I. To Enter the Garden of Delights. For now, in this Rotterdam arcade, we have to pass through the primitive and intermediary stage of helmets and goggles. Once a high degree of miniaturization of the devices—to the molecular level—has been achieved, we will be able to introduce the minuscule generator of visions into the cerebral tissue. Then our lives will consist exclusively of the unending melodrama of the world I’ve always longed for. Our visions will take on physical consistency so that when projected before us they float “as far as the eye can see,” and as we’re about to go around a corner, we’ll know we will find another perfectly real street on the other side, with automobiles circulating and pedestrians hurrying past, which is to say that we’ll know this same tableau will rise before us and that the end of that street will move away into infinity as we move forward, like the line of the horizon. (And isn’t the line of the horizon the floating limit of a virtual field?) A game without locked doors or forbidden passageways. At the end of the staircase there will always be a room, and in it a bed, and on that bed, beneath an open window, the woman of our dreams. When, sated by these endless pleasures, we lose all notion of the falsity of this perfect world then we will never be able to leave, for we will entirely have forgotten the little doorway by which we came in.
II. To Live in the Garden of Delights. To walk naked through the Garden is to have no contact with this real world where you and I live. Therein is a paradise of vivid colors and simple forms, the pure and archetypal pleasures that in our earthly life we do no more than clumsily brush against. The concrete skin of an actual young woman is a mere imitation, an inexact copy of the cheeks of that same young woman as she exists in our thoughts. To live in the Garden is to cross over the abyss that divides these two from each other. (You, in the case of P.O.A., are not exactly the woman I desired, merely her incarnation.)
I could recognize the woman I dream of and even reproduce her in the camera obscura of my mind, which confirms my thesis. Each of us would end up elaborating his own private world and thousands of parallel worlds would come to exist, the worlds intuited by Saint Augustine. I imagine a multitude of Gods, all reclining in dark rooms and thinking of us. (THELONIOUS, RUDI, Kolia are no more than characters in a world created by me, a lone God.) And these parallel worlds cannot be reached or entered by others (the solitude of the Creator). Therefore:
a) The dreams where we see alien worlds are glimpses of the nearby presence of a neighboring God; they can be explained as a result of interference with the signal.
b) The multiplicity of worlds could also be explained as the tree diagram of someone who peoples his world with characters from fiction; the hair-raising and voracious Pac-Man, or the no less hair-raising bipedal models (men) who, when the moment arrives, sometimes generate other worlds, and so on into infinity. (All we can do is imagine the original form of that Creator of ours: either bipedal—“in the image and likeness”—or without any point of resemblance to his creations, the nebulous divinity of an unimaginable anteworld.)
c) In that latter case, we are, to him, creatures as horrible as the sanguinary entities who tirelessly pursue us through Pac-Man’s virtual labyrinths.
III. To Awaken in the Garden of Delights. We’ve forgotten our former human existence and thus conclude that we have always lived in the Garden. One day, the serpent whispers the terrible truth in our ear; we break through the membrane, open the door, and discover our own nakedness.
When the veil is drawn back, we take those who control us from the center of the universe or the center of ourselves by surprise. (Isn’t it amazing that we have such a peculiar vision of our own bodies? We see a hand covering a sheet of paper with irregular marks and our view of that image is blurred by a protuberance just beneath the eyes—which we call a nose. Aren’t we concealed within this body? Isn’t it true that we “inhabit it” and spy on the world through its eyes like Ulysses’s men through the blind sockets of the Trojan horse?)
IV. To be Cast Out of the Garden of Delights. But every world has its real ending, like a program infected by a virus that will activate at 00:00 hours on Judgment Day. The Creator has allowed us to glimpse this truth, which presupposes an ending to our pleasant existence (the flaming sword) and the beginning of the anguished scientific quest (the iron balls Galileo threw down from the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Let us begin, then, to wander through a labyrinth overflowing with “prehistoric” skeletons that are nothing but the false evidence of a theory of spontaneous generation, the idea that we are the product of a simple confluence of natural factors. This fallacious “scientific” theory only manages to delay our arrival at the true solution, the SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE, for as long as the undoubtedly true hypothesis of an act of creation is refuted by the rigged proofs of a process of “evolution.” The only merit of the scientific progress that ensues is to clarify the development of TECHNOLOGY and the arrival at the SUMMA: the belief in ghosts, the creation of reality by the image, the achievement of the imagined paradise. The return to the Garden.
T
TEA. An inexpensive infusion readily available to all, TEA enjoys great popularity across the IMPERIUM, where the practice of taking TEA with little cookies and homemade jam is widespread. The distinctly foreign climate required for the cultivation of TEA saved it from becoming a Siberian crop, “very much our own,” along with the potato and the tomato which are both obviously and notoriously indigenous to Russia. The best TEA was imported from Ceylon in tins decorated with landscapes of verdant rolling hills. Bad TEA was perfidiously hacked atop the mountains of Georgia. Muscovy never had any particular problem with tea, at least not during my stay in the country. Other less innocent infusions, characterized as delicacies (дэликатэссэн), were frowned upon for the aspersion of inefficiency they cast upon the IMPERIUM. For a period of five years, cocoa was entirely absent from the stores. The People’s Comissariat organized a vast defamation campaign featuring a poster with these lines by G. K. Chesterton (translated into Russian, of course):
TEA, although an Oriental,
Is a gentleman at least;
Cocoa is a cad and coward,
Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
Followed by a brief text in boldface: “It is a well-known fact that as a boy Volodia Ulianov (LENIN) loved TEA. During his childhood in Simbirsk . . .” et cetera.
THELONIOUS MONK. As if I were called THELONIOUS MONK and she were LINDA EVANGELISTA.
I knew how to lead a false existence under those names; we had only to believe in our metamorphosis, leap onto the magic carpet of a perfect life, and contemplate from there the ciphers that denoted a bad year, any bad year—1990, 1991—as if it were 1819 or 1099 or some other historically significant combination of numerals, viewed from a distance.
Folded up inside THELONIOUS—a name that sounded like a Nordic mammal, followed by MONK, the dull thwack of its tail against the water—I was acquiring an incredible facility for generating limpid musical phrases, melodies that found their place in the teeming universe of songs that seem to have a natural life of their own, as if they’d been resonating through the air since the beginning of time. One such song had loaned me the necessary tone for this history. Two melodies that alternated throughout the composition: an initial one that came unstrung like a series of glass beads clinking against a rock crystal vase (perfectly reproducible with an arpeggio on the celesta), followed by another, pregnant with hope, that waited half a beat after the final la of the silver bell to break into the torrential whirl of a spring thaw: blue ice floes floating past, the cry of seagulls audible in the tune raised by the brass ensemble, the anguished lamentations of the English horn (the landscape, its Faustian distances).
That was the motif for the sunny, careless days. When I recount the genesis of this novel, my visit to the (CHINESE) PALACE, the music subsides into the graceful contours of a violin pizzicato, the sun and its shimmering reflection on the canals, the tender green of the gardens, a merry lightness that also serves as background to THELONI
OUS’S hopeful stroll along Nevsky Prospekt in search of LINDA. The crucial moment of recognition when the face of LA EVANGELISTA peers out from the features of a busker playing the FLUTE is signaled by a return of the initial phrase, which then takes flight, the opening of a window . . .
I. Let us conceive, therefore, of a very expensive book, product of an advanced TECHNOLOGY, whose pages are capable of determining what paragraph the reader’s eyes will alight upon. Your stereo would simultaneously produce a certain melody, a central theme with its corresponding variations, written expressly for this novel. There might be other books, as well; that remains to be seen. We would have examples of LINDA’S silvery voice, MONK’S hoarse and melancholy laughter, cars racing through the streets of Saint Petersburg, the distant whisper of rain against the flagstones. (In fact, the computer software for this novel has been duly developed, and the interested reader can receive by return mail a CD with the soundtrack of P.O.A., its principal theme a continual bass line from which all other motifs ramify, restrained violins at moments of tension. It’s called The MONK.) I visualize poor MONK fighting against a malady that, page after page, plunges him further into the unfathomable abyss of an excess of lucidity. A terrible thing. Lend me your ears: second introduction to The MONK.
MONK suffered from a strange malady.
U
ÚLTIMO VERANO DE KLINGSOR (KLINGSOR’S LAST SUMMER or KLINGSORS LETZTER SOMMER). Stripes of light fanned out over the sea, and there was a wind. When we stopped our PACKARD, LINDA kicked her feet over the edge of the door (the window was down), and jumped out onto the gravelly clifftop. Through the telescope mounted on the terrace of our DACHA, we had discovered mountain lilac in that small meadow across the bay. We had analyzed it minutely in the disturbing proximity granted by the telescope’s prisms, and this cliff had seemed an ideal place to go and view lilacs. In my dossier I had located a military map of the littoral, a военная карта or voennaya karta, and studied various means of egress. We could get there by car, though my karta warned of a dangerous stretch of road. I showed it to LINDA: “the lovers’ precipice,” the name by which cartographers would henceforth label that anonymous spot in honor of our deaths.
LINDA wanted to bring Bovary’s old lorgnette (she bought it in that antique store in Saint Petersburg), but I explained that we had to look at the lilacs with our naked eyes: the lenses would put too great a distance between pupil and meadow. “Anyway, tomorrow’s going to be cloudy, you’ll see.”
And, in fact, we had only those stripes of light. LINDA went first, dreamily swaying along, our picnic basket dangling from her arm. That day, for the first time, she was wearing a new dress made of delicate pink ORGANDY, with a full skirt and ribbons lacing up in back. I’ve mentioned this already: I had the money, the time, the inclination, so why wouldn’t I indulge myself with such an outing? Or rather, wasn’t this expedition, to admire the lilacs the best of all possible day trips? I followed her, walking across the grass, my eyes on her nimble heels. For this special occasion I had selected a pair of Bermuda shorts with red and blue whales on a white background that represented the foamy sea. Each time I put one foot forward, I couldn’t keep from glancing down at my thighs, covered by that fabric, which was simple but full of meaning for me. We had cut down on the ornamentation, streamlined the voluminous slashed pantaloons, eliminated the gold and freshwater pearls, but conceptually . . . were not my capacious movements a repetition of those of a Byzantine cardinal—the officiant’s chasuble, the richly jeweled cross—proceeding toward the altar?
We sat down on the grass and I explained to LINDA that when the form of a flower—the silken petals, the stiffness of the stalk—emerges from the depths of chaos to exist for a certain number of hours and then decompose, we witness the consummation of an event that unveils a law, a norm. Beauty tends to appear in what is ephemeral, momentary; the brief life of the lepidoptera, the ice formations that a HARD FROST sketches across the windowpane . . . The monstrosity of a crag, a rocky outcrop—its formlessness—is perennial; it exists unaware of the vertigo of entropy or finds itself so far removed from it in time that entropy itself seems insignificant (the inhuman amount of time necessary for the friction of a piece of cloth to transform this crag’s mass into fine sand). Extremely powerful forces exert their pressure from below on the magma of the material world and condition the emergence of perfect forms, casting them into certain preexisting reticulations capable of endowing these clots of energy with form. I believe in the existence of a unique crystal, a universal network that holds within it the memory of the world; its discernment is anterior to our existence and as inexorable as the periodic table of the elements. I perceive two orders, one natural or divine and the other human. The natural goes about modeling a rose, a calendula, from the material it has at hand, and it is up to man, made of the same atoms and modeled within the same grid, to admire this beauty and confirm his own identity with the flower. True, there do exist differences in grain and resolution. A painstaking education, certain experiences, will diminish the margin of error and adjust your soul to respond to the slightest stimulus. Hence aesthetic pleasure is no more than an extremely precise and mathematical agreement between the vision of this flower and the model for it that we possess or perhaps—to make use of a more flexible schema—the model that can be created on the basis of leaves, petals, stem, and variations, though certainly within a narrow range of texture, degree of fuzziness, circumference, and consistency. And, as we go along, we adjust what we see to what we intuit or imagine. We should rejoice over this, rejoice that the good Lord has not tried out all variants, though I believe that he sometimes goes on intuition, that he, too, does not know a ciencia cierta (with scientific certainty) what the results will be.
LINDA: But in what way, then, does a change of time period influence taste? How does one explain a phenomenon such as fashion?
THELONIOUS: In the sense of an evolution or progress in taste? Not at all. The alphabet is very limited and not all combinations are possible or—and this amounts to the same thing—discernible by mankind. This limitation is the path of order, what saves us from madness. Our corporeal reality, our bipedal nature, introduces rigid invariables. God—the highest freedom—is therefore conceived as an entity without a body, not physical. And this incorporeal existence allows him to imagine all possible combinations of the universe. To us humans, he has allotted the few variations of the flower, the toga, jewelry, orders that permutate within a certain periodicity. A while ago I spoke to you of slashed pantaloons, the ingenious play of their multicolored billows of fabric, that feast for the eyes. Well, do you see that shadow, as if a cloud were passing over the meadow right now? Raise your eyes, I wanted to give you a surprise.”
Over our heads, caught in the same air that surrounded the cliff, floated the striped mass of a Montgolfier. LINDA stared at it. For many seconds. The time it took for the long, segmented shadow of a rope ladder to extend down across her eyes, held wide in amazement. The final rung struck the ground with a dull thud. Someone, a celestial monster, the hot air balloon’s crewman, was inviting us up into his basket. LINDA turned to me. The irruption of the great form of this balloon over the smooth canvas of our conversation had left her speechless. Finally she seemed to grasp it. “How is it that we didn’t see it flying toward us? It came so suddenly, just like that!”
“It lifted off from the beach at the foot of the cliff,” I answered, shouting up toward the basket, “It’s all right, Kolia, I’ve got the cord.”
Kolia had thrown down the anchor, which I managed to wedge between some rocks. The ladder swayed in my hands. I went up several steps and invited LINDA to follow. Once we were comfortably installed, I dislodged the anchor, opened the throttle on the gas and we rose into the air. “It’s important to be able to invert one’s point of view,” I explained to LINDA. “A few moments ago we were seated down below, observing the perfection of the lilacs from the distance of our ocular globes. Now, suspended in this hot ai
r balloon with its red and yellow stripes like the eyes of a deep-sea fish that allows itself to be pulled along by the ocean’s currents, we can contemplate the meadow, appreciate how small that crag really is, see Kolia’s black cap against the red patch of our PACKARD as he carries out my instructions to drive it back to our DACHA. So, then: what can we use this vision of the meadow dotted with flowers for? What ornament can it inspire in us?”
“For Christ’s sake, IOSIF. They’re just flowers!”
That time she was right.
V
VANILLA ICE. Motionless on the chair, with nothing in her stiffness to recall her former pliancy, LINDA presented her profile to me, the splendid colors of her face against the indigo of the sea. When she heard my question, she took a century to turn around and even then her eyes, as if imbued with all that blue, reluctantly followed the slightly less torpid movement of her head, lingering over the beach’s pebbles, the gray mass of the breakwater, the white seagull perched on the café terrace, then sweeping the air over my head and finally locating me, as if with difficulty, resetting her gaze to zero, readjusting the beauty of the background to the immobile and insignificant figure of the writer.
Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia Page 15
