“I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t until much later, what guides the hands of those who paint signboards for watchmakers.
“According to probability theory, given all possible combinations of a clock’s minute and hour hands, only one in seven hundred and twenty painted clockfaces should show one twenty-seven. However, as you’ve probably noticed, in seven cases out of ten—”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. “And I’d like to know how you explain that.”
My companion was silent; he sat with his head sunk still deeper between his shoulders, evidently absorbed in remembering.
A predawn wind dandled the shadows of the trees and then replaced them at our feet. Lövenix emerged from his somnolence.
“Yes, I left all that behind. Soon the threshold of my cramped and lowly laboratory, with its pitiful equipment and textbook methods, was also in the past. I took off my ceiling and accustomed my thoughts to covering themselves with just the sky. The problem, as I saw it, was this: The ocean has its ebb tides, and so does being. The feeling of being may be conveyed in two ways: as ‘I am’ and ‘there is.’ ‘I’ knows itself as ‘I am’; ‘not-I’ is known to it as ‘there is.’
“Tell me, have you ever once, in your entire life, been in these three contiguous moments? First: I am and there is. Second: I am. By itself. Third: There is in I am. Confusing? I’ll explain. Ever since the universe was taken from me once, and then again by that existential crack that can expand into an abyss, swallowing earth and sun, I have been suspicious of the universe. I don’t believe that the orbital ellipses of its planets are unwavering or its suns inextinguishable. True, tumbles into the night are rare, as are those who know about them, but the crack threatening a cataclysm never closes up entirely; it threatens every instant to expand, to yawn into a world-enveloping abyss. I’m not the only one torn in two by this crack. Aren’t you as well? Didn’t Heine write that ‘a great world rent has run through my soul’? He was a poet, so didn’t know that this was more than a metaphor. And if—”
Lövenix suddenly broke off and threw an arm out in front of him: “Look.”
Absorbed in listening, I had failed to notice: The night had gone. The dawn was glimmering in a narrow crimson crack between earth and sky. Ever so slowly the crack widened. The stars drew in their beams. The night, tucked away under vaults and eaves, was already torn up into black scraps of shadows. Things reemerged: first their outlines and then their colors.
“I must go,” he said.
Lövenix turned toward me. At last I could see his face: Slightly puffy, with a bold gash-like mouth, it was somehow sharpened and translucent; only in the glow of his motionless but burning eyes did there lurk some ineradicable life. I seemed to recall having seen that face and gaze before, in an old engraving in a book from someone’s long-flown life.
“But you haven’t finished . . .”
“One can never finish. My point is this: If there is no single thread of time, if being is not continuous, if ‘the universe is not whole’ but cloven by cracks into odd, unrelated pieces, then all those textbook ethics based on the principle of responsibility, on the connectedness of my tomorrow with my yesterday, all fall away and are replaced by a single crackist ethic. The formula? Just this: For everything left behind the crack, I, who have stepped over the crack, am not responsible. I am here, the deed is there, behind me. I and what I have done are in different worlds, and between those worlds there are no windows. Oh, that I realized long ago. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“You see, she, the woman waiting around the bend in the path, waited in vain. I broke it off without words. I returned her letters unopened. Then one day in the paper I came across her name (her name was Sophia, yes, Sophia): ‘ . . .threw herself out of a window. Left no note . . .’—but why am I telling you this?”
He turned away. I could see only the sharp cusp of his shoulder and the black crown of his hat; the brim trembled slightly.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just . . . Forgive me.”
He stood up. As did I.
“But you haven’t explained the signboard clockfaces.”
“Ah, yes. Some other time.”
I retained his hand in mine.
“But when will that be?”
He seemed uncertain.
I pulled out my manuscript.
“This belongs to you, not me.”
He smiled weakly: Thank you. He gave me his address and walked quickly away down the boulevard path. I sank back onto the bench. The day was beginning. People were striding by, stirring up the dust; hooves and wheel rims clattered, striking sparks on the cobbles.
I too had to go. But I lingered: A strange distrust of the sun, of the earth, and of myself checked my muscles. I felt that if I took even one step, then everything—from the sun to the sparks under hooves, from the earth spread out under all our vanities to the tiny dust motes stirred up by people’s soles—everything would suddenly tumble into the night, and the dawn-promised day would never come.
4
For a long time I could not bring myself to go and see the Collector of Cracks. But signboard clockfaces kept urging me: Their bold black hands seemed to be pushing me to pursue the mystery of their numerals.
I found Lövenix’s room on the sixth floor, by the last spiral step of a back stairs, hard under the attic. To my chagrin, it was empty. Gottfried Lövenix had gone. But where?
Lengthy inquiries in the house manager’s office produced only the name of the tiny nondescript town for which Lövenix had left. Not wanting to lose his trail, I wrote to him at once, addressing the letter with just the names—of man and town. Would it reach him?
For a long time I had no answer; so it hadn’t reached him. But then one day, when I’d given up waiting, the postmistress handed me a square gray envelope. I opened it.
Dear Sir,
I hope you have forgiven me my somewhat erratic behavior: I am a hopeless eccentric. Only now, upon rereading your fairy tale and your letter, do I see that I was wrong to shun you. We are connected, at least by a common theme. I hasten first to reassure you concerning the clockfaces. There is no special mystery about them: If the sea’s ebb tide has its times (exact to the second), then the ebb tide of being (though not a daily event) must also have its favorite hours, minutes, and even seconds. People’s consciousnesses are coarse. But the unconscious—whether the philosopher’s or the signboard painter’s—is always wise. The hand of the painter (who acts unthinkingly, unconsciously, when painting a signboard clockface) is wiser than the painter himself. He doesn’t care where he puts the hands on the disk, but his unconscious does; everywhere and always it inscribes its hour, the hour of unconsciousness, of canceled consciousnesses—the hour of emptinesses. People tramping down the sidewalk don’t realize the danger posed them by those painted clock hands suspended over their lives. And they never will.
All my observations thus far only confirm this hypothesis, and in my forthcoming experiments with nothingness, I mean to be guided by precisely that combination (known to you and me) of hour and minute.
Your humble servant,
G. Lövenix
I replied immediately. I thanked him warmly for his letter, his hypothesis, and asked, in the manner of a pupil, if he might reveal to me the method he planned to use in his next experiments. In his second letter, the Collector of Cracks, now addressing me as his young friend, said that his thinking, after passing through physical formulas and ethical maxims, had entered a new phase.
Only now do I find the ontological framework of your fairy tale justified. You poets see what you see dimly but straightaway, whereas we philosophers see clearly but only by degrees. I’m rereading Descartes’s Meditations. His thoughts about divine guidance are astonishing. “Providence,” he deduces, “is not the conservation of existence but a continuous creation of the world, which at every fraction of an instant”—I take Descartes in extenso—“tumbles into nothingness, and is created
anew and anew, from instant to instant, in its entirety, from suns to grains of sand, by the might of the Creator’s will.” It is clear that between those Cartesian “anew’s” there may be breaks—dead points: Stuck away in their stipple is that dead evil kingdom, the interworld, the black Land of Cracks.
One of you poets—this was long ago—went down into the chasms of the Kingdom of the Dead. The metaphysician should as well.
I hesitate to entrust the nature of my experiments to a postal envelope. If you are interested, come and see me: I’ll show you what I can.
At any rate, the time of meditations is past. It’s time to cranny into the crack.
The singularity of my method is this: People are ignorant of what any street clock knows. Why? Because the crack that cleaves existence also swallows their existence-reflecting consciousnesses. Thrown back into existence, the poor souls don’t suspect that a moment ago they didn’t exist—and only isolated things and persons, swallowed by the crack never to return to this world, arouse a certain fear and foreboding. About the disappeared, people say, “Place of death unknown.” They don’t realize that every instant threatens everything and every one of us with that “place of death unknown.”
The only way to know the inside of the abyss is to not surrender one’s consciousness to the yawning crack. The man who, having exactly calculated the hour and second of the cataclysm, contrives by force of will and faith to exist alone in nonexistence, that man shall enter death alive. Here Dante’s terza rima will not suffice; figures and formulas are needed; what the poet could do only with the images and likenesses of things, the metaphysician must be able to do with the things themselves.
My calculations will not deceive me. Neither will my faith. The day of my experiment is near. So help me God. G.L.
This letter disturbed me. I had no more news that week. I packed a small bag, and a morning train rushed me to the solution.
5
The train was supposed to arrive at noon, but it was an hour late. I left my bag at the station and went off in search of Lövenix’s lodgings. My watch showed a quarter to two when I pushed open the gate in a high solid wall; inside the wall was a yard; at the back of the yard was a little house with three windows. Not a soul. The door stood ajar. I walked in.
A passage; I knocked. No one came. I pushed the handle—the door gave.
The first room contained only books. I called out. No answer. Puzzled, I peeped through an open door into the next room: A table, and drawn up to it an armchair; in the armchair sat Lövenix, forehead slumped on the table, limp arms grazing the floor.
I called out. Silence. I called again. Silence. I tapped him on the shoulder. Harder. His head flopped over, landing noiselessly on his left ear—and I saw a dead, glassy eye, a frozen look of horror in the white pupil. Under his heavy head, stuck to his cheek, lay a notebook filled with tiny writing. I lifted his head (it was still slightly warm), pulled out the notebook, and quickly scanned the last, still-wet lines. I stuffed the notebook in my pocket and went out, closing one door, then another, then a third tightly behind me. The yard and the street were empty. An hour later I was sitting in the train.
I did not understand all the figures and formulas in Lövenix’s notebook. Still, I do understand this: My fairy tale is finished. I surrender. But Lövenix’s figures want more: They want all concoctions, mine and not mine, written and unwritten. They require the return of every last phantasm. No. Yesterday I threw my crackist inheritance into the fire. Concoctions and conjectures are quits. The phantasm is avenged.
1927
THE LAND OF NOTS
Those come to serve the Great Sovereign
count as Ises, others mark down as Nots.
From a census (late seventeenth century)
1
I AM—ADSUM. And I namely am because I belong to the great Nation of Ises. I cannot not be. I think that’s fairly clear and commonsense.
But to explain to you, my worthy Ises, how Being can tolerate a clot of Nots, how it can have allowed—even on a desolate outskirt, on an out-of-the-way little planet—a strange little world of Nots to spring up and spread, that for me will be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, the Land of Nots is a fact. I myself have been there and what follows will attest to the truth of my declaration.
A philosophizing Not once said, “Being cannot not be without becoming Nothing, while Nothing cannot be without becoming Being.” This is so very reasonable it’s hard to believe that a Not, a nonexistent being, could—in little more than a dozen words—have come so close to the truth.
But to return: The bizarre Land of Nots, which I chanced to visit, is a sphere that to them, to Nots, seems flat. Over this seeming flatness through equal intervals of time (which, as the wisest Nots have proven, does not exist per se) occur the seeming risings and settings of a sun that is in fact motionless relative to their little world, that begets shadows now short, now long, now flaring, now fading, so that one cannot say with any certainty whether or not those shadows exist. True, the Nots teach their notkins that shadows are cast by things, but if one thinks about this sensibly, then one cannot know exactly if shadows are cast by things or things by shadows—and if one oughtn’t to cast aside, as pure ostensibilities, Not things, Not shadows, and the Nots themselves with their notional notions.
2
Nots live cheek by jowl. To them it has always seemed, and seems, that many “no’s” can always make a “yes,” that a host of ghosts can be condensed into a solid body. This, of course, is a hopeless notion, even a bit silly, and experiments with such a notion are bound to fail. Then again, these stubborn and extended attempts to be, subverted by Being and launched anew, are the stuff of their so-called life.
Hence: their love, their society, their religion.
Love is when one Not is drawn to another Not, unaware that that Not does not exist. This passionate unawareness may last (depending on the circumstances) moments, minutes, months, or even longer. By the way, they usually love each other in the dark, and only in those rare moments are those imaginary beings from the Land of Nots possibly sincere, admitting as they do that they are no more visible in the light than in the dark.
In spring, when in their little world the faded grasses and Not-intoxicating Not flowers bloom, when here too, in our great Nation of Ises, reality becomes a dream and dreams wake as reality, those imaginary beings start imagining that they too can have love. Just as the wind entwines one grass with another, so the spring effusion, confusing one “I” with another, impels even Nots to exchange what they do not have: bodies and souls. And only when the swirl has fanned away, when the spring has shed its petals, do the Nots see: it was all nothing.
3
Not scholars shut up in their studies spend endless years trying to prove to themselves and others—with the help of letters—that they exist; this is a favorite theme in their tracts and dissertations; the letters comply, but the truth always tells the Not: no.
You would think that rather than try to prove oneself to oneself, rather than weave ideas about life, it would be far simpler to live; having finished part one of the Ethics, rather than embark on part two, it would be simpler and more useful to perform at least one ethical act. But no. Surrounded by his bookish rustlings, his bookshelves buckling beneath their heaps of letters, the Not tries to prove himself to himself. Time, tugging at the pointed hands on their clockfaces, goes round and round; and no matter how pointed some Not thoughts are, they know only how to revolve around themselves. At any rate, the succession of events in the head of a Not is as follows: first the soul, then a piece of dead flesh, then decaying detritus, and then, if one peers through the skull’s blind black sockets, the most ordinary nothing, the Not reduced to naught.
One Not adept began thus: “I think, therefore I am.” But existence is not a consequence of thought—thought is a consequence of existence. And since even Not logic strictly forbids arguments in which a premise follows from a conclusion, the Nots, by inferring thei
r existence from their thinking, forbid themselves to themselves with all the premises of their logics. And yet, do many Nots think? Occasional thinkers, a handful of ideationists. And that’s all. I don’t recall any others. So the rest of them not only don’t exist, they don’t even think. Scholarly Nots, immured in their studies and the pages of their books, typically divide their all into “I” and “not-I.” Therefore, given Not A and Not B in their respective studies, A is “not-I” to B, and B is “not-I” to A. In other words, both A and B will always be “not-I” to someone. That constant “someone” (even their sages did not suspect) was I, an Is, journeying through their land.
It must be admitted, certain philosophizing Nots have, by dint of conjecture, arrived at a nottifying philosophy. In their inventions, dim as the glimmers of their winter dawns, I at times divined an eternal, all-encompassing truth. Some truly intrepid Nots have resolved to do the extraordinary: to diffuse themselves by dint of their thoughts. Thus one wise Not withdrew from the world of ostensibilities to a small quiet study where he spent long years in solitary reflection without ever opening his window on the “outside world”; he became estranged from that world from which he had cut himself off with his sensorium and thinking. Then one day, wandering up to the window by chance, he remembered that world outside and pulled the cord of the blind. Imagine the Not’s surprise when out the window he saw no world at all, as if the whole world, lambent with stars and suns, clad in green and azure, had fallen away, had come unstuck from the panes like a cheap paste-on picture washed off by the rain. Still clutching the cord, the scholar stared into the yawning darkness. There was absolutely no doubt: This was nothing, the most ordinary nothing. The scholar let go of the cord—the blind rustled down. Then he went to his writing table and set to work on what would become his famous treatise arguing that the outside world is just a bad habit of the so-called nervous system.
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