Babylon

by Виктор Пелевин

  ‘Of course, what else?’ Tatarsky muttered to himself.

  He only found the shop after weaving his way for ages through nearby yards and passages - near the end of his journey he remembered that Gireiev had mentioned this shop to him, but he’d used the abbreviated form of its name, PYS. There were no large signboards anywhere to be seen, nothing but a small board with the handwritten word ‘Open’ in the doorway of an ordinary-looking two-storey building. Tatarsky realised, of course, that things hadn’t been arranged like this through lack of foresight, but in order to induce a feeling of esoteric anticipation. Nonetheless, the method worked on him as well - as he climbed the stairs leading into the shop, he was aware of a sensation of subtle reverence.

  Once inside the door he knew that instinct had led him to the right place. Hanging above the counter was a black tee shirt with a portrait of Che Guevara and the inscription: ‘Rage Against the Machine’. On the piece of cardboard under the tee shirt it said: ‘Bestseller of the month!’ There was nothing surprising about that - Tatarsky knew very well (he had even written about it in one of his concepts) that in the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.

  ‘What sizes do you have?’ he asked the sales assistant, a very pretty girl in a vaguely Babylonian-Assyrian style.

  "There’s only one left,’ she answered. ‘Just your size.’

  He paid, put the tee shirt in his shoulder-bag and then froze in indecision at the counter.

  ‘We’ve got a new lot of crystal balls, better buy one before they all go,’ purred the girl, and she began sorting out a pile of children’s bibs with inscriptions in runic characters.

  ‘What are they for?’ Tatarsky asked.

  ‘For meditation.’

  Tatarsky was just about to ask whether you were supposed to meditate on something through the crystal balls or something actually in them, when he suddenly noticed a small shelf on the wall - it had been hidden behind the tee shirt he had just bought. Slumbering on the shelf under a clearly visible layer of dust were two objects of an uncertain nature.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what are those things up there? Is that a flying saucer or something? What’s that pattern on it?’

  ‘That’s a supreme practice frisbee.’ said the girl, ‘and what you call a pattern is a blue letter "hum".’

  ‘But what’s it for?’ asked Tatarsky, a vague memory of something connected with mushrooms and Gireiev nudging briefly at the edge of his awareness. ‘How is it different from an ordinary frisbee?’

  The girl twisted her lips into a wry expression. ‘When you throw a frisbee with a blue letter "hum", you’re not simply throwing a plastic disc, but accumulating merit. Ten minutes throwing a frisbee with a blue letter "hum" generates the same amount of merit as three hours of samadhi meditation or one hour of vipassana meditation.’

  ‘A-ha.’ Tatarsky drawled uncertainly. ‘But merit in whose eyes?’

  ‘What do you mean, in whose eyes!’ the girl said, raising her eyebrows. ‘Are you buying or do you just want to talk?’

  ‘I’m buying,’ said Tatarsky. ‘But I have to know what I’m buying. What’s that to the right of the supreme practice?’

  ‘That’s a ouija board, a classic.’

  ‘What’s it for?’

  The girl sighed. She was obviously tired of dealing with fools all day long. She took the ouija board down from the shelf and set it on the counter in front of Tatarsky.

  ‘You stand it on a sheet of paper,’ she said. ‘Or you can attach it to a printer with these clips here. In that case you put the paper in through here and set the line print speed to ‘slow’. It’s easier if you load a roll. In this slot here you put a pen - best to buy a helium one, with a reservoir. You put your hands on it like this, see? Then you enter into contact with the spirit and just let your hands move however they want. The pen will write out the text that’s received.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Tatarsky, ‘please don’t be angry, I really want to know - what spirit am I supposed to contact?’

  ‘I’ll tell you if you’re buying.’

  Tatarsky took out his wallet and counted out the money. For a piece of varnished plywood on three wheels the ouija board was refreshingly expensive - and this disproportion between price and object inspired a trust that could hardly have been generated by any explanation, no matter how profound.

  ‘There you go,’ he said, putting the banknotes on the counter. ‘So what spirit do I get in contact with?’

  ‘The answer to that question depends on your level of personal power,’ said the girl, ‘and especially on your belief in the existence of spirits. If you stop your internal dialogue using the method from Castaneda’s second volume, you enter into contact with the spirit of the abstract. But if you’re a Christian or a Satanist, you can contact a specific spirit… Which kinds are you interested in?’

  Tatarsky shrugged.

  The girl lifted up the crystal hanging on a narrow black leather strap round her neck and looked at Tatarsky through it for two or three seconds, gazing directly at the centre of his forehead.

  ‘What kind of job are you in?’ she asked. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Advertising,’ Tatarsky answered.

  The girl slipped her hand under the counter and took out an ordinary exercise book with squared paper and spent some time leafing through pages covered with tables in which the columns were completely filled with fine handwriting.

  ‘It would be best for you,’ she said at last, ‘to regard the text received as a free discharge of subconscious psychic energy facilitated by the motor skills of writing. A kind of spring-cleaning for an advertising man’s personal Augean stables. That approach will be less offensive to the spirits.’

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said Tatarsky, ‘do you mean to tell me that the spirits will be offended when they find out I work in advertising?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. So the best protection against their wrath would be to doubt their existence. When it comes down to it, everything in this world is a matter of interpretation, and a quasi-scientific description of a spiritualist seance is just as correct as any other. And then, any enlightened spirit will readily agree that he doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Interesting. But how will the spirits guess that I’m in advertising? Is it written on my forehead or something?’

  ‘No,’ said the girl. ‘It’s written in the adverts that came out of your forehead.’

  Tatarsky was about to take offence at that, but after a moment’s consideration he realised that he actually felt flattered.

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said, ‘if I need a consultation on spiritual matters, I’ll come to you. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘All things are in the hands of Allah,’ the girl answered.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said a young man with dilated pupils, swinging round from the huge crystal ball into which he had been gazing to face the girl. ‘All things? What about Buddha-consciousness? The hands of Allah only exist in Buddha-consciousness. You won’t argue with that, will you?’

  The girl behind the counter smiled politely.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. "The hands of Allah only exist in Buddha-consciousness. The catch is that Buddha-consciousness still lies in the hands of Allah.’

  ‘As Isikawa Takuboku wrote,’ interrupted a gloomy-looking customer of a Mephistophelean appearance, who had approached the counter in the meantime, ‘"leave off, leave off this vain dispute"… I was told you had Swami Zhigalkin’s brochure "Summer Thoughts of a Samsaric Being". Do you think you could have a look for it? It’s probably up on that shelf, no, no, over there, to the left, under the tibial flute…’

  CHAPTER 7. Homo Zapiens

  On the table the ouija board looked like a tank on the central square
of a small European town. The bottle of Johnny Walker standing beside it reminded Tatarsky of the town hall, and so in his mind the red wine he was drinking was fitted into the same pattern. Its vessel, a long narrow bottle, was like a Gothic cathedral occupied by the Communist Party committee, and the void within the bottle was reminiscent of the ideological exhaustion of communism, the senselessness of bloodshed and the general crisis of the Russian idea. Setting the mouth of the bottle to his lips, Tatarsky finished what was left of the wine and tossed the bottle into the waste-paper basket. ‘The velvet revolution,’ he thought.

  Sitting at the table in the tee shirt with the inscription: ‘Rage Against the Machine’, he finished reading the manual for the ouija board. The helium pen he’d bought in a kiosk by the metro fitted into the slot without any effort and he secured it in place with the screw. It was suspended on a small spring that was supposed to press it against the paper. The paper - an entire pile of it - was already lying under the ouija board. He could begin.

  He glanced around the room and was just about to place his hands on the board, when he rose nervously to his feet, walked across the room and back again and drew the blinds over the windows. After another moment’s thought, he lit the candle standing on the table. Any further preparations would simply have been laughable. In actual fact, even the ones he had made were ridiculous.

  He sat down at the table and set his hands on the ouija board. ‘OK then,’ he thought, ‘so now what? Should I say something out loud or not?’

  ‘I summon the spirit of Che Guevara. I summon the spirit of Che Guevara,’ he said, and immediately thought that he ought not just to summon the spirit; he ought to ask it a question. ‘I’d like to know… mmm, let’s say, something new about advertising, something that wasn’t in Al Rice or comrade Ogiivy,’ he said. ‘I want to understand more than anybody else.’

  At that very instant the ouija board began jerking epileptically beneath his spread palms and the pen set in the slot traced out a string of large capital letters at the top of the sheet of paper:

  IDENTIALISM AS THE HIGHEST STAGE OF DUALISM

  Tatarsky jerked his hands away and stared in fright at the words for several seconds. Then he put his hands back and the ouija board began moving again, but this time the letters produced by the pen were small and neat:

  These thoughts were originally intended for the journal of the Cuban armed forces, Oliva Verde. But it would be foolish to insist on matters of such petty detail now that we know for certain that the entire plan of existence, in which journals are published and armed forces engage in action, is simply a sequence of moments of awareness, united solely by the fact that in each new moment the concept of the preceding moments is present. Although from time without beginning this sequence remains unbroken, awareness is never actually aware of itself. Therefore the condition of man in this life is lamentable.

  That great champion of the liberation of humanity, Siddhartha Gautama, has indicated in many of his works that the principle reason for the lamentable condition of man in this life is first and foremost the very conception of man’s existence, life and lamentable condition - that is to say, the dualism that imposes the division into subject and object of something that in actual fact has never existed and never will.

  Tatarsky pulled out the sheet of paper covered in writing, set his hands on the ouija board and it trembled into motion again:

  Siddhartha Gautama was able to convey this simple truth to many people because in his time their feelings were simple and strong, and their internal world was clear and unclouded. Hearing a single word could completely change a man’s entire life and transport him instantly to the other shore, to a freedom unconstrained in any way. But since that time many centuries have passed. The words of the Buddha are now accessible to all, yet salvation comes to but few. There can be no doubt that this is the result of the cultural situation that the ancient texts of all religions called the ‘dark age’ to come.

  Comrades in the struggle! This dark age has already begun. And its onset has been brought about primarily by the role that the so-called visual-psychic generators or type-two objects have come to play in the life of man.

  In speaking of the fact that dualism lisas engendered by the arbitrary division of the world into subject and object, the Buddha was concerned with subject-object division of the first type. The major distinguishing feature of the dark age lies in the decisive influence exerted on the life of man by subject-object division of the second type, which in the time of the Buddha simply did not exist.

  In order to explain what is meant by objects of the first and second types, let us take a simple example, a television set. This is simply a box with a glass wall, which we are free to watch or not watch. When an individual’s gaze falls upon a dark screen, the movement of his or her eyes is controlled exclusively by internal nerve impulses or the psychological process taking place in his or her consciousness. For instance, an individual might notice that the screen is fly-spotted. Or he or she might decide that it would be a good idea to buy a television twice as big. Or think that it would be a good idea to stand it in a different corner. Until a television is switched on it is in no way different from the objects with which people had to deal in the Buddha’s time, be it a stone, the dew on a blade of grass or an arrow with a divided head - in short, everything that the Buddha used to illustrate his talks.

  But when a television is turned on, it is transformed from an object of the first type into an object of the second type. It becomes a phenomenon of an entirely different order. And although the person looking at the screen does not notice this customary transformation, it is truly immense. For the viewer the television disappears as a material object that possesses weight, size and other physical properties. Instead of this the viewer has the sensation of being present in a different space, a sensation familiar to all who are assembled there.

  Tatarsky glanced around, as though expecting to find himself surrounded by this assembled company, but of course there was nothing to be seen. As he removed another sheet of paper covered in writing from under the board, he figured out roughly how long the paper would last, then set his palms back against the wooden surface.

  Comrades in the struggle! The question is - who is actually present? Can we say that it is the viewer himself?

  Let us repeat the question, since it is extremely important: is it possible to say that the television is being watched by the individual who is watching it?

  We assert that it is not, for the following reason. When the individual viewed the television while it was switched off, the movement of his or her eyes and the flow of his or her attention were controlled by his own voluntary impulses, chaotic though they may have been. The dark screen with no image of any kind did not exert any influence over them, or if it did, it was only as a background.

  When it is switched on, a television almost never transmits a static view from a single motionless camera, and therefore the image on it is not a background. Quite the contrary, this image changes at an extremely rapid rate. Every few seconds there is either a change of camera angle or a fade into close-up on some object, or a switch to a different camera - the image is constantly being modified by the cameraman and the producer who stands behind him. This changing of the image is known as technomodification.

  We ask you to pay particularly close attention at this point, since our next thesis is rather difficult to grasp, although in essence it is extremely simple. In addition, the feeling might arise that we are dealing with something that is insignificant. But we make bold to assert that we are in fact dealing with the most real psychological phenomenon of the end of the second millennium.

  The changes in the image produced by various technomodifications can be correlated with a virtual psychological process in which the observer is forced to switch his attention from one event to another and select the most interesting content from what is taking place - that is, to manage his own atte
ntion as the makers of the programme manage it. This psychological process creates its own virtual subject, which for the duration of the television programme exists in place of the individual, fitting into his or her consciousness like a hand into a rubber glove.

  This is similar to the condition of possession by a spirit. The difference lies in the fact that in this case the spirit does not exist; all that does exist are the symptoms of possession. This is a virtual spirit, but from the moment the viewer entrusts the programme-makers with redirecting his or her attention at will from object to object, he or she effectively becomes this spirit, and the spirit, which does not actually exist, possesses this viewer and millions of others.

  What is taking place could appropriately be called the experience of collective non-existence, since the virtual subject that replaces the viewer’s actual consciousness is absolutely non-existent - it is merely an effect created by the collective efforts of editors, cameramen and producers. However, for the individual watching the television there is nothing more real than this virtual subject.

  Furthermore, Lapsang Suchong of the Pu Er monastery believes that if a certain programme, for instance a football game, were to be watched simultaneously by more than four-fifths of the population of Earth, this virtual effect would become capable of displacing from the aggregate human consciousness the collective karmic vision of the human plane of existence, the consequences of which could be unpredictable (it is entirely possible that to the hell of molten metal, the hell of knife trees etc. there would be added a new hell, the hell of an eternal football championship). However, his calculations have yet to be verified, and in any case this is a matter for the future. Here we are interested not so much in the frightening prospects for tomorrow as in the no less frightening reality of today.