...our origins being aqueous...

More Cendrars, from Moravagine:

I have already said that the activity of consciousness is a congenital hallucination. Our origins being aqueous, our life is the perpetual rhythm of tepid waters. We have water in our stomachs and in our ears. We perceive the rhythm of the universe through the peritoneum, which is our cosmic tympanum, a collective sense of touch. Of our individual senses the first in rank is our hearing, which perceives the rhythm of our own particular and individual life. This is why all diseases begin with auditory troubles which are, like the manifestations of marine life, keys to the past and precursors of an inexhaustible process of becoming. It was, therefore, none of my business as a doctor to attempt to hinder such manifestations. I envisaged, rather, the possibility of multiplying these tonic accidents and achieving, through a prodigious subversion, the perfect accord of a new harmony. The future.

I should have liked to open all cages, all zoos, all prisons, all lunatic asylums, see the great wild ones liberated and study the development of an unheard-of kind of human life. And if I later abandoned my Machiavellian plans for struggle and worldly success, if I turned away from my career, if I deliberately renounced the glory that my first writings already promised me, it was because i met, in the course of my duties at the English Farm, the supurb creature who to lead me to a grandstand seat at a tremendous spectacle of revolution and transformation, the transvaluation of all social values and of life itself.

I let an incurable escape.

But that is a story in itself, the story of a friendship.