Authors: Michal Ajvaz
Whenever I told my friends about the island in the Atlantic Ocean where in my travelling days I spent almost three years, it often happened that one of them would ask me to submit a written report on this little-known island which is known to its inhabitants by no name and which travellers through the ages gave a name according to superficial impressions, moods of nostalgia and the need to flatter the families of their rulers. I would be vexed by the thought of writing of a society whose mores and pleasures I barely understood even when I was living among them (although I succeeded during my stay in catching every sickness of its spirit). It seemed to me more agreeable and more considerate to this place to accord it the fate of other landscapes I passed through, simply to look on contentedly as its contours gradually dissolved in a haze created by a mix of memory, forgetting, and dream, a radiant mist which softens shapes, leaving phantoms of sense to wander among them, and soaks them with the breath of a conciliation which perhaps has its basis in fallacy and the long useless. I thought it perfectly appropriate for the island to live on only in the form of nameless echoes which are stirred in gestures, muted tones resonating in the meaning of words and utterances, phantom-like faces which flit past in the contours of things perceived, when the fluttering of time unlooses memories and their liquid quintessence seeps into the landscape of the present.
That I have now undertaken to make a second journey to the island is not because I have begun to feel regret that the memories of my last visit will soon dissolve. (Images must die so that they may help make new images and feats.) The taste and the courage for a new journey were born of other reasons. Only now, when the images are at last being swallowed by the confused jungle of the past, when they are almost entirely lost to the rainforest of the past which covers the greatest part of the territory of our consciousness, only now am I drawn to embark on a journey which promises to be as adventurous as a voyage across the seas, en route to the exotic lands of the past, to the tropics of memory of forgetting, where flashes of reality mingle with dreams and visions, images with the rhythms and whirls of forces, crumbling words with the unremitting hum of the consciousness and the tenacious glare of erstwhile gemstones and the painfully dazzling rays of an inner sun.
The aim of this expedition is not the conquering of images, nor the salvation of distorted shapes, nor the discovery of an order or a sense of the real. These wanderings have a purpose in and of themselves. Whatever aim this journey has consists in its futility. The aim of my return to the island is merely my private joy at a pointless resurrection, a parody of passion in which the dissolving phantoms of memory come back to life as the even less real and spookier ghosts of language, joy and comedy, in which the ever-more elaborate maze of the past turns into a similarly elaborate and impenetrable maze of sentences, in which the questionable joys of language feed on the untrustworthy pleasures of memory and forgetting. Welcome to the show, dear reader. It is possible that some will think the celebration of the pleasurable rituals of futility the realm of less dignified literature; I would like to remind such readers that there are many books replete with wise thoughts and deep psychological insight which will no doubt satisfy their needs, and that there is no reason why they should read a travel book about an island unknown to them and its strange inhabitants.
The islanders would understand this; and I would surely not undertake such a journey if during my long stay on the island I had not become infected with the islanders’ way of perceiving the world. On the island meaningfulness was taken as something base, almost indecent, and the islanders saw a great many shades of pleasure in the meaningless. So while others use words to build complex structures of meaning, I wish to devote myself to the joyful histories in which the maze of the island’s life, which is without order and has no centre, is first transformed into the still more fantastic ruins of memory reminiscent of the sleeping Leviathan before it is overgrown with the jungle of language so completely that it disappears into it. I must admit that I am also driven to write by regret, by nostalgia, and the silent hope that as the sentences meander the smells of the island—from which once I had allowed one ship after another to leave without me—will waft in my direction, at least for a while. For the very reason that words do not always attend to our wishes, coming to us uninvited, serving to confuse us, out of landscapes unknown, for a moment their light can shine on lost treasures, treasures hidden from the memory.
When I confided in some of my friends my intention to write about the island after all, I was given various advice. There were those who advised me not to succumb to the prejudices of the society in which I live or to my own sympathies or animosities; I should keep a cool distance from my material. This is unproblematic for me, as I neither loved the inhabitants of the island nor did I loathe them (although there were times when I admired them and times when I felt for them contempt and perhaps even hatred). The islanders never did anything to harm me, but when I left none of them were particularly sad to see me go. I am not sure if my indifference—which is a product of my stay on the island, incidentally—will allow me to keep the scientific distance of the ethnologist, but at least it is a guarantee that I will treat even-handedly a people among whom I lived for three years and in whose language my dreams still speak.
It will be more problematic for me not to disappoint the hope of some that what I have to tell of the island will be enthralling. For certain life on the island was different in many ways from our life, but it would be difficult to find in its features any richness of colour or picturesqueness. The island was not adorned with any examples of natural beauty or historical monuments; it had no stories that boasted of glory or fame; there were no gaily-coloured festivals or folk costumes to charm the visitor, nor was there fineness in the ways or peculiarity in the character of the islanders. We might indeed describe life on the island as exotic, but this was an exoticism of elaborate ornament and oriental music that captivate at first by their unfamiliar shapes and sounds but after a while induce boredom, as they offer no instructions for their rendering in the language of our shapes and the language of our sounds. And I will disappoint those who enjoy reading tales of the adventures of travellers in distant lands: for several hundred years, since the time conquerors from Europe disembarked on its shores, nothing of note has happened on the island. It was one of the safest places on earth, but—for those with no appreciation of the strange pleasures of the islanders—also one of the most boring.
Some writers adopt the habit of describing a strange land by admitting or concealing their intention to demonstrate and criticise faults in their own society. I can assure the reader that he or she will not encounter any such bad literary practises in my report. On the one hand it does not seem to me that life on the island has anything to offer an understanding of our own world, and on the other I am not in the slightest tempted to exploit my encounter with another world in the service of something that interests me so little as a social or moral critique of our own society. (Although I have just expressed the concern that the reader will find a description of life on the island less than thrilling, I still think that learning about this most boring of foreign worlds is more interesting than a lesson in moral philosophy.) The reader need have no fear that he will be presented with some kind of social or moral ideal dressed up as description of an unfamiliar society. If I indeed held to such an ideal and wanted to communicate it to others, a description of my travels beyond distant seas would not be the way to achieve this. And if for whatever reason I decided to disguise my scheme as a tale of travel, I would certainly not make this nameless island, whose inhabitants fortunately were quite unusable for the communication of ideals, the subject of my book. One of their virtues was the impossibility of making of them citizens of some Utopia.
The island is about twenty kilometres in diameter and lies in the Atlantic Ocean on the Tropic of Cancer between Cape Verde and the Canary Islands. In the course of my stay I could only guess at its shape; on maps it always looked like a small circle. It seems that no publisher thinks enough of this region to commission the drawing up of a proper map. Only after my return did I first see a more detailed cartographical representation of the island, in a scale of 1:300,000; this was in a slim paperbound volume from late-nineteenth-century England which took the island as its subject. (For some reason it referred to it as St George’s Island.) I found this book in an antiquarian bookseller’s in Munich’s Schellingstrasse; its leaves were falling out and tiny flakes of paper jumped from its pages as I turned them. I took it with me to a small Italian coffee house in nearby Türkenstrasse, where I sat over a sweet espresso and studied the map.
The island of the map was like a jellyfish, its waving tentacles the headlands and promontories of rock separated by wide, rounded bays. The eastern side of the island had been hatched by the cartographers of old with loving care almost in its entirety; this hatching, reminiscent of crumpled fabric, modelled faithfully the slopes and gorges of the mountain ranges, with the greatest peak marked on the map with a little white cloud and recorded as 3,400 feet high. As the mountains of the east dropped sharply to the sea, the hatching became denser, remaining so until it was cut off by the thick black line of the coast. In the island’s centre the hatching suddenly disappeared for the stretches of stony upland plain which are overgrown with low bushes. The cartographer had represented with a small oval the cold lake that lies in a shallow depression, but the three mountain streams that rise in the slopes and whose waters are gathered in the lake perhaps seemed to him too paltry, and their beds, which the current fumbles to find in the rainy season, too uncertain to bother with. But the river, which flows out of the lake and on which lie both the island’s towns, had been rendered conscientiously with all its bends. As the river approaches the sea its flow becomes lazy; on the map it seemed that the engraver’s hand had faltered. West of the lake the hatching returned, now less dense than in the east; here were the slopes out of which the upland plain dropped to the coastal flats, the most fertile part of the island. It was here that I often walked under the trees; behind their greyish trunks was the dark-blue canvas of the sea, and against their dark leaves the berries shone yellow, red and orange. It was from these berries that the islanders made their celebrated jellies and pastes.
Someone who had never been on the island might be mystified by the place on the map where the hatching of its western side was intersected by the line of the river. Perhaps he would be unable to say what it meant; he might think he was looking at the rough traces left by a sudden mental disturbance on the part of the cartographer. In this place the hatching suddenly thickens, while the line of the river frays into fibres which get ever thinner, as if the river had decided to disappear, before the delicate lines gradually come together again. Into this tangle of hatches and threads a little black wheel is set, of the kind used on maps to indicate a town. The area represented by this jumble of lines is stranger still than it appears on the map. Here the gentle, fertile slopes of the west become a rocky scarp, through which the river cuts as it flows out of the lake; ledges of rock divide the river into many branches. On islets of stone between these branches the inhabitants of the island built the upper town, a kind of vertical Venice. Beneath this the waters of the river merge again in a single stream which flows unhurriedly to the coastal flats, through a corridor of high bulrushes which sway in the wind that never quite dies on the island, down to the lower town, at whose harbour it joins the sea. In the Munich coffee house my feet recalled the hot sandy earth of the coastal flats, how one’s shoes would sink into it and dry, thorny stalks would keep cracking under one’s soles. When I looked up from the book I saw on the white wall a faded film image of the sand lifted by the wind, like a yellow veil rippling over the ground.
The island’s only road joins the lower with the upper town; in its final stretch it becomes nothing more than a widish path carved into the rock. On the coastal flats the road follows the river, and in stretches it is difficult to find beneath the sand scattered over it by the wind. But as there are no automobiles on the island, no one minds this. (The islanders know nothing about technology, and they dislike noise, speed and sudden movement.) Apart from two broken motorboats left by seamen in the harbour, the visitor will discover a single testimony to the modern world: one day a boat with a cable in tow landed on the island, since which time a telephone box has stood on the harbour’s stone jetty. The only people to use this are the seamen from the boats; there are no other telephones on the island and the islanders know no one abroad whom they might telephone.
With the exception of the western slopes which extend between the coastal flats and the plateau, the island is not particularly fertile, but in many places its earth conceals colourful stones immediately below the surface. The mining and trading of precious and semi-precious stones is the islanders’ main employment, and in the harbour of the lower town boats with British, American, Italian, Spanish and Greek flags—and, quite often, the gaily-coloured flag of some African state—are forever lying at anchor. The islanders obtain most things they need in exchange for precious stones. To this trade in export we can add certain culinary specialities and fine papers produced from reeds.
There is no money on the island, a fact which in the 1960s provoked a French writer of the Left to produce an article which makes a point of describing the island’s society as a prototype for selfless brotherhoods of the future. The fallacy at the centre of his thesis is quite laughable: the islanders had not the remotest interest in philanthropy and humanism; indeed, their language possessed no words to give expression to these concepts. While the islanders’ absolute lack of appreciation for the accumulation of money was estimable and did much to clarify their behaviour, it was also connected with features of their character which were more difficult to take and by which I was often exasperated. Money is nothing but a pile of memory and anticipation by which we unchain ourselves from our given circumstances; the accumulation of money is a form of asceticism which holds back forces so that these may later form new shapes and deeds. Time on the island knew no such barriers. It knew no lulls and hardships; it was a monotonous milling of many weak energies, all of which ran flat as soon as they emerged. What went on here was reminiscent of the endless rearrangement of the fragments of colour in a kaleidoscope; there were moments when I found these figures fascinating and more beautiful than anything I had seen in Europe, but there were others when they seemed to me superficial, disagreeable and boring.
I have mentioned already that the inhabitants of the island did not call it by any name. They did not like fixed names and changed their own with great frequency; in the course of his life, each islander had dozens of names. A new name might come into being by the bearer’s accepting a corrupted pronunciation he had heard somewhere of the name by which he had gone up to that point, or he might adopt a name by which someone addressed him in error. At the same time the islanders understood names as things which established a certain dialogue with the things they designated. Names were saturated with the qualities of things, but they also worked on these things and transformed them. In this dialogue both names and things matured, underwent change and perished. Some people might think it strange that while on the one hand the islanders conceded so much power to the name, on the other they could quite light-mindedly accept as their own a name which had come into being by chance. But the inhabitants of the island believed that it was precisely names with their origins in errors, slips of the tongue or mishearings which in their dialogue with things had the power to surprise—that it was these names which embedded themselves in their unprotected side, from where their most interesting voice was wrung.
Whenever an islander accepted a name, he tended to adjust his behaviour so that it corresponded to the new name. Islanders also went through periods when they lived without a name. I believe that in the past the island, too, had various names, and it will surely have a great many names in the future, but my time there coincided with a time when the last name had expired and the next had not yet come into being. The islanders would forget the island’s past names, just as they forgot the names they themselves had had in childhood and youth. I, too, had several names while I was on the island and I, too, have forgotten what they were, with one exception; this was a word which in their language designated a bird similar to a pelican, and perhaps I got it because my European name was similar to this word. In the time that this word was my name, I came to recognize in myself certain qualities I shared with the bird; already I was so steeped in the mores of the island that I caught myself imitating its strange walk and the timbre of its voice. Was it the name which had imposed these traits upon me or were they already present within me, waiting for discovery and restoration by the new name? But as others never gave a thought to such things, nor did I agonize over them.