by Michal Ajvaz
Among the connections established by the island’s cases, those that seem to us most important (and that find expression in our own cases) were missing. The case endings of the island’s language expressed relations which seemed to me (at the time I was learning the language) wholly bizarre. For example, one of the cases was only used for nouns referring to things that were the subject of fear connected with the vague and probably not altogether pure intentions of a close relative; another was used for nouns referring to things placed on a soft surface which sagged slightly under the weight of the subject, forming on the surface a star shape of shallow pleats. Things were not much better with conjugation. Verb endings did not express which person the action concerned, nor indeed the number of actors. The ending -vi, for example, determined that the act signified by the verb occurred on a sandy seashore, while the ending -ark made it clear that the action took place on the surface of a cold mirror; if the ending -ut was attached to the verb, this signified that the action was somehow connected with green and red precious stones. Verb endings might also be linked together: for example, the word izarkut meant that it was visible in a mirror how something in which precious stones were sparkling was slowly submerged in water. A strange world emerged out of this declension and conjugation, a network of peculiar relations and roles which was antecedent to logic.
What irritated me most about the island’s extraordinary grammar was not that it concerned itself with unimportant features and relations of reality and created its forms based on the model they provided. The island’s lunatic grammar made me anxious more because of what seemed to me the grimace it gave the face of reality, modelling existence as a series of bizarre statues by pouring the substance of reality—admittedly diaphanous—into such peculiar moulds. One couldn’t really say that their grammar twisted reality, as it looked at reality in embryonic form: it penetrated to the germs of reality and adapted them to its own obscure dreams. The island’s grammar infected the sight, sound, and gesture through which reality comes to us, causing that reality to be composed exclusively of its bizarre and practically endless catalogue of prefixes, suffixes, and endings, its peculiar rhythms, beats, tensions, breaths, gleams, moving shadows, and its attention to whatever goes on inside things or on their surface, for which we do not even have a name.
However, and strangest of all, after a while on the island I began to find its grammar and the reality it created quite natural. This is one of the sicknesses I brought back from the island, of which, it seems, I shall never be cured. As I listen to Czech, now, I sometimes catch myself needing to translate it into the language of the island so that I can understand; and it seems to me that Czech, in common with all other European languages, has on the one hand very little to say about reality, and, on the other hand, contains much that is superfluous. When I hear someone say “They’re on their way,” and I ask myself unhappily why the form of the verb must communicate that more than one person is coming when this detail is not of the least interest to me and in any case will soon be made manifest, I am disturbed that we can’t simply attach an ending to the verb, -rao for instance, making clear that this is an action heightening our impatience while holding in check and subduing a vague fear of the goal that will soon be accomplished. This is the sort of thing that really interests me about whomever is on their way; this is the sort of thing that’s worth taking the time to express, unlike the banal detail that there happens to be more than one of them.
And so Czech and the language of the island grow together in my head; the cases of the island grow like obstinate weeds between the seven cases of Czech, and when I’m alone my thoughts are in this hybrid language—just as incomprehensible to a Czech as it would be to an islander. It happens once in a while that I am in a shop, standing in line at the checkout, lost in thought; that I fail to notice that I’ve reached the front of the line; that the checkout girl tries to get my attention; that I reply in my own language. By the way she looks at me I know she thinks I’m crazy, and I feel embarrassed; I pretend to have mispronounced my intention, or I make out that I’m a foreigner and adopt an accent. Having decided to compose this report on the island, I even considered, initially, writing it in my private language. Certainly no one would read such a book, and certainly too no one would want to publish it, but I dreamed of publishing it myself, of establishing my own press through which I would publish only novels of my own, written in my own language; who knows, perhaps one day someone would buy one of them and set about deciphering its text; on the basis of this perhaps he would then invent a language of his own with marvellous new cases and grammatical categories, in which—let’s say—there will be a verb ending indicating that in the action thus described, a burning energy full of a magnificent malice is gradually exhausting itself, and that this exhaustion evokes relief, nostalgia, and a kind of spine-tingling music.
The adventure of letters
At the same time, I got to know the islanders’ script from their Book (of which I have much to tell in the chapters to come). I had the impression that it was a mixture of fragments from various other scripts. There was a group of characters that gave the appearance of small, schematic pictures of objects, animals, people, and figures; then there were the letters which bore no similarity to objects or living forms, and these could be divided into several groups, including one of simple signs made up of two or three straight lines, another of complicated tangles of wriggling curves that reminded one of a bird’s nest, and another of letters composed of clusters drawn from many barely ascertainable points that increased in density before becoming looser again. My first impression was that the creator of the islanders’ script had composed it in haste; he had borrowed letters hurriedly from many sources without in any way attempting to integrate them into the whole, and afterwards this ill-assorted mix endured by the simple force of habit.
Yet I found this explanation unsatisfactory, and as questions pertaining to the script’s strange diversity continued to tantalize me, I began to pay visits to the royal palace in the hope of discovering in its old papers something about the script’s history. I remember the afternoons I spent seated on the floor of the one of the empty chambers, digging out old documents from under the hot sand and reading them through. No matter where I sat, the crumbling facade of the uninhabited building was always visible in the windows on one side of the room, while the windows on the other side were filled with the splendid blue of the sky; whenever I stood up, the sparkling, azure canopy of the sea was raised to half the height of the windows, as though drawn up by some miraculous pulley. In a distant room I could hear the steps of the queen as she paced, deep in thought; sometimes I would spot her standing in the empty frame of the door, one of dozens of empty frames that playful perspective made into a grooved ornament, a row of characters in the shape of the letter pi, each enclosed in the next, each smaller than the last. Sometimes the siren of a ship sounded in the harbour.
These quiet afternoons taught me that the chaotic heterogeneity in the letters was not brought about by habit and inertia; indeed, there was a restlessness in the script that caused its constant transformation. It was as if it were running away from itself while trying to catch up with itself; it seemed to me that it dreamed of a long-lost past or a magnificent future, of a script ages old or else an idealized one yet to come, full of perfect, resplendent letters, seeking these in endless transformation, following a great variety of mysterious clues, setting out in many different directions at once, but in the end always failing in its efforts.
Even after this it was a long time before I was in a position to appreciate the true nature of the island’s script. Having abandoned the hypothesis that symbols from a variety of systems had been stitched together and the whole then maintained by inertia, there was a time—after I succeeded in uncovering the pictograms from which most of the island’s letters were derived—I supposed I had indeed discovered the script’s origin; how great my surprise, then, when, delving deeper in the drifts of sand in
the royal palace, I discovered some documents written in a script older still! I learned that what I had assumed to be an early pictographic script had itself originated in the interpretation of puzzling symbols which represented absolutely nothing.
It seemed that changes washed over the script in waves, and that these waves had no single direction. Apparently the pictographic script had changed many times to form more abstract symbols—by the simplification of the figures into outlines in which it was no longer possible to read the model, or else by the in-growth of tangles of lines—and many times, too, the abstract symbols turned back into pictures, once their outlines began to live and grow, the tangles of lines yielding the figures of humans and demons, animals, birds, and monsters, which till then had been present only in the shapes of the letters as distant dreams or reflected reflections—as memory and suggestion. It seemed to me that the present-day letters of the island were on the cusp of just such a transformation into a pictographic script: a few of the characters had already taken on the form of a bird or an animal. Though the majority had yet to begin forming pictures, I saw shapes trembling in the letters, preparing to break through: nascent, hitherto veiled faces of strange creatures whose cunning eyes blinked or beaks obtruded impatiently from their tangles of lines; unsettling, to say the least. I soon realized that all the letters were exuding the same sort of anxiety—as if they contained a secret message, unknown but foreshadowed; every text is a palimpsest, every letter a secret cipher.
The transformation of pictures into abstract symbols and abstract symbols into pictures wasn’t the only way in which the script developed, however; evidently there were times, for example, when their lines frayed into ever-thinner threads, or when the lines ran into one another, forming square, solid shapes, or when the lines stretched out like the stalks of climbing plants and had to bend their tips into spirals or arch into sine curves so that they could fit into the spaces between the lines. Then there were times when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, crumbled into ever-smaller pieces until they became cloudlets of ink dust; the documents of these eras look like pictures of a white sky studded with black constellations. There were times too when the letters, pictorial and abstract both, became so complicated that it would take several hours to write just one of them; so, of course, very little was written, although it doesn’t seem that anyone on the island was too concerned by this. Indeed, I believe the writer was actually pleased if, on his way across the line, he struck upon such a letter; he could then take a break from his narrative and immerse himself joyfully in the writing of a single character.
Nor was it possible to read this kind of laboriously written script in a single, fleeting glance; it was necessary to go through it collecting distinguishing features—and there were a great many of these, hidden in its knotty network of lines. (It might be that two letters had twenty-nine distinguishing features in common, differing only in the thirtieth.) Hence, a reader could wade around in the bliss of a single letter, and the reading of a single letter of this labyrinthine script might take him one whole afternoon. It rarely happened, in the process, that the reader attained the meaning of the word of which this letter was a part, but he was certainly not concerned by this: his compensation was his encounter with the meaning of a single letter—which always far surpasses the reference point of speech, and its mysterious capacity for communication.
Having decided to write this book, I considered how it should look. For a time I wondered whether it might not be best to produce a book which, instead of a narrative about the island, was made up of nothing more than a few of these complicated letters, thus allowing readers to read into it what they would. To the objection that my readers wouldn’t know the sounds to which the letters refer, the islanders’ riposte would surely be, “All the better!”
Of course, the island’s script developed through its interaction with other scripts as well. Thanks to its precious stones, the island always had contact with the outside world. Sometimes I even think I see traces of the island’s viewpoint and manner of thinking in European culture—in Novalis’s meditations on shapes that generate sounds in wood shavings, for example, or in the origins of abstract painting, or in the letter-pictures of Klee. It’s far more difficult, on the other hand, to find manifestations of the spirit of Europe on the island. Although the islanders have always been very accepting of everything, in the end things always turn out the same way, as they did with the language, science, and religion of their erstwhile conquerors from Europe: all of these borrowings were perfectly absorbed into the rhythms of the island and thus transformed into everyday parts of island life, indistinguishable from any other. Nevertheless, it is still possible to find deposits in the island’s script that indicate several old encounters with the Latin alphabet, each of which led to the siphoning off of some of its letters. Marooned among the native letters, these orphaned Latin characters experienced a bizarre metamorphosis: they expanded, they hurled out offshoots in all directions, slowly revealing images of tigers, birds, and fantastical trees. (Was this not, in fact, a return to their mystical origins? A partial revelation of their enduring, hidden power?) Whenever the script of the island swallowed up foreign letters in this way, it would transform them so perfectly in the course of its digestion—into the aforementioned animals, or tangles of lines, or geometric shapes—that on second encounter they were unrecognizable. And it would accept the same letter again and again, and so seem to have grown a new symbol with a distant similarity to the existing one, when in fact what had happened is that the same alien character had been swallowed up by itself, by its own rampant form, which it had initially acquired after first being disfigured by the island’s contagion…
But, none of these transformations could explain the island’s script’s most striking feature: the strange lack of unity among the characters. This disunity arose as a consequence of the fact that the restless tangle of forces urging the letters to undergo their continuous metamorphoses was not distributed equally across all letters; for example, the force that impelled the transformation of letters into thin, frayed, and randomly twisted threads might strike violently in one place—within a single letter or a group of letters—and would pick at and crumple its target quite furiously, without noticing the fact that at the same moment, in another part of the text, a force was at play which was beating the letters into solid pegs, while, simultaneously, in yet another section, the letters had become translucent and were transforming into dull smears (but this force had already almost burned itself out), and then, finally, in yet another place, a force thus far unidentified seemed to be staking a claim for symmetrical ornamentation. At any given moment a letter was tugged at by a variety of forces at various stages of development; some of these were tentative, hesitant, just starting out, some were now at the height of their strength, while others were almost entirely spent. And where these forces abutted each other, they collided, made alliances, applied indirect influence, held themselves back, and gathered their strength.
And then it seems there was a long period when all such forces were asleep and the island’s script was frozen, after which came a new awakening and a time of even wilder transformation. Although in the days when I was on the island, a tendency towards a pictographic script was predominant, one could see many other tendencies dormant under the surface of their texts—some on the wane, some just being born. The islanders also had a kind of literature, of course, not least their Book (which I will get to presently, I trust), but I sometimes think that the story of the island’s script makes up a more interesting narrative than all the stories contained in their literary works.
The café on Rue des Beaux-Arts
The islanders’ letters were so restless that from time to time they produced a longing to pass out of the territory in which script is enclosed; indeed, they began to doubt where the border between script and non-script lay. And so it occurred that the script passed through stages in which it was impossible to say for sure whether
its figures were still letters to be read or whether they should be looked at as pictures. And there were other times when the script cast into doubt a border more remote still, that which exists between symbol and object. The letters thought of their depth and accentuated this; they transformed themselves into three-dimensional forms that retained traces of the old life of the letter, but at the same time they were objects in which were born relations to places, to other objects and to certain purposes—which to begin with only glimmered through, but which later gradually established themselves and grew with their hosts. And in echoing this movement another movement was awakened; in the world of objects—in stones, in trees, in machines, in bodies—the germ of an ability to be a letter announced itself. This ability, which until now had kept its peace within, suddenly generated avenues of text, strange sentences which oddly enough were not entirely incomprehensible.
I had occasionally encountered in the cultures of Europe and Asia this fuzziness on the borders between letters and pictures, but the growing together of letters and objects is something known perhaps only to the inhabitants of the nameless island. I have heard only once of a similar fusion of letters and pictures in Europe, and this came in a story whose truth I have never been able to verify. It happened several years after my return from the island, at the Czech Centre in Paris’s Rue Bonaparte. I was present at the opening of an exhibition of the work of Josef Váchal, where I met a man of about sixty who came from Prague but had obviously lived for many years in Paris. We struck up a conversation at the buffet; it turned out that he was interested in Váchal’s wonderful typography. We went on to speak of the letter-pictures of Klee and Michaux and I was reminded of the script of the island. I mentioned that its letters occasionally release a yearning to transform themselves into objects. He considered this information before telling me that a friend of his in Paris, who had also been born in Prague, had experienced two incidents—one in his homeland and the other in Paris, each by different means—in which letters and pictures were in fusion. This was of considerable interest to me and I asked him to tell me about it. He said that it was a story long in the telling, and he invited me to accompany him to a small café that was just around the corner in Rue des Beaux-Arts.