Authors: Michal Ajvaz
On the island I often encountered a peculiar shape—asymmetric stains out of which there grew several long, broad lobes; this shape reminded me of a bison on the attack with its head bowed, or perhaps even more so of a lady’s glove hanging limp. I saw flat stones which had been carved into this shape and set on a plinth so that the end of the narrowest of the projections on its bottom side was resting on this. These mini-monuments—examples of a kind of “stain” sculpture—channelled streams of water at the centre of fountains in the upper town, and they stood high on promontories of rock. In the lower town the shape appeared as a bas-relief on the escutcheons of palaces or in faded frescoes; some inhabitants of the upper town would set small coloured stones in their walls and mirrors in this shape reminiscent of a bison or glove. I asked several islanders about the shape: once I learned that it represented a monster that many years ago had devastated the island, another time that it described the outlines of magical, luminous flowers that had grown one night on the floor of the bed chamber of a queen who had lived long ago and whose name was forgotten.
I had little doubt that they thought up such explanations on the spot. It was highly unlikely the islanders knew the origin of the shape. To say that they were lying to me would be imprecise; it was rather that for them the past was of the same realm as dream and imagination, and thus they treated fabulation and vague traces of dreams in the present as legitimate means of penetrating the world of the past, from which objects would emerge still breathing, like pleasant fragrances. This approach was born out of their requirement for a certain exactness, albeit of a kind different to the one on which our own sciences pride themselves. The islanders were offended by the notion of historical research, considering it on the one hand practically indecent (obscene behaviour towards the past), and on the other a strange, even comical bypassing of the task at hand. Karael—who, like most islanders, knew English—once spent a long time browsing a history book in English I had brought with me before laying it aside and announcing, “It puts me in mind of an expedition that goes off to hunt animals that don’t exist, taking a few cooking pots for use as hunters’ tools.” In order to hold on to my good name, I felt it necessary to conceal from the islanders that I was researching the history of the island, although the dearth of available sources coupled with the infectiousness of the islanders’ worldview meant that my research was more about dreaming than comparing, categorizing, judgment and proof.
Evidently objects in which the mysterious shape was repeated had once had a sacral significance. That religion should have existed on the island seemed to me curious. The islanders were of a nation that felt no need for the spiritual and the transcendental; it was extremely difficult for me to imagine a religious islander. Missionaries of various religions were constantly arriving on the island. Naturally the islanders would hear them out willingly enough and were prepared to repeat after them all manner of things (meaning the islanders would draw the visitors into their games). When the missionaries realized what was happening in these games to the articles of their faith and the identity of their god, they thought it better to leave the island. Many considered this the Devil’s island.
I attempted a reconstruction of the lost religion of the islanders, which had perished long before the European invasion, but in my investigations I was not helped along even by the sand-strewn documents in the royal palace. I had very few clues to go on: certain present-day practises of the islanders, the mysterious carving of a man with a fish’s head in a rock overhanging a mountain lake, short dispatches posted by Arabian travellers in the Middle Ages (which I had read before coming to the island), notes in a little-known tractate by Averroes. There are so few of these clues, and their value as documents is so dubious, that my reconstruction of the island’s religion—and its origins, development and end—had more about it of a dream or vision than the revelation of a fragment of the island’s history.
The Arabians write that the inhabitants of the island of Phoenix (which, for some reason, was the name they gave the island) regard marks on walls as a script used by their god to impart his messages and commandments. Some of these communications are reputed to be important—addressing fundamental principles of the universe and ethics—but others are surprisingly vapid, even embarrassing, containing gossip or indiscretions concerning the domestic practises and unspoken thoughts of the islanders; some of these divine inscriptions would be best described as slander. The travel writings of the Arabians also contain a lone, curious mention of how the prophet who founded the island’s religion fought on a rock above the sea with a god or demon with a fish’s head and killed it.
On the basis of these scraps of information I tried to imagine how the island’s religion came into being. It may have been like this: the islanders had once worshipped a deity with the head of a fish; the history of this archaic religion has been lost, leaving behind it nothing more than a carving in the rock in the wilderness of the mountains that is reflected in the water of a lake. I imagine that the prophet of the new religion lived at a time when the original faith was losing strength and changing into dogma, that the vanquishing of the old faith in a struggle to the death between the prophet and the demon with the fish’s head had left traces in the tales of the Arabians. Perhaps the prophet had been a priest of the old religion for whom prayers had become sounds without meaning and the script of the sacred texts had lost the power of speech. The silence of this world abandoned by the gods weighed upon him heavily. One evening his despair was so great that he thought to take his own life. In his abstracted state he upset a bowl containing a red sauce over the open pages of one of the sacred books. As the sauce soaked into the paper it formed a stain that was slightly reminiscent in shape of a bison or a glove. As he studied the stain he realized with astonishment that, unlike the other characters, this mark was not mute; it was whispering something to him with great urgency. He saw the red stain as a hole burned into the cool fabric of the world. What is this? he asked himself. Had he perhaps discovered a secret, divine script?
Then he realized that the whispering of the stain was not the only voice he could hear, that other stains on the walls and on objects had begun to speak; there came a drone from the cracks in the dry earth and seams in the rock. This great awakening of the world went further: all shapes were soon learning the language of stains—shapes, too, were stains, but either they had forgotten this or man had convinced them otherwise. The red stain on the page of a book had fought free of the language man had forced on shapes. Suddenly they were reminded of the ancient shape language and their present understanding of the world was overthrown. And the shape language re-opened the world and filled it with joy.
This was the beginning of the prophet’s mission. He taught the islanders to listen to the voices of stains—perhaps the prophet saw a god behind the stains, perhaps islander disciples of the prophet imagined a new deity who was the author of the text of stains. (It may be that in those days the islanders were unable to imagine something that today is marvellously easy for them to imagine—that the murmurous text of the stains is forever writing and erasing itself.) Maybe this was when the Stain of Awakening—the stain designed by the sauce, the mysterious alfa, the initial of a divine text—began to be shown and worshipped.
I believe that the new religion changed after the prophet’s death. It rid itself of some of its more eccentric features and drew nearer to other religions. That it developed some kind of notion of an afterlife is testified to in Averroes’s tractate, in which the thinker from Cordoba rejects the notion of the immortality of the individual soul, employing in his polemic an anecdote from the island as a kind of
reductio ad absurdum
. This is the tale Averroes tells: the prophet of the island of Phoenix pays a visit to his neighbour, arriving as the latter is about to whitewash his home. The prophet bursts into tears and pleads with his neighbour to abandon this course of action. When the astonished neighbour asks what it is about the painting of his home that so troubles the prophet, the latter points to a dried stain on the wall and says: “I see in that the face of my late father. I visit you only in order to be closer to him, so that my father may see me and hear my voice. Were you to paint over him, his soul would wander the atmosphere in confusion, looking for another stain to inhabit. Perhaps it would be forced to settle in a place that would bring it great indignity, perhaps on a wall at the other end of the world, so we should never see each other again.”
Averroes writes that the islanders believe that the souls of the dead live on in stains on walls, that they prove this by a curious concatenation of evidence: souls are incorporeal so they must dwell in something with a material volume; volume lacks a two-dimensional form, and as stains on walls are two-dimensional, souls undoubtedly reside in stains. Perhaps the islanders themselves were not altogether convinced of the logic of this, so as a second proof of life after death in stains, they declared that in the half-light we often have the impression we see the outline of a person or an animal.
This story may be based in truth, although plainly it is paraphrasing what Diogenes Laertius tells of Pythagoras (fragment B7 in Diels). It was not so far from Cordoba to the island, and before the original communication was changed into an anecdote and before this anecdote was heard by Averroes, it must have passed through many mouths. I can well imagine the impact the imaginations of sailors and merchants steeped in tales from the Orient would have worked on it.
When the prophet—an exemplar of courage who invested the glowing, nonsensical world with murmurs and stains—no longer walked among them, the islanders became uncertain of the way and began to look around for translators and interpreters. Now they needed a grammar and a lexicon of stains, so that they might understand their language. At that time catalogues and dictionaries of stains came into being. We see the transitions as indistinguishable from one another, but to the islanders they are full of similarities and differences. Stains came to be classified, and the various types were given names to which fixed meanings were attached. It seems that in the old days the attitudes of the islanders to stains were personal—some of them one loved, others one hated. These attitudes were subject to sudden, fleeting fashions; sometimes a marginal stain that no one had paid any attention to would appear overnight on all walls and garments and would suddenly adorn the surfaces of dozens of objects. Of course, the Stain of Awakening still held a privileged and unshakable position, and the shape made by the sauce on the page of the sacred book was carved in stone, set in bright-coloured gemstones and tattooed on skin.
At that time the islanders would walk about with dictionaries in their hands, employing them in the reading of stain texts and any other shapes they happened upon. One Arabian merchant tells the tale of how he arrives at the home of one of the islanders for a business appointment. He finds the islander in the yard of his dwelling, watching with excitement a bedsheet that is flapping and swelling in the strong wind as it dries on a washing-line; also he keeps looking in a thick dictionary he is holding in his hand. The islander asks the merchant to wait a few moments. Once the wind calms down, he makes his apologies: the story written in the sheet was an exciting one, and he wished to find out how it ended. When the merchant expresses his surprise at this, the islander explains that his countrymen regularly read the shapes that gather in pieces of cloth in windy weather; like hieroglyphs, he says, they create a continuous text.
I do not know how long this phase of the islanders’ religion lasted, but I believe that over time they ceased to perceive stains as communications from god. The changes occurring, the shapes, the stains became for them a game that had no connection to anything in particular. At around this time they laid aside their lexicons and grammars and ceased to ascribe to stains any fixed meanings. But the stains did not fall mute; they returned to their original voice, their blissful, meaningless murmuring. In this way the end of the religion was a triumph, a return to the beginning. Some travellers have written of the islanders with scorn or indignation; in their opinion, the veneration of the god of stains, which it was to be hoped still lingered in the islanders’ consciousness, was at least a form of prayer, and thus an attempt—albeit a dark and confused one—to make contact with God; they consider today’s total absence of any sense of transcendence as degeneracy of the severest kind. I feel I have neither the authority nor the need to reproach or praise the islanders for their godlessness, but I must say in their defence that much of what has been written about them is baseless slander: the atheism of the islanders has a special mystique based in its superficiality and immediacy, and it creates a space in which fine, almost noble gestures can develop. This hope-free, fear-free, sense-free space is often lit by a silent joy of the kind I have rarely experienced in Europe, and the shapes of stains and objects glow with a clear light. I learned that the islanders knew neither passion nor genuine cordiality, but in their behaviour there was always a tone in which discretion and noble tact were present. It seemed to me that out of this tone there might grow a kindness that would protect the maturing contours of things, a kindness that would be stronger than the kindness we know, because there would be no need for it to take into account sense and order, which always lead to violence and malevolence.
It is true that during my stay on the island I never met anyone who gave the impression that he was approaching such a transformation. For this to happen, it would perhaps be necessary for the seeds of future kindness to be nourished on realities other than the island’s anaesthetic murmurs and glimmers, the monotonous fraying and entwining of its currents, the slow melting of the solid and the crystallization of the liquid. It is possible that such a transformation will never come to pass, that what appeared to me as the seeds of a new world was really an afterglow projected by the past, that the islanders already have behind them their better days, their era of kindness and goodness, and that all that remains of it is the dubious virtue of discretion, in which tact comes together with indifference.
I once mentioned to Karael that it seemed to me that island life was heading for transformation, but my girlfriend disliked visions in which developments moved towards aims. I said nothing to contradict her; I didn’t have the right. There was only one person I could ask for help in the attempt to realize by alchemy a change in the islanders’ indifference, and naturally that person was me. I made an effort at it after I returned from the island, but the alchemy slipped from my fingers just as it did from those of the sorcerer’s apprentice: the result was a centaur with a human body and a horse’s head, mixed from the island’s distaste for large buildings, devoid of the island’s lightness and joy, with the European need for sense robbed of the ground beneath its feet that connects it firmly to our world.
The lexicons of stains had been lost and the islanders had forgotten about them, but the categories that had their origins in these books had left a deep impression in the islanders’ language and ways of seeing. Stains of different shapes belong to different types; for the islanders they are as different in kind as a chair and a table are to us. Although on the island a great many instruments—many of them objects connected with civilization—are missing that we have by us constantly, the islanders are surrounded by a far greater amount of things than we are. The islanders live among stains as we live among objects and letters. Indeed, they feel more at home in expanses of stains than in the world of objects; for them, stains have more of an existence than ordinary objects. While we compare stains to objects and bodies and say things like, “Hey, look at that stain! It looks like a walrus,” when the islanders want to describe the shape of an object—let’s say a ship that has just appeared in the harbour—they say, “It looks like a tnaeb.” A tnaeb is an oblong, saggy stain with a number of outgrowths on its upper side. The islanders look at the world of objects and bodies as at a Rorschach-type test turned inside out.
The categorizing of stains is embedded so deeply in the consciousness of the islanders that not only do they seek to compare the shapes of objects with those of stains, but types of stains play a role—consciously or unconsciously—when objects come into being. There are many household objects and buildings on the island that are in the shape of a stain, not least being the escutcheons on mansions and palaces of the lower town built in the final phase of building activity that imitate the shapes of various types of stains. It was instructive for me to study the architecture of the conquerors from the time they were already losing the war against the spirit of the islanders; from these it was plain that the shapes of stains had infiltrated the visions of the architects—for example, the facade of a church obviously meant to be a replica of Rome’s Jesuit Church of the Gesu was far more reminiscent of the mark amamr. I can well imagine the dejection of the church’s architect when he realized this result of his work.
It was a blasphemy to glorify the god of the stain (a god who accepted such devotion would transform into another deity), and it was not possible to run away from a stain. The islanders’ stains lay in wait for the builders like cunning beasts of prey; not only did they reside in the dark gaps between shapes (these spaces could have been left as a kind of reservation), but they stole into the seemingly secure territory of recognized shapes and caused much damage there. They destroyed recognized shapes and appointed themselves in their place, or at the very least the stains so bedevil-led and confused the recognized shapes that these began to imitate stains. The capitals of pilasters and the volutes of escutcheons could not resist the urge to become grm or mupu stains. Even the figures of saints became images and statues of stains; they were unable to deliver salvation, or—worse still—they offered a terrible salvation, the monstrous paradise of stains.
It was pathetic to watch the desperate attempts of the architects to escape the stains that pursued them, which were more terrifying to them than the monsters of mythology. I often felt the facades of the houses told of their builders’ fear of a terrible, debilitating sickness, which we might name the impossibility of the indefinite. Indefiniteness and shapelessness were forever escaping them, because every accidental splatter of mortar immediately became an irao or a ladoe; when they wanted to escape an ede that had grown right under their hands, they found it turning into an alopo. Perhaps it seems strange that they were so keen to preserve the shapeless, the indefinite, the nameless and the patternless. Most of all the builders looked for shapelessness to salvage the world of shapes; shapes needed indefinite, discreet matter to which they could give their orders and which would serve them. When a shape on the island entered matter, what it found there was not calm complaisance but the frenzied proliferation of figures, and in this uncomfortable jungle it could not find a place to settle. It was used in overcoming the resistance of matter, but here its power and solidity were worth nothing; here matter was so apathetic that it put up no resistance to shapes, but it pulled them into its whirling dance and enfeebled it by its toxic breath. The worst thing of all about this was that the monstrous and offensive stain figures constantly putting themselves in the paths of shapes were uncannily similar to these shapes and thus familiar to them. When the shapes discovered the reason for this, they were horrified: it was not that stains were imitating shapes and wished to take their place, but that shapes were of the same genus as stains and had forgotten the world they were born into, that they were just as phantasmic and monstrous as stains, that shapes and stains were the same fruit of the wild proliferation of matter, meaning that shapes were afforded no privileges.
We know how the anguished battle between the foreigners and the demons of the island ended. After a long period of unbearable strain the foreigners yielded, and this yielding was made manifest in their attitude to the danger posed by stains. In a sudden flood of bliss the foreigners were plunged into a paradise they had long yearned for but had been afraid to admit to. In the lower town, buildings from the time of blissful defeat have been preserved; they reveal how their architects revelled in the once-forbidden depravity of stains, how they luxuriated in the stains that had eluded them for many years, how in triumph they allowed them to dominate the island and declare the Collapse of Shape.