Fingers Pointing Somewhere Else
Page 13
“He entered this in the emperor’s birthday contest.”
His face was in its way perfect — so perfect that it is hard to report what sort of face it was. It was so cultivated as to be a sort of abstraction: not degenerate or decadent, but an ineffable harmony of features, a small hollow of silence at the very summit of its consummation.
Wu took the sheet from the censor. It was scribbled from margin to margin in a familiar hand — careless but without lightness, illegible without grace. He raised the paper to his eyes and felt ashamed, with the preposterous vanity of old men who have not grown old together. He saw instantly that it was some sort of trick. The first stanza ran as follows:
The Emperor
is an emperor
is an emperor
is an emperor.
The second:
The Emperor
is like an emperor
who is like an emperor
who is like an emperor
that is emperor.
The third stanza is more or less untranslatable, for the construction governing the words emperor and emperor can be translated either as nothing but or precisely such or also most highly similar and a few other variants. In older translations we sometimes find the possibility … he and only he! and in the contemporary form of the language (in what is left of these etymological seeds) this construction confirms the complete identity of two mathematical elements.
The fourth stanza is the most chaotic and can only be understood in a logical and linguistic trance. It says, roughly:
If the Emperor,
who is emperor
and likewise is like an emperor
and is nothing but an emperor
(he and only he!)
were not emperor
who is like an emperor
and nothing else
than emperor himself,
there would be no emperor.
“What is it supposed to mean?” Wu said without even raising his eyes. “Has he gone mad?”
“Oh no … I do not think it is exactly that,” the censor replied in that featureless tone that never conveyed more than he wished.
“Then why bring it to me?” Wu burst out in annoyance, fixing his eyes on the censor. Even the censor did not know about Wu’s poor vision; he did not realize that the gaze fixed so directly on him saw only an indistinct outline, and that it was this which gave Wu such a firm sense of security. Wu was aware of the secret power of the nearsighted: this was how he stared at the servants when the bowls weren’t hot enough, and at the princess when she tasted her food.
The other old man responded with a shapely curve of his fingers, which in the language of gestures meant I defer to you, as if indicating that he could certainly answer, but was giving Wu a chance to come to it himself. Wu knew this maneuver all too well from years past. Two ancient tricks dissolved mutely into one another, and for a while there was quiet. When they finally spoke, their words came together.
“The emperor is most ungracious just now,” the censor said.
And Wu: “Does my nephew know?”
The censor shook his head. Then he added unexpectedly:
“That’s why I’m here. Explain it to me.”
“Me? What’s there for me to explain?” Wu tossed the paper onto the floor. His eyebrows bristled like blades of grass. Without even knowing why he was so furious, he felt his old anger welling up inside.
“Why me?”
“I hoped,” the censor said soothingly, “I hoped you’d know something about it. That’s the only reason I dared disturb you.”
“I don’t know anything!” Wu snapped. Acrid smoke rose, burning, through a crack in his memory. “It’s mishmash, no head or tail. It’s nonsense!”
“I do not recommend executions,” the censor replied, his laconic gesture of release indicating utter resignation, “and it is not in my power to overturn the sentence. But I would like to understand for myself something so … so…” He hesitated and then added tentatively:
“Something so … exceptional?”
As to the censor’s role in the history of poetry, he is among those who are, as they say, a step ahead of their time. The censor achieved this in a very strange way. He stepped ahead of his time without that time even noticing it was being stepped over. The censor’s genius lay in the inconspicuousness of his actions. His adroit strategy tamed the world’s vicissitudes and inconspicuously overturned the course of an era.
The poetry of the temporally bounded enclave that spanned the old men’s birth consisted of purely objective military epics. A more diligent analysis than ours would reveal its song-like format, its stereotypical plot schemes and, most of all, its marked poverty. The same heroic fragments predominate time after time, and the poems are as alike as two peas in a pod. For generations no individual spirit had come forth.
It would not be precisely true to say that the censor played the same role in his time as Sappho did in Greece, for he formed a channel from one style into another and was king in both. He established himself in official poetry, even as a young man imposing on it a certain pervasive lightness without distinguishing himself from it in any special way. Only when he had made his name, when he had become a significant participant in the imperial Word, did an unheard-of note begin to creep into his work: private life and emotion.
At first it mimicked existing traditions so precisely that no one even noticed it. Its quantity increased only gradually, with a diplomacy usually reserved for altering word order in government documents — but suddenly, without that generation’s ever expecting it, they found the censor’s tone had become the voice of the century.
Today, when, through none of our own doing, we understand better, we know that the censor was truly a great poet, and prefigured an age in poetry probably fifty times longer than the age he himself attained — which was quite advanced. His poems, especially those of his midday mountain, are widely read and critiqued to this day. Even now the best of them can, in their depth and fervency, stand up to the highest achievements of all future times, and placed next to them even a nineteenth-century poète maudit seems a bit too heavily starched.
But the most wonderful part was that the censor’s contemporaries did not know about it; the censor did not disturb or insult them, as such harbingers tend to do. The change from the monotonous racket of military campaigns to hysterical confessional trembling is so leisurely that the enlightened modern reader studying the censor’s work cannot avoid the impression of a clear plan and exceptionally adroit staging. A historian of our time, a young Swede, aptly called it “ecstasy by flowchart.”
“Wu, speak, please — if you can, of course,” the censor gently pleaded.
At fifty the poet in him had fallen silent; he obtained a government post and the track of his poetry suddenly disappears with no explanation.
The birdcalls grew louder; outside it was deepest night. Midnight flared down from the heavens in a twinkling of lights. Laboriously and against his own will, Wu dug from his memory snippets of their absurd conversation.
“Did the boy visit you today?” the censor asked, but it did not sound very much like a question.
“Why do you ask if you already know?”
“I haven’t had you watched, I’m thinking it through. Wu, there’s not much time before dawn. The execution will be secret, so as not to disturb the celebration. Did the boy tell you anything about his poem?”
In a tremor of anger Wu felt himself nodding to the censor. He tried to prevent it; he did not want to comply, and he hated the feeling that the censor was concealing something from him. Arrogance, peremptory pride — once again he knows best! It was always thus, always — and thirty-three years hadn’t changed anything at all.
“He’s gotten it into his head that the emperor will disappear,” Wu snorted. The censor’s placid face immediately tensed.
“Disappear? Why?”
For a moment he resembled an old bird, a slender, withered raptor.
“Go on! What else did he say? Go on!”
The censor leaned over in his chair, and suddenly his elaborate elderly deferentiality gave way to the aggressiveness of a secret imperial lord. His handsome face regained its shape.
Wu had always been far removed from the world of poetry. Although he had been forced to live his whole life at its legally sanctioned heart, it had never held great interest for him. It is fair to say he took note of it only once the censor had initiated the ingenious inch-by-inch shift from propaganda songs to the torment of self-reflection. And strange as it sounds, Wu belonged to that scant handful who noticed the difference. What’s more, the change astounded him far more than it astounds us today, from the heights of our foreshortened omniscience of all those years to come.
“The thaut. He went on about the thaut.”
“And then?”
“As if I know! That the thaut used to have its own character.”
The tall functionary suddenly stood up. With surprising agility he strode over to the stove and grabbed the ash-rake from the wall. While Wu spoke, while he dredged fragments and snatches from his memory, in rapt attention the censor sketched word after word on the dirty tiles.
“Quiet!” he abruptly silenced the chef. “Not another word. Let me think.”
He tapped the rake and then squatted. Pained, Wu stared at the narrow back, at the censor in all his imperial majesty, robed in gold from head to toe, crouched in a position Wu associated only with servants, or with little girls, who could toy with things this way for days on end.
Suddenly the censor laughed. It was a laugh full of wonder and distress. Then he shook his head and put back the rake.
“Wu,” he said politely, “excuse me, I’ll be leaving now. But I’d like to know: where does your nephew sleep?”
When Wu was a bit over forty (he was slightly the elder of the two old men) the censor’s existence struck him like a lightning bolt to the head. It happened in late spring, one luminous evening. It is relevant that Wu already thought he was past his peak.
It is true that, from a certain perspective, the censor temporarily became his “number one,” despite the fact that Wu never felt toward him any love or affection in the true sense of the words, or even closeness or trust. But still, thanks to the censor (or rather: in the grip of his emotional force field) Wu experienced these feelings more deeply and passionately than ever before.
Long ago, when the censor’s thunderous confessional whisper first resounded in the world’s Word, Wu knew as little as could be known about poetry. He had never had the slightest need for the medium of words, and treated poetry with the indifferent attitude typical of masters in other professions. He had a simplistic, if by and large correct view of poetry as a secondary accompaniment to music and, of course, as the history of the empire. Wu always vastly preferred wandering tellers of fables and outlaw stories, which no longer fell into that category.
When quite by accident he later heard one of the censor’s more intimate poems (he remembers it to this day: it was a clear evening, the sun was pale, the censor was smoking, and the smoke from his mouth rose into the olive branches), he was shaken to the depths of his soul.
The poem that struck him so was not intellectually complex and today would be dismissed as banal. It unobtrusively expressed surprise at a common fact: namely, that there was a single encounter, never repeated, which the poet could not forget, while in his heart’s memory people he saw every day were far less meaningful. It was essentially just the flip side of the German wordplay einmal ist keinmal, aber zweimal ist dreimal — “once is never, but twice is thrice.” Emotional life is exactly the opposite, as we know. There einmal is a relatively high card and singularity is the gate to eternity.
(Incidentally, a further note: a few years later, when Wu no longer knew him, the censor finally arrived at the celebration of the sovereign never, at the troubadors’ amor d’onques, which sings the praises of unrequited love. That which has not happened always has a slightly unfair advantage over reality. It is hard to say whether the censor knew this from his own experience. It could have merely been logical speculation, in which his beloved leitmotif reached its most extreme point.)
But the poem Wu heard that day was not this far along. Formally it was modest. It revealed the fatal einmal in a traditional form full of flowers, meteorological phenomena, and melancholy evening sounds.
Wu was astounded. He was promiscuous by nature, as is common among such sensual beings, and he was also impatient. He had never understood why (in the language of his scullions) he so quickly lost interest in every woman and why repetition deprived physical love of all savor. It was that fateful einmal that made the strongest impression; after it, everything else seemed shallow. He was astounded that someone else could feel the same way. He had never spoken of his einmal — a thin, middle-aged woman, long ago, when he had trekked across the desert in his youth — to anyone, even to himself. And suddenly someone had said out loud what had happened to Wu, and had said it precisely, rhythmically, openly.
Wu did not understand how anyone could name that mute gust of wind, and not only name it, but broadcast it. It was not chastity or introversion that bewildered him; he was simply and methodically amazed at the shattering of a concept — here, presumably, the concept of poetry. Someone had jumped the hedge of his heart, penetrated his gravitational field. The cook was overcome by shock.
But once that first astonishment had passed, it was replaced by a much more subtle amazement. Wu discovered that he could identify, more or less, with the majority of the censor’s poems, which he only now began to notice. It seemed to him that the censor, by some sleight of hand, could look right into his blindly tumbling soul and then willfully toy with it out loud.
Inexperienced as he was, Wu took every word as an authentic expression of the censor’s feelings and was startled by their great similarity. Yet it is worth noting the single, characteristically intractable mistake the impatient cook was making. It is, by the way, an exceedingly common mistake, and even today various psychologies have foundered on it.
Wu had had a rare experience: an alien inner space had been opened to him, one which he had till then been unaware of, but he was only tentatively getting his bearings in it. He accepted it quite simply — we could even say flatly, at the expense of its multilayeredness. Wu had erroneously let himself believe that every hidden feeling he found in this other ego had to be made of the same substance. He did not know that hiddenness does not by any means entail depth, that secrets can be utterly superficial. Lacking experience in the affairs of the soul, Wu was fascinated to hear the censor speak of things that were not commonly discussed — which was, incidentally, the censor’s primary contribution to literary history. The more the censor’s work enthralled him, the more he came to believe that the two of them were a single being. The other man was by some magic speaking for him and, like the wind, stealing the words from his mouth.
Wu put himself into close contact with the censor. With persistence he became the censor’s constant companion, in order to get to the heart of the matter. Wu saw the censor as some sort of freak of nature. He studied him like a spice box.
The censor (we will let him keep this title for clarity’s sake, but back then he was not yet censor; he obtained that post only once his productive days were past) was a tall, polished, somewhat coolly attractive man. A ring of reserve surrounded him; inside it he had no real friends. He was not married and did not conduct “affairs.” The censor accepted Wu’s aggressive affections with kindness and a monotonous politeness, and in time he even found a certain pleasure in his debates with the master chef.
This not too close friendship lasted about three years. After all that time Wu was not a step nearer his goal. His tenacity came to nothing. Who is this man? How does he know what I know and yet do
n’t know? And why him?
The more Wu saw the censor, the more the man disturbed him. He simply could not reconcile that restrained — one could even say British — exterior with the fevered cry of his poetry. They spent hours together on the covered terraces, idly gossiping just so as not to lapse into silence. In his work Wu was accustomed to step-by-step analysis; at one point he secretly focused on one after another of the censor’s characteristics — his face, tastes, way of speaking — and delved into them with a persistence he had never before applied to another person. But the censor’s eyes were expressionless, his hands calm as they poured the wine, and his tastes temperately indifferent.
By the third year he felt the censor was deliberately deceiving him. The further this current of introspection carried him, the more he came to believe that while he conducted his detailed study of the censor, the censor was doing the same to him. In each new poem he found a piece of himself and countless times erroneously ascribed to himself the poem’s feelings and states. He experienced an entire range of emotions never before imagined, and he was quick to appropriate each of them, like a hypochondriac does with the symptoms of diseases. In the final analysis, poets everywhere can thank this egocentricity and its uncontrollable tendency toward error for the fact that we tolerate poetry’s existence at all.
“How did you think up that poem?” he would turn on the censor during their early evening meetings. “Who were you thinking about? What kind of mood were you in when you wrote it?”
Wu posed the censor questions that are heard all the time on television. He rousted them forcefully from time’s womb. The answers that most of today’s artists prefabricate as an integral part of their work were at the time beyond anyone’s concern. The creator as subject was beside the point. Wu’s insistence came across as slightly vulgar.
“This?” the censor would answer with a smirk. “I don’t even know. I can’t remember.”
“When did you write it?” Wu would not be put off.
“Yesterday.”
“All at once?”