by Michal Ajvaz
I believe that the new religion changed after the prophet’s death. It rid itself of some of its more eccentric features and drew nearer to other religions. That it developed some kind of notion of an afterlife is testified to in Averroes’s tractate, in which the thinker from Cordoba rejects the notion of the immortality of the individual soul, employing in his polemic an anecdote from the island as a kind of reductio ad absurdum. This is the tale Averroes tells: the prophet of the island of Phoenix pays a visit to his neighbour, arriving as the latter is about to whitewash his home. The prophet bursts into tears and pleads with his neighbour to abandon this course of action. When the astonished neighbour asks what it is about the painting of his home that so troubles the prophet, the latter points to a dried stain on the wall and says: “I see in that the face of my late father. I visit you only in order to be closer to him, so that my father may see me and hear my voice. Were you to paint over him, his soul would wander the atmosphere in confusion, looking for another stain to inhabit. Perhaps it would be forced to settle in a place that would bring it great indignity, perhaps on a wall at the other end of the world, so we should never see each other again.”
Averroes writes that the islanders believe that the souls of the dead live on in stains on walls, that they prove this by a curious concatenation of evidence: souls are incorporeal so they must dwell in something with a material volume; volume lacks a two-dimensional form, and as stains on walls are two-dimensional, souls undoubtedly reside in stains. Perhaps the islanders themselves were not altogether convinced of the logic of this, so as a second proof of life after death in stains, they declared that in the half-light we often have the impression we see the outline of a person or an animal.
This story may be based in truth, although plainly it is paraphrasing what Diogenes Laertius tells of Pythagoras (fragment B7 in Diels). It was not so far from Cordoba to the island, and before the original communication was changed into an anecdote and before this anecdote was heard by Averroes, it must have passed through many mouths. I can well imagine the impact the imaginations of sailors and merchants steeped in tales from the Orient would have worked on it.
Names of stains
When the prophet—an exemplar of courage who invested the glowing, nonsensical world with murmurs and stains—no longer walked among them, the islanders became uncertain of the way and began to look around for translators and interpreters. Now they needed a grammar and a lexicon of stains, so that they might understand their language. At that time catalogues and dictionaries of stains came into being. We see the transitions as indistinguishable from one another, but to the islanders they are full of similarities and differences. Stains came to be classified, and the various types were given names to which fixed meanings were attached. It seems that in the old days the attitudes of the islanders to stains were personal—some of them one loved, others one hated. These attitudes were subject to sudden, fleeting fashions; sometimes a marginal stain that no one had paid any attention to would appear overnight on all walls and garments and would suddenly adorn the surfaces of dozens of objects. Of course, the Stain of Awakening still held a privileged and unshakable position, and the shape made by the sauce on the page of the sacred book was carved in stone, set in bright-coloured gemstones and tattooed on skin.
At that time the islanders would walk about with dictionaries in their hands, employing them in the reading of stain texts and any other shapes they happened upon. One Arabian merchant tells the tale of how he arrives at the home of one of the islanders for a business appointment. He finds the islander in the yard of his dwelling, watching with excitement a bedsheet that is flapping and swelling in the strong wind as it dries on a washing-line; also he keeps looking in a thick dictionary he is holding in his hand. The islander asks the merchant to wait a few moments. Once the wind calms down, he makes his apologies: the story written in the sheet was an exciting one, and he wished to find out how it ended. When the merchant expresses his surprise at this, the islander explains that his countrymen regularly read the shapes that gather in pieces of cloth in windy weather; like hieroglyphs, he says, they create a continuous text.
I do not know how long this phase of the islanders’ religion lasted, but I believe that over time they ceased to perceive stains as communications from god. The changes occurring, the shapes, the stains became for them a game that had no connection to anything in particular. At around this time they laid aside their lexicons and grammars and ceased to ascribe to stains any fixed meanings. But the stains did not fall mute; they returned to their original voice, their blissful, meaningless murmuring. In this way the end of the religion was a triumph, a return to the beginning. Some travellers have written of the islanders with scorn or indignation; in their opinion, the veneration of the god of stains, which it was to be hoped still lingered in the islanders’ consciousness, was at least a form of prayer, and thus an attempt—albeit a dark and confused one—to make contact with God; they consider today’s total absence of any sense of transcendence as degeneracy of the severest kind. I feel I have neither the authority nor the need to reproach or praise the islanders for their godlessness, but I must say in their defence that much of what has been written about them is baseless slander: the atheism of the islanders has a special mystique based in its superficiality and immediacy, and it creates a space in which fine, almost noble gestures can develop. This hope-free, fear-free, sense-free space is often lit by a silent joy of the kind I have rarely experienced in Europe, and the shapes of stains and objects glow with a clear light. I learned that the islanders knew neither passion nor genuine cordiality, but in their behaviour there was always a tone in which discretion and noble tact were present. It seemed to me that out of this tone there might grow a kindness that would protect the maturing contours of things, a kindness that would be stronger than the kindness we know, because there would be no need for it to take into account sense and order, which always lead to violence and malevolence.
It is true that during my stay on the island I never met anyone who gave the impression that he was approaching such a transformation. For this to happen, it would perhaps be necessary for the seeds of future kindness to be nourished on realities other than the island’s anaesthetic murmurs and glimmers, the monotonous fraying and entwining of its currents, the slow melting of the solid and the crystallization of the liquid. It is possible that such a transformation will never come to pass, that what appeared to me as the seeds of a new world was really an afterglow projected by the past, that the islanders already have behind them their better days, their era of kindness and goodness, and that all that remains of it is the dubious virtue of discretion, in which tact comes together with indifference.
I once mentioned to Karael that it seemed to me that island life was heading for transformation, but my girlfriend disliked visions in which developments moved towards aims. I said nothing to contradict her; I didn’t have the right. There was only one person I could ask for help in the attempt to realize by alchemy a change in the islanders’ indifference, and naturally that person was me. I made an effort at it after I returned from the island, but the alchemy slipped from my fingers just as it did from those of the sorcerer’s apprentice: the result was a centaur with a human body and a horse’s head, mixed from the island’s distaste for large buildings, devoid of the island’s lightness and joy, with the European need for sense robbed of the ground beneath its feet that connects it firmly to our world.
The lexicons of stains had been lost and the islanders had forgotten about them, but the categories that had their origins in these books had left a deep impression in the islanders’ language and ways of seeing. Stains of different shapes belong to different types; for the islanders they are as different in kind as a chair and a table are to us. Although on the island a great many instruments—many of them objects connected with civilization—are missing that we have by us constantly, the islanders are surrounded by a far greater amount of things than we are. The islanders live amon
g stains as we live among objects and letters. Indeed, they feel more at home in expanses of stains than in the world of objects; for them, stains have more of an existence than ordinary objects. While we compare stains to objects and bodies and say things like, “Hey, look at that stain! It looks like a walrus,” when the islanders want to describe the shape of an object—let’s say a ship that has just appeared in the harbour—they say, “It looks like a tnaeb.” A tnaeb is an oblong, saggy stain with a number of outgrowths on its upper side. The islanders look at the world of objects and bodies as at a Rorschach-type test turned inside out.
The categorizing of stains is embedded so deeply in the consciousness of the islanders that not only do they seek to compare the shapes of objects with those of stains, but types of stains play a role—consciously or unconsciously—when objects come into being. There are many household objects and buildings on the island that are in the shape of a stain, not least being the escutcheons on mansions and palaces of the lower town built in the final phase of building activity that imitate the shapes of various types of stains. It was instructive for me to study the architecture of the conquerors from the time they were already losing the war against the spirit of the islanders; from these it was plain that the shapes of stains had infiltrated the visions of the architects—for example, the facade of a church obviously meant to be a replica of Rome’s Jesuit Church of the Gesu was far more reminiscent of the mark amamr. I can well imagine the dejection of the church’s architect when he realized this result of his work.
It was a blasphemy to glorify the god of the stain (a god who accepted such devotion would transform into another deity), and it was not possible to run away from a stain. The islanders’ stains lay in wait for the builders like cunning beasts of prey; not only did they reside in the dark gaps between shapes (these spaces could have been left as a kind of reservation), but they stole into the seemingly secure territory of recognized shapes and caused much damage there. They destroyed recognized shapes and appointed themselves in their place, or at the very least the stains so bedevil-led and confused the recognized shapes that these began to imitate stains. The capitals of pilasters and the volutes of escutcheons could not resist the urge to become grm or mupu stains. Even the figures of saints became images and statues of stains; they were unable to deliver salvation, or—worse still—they offered a terrible salvation, the monstrous paradise of stains.
It was pathetic to watch the desperate attempts of the architects to escape the stains that pursued them, which were more terrifying to them than the monsters of mythology. I often felt the facades of the houses told of their builders’ fear of a terrible, debilitating sickness, which we might name the impossibility of the indefinite. Indefiniteness and shapelessness were forever escaping them, because every accidental splatter of mortar immediately became an irao or a ladoe; when they wanted to escape an ede that had grown right under their hands, they found it turning into an alopo. Perhaps it seems strange that they were so keen to preserve the shapeless, the indefinite, the nameless and the patternless. Most of all the builders looked for shapelessness to salvage the world of shapes; shapes needed indefinite, discreet matter to which they could give their orders and which would serve them. When a shape on the island entered matter, what it found there was not calm complaisance but the frenzied proliferation of figures, and in this uncomfortable jungle it could not find a place to settle. It was used in overcoming the resistance of matter, but here its power and solidity were worth nothing; here matter was so apathetic that it put up no resistance to shapes, but it pulled them into its whirling dance and enfeebled it by its toxic breath. The worst thing of all about this was that the monstrous and offensive stain figures constantly putting themselves in the paths of shapes were uncannily similar to these shapes and thus familiar to them. When the shapes discovered the reason for this, they were horrified: it was not that stains were imitating shapes and wished to take their place, but that shapes were of the same genus as stains and had forgotten the world they were born into, that they were just as phantasmic and monstrous as stains, that shapes and stains were the same fruit of the wild proliferation of matter, meaning that shapes were afforded no privileges.
We know how the anguished battle between the foreigners and the demons of the island ended. After a long period of unbearable strain the foreigners yielded, and this yielding was made manifest in their attitude to the danger posed by stains. In a sudden flood of bliss the foreigners were plunged into a paradise they had long yearned for but had been afraid to admit to. In the lower town, buildings from the time of blissful defeat have been preserved; they reveal how their architects revelled in the once-forbidden depravity of stains, how they luxuriated in the stains that had eluded them for many years, how in triumph they allowed them to dominate the island and declare the Collapse of Shape.
The master from Berlin
Perhaps, dear reader, you think that as I write my mind is filled with visions of the island, that nothing is important to me except the efforts to fish out of memory clearly-drawn pictures of the landscape of the island. Perhaps you think I consider you a remote figure, unreal or bothersome, a figure that disturbs my dreams and at whose behest I have to demean and exert myself by transferring glowing images into dark, clumsy words, to bind in the manacles of grammar and syntax the free, light motions of the waves, sands, and winds that linger in my memory. Perhaps you think that because of this I hate you, that I consider you the agent of my misfortune, that I sit at my computer keyboard—whose gentle tapping beneath my fingers is transformed into the sounds of gravel underfoot on the scorched paths of the island’s rocks—hatching plans which do you harm, which use language to ensnare you.
How mistaken you are, dear reader! I think of you continually; I am grateful to you that our conversation allows me to inject by sharp, angular words at least a flickering glow in the faded images. It is your face that I see in the gaps between all words, I am forever anxious for your comfort, I worry that the reading I ask of you is boring you. I would be happier if this travelogue were sold in a box containing items to supplement the reading matter—a fine-woven hammock, a bottle of a sweet liqueur, flacons, Oriental sweetmeats; you would read the book stretched out comfortably in the hammock, nibbling on Turkish delight and sipping the liqueur, the air would be scented with essence of cedarwood and myrrh; in fact, I would even offer my services for free for the packing of these boxes.
When I told you that nothing ever happened on the island, I suspect you did not believe me; you thought that I was exaggerating, that there was surely a tale of excitement to come. In this I am afraid I have to disappoint you: it really is the case that you will encounter nothing like this in the whole book. I suppose I could invent something, tell you of fights with vicious beasts, of the discovery of precious carvings in a sunken gallery, of the stirring of a volcano, of the remnants of an ancient cult of magic into which I was initiated, of mysterious apparitions in the hot, empty streets of the lower town…But I really want to tell you the truth, which is that in the three years I spent on the island, nothing happened; nor had anything interesting happened there in all the centuries since the European conquest. But when—thinking of you—I sat down at my computer this morning, an idea came to me: if you are so anxious to have a story, I can at least finish that of the Czech emigrant in Paris. Now it seems to me I was too harsh on you in refusing to say any more about the theft of the necklace. Let us return to Paris; perhaps you remember that we left Baumgarten sitting next to the cat-burglar—whose life he had just saved—on the snow-covered roof, perched on the neon letter “a.”
“Is it really necessary to commit crimes in weather like this?” he asked her with reproach, when at last he had got his breath back. The girl began to apologize, assuring him that she, too, would sooner be sitting at home than in a blizzard like this. But she desperately needed to get her hands on some money by the morning of the next day, when at eleven o’clock an auction would commence where a painting sh
e had long hankered after was up for sale.
“And what picture is this for which you almost plunge from the rooftops? Have your friends ransacked the Louvre?”
“No, the gallery where the auction is taking place is a respectable business. The picture I want is by a German painter who recently died. Drowned last year bathing in the Wannsee. He left only a few works behind and hardly anyone knows him. I came across the picture by chance in a small gallery in Kreutzberg, the quarter of Berlin. And unfortunately I didn’t have the money for it then.”
“Nothing’s changed there, has it?”
“Quite right. In fact I’m in a worse position now than I was then, because the artist’s death has raised the cost of his pictures. But I’ve stopped working in a bank and found a new career for myself, one where I can get more money.”
“I have to say you’re pretty good at clambering over roofs. But what’s so wonderful about the picture by the drowning Berliner?” Baumgarten was asking out of politeness; he was getting cold and he was imagining himself back in his warm bed. But obviously the girl had been waiting for such a question and she began to talk of the picture.
“The picture is really a great book of stories,” she said. “There are hundreds of elaborate story-lines on it, which at certain points cross, join or branch off in new directions. It’s true that the picture shows a single place at a single, non-dimensional moment, but into the space which fills this moment the artist has implanted a great many signs which form some kind of lettering. One needs to make connections among the signs, to group them into the words and sentences of the individual stories.”
“These are symbols, did you say?” Baumgarten, who taught a seminar in semiotics at the university, was suddenly attentive.
