The World Goes On

by László Krasznahorkai

  indeed at the very next moment, just as we are unbuckling a belt, when all our clothes drop away at once, the way their eyes promise, which is the look you are searching for and which you clearly want to immortalize in your picture, and, on a good day, you find that look straightaway, and it promises satisfaction now, yes, right now, but only perhaps . . . for deferred pleasure is the very essence of this essentially infernal arrangement, the cage in which you too are imprisoned, as is every man in Venice—in the world at large—and though you might always be wanting to paint the pending moment, that moment the promise is made good with all that that entails, the whole process recorded in color and line on your canvas, that process being inherent in the look you buy for one escudo (that’s if you get what you paid for), this painting you so desire to paint is, in fact, about something else that no one could ever paint, because that would be a picture of stillness, of stasis, an Eden of Fulfilled Promises where nothing moves and nothing happens and—what is more difficult to explain—where there’s nothing to say about this immobility, permanence, and absence of change, because, in fulfilling the promise, you have lost the thing promised, the thing that vanishes in the fulfilment of that promise, and the light in the desired object goes out, its flame quenched—and so desire limits itself, for however you may desire, there’s nothing more to be done, because there is nothing at all real about the desire, desire consists entirely of anticipation, that is to say the future, because, strange as it is, you can’t go back in time, there’s no returning from the future, from the thing that happens next, no way of getting back to it from the other side, the side of memory, that being absolutely impossible, because the road back from the present inevitably takes you to the wrong place, and perhaps memory’s whole purpose is to make you believe that there once was a real event, something that actually happened, where the thing previously desired existed, and all the while the memory is shepherding you away from its object and offering you its counterfeit instead, because it never could give you the real object, the fact being that the object doesn’t exist, though that’s not exactly your way of perceiving it, for you are a painter, meaning someone who inhabits desire but can reject it in advance, consoling yourself with the thought that there will come a moment when the chemise drops away, though believing the promise of that thought makes you a guilty man, a miserable sinner, a man condemned to sinning miserably until the day of judgment arrives, albeit that day is still far off for you; so, for now, you can carry on believing and desiring, and you need not think; you can go crazy, you can rage and thirst so you can hardly breathe—and then you can remember Federico and send him over to us, and we can send you Danaë, Veronica, Adriana, and Venus, the lot of them, and we can carry on sending them as long as Federico arrives to tell us what you need . . . but there will come the day when we draw a line under it all, when we call it a day, add up everything you ordered, and then, there will be no more Palma Vecchio, no more Iacopo Negretti, then it will be over and we’ll send you the bill, you can be sure of that.

  THAT GAGARIN

  I don’t want to die, but just to leave the Earth: this desire, however ridiculous, is so strong that it’s the only thing in me, like a deadly infection, it’s rotting my soul, and it cuts into me, namely that in the midst of a general yesterday it seized upon my soul, and well, this soul could no longer free itself, so that well, yes: it would be so good to leave the earth, but I mean really leave it, to lift off, and go up and up and go ever higher into those dreadful heights, to see what he saw for the first time, he who was the first person able to lift off and attain this dreadful height, it’s not just since this general yesterday I’ve been the victim of this infection, but that with this infection I’ve already been rendered somewhat idiotic by the thought that I will do it somehow—I know I shouldn’t talk about it, and I know that I can’t show this notebook to anyone because I would immediately be accused of sensitivity or something even worse—in any event, to one side they would be holding up the dose of Rivotril, on the other gesturing that I’m an idiot, and all the while looking suspiciously directly into my eyes, because they know full well I’m not an idiot; in any event nobody would even consider taking me seriously, no one would understand what exactly brought me to this place, and I hardly know myself; in any event, all I know is that there’s no way out now: I close my eyes, and I see myself rising, and now I’m getting dizzy, I open my eyes . . . but then I already know that I’m not going to lift off from anywhere here, not even by as much as a centimeter, I will stay here in this cursed place, like a tree rooted to this ground; I can’t move, I can only think; at the very most I can only try to conceive what he was like—he who did this for the first time: and that’s how it all began; there I was already on that downward slope, at first I’m just ambling along the road, and then I’m not even sure where it’s sloping down to—I begin in the library, and I’m asking auntie Marika, who’s always there on Wednesday afternoons from three till five, I ask her if there’s something about Gagarin—who? auntie Marika stares at me, I pronounce the syllables slowly: Ga-ga-rin; auntie Marika purses her mouth, I don’t know who that is, she says, but I can take a look—of course you know who he is, I say, Gagarin, he was the first person in space, you know, oh yes, that Gagarin, she smiles, as if now acknowledging that she too is essentially a person of that era, and for any person of that era—just as in my own case—it is perfectly obvious who that Gagarin is: she looks at a box full of index cards, she flips through the cards, she stops in one place, flips the cards forward, flips the cards backwards, well, there’s nothing, she says, I’m very sorry; but this is only the beginning, after all this is only a small institutional library, then I take the morning bus to the district town, and there, and even there, somebody just flips through the index cards, standing in one place, he flips the cards forward, he flips them backwards, shaking his head, nothing, he says, and I go on further with the morning bus: I go to the county library, and someone flips the cards forward, and flips them backwards, of course now on a computer, and now I’m sitting on the train on the way to Budapest, it’s dreadfully hot, the windows are wide open in vain, the scorching air rushes in from outside, striking whomever it reaches, it doesn’t reach me though because I’m not interested in this train, there’s only one thought in my mind, and I’m already standing in front of the counter at the Ervin Szabó Library, Gagarin?! the librarian asks, and he just looks at me, and it’s possible that in front of the counter at the Gagarin Library they would look at me that way if I were to pronounce the name of Ervin Szabó, no matter, from this point onward everyone begins to look at me like that, that is to say strangely, that is to say distrustfully, or because they think that maybe I’m just putting them on or because they’re trying to make out if I’m really an idiot and really, no matter where I inquire to try to get some information—it’s futile to try to come up with some sort of acceptable explanation instead of the actual one—their faces immediately grow suspicious, no matter how this matter concerns them, they don’t understand what I want, and somehow they sense that the explanation I’ve given them is unconvincing: they can see in my eyes that something else is going on, they don’t believe me, don’t believe that I’m planning a lecture—what else though could any of this be good for, though, as my original occupation was that of a science historian, so they could actually take my word—but they don’t believe me, because who the hell today would be interested in Gagarin, well, stop kidding me already, I see that in everyone’s eyes, although nobody says it aloud, that’s what their eyes say, as they look at my personal information card, or, when I am registering with the library, and they ask about my profession, and they wonder: how did he became a science historian, and there are even worse cases that that, because still one out of ten thousand will recognize me, because they saw me once or twice before, years ago on a popular science program on TV, and then it gets even worse, because then, when I tell them about the Institute and everything, they wink at me conspiratorially, indica
ting that fine, they understand: they know full well that the end result of this will be something serious and scientific, and then there arises this horrific familiarity as if with a customary glutinous substance and customary persistent odor, of course at times like that I flee, meaning that I move on, but I can’t really go too far, because well, I’m interested in this, I ask, well, nothing about Gagarin? well, as far as Gagarin is concerned, there’s nothing, they say, so then what have you got, I ask, what about Kamanyin for example? and they just shake their heads, they don’t even understand the name, Ka-ma-nyin, I pronounce the syllables yet again and I could even mention that’s there’s a kind of memoir about him in Hungarian—obviously edited to death by the KGB—but then I let it go, what’s the point of sharing this with anyone, driving yourself mad with explanations, God preserve me, this whole thing is enough to make one ashamed, maybe I am ashamed too because I can’t really imagine that I would truly say to somebody why I’m researching Gagarin with such persistence, such obsessiveness, when I don’t even know myself why I’m doing it, in other words it keeps changing as the days and the weeks go by, in the beginning I knew, or at least I was convinced that I knew, but then it all became ever more obscure, and as for today, as I stand here with Kamanyin and of course Gagarin, and of course hundreds and hundreds of books, documents, films, and photographs, if I were to ask myself why, everything would grow completely dark at once: so I don’t even ask, and then it emerges all by itself, and everything is so sharp and clear, like a splashing mountain brook in the dark, but of course nobody asks, I don’t even ask myself, others don’t ask me, it’s completely clear that I myself have no idea what I want with this whole thing, just as that original desire works within me uninterruptedly: yes, that’s it, to leave the Earth, but as for how Gagarin and the others will help me with this, I really don’t know, of course at one point I had some kind of idea about it, but that was still at the beginning, and I’m not at the beginning anymore, no longer with auntie Marika, so I try to concentrate only on Gagarin, however there’s a problem with that; because my brain can’t do it, fifty-seven years and on Rivotril, it’s over, that’s more than enough for one brain, and it’s not just a question of concentration but it’s about the entire being, meaning my own, and the ability to pull oneself together, namely I’m not able to pull myself together anymore, the only thing I can do is focus now and then on only one aspect of a question that I’m preoccupied with, always on just one such aspect, I concentrate on the detail of one aspect, and that’s fine, and actually it goes well, I can shut out the world, shut out what’s going on around me at a given moment—because the world of course is there, it goes on working in its own rational way, namely in a particular moment of time and in its particular details, namely today, at this particular moment, as I’m writing this, namely on the date of Friday, July 16, 2010, the world is still functioning rationally—it’s just in relation to the entire thing there’s no meaning to how and why it works—because it has already emerged about this concept is that it’s senseless, and I mean that there never was any sense to it, never, in any kind of historical past; people believed only from necessity that there was some point to it, whereas today we know precisely that it’s irrational, that words like “world” and “whole” and “fate destined from afar,” and all such things are simply empty and meaningless generalities, about which it would be simplest to say that’s it’s so much humbug, because that’s what the whole thing is: just one big humbug—and not because these are inconceivable abstractions and things like that, but because there are errors in the formulation, that’s what’s going on here, a misunderstanding, when a person gets a short-term contract for one human life, and he starts to believe in these abstractions, in part directly, in part as a confirmation, he spreads them all around like carpets, and look at this, he says, life goes on, I even explained this to Dr. Heym, but of course he just listens and doesn’t say anything, although he understands what I’m talking about perfectly and “due to my outstanding logical faculties” he doesn’t deprive me of the right to come and go freely between the Institute and the outer world, as he expresses it: he KEEPS me at large, and then we just smile at each other as if we were both thinking about the same thing, I’m not though, I’m thinking that one day I will definitely be done with him, and there will be no other cause at all other than how he smiles at me, I am complicit with him in nothing, one day I’ll wring his neck, I stand behind him, he doesn’t notice, he never notices what’s going on behind his back, well, one day I’ll pick myself up, and I’ll steal over there, and I will grab this head smiling in complicity, and crack it, that’ll be it, there can’t be any other end but this, but until then I’ve got enough to do, for example here is the question of Gagarin, this Gagarin and the others, and I really have to get to the end of it if I really want to leave the Earth, I do really want to leave, once and for all, this is my desire, no matter how ridiculous it may seem, so strong that this is the only thing within me, like a fatal infection, it’s been rotting away my soul for months now already, I really don’t know anymore, the beginning is lost in obscurity, and only Gagarin is becoming ever more clear, I see him right here in front of me, they’re taking him somewhere on the bus, and behind him is Tyitov, both of them in their spacesuits, both of them pretty serious, there’s no joking here, although we know about Gagarin that he was inclined to things like that, his nerves were made of steel, that’s what Kamanyin said about him, or maybe Korolev said it, I don’t remember anymore, right before takeoff his pulse was measured at 64, the doctors couldn’t believe their eyes, 64, well, but that’s what it was, a pulse of 64 in Tyuratam in the Kazakh desert, where the alarm clock went off at 5:30 Moscow time—and not UTC, that is Universal Coordinated Time—and it was about 7:03 when the First Person took his place in the spacecraft, and then this First Person, this Lieutenant by the name of Gagarin from the tiny village of Klushino, the son of Alexei Ivanovitch and Anna Timofeyevna, this peasant boy hailing from Smolensk Oblast and measuring 157 centimeters tall, on April 12, 1961, entered the tiny cabin of Korolev’s shockingly dangerous spacecraft, and was obliged to wait for a long time, and then the time came, and once again, thumbing their noses at the clock hands of Universal Coordinated Time, at 9:07 Moscow time the engines of the Vostok 1 started up, and within minutes Gagarin had lifted off with terrifying bravery into the stratosphere, so that under the overwhelming pressure of the acceleration, as well as subsequently entering escape velocity, he could go into orbit, in other words: leave the earth to take off from here and rise up and up, and he says, from these heights, from a height of 327 kilometers above the Siberian desert, that it is AMAZING, he says Внимание, вижу горизонт Земли. Очень такой красивый ореол . . . Очень красивое, that’s what Gagarin said, when as the very First Person, he glimpsed the Earth from one of the windows of the Vostok 1, and he didn’t try to explain just how much it was ochen’, and how much it was krasivoye, because he saw something—the Earth—as no one had ever seen it before, but let’s not dwell on this, let’s go back to before the takeoff, to Korolev in the takeoff center after he had spent the whole night awake, or to put it more correctly, in deathly fear, because particularly when in the yoke of the so-called evening darkness, when everything tends to show its most threatening side, he felt that in placing Gagarin in this time bomb he was sending him to an almost unpredictably fatal journey, this sober and reserved man was like someone who could immediately, from the sleeplessness and his considerably rational anxiety, bite the head off anyone who might happen to approach him now, so that nobody really approached him, not a single colleague, they merely followed his orders from a respectable distance, and they sent Gagarin up the stairs next to the portable scaffolding into the capsule, they let him make—as was his right to utter these last words—a kind of proclamation to the Soviet people and to the Party, then they sat him down in the seat in the capsule, they closed the door, and then everyone, including
Gagarin himself, began to work vehemently on the preparations, checking and checking and checking everything possible again and again and again, so that Korolev would be able to address Gagarin by radio, so he could shout out that famous sentence—among others—into the microphone during the next one hundred and eight minutes, a sentence that still can be heard today, namely that Zarya was calling Kedr. The spaceship is about to lift off, Kedr—upon which Gagarin announced with all the decisiveness that was expected of him, but at the same time with childish enthusiasm: