‘Cavalli No.3.’
‘Oфteн!’
‘Bloody masha ts.’
‘Chichiki.’
But my forays into the turbid smog of other souls were not in vain. I gained ever more acute understanding of what was going on in the world around me. Now, when I read coverage of a private concert by an A-list popstar in a Rublevka estate or some deferential article about the second Moscow Region Yachting Festival in Nice, I no longer felt crushed by another proof of my own inadequacy, but recognised that I had simply stumbled into the firing line of the new breed of Party machine-gunners who were replacing the Political Commissariat and National Folk Dance Ensembles.
The same was true of Discourse. I began to see that a spat between two intellectuals, one a lapdog of the regime, the other a fearless Valiant-for-truth fearlessly attacking it from all possible standpoints, bore no resemblance to a genuine conflict of ideologies, but was a duet for mouth organ and concertina. It was nothing but noise, whose only purpose was to act as background for the real ideology being trumpeted out loud.
‘If Glamour is the ideology of the regime,’ said Jehovah, ‘the most important of all arts for us are PR, GR, BR and FR. In a word – advertising.’
GR, apparently, stood for Government Relations. I did not know what BR and FR were, and was too idle to ask.
We had two lessons devoted to advertising, not to its dubious theory as developed by human beings (Jehovah called it simply ‘charlatanry’), but to its core techniques as applied to commerce, politics and information. Jehovah’s definition was as follows: ‘Without ever resorting to outright untruth, to construct from fragments of the truth a picture whose connection to reality is limited to whatever is good for sales.’ It was an apparently simple formulation, but in fact it embraced a vitally important elaboration: if the link to reality proved not to increase sales (and very often it could not) then the solution was to connect it to something else. This was precisely the eye of the needle through which the multitude of caravans passed.
Among the examples adduced to illustrate this concept was this linguistic-geometric construct:
No one speaks of it.
No one forgets it.
This is the root of all.
The source from which we all came, you and I,
And all those whom for now you regard as ‘other’,
Is not far off in the Himalayas, but inside yourself.
It’s real and tangible.
Certain and serious.
This is for real.
The explanation was as follows:
Rule 3. Non-traditional positioning of anal–phallic penetration with addition of contexts orthogonally related to the subj.
‘Why the shape of the cross?’ I asked Jehovah.
Jehovah shook a drop of clear liquid from the test tube on to his finger, licked it, and for a few moments stared unseeing into the far distance.
‘You didn’t read it all the way through,’ he said. ‘“Why the cross?” is the campaign slogan.’
A template example of spin being deployed for political purposes was the campaign by the Loyalist Youth Movement ‘True Batch of Hope’ (Surkoff_Fedayeen/built305). This campaign was aimed at generating positive interest in the English-speaking mass media, basing itself on a quotation from late Nabokov translating early Okudzhava:
Nadezhda I shall then be back
When the true batch outboys the riot …
I did not need to ask: ‘Why true batch?’ The homonyms with the Russian phrase for a trumpeter sounding the retreat were obvious. The brief digression into advertising was thereupon abandoned, and we continued with the general theory of Glamour.
I now find it quite amusing to think back to the importance I attached at the time to the insights I neatly inscribed in my notebook:
The need for Scientific Communism arises when belief fades in the feasibility of Communism actually being built, while the need for Glamour arises at the disappearance of natural sexual attraction.
Be that as it may, after I had experienced the effects of preparations labelled ‘Catwalk Meat 05 – 07’and ‘Suicide-Bimbombers of Beelzebub’ (categories of fashion models so designated by some particularly misogynistic vampire) my original conception underwent an important clarification:
It is not as simple as that. What precisely is natural sexual attraction? When you look close up at a girl who is considered the epitome of beauty, you see the pores in her skin, the pimples, the chapped lips and so on. Beauty or ugliness can be sensed only at a distance, when the lineaments of the face can be reduced to a schematic diagram which may be compared with the manga-style templates stored in the unconscious mind. Where these templates come from is anyone’s guess – but one suspects that in our day they have less to do with the genetic code than with the Glamour industry. In the world of automation, coercive governance of this type is known as ‘override’.
There were a few entertaining moments. One sample turned up twice in my programme, under different headings. The preparation was classified as: ‘Art Projects Curator Rh4’.
The red liquid had come from a middle-aged lady who really did look as if she could be an Islamist suicide-bomber. Both Baldur and Jehovah had included her in their lists because in their eyes a curator was seen to be someone pursuing an occupation midway between Glamour and Discourse and thus representing an invaluable source of information. I thought otherwise. The purpose of the degustation was to study the inner world of the contemporary artist, but this curator had not even mastered the jargon of her profession – she was merely Googling her way round it. There was, nevertheless, one touching detail: she had experienced orgasm only once in her life, when a drunken lover had called her a pubic louse feeding on financial capitalism.
I expressed my perplexity at this outcome to Jehovah and was informed that this experience was, in fact, the point of the lesson inasmuch as it revealed the subject in its entirety. I said I did not believe it, whereupon he made me sample three artists and another art gallery curator. Afterwards I made the following entry in my notebook:
On average, the contemporary artist is an anal prostitute with a mouth stitched shut and an arse painted on the wall. And the so-called curator is a person who sets himself up as the artist’s spiritual pimp despite the complete absence of any spiritual dimension in the proceedings.
Writers (whom we also covered in the Glamour course) were slightly better. After familiarising myself with their category I wrote in my notebook:
What is the most important thing for a writer? It is to possess a malicious, morbid, jealous and envious ego. If this is present, all else will follow.
Assorted varieties of critics, experts, press and Internet culturologists (it was around this time that I finally worked out what the word meant) found their way into the Discourse curriculum. A half-hour excursion into their universe allowed me to formulate the following rule:
The interim height of a crab louse equals the height of the object onto which it craps, plus 0.2 millimetres.
The last note I made on the Glamour course was as follows:
The most fruitful technique for promoting glamour in modern Russia will be anti-glamour. ‘Deconstructing’ glamour will allow it to infiltrate even those dark places where glamour itself would not dream of trespassing.
Not all the tastings had an epistemological purpose. Baldur often had me pry into another person purely in order that I should familiarise myself with a particular brand of Spanish crocodile-skin footwear or line of men’s eau de cologne. A highborn English economist found his way into the Glamour list because he was a specialist in expensive clarets, and he was followed in my investigations by a Japanese designer whose silk neckties were the best in the world (it emerged that he was the son of a man w
ho had been sentenced by court martial to be hanged). Needless to say, such researches appeared to me a complete waste of my time and energy.
Before long, however, I grew to understand that the object of these excursions was not just to absorb yet more information, but to remodel my entire mode of thinking. The truth is that there is a vital difference between the mental processes of a vampire and those of a human being. When thinking, the vampire employs the same cerebral constructions as the man, but the path taken to get from one premise to another is as different from predictive human thought as is the exquisite trajectory of a bat flying through the dusk from a pigeon circling over an urban rubbish dump.
‘The best human beings are capable of thought almost on a level with vampires,’ said Baldur. ‘They have a name for it in their world – genius.’
Jehovah’s take was more restrained.
‘About genius I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘Genius resists analysis and explanation, it’s a bit of a grey area. With us, everything is straightforward and clear. Thinking becomes vampiric when sufficient degustations have been imbibed to generate new parameters of associative connections.’
Technically speaking, my brain was already equipped to function in a new way. But the inertia of human nature still imposed its innate conditions. Many things which to my mentors were crystal clear I failed to grasp. What they saw as a logical bridge all too often presented itself to me as a conceptual chasm.
‘There are two main aspects to Glamour,’ declared Jehovah at one of our lessons. ‘On the one hand, it is the searingly painful shame and humiliation brought about by one’s poverty and physical ugliness. On the other, it is a malignant glee at the sight of the depravity and imperfections which others have not succeeded in concealing …’
‘How can this be so?’ I marvelled. ‘You told me Glamour was sex expressed as money. Surely there must be something attractive about it. Where is that in what you have just said?’
‘You’re thinking like a human being,’ said Jehovah. ‘Why don’t you tell me where it is?’
I thought. But nothing came into my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said finally.
‘Nothing that exists is imperfect or hideous in or of itself. Everything depends on correlation. For a girl to realise that she is a fat, poor, ugly freak, all she has to do is open a glamour magazine, where she will be confronted with a slim super-rich beauty queen. Then she has someone against whom to compare herself.’
‘But why should the girl want to do this?’
‘Well, come on, you can answer that,’ said Jehovah.
I thought some more.
‘She has to …’ and suddenly vampire logic laid out the answer clearly before me. ‘She has to, so that she and all those other people the glossy mags have turned into humiliated freaks will carry on financing the Glamour industry out of their wretched earnings.’
‘Quite right, well done. But even that is still not the ultimate objective. You rightly talk of Glamour needing to be financed, but what is its aim?’
‘Glamour drives the economy forward because its victims start stealing money?’ I hazarded at random.
‘Far too much like human logic. You’re not an economist, Rama, you’re a vampire. Concentrate.’
I was silent, because nothing entered my head. Jehovah paused for a minute, then said:
‘The aim of Glamour is to ensure that the life of mankind passes in a miasma of ignominy and self-contempt, a condition known as “original sin”. It is the direct result of consuming images of beauty, success and intellectual brilliance. Glamour and Discourse submerge their consumers in mediocrity, idiocy and destitution – qualities which are, of course, relative, but cause real suffering. All human life is dominated by this sense of disgrace and poverty.’
‘Why is original sin necessary?’
‘It is necessary because human thought must be confined within strict limits, and because mankind must remain in ignorance of its true place in the symphony of men and vampires.’
I guessed that in this context the word ‘symphony’ meant something like ‘symbiosis’. But I could not get out of my head an image of some gigantic orchestra, before which stood Jehovah on the conductor’s podium in a black tailcoat, his mouth smeared in blood …
After a pause for thought, I said:
‘All right. I can understand why Glamour is a mask. But why do we say the same of Discourse?’
Jehovah closed his eyes and assumed a look of Yoda, the mentor of the Jedi.
‘In the Middle Ages no one knew that America existed,’ he said, ‘therefore it was not necessary to conceal it. It never entered anyone’s head to look for it. That is the best disguise of all. If our aim is to hide something from people, all we need do is make sure no one thinks of it. For this to be the case, human thought must be under permanent supervision, that is to say Discourse has to be controlled. To control Discourse, all we need is the power to establish its borders. Once they are set, an entire universe can be hidden beyond them. You know this from your own situation. You must admit, the world of vampires is pretty well camouflaged.’
I nodded.
‘Not only that,’ continued Jehovah, ‘discourse is another, and magical, form of masking. I’ll give you an example. No human being will disagree with the proposition that there is a great deal of evil in the world, is that not so?’
‘It is.’
‘But what is the source of this evil? Not a day goes without newspapers filling acres of space arguing about it. It is one of the most astounding aspects of the world we live in, given that people are capable of recognising the nature of evil instinctively, with no need to have it analysed and explained. To have succeeded in rendering it such a shrouded mystery is a serious magical act.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed sadly, ‘that seems to be very near the truth.’
‘Discourse acts in a manner not unlike an electric barbed-wire fence where the current touches not the human body but the human mind. It defines territory that cannot be penetrated from territory from which it is impossible to escape.’
‘What is the territory that cannot be escaped?’
‘I can’t believe you’re asking that. Glamour, of course! Open any glossy magazine and look. There in the middle you find Glamour, and round the edges Discourse. Or the other way round – Discourse in the middle and Glamour round the edges. Glamour is always surrounded either by Discourse or by empty space. There is nowhere for the human being to escape to. Empty space holds nothing for him, yet he cannot pass through the Discourse barrier. The only thing left to him is to sleepwalk through the pastures of Glamour.’
‘But why do vampires need it?’
‘Glamour has one other function which we have not yet mentioned,’ replied Jehovah. ‘And for vampires it is the most important one. But it is too early to speak of it yet. You will find out about it after the Great Fall.’
‘And when will that be?’
To this Jehovah made no reply.
And so it was, taste by taste, swallow by swallow, step by step, that I was transformed into a culturally advanced metrosexual, ready to plunge into the very heart of darkness.
THE FILING CABINET
From what I have written it may appear that my transformation into a vampire was accomplished without inner struggle. This was far from the case.
During the first few days I felt as though I had undergone a major operation on my brain. At night I had nightmares. I was drowning in a bottomless black swamp enclosed by a ring of stone blocks, or else I was being roasted in the mouth of some horrible brick monster, which for some reason contained a stove. But the worst nightmare of all was when I woke up and became conscious of the new centre of my being, a nucleus of steel that had taken the place of my heart, had nothing to do with me, yet was at the same time the core of my person. This was how I experienced the Tongue as it gradually entered int
o a symbiotic relationship with my brain.
Once my missing canine teeth had grown back in (apart from being slightly whiter they were identical to my old ones) the nightmares ceased. Or more accurately, I stopped reacting to them as nightmares and came to terms with such visions in my dreams. I had had to make a similar adjustment when I first went to school. Now my soul gradually recovered itself, much as an occupied city comes back to life or the fingers of a benumbed hand begin again to stir. But all the time, day and night, I felt as though I was under surveillance by an invisible television camera installed inside me, through which one part of me observed the other part.
One day I went home to collect my things. The room in which I had spent my childhood seemed small and dark, the Sphinx in the hallway no more than a kitschy caricature. Seeing me, my mother for some reason lost her cool, then shrugged her shoulders and went into her room. I felt no link whatsoever with the place in which I had spent so many years; everything about it was alien. I quickly gathered up the things I needed, threw my laptop into my bag, and returned to my new apartment.
After lessons with Baldur and Jehovah I had time to take a closer look at my surroundings. I had been curious from the very beginning about the somewhat skimpy library of test tubes in Brahma’s study, and guessed that somewhere there must be a catalogue. Before long I found it in one of the drawers of the escritoire: a handwritten album bound in a rather unusual snakeskin or something of the sort. Each drawer of the filing cabinet corresponded with a pair of pages in the catalogue, in which were notes and brief commentaries on the numbered test tubes.
The catalogue itself was divided into sections, amusingly reminiscent of the bays in a video store. The largest section was erotica, itself divided into eras, countries and genres. The cast list was impressive: in the French bloc were Gilles de Rais, Madame de Montespan, the Bourbon King Henry IV and Jean Marais. I could not conceive how it had been possible to obtain the red liquid from all these people, even in microscopic doses.
The military section included, besides Napoleon, one of the last shoguns of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Marshal Zhukov and various celebrities from the Second World War, among them the air aces Pokryshkin, Adolf Galland and Hans Ulrich Rudel.
Empire V Page 8
