SubStance

SubStance 32.1 (2003) 56-59

I. Bryce-Hell

Michel Serres:

First the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but: wind, rain, ice, hail, and finally drought under an intense sun, eroding the red rock of the canyon over the course of long eras. Different in duration here and there, the most resistant of it remains—hence these thousands of aligned, vertical needles. End of the visit, let's get in the car and head out to go to bed.

Too bad for the truth, flat and stupid. An Indian legend recounts it differently: in ancient times a population lived there, in the valley. Filled with hatred and vengeance, haunted by suspicion and resentment, it was so violent that God decided to punish it. He turned it into statues, petrified in its own blood and that of its enemies.

It is thus that I see Bryce Canyon for the first time. Impossible not to see those legions of the damned. Upright, close together, compressed and [End Page 56] compiled in rows and columns, by squadrons, brigades and divisions, legions and army corps—proud, heads high, distinct and helmeted, chests thrust out, confined in their uniforms, legs stiff beneath their gaiters, immobile, on the look-out, their weapons resting against their feet, ready to do battle. All gather in a mass as though on parade beneath the fortified castle that dominates, behind them, and from which the general will appear to hurl them into the furnace: Agamemnon and his Greek kinglets, Ajax and Achilles, to destroy and burn Troy; Darius, to hurl his mob of Persians to assault Thermopylae; Alexander and his generals commanding the Macedonians to devastate India; Caesar and his centurions to massacre Gaul till nothing is left; Attila and his Huns with their scorched-earth policy; Napoleon and his marshalls to bury the Great Army beneath the snow; White Power to assassinate the Indians and enslave the Bantus, the Maoris, the Dravidians ... Blucher, Hindenburg, Foch and Joffre, Rommel and Patton ... Truman to incinerate Hiroshima, and the atomic scientists to increase the destructive power of bombs ... All the chief butchers of the ancient and recent abominations of "human" history ... and their sons, sacrificed by the millions—artillerymen, foot soldiers, grenadiers—all finally petrified, covered and soaked through with coagulated blood for all eternity.

Never having seen Bryce, Dante did not know how to describe Hell.

II. Fontenelle, Troubadour of Knowledge ¹

I love Fontenelle because he incarnates an ideal of knowledge that today is rejected. In the nine volumes of his Oeuvres that I have just edited, I found the old alliance between the culture of science and the humanities—a vital synthesis in all our authors since the 16^th century until quite recently. Today's university, grown partial and no doubt stupid, no longer gives one the right nor the possibility to write a book on the theatre of Pierre Corneille (one of Fontenelle's uncles) and another on infinitesimal calculus, or to ponder the origin of myths and to participate in an expert and inventive way in the debate between Cartesian vortexes and Newtonian mechanics (a debate I consider still open, since today's physics has not yet said the last word on turbulence). It no longer gives the right to pen a preface to Monsieur de l'Hôpital et son calcul de l'Infini and to critique Malebranche's occasional causes; to write for the theater and the opera, on the one hand, but also to write Eloges of scientists. Like so many others of our language, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, a member of both the Académie Française and the Académie [End Page 57] des Sciences, thinks and invents without making a distinction, as we unfortunately do, between culture strictly limited by an ignorance of the sciences, and science limited by its lack of culture. In Fontenelle there is a marriage between subtlety and geometry. Although we are descendents of this union, we reject its lesson.

Thus I love Fontenelle's first volume, Dialogue des Morts, which imitates Lucian. Not...