Naturally we can only mourn what is absent or missing if some vestige of it, some whisper, perhaps little more than a rumor, a semiobliterated trace, an echo of an echo has found its way to us. How I would love to know what the Nazca lines in the Peruvian desert mean, how Sappho’s Fragment 31 ends, and why Hypatia was considered such a threat that not only her complete works but even she herself was hacked to pieces.
Sometimes certain remnants seem to be commenting on their own fate. For instance, all that remains of Monteverdi’s opera “L’Arianna” is, of all things, the lamento, in which the eponymous heroine sings in despair: “Let me die! What do you think can comfort me in such harsh fate, in such great suffering? Let me die!” The picture by Lucian Freud that now survives only as a reproduction since it was stolen from a Rotterdam museum and incinerated in a Romanian stove by the mother of one of the thieves, shows a woman with her eyes closed, and one cannot tell for sure whether she is just sleeping or is actually dead. And of the work of the tragic poet Agathon only two aphorisms have found their way to us, because they are quoted by Aristotle: “Art loves chance and chance loves art” and “Not even the gods can change the past.”
That which is denied the gods is something that despots through the ages all seem to aspire to anew: the destructive drive to make their mark is not satisfied by inscribing themselves in the present. Anyone who wants to control the future must obliterate the past. And anyone who appoints himself the founding father of a new dynasty, the source of all truth, must eradicate the memory of his predecessors and forbid all critical thinking, as Qin Shi Huang, the self-appointed “First Sovereign Emperor,” did when in 213 B.C. he ordered one of the first recorded book burnings and had anyone who opposed the measure executed or sentenced to forced labor, working on the expansion of the imperial road network and the Great Wall of China—or otherwise on the construction of that colossal mausoleum whose megalomaniac funerary art includes the Terracotta Army of life-size soldiers along with their chariots, horses, and weaponry, copies of which now tour the world, thereby both fulfilling and undermining the purpose of the memorial its patron had so craved by untold profanation.
The dubious plan to make a tabula rasa of the past often springs from the understandable desire to start afresh. Apparently, in the mid-seventeenth century, the British parliament seriously discussed burning the Tower of London archives to extinguish all memory of the past and start life over again, at least according to Jorge Luis Borges in a passage I have been unable to locate.
The Earth itself is, as we know, a heap of rubble from a past future, and humanity the thrown together, bickering community of heirs to a numinous yesteryear that needs to be constantly appropriated and recast, rejected and destroyed, ignored and suppressed so that, contrary to popular belief, it is not the future but the past that represents the true field of opportunity. That is precisely why its reinterpretation is one of the first official acts of new governing regimes. Anyone who, like me, has experienced a historical upheaval, the iconoclasm of the victors, the dismantling of monuments, will readily recognize every vision of the future as effectively representing a future past in which, say, the ruins of the rebuilt Berlin City Palace will have to make way for a replica of the demolished Palace of the Republic.
At the Paris Salon of 1796, in the fifth year of the Republic, the architecture painter Hubert Robert, who had captured the storming of the Bastille as well as the demolition of the Château de Meudon and the desecration of the royal tombs in Saint-Denis, exhibited two paintings in the Palais du Louvre. One depicted his proposed design for the transformation of the royal palace to create the Grande Galerie—a room packed with paintings and sculptures, teeming with visitors and flooded with light thanks to its glass roof—while the other painting showed the same room in ruins. The skylights visible in the first vision of the future are replaced in the second by an uninterrupted view of a cloudy sky: the arched roof has caved in, the walls are bare and unadorned, broken sculptures lie on the floor. Only the Apollo Belvedere, a trophy from Napoleon’s Italian foray, is left standing among the rubble, sooty but unscathed. Disaster tourists wander among the ruins, salvage toppled torsos, warm themselves by a fire. Weeds sprout from the cracks in the vault. The ruins are a utopian place in which past and future become one.
The architect Albert Speer went even further with his speculative theory of a “ruin value”: decades after the end of National Socialism, he claimed that its plans for, literally, a thousand-year Reich would not only have made use of exceptionally durable materials, but would even have taken into account the future appearance of each building once it fell to ruin, so that, even in a dilapidated state, it could still compete with the grandeur of the Roman ruins. Auschwitz, on the other hand, was referred to, for good reason, as a case of destruction without ruins. It was the utterly dehumanized architecture of a minutely organized industrial annihilation machine whose workings left no trace, which by exterminating millions of people, left behind the biggest void in Europe in the twentieth century, a trauma still not fully processed in the memory of the survivors and their descendants on either the victims’ or the perpetrators’ side, one which forms a dissociated foreign body that resists integration. The genocides committed have lent added urgency to the question of the extent to which loss can ever be made tangible and have led many from later generations to the frustrating yet understandable conclusion that what happened eludes all representation.
“What do historical sources preserve? Not the fates of the violets trodden underfoot in the Battle of Liège, nor the sufferings of the cows as Leuven burned, nor the cloud formations on the approach to Belgrade,” writes Theodor Lessing in his book History: Making Sense of the Senseless, published during the First World War, in which he exposes the chapters in any history that advances in a reasonable way as retrospectively giving form to the formless—stories of beginnings and endings, of ascendancy and downfall, of blossoming and decay which tend to follow narrative rules.
The fact that faith in progress, the legacy of the Enlightenment, persists virtually intact, even though the principles of evolution have shown that what survives for a certain time is determined, rather, by a disturbingly complex interplay of chance and adaptation, is perhaps due to the simple appeal of the nerdy historical timeline and its equivalents in the linear scripts of western cultures—which make it all too easy to fall prey to the naturalistic fallacy, despite the loss of significance of the divine entities, of perceiving everything that exists as intended and meaningful. In the simpleminded yet compelling script of ceaseless advancement, the only use for the past consists in it being inferior to the present, whereby history—the history of one’s own life or of a nation or of the human race—is imagined as representing necessary, or at least not random, progress. It has been proved however that, as every archivist knows, chronology—the allocation of sequential numbers for each new addition—is in its banal logic the most unoriginal of all organizational principles, being only a simulation of order.
In a sense, the world is a sprawling archive of itself—and all animate and inanimate matter serves as documentary evidence forming part of a monstrous, highly tedious inscription system that attempts to draw lessons and conclusions from past experience, while taxonomy is merely the retrospective attempt to index the muddled archive of biological diversity by keyword and impose an apparently objective structure on the sheer inexhaustible chaos of evolutionary legacy. Fundamentally, nothing can be lost in this archive, because its overall energy level is constant and everything seems to leave a trace somewhere. If there is truth in Sigmund Freud’s perplexing dictum—reminiscent of the law of energy conservation—that no dream and no thought is ever really forgotten, then not only could past experience—an inherited trauma, two random lines from a poem, a hazy nightmare from a stormy night in early childhood, a pornographic horror scenario—be exhumed from the soil of human memory by an effort akin to an archaeological dig in the same way as bones,
fossils, or fragments of pottery. It might also be possible to wrest from the underworld the actions of countless lost races, if only one started to look for traces of them, in which case the truth, even that which has been suppressed or obliterated, recast as a mistake or consigned to oblivion, could not be denied and would remain ever present.
Yet the laws of physics offer only limited consolation. For the principle of energy conservation with its triumph of transformation over the finite fails to mention that most conversion processes are irreversible. What use is the heat of a burning artwork? Its ashes will retain nothing worthy of admiration. Those billiard balls fashioned from the recycled, desilverized material used to record early silent movies roll over the green felt-covered table with indifference. The meat of the last Steller’s sea cow did not take long to digest.
True, the demise of all life and endeavor is a condition of its existence. It is naturally only a matter of time before everything has disappeared, disintegrated, and decayed, before everything is annihilated and destroyed, even those peculiar products of the past whose existence we owe entirely to disasters: the only documents written in the long unfathomable, pictogram-style ancient Greek syllabic script, Linear B, which have been preserved only because the major fire that destroyed the Palace of Knossos in around 1380 B.C. at the same time caused thousands of clay tablets on which the palace’s income and expenditure were recorded to harden, thereby preserving them for future generations; the plaster casts of people and animals buried alive in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted whose corpses, having decomposed, left fillable cavities in the set stone; or the silhouettes left like ghostly photographs on walls and road surfaces in Hiroshima by people vaporized when the atomic bomb went off.
To acknowledge one’s own mortality is painful, and the vain urge to defy the transience of life and leave traces for unknown future generations, to remain in memory, “unforgotten,” according to the valiant declaration of intent chiseled into the granite of gravestones, is understandable.
The poignant desire to draw attention to the existence of an intelligent species is also manifest in the messages carried by the two time capsules on board the Voyager I and Voyager II space probes as they drift further and further into interstellar space. The two identical gold-plated copper discs contain images and diagrams, pieces of music and sounds, as well as spoken greetings in fifty-five different languages, the intrepid awkwardness of which—“Hello from the children of the planet Earth”—reveals much about humanity. There is a certain appeal in imagining that all that will one day remain of humanity is Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria, Louis Armstrong’s “Melancholy Blues,” and the blare of Azerbaijani bagpipes, assuming the extraterrestrial finders succeed in both deciphering and following the instructions for playing the analog-encoded record, which are engraved on the disc in diagrammatic form. The likelihood of this, as the authors of this space-age message in a bottle themselves conceded, is so slim that this undertaking can be viewed as the product of a kind of magical thinking that lives on in the scientific community, which, in this project, has staged a ritual that serves first and foremost as a means of self-reassurance for a species unwilling to accept its own utter meaninglessness. But what use is an archive without a reader, a time capsule without a finder, an inheritance without inheritors? Experience shows that it is the discarded trash of past ages that proves most enlightening to archaeologists. Forming a geological layer of technological junk, plastic, and nuclear waste, it will stand the test of time without our assistance, provide genuine information about our habits, and burden the planet for generations to come.
It may be that, by then, our descendants will have long since relocated to that second Earth we have yearned for since time immemorial, which would enable us to turn back time, put right past mistakes and if need be painstakingly recreate all that was thoughtlessly destroyed. And perhaps by then the cultural legacy of the human race will actually be stored as artificial DNA in the genetic material of a particularly resistant strain of bacteria.
There exists a papyrus roll dating from the middle years of the first Egyptian dynasty in around 2900 B.C. that, owing to its precarious state of preservation, has not been opened to this day, so we cannot know what message it contains. Sometimes I imagine the future thus: generations to come standing baffled in front of today’s data storage media, strange aluminum boxes whose contents, owing to rapid advances in platforms and programming languages, file formats and playback devices, have become nothing but meaningless codes, and moreover ones that, as an object in themselves, exude less of an aura than the knots of an Inca quipu string, as eloquent as they are mute, or those mystifying ancient Egyptian obelisks that may commemorate triumph or tragedy, no one knows.
Although nothing lasts forever, some things do endure longer than others: churches and temples survive longer than palaces, and written cultures outlive those that got by without complex semiotic systems. Writing, which the Khwarezmian scholar Al-Biruni once described as a being propagating itself in time and space, was from the outset a system for passing on information in parallel with inheritance and irrespective of kinship.
By writing, as by reading, one can pick one’s own ancestors and establish a second, intellectual hereditary line to rival conventional biological heritage.
If you want to regard the human race itself, as is sometimes suggested, as the world-archiving faculty of a deity, one that preserves awareness of the universe, then the myriad written and printed books—with the exception, of course, of those written by God himself or his numerous emanations—appear as attempts to discharge this futile duty and capture the infinite nature of all things within their finite bodies.
It may be due merely to my inadequate powers of imagination that the book still appears to me as the most complete of all media, even though paper, in use for several centuries now, is not as durable as papyrus, parchment, stone, ceramic, or quartz, and not even the Bible—the most commonly printed, most widely translated collection of writings there is—has been handed down to us in its entirety, though its multiplicity of versions increases the chances of its being passed down for the duration of a few human generations, an open time capsule in which the traces of the time that has passed since it was written and printed are recorded as well, and in which every edition of a text proves to be a utopian space not unlike a ruin in which the dead communicate, the past is alive, the written word is true, and time is suspended. The book may be inferior in many ways to the new, seemingly incorporeal media that lay claim to its legacy and overwhelm us with information, and may be a conservative medium in the original sense of the word, but it is the only one which, by the very self-sufficiency of its body, in which text, image, and design dovetail perfectly with one another, promises to lend order to the world or sometimes even to take its place. The theological division of being into a mortal and immortal part—the body and soul—may be one of the most consoling strategies for overcoming loss. However, for me, the inseparability of form and content is the reason why I like not only to write but also to design books.
This book, like all others, springs from the desire to have something survive, to bring the past into the present, to call to mind the forgotten, to give voice to the silenced, and to mourn the lost. Writing cannot bring anything back, but it can enable everything to be experienced. Hence this volume is as much about seeking as finding, as much about losing as gaining, and gives a sense that the difference between presence and absence is perhaps marginal, as long as there is memory.
For a few precious moments during the long years of working on this book, the notion that all things must pass struck me as just as consoling as the image of all the copies of it gathering dust on the shelves.
Südliche Cookinseln
Tuanaki
also known as Tuanahe
* The atoll was situated around two hundred nautical miles south of the island of Rarotonga and around one hundred nautical miles southwe
st of the island of Mangaia.
† Tuanaki must have sunk in a marine earthquake in late 1842/early 1843, for in June 1843 missionaries could no longer locate the island. Not until 1875 was the atoll erased from all maps.
It was on a bright, perfectly windless April day exactly seven years ago that I discovered, on a globe in the map department of the National Library, an island by the name of Ganges that I had never heard of. The solitary isle was located in the empty expanse of the northeastern Pacific Ocean, in the wash of the mighty Kuroshio, that blue-black rippling ocean current that sweeps great bodies of warm salty water tirelessly northwards from the island of Formosa along the Japanese archipelago, and formed the imaginary northern vanishing point of the Mariana and Hawaiian Island chains, the latter of which still bore the name of John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, at least on that sphere of plaster and elaborately printed papier-mâché roughly the size of a child’s head. Intrigued by the familiar name and unusual position, I embarked on a bit of research which revealed that, close to the coordinates 31°N 154°E, there had been two sightings of a coral reef and no less than four sightings of land. Its existence, however, was repeatedly called into question by various authorities until, on June 27, 1933, a posse of Japanese hydrographers, after a thorough search of the region in question, announced the official disappearance of Ganges, though the world at large paid little attention to this loss.
Indeed, old atlases record scores of phantom islands. The more accurate the maps became and the less scope they left for uncharted territory, the more frequently seafarers claimed to have sighted such islands, excited by the latest white dots, inspired by the desolation of the fathomless sea, fooled by low-hanging clouds or drifting icebergs, nauseated by briny drinking water, maggoty bread, and stringy salt meat, thirsting so eagerly for land and fame that, in their boundless greed, everything they desired coalesced into a cluster of gold and glory, tempting them to note wondrous names in their logbooks alongside prosaic coordinates, to cut through the monotony of their days with would-be discoveries. And so names like Nimrod, Matador, and the Auroras started to appear on charts in bold cursive lettering next to the sketchily defined outlines of scattered chunks of land.
An Inventory of Losses Page 2
