Bright Magic

by Alfred Doblin

  Not so the elephant. He had them repeat a hundred times how it stood: about atoms, and reflexes, and that everything else was just superstructure. The antelopes, since they couldn’t keep straight what the tiger in his profundity had proclaimed, brought a few older parrots along to their conversations with the tiger, as stenographers you might say. They repeated to the elephant word for word what they heard: about causality (the elephant thought this had to do with a raven’s caws), about waves and vibrations (the parrot said “libations”). Finally the elephant seemed to understand. It gave a deep sigh, of a kind that had never passed through its trunk before, and then demanded proof. The antelopes were not prepared for that.

  With their secretaries, they raced back to the tiger, who had taken a job with a farmer as an assistant gardener. He was just then watering the flowers. They asked him for proof. Evidence mattered to the elephant.

  The tiger, setting aside his watering can and stroking his whiskers—it was his first cheerful moment in weeks—sympathetically answered, “If he still needs proof, then the gentleman cannot be helped. Does Mr. Elephant really want to end up in a lab himself?”

  The antelopes: From whom did the esteemed Mr. Tiger learn all of this, about the atoms and the superstructure? Who might condescend to explain it to them as well?

  The tiger, who had returned to his work, scornfully shook his head and tossed out: “Try the hyena.”

  So the antelopes and their staff were off to the hyena, and thence to certain migrating birds who had recently arrived, and then it came out: The source was people. The cranes named as key witnesses several dogs and a group of guinea pigs, all of whom had spent years working in a laboratory. Their reports were entirely consistent. That was enough to satisfy even the elephant. It trumpeted in shock for an entire morning. It wandered aimlessly back and forth through the jungle. But it didn’t fall apart. It had too thick a skin for that.

  •

  The fresh young grass on the plains, though, couldn’t bear up under the great news it heard from all the animals walking on it.

  Every day the grass sprouted anew. It was young and delicate. The tidings—“Everything is matter; thoughts and feelings are just window dressing, just imagination”—had a devastating effect on their tender feelings, since after all the grasses poured forth their whole life in the few weeks between dissemination, germination, and withering away, and enthusiastically sacrificed themselves for all who needed them, from the worms to the ponderous grazing cattle. We would never have thought that the grass, this ordinary meadow grass and plains grass wildly growing and perishing in millions of copies, would pine and grieve so over the loss of its individual personality, since obviously, as we all know, it doesn’t have any. But look, it does (or at least—let’s not meddle—it thinks it does). Or no, why overlook it and deny it? Every single straight green despised blade of grass in its simple workday clothing was a little individual, a being of its own, daily growing with the dew and the sun, loving and marveling at the moon and the starry sky.

  Now, as the animals discussed the news, how could the grass cover its ears? At first the grasses defended themselves, saying it’s not true, it’s just rumors, it can’t be true. Then the mass of yea-sayers overcame their resistance and they began to cry and lament. Now they were supposed to not love the glittering dew anymore, the fresh morning, the little beetles crawling on them? It was all dumb, retarded, and ridiculous, all worthless? They were no longer supposed to hold their delicate little flowers up to the sun and entrust to it what they had brought forth?

  They sobbed day and night. It had all been so sweet, before—not to mention the calm and the certainty. Now: it was illusion, all illusion, imagination, self-deception.

  And it had to be true. The lapwings said so, the parrots agreed, the pelicans opened their beaks wide with amazement and didn’t even swallow the flies that flew in. The migrating storks stood in studious groups, their long red beaks on their breasts, one leg tucked up, debating back and forth for hours. Crowds of frogs leapt around their feet and listened, like students to their professors. And no one knew what they should do.

  The animals had time, those big slow creatures. Not the blades of grass. They withered too quickly; they were staring death in the face.

  They steeled themselves. They did not say, like the tiger, “It’s sobering, it’s very sobering” and then go help a farmer. They withdrew into themselves, no longer interested in sun or cow or butterfly. Like monks, they cloistered themselves. They covered themselves with a callus, which they then turned into a little bamboo stalk. They turned sharper than reeds. Silent and sealed up like a band of warriors, a forest of spears, they stood together.

  Now as the cool night drew to a close in Rajasthan, India, and a fakir had finished his morning devotions at home—lying for two hours on a bed of sharp nails—he left the house and, to relax and enjoy the fresh dewy morning, threw himself onto the rolling meadow outside. At once he let out a shriek of bloody murder. People poured out of his and the neighboring houses and helped the holy man stand up. He could barely move. His skin was bleeding on his back and arms and he was covered all over with tiny needles: blades of grass that had to be pulled out one by one. It took hours. They didn’t think it was possible, but they could see it with their own eyes: The harmless grass had turned dangerous overnight. The fakir sat on his veranda in shock. What had driven the lovely grass out of its mind? Why would it assault a holy man?

  Already children from the neighborhood were coming running with their goats and sheep. They begged the holy man to help them: The animals had mouths pricked all over and bloody tongues, they were bleating and baaing miserably, they were hungry but didn’t dare go out into the grass. The children themselves were bleeding from their hands and naked feet. A great cry of woe went up from both animals and humans. The fakir had to do something. He showed them his back. The goats bleated questioningly and there was nothing he could say. To recover, he lay back down on his bed of nails.

  •

  Far away, in Abyssinia, the Blue Nile flowed, and there were waterfalls.

  How magnificent the spray as the water thunderingly rolled over the cliffs in white whirls, plunged into the maw of rock, and dashed itself to pieces—how blissfully the masses of foam, the millions of droplets, hurled themselves toward the sun, arcing a wide rainbow over the falls. This had happened since time immemorial, the animals knew it and partook of it, and the water never tired of bringing its inundations to the cliffs, venturing one exultant plunge after another, hurtling in and passing away, surging down in a haze, day and night.

  Who brought the terrible news to the happy waterfalls? Migrating birds. By midsummer they had already left Europe, and their early arrival attracted attention. They had rushed south, bathed in sweat as it were, with their terrible tidings. From the pheasants, pelicans, and bitterns they met with total skepticism. These birds thought they were crazy. The messengers were acting like it was the end of the world. The fishes and swamp animals noticed their agitated twittering, shrieking, and cawing, and so the news reached the water.

  Having seen how the grass reacted to the news, it will come as no surprise that the water—utterly soft, delicate, without any protective skin—took the news to heart, dissolving in tears. It was most wretchedly stung to the quick. To be debunked just like that, with a single, tiny formula, H2O? What was once a thousand shape-shifting beauties, a thousand miracles—icebergs, hail, rain, snowflakes, mountain springs, rivers, oceans, present in everything alive, practically all-powerful—was now just H2O. It was enough to crush even a stronger spirit. The water could only grieve. There was now only one thing it wanted to do: grieve. No question of creating another rainbow. No sign of joy, no many-colored variety, no adding to false appearances. There were enough lies already.

  The water lost its high-spirited merriment. It flowed sluggishly, slow and stagnant. It would get where it was going soon enough. No need to push. The water above the falls spread out flat and seemed
to want to seep away into the ground. It avoided forming eddies where they weren’t absolutely necessary and muffled any sound of splashing. Then, once it reached the edge of the cliff, it crawled—to the amazement of the birds and plants that did not see through the water’s behavior—it crept cautiously down like an old man, throwing off no superfluous drops to either side. Like a miser, the water, which was once so rich and spendthrift, clung tightly to its possessions. When at last it finally plopped to the bottom, it again spread out smooth and kept a straight face. It didn’t flash when the sun shone down, and it rippled when the moon came to look at itself in the mirror of the water and coif itself for the night. It’s easy to understand how annoyed the moon must have been. Because the moon, shining its light on so many gallant adventures, naturally wants to look presentable itself in such circumstances.

  In vain did the birds wait for their misty bath, in vain and appalled did the bushes and trees up above and to either side await the gush they expected to drink. The water kept to itself. It was like a worried old woman, a widow, with dry eyes, going to market. She clutches her purse in her hand and pays no attention to the beggars abjectly coming up to her. She bites her lips and stares severely straight ahead.

  •

  This was the period of depression. It didn’t stop there.

  One fine day, a white-bearded chimpanzee showed up to visit the tiger who had sunk so low as to be an assistant gardener. He had a big book in his hand, which a jungle expedition had lost, and during lunch break he read at length from it to the tiger. It was as clear as day from the book that the world did not in fact deserve the boundless trust it had once been given. It was entirely meaningless, pointless, and irrational, although it could be described mathematically. Precisely the fact that it could be described mathematically (the erudite chimpanzee explained) obscured—or tried to obscure—the irrationality hidden behind it, the utter nothingness. He said it was like the brilliant rainbow show that the H2O used to put on, back when it was still called “the water,” “His Honor the Water.” Once you fundamentally realize the meaninglessness and complete emptiness and charlatanry of the world, you invent something so as not to seem like a fool to yourself and others. You grasp at images and symbols, which look like something, because you’re ashamed to live in a world as blockheaded as this one, set in motion by nothing but these idiotic things like atoms and electrons. Still, it’s all totally superfluous. Everything would take its course even without these images and symbols, and maybe better.

  At this the tiger, truly starving by now, put aside his spoon (his master the gardener had taught him table manners) with which he was eating the gruel they had prescribed for him because of his endless stomach pains, and pricked up his ears.

  “The chaos in the world,” the bleak old ape went on, “is obvious. Something goes wrong now here, now there. Now it rains too much, now too little. Now the trees are covered with fruit, now we look and look and the caterpillars have destroyed everything. People have seen that for a long time, and complained about it, but no one has ever thought seriously about it and drawn the proper conclusions. Now at least we know why.”

  “So why?” the tiger asked in a melancholy voice. He wanted to blame this cause for his stomach troubles. “What’s the cause?” He was full of resentment. An assistant gardener does not have it easy. He wanted to know what was behind his problems and then, when he knew it, try to tackle it.

  The chimp: “There is no place in the world for reason.”

  “What?” the tiger asked, amazed. “You’re joking.” He pointed to the wide plains outspread before them. “There’s plenty of room there.”

  The ape laughed a supercilious laugh. “It only looks that way. Actually it’s all full. There is no place free.”

  The tiger screamed in rage, “There’s no one there! Open your eyes.”

  “All full,” the ape repeated patiently, refusing to be intimidated since he knew he was right. “There’s the earth on the bottom, above it the grass, then the air and the light, and on top the sky and the sun. I don’t see any gaps.”

  “And not even an inch of space,” the tiger lamented, “for reason?”

  The chimpanzee stayed firm: “All occupied already. Atoms and electrons everywhere.”

  “Those bastards,” the tiger cursed. “If I could get my hands on just one of them. But why? Did reason get here too late? Or did it let the atoms go first?”

  “Who knows? Maybe it was force. Force always outweighs justice. The one with the sharpest elbows gets through.”

  A long pause. The dignified white-beard slapped his belly and pushed his reading glasses up onto his forehead. “And because that’s how it is, because reason, back when the world was being set up, got the short end of the stick, we have to take care of it ourselves. Now we have to look after our own interests.”

  That cleared things up for the tiger. He liked that. It made him light at heart.

  He stood up at once on his four long shaggy legs and shook out his scrawny body, all covered with burrs. He let out a growl that made the old chimpanzee drop his valuable book in the bowl of gruel. But suddenly the tiger seemed no longer interested in gruel. He stepped into the bowl with his left paw. The ape ran away and clambered up the nearest tree. He cried for help to the gardener. Something seemed wrong with the tiger. But the tiger jeered up at him: “You hit the nail on the head there, chimp. We have to look after our own interests. And we will.”

  And he leapt at his master, the gardener, who had come running to see why the ape was screaming and shouting—knocked him down and bit him in the throat. He raced off in leaps and bounds to the cornfield where the antelopes were playing. They thought he must be rushing up to share some interesting news from the wider world. Indeed he did. He leapt at an antelope, brought it down, tore it to pieces, and drank blood once again, hot blood after several long months. It tasted so good and made his stomach pains go away so completely that he immediately turned the page and went after the next one and brought that one down too and let out his terrible roar, which told the animals: The tiger is back.

  “We have to look after our own interests,” he panted, eyes twinkling. “We have to bring reason into the world. I’ll do my part.”

  •

  That was the turning point. Nature came to understand, in its way, what the natural scientists and philosophers and enlightenment thinkers had reported.

  Nature broke through to itself. It took the situation into its own hands. It let fly the flag of liberating materialism: a grass-green ox eating grass on a grass-green background. You are what you are. Let no creature, in its freedom, in its scientifically proven and mathematically certain meaninglessness, be constrained.

  After the tiger, feeling the new age in the air, gave the sign, the uprising of Nature—the resistance—spread everywhere.

  The frogs trumpeted: “To each his own world.”

  The saying went around: “Start with nothing, end with nothing, that’s the best way to live.”

  •

  The first acts of a world set free by materialism and left to its own devices were soon plain to see. As the theory itself would suggest, everything proceeded without any sort of plan, but no one could deny that what happened bore all the signs of genuine meaninglessness.

  A driver in the entirely neutral city of Bern filled up his tank with gas: good, distilled, high-octane, and fully, as the Americans say, up-to-date. As soon as it found itself in the tank, the gas shared its view of the world with the various engine parts. Soon afterward, the driver appeared (it was a large fashion studio’s car) and drove off. Suddenly it seemed he was having engine trouble, but he could feel that it was trouble of a very unusual kind. He shifted into this gear, pulled that lever, pulled the other lever, lurched here, lurched there, it didn’t matter. What wasn’t responding was the car. You couldn’t say that it wasn’t going, but it wasn’t going the way the driver wanted it to go. It was driving capriciously, temperamentally, surprisingly— wittily
, you might say. It suddenly stopped—contemplatively, as though wanting to admire the view—at one of the lovely lookout points with which the city of Bern (bad luck for the driver) is so lavishly furnished.

  Then it raced off like wild after a mutt, only to stop as soon as it caught up to it, as if it were grinning. Then it decided to drive backward—luckily they were in a sparsely populated suburb at that point.

  We know what was happening: It was a game, a good-natured and mischievous obeisance on the car’s part paid to its aged driver— a tribute, well-meaning if clumsy, like the one a young puppy offers when its master lets it loose outside.

  The master, though, the driver, who had spring suits to deliver, did not understand any of it. He was thinking only about business. The spring, all around him, did not interest him either.

  To bring him pleasure and make him think other thoughts, the car drove up a hill, took a little hop, and lay down gracefully on its side. The man jumped out. The car noticed and followed him. He fled, the faithful car right behind him. The man ran into a nearby pharmacy and slammed the door behind him. The car, surprised, stayed outside and purred.

  Inside, the man called the police. As soon as the car heard the phone ringing, it smelled betrayal and ran off. They found it later five miles away, in a field, where it was apparently grazing. It put up no resistance to being caught and driven away. After a two-week observation period they had no idea what to do with it except slaughter it.

  •

  The news flew to the chemical elements, which are among the most fusty and old-fashioned creatures in Nature. They have always done the same thing since forever and shown no sign of getting tired of it. Here we find the atoms. How, we wonder, bursting with curiosity, will they react? Mightn’t they turn megalomaniacal when they learn the status to which they have been promoted—the first in creation, and moreover the actual foundations and creators of Nature, the true reality from which all objects (at bottom only apparent objects) draw their existence?