M

MAGNUS, ALBERTUS. At seven p.m. I proceeded downstairs to the Astoria’s restaurant to finalize the details of our dinner. I found the waiter who would be serving us that night in the kitchen, shining his shoes. He answered to the alias of RUDI and I spoke with him a while to make sure he would know how to play his role. He listened to me with his face turned toward the floor, spying on me through his thick eyebrows: RUDI, a HAM of the Transcaucasus. In the dining room, I showed him a table for six next to a large window and told him I expected a fresh tablecloth. I removed a heavy candlestick from the center of the table and in its place arranged pieces of glass fruit next to every setting. For the time being, only LINDA and I were on the guest list, but it’s an easy matter to assemble six people around a table in the Grand Duchy of Muscovy: Russian spontaneity.

I. Back in the lobby—hands in my pockets—I was struck by one of those flat, two-dimensional mannequins made from a photo blown up to life size that a travel agency was exhibiting in the corridor. It seemed to be part of a campaign to promote tourism in Southeast Asia. The model’s makeup was powerfully exotic: a white mask, pale as plaster, lips of the most vivid violet, a penciled-on beauty spot. From afar, the woman seemed to be offering something (a pair of tickets?) in her extended right hand. As I approached the mannequin I bent forward to study it, my eyes fixed on its eyes, which were staggeringly realistic. In the dim light of that hour, they had the translucent green of those unfathomable human gazes in which we lose our way, wavering between the eyes and the point of light reflected within them, or else they were as vacant as the holes that serve as the eyes of a fairground colossus, filled in by the faces of tourists who are the iris and the pupils. I discovered that what she had in her hand was one of the heavy knobs to which the hotel’s room keys were attached, and immediately the smiling girl became a Japanese reminder placed there by the hotel management to admonish forgetful guests who would sometimes leave the hotel still carrying their keys. Calmer now, I lowered my eyes and brought them to rest on her chest and its admirably lifelike flesh color (but why admirable? a mere photographic illusion). Still half-leaning toward her, I suddenly perceived a growing flutter, a slight agitation, a crinkle of printed silk, and my ear captured the faint whistle of air expanding through her breast. Then, into the heart of the mystery, breaking the shell of air that surrounded me, a vox descended and called my name: “JOSUÉ! JOSUÉ! Wake up for God’s sake!” In a flash I thought, “Yes, wake up to reality, to real life! Now, and for all time!” Shaken by this truth, I rose through the clots of air, raised my eyes and . . . it was LINDA! For the love of God! LINDA! I stared at her another fraction of a second without understanding a thing, still shaken (to the very core of my being), reorganizing my hemispheres, returning the scattered blocks of consciousness to their place. Back in the lobby of the Astoria, in Saint Petersburg, in 1991, I understood that LINDA was seeking to put my nerves to the test with her disconcerting rediscovery of the polychromatic nature of ancient Greek statuary. But how many years would it be before the rest of us caught up to the daring color combination that LINDA was trying out that evening?

Many, many years. Her taste was astonishingly developed, as I already knew (it wasn’t a question of having or not having good taste). She’d imagined I would scold her in annoyance: “My God, you’ve been playing the flute since you were seven but you still don’t know how to put makeup on?” It surprised her when I explained patiently how futile her little last-minute protest was.

“LINDA, the dress is yours, it’s a gift.”

“You’re completely inconsistent! Your thesis . . . The novel you say you’re writing . . .”

“It’s because I had warmer tones in mind for you. Look at this print. Why do you need more color? I’ll wait for you to change your makeup, but you must do it quickly. It’s almost eight.”

“знаеш!” In her indignation she switched automatically into a harder form of Russian. “Znaesh!” (She meant: “Know what? I can walk out of here right now.”) She drew a breath. “Give me back the pictures!”

Ay, I was expecting this! I took out the Polaroids and held them in front of her eyes like a man about to plunge a piece of litmus paper into the test solution. LINDA changed color beneath her mask and stared at them in fascination. “It’s as if years had gone by, as if they were very old pictures,” she murmured.

That was what she said, in a very small thread of voice. “It’s as if years had gone by . . .” I wasn’t expecting such a crushing reaction. A devastating chill advanced along my spine and LINDA’S smooth face became impenetrable once more. She raised her eyes slowly to ask me another question, to tell me something I could no longer hear and her two obols flecked with green and black settled a cold gaze upon me, a gaze that was inhuman, unblinking.

II. In biographies of Thomas Aquinas we find the same alarm followed with sudden rage triggered by a serious mistake on the part of his mentor, Albertus Magnus: the automaton or alchemical doll. Allow me to explain: the construction of an android is a false path, a dead end by which we will never reach the SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE. It offers a mechanical solution—creation not in the image but in the semblance—when the true solution verges on ghostliness, the generation of a mental world created entirely out of such stuff as dreams are made on.

(Necesse est ponere aliquas creaturas incorporeas. Id enim quod praecipue in rebus creatis Deus intendit est bonum quod consistit in assimilatione ad Deum. Perfecta autem assimilatio effectus ad causam attenditur, quando effectus imitatur causam secundum illud per quod causa producit effectum; sicut calidum facit calidum. Deus autem creaturam producit per intellectum et voluntatem, ut supra ostensum est. Unde ad perfectionem universi requiritur quod sint aliquae creaturae intellectuales. Intelligere autem non potest esse actus corporis, nec alicuius virtutis corporeae, quia omne corpus determinatur ad hic et nunc. Unde necesse est ponere, ad hoc quod universum sit perfectum, quod sit aliqua incorporea creatura.)

(Or: There must be some incorporeal creatures. For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself. And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a cause is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat. Now, God produces the creature by His intellect and will. Hence the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures. Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty, for every body is limited to “here” and “now.” Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature.—Treatise on the Angels (QQ [50] a. 1, Saint Thomas Aquinas, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province)

MASTER AND MARGARITA, THE (Мáстер и Маргарта). “Listen, we have makeup experts who can spend a whole hour just preparing the face for a normal workday. You’ll have to get through a short trial period during which we decide whether or not to hire you, but that will be better for you than playing the FLUTE at the cathedral. We’ll be working on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg—there are extremely beautiful spots there; ever visited the (CHINESE) PALACE?—and then, if you really are what we’re looking for (and I’m almost sure you are), we’ll travel south, to YALTA, for a cover photo—redheads are big this year. The work will be exhausting, I’m warning you, but there are a lot of girls who’d give almost anything to be in your place.

“You never wanted to be a model? You think it’s a job for women who are stupid? You’re wrong. There is an intelligence in beauty, a true feeling that can alter the silhouette of a pair of legs, penetrate the occult meaning of rouge and expensive face creams. What interests me is the possibility of removing you from your animal state, endowing you with eyes that will allow you to contemplate the world in a more precise way. This will be easy; you have the natural intelligence of your red hair. A while ago, as I watched you playing in the cathedral, nothing in your face, neither your speckled eyes nor your Slavic cheekbones, caught my attention. Everything changed, as you know, when I watched your hair fall over your shoulders.

“I seek to expand the borders of the moment, to capture all signals, painstakingly, to stop the passage of time in a perfect second of heightened perception: the pleasing touch of a linen shirt, your full, arched eyebrows, the breeze that dries us off after a warm bath. It’s as if I were to tempt you with immortality, though I am not an emissary from the devil. Notice my shoes. Aren’t they beautiful? The signals arrive in such profusion and are so dissimilar that they demand a keen eye, a highly trained intelligence.”

(I patted my portfolio.) “I have here a dossier I’ve been assembling for several months. I’ll keep the photos I’ve taken of you today here, too, so that half a year from now you can see yourself as you once were. You’ll be amazed at how vague your eyes were, without the fixity of a subtler appreciation, a purer decanting. I’m sure you’ll get there soon. That’s what I’m here for. The main thing is to meet the person who can give you this kind of polish. It will be as if I were teaching you to sing and, in fact, that’s exactly what I want to do: nuance the voice of your gaze, your bearing, so you won’t be swept along by your natural tone, but will build constructions that shift at every moment, leave an empty space, create a hollow that then becomes your voice, which hits a note that rings from a thousand points like one of those amazing singers of spirituals.

“In fact, I must now confess: I don’t actually work for a fashion house. But that in no way alters the meaning of my invitation. I deal in real life; I seek to confer upon it the luster of a finished product, ready for the marketplace. I move the clouds in the sky, add light and air to distant vistas, accentuate the green of trees and lawns, seek to awaken a reality that will be more blue and more red. This is a private initiative, and I require a woman, a redhead such as yourself, to help me bring the project to a successful conclusion. You had already almost agreed to pose for a fashion magazine. What I’m proposing is that you pose for this novel. It amounts to the same thing, essentially. In fact it’s better, because you’ll actually experience everything that’s generally left outside the frame in photography. Okay, I know that in the OCCIDENT very rich models make two million dollars a year and wouldn’t see the life you’ll lead as even remotely luxurious. That’s just a detail, a small incongruence of scale. You’ll get used to it, LINDA,” I said, calling her by her name for the first time. “It’s as if you’d been working at a soda fountain or a cheap café and were discovered there and cast in the role of The Rise and Rise of the Girl from Nowhere.”

She had been listening attentively but then let out a shriek. “My God, something’s happening to your shoes!”

As if abandoned there on the gravel and entirely alien to me, my BOOGIE SHOES were emitting a fluorescent glow that pulsated more intensely from time to time. In just a few seconds they grew to several times their normal size and stretched all the way across the path, inflating to a malevolent roundness.

I. That same voice, previously: “. . . though I’m not an emissary from the devil.” (An entirely superfluous justification.) The MASTER who, weakened by a strange malady, knows his death is approaching and makes a pact with the devil. For a while now, THELONIOUS has toyed with the idea of an essay on frivolity, and has disposed of the amount of whalebone necessary to elaborate a Tractatus (Basel, 1650). Finally, he decided upon an essay in the primitive sense of the word: an alchemical experiment. To mix all his dandified knowledge within the vessel of a young soul, to bequeath his vision to an innocent girl. To gain her consent, THELONIOUS tempts her with a model’s life and even resorts to a brief demonstration of his alchemical powers, transforming his shoes before her eyes. Булгáков (Bulgakov), in THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, describes a similar scene, from which I excerpt this passage:

Удивленная Маргарита Николаевна повернулась и увидела на своей скамейке гражданина, который, очевидно, бесшумно подсел в то время, когда Маргарита загляделась на процессию и, надо полагать, в рассеянности вслух задала свой последний вопрос . . .

Рыжий оглянулся и сказал таинственно:

—Меня прислали, чтобы вас сегодня вечером пригласить в гости.

—Что вы бредите, какие гости? . . .

—К одному очень знатному иностранцу—значительно сказал рыжий, прищурив глаз . . .

—Я приглашаю вас к иностранцу совершенно безопасному. И ни одна душа не будет знать об этом посещении. Вот уж за это я вам ручаюсь.

—А зачем я ему понадобилась?—вкрадчиво спросила Маргарита.

—Вы об этом узнаете позже.

—Понимаю . . . Я должна ему отдаться—сказала Маргарита задумчиво.

MARGARITA Nikolayevna turned with a start and found an individual beside her on the bench. He must have taken advantage of her absorption in the procession—the same absorption that had made her speak her question aloud—to sit down there.

The red-haired man looked around, then said in a mysterious tone, “I’ve been sent here to deliver an invitation for this evening to you.”

“You must be mad. What sort of invitation?”

“An invitation to the home of a very illustrious foreigner,” said the red-haired stranger, narrowing one eye with an air of great significance. “I’m inviting you to the home of a foreign gentleman who can do you no harm. Furthermore, no one will be aware of your visit. You have my word on that.

“And what does he need me for?” MARGARITA asked timidly.

“You’ll learn that in time.”

“I understand . . . I must let him have his way with me,” said MARGARITA pensively.

In the end, Azazello, emissary of Woland, the devil, gives MARGARITA a magical unguent that will enable her to fly. THELONIOUS, too, will one day fly, before LINDA’S astonished eyes.

MEMORY BUFFER. It’s an instant of seeing yourself from the outside, holding your breath while it happens. It allows us to postpone, for a thousandth of a second, the experience of the smiling face, and receive it steadily, free of the trembling of our hands. It allows for a minimum interval of certainty between the eye and the real image, a lapse of time that is sufficient to work it through entirely and render it in improved form, ready to be digested. It is a gulf of temporary oblivion, a subtle snare, a pass of the prestidigitator’s hand. (LINDA would film our entire journey through Crimea. I showed her how to do this with my camcorder, the latest model, complete with MEMORY BUFFER.)

“I want to show you how the instant camera works, too.” (The machine whirring in my hands.) “Look at this,” I said, handing her the shot. “Those are your legs.” (LINDA’S agile legs encased in jeans, slender and rounded, much preferable to the sight of them unclad: ugly prolongations of the torso finished off with feet, her toes joined to each other by a membrane: the mallard’s webbed feet.)

“Don’t you think they’re easier to see there, in the photo?”

I. “Stay, swift instant, you are so fair!” How difficult it is to put down on paper the deep sorrow, the sad evocation of unhappy love, that a song evokes when it moves us for a moment. It’s always while we’re living, never while we’re remembering the past, that we would like to be conceded the grace of an eternal moment. We can’t imagine that Goethe uttered this phrase as he read an obscure poet of the Ming dynasty in the solitude of his study. Only when we breathe happily beneath a blue sky do we want to halt time, to withstand every one of its tiniest recesses.

But time’s nature is inapprehensible; it remains deep in the background of our lives and, incapable of observing it objectively from the present moment, we know nothing, in the end, of its fierce transit. Only when we spend an idle moment leafing through old fashion magazines do we discover the degree to which that humanity, those others so different from ourselves, entered into contact with eternity. For the fashion that dictates a certain type of hairstyle—a feeling of well-being when attired in a made-to-measure suit, throatily tra-la-la-ing with all the exaltation of an opera singer, some tune from the last movie we saw—frees us from our fears about what was and what will be, to live in a perfect, orgiastic present.

a) In order to put past time—the old fashions—to the test, I have a scratched record with the songs I once enjoyed, a test-record. Each time I listen to it, there is, between today’s “I” and the song that only yesterday filled me to my brim, an immense space, difficult to conceive of. The bass is no longer today’s bass, so juicy, so pectoral; the highs are scandalously strident, the voices saccharine, the keyboards tinny. “What’s missing here?” I wonder, displeased by this pallid music and the answer is: life is missing. Life, seasoned with the salt of frivolity, which is like the water we add to these dry, dehydrated songs to make them appetizing.

The idea of the past, the history of the universe, would be incomplete without this slight adjustment. The sensation of well-being—between sheets whose colorful patterns are designed to accord with the feeling of a today that already, by tomorrow, will be an embarrassing yesterday when it sees itself reflected with appalling fidelity in the photos of yesteryear and the collections of “oldies but goodies” advertised on the RADIO—is the principal motor of existence. Trivial, yes: but then life is, too.

MOON WALK. One afternoon we stopped at a pension in Yevpatoriya, beside the sea. As night fell, we strolled down to the little square with its dance floor where older couples, clearly VILLAGERS, circled slowly, as if they were herding the foreign rhythms that poured forth inexorably from the loudspeaker. I wanted to teach LINDA to dance and thus enable her to divine the beat’s hidden accents without dispersing her energies in the cymbals’ reverberation to smooth out the angles and display her skill at sketching the broader cadences that enclose the rhythm’s less perceptible tremors.

In fact, for P.O.A., it was enough that she could dance, whether or not she did it well. The important thing was to introduce a meaning into her moves, reproduce the process that had allowed me, during long dance sessions, to break down my pas into elemental gestures that might even be reduced to notations. One of these, in which I raised my arms to the height of my head and agitated them rhythmically as if saying good-bye, was indeed a good-bye to my former life full of worries, absurdly responsible, my sleepless nights. An innovative lighting technology of those years—a phantasmagorical strobe—immobilized the shuttlecock of my dancing into very crisp snapshots that emerged from the darkness one after another for as long as the blink of magnesium lasted. Beneath this light, interrogated by it, immobile in my own perception but actually in movement, I wondered one night: why do we dance? How to find a satisfactory explanation for this irrational fact? Was the world not full of inexplicable phenomena, then, if I couldn’t find an answer to the question of something as trivial and widespread as dance? Incapable of sidestepping these lacunae in my knowledge, I found myself thinking of prehistoric shadows, totems, roaring lions, ritual cavorting around the bonfires. We kept on moving there, on that same dance floor, essentially as we did five or ten thousand years earlier, voguing freely across the savannah, a thing as elemental as the release of your breath. I was never again the same after that dance revelation.

Curiously, the only songs that aroused my enthusiasm were the hits of the moment. Very silly songs—Italian, mainly, in the mid-eighties—which, once the season was over, were cast off without an afterthought. The music didn’t suffice unto itself, it was we who had to infuse it with life, connect it to our up-to-date nervous centers, surround it with the truths of the present day, season it with our acute awareness of our own youth and strength. We would stamp our feet in rage if some disc jockey, well intentioned but stupid, tried to stir us with a potpourri of old favorites; the revolutions of the dark mass of dancers would slow, as if encumbered by an invisible weight, a generalized yawning would ensue, people stumbling into each other, hisses. When we’d gone very limp, almost to the point of death, the DJ would inject us with a strong dose of some group that was very bad but very new, and we would hurl ourselves to the center of the floor once again and spend hours in a zone of time that could only be accessed through music and dancing: when their effect wore off, the grayness of your gray life awaited you.

MORRIS, WILLIAM. When, after nightfall, I sat on the terrace of the DACHA we’d rented in Crimea and devoted several hours to making some notes for this work, I would generally visualize myself as a Benedictine monk stooped over the Imago Mundi of Honorius Inclusus: the smoothness of the skillfully honed parchment, his miniaturized initials in blue and azure, the fine glints of gold leaf that he would study before printing this ENCYCLOPEDIA.

I. I would like to heighten the story of P.O.A. in some way, confer upon my book the status of those incunabula in folio, prized not for the apocryphal text they contain but for their beautiful illuminations depicting the garden of delights. I’ll have to resort to the splendor of coated stock, perfect for photos in every color, like those magnificent ones of the Venice carnival I showed you; images that suggested to us the essentially different and more profound life led by Pierrots and Columbines. In the same way, this Lexicon Universalis, for which I’ve designed a cover with silver Cyrillic letters scattered chaotically across a field of blue—a composition that prefigures the eccentric character of the text, from which the reader can extract the title as from an alphabet soup—must be printed in accordance with the canons of an expensive fashion magazine. An entire fascicle with views of Saint Petersburg, pictures of you on every page, the multicolored Montgolfier that repeats the motif of those Russian cupolas in red, green, and blue; your delicate satin shoes in the foreground of the luxurious restaurant at the Astoria where we dined that night, and the PACKARD’S chrome-plated grille, with its little stag, rampant . . . And since this, too, is now possible, I would insert perfumed strips impregnated with OPIUM, with Anaïs Anaïs, with the perfume in the multifaceted bottle I gave you that night in Fedosia, on the mountain.

A graphic solution that suggests the ephemeral life of the many books that will receive lukewarm reviews in the Times Literary Supplement this month, only to return, a week later, to their virtual existence in the depths of the computer, like deep-sea fish that appear on the surface for their brief hour then dive back down to be fed into the shredders where the unsold copies go. It wouldn’t pain me if, once consulted, my ENCYCLOPEDIA were to be forgotten on the luggage rack of a commuter train. In fact, such a fate would be marvelously well suited to the philosophy underlying this ENCYCLOPEDIA. I would like for it to be sold at the magazine stands of the world’s great train stations, where its resemblance to Vogue would confound the bored passenger: the Harper’s Bazaar we find on a chair in the waiting room of an international airport that stays with us all the way to Capetown.

These are the multivalent graphic gems we will hand down to posterity. Essentially the same as those incunabula by Fiodorov, the first Russian typographer. In fact, when we get to Nice, I will personally take charge of the task of printing and binding it. Thirty copies to be given out to friends, as if it were a printed book and not a manuscript—a distinction that’s about to disappear in our headlong return to the origins. It’s very simple; my computer already has a fantastic arsenal of fonts.

II. As you already know, I disapprove of the text’s independence from its material support. Though here, too, we’re on the verge of going beyond—or rather, we’ve already left behind—the domain of printed paper. Let’s think, rather, of one of those books printed on . . . No, better to say engraved with a laser on a photosensitive emulsion, the CD version of this same ENCYCLOPEDIA. (And of course its organization into entries, or voces, is no more than an old-fashioned mechanical simulation, on paper, of one of those new books available on CD.) Where does such a book begin, its beauty? In the fascinating litmus of a strange plaque we hold up to our eyes, seeking to discover beneath its mirroring surface, the signs, typefaces, and symbols we’re accustomed to? For it contains a text we cannot manage to see, forms we do not succeed in imagining. Are these books, then? Can they be described as such? Where are the hard covers, the thin paper, the gilded edges, all the exquisite work of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the jewel designed by Morris that I promised to show you? I’ll give you an example: do you believe that any trace of the hourglass can be detected in the pale green blink of seconds upon the liquid crystal? Books disappear the same way. We learn to rejoice in the lightness of the polyvinyl plaque, admiring its slenderness. Eventually we forget about the pleasing heft of coated paper.