Don't think that the lies of your idolising poetry can do no harm. Suicide is all the rage nowadays. Every messenger boy and attorney's apprentice who has ever managed to rhyme two successive lines and has then not been admitted instantly to the pantheon of the immortals, grabs for poison. They bring it to their lips, at the crack of dawn, sniffed at by the mist, leaning against the pylon of a bridge or lying full-length among the peelings in Covent Garden. And what do these chaps then see approaching them? The alluring appearance of a pale beauty, a young Lacedaemonian. They would have bolted I-don't-know-how-quickly had they seen a prosperous soapmaker in a worsted coat and wearing a palmwood wig, a tricorn, and with a few glasses of port down him. This little fact alone might have saved scores of lives.
But against such an appetising concoction of lies, the facts are powerless. Years ago, I wrote a book of objections to Shakespeare's depiction of Richard the Third. In my innocence, I believed that my argued evidence might have an effect against the libellous talk of the Bard. Even scholars who knew better did not wish to believe me. To Chattertonians that book is even a half-admission of guilt. Why should I seek to whitewash that child murderer? Because he and I are brothers in crime, of course! Richard is still the same monster. Yet I have no regrets about my investigations. I learned something from them: that is, that the lie can be given to any story granted the necessary keen nose and tenacity. Then I believed that we must respect the facts of history, because they are real and because everything that is real deserves respect. Confabulations like your Chatterton-myth force the facts into a malevolent, subcutaneous existence. Not just the facts of the past, but the recalcitrant ones of the here-and-now, too, ones which refuse to drape themselves in accordance with your myth. These then cause a pain which must be suffered in loneliness, outside of history, by each human being individually. He who falsifies history sets a long repetition of doom and failure in train. I am convinced of this still, but that facts can do something about it, this I no longer believe. In themselves, they mean nothing. They're loose stones, rubble without the cement of the personalities which perpetrated them. When writing my book about Richard the Third, I noticed how each event from the past, each tradition, becomes incomprehensible if only you stare at it for long enough, and also how your objections and doubts become certainties over time and join up to form a new tissue of lies. Faith is stronger than reason. Clio cannot do without myths. They are her suitcases on her journey through time. The straps snap, the locks burst open and the dirty linen tumbles out. Not to worry! She puts everything back and goes and sits with her mighty whatyamacallit on the suitcase until the lid can be closed once again.
No greater Jezebel than Clio. Written history is cobbled together from lies and falsifications. Chatterton falsified Rowley. The angelic poet in whose name you have come to indict me is a falsified Chatterton. But you would not give even a penny to the historical wonderboy. Don't you deny it: I am sure of this! The counterfeits of Chatterton and Ossian are read and discussed in every salon: original mediaeval poetry is something for dusty archaeologists. In painting the story is perfectly similar. Most people think copies more real than the original works after which they have been made. Copies flatter contemporary taste. They make a cosy costume drama out of that strange, distant past. And I don't wish to present myself as being better than I am: the little fake castle we now sit chatting in so cosily suits me infinitely better than any authentic mediaeval draught-pit conceivable. We need falsifications to make the past inhabitable.
Let me tell you something: at this very moment, under this same roof, my typographer Kirgate is busy reprinting those expensive books on the sly, the ones published by my Officina Arbuteana. He can't even restrain himself until I'm dead, the ungrateful scoundrel. Gray's Odes go for five guineas in London at the moment. But I'll have my will changed this very week. I'll soon see to him!
Ah well, I do understand the necessity for that Chatterton myth. Because of a suicide the remaining relatives feel despised and rejected. They appear to have failed, post hoc and propter hoc, which is why they are all too prepared to point an accusing finger. One, that nameless all-powerful creature one, has decided that I am Chatterton's executioner. Not one of all of those who throw stones at me wish to realise that the same goes for them. Or they throw harder than ever because they do realise this. The fools. Suicide, dying as a public gesture - what folly, what vanity! Is it not bluffing on the grandest possible scale, to invest yourself with the authority of the Unknown? But they fall for it, they're affected by it. When now, in my autumn years, I happen to venture forth outside, I am shaken by my reputation. A long, black intangible shadow walks ahead of me and darkens the faces of the people I meet. My history has been written: I am Chatterton's murderer.
All that I have done is as naught compared with that which, in '69, 1 did not do. All I know is as naught compared with what then I did not know. I didn't know that Chatterton was an insane poet. I believed him to be a vulgar fraudster. Everything else I have meant is no longer of any importance whatsoever. My friendships - my friendships are ones with those deceased who can no longer testify on my behalf. This house I have been building my entire life, these curios I have collected with boundless patience - when later no one knows any longer who were the owners of my Apostle spoons, my snuffboxes, my moth-eaten gloves, then this place will not distinguish itself in any way from a common-or-garden junkshop. People will laugh at me when they hear that I kissed those silver spurs over there when the dealer came to bring them to me. Go on, laugh! I kissed them, Sir, because King William the Third wore them at the Battle of the Boyne.
My misfortune is that I'm not dead yet. I'm standing in the lobby to the House of Life. I can see inside how the party goes on without me. I am waiting for Clio and her carriage. A frail little man is still connected to that monstrous reputation of mine. I can still suffer, young man; your rage at my name still strikes at this greybeard, too. In the past, I never hankered after power. Only now I'm a helpless wreck, the desire gnaws at me, the desire to make people quake, to have them fawn and compromise themselves. To see everyone jump to attention as you approach - how wonderful that must be!
When, later on, you leave and you cross the river, you will come past a ruined archway. In the past, the palace of Sheen lay behind it, where our Queen Elizabeth died. She was gone on sugar, a rare delicacy in those days, and suffered hideous toothaches. For fifteen hours she stood dying in that palace, standing rigid and straight, like a post, the knuckles of her hands pushed into her mouth. No one of the court was allowed to sit down as long as the Queen was standing. The entire court stood upright for fifteen hours and when finally her heart gave way and she dropped dead, her entire court fell down with her. I, too, should wish to die like that.
What was it you said? Oh yes, you did say something. 'I, too, cannot resist smuggling a bit of life into Yes, you do have a point there, indeed. And do you know why that is? Because death is so utterly uninteresting. There's no scent or glory to it. We cannot speak about it without tittifying it up a bit. But certainly, you are right: I ought not to mirror myself in such false images, not at my age. With the passing of each day I gain more admiration for your Marie Antoinette. When the riff-raff asked her whether she still had anything to say before she lost her head, she merely said: Rien. No mean feat,
Far more stupid, however, is to smuggle boring, sleep-inducing death into life, and this is what you do, with your deyit for the world, with your cult of genius. Thus you condemn yourself to loneliness. Loneliness is quite as bad as death, at the very least. To yourself you're nothing. Let me give you a good piece of advice: don't be a scorpion, don't be a Rousseau. That way leads to insanity. You know what happened to Rousseau in the end. Don't take up battlestations against the entire world for in that case the world might well turn its broad back on you. If you absolutely must be subversive, then be so on the sly. Cloak yourself in the garb of hypocrisy and flattery. Jump and gabble even though your ears are revolted by that wh
ich comes forth from your mouth. Borrow money from the world, then you won't be from its mind for a moment. Only in its mind do we have our soul. Only by its tongue are we given shape. The bear licks her cubs, the poet his verses, Joe-Public-and-his-mate lick you. Allow yourself to be licked by that great, rugged tongue, no matter whether they speak ill of you or praise you: that warm wet tongue will make you grow, grow so large they can no longer get round you. The name is all. Where one or two be together in your name, there be you. What does your Chatterton have in common with that sot roaming the streets of London but his name? And yet he exists, more so than during his lifetime. And through him, I exist. God grant that one day some softy will get up who shall commit himself to the restoration of my honour, and with more success than the way I have done on Richard the Third's behalf.
There. I have spoken some home truths to you and now I shall bestow on you an exceptional favour. I will show you my house, in person. Where's my cane. No, don't trouble yourself: I've got it already. The last one I did this honour was my old friend Lady Diana Beauclerk. A versatile woman. I named one of the towers on the North side after her. In it there is a cabinet containing seven bistre watercolours she painted. They are illustrations to a tragedy from my pen. My only tragedy. Doubtless you will already have written ten, young as you are. My talent lies more in the comic. As I have said in the past: life is a tragedy to one who feels, a comedy to one who thinks. Now I must get up very carefully. Tha-aa-aa-at's it. Ouch! Alas, there's no escaping from feeling when you are as old as I am. Now lend me your arm. When I am dead, my house, like my body, will fall prey to putrefaction. The junkdealers will wrestle their way down the corridors like maggots and worms, and gnaw my collections to bits. You are privileged. You are just in time for the last glimmer of my light of life. By that light you will be able to see everything for just a moment in its true context and full significance. And we'll take a look at Kirgate, too. Such a fright he'll have! Should be a laugh. Now, don't stand there dawdling like that. Give me your arm. Oh, those darned feet of clay of
Your arm! Come, lend me your arm!'
Anton Koolhaas
If I wasn't a spider, I would love to be one, thought spider Baldur D. Quorg, and he thought this not without reason, for he had just made his first descent from the top edge of an iron fence to the first crossbar, half way down. He was now sitting on this crossbar he had ended up on with a bump. With a very funny feeling in his hindquarters - because of the speed with which that first thread had appeared - yet, it has to be said, especially with one of satisfaction. When he had begun to let himself drop, he had in no way borne in mind the downward distance he had to cover, for this was simply a fever: he had to descend, now.
He had started by walking some way across the ground, until he had ended up by that fence and, wild and possessed, he had climbed it. Without pausing for breath, he had then run along, on to the top edge of the fence, to the point where there was a lump in the paint with a hair from the brush the painter had used sticking out from it. Without a moment's thought, he had cast the first beginnings of his thread round that hair and, hot-headed, had hurled himself down.
At first, he only dropped seven and a half centimetres, and then all appearances indicated that no more thread was to hand internally. For a moment, he was taken aback by this, for though spiders occupy themselves with the future more than other animals do, and tend to put their trust in it, it did occur to him that these seven and a half centimetres were possibly all the thread he could manage to produce, and this was not much, or of much promise.
Nervously, he thought about what it was he must do, should this meagre length prove to be all, but it was then, without him making a plan to this effect, as though something had happened to the apparatus in his hindquarters with which he was then able to spin. Before setting out to make a thread in proper earnest, he had practised and wondered at the curious feelings this evoked in him, but these exercises had really not brought him much more than the insight that it was truly possible to produce a thread. But something was now happening in that apparatus of his, and suddenly Baldur D. Quorg dropped further at fearsome speed. Quite a relief, for at seven and a half centimetres below the top edge of that fence, he had been made to think for a moment that it was all just nonsense, what he expected from life, and that this would keep him on a far shorter leash than his over-confidence had presumed. Such thoughts had now been wiped out again, however, and Baldur dropped a further sixty centimetres at a stretch. Then a short interruption again, but this passed so quickly that it did not lead to fresh panic - and then the spider landed with a bump on the first crossbar.
Baldur D. looked up along his first thread, being waved very elegantly in a curve by a zephyr. And when he had looked a long time, and not without emotion, at this first piece of handiwork, he spoke the words that indicated that he would gladly have come into the world as a spider should this not have been the case.
Outsiders, had they spotted this terribly measly little thread among those iron bars of the fence, would certainly have smiled, but to Baldur this was a different matter. He was not remotely struck by the difference in dimensions between the bars and his thread, for this was his thread and with all its length it had come forth from him, and this made him so extraordinarily proud, rightly so, that he sat back a bit in order to consider his work once again, somewhat more leisurely now. That thread belonged to him and nobody else. 'And,' said Baldur D. Quorg inwardly, with an amount of grim determination, I make an issue of this. Never you fear,' he now said out loud, 'it's not lost on me that this thread belongs to me and not to anyone else at all!' At times, when the wind was more powerful, the thread would bend way out beyond the bars of the fence and then it would glisten and twirl a little; and when the wind vanished again, the thread would fall back between the uprights and hang there, quite motionless. Baldur D. would then climb up it a little way and calmly let himself drop again. This went very well.
And when Baldur D. Quorg had done this sixty-odd times, he went and sat even further back to look with even greater satisfaction now at his thread which could quite legitimately be called something colossal.
Having sat there like this for a good while amidst feelings of which quiet pride and a restless urge to act fought for precedence, he suddenly fell asleep.
This was no cause for surprise, for as his first effort, Baldur had delivered a very fine thread with a slight thickening at seven and a half centimetres from the edge, a barely noticeable thickening at sixty-seven and a half centimetres and otherwise as straight and flawless as can be imagined. And that this must have left him dogtired was clear.
When he woke up, it turned out to be blowing a little more. The thread was continually bending far beyond the bars. It had not fumed any colder. The thread still glistened, but no longer as freshly as that morning. If anything, it had gained something mysterious. The thread was his property more than ever, was Baldur's opinion, now it looked somewhat less physical and rather more like something manufactured, a thing made by Baldur, and his forever.
Baldur climbed up and he instantly felt the difference now it was blowing. It'd be bitter if it broke, he thought, for he would not gladly see any possession lost. But when he had progressed halfway to the top edge and had to hold on tight in the wind, the thread, in his own eyes too, became rather everything really turned all fine and dandy, making Baldur highly active. He would like to dash off in all directions to make repairs in the places under threat; he ought to be in charge of overseeing a whole network of threads encompassing a gigantic space. Animals would swarm towards it from all sides and be left dangling in those threads, caught by their silly spiky bits and hairs.
'Ahoy,' shrieked Baldur on just his single little thread, as he already felt that network tense and tremble around him, and now he shouted passionately: 'Shulk the flyzum - snuff the hum; calcium marrow, hook the buzzers!' What a wild triumph this is, Baldur thought, such a poisonous dash towards the threats. How I'll block this blowing, he t
hought, allowing himself to go with the wind, sitting on the tautly drawn bow his thread had become because of the force of the wind.
'Come on,' he shouted. 'Silent flyers. Let's be having you augurs!' That's how Baldur D. Quorg sat on his first thread and he understood so well that it might snap in a hard wind, that he didn't dare laugh. But he had to do something to give his joy an outlet and that's why he chuckled, most mindful to do this moderately and cuttingly, grinding his jaws together in the process. Ah well, he had just one little thread, and he looked along it from the bottom to the top and from top to bottom, and it wasn't much, that single little thread! He had to have very many of them, and not all loose ones, but ones arranged in such a way that they contained and balanced each other. Then Baldur climbed up rapidly, for he suddenly felt that the wind was not a force to play with on a single, wobbly and windy, loose thread. 'You shouldn't make things up, Baldur,' said Baldur when he was sitting on the edge, 'and you mustn't shout. In fact, you, gotta be very quiet!' he cheekily cried immediately afterwards, on purpose, and this he repeated once more: 'In fact, you gotta be very quiet!'
He was sitting by the lump of paint again and looked at the way his thread was fixed to the hair from the paint brush. Disapproving, he shook his head and then walked over to the fence post. He looked down and then back again, at his thread, then upwards, suspiciously, and then he prepared himself to walk down along the post. But before doing so, he muttered something which made him look rigidly ahead of himself for the full length of the descent along the post.
'I'm a calculator, dammit!' he muttered.
Once he had landed on the ground, he continued to sit there for a while, quite motionless. What nonsense, to set to, on a fence like that. You ought to set to work in the shade and make an entire net at a stroke. What a job that would be. Such a tremendous job. Nobody else could do that. Such a grand thing one does in silence and awaits the results just as silently. He who touches shall wither, thought Baldur. Space is the lust to play, the net is will!
The Dedalus Book of Dutch Fantasy Page 21
