Authors: Michal Ajvaz
At the same time, I got to know the islanders’ script from their
Book
(of which I have much to tell in the chapters to come). I had the impression that it was a mixture of fragments from various other scripts. There was a group of characters that gave the appearance of small, schematic pictures of objects, animals, people, and figures; then there were the letters which bore no similarity to objects or living forms, and these could be divided into several groups, including one of simple signs made up of two or three straight lines, another of complicated tangles of wriggling curves that reminded one of a bird’s nest, and another of letters composed of clusters drawn from many barely ascertainable points that increased in density before becoming looser again. My first impression was that the creator of the islanders’ script had composed it in haste; he had borrowed letters hurriedly from many sources without in any way attempting to integrate them into the whole, and afterwards this ill-assorted mix endured by the simple force of habit.
Yet I found this explanation unsatisfactory, and as questions pertaining to the script’s strange diversity continued to tantalize me, I began to pay visits to the royal palace in the hope of discovering in its old papers something about the script’s history. I remember the afternoons I spent seated on the floor of the one of the empty chambers, digging out old documents from under the hot sand and reading them through. No matter where I sat, the crumbling facade of the uninhabited building was always visible in the windows on one side of the room, while the windows on the other side were filled with the splendid blue of the sky; whenever I stood up, the sparkling, azure canopy of the sea was raised to half the height of the windows, as though drawn up by some miraculous pulley. In a distant room I could hear the steps of the queen as she paced, deep in thought; sometimes I would spot her standing in the empty frame of the door, one of dozens of empty frames that playful perspective made into a grooved ornament, a row of characters in the shape of the letter
pi
, each enclosed in the next, each smaller than the last. Sometimes the siren of a ship sounded in the harbour.
These quiet afternoons taught me that the chaotic heterogeneity in the letters was not brought about by habit and inertia; indeed, there was a restlessness in the script that caused its constant transformation. It was as if it were running away from itself while trying to catch up with itself; it seemed to me that it dreamed of a long-lost past or a magnificent future, of a script ages old or else an idealized one yet to come, full of perfect, resplendent letters, seeking these in endless transformation, following a great variety of mysterious clues, setting out in many different directions at once, but in the end always failing in its efforts.
Even after this it was a long time before I was in a position to appreciate the true nature of the island’s script. Having abandoned the hypothesis that symbols from a variety of systems had been stitched together and the whole then maintained by inertia, there was a time—after I succeeded in uncovering the pictograms from which most of the island’s letters were derived—I supposed I had indeed discovered the script’s origin; how great my surprise, then, when, delving deeper in the drifts of sand in the royal palace, I discovered some documents written in a script older still! I learned that what I had assumed to be an early pictographic script had itself originated in the interpretation of puzzling symbols which represented absolutely nothing.
It seemed that changes washed over the script in waves, and that these waves had no single direction. Apparently the pictographic script had changed many times to form more abstract symbols—by the simplification of the figures into outlines in which it was no longer possible to read the model, or else by the in-growth of tangles of lines—and many times, too, the abstract symbols turned back into pictures, once their outlines began to live and grow, the tangles of lines yielding the figures of humans and demons, animals, birds, and monsters, which till then had been present only in the shapes of the letters as distant dreams or reflected reflections—as memory and suggestion. It seemed to me that the present-day letters of the island were on the cusp of just such a transformation into a pictographic script: a few of the characters had already taken on the form of a bird or an animal. Though the majority had yet to begin forming pictures, I saw shapes trembling in the letters, preparing to break through: nascent, hitherto veiled faces of strange creatures whose cunning eyes blinked or beaks obtruded impatiently from their tangles of lines; unsettling, to say the least. I soon realized that
all
the letters were exuding the same sort of anxiety—as if they contained a secret message, unknown but foreshadowed; every text is a palimpsest, every letter a secret cipher.
The transformation of pictures into abstract symbols and abstract symbols into pictures wasn’t the only way in which the script developed, however; evidently there were times, for example, when their lines frayed into ever-thinner threads, or when the lines ran into one another, forming square, solid shapes, or when the lines stretched out like the stalks of climbing plants and had to bend their tips into spirals or arch into sine curves so that they could fit into the spaces between the lines. Then there were times when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, crumbled into ever-smaller pieces until they became cloudlets of ink dust; the documents of these eras look like pictures of a white sky studded with black constellations. There were times too when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, became so complicated that it would take several hours to write just one of them; so, of course, very little was written, although it doesn’t seem that anyone on the island was too concerned by this. Indeed, I believe the writer was actually pleased if, on his way across the line, he struck upon such a letter; he could then take a break from his narrative and immerse himself joyfully in the writing of a single character.
Nor was it possible to read this kind of laboriously written script in a single, fleeting glance; it was necessary to go through it collecting distinguishing features—and there were a great many of these, hidden in its knotty network of lines. (It might be that two letters had twenty-nine distinguishing features in common, differing only in the thirtieth.) Hence, a reader could wade around in the bliss of a single letter, and the reading of a single letter of this labyrinthine script might take him one whole afternoon. It rarely happened, in the process, that the reader attained the meaning of the word of which this letter was a part, but he was certainly not concerned by this: his compensation was his encounter with the meaning of a single letter—which always far surpasses the reference point of speech, and its mysterious capacity for communication.
Having decided to write this book, I considered how it should look. For a time I wondered whether it might not be best to produce a book which, instead of a narrative
about
the island, was made up of nothing more than a few of these complicated letters, thus allowing readers to read into it what they would. To the objection that my readers wouldn’t know the sounds to which the letters refer, the islanders’ riposte would surely be, “All the better!”
Of course, the island’s script developed through its interaction with other scripts as well. Thanks to its precious stones, the island always had contact with the outside world. Sometimes I even think I see traces of the island’s viewpoint and manner of thinking in European culture—in Novalis’s meditations on shapes that generate sounds in wood shavings, for example, or in the origins of abstract painting, or in the letter-pictures of Klee. It’s far more difficult, on the other hand, to find manifestations of the spirit of Europe on the island. Although the islanders have always been very accepting of everything, in the end things always turn out the same way, as they did with the language, science, and religion of their erstwhile conquerors from Europe: all of these borrowings were perfectly absorbed into the rhythms of the island and thus transformed into everyday parts of island life, indistinguishable from any other. Nevertheless, it is still possible to find deposits in the island’s script that indicate several old encounters with the Latin alphabet, each of which led to the siphoning off of some of its letters. Marooned among the native letters, these orphaned Latin characters experienced a bizarre metamorphosis: they expanded, they hurled out offshoots in all directions, slowly revealing images of tigers, birds, and fantastical trees. (Was this not, in fact, a return to their mystical origins? A partial revelation of their enduring, hidden power?) Whenever the script of the island swallowed up foreign letters in this way, it would transform them so perfectly in the course of its digestion—into the aforementioned animals, or tangles of lines, or geometric shapes—that on second encounter they were unrecognizable. And it would accept the same letter again and again, and so seem to have grown a new symbol with a distant similarity to the existing one, when in fact what had happened is that the same alien character had been swallowed up by itself, by its own rampant form, which it had initially acquired after first being disfigured by the island’s contagion…
But, none of these transformations could explain the island’s script’s most striking feature: the strange lack of unity among the characters. This disunity arose as a consequence of the fact that the restless tangle of forces urging the letters to undergo their continuous metamorphoses was not distributed equally across all letters; for example, the force that impelled the transformation of letters into thin, frayed, and randomly twisted threads might strike violently in one place—within a single letter or a group of letters—and would pick at and crumple its target quite furiously, without noticing the fact that at the same moment, in another part of the text, a force was at play which was beating the letters into solid pegs, while, simultaneously, in yet another section, the letters had become translucent and were transforming into dull smears (but this force had already almost burned itself out), and then, finally, in yet another place, a force thus far unidentified seemed to be staking a claim for symmetrical ornamentation. At any given moment a letter was tugged at by a variety of forces at various stages of development; some of these were tentative, hesitant, just starting out, some were now at the height of their strength, while others were almost entirely spent. And where these forces abutted each other, they collided, made alliances, applied indirect influence, held themselves back, and gathered their strength.
And then it seems there was a long period when all such forces were asleep and the island’s script was frozen, after which came a new awakening and a time of even wilder transformation. Although in the days when I was on the island, a tendency towards a pictographic script was predominant, one could see many other tendencies dormant under the surface of their texts—some on the wane, some just being born. The islanders also had a kind of literature, of course, not least their
Book
(which I will get to presently, I trust), but I sometimes think that the story of the island’s script makes up a more interesting narrative than all the stories contained in their literary works.
The islanders’ letters were so restless that from time to time they produced a longing to pass out of the territory in which script is enclosed; indeed, they began to doubt where the border between script and non-script lay. And so it occurred that the script passed through stages in which it was impossible to say for sure whether its figures were still letters to be read or whether they should be looked at as pictures. And there were other times when the script cast into doubt a border more remote still, that which exists between symbol and object. The letters thought of their depth and accentuated this; they transformed themselves into three-dimensional forms that retained traces of the old life of the letter, but at the same time they were objects in which were born relations to places, to other objects and to certain purposes—which to begin with only glimmered through, but which later gradually established themselves and grew with their hosts. And in echoing this movement another movement was awakened; in the world of objects—in stones, in trees, in machines, in bodies—the germ of an ability to be a letter announced itself. This ability, which until now had kept its peace within, suddenly generated avenues of text, strange sentences which oddly enough were not entirely incomprehensible.
I had occasionally encountered in the cultures of Europe and Asia this fuzziness on the borders between letters and pictures, but the growing together of letters and objects is something known perhaps only to the inhabitants of the nameless island. I have heard only once of a similar fusion of letters and pictures in Europe, and this came in a story whose truth I have never been able to verify. It happened several years after my return from the island, at the Czech Centre in Paris’s Rue Bonaparte. I was present at the opening of an exhibition of the work of Josef Váchal, where I met a man of about sixty who came from Prague but had obviously lived for many years in Paris. We struck up a conversation at the buffet; it turned out that he was interested in Váchal’s wonderful typography. We went on to speak of the letter-pictures of Klee and Michaux and I was reminded of the script of the island. I mentioned that its letters occasionally release a yearning to transform themselves into objects. He considered this information before telling me that a friend of his in Paris, who had also been born in Prague, had experienced two incidents—one in his homeland and the other in Paris, each by different means—in which letters and pictures were in fusion. This was of considerable interest to me and I asked him to tell me about it. He said that it was a story long in the telling, and he invited me to accompany him to a small café that was just around the corner in Rue des Beaux-Arts.
Once the waiter had brought us our coffee, my new acquaintance began to tell me the story of his Parisian friend. Naturally my first thought was that he was employing the banal tactic of talking of himself in the guise of another, but it may have been so that—as in the famous Jewish joke about trains—he was speaking of someone else so I would believe he was speaking of himself while all the time he was speaking of a third person. Completing his studies in the mid-Sixties at Prague’s Faculty of Arts, the hero of the story began to work as a junior lecturer in the Department of Aesthetics. The narrator did not tell me his name, but let us call him Baumgarten. He began to write a book, because this was expected of a young academic. He chose its title somewhat at random; let us say it was “The Beauty of Nature in the History of Art and Aesthetics,” “Art and Society,” “The History of the Golden Ratio” or “Kant and Schiller.” By staying on at the university as a teacher after completion of his studies, above all he was able to prolong the life without roots of his student years, a life composed of many flaming and fading encounters with people, things, places and ideas. His world was restless, constantly entangling itself in and extricating itself from a web of academic, amicable, social and erotic ties, which transformed themselves from one to another and then evaporated.
After the purges of the Sixties they fired him from the university. But he did not end up as a boiler-man or a porter. He sat in the small offices of scientific institutes, in the light of flickering bulbs whose hum was a cheerless music that always came back to him when he remembered those years; he compiled biographies, wrote précis of papers and translated articles in periodicals, all of which they set down for him on the edge of his desk. The weave of his world, with its ongoing attachment to any situation, disintegrated, leaving behind it nothing but emptiness.
He attempted to fill this emptiness by continuing to work on his book, even though he knew that no one would publish it. He was surprised to discover that his work had embarked on a strange transformation. Now, in the theories on aesthetics which occupied his mind, no matter whether these took beauty to be the expression of an idea, life or formal ties, he saw remnant traces of an encounter with a terrible incident of some kind. Perhaps this was because he was having to learn to live with his new emptiness, that this woke in him an appreciation of slow motions, unnoticed rhythms and slight eddies. He saw in thoughts and gestures as well as in objects a trembling that until now he had never noticed. It was difficult to determine what this meant—not because the trembling resisted expression but because the concepts supposed to capture it stirred related, perhaps even identical vibrations, so that instead of performing the work accorded them, the concepts vibrated along with their subjects in a drunken round dance. Perhaps what was moving was some kind of larvae of being, the blind squirming, lashing out, twisting of being before the birth of something recognized, something named in the world, before the emergence of a thing; or else this was the convulsive twitching of nascent, crude time as it flowed into the body of things as the luminous fuel of their peregrinations across the landscapes of the world. These motions were rather repulsive to him; he felt himself to be looking into an aquarium dark and murky with slime, although there were also times when there was a radiant glow. Whether his feeling was one of disgust or delight, at any given moment these events were interesting to watch; Baumgarten told himself that this was not the worst amusement this wretched time could have found for him.
It seemed to him that the beauty he had read so many theories about, was nothing but this glow, a glow that was born in the midst of revulsion without ever quite accepting into itself that art was an endless, ever-transforming hymn about the soft, revolting germs of reality, an ode composed to themselves by the nameless white larvae of being. Sitting in his corner of the office he sometimes imagined himself presenting his superiors with an extract from the book he was writing and the expressions they would assume, and this fancy pulled his mouth into a grimace of amusement, which itself was a source of confusion among his colleagues.
Perhaps, he thought, many artists and thinkers have come across these motions, but all took fright at them, seizing instead on an understanding of beauty as expressed by an order (in a way this is simple to achieve: in the proximity of beauty it is always possible to find some kind of order which resembles it, because such orders use as their blueprints constellations opened up by the blind motion of beauty) even if they made the same assumptions as he, that beauty was a tumultuous clash of the emergence, transformation, perseverance, hardening and dissolution of order, that symmetry and chaos, maturation and decay, organization and dissolution were figures in the game but were indifferent to it and closed into themselves; that beauty was a poison which circulated in systems, providing them with a force for the creation of chaos (chaos can only be governed by a force which has roots as dark as its own and which gushes from the same source) while it ate away at them and destroyed them, captivated them by a blissful vision of death so as to paralyse them and urge them towards the most distant flashes of its flame. Baumgarten knew, too, that beauty is so much present in these continuous leakages that it conceals itself in them, that we always catch sight of it in a constellation just as it is disappearing; the next moment all that is left to us is a faithful copy, a mask produced with its own skin by which it intends to call our bluff.
He dreamed of a book which he would call “On the Origins of Beauty,” a book which would be a hymn to beauty’s fascinating revoltingness and also a catalogue of the figures of the dark motions of being and an attempt at the determination of the principles of their choreography. The book in gestation became the one thing of any importance in a life without family, lovers and friends. And as he sensed that the motions he was writing about exercised a clandestine control over his writing, that they agitated the tip of his pen as it moved across the paper, he sensed also that the circle was closing, thus bringing a certain unity into his life. Admittedly this unity reminded him of the motion of plankton in stagnant water and was probably the work of a devil of some kind, yet it brought him a continuous silent joy: after a long time something had appeared in his life which bore a likeness to harmony. He got into the habit of taking long walks across the open country above the city, along the roads which skirted Prague; while on these destinationless trips he would ponder his book. The larva-like motions were also supreme in the realm of sight; in open country they flickered along the outlines of visible objects so that often he found the answer to his own question by looking at a roadside tree or a pile of junk in a garden.
Then all of a sudden the tremblings of the world ceased, the unborn book closed, the landscape abandoned the production of ideas. By now he was so familiar with the world of larva-like motions that he knew long periods of torpor to be part of their life, that he would have to accept this peace just as they did, but he lacked the courage to give up the only thing which still satisfied him. Baumgarten continued to pace the open country above Prague in the hope that as before some rust-stained oddments next to a wall or a torn colour poster on a wooden board would give rise to ideas.
On one such hopeless walkabout he strayed further from the city than usual. He became aware of this only once he noticed that the houses had taken on a different aspect; no longer were they distracted by the proximity of the great capital, no longer did they look beyond the horizon to the city but inwards to their own yards, all the time contemplating the country around them. In the village squares there were no longer city-bus stops, their timetables behind opaque glass; in their place were corrugated-iron huts surrounded by stinging nettles. In one of the villages they told him at the pub that the last bus to Prague had already gone. Fortunately it was a Saturday and he would not be going to work the next morning. He asked if there was anywhere in the village he could sleep and one of the men seated at the table told him he could make himself a bed of straw at the farm on the opposite side of the square. Baumgarten was tired and in need of sleep, so he finished up his second beer and left the pub. Beyond an empty concrete storage tank, on whose bottom there was a foul-smelling black ooze, the gates of the farm opened wide. He entered the rutted yard; on one side there stood a large barn, on the other the white wall of a windowless building against which sundry agricultural implements and assorted junk had been left. Men and women in overalls kept coming into the yard to prop more shovels, rakes and hoes against the wall. He went into the barn, lay down in the straw and fell asleep immediately.