If the answer Baldur gave to any query was so specific as to make it almost impossible not to grasp, Jehovah’s explanatory powers had another distinction. He could outline an entire intellectual field in a few words, or follow a thread of key concepts through the most labyrinthine web of ideas. Often he would resort to surprising analogies.
‘If you want to understand what human culture is,’ he said one day, ‘consider the inhabitants of the Polynesian Islands. There are tribes there who deify the technology of the white man. A particular object of worship is the aeroplane, which flies through the sky bringing all manner of beautiful and delicious objects. The Polynesian belief system is known as “cargo cult”. The aboriginal people there have constructed ritual aerodromes to await, so to speak, Coca-Cola from heaven …’
I had the usual reaction in my head, along the lines of ‘I remember everything that happened not to me …’
‘No,’ I said, ‘that’s nonsense. The reason the aborigines told that story to American anthropologists was simply in order to get rid of them quicker. Anyhow, it would have been impossible to persuade the anthropologists that the aborigines were actually after something entirely different. The truth is that the spiritual core of cargo cult lies elsewhere, and deeper. In Melanesia, where it all began, the inhabitants were so impressed by the feats of Japanese kamikaze pilots that they built ritual aerodromes for them to invite their souls to be reborn in the archipelago, should it be found there was not enough room for them in the Yasakuni Shrine.’
‘I had not heard that,’ said Jehovah. ‘Interesting. But it does not alter anything. The indigenous people do more than build fake airstrips. They also make dummy aeroplanes out of mud, sand and straw – no doubt to provide the souls of the kamikaze with somewhere to live. These planes are inspirational artefacts. They sometimes have up to ten engines, fashioned out of old buckets and barrels. Seen as objets d’art they could be considered chefs-d’œuvre. But aeroplanes made out of mud do not fly. The same applies to human Discourse. No vampire should ever treat it seriously.’
I reported this conversation to Baldur.
‘Does this mean,’ I asked, ‘that I too am learning how to make bogus aeroplanes out of sand and straw?’
Baldur looked me up and down with an expression of exasperation.
‘Not just that,’ he replied. ‘That is indeed what you’re being taught, but there’s another side to it as well. You’re also learning how to tart yourself up like a poof so that everyone will think you have access to a pipeline that spews out dosh – and hate you for it even more strongly. Have you forgotten who you are, Rama? You’re a vampire!’
I spent a few days mulling over what Jehovah had said, looking up on the Internet examples of my countrymen’s discourse, among them my old man’s dicta on ‘plebs’ and ‘responsible elites’. I could now understand practically all of them, including references to other texts, innuendoes and cultural allusions, some of them suave, witty and well written. Jehovah was right, all the same: these aircraft were not designed to fly. I found a good many wise words in them, but they rang empty and hollow, like a cannibal’s beads made from stray European coins.
I wrote in my notebook:
The cargo-discourse of Moscow differs from the Polynesian model in that, instead of playing with fragments of alien aviation technology it plays with fragments of borrowed jargon. The linguistic camouflage with which the ‘pundit’ lards his article fulfils the same function as the bright orange life-jacket adopted by an African headhunter: it’s more than a mask – it’s warpaint. The aesthetic face of cargo-discourse is cargo-glamour, it is what makes the struggling office boy skimp on his food so that he can buy himself an expensive power suit.
When I proudly showed this observation to Jehovah, he twiddled his finger meaningfully round his temple.
‘Rama,’ he said, ‘you’re missing the point. You seem to think Moscow cargo-discourse is subordinate to New York or Paris cargo-discourse and that is the whole problem. It is not the case at all. All human cultures are cargo cultures. In no way can the artificial aircraft created by one tribe be superior to the artificial aircraft created by another.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because flightless aircraft are not susceptible to comparative analysis. They do not fly, and they lack any technological specifics that can be measured against any others. They only have one function, and that is a magical one which does not depend on how many buckets they put under the wings for imitation engines, nor on what colour they are.’
‘But,’ I objected, ‘if we are surrounded by ersatz aeroplanes, they must have some basis in things people have copied, must they not? After all, for the cargo cult to have developed in the first place, there was presumably at least one real plane flying through the sky.’
‘The plane in question was not flying through the sky,’ Jehovah answered. ‘It was flying through the human mind. It was the Mighty Bat.’
‘You mean vampires?’
‘Yes,’ said Jehovah. ‘But there is no point in discussing it now. You lack the requisite knowledge base.’
‘Just one question,’ I said. ‘You say that all human culture amounts to no more than a cargo cult. What do people build instead of mud aeroplanes then?’
‘Cities.’
‘Cities?’
‘Yes,’ answered Jehovah, ‘and everything else as well.’
I tried raising the subject with Baldur, but he also declined to discuss it.
‘Too soon,’ he said. ‘Don’t run before you can walk. You’ve got to absorb what you need to know in the correct order. Your studies today must be the foundation for what you will learn tomorrow. When you build a house you don’t start with the attic.’
There seemed no room left for disagreement.
There was one more societal practice I was required to master. It was the art of ‘vampospirituality’, sometimes called by Jehovah ‘metrospirituality’, from which I concluded they were more or less the same thing. Jehovah defined it as: ‘conspicuous consumption in the domain of spirit’. What vampospirituality meant in practice was proof of access to, and familiarity with, the least accessible forms of ancient spiritual practices: it might include photo opportunities with the Dalai Lama, documentary evidence of acquaintance with Sufi sheikhs and Latin-American shamans, nocturnal visits by helicopter to Mount Athos, and so on.
‘And this goes on here as well?’ I asked bitterly. I could not see exactly what he was driving at.
‘Yes, it is just the same here, and everywhere else as well,’ said Jehovah. ‘And for all time. Observe what happens when people converse with one another. Why does a man open his mouth?’
I shrugged.
‘The key message a human being tries to convey to others is that he enjoys a much more prestigious level of consumption than might at first appear. At the same time he tries to instil in those around him the idea that their own level of consumption confers significantly less prestige than they had naïvely imagined. All social manoeuvres are subordinated to this aim. More importantly, it is the only issue that inspires unvarying emotions.’
‘Well, I seem to have come across rather different kinds of people in my life,’ I said in an attempt at light-hearted irony.
Jehovah looked at me mildly.
‘Rama,’ he said, ‘you have just presented me with a prime example of what I was trying to get across. You wish to let me understand that you are accustomed to a mode of consumption that is superior to mine. Mine, you suggest, sucks. The only difference is that we are talking about consumption in the sphere of human relationships. This is the very movement of a human soul I have in mind. However hard you look, you will never find anything else there … The only thing that changes is the particular mode of consumption. It may relate to objects, impressions, cultural manifestations, books, conceptions, states of mind and so on.’
‘That is revolting,’ I said, quite sincerely.
Jehovah raised a finger.
‘But on no account should you hold people in contempt because of it,’ he said. ‘Always keep in mind that for a vampire to do so is as shameful as it is for a human being to laugh at a cow because she has a greasy, fat, ugly udder dangling between her legs. It was we, Rama, who bred people and reared them. For that reason we must accept them as they are. No one else will ever feel compassion for them.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘So what am I supposed to do when someone fishes out his picture taken with the Dalai Lama?’
‘You produce one of your own, a photograph of yourself standing beside Christ, the Buddha and Muhammad … No, better not have Muhammad actually there with you. You can just have arrows pointing to the edge of the picture: “Muhammad was here” …’
The word ‘spirituality’ often came up in our discussions, and eventually I became interested to know exactly what was meant by the term. Researching the subject by means of random degustations, I summarised the results of my observations in the following note:
Russian ‘spirituality’ means that people here devote their best efforts not to material production of any kind, but to putting on airs. By the same token, a person who lacks ‘spirituality’ reveals it by his inability to do so in the appropriate manner. Expertise in this field can only be gained through experience and money, hence there is no creature less spiritual than a junior manager.
The range covered in the Glamour course was extensive, but almost none of it could be memorised on the conscious level. It included a great many tastings – I had to sample an unbelievable number of absurd preparations, each one of which swelled the load of life experiences now weighing on my shoulders. To this day I do not know how I could have swallowed such as the following:
‘Little bastard $%’
‘Blow ayu-yu.’
‘Cavalli No.3.’
‘Oфteн!’
‘Bloody masha ts.’
‘Chichiki.’
But my forays into the turbid smog of other souls were not in vain. I gained ever more acute understanding of what was going on in the world around me. Now, when I read coverage of a private concert by an A-list popstar in a Rublevka estate or some deferential article about the second Moscow Region Yachting Festival in Nice, I no longer felt crushed by another proof of my own inadequacy, but recognised that I had simply stumbled into the firing line of the new breed of Party machine-gunners who were replacing the Political Commissariat and National Folk Dance Ensembles.
The same was true of Discourse. I began to see that a spat between two intellectuals, one a lapdog of the regime, the other a fearless Valiant-for-truth fearlessly attacking it from all possible standpoints, bore no resemblance to a genuine conflict of ideologies, but was a duet for mouth organ and concertina. It was nothing but noise, whose only purpose was to act as background for the real ideology being trumpeted out loud.
‘If Glamour is the ideology of the regime,’ said Jehovah, ‘the most important of all arts for us are PR, GR, BR and FR. In a word – advertising.’
GR, apparently, stood for Government Relations. I did not know what BR and FR were, and was too idle to ask.
We had two lessons devoted to advertising, not to its dubious theory as developed by human beings (Jehovah called it simply ‘charlatanry’), but to its core techniques as applied to commerce, politics and information. Jehovah’s definition was as follows: ‘Without ever resorting to outright untruth, to construct from fragments of the truth a picture whose connection to reality is limited to whatever is good for sales.’ It was an apparently simple formulation, but in fact it embraced a vitally important elaboration: if the link to reality proved not to increase sales (and very often it could not) then the solution was to connect it to something else. This was precisely the eye of the needle through which the multitude of caravans passed.
Among the examples adduced to illustrate this concept was this linguistic-geometric construct:
No one speaks of it.
No one forgets it.
This is the root of all.
The source from which we all came, you and I,
And all those whom for now you regard as ‘other’,
Is not far off in the Himalayas, but inside yourself.
It’s real and tangible.
Certain and serious.
This is for real.
The explanation was as follows:
Rule 3. Non-traditional positioning of anal–phallic penetration with addition of contexts orthogonally related to the subj.
‘Why the shape of the cross?’ I asked Jehovah.
Jehovah shook a drop of clear liquid from the test tube on to his finger, licked it, and for a few moments stared unseeing into the far distance.
‘You didn’t read it all the way through,’ he said. ‘“Why the cross?” is the campaign slogan.’
A template example of spin being deployed for political purposes was the campaign by the Loyalist Youth Movement ‘True Batch of Hope’ (Surkoff_Fedayeen/built305). This campaign was aimed at generating positive interest in the English-speaking mass media, basing itself on a quotation from late Nabokov translating early Okudzhava:
Nadezhda I shall then be back
When the true batch outboys the riot …
I did not need to ask: ‘Why true batch?’ The homonyms with the Russian phrase for a trumpeter sounding the retreat were obvious. The brief digression into advertising was thereupon abandoned, and we continued with the general theory of Glamour.
I now find it quite amusing to think back to the importance I attached at the time to the insights I neatly inscribed in my notebook:
The need for Scientific Communism arises when belief fades in the feasibility of Communism actually being built, while the need for Glamour arises at the disappearance of natural sexual attraction.
Be that as it may, after I had experienced the effects of preparations labelled ‘Catwalk Meat 05 – 07’and ‘Suicide-Bimbombers of Beelzebub’ (categories of fashion models so designated by some particularly misogynistic vampire) my original conception underwent an important clarification:
It is not as simple as that. What precisely is natural sexual attraction? When you look close up at a girl who is considered the epitome of beauty, you see the pores in her skin, the pimples, the chapped lips and so on. Beauty or ugliness can be sensed only at a distance, when the lineaments of the face can be reduced to a schematic diagram which may be compared with the manga-style templates stored in the unconscious mind. Where these templates come from is anyone’s guess – but one suspects that in our day they have less to do with the genetic code than with the Glamour industry. In the world of automation, coercive governance of this type is known as ‘override’.
There were a few entertaining moments. One sample turned up twice in my programme, under different headings. The preparation was classified as: ‘Art Projects Curator Rh4’.
The red liquid had come from a middle-aged lady who really did look as if she could be an Islamist suicide-bomber. Both Baldur and Jehovah had included her in their lists because in their eyes a curator was seen to be someone pursuing an occupation midway between Glamour and Discourse and thus representing an invaluable source of information. I thought otherwise. The purpose of the degustation was to study the inner world of the contemporary artist, but this curator had not even mastered the jargon of her profession – she was merely Googling her way round it. There was, nevertheless, one touching detail: she had experienced orgasm only once in her life, when a drunken lover had called her a pubic louse feeding on financial capitalism.
I expressed my perplexity at this outcome to Jehovah and was informed that this experience was, in fact, the point of the lesson inasmuch as it revealed the subject in its entirety. I said I did not believe it, whereupon he made me sample three artists and another art gallery curator. Afterwards I made the following entry in my notebook:
On average, the contemporary artist is an anal prostitute with a mouth stitched shut and an arse painted on the wall. And the so-called curator is a person who sets himself up as the artist’s spiritual pimp despite the complete absence of any spiritual dimension in the proceedings.
Writers (whom we also covered in the Glamour course) were slightly better. After familiarising myself with their category I wrote in my notebook:
What is the most important thing for a writer? It is to possess a malicious, morbid, jealous and envious ego. If this is present, all else will follow.
Assorted varieties of critics, experts, press and Internet culturologists (it was around this time that I finally worked out what the word meant) found their way into the Discourse curriculum. A half-hour excursion into their universe allowed me to formulate the following rule:
The interim height of a crab louse equals the height of the object onto which it craps, plus 0.2 millimetres.
The last note I made on the Glamour course was as follows:
The most fruitful technique for promoting glamour in modern Russia will be anti-glamour. ‘Deconstructing’ glamour will allow it to infiltrate even those dark places where glamour itself would not dream of trespassing.
Not all the tastings had an epistemological purpose. Baldur often had me pry into another person purely in order that I should familiarise myself with a particular brand of Spanish crocodile-skin footwear or line of men’s eau de cologne. A highborn English economist found his way into the Glamour list because he was a specialist in expensive clarets, and he was followed in my investigations by a Japanese designer whose silk neckties were the best in the world (it emerged that he was the son of a man who had been sentenced by court martial to be hanged). Needless to say, such researches appeared to me a complete waste of my time and energy.
Before long, however, I grew to understand that the object of these excursions was not just to absorb yet more information, but to remodel my entire mode of thinking. The truth is that there is a vital difference between the mental processes of a vampire and those of a human being. When thinking, the vampire employs the same cerebral constructions as the man, but the path taken to get from one premise to another is as different from predictive human thought as is the exquisite trajectory of a bat flying through the dusk from a pigeon circling over an urban rubbish dump.
‘The best human beings are capable of thought almost on a level with vampires,’ said Baldur. ‘They have a name for it in their world – genius.’
Jehovah’s take was more restrained.
‘About genius I’m not so sure,’ he said. ‘Genius resists analysis and explanation, it’s a bit of a grey area. With us, everything is straightforward and clear. Thinking becomes vampiric when sufficient degustations have been imbibed to generate new parameters of associative connections.’
Technically speaking, my brain was already equipped to function in a new way. But the inertia of human nature still imposed its innate conditions. Many things which to my mentors were crystal clear I failed to grasp. What they saw as a logical bridge all too often presented itself to me as a conceptual chasm.
‘There are two main aspects to Glamour,’ declared Jehovah at one of our lessons. ‘On the one hand, it is the searingly painful shame and humiliation brought about by one’s poverty and physical ugliness. On the other, it is a malignant glee at the sight of the depravity and imperfections which others have not succeeded in concealing …’
‘How can this be so?’ I marvelled. ‘You told me Glamour was sex expressed as money. Surely there must be something attractive about it. Where is that in what you have just said?’
‘You’re thinking like a human being,’ said Jehovah. ‘Why don’t you tell me where it is?’
I thought. But nothing came into my head. ‘I don’t know,’ I said finally.
‘Nothing that exists is imperfect or hideous in or of itself. Everything depends on correlation. For a girl to realise that she is a fat, poor, ugly freak, all she has to do is open a glamour magazine, where she will be confronted with a slim super-rich beauty queen. Then she has someone against whom to compare herself.’
‘But why should the girl want to do this?’
‘Well, come on, you can answer that,’ said Jehovah.
I thought some more.
‘She has to …’ and suddenly vampire logic laid out the answer clearly before me. ‘She has to, so that she and all those other people the glossy mags have turned into humiliated freaks will carry on financing the Glamour industry out of their wretched earnings.’
‘Quite right, well done. But even that is still not the ultimate objective. You rightly talk of Glamour needing to be financed, but what is its aim?’
‘Glamour drives the economy forward because its victims start stealing money?’ I hazarded at random.
‘Far too much like human logic. You’re not an economist, Rama, you’re a vampire. Concentrate.’
I was silent, because nothing entered my head. Jehovah paused for a minute, then said:
‘The aim of Glamour is to ensure that the life of mankind passes in a miasma of ignominy and self-contempt, a condition known as “original sin”. It is the direct result of consuming images of beauty, success and intellectual brilliance. Glamour and Discourse submerge their consumers in mediocrity, idiocy and destitution – qualities which are, of course, relative, but cause real suffering. All human life is dominated by this sense of disgrace and poverty.’
‘Why is original sin necessary?’
‘It is necessary because human thought must be confined within strict limits, and because mankind must remain in ignorance of its true place in the symphony of men and vampires.’
I guessed that in this context the word ‘symphony’ meant something like ‘symbiosis’. But I could not get out of my head an image of some gigantic orchestra, before which stood Jehovah on the conductor’s podium in a black tailcoat, his mouth smeared in blood …
After a pause for thought, I said:
‘All right. I can understand why Glamour is a mask. But why do we say the same of Discourse?’
Jehovah closed his eyes and assumed a look of Yoda, the mentor of the Jedi.
‘In the Middle Ages no one knew that America existed,’ he said, ‘therefore it was not necessary to conceal it. It never entered anyone’s head to look for it. That is the best disguise of all. If our aim is to hide something from people, all we need do is make sure no one thinks of it. For this to be the case, human thought must be under permanent supervision, that is to say Discourse has to be controlled. To control Discourse, all we need is the power to establish its borders. Once they are set, an entire universe can be hidden beyond them. You know this from your own situation. You must admit, the world of vampires is pretty well camouflaged.’
I nodded.
‘Not only that,’ continued Jehovah, ‘discourse is another, and magical, form of masking. I’ll give you an example. No human being will disagree with the proposition that there is a great deal of evil in the world, is that not so?’
‘It is.’
‘But what is the source of this evil? Not a day goes without newspapers filling acres of space arguing about it. It is one of the most astounding aspects of the world we live in, given that people are capable of recognising the nature of evil instinctively, with no need to have it analysed and explained. To have succeeded in rendering it such a shrouded mystery is a serious magical act.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed sadly, ‘that seems to be very near the truth.’
‘Discourse acts in a manner not unlike an electric barbed-wire fence where the current touches not the human body but the human mind. It defines territory that cannot be penetrated from territory from which it is impossible to escape.’
‘What is the territory that cannot be escaped?’
‘I can’t believe you’re asking that. Glamour, of course! Open any glossy magazine and look. There in the middle you find Glamour, and round the edges Discourse. Or the other way round – Discourse in the middle and Glamour round the edges. Glamour is always surrounded either by Discourse or by empty space. There is nowhere for the human being to escape to. Empty space holds nothing for him, yet he cannot pass through the Discourse barrier. The only thing left to him is to sleepwalk through the pastures of Glamour.’
‘But why do vampires need it?’
‘Glamour has one other function which we have not yet mentioned,’ replied Jehovah. ‘And for vampires it is the most important one. But it is too early to speak of it yet. You will find out about it after the Great Fall.’
‘And when will that be?’
To this Jehovah made no reply.
And so it was, taste by taste, swallow by swallow, step by step, that I was transformed into a culturally advanced metrosexual, ready to plunge into the very heart of darkness.