of waves, of storms.
The same strident lament, taken from the cyclone or from the desert wind that whirls as it hollows out the sand. These quarter-tones that tear at the ear and will one day charm it: the Arabs have taken them from the simoom, the Kanaks from cyclones, the Basques from the whistling of the wind in the mountains.
The rudiments of language are due above all to our foremothers.
The human female, like that of the wild beast in the depths of time, hid her young in holes in forests or caves to protect their tender flesh from human voracity, making them hear the signal of silence, of flight, of immobility.
Everything being prey, these human nests had to remain hidden.
The mother had, to warn her young, accents that struck them forever, and to charm them, caressing modulations, like those of cats licking their kittens.
There are tribes where the mother gently smooths with her tongue the short and rough hair of the young.
At times, when man, no longer driven by hunger as a hunter, found pleasure in the spectacle and raised his head proudly, he must have made the echoes of the forests resound with a song like the crowing of the rooster.
Who knows whether music did not thus precede speech.
Stages are broken between man of the woods – gorilla or other – who, striking his chest with his enormous fists, picked up a stone or broke a branch, uprooting a young tree to defend himself.
Does this primitive weapon not resemble the club of Hercules?
Stones are also rolled in mythologies: the rock of Sisyphus.
Let us go further back: the bear (the old man), say the Scandinavians, also gathers stones to throw at his enemies.
There still exists among certain island peoples a cry called houhoulement; thus, in Great Britain, John Bull expresses his joy; yet many centuries have passed since those who were the primates of Europe.
The Greeks, in the time of Homer as in the time of the caves, made heard from the depths of their chest a doubled sob: it was the cry of tragic choruses:
(Greek text reproduced)
Sensations first thrown out at random, then addressed to other beings: the cries of joy, of pain, of astonishment, are entirely natural.
The sta of rest;
The ouf of breathlessness;
The ha of surprise.
Interjections that command silence blow upon noise:
Pschut! hush.
In English: hush.
Spanish chuto is less clear; guk! more brutal.
In the English alas, the German leider, the voice laments.
In the Latin evoi, joy bursts forth as in the naïve iou of little children.
The Greek ouai, the mocking ouais of Molière laughs in your face.
Greeks, Gauls, barbarians bellow across the mountains like horns of calling, the same interjections thrown from one syllable to another, echoing through the valleys: oho, hoé, hâ, ohe.
The interjection later becomes more complex, forming a symbolic phrase: one was sent to the bear, to the ravens, to the devil, according to customs and place.
Comparisons came in a flood like the blowing of the wind; there was the breath of hatred, compared to the cold torments of winter; there was also the breath of gentle breezes.
Poetry developed; the formless arts introduced into the earliest tribes the idea of beauty, until then vague.
Languages grew, budding and branching like polyps; they had their first blossoming in simple and expansive forms of poetry.
Sta, said the great ancestors, sitting on a rock by the roadside.
Station, said the tribe resting along the way.
I, said the great ancestors, rising with effort. Ire, one said, departing in groups.
The hazards of the struggle for life, the ceaseless combat for existence, had forced man to call upon the aid of other men. The first relationships brought exchanges of words, of signs, of products; the discovery of fire brought about stories told around the hearth; legend was born—written, or rather engraved, on the bones of reindeer or bears: drawing preceded writing.
Weapons took their names; the axe everywhere took the name of the stone from which it was made.
A precious material among certain tribes, there were jade axes—ghi among the peoples of the Ocean.
Acha, in Basque, means stone or rock. When iron replaced stone, it was still the axe. Arricatz, coal-stone, coal.
Then came amiante zuarna, fire-stone, as among the Basques as well as in India.
Like a handful of sand, so return these ancient names that rolled through human migrations at the time when the ancestors of the Etruscans, the Pelasgians, and the Celts lived together.
The Orpheuses having cast songs of awakening, the Gyph peoples who lived near the mouths of the Indus set out on their wanderings, and nature with them sang at dawn.
These first artists cast the bronze of shields and ornaments using the same methods still employed today to mend cauldrons.
