The Possibility of an Island (14 page)

For three consecutive days, I received no message from Marie22: this was unusual. After having turned it over in my mind, I sent her a coding sequence that linked into the video surveillance camera of the unit Proyecciones XXI, 13; she replied within a minute, with the following message:

Beneath the sun of the dead bird,

Spreads infinitely the plain;

There is no death more serene:

Show me some of your body.

4262164, 51026, 21113247, 6323235. At the address indicated there was nothing, not even an error message; a completely blank screen. So she wanted to pass into noncoding mode. I hesitated as, very slowly, on the blank screen, the following message formed: “As you have probably guessed, I am an intermediary.” The letters disappeared, and a new message appeared: “I am going to die tomorrow.”

With a sigh, I plugged in the video mechanism and zoomed in on my naked body. “Lower, please,” she wrote. I suggested we pass into vocal mode. After a minute, she replied: “I am an old intermediary, nearing the end; I don’t know if my voice will be pleasant. But, if you prefer, yes…” I then understood that she would not want to show me any part of her anatomy; degradation, at the intermediary stage, is often very sudden.

In fact, her voice was almost entirely synthetic; there remained, however, some neohuman intonations, especially in the vowels, some strange slips toward softness. I took a slow panoramic shot down to my belly. “Lower still…,” she said in an almost inaudible voice. “Show me your sex, please.” I obeyed; I masturbated my virile member, following the rules taught by the Supreme Sister; certain intermediary women feel a nostalgia at the end of their days for the virile member, and they like to contemplate it during the final minutes of actual life; Marie22 was apparently one of these women—this did not really surprise me, given the exchanges we had had in the past.

For three minutes, nothing happened; then I received a final message—she had returned to nonvocal mode: “Thank you, Daniel. I am now going to disconnect myself, put the last pages of my commentary in order, and prepare for the end. In a few days Marie23 will move in here. She will receive her IP address from me, and an invitation to stay in contact. Some things have happened, through our partial incarnations, in the period following on from the Second Decrease; other things will happen, through our future incarnations. Our separation does not have the character of a farewell; I can sense that.”

Daniel1, 11

We’re like all artists, we believe in our product.

—Début de soirée,
THE GROUP

IN THE FIRST DAYS OF OCTOBER,
under the influence of an attack of resigned sadness, I went back to work—since, undoubtedly, that was all I was good for. Well, the word
work
is perhaps a bit strong for my project—a rap record entitled
Fuck the Bedouins,
with “Tribute to Ariel Sharon” as the subtitle. It was a big critical success (I was again on the cover of
Radikal Hip-Hop,
this time without my car), but the sales were average. Once again, in the press, I found myself portrayed as a paradoxical paladin of the free world; but even so, the scandal was less intense than during the days of
We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts
—this time, I told myself with a vague nostalgia, the radical Islamists had truly lost it.

The relative lack of success in sales terms was doubtless attributable to the mediocrity of the music; you could hardly call it rap, I had settled for sampling my sketches over some drum and bass, adding a few vocals here and there—Jamel Debbouze took part in one of the choruses. I had, however, written an original track, “Let’s Fuck da Niggahs’ Anus,” that I was quite pleased with: “anus” rhymed with “cunnilingus,” “fuck” with “suck,” “niggah” with “mafia”; pretty lyrics that could be read on all sorts of levels—the journalist from
Radikal Hip-Hop,
who himself rapped in his spare time, without daring to tell the editor, was visibly impressed; in his article he even compared me to the sixteenth-century poet Maurice Scève. At last, potentially, I had a hit, and what’s more, there was a good buzz about me; it really was a shame that the music wasn’t up to it. I had heard lots of good things about a sort of independent producer, Bertrand Batasuna, who fiddled around on cult records, because they were no longer available on the market, for an obscure label; I was bitterly disappointed. Not only was this guy totally sterile creatively—he spent all his time, during the recording sessions, snoring on the carpet and farting every quarter of an hour—but he was, in private, very unpleasant, a real Nazi—I later learned that he had in fact been a member of the National and European Federation for Action. Thank God, we weren’t paying him much; but if this was the best “new French talent” Virgin could come up with, they rightly deserved to be gobbled up by BMG. “If we had used Goldman or Obispo, like everyone else, we wouldn’t be in this situation…,” I ended up saying to Virgin’s artistic director, who let out a long sigh; basically, he agreed. Besides, his last project with Batasuna, a chorus of Pyrenean ewes sampled with hardcore techno, had been a dismal commercial failure. It was just that he had his budget, he couldn’t take the responsibility of exceeding it, it was necessary to consult the group’s headquarters in New Jersey, in short I dropped it. One does not travel second class.

That said, my time in Paris during the recording was almost pleasant. I was staying in the Lutétia, which reminded me of Francis Blanche, the German High Command, my best years, in fact, when I was ardent, hateful, with a future ahead of me. Every evening, to send myself to sleep, I reread Agatha Christie, especially the early works, the last ones were too overwhelming for me. Don’t even mention
Endless Night,
which plunged me into stupors of unhappiness, but I had also not once managed to prevent myself from crying at the end of
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case,
whenever I read the farewell letter from Poirot to Hastings.

But now I am very humble and I say like a little child, “I do not know…”

Goodbye, cher ami. I have moved the amyl nitrate ampoules away from beside my bed. I prefer to leave myself in the hands of the bon Dieu. May his punishment, or his mercy, be swift!

We shall not hunt together again, my friend. Our first hunt was here—and our last…

They were good days.

Yes, they have been good days…

With the exception of the Kyrie Eleison from the Mass in C, and perhaps Barber’s
Adagio,
I couldn’t imagine very much else that could put me in such a state. Infirmity, sickness, forgetting, that was good; that was
real.
No one before Agatha Christie had been able to portray in such a heartrending way the sadness of physical decrepitude, of the gradual
loss
of all that gave life meaning and joy; and no one since has succeeded in equaling her. For a few days I almost felt like returning to a real career, doing serious things. It was in this state of mind that I telephoned Vincent Greilsamer, the Elohimite artist; he seemed happy to hear from me, and we agreed to go for a drink that very evening.

I arrived ten minutes late at the brasserie of the Porte de Versailles, where we had arranged to meet. He got up and waved to me. Antisect associations encourage you to resist the favorable impression that forms after a first meeting or an initiation course, during which the sinister aspects of the doctrine may well have been silently diffused. In fact, so far, I couldn’t see where the trap might be; this guy, for example, seemed normal. A bit introverted, granted, doubtless a bit isolated, but no more than I. He expressed himself directly, straightforwardly.

“I don’t know much about contemporary art,” I said apologetically. “I’ve heard of Marcel Duchamp, and that’s all.”

“He is certainly the one who’s had the greatest influence on twentieth-century art, yes. One thinks less frequently of Yves Klein; yet all the people who do performance art and ‘happenings,’ who work on their own bodies, refer more or less consciously back to him.”

He was silent. Aware that I had offered no reply, and that I didn’t even look like I understood what he was talking about, he spoke again:

“Roughly speaking, you have three big trends. The first, and most important one, the one that gets eighty percent of the subsidies, whose pieces go for the most money, is gore in general: amputations, cannibalism, enucleation, etc. All the collaboration work done with serial killers, for example. The second is the one that uses humor: there’s irony directed at the art market, à la Ben; or at finer things, à la Broodthaers, where it’s all about provoking uneasiness and shame in the spectator, the artist, or in both, by presenting a pitiful, mediocre spectacle that leaves you constantly doubting whether it has the slightest artistic value; then there’s all the work on kitsch, which draws you in, which you come close to, and can empathize with, on the condition that you signal by means of a meta-narration that you’re not fooled by it. Finally, there is a third trend, this is the virtual: it’s usually young artists, influenced by manga and by heroic fantasies; many of them start like that, then fall back to the first trend once they realize they can’t make their living on the Internet.”

“I suppose you don’t belong to any of the three trends.”

“I like kitsch sometimes; I don’t particularly feel the desire to mock it.”

“The Elohimites go a bit far in that direction, don’t they?”

He smiled. “But the prophet does that with complete innocence, there’s no irony in him, it’s much healthier…” I noticed in passing that he’d said “the prophet” absolutely naturally, without any particular inflection in his voice. Did he really believe in the Elohim? His disgust for the pictorial productions of the prophet must have sometimes bothered him, all the same; there was something in this boy that eluded me, I was going to need to pay particular attention if I wanted not to get his back up; I ordered another beer.

“Basically, it is a question of degree,” he said. “Everything is kitsch, if you like. Music as a whole is kitsch; art is kitsch, literature itself is kitsch. Any emotion is kitsch, practically by definition; but any reflection also, and even in a sense any action, the only thing that is not absolutely kitsch is nothingness.”

He let me meditate a little on these words before continuing: “Would you be interested in seeing what I do?”

Obviously, I accepted. I arrived at his place the following Sunday, in the early afternoon. He lived in a house in Chevilly-Larue, right in the middle of a zone that was undergoing a phase of “creative destruction,” as Schumpeter would have said: muddy wastelands, as far as the eye could see, sprouting with cranes and fences; a few carcasses of buildings, in varying states of completion. His buhrstone house, which must have dated from the thirties, was the only survivor from that era. He came to the doorstep to greet me. “It was my grandparents’ house…” he told me. “My grandmother died five years ago; my grandfather followed her three months later. He died of a broken heart, I think—I was surprised he even held on for three months.”

On entering the dining room, I had a sort of shock. I wasn’t really working class, despite what I liked to bang on about in all my interviews; my father had already climbed up the first, and most difficult, half of the social ladder—he had become an
executive.
Nevertheless I
knew
the working class, I had had the occasion throughout my childhood, at my uncles’ and aunts’ houses, to be immersed in it: I knew their sense of family, their naive sentimentality, their taste for alpine chromolithographs and collections of great authors bound in imitation leather. All this was there, in Vincent’s house, right down to the photos in their frames, to the green velvet phone cover: he had visibly changed nothing since the death of his grandparents.

Somewhat ill at ease, I allowed myself to be led to an armchair before I noticed, hanging on the wall, perhaps the only decorative element that did not date from the previous century: a photo of Vincent sitting next to a big television set. In front of him, on a low table, had been placed two quite crude, almost childish, sculptures representing a loaf of bread and a fish. On the television screen, in giant letters, was displayed the message:
FEED THE PEOPLE. ORGANIZE THEM.

“It was the first piece of mine that really had any success…,” he commented. “In my early years I was strongly influenced by Joseph Beuys, and especially by the happening ‘Dürer, ich führe Baader-Meinhof durch Dokumenta.’ It was the middle of the seventies, at the time when the terrorists of the Rote Armee Fraktion were being hunted throughout Germany. The Dokumenta de Kassel was then the most important exhibition of contemporary art in the world; Beuys had displayed this message at the entrance to indicate his intention of showing Baader or Meinhof around the exhibition, on a day that suited them, in order to transmute their revolutionary energy into a positive force, utilizable by the whole of society. He was completely sincere, that was the beauty of the thing. Of course, neither Baader nor Meinhof turned up: on the one hand, they considered contemporary art to be one of the manifestations of bourgeois decomposition, on the other they feared a trap by the police—which was, by the way, perfectly possible, the Dokumenta not enjoying any special status; but Beuys, in the megalomaniac delirium he was in at the time, had probably not even given the slightest thought to the police.”