by Michal Ajvaz
Once the waiter had brought us our coffee, my new acquaintance began to tell me the story of his Parisian friend. Naturally my first thought was that he was employing the banal tactic of talking of himself in the guise of another, but it may have been so that—as in the famous Jewish joke about trains—he was speaking of someone else so I would believe he was speaking of himself while all the time he was speaking of a third person. Completing his studies in the mid-Sixties at Prague’s Faculty of Arts, the hero of the story began to work as a junior lecturer in the Department of Aesthetics. The narrator did not tell me his name, but let us call him Baumgarten. He began to write a book, because this was expected of a young academic. He chose its title somewhat at random; let us say it was “The Beauty of Nature in the History of Art and Aesthetics,” “Art and Society,” “The History of the Golden Ratio” or “Kant and Schiller.” By staying on at the university as a teacher after completion of his studies, above all he was able to prolong the life without roots of his student years, a life composed of many flaming and fading encounters with people, things, places and ideas. His world was restless, constantly entangling itself in and extricating itself from a web of academic, amicable, social and erotic ties, which transformed themselves from one to another and then evaporated.
After the purges of the Sixties they fired him from the university. But he did not end up as a boiler-man or a porter. He sat in the small offices of scientific institutes, in the light of flickering bulbs whose hum was a cheerless music that always came back to him when he remembered those years; he compiled biographies, wrote précis of papers and translated articles in periodicals, all of which they set down for him on the edge of his desk. The weave of his world, with its ongoing attachment to any situation, disintegrated, leaving behind it nothing but emptiness.
He attempted to fill this emptiness by continuing to work on his book, even though he knew that no one would publish it. He was surprised to discover that his work had embarked on a strange transformation. Now, in the theories on aesthetics which occupied his mind, no matter whether these took beauty to be the expression of an idea, life or formal ties, he saw remnant traces of an encounter with a terrible incident of some kind. Perhaps this was because he was having to learn to live with his new emptiness, that this woke in him an appreciation of slow motions, unnoticed rhythms and slight eddies. He saw in thoughts and gestures as well as in objects a trembling that until now he had never noticed. It was difficult to determine what this meant—not because the trembling resisted expression but because the concepts supposed to capture it stirred related, perhaps even identical vibrations, so that instead of performing the work accorded them, the concepts vibrated along with their subjects in a drunken round dance. Perhaps what was moving was some kind of larvae of being, the blind squirming, lashing out, twisting of being before the birth of something recognized, something named in the world, before the emergence of a thing; or else this was the convulsive twitching of nascent, crude time as it flowed into the body of things as the luminous fuel of their peregrinations across the landscapes of the world. These motions were rather repulsive to him; he felt himself to be looking into an aquarium dark and murky with slime, although there were also times when there was a radiant glow. Whether his feeling was one of disgust or delight, at any given moment these events were interesting to watch; Baumgarten told himself that this was not the worst amusement this wretched time could have found for him.
It seemed to him that the beauty he had read so many theories about, was nothing but this glow, a glow that was born in the midst of revulsion without ever quite accepting into itself that art was an endless, ever-transforming hymn about the soft, revolting germs of reality, an ode composed to themselves by the nameless white larvae of being. Sitting in his corner of the office he sometimes imagined himself presenting his superiors with an extract from the book he was writing and the expressions they would assume, and this fancy pulled his mouth into a grimace of amusement, which itself was a source of confusion among his colleagues.
Perhaps, he thought, many artists and thinkers have come across these motions, but all took fright at them, seizing instead on an understanding of beauty as expressed by an order (in a way this is simple to achieve: in the proximity of beauty it is always possible to find some kind of order which resembles it, because such orders use as their blueprints constellations opened up by the blind motion of beauty) even if they made the same assumptions as he, that beauty was a tumultuous clash of the emergence, transformation, perseverance, hardening and dissolution of order, that symmetry and chaos, maturation and decay, organization and dissolution were figures in the game but were indifferent to it and closed into themselves; that beauty was a poison which circulated in systems, providing them with a force for the creation of chaos (chaos can only be governed by a force which has roots as dark as its own and which gushes from the same source) while it ate away at them and destroyed them, captivated them by a blissful vision of death so as to paralyse them and urge them towards the most distant flashes of its flame. Baumgarten knew, too, that beauty is so much present in these continuous leakages that it conceals itself in them, that we always catch sight of it in a constellation just as it is disappearing; the next moment all that is left to us is a faithful copy, a mask produced with its own skin by which it intends to call our bluff.
He dreamed of a book which he would call “On the Origins of Beauty,” a book which would be a hymn to beauty’s fascinating revoltingness and also a catalogue of the figures of the dark motions of being and an attempt at the determination of the principles of their choreography. The book in gestation became the one thing of any importance in a life without family, lovers and friends. And as he sensed that the motions he was writing about exercised a clandestine control over his writing, that they agitated the tip of his pen as it moved across the paper, he sensed also that the circle was closing, thus bringing a certain unity into his life. Admittedly this unity reminded him of the motion of plankton in stagnant water and was probably the work of a devil of some kind, yet it brought him a continuous silent joy: after a long time something had appeared in his life which bore a likeness to harmony. He got into the habit of taking long walks across the open country above the city, along the roads which skirted Prague; while on these destinationless trips he would ponder his book. The larva-like motions were also supreme in the realm of sight; in open country they flickered along the outlines of visible objects so that often he found the answer to his own question by looking at a roadside tree or a pile of junk in a garden.
Then all of a sudden the tremblings of the world ceased, the unborn book closed, the landscape abandoned the production of ideas. By now he was so familiar with the world of larva-like motions that he knew long periods of torpor to be part of their life, that he would have to accept this peace just as they did, but he lacked the courage to give up the only thing which still satisfied him. Baumgarten continued to pace the open country above Prague in the hope that as before some rust-stained oddments next to a wall or a torn colour poster on a wooden board would give rise to ideas.
On one such hopeless walkabout he strayed further from the city than usual. He became aware of this only once he noticed that the houses had taken on a different aspect; no longer were they distracted by the proximity of the great capital, no longer did they look beyond the horizon to the city but inwards to their own yards, all the time contemplating the country around them. In the village squares there were no longer city-bus stops, their timetables behind opaque glass; in their place were corrugated-iron huts surrounded by stinging nettles. In one of the villages they told him at the pub that the last bus to Prague had already gone. Fortunately it was a Saturday and he would not be going to work the next morning. He asked if there was anywhere in the village he could sleep and one of the men seated at the table told him he could make himself a bed of straw at the farm on the opposite side of the square. Baumgarten was tired and in need of sleep, so he finished up his second beer and l
eft the pub. Beyond an empty concrete storage tank, on whose bottom there was a foul-smelling black ooze, the gates of the farm opened wide. He entered the rutted yard; on one side there stood a large barn, on the other the white wall of a windowless building against which sundry agricultural implements and assorted junk had been left. Men and women in overalls kept coming into the yard to prop more shovels, rakes and hoes against the wall. He went into the barn, lay down in the straw and fell asleep immediately.
Ino of the beautiful ankles
When he woke up it was just getting light and everyone else at the farm was still asleep. Soon the cock began to crow, the only sound to be heard in the village. Baumgarten lay on the straw and looked into the yard through the open door of the barn. For a while he thought of his book, but soon he emptied his mind of these thoughts and left it empty. He let his eyes wander over the objects leaning against the blind wall of the building; most of these were farm tools the names of which he did not know, or parts of things of which it was impossible to say what they had once belonged to. By now there was a pink strip of light across the top of the wall, but all the tools and parts remained submerged in the cold shadow that covered the yard. To the left of the gate leading to the square there was a rusty instrument composed of four poles fastened together by rivets out of which there projected soil-covered prongs; he told himself that this was probably a harrow, though he knew very little about the subject. Leaning against the wall to the right of this were two dark beams, crossed, beaten together at their centres to look like a great “X” he imagined these forming part of a framework used in the cutting of wood. Resting against this rotten saltire were the remnants of a dilapidated door, upon which were quivering the flakes of a cream-coloured varnish with which the door must once have been painted; the door’s centre panel still bore a brass handle. Surely, thought Baumgarten, the farm’s manager was an exceptionally frugal character to hold on to junk such as this; at the same time it struck him that what was left of the door looked like a large “E.” He began to see amusement in a game in which one read letters in farm tools etcetera, so he moved on to the next object, a triangular wire sand sieve, but he could not think of a letter to compare this with. Next to the sieve there was the handle of a shovel, an obvious “I,” followed by a rusting construction of some kind made of the type of pipes used in scaffolding, a passable approximation of the letter “H.” The last item in this group of objects comprised three planks propped against the wall, which for some reason had been nailed together; it was not difficult to will himself to see in these the letter “N.”
Baumgarten ceased to find amusement in the game. He had not succeeded in his attempt to transform all objects into letters, nor did “XE” or “IHN” have any meaning to disclose. He was almost ready to get up and walk into the yard when something dawned on him: the harrow and the sand sieve did not resemble any letter of the Latin alphabet, but it was possible to see in them perfect representations of sigma and delta. Which would mean that “X” was in fact “CH” and the “H” of the scaffolding was “É,” so that the complete group of old objects read schedién, the accusative form of the Greek word for raft. Baumgarten resumed his game, this time reading the object-letters in Greek. The first item in the next group was a metal stand that was held stable at the bottom by a transverse bar and had a metal spool attached to its top in which was gathered a steel cable with frayed ends; all this was covered in rust, like all the metal objects in the yard. The stand was a fine representation of the letter “A.” Next to this were two wooden poles joined at an angle by insulating sleeving, whose purpose he could not imagine and which formed the letter “N” (the second in this curious notice); to the right of this was the broken lid of a crate in the shape of an “E,” and in two columns of some kind of plastic that were joined by a rubber belt gone slack, an “M” was clearly visible. At this point Baumgarten became truly agitated: the murmur of a text was beginning to take shape in his head, a text drawn out from the depths of his memory. He closed his eyes and caught hold of the words, which he uttered in a muted voice.
Then it came to him what the text was, and with eyes closed he whispered, “Schedién anemoisi feresthai kallipe…” When he opened his eyes again he was not surprised to see next to the plastic columns in the shape of an “M” a concrete full-round form (“O”), then a stake (“I”), a tool whose function he could not identify (sigma) and another stake (“I”). The tops of the object-letters were by now touched by the pink light. After the last stake there was a gap—a stretch of white, plastered wall which put him in mind of a sheet of paper sticking out of an enormous typewriter whose opening line was covered in typescript. Then came another group of objects: phi was represented by a small gate stood vertically, which on a round piece of scratched tin appeared to bear the remains of the legend “No Entry” the next “E” was a portion of a window. All thirty letters and three gaps were where they should be. Theta was particularly well done in a wooden hatch from which all the laths but the one in the centre had been ripped out, while pi had been produced in a block and tackle.
Schedién anemoisi feresthai kallipe. Leave your raft to drive before the wind. When the gods order the nymph Calypso to set Odysseus free, and after he drifts away from her island on a raft, Poseidon unleashes a fearful storm. With the last of his strength Odysseus clings to the raft as it is tossed hither and thither. As the waves roar all around him, he hears a woman’s voice. Ino, also called Leucothea, the goddess of the slim ankles, has risen before him from the waves. Odysseus was expecting her to come to his aid, he was hoping she would calm the storm, would repair his disintegrating sail, or that she would carry him away to shore. But to his surprise Ino demands of him the most nonsensical thing imaginable in the circumstances. She tells him to quit his raft, his last hope, to give himself up to the wild water. Odysseus is slow to obey; he is hesitant, asking himself if this is a trick the gods are playing on him. In the end the decision is taken out of his hands by Poseidon, who smashes the vessel and casts Odysseus to the waves. Is not Poseidon, who would have Odysseus roam the seas, truly his friend? This is a difficult question to answer. As the case may be, the sea carries Odysseus to the shore of the island of the Phaeacians, where he meets Nausicaä and from where he sets sail for Ithaca, where Penelope, Telemachus and Argos are waiting for him.
Baumgarten smiled. He did not take long to consider what this strangely conveyed message meant for him. And its content did not surprise him as it had Odysseus because he had known it all along. What had befallen him was quite plain: the book he was writing had grown out of the pain of emptiness and gradually it had filled this emptiness, but in so doing it had destroyed the ground that nourished it, and died; such things happen. And the solution, too, was simple: it was enough to return to the territory of the void, to let himself be carried by its waves and to wait. So rather than thinking about the content of the message, he thought about who could have sent it to him. There was no point in his suspecting any of the people of the village. Being a sceptic he told himself that this was nothing more than a strange coincidence; it was improbable but not impossible. Quite simply he had dreamed that a local deity, lord of sad villages around Prague, demon of abandoned bus stops, had spoken to him. In the end he decided to understand the notice composed of objects as a message from Ino of the beautiful ankles, daughter of Cadmus, founder of the seven-gated city of Thebes, who had been transformed into a marine divinity and had now, for his sake, descended on the yard of this farm.
He decided, too, to follow immediately the advice Ino had given him; he threw the part-written book in the dustbin, shortly afterwards abandoned in his Prague flat all books and papers with notes and extracts on the subject, and left the country. He settled in Paris because it seemed to him that this was a place where one could easily lose oneself, and this he wished to do. It was not his intention to become a clochard; he wished to live in a foreign city and try again to be faithful to the void he had once betrayed, to wait for a g
limpse of new motions as nonsensical and marvellous as the hymn about the embryology of being he had composed on the dusty streets around Prague and in country pubs.
As he walked the wastelands of the great city, as the faces of men and women unknown to him floated past in the streets like so many incurious fish, as his gaze wandered the facades of buildings and climbed through windows into flats whose furniture was angular and hostile, as he felt on his cheeks the cooling mask of a wind saturated in incomprehensible smells both foul and fine, a new joy was born within him. He changed his job often: he was a messenger and a gallery attendant, a custodian in a museum, a sales assistant. He glimpsed nothing that promised to be the germ of some kind of task; he took joy from the purity of emptiness, from its great airy halls, which he passed through light-footedly. He realized that the most important thing was not the task—a task born, perhaps, out of the emptiness, whose fineness and fragrance it preserved in itself—but the tranquil shelter of waiting for nothing. In this shelter a note of happiness was sounded and gained in strength. Perhaps his task in the great game was to make this realization.
