Angelica's Grotto

7 Fingers And Fins And Wings

With Lucifer still soaring in his mind, Klein found himself cruising his bookshelves. He saw his hand go up and return with one of his own titles, Darkness and Light: the inner eye of Odilon Redon. He turned to No. 14 of the third series of lithographs illustrating Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Antony: Oannes with his serpentine body, human face, and pharaonic headdress, hovering in a blackness.

He took the French edition of Flaubert from the shelves, turned to the Oannes page, and read his translation that was inserted there:

Then appears a singular being, having the head of a man on the body of a fish. He advances upright in the air by beating the sand with his tail; and this patriarchal figure with little arms makes Antony laugh.

‘Redon’s Oannes,’ said Klein, ‘is not laughable; he is of the darkness, he is between the times of one thing and another.’ He read on:

OANNES

In a plaintive voice:

Respect me! I have been here from the very beginning. I have lived in the unformed world where hermaphrodite beasts were sleeping under the weight of an opaque atmosphere, in the depths of the dark waters — when fingers and fins and wings were mingled, and eyes without heads were floating like molluscs, among bulls with human faces and serpents with the paws of dogs.

‘Yes,’ said Klein: ‘a world of undifferentiated matter where nothing has found its final form and function and doesn’t know whether to swim or fly or walk. That’s how it is with me.’ He read on:

Over this muddle of beings, Omoroca, bent like a hoop, extended her woman’s body. But Belus cut her clean in two, made the earth with one half, the sky with the other, and the two equal worlds contemplate each other.

‘Is there a sky in me?’ said Klein, seeing Lucifer high, high above him in pinks, in greens, in greys. ‘Is there an earth?’ He read on:

I, the first consciousness of chaos, I have risen from the abyss to harden matter, to regulate forms, and I have taught humans fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods.

‘“Fishing, sowing, writing and the history of the gods,”’ Klein repeated, and read on:

Since then I have lived in the pools that remain from the deluge. But the desert encroaches on them, the wind fills them with sand, the sun dries them up; and I am dying on my bed of mud, looking at the stars through the water. I must return.

He leaps, and disappears in the Nile.

‘No!’ said Klein. ‘Oannes should stay and Antony should go! Poxy old Saint Antony. What did he ever teach that was any use to anyone?’ He looked again at Oannes hovering in the black. Was Oannes looking back at him? Were his eyes open or closed? So dim, his face! Klein thought of Oannes dying on a bed of mud, his pools filled in, his blackness gone, and shook his head. ‘But,’ he said, ‘but! Oannes didn’t die; his original self, his old self, his powerful self, moved into the head of Odilon Redon and compelled him to create a noir for him to live in. Oannes lives! Perhaps he will yet harden my matter, regulate my form, teach me to fish, to sow, to write. Perhaps he will teach me the history of the gods. Or something else. Are there pinks in the black? Greens and greys?’