Nine

The bureaucrat? A conservative, of course, like anyone canonised. A hinderer. That’s what the old Sherpa would say. And at the same time: a holy man. A guardian, the Grail’s custodian, a Joseph of Arimathea eternalised in his crypt of laws, edicts, and amendments, provisions and standardised protocols all in keeping with arbitrary norms: therein lies their value. That’s the key, the old Sherpa would point out. The arbitrariness.

The bureaucrat has been toppled over into the watery well of disgrace, the old Sherpa would say. He has been subjected to the notion – now irreversibly disseminated – that a bureaucrat is a device – half-human, half-anonymous, entirely impersonal – whose mission is to encumber the lives of free souls. A sly Leviathan that takes pleasure in crushing the citizen-insect. And the apathetic citizens and the witless insects are like so many bits of crystal – delicate, fragile, and above all sensitive, so sensitive – that wind up pulverised by the machinery of all-powerful intrigue.

We have to understand, the old Sherpa would continue – in a calmer tone – that behind the bureaucrat there’s something both substantial and ungraspable: something that one minute offers shelter to those on the street, that feeds them, and clothes them; and the next minute transforms into a terrifying apparatus, a creature with wild claws that spreads plagues and conflagrations, magnicides. One minute it represents the pinnacle of gregarious engineering, the most refined Apollonian mechanism of social regulation; the next it’s a groping homunculus spewing pus and other people’s blood onto the last remnants of a massacred autonomy.

Good thing there’s no one to come up to him, no one to inquire about bureaucracy, no one to distract him from the contemplation of that British body which lies eight or ten metres below; its head pointing west, its legs south, for the most part, although really in every direction.