True, naysayers maintained that the “fact” substantiating this treatise was easily explained. The window shutters were closed, a circumstance that the absentminded philosopher had forgotten when he raised the blind: He mistook wooden shutters painted black for the outside world and jumped to conclusions. It happens.
Another wise Not, eyeing the hands of his pocket watch, made the profound observation that although they moved continually, they never left his pocket. Everything else in his system was a simple analogy.
But these are isolated cases. As a rule, as I’ve said, the Nots, who came into Being owing to some incomprehensible oversight or error, must naturally fear and do fear the truth since the truth is something that, in its very essence, annuls all Nots. Though they flatter this word in their books, it is not to the Nots’ advantage to search for the truth, and they find salvation in mystery. Their religion, for instance, is a complex maze of mysteries and what they call sacraments in which they hide something from themselves, deftly practicing the remarkable art of not knowing, attaining at times an astonishing mastery. The Nots’ holy books say that their world was made from nothing. This is true; to study their world is to encounter at every turn that strange material from which it was created—nothing. The few glimmers of truth I found in their books were gradually obscured by their words and sophistries. In their book of Genesis, for instance, it says that the Nots’ forebears ate of the tree of knowledge but not of the tree of life.
Here I must acquaint you, my worthy Ises, with an alien concept specific to Nots—death. Although Nots do contrive at times with extreme naturalness to feign existence, this hoax is exposed sooner or later by what they call “death.” The Not—who supposedly existed only a moment ago—suddenly weakens, becomes still, stops feigning life, and ceases to be: The truth bursts forth. Over the so-called grave of the Not now exposed by death, as yet unexposed Nots sing something about “eternal memory,” speak about the soul’s immortality, and so on, but neither the speakers nor the listeners believe this; “eternal memory” is usually forgotten in a few revolutions of the hour hand. Some Nots, the most ambitious ones, cling to their “immortal name,” but a name is a just a handful of letters and scarcely worth discussing.
In any case, the Nots do not like death: It troubles their conscience, spoils their game of appearances, and torments them with grim forebodings. Their marvelous art of appearing, their ability to be everything while being nothing, was nowhere so striking as in that specifically Not institution, the theater. We Ises invariably reside in our own ownness, whereas Nots will, in a twinkling, trick themselves out in other people’s lives; in their theaters, on a counterfeit ground made of boards, under artificial lights instead of the sun, surrounded by counterfeit, painted things, Nots live invented lives, cry over nonexistent sorrows, laugh for make-believe joy. As I watched, I couldn’t but agree with their best critics who maintain that for them, for Nots, theater is a “school of life.”
4
Here is a fragment from Not mythology.
In the beginning was Chaos. Chaos spewed forth Ocean. Ocean took to wife Fate. And to Fate and Ocean were born three sons: Eν,[1] Kαí,[2] and Παν.[3] The eldest, Παν, inordinately tall, strong, and fond of power, had the temperament of his mother, Fate; the middle son, Eν, who loved solitude, was fitful and morose like his grandfather Chaos; the youngest, Kαí, was neither this nor that: He copied his brothers—both the gregarious Παν and the taciturn Eν. The brothers vied with each other for Kαí’s attention; each loved and taught him in his own way.
When Kαí was still very small, Παν would scoop up a pearl in his enormous fingers, or a trembling drop of deathly afraid water, and show Kαí his reflection inside the pearl or drop. Kαí would always laugh.
When Kαí was a bit older, Παν taught him to play hide-and-seek. The huge yet nimble Παν would hide inside the curl of a crashing wave, or between the valves of a tiny mollusk, or among the petals of flowers on dancing stems, or even between barely visible ripples on the water. Kαí would look for him, splashing the waves with his little fists, riffling the flowers with his plump fingers, prying apart the valves of mollusks. And what joy was his when suddenly, among the tiny petals or sparkling ripples, he discovered his brother.
“Found you!” Kαí would cry, and the enormous Παν, straightening up to his full gigantic height, would roar with thunderous laughter.
Εν looked on in silence at the giant’s games with the little boy. Seizing the moment when Καí was alone, he would take him to his cave for lessons in solitude and pride: Reaching for his own suddenly dilated pupil with fine tenacious fingers, Εν would pluck out of his eye a world entire—with stars and blue skies, seas and lands—and, smiling slyly, show this new bauble to the wonderstruck child. But on hearing Παν’s heavy footfall or his father’s churning tread, Εν would quickly slip the world back into his eye, lower his eyelids, and quietly retreat into the depths of his lonely cave. Καí became so enamored of this game that whenever he caught sight of Εν, his little fists would fly up, reaching for his brother’s eyes.
One day Παν heard Καí crying. He rushed up. The little boy was desperately trying to pull out of his eye something enormous, mottled, and manifold, brilliant with the radiance of all the suns; this “something” was stuck in his pupil and, no matter how he struggled, it would not budge. Παν quickly shoved the enormous, manifold brilliance back inside the child’s eye and slapped his trembling fingers. “Don’t you ever do that again!” he shouted. “Do you hear me?” Scared to death, Καí was silent.
When Ocean grew old and streaked with foamy gray, he began to feel the weight of his shorelessness. Fate said to him, “Ocean, why should you not acquire shores? For a good price.”
The old man was loath, but Fate kept insisting—“You should, you should”—until Ocean summoned his sons before him and said, “Εν, Καí, Παν, my shorelessness weighs on me. I gave you life, and I shall give you death if you do not do exactly as I say: Go into my shorelessness and fetch me—grudging neither your life nor the price—shores.” Little Καí took his brothers by the hand, and they set off into that shorelessness for shores: Παν, Καí, and Εν. On and on they walked. One day, overcome by sleep, they lay down to rest, and Παν and Εν dreamed the same dream: Nothing appeared to them, unseeing and unseen, and said in a hollow, sepulchral voice, “I am Nothing. I do not appear in reality, only in dreams. I have shores, but I am hungry and shall give them only to the ones who say, ‘Yes, I will not be.’ I won’t take fewer than two.”
The night passed. Εν recounted his dream to Παν, and Παν his to Εν, and the brothers said to each other, “Whatever our father, Ocean, has got into his head, it cannot be got out. If we three return without shores, he will kill all three of us; better that two of us should die. We are sorry to part with sweet life, sorrier still to part from our dear little brother, Καí, but if our mother, Fate, so wills it, then yes, we will not be.” With that, they fell back to sleep, but their sleep was eternal. Little Καí poked and prodded the still bodies of his sleeping brothers; finally, looking about for help, he saw lying in front of him brand-new, never-worn shores: steeper here, flatter there, sloping elsewhere. Καí called out: “Εν! Παν!” Seated on the shores’ cliffs and ledges, Echo mimicked him: “Εν . . . Παν . . .” Καí began to cry. Then, drying his tears, he hoisted the craggy shores onto his tender shoulders and, staggering under the weight, carried his costly purchase back to his father. Old Ocean rejoiced at the shores; he flowed into them, tenderly lapping; he grew calm and fell asleep. Καí was left in the care of his mother, Fate.
Without his brothers, Καí began to feel melancholy.
“Dear Εν, dear Παν, what am I without you?” he wailed. “When the two of you, big and strong, took me by the hand, you, Εν, by the right, and you, Παν, by the left, then I was strong with your strength and great with your greatness. Never again will you play hide-and-seek with me, Πα
ν, darting under ripples and petals. Never again will you show me the world inside your eye, dear Εν. Without the two of you I am only ‘Καí,’ only silly little ‘Καí’—an ‘and’ joining nothing.”
Little Καí began to waste and wilt: He shrank from Καí to Kai. Here the myth breaks off. Only in Not books of so-called logic did I find the ending, though it is overly terse and dry: “All men are mortal. Kai is a man. Therefore, Kai is mortal.” Evidently, if one believes these books, Καí became mortal; from him came the Nots, or “mortals,” as they are called in myth, beings whose essence lies in their ability to die, that is, not to be. From their distant ancestor they inherited (all their books make this clear) his longing for Παν-Εν. Settled along the shorelessness of shore-embraced Ocean, they still repeat the old legend about Kai, although distortions have crept in over time: Kai’s longing for his dead brothers has turned into their longing for themselves; Kai’s name is now pronounced “Cain”; and the story of the disappearance of his beloved brothers has been twisted into that of Cain’s fratricide.
5
The most anti-existential aspect of the Nots is their reason, that builder of multiple multiplicities: “thus,” “therefore,” and so on. In the Land of Nots even a pitiful cactus grows from root to spine; yet a Not’s thought, tucked inside eight interlocking bones that form the “head,” tends from spine to root, flows from effect to cause, contrary to all of Nature, which flows from cause to effect, which spurs growth from roots to leaves. Upon receiving a stimulus (a shot, as it were) from without, the Not’s “reason” turns all perceptions upside down, thinks against the current of time, turning to “before” only after “after,” moving from effect to cause. Just as their “reason” revolts against the movement of the hour hand that points to III after II, and II after I, so it revolts against all of Nature whirling planets through orbits, blood through veins, and water through plant cells, while brooking no opposition. The Nots invented the legend of the ship Argo, but isn’t their imaginary life a tale of the wreck of ergo? Parenthetically I would note that the profound system of panlogism recognized by very learned Nots boils down to the story of one extremely anxious ergo that meddled in every problem until it lost one of its letters. (Whoever finds the “r” and the “ego” is requested to return them to their proper place.)
Shortly before leaving the land of the imaginary, I witnessed a scene that made me extremely angry. One day I saw a knot of little notkins gathered round a grown-up Not and, intrigued, I approached the group. The Not was telling the notkins about . . . Only guess what, my worthy Ises! About our life, about life in the Nation of Ises. The Not’s story was confused and nonsensical, but even so it profoundly disturbed and even stunned me. I strode right up to him, barging past the frightened little notkins.
“Now where could you have learned that?” I exclaimed.
“Nowhere,” the Not drawled with a faint smile, “it’s just a fairy tale, a story about what never was.”
“If you want to tell tall tales,” I barked, “you’d better tell them about your own lives, honestly and without involving Being.”
I turned round and walked off. Behind me I could hear the little notkins’ high-pitched giggles.
After that seemingly trivial incident, a strange nagging melancholy came over me, my dear fellow Ises. Nevertheless, I firmly resolved to continue my journey.
I did not remain long in the Nots’ little world. Pushing on farther and farther, deeper and deeper into the wastes of Nothing, I left the Not land where shadows are cast by things, and reached a world where, rather than shadows by things, things are cast by shadows, where the sun barely rises above the arc of the horizon, fumbling the quavery contours of things with its weak and tremulous rays. I now entered the Dead Land where there are neither suns nor things—only an eternal whirling and silent creeping of shadows. Here the sadness that had come over me while still in the Land of Nots became unbearable: I pictured my distant, dazzling homeland and you, my real and undoubted Ises, far away, beyond the wastes of the worlds—and I turned back. Again I crossed the worlds—the world of shadows, timidly trembling at the feet of things (here I bid my Not acquaintances a final farewell)—and at last I reached the land where things have no shadows, where everything is flooded with a light forever at its zenith.
“Nearly there,” I thought as I continued my rapid return to the sun. The last leg of the journey. Under the lashes of waning and waxing beams, shadowless things faded, lost their contours, and quivered until they too had diffused—like their shadows. I had returned home, to you, my fellow Ises.
1922
1. One. (Greek)
2. And. (Greek)
3. Many. (Greek)
THE RUNAWAY FINGERS
1
TWO THOUSAND ears turned toward the pianist Heinrich Dorn as he calmly adjusted the wicker seat of his swivel chair with long white fingers . . . The tails of his dress coat hung down from the chair, while his fingers leapt onto the piano’s black case—and cantered down the straight road paved with ivory keys. Polished nails flashing, they first set off from a high octave C to the treble’s last, glassily tinkling keys. There waited a black block—the edge of the keyboard frame. The fingers wanted to go farther; they stamped distinctly and fractionally on the last two keys—eyes here and there in the hall narrowed: “What a trill!”—then spun round on their tapered ends shod in fine epidermis and, leaping over one another, began galloping back. Halfway along the fingers slackened their pace, musingly choosing now black, now white keys for a footfall that was soft but deeply impressed upon the strings.
Two thousand auricles leaned toward the stage.
A familiar nervous trembling seized the fingers; poised on the string-pressing hammers, they suddenly, in one violent bound, catapulted across twelve keys, coming to rest on C-E#-G-B.
Pause.
And again, cutting loose from the chord, the fingers raced away in a rapid passage toward the end of the keyboard. The pianist’s right hand made to pull back, to the middle register, but its galloping fingers refused—on they flew at breakneck speed: The quarter octave’s glassy tinkles flashed past, the treble’s auxiliary keys squeaked, the black keyboard rim rapped them on the nails. With a desperate tug the fingers suddenly wrenched themselves free, hand and all, from the pianist’s cuff and jumped—diamond ring on the little finger glinting—down onto the floor. The parquet’s waxed wood struck their joints a painful blow, but the fingers, without missing a beat, picked themselves up and—mincing along on their pink shields of nails, vaulting high into the air with great arpeggio-like leaps—hared toward the hall’s exit.
The huge bulbous nose of someone’s boot nearly barred the way. Someone else’s dirty sole briefly pinned the little finger to the carpet. Hugging their pinched pinkie to them, the fingers darted under a floor-length curtain. But a second later the curtain was hiked up to reveal two black columns that widened at the top: The fingers understood—this was the dress hem of one of Dorn’s admirers. Swinging round on their ring finger, they jumped aside.
There wasn’t a minute to lose. All about them people were beginning to whisper. The whispers became murmurs, the murmurs a hubbub, the hubbub an outcry, and the outcry the roar and riot of a thousand feet.
“Catch them! Catch them!”
“What?”
“Where?”
Other members of the audience rushed up to the pianist: He was slumped on his chair in a deep faint, his left hand flopped on his knee; the empty cuff of his right still lay on the keyboard.
But the runaway fingers had no time for Dorn; working their long phalanges, bending and unbending their joints, they were sprinting prestissimo down a Turkish runner toward the brow of the stairs.
With wails and squeals, elbows elbowing elbows, people scrambled out of the way. From the hall came more cries of “Catch them! Where? What?” But the stairs had been left behind.
In one masterly bound, the fingers sailed over the threshold and out into
the street. The riot and racket broke off. The blank, benighted square, wreathed in a yellow necklace of lamplights, gaped in silence.
2
The manicured fingers of the famous pianist Heinrich Dorn, accustomed to strolling the ivory keys of concert pianos, were unused to perambulating wet, dirty pavements.
Finding themselves on the square’s cold and sticky asphalt, picking their way through spittle and puddles of slush, the fingers now realized the folly and extravagance of their escapade.
But too late. Over the threshold of the building left behind, shoes, boots, and walking sticks were already clattering; to return would mean being crushed. Pressing its aching little finger to its ring finger, Dorn’s right hand leaned against a scabrous spur stone and observed the scene.
The concert hall disgorged all the people then shut its doors—leaving the fugitive fingers alone on the empty square.
It began to drizzle. The fingers would have to find lodgings for the night. Sopping their fine white skin in puddles and gutters, they plodded, now tripping, now slipping, along the street. Suddenly, from out of the fog, a wheel rim came thundering past, spattering clumps of mud.
The squeamish fingers barely managed to duck; shaking off the foul daubs, they clambered, shivering and wobbling with exhaustion, up onto the sidewalk and hugged the walls of the massive buildings.
Autobiography of a Corpse Page 14