Anarchistbanjo's World

The Rebirth of Melchior Dronte by Paul Busson and translated by Joe E Bandel

Over and over again they went about to create new life.
They hid themselves from the others and became one. All
beings, which were invisible to the people, but always surround
them, retreated before the divine, which emanated from the
procreators, however barren and poor they might otherwise be,
as flawed and weak, but in this action they unleashed the
elemental power of eternity, they were more powerful and
greater than all other creatures. I was fervently attached to such
pairs of people everywhere. In the black nomad tents of the
steppes, in dim snow huts, in thin beds, on haystacks, behind
stacks of boards, in the bushes of the forest, on the straw
mattresses of dull houses, in garrets and state rooms. In
countless places, at secret hours of the day and night. The law
was above me. I felt attracted and repelled, without grief,
disappointment or impatience.
Once it happened, quicker than the lightning flared up.
At the union of two cells, the power of new life enclosed
me. I was caught in tiny union, caught up in hot, red, radiant,
working and pulsating being. I felt warmth, darkness, moisture,
currents of nourishment, the rustling of creative forces. Blissful
growth was in me.
Juices flowed through me; the thunder of unfolding and
the soft crackling of becoming were around me. Consciousness
became dim. Sleep enveloped it, happy, refreshing sleep. Torn
and incoherent experiences passed through my dreams as
unrecognizable silhouettes, disjointed and inaudible, ancient,
lost, sinking memories.
I grew in slumber, stretched my limbs out comfortably,
smacking with pleasure, stretched, moved softly in sleep.
Delicate and precious organs, protected in bony armor, were
formed in me, warm blood raced through me in rapid,
throbbing beats, friendly tightness pressed me tenderly, moved
me swaying, showing me the way to the light.
Crystal, cold, clear air rushed into my lungs.
Colorful, confused rays penetrated my eyes, confused
sounds pressed into my ears. Everything happened to me that
accompanies young life when it enters this world.
I was there. I was the one who had come back, the Ewli.
My name was Sennon Vorauf.
I had a father, a mother and other people who loved me. I
learned to speak and walk, a child like other children.
Everything was new to me, a great revelation.
Until the ability to look back into my past life.
This began with dreams of anxiety in childhood, which
caused my good parents a lot of worry. But even when I was
awake, I was not safe from sudden sinking. The memories of
Melchior Dronte, the son of a nobleman in days long past,
came back to me fiercely, and frightened me very much. Only
slowly did I gain from myself the repetitive, chasing, and
frightening memories and gradually put them together so that I
could grasp them as fragments of a former whole, which I
called the life of Melchior Dronte, my former life.
Shaken by the horror of my parents (they often both sat
by my bedside and listened, stunned by my wild fantasies, as
they thought), I withdrew already in boyhood and showed
myself to others as a strangely precocious, quiet and thoughtful
child, who preferred to sit alone staring with open eyes.
My new life was suitable for such thoughtfulness. My
parents, good-hearted and simple people, had, following a
custom of the country, named me “Sennon” after one of the two
saints of my birthday and loved me more than anything. After
ten years of childless marriage, I was the eagerly awaited “gift
from heaven” sent to them. In the first years of my life, I had,
as already mentioned often caused them great fear and worry.
Thus I had once fell into severe convulsions when, by accident,
I was present when a few boys threw stones at a black dog, so
that it ran away howling. To an aunt, who loved me tenderly, I
did not want to go to her until the squawking parrot, which she
had in her apartment was removed.
Sometimes one, such as the reader of this book,
understandably took these behaviors for stubbornness and
punished me mildly. The patience and the lack of any
consciousness of guilt, with which I accepted the gentle
punishments, however, soon made it completely impossible for
the good-hearted to act against me in such a way.
Especially my mother, who despite her low status was an
unusually sensitive Frau, who with her trained intuition,
recognized better than my father, that all the violent emotional
expressions of her child must indicate quite unusual mental
processes which ruled out any crude influence. I clearly
remember a Sunday afternoon, when I was with her in a garden
filled with the deep glow of the autumn sun. She had cut
flowers to put in a vase. The arrangement of the copper, blue,
white and fire-yellow Georgiana flowers she had made
suddenly seized me in a very peculiar way, and without being
able to explain where these words came from, I said
completely lost in a dream and quietly to myself:
“Aglaja also arranged them like this”.
Then my mother looked at me with a very strange, shy
look, stroked her hand over my hair and said to me:
“You must have once loved her very much -.”
We then spoke nothing for a long time, until it became
completely dark. Then mother heaved a sigh of relief, hugged
me fiercely and we went into the house to wait for my father,
who was working in a large optical company.
I had little contact with other children, and generally kept
away from them, not because I was arrogant or afraid of people,
but because I had no taste for their games. I still liked best to
be with the son of a well-traveled doctor who lived in our
neighborhood, with Kaspar Hedrich, who was the same age as
me, and who, like me, was a quiet and lonely boy. I went on
many hikes in the surroundings of the small town that was my
home, and to him, as the only one, I sometimes told my dreams,
but only when I was in my twelfth or thirteenth year, did the
realization dawn on me of the nature of these ever-renewing
and complementary dream images and what they were. From
then on I kept them to myself and did not listen to Kaspar’s
vehement pleas to tell him more. In any case, he was the only
one who listened with great attention and without any sign of
disbelief until then to the tangled stories that often violently
forced themselves out of me, perhaps only in the unconscious
longing to find an explanation for them. When this finally came
like a revelation, I guarded my secret in the realization that it
could hardly ever be understood correctly by others.
Then something happened with Kaspar Hedrich and me,
which at that time filled me with great uneasiness. Today,
however, I must think of the event with a smile and am filled
with consolation, of an event that was my first, dearest, greatest
and most valuable confirmation of the special pardon that I
have been granted.
Kaspar and I had a special joy of walking on cold winter
days on the frozen dead branch of the river to a place where we
could ice skate that was a half an hour’s walk away. We kept
this place of our solitary pleasures from our parents, knowing
that they would not have allowed us because of the danger of
both the remoteness of the water and the uncertainty of the ice
conditions. They thought nothing other than that we, like the
other boys, were on one of the two busy and completely safe,
artificially created skating rinks of the town. The deception
succeeded all the more, because neither of our fathers, who
were busy during the day nor my mother, who was absorbed in
the economic worries of the day (Kaspar’s mother had been
dead for a long time), had ever found time to teach us skating
skills.
On the day I want to tell you about, Kaspar came to us
with the skates on his arm to pick me up. There was a warm
wind that had sprung up, and water dripped softly from the roof.
All the more reason, thought my playmate, to hurry in order to
take advantage of the last opportunity of the departing winter.
However, I had caught a cold the day before and was
feverish. My worried mother, who came into the room during
the visit, explained that in view of my condition Kaspar would
have to do without my company this time. I was always
obedient to my mother and complied. Kaspar was disappointed
to have to do without his comrade, but then he said goodbye
and went on his usual way to the lonely river place alone.
After about an hour, my mother took a pillow and
lovingly made me sit on the bench by the warm stove and lean
against the cushion. She herself did some work and advised me
to take a little nap, and I soon heard her knitting softly rattling
half in a dream. All of a sudden it was as if I could clearly hear
the voice of my friend, who repeatedly and in the highest fear
called my first name!
I wanted to rise, but I was paralyzed. I made a
tremendous effort. Then it happened.
Suddenly I found myself outside my body. I clearly saw
myself, sitting on the stove bench with stiff, wide-open eyes,
with my unsuspecting mother at the table, lost in her counting
meshes at the table. In the very next moment I found myself, as
if carried away by a whizzing gust of wind, at the edge of that
river arm. With the greatest sharpness I saw the leafless pollard
willows, the uniform gray of the ice, the snow eaten away by
the warm wind, the skate tracks on the slippery ice and in the
middle of the cracked ice an open spot of the water, from
which, screaming in fear, Kaspar’s head protruded, and his
wildly beating hands that searched in vain for a hold on the
breaking ice sheets.
Without any reflection I stepped across the ice to the very
edge of the collapse, reached out my hand to the man in the
greatest need and pulled him without the slightest effort onto
the solid ice. He saw me, chattering with his teeth from the
frost, and yet laughing with joy, and opened his mouth to say
something —.
Then something pulled me away from him with terrible
force and I was seized by an unparalleled feeling of fear, and I
became painfully aware of my own distressed body —