The philosopher’s thinking went like this: Any concept (Begriff, in the language of the great German metaphysicians) comes lexically and logically from greifen (to grasp, grip, bite). But any Begriff, when thought through to the end, turns into a Grenzbegriff, or boundary concept, that eludes comprehension and cannot be grasped by the mind, just as one’s elbow cannot be grasped by one’s teeth. “Furthermore,” Kint’s article continued, “in objectifying the unbitable outside, we arrive at the idea of the transcendent: Kant understood this too, but he did not understand that the transcendent is also immanent (manus—‘hand,’ hence, also ‘elbow’); the immanent-transcendent is always in the ‘here,’ extremely close to the comprehending and almost part of the apperceiving apparatus, just as one’s elbow is almost within reach of one’s grasping jaws. But the elbow is ‘so near and yet so far,’ and the ‘thing-in-itself’ is in every self, yet ungraspable. Here we have an impassable almost,” Kint concluded, “an ‘almost’ personified by the man in the sideshow trying very hard to bite his own elbow. Alas, each new round inevitably ends in victory for the elbow: The man is defeated—the transcendent triumphs. Again and again—to bellows and whistles from the boorish crowd—we are treated to a crude but vividly modeled version of the age-old gnoseological drama. Go one, go all, hurry to the tragic sideshow and consider this most remarkable phenomenon; for a few coins you can have what cost the flower of humanity their lives.”
Kint’s tiny black type proved stronger than the huge red letters on circus posters. Crowds flocked to see the dirt-cheap metaphysical wonder. The elbow-eater’s act had to be moved from its suburban tent to a theater in the center of the city, where No. 11111 also began performing at universities. Kintists took to quoting and discussing the ideas of their teacher, who now expanded his article into a book: Elbowism: Premises and Conclusions. In its first year, it went through forty-three editions.
The number of elbowists was mushrooming. True, skeptics and anti-elbowists had also cropped up; an elderly professor tried to prove the antisocial nature of the elbowist movement, a throwback, he claimed, to Stirnerism, which would logically lead to solipsism, that is, to a philosophical dead end.
The movement also had more serious detractors. As a columnist named Tnik, speaking at a conference on problems of elbowism, put it: Even if the elbow-eater should finally manage to bite his own elbow, what difference would that make?
Tnik was hissed and hustled off the podium before he could finish. The poor wretch did not ask for the floor again.
Then there were the copycats and wannabes. One such self-promoter announced in print that on such-and-such a date at such-and-such a time he had succeeded in biting his elbow. A Verification Commission was immediately dispatched and the imposter exposed. Dogged by contempt and outrage, he soon committed suicide.
This incident only increased the renown of No. 11111; students at the universities where he performed followed him around, especially the girls. One of the loveliest—with the sad, shy eyes of a gazelle—obtained a private meeting with him so as to offer up her half-bared arms: “If you must, bite mine: It’s easier.”
But her eyes met two turbid blots hiding beneath black brows. In reply she heard: “Do not gore what is not yours.”
Whereupon the gloomy fanatic of his own elbow turned away, giving the girl to understand that the audience was over.
Nevertheless, No. 11111 remained the rage. A well-known wag construed the number 11111 to mean “the one-and-only five times over.” Men’s clothing stores began selling jackets with detachable elbow patches. Now a man might try to bite his elbow whenever and wherever, without removing his jacket. Many elbowist converts gave up drinking and smoking. Fashionable ladies began wearing high-necked, long-sleeved dresses with round cutouts at the elbows; they decorated their funny bones with elegant red appliqués imitating fresh bites and scratches. A venerable Hebraist, who had spent forty years studying the veritable dimensions of Solomon’s temple, now rejected his former conclusions: He said that the length of sixty cubits stated in the Bible should be understood as a symbol of the sixtyfold incomprehensibility of what is hidden behind the veil. A member of parliament in search of popularity drafted a bill to abolish the metric system in favor of that ancient, elbow-conscious measure: the cubit. And although the bill was ultimately defeated, while still under review it provoked brawls in the press and the corridors of power, not to mention two duels.
Embraced by the masses, elbowism became vulgarized and lost the strict philosophical aspect that Eustace Kint had attempted to give it. Scandal sheets, misinterpreting elbowist teachings, took to promoting it with slogans like ELBOW YOUR WAY TO THE TOP and RELY ON YOUR ELBOWS AND YOUR ELBOWS ALONE.
Soon this new way of thinking had become so widespread that the State, which counted No. 11111 a citizen, decided to use the elbow-eater for its own fiscal purposes. The opportunity promptly arose. Certain sporting publications had already begun printing daily bulletins on the half inches and quarter inches still separating the elbow-eater’s teeth from his elbow. Now a semiofficial government newspaper followed suit, running its bulletins on the next-to-last page with the trotting-race results, soccer scores, and stock market reports. Some time later, this same semiofficial paper ran a piece by a famous academician, a proponent of neo-Lamarckism. Proceeding from the assumption that the organs of a living organism evolve by means of practice, he concluded that the elbow was, in theory, bitable. Given a gradual stretching of the neck’s transversely striate muscular matter, this authority wrote, a systematic twisting of the forearm, etc. . . . But then the logically impeccable Kint struck back with a blow for unbitability. The argument that ensued recalled Spencer’s with the dead Kant. The time was now ripe: A bankers’ trust (everyone knew its shareholders included government bigwigs and the country’s richest capitalists) sent out fliers announcing a Grand BTE (Bite That Elbow) Lottery to be held every Sunday. The trust promised to pay every ticket holder 11,111 monetary units to one (one!) as soon as the elbow-eater’s elbow was bitten.
The lottery was launched with much fanfare—jazz bands and iridescent Chinese lanterns. The wheels of fortune began spinning. The ticket ladies—their white teeth grinning in welcome as their bare, red-flecked elbows dove down into glass globes full of tickets—toiled from midday to midnight.
But ticket sales were slow at first. The idea of unbitability was too firmly ingrained in people’s minds. The ancient Lamarckist called on Kint, but Kint continued to find fault.
“The Lord God himself,” he said, “cannot arrange things so that two and two do not equal four, so that a man can bite his own elbow, and thought can go beyond the bounds of the boundary concept.”
The number of so-called bitableists who supported the lottery was, compared to that of unbitableists, insignificant and shrinking every day; lottery bonds were tumbling, depreciating to almost nothing. The voices of Kint and company—demanding that the names of the masterminds behind this swindle be revealed, that the cabinet resign, that reforms be instituted—sounded louder and louder. But then one night, Kint’s apartment was searched. In his desk investigators found a fat stack of lottery tickets. The warrant for his arrest was instantly revoked, the discovery made public, and by next day the stock price for tickets had begun to climb.
An avalanche, they say, may begin like this: A raven, perched high on a mountain peak, beats its wing against the snow, a clump of which goes sliding down the slope, gathering more and more snow as it goes; rocks and earth go crashing after it—debris and more debris—until the avalanche, goring and gouging the mountainside, has engulfed and flattened everything in its path. So then, a raven first beats its wing against the snow then turns its hunched back on the consequences, pulls the scales over its eyes, and goes to sleep; the avalanche’s roar wakes the bird; it pulls the scales from its eyes, straightens its back, and beats the other wing against the snow. The bitableists took the place of the unbitableists, and the river of events reversed itself, flowing from mouth
to source. Jackets with detachable elbow patches were now to be seen only in rag-and-bone shops. Meanwhile No. 11111, that lottery-ticket wonder, that living guarantee of capital investment, went on public view. Thousands of people filed past the glass cage in which he labored day and night over his elbow. This buoyed hopes and increased ticket sales. As did the semiofficial bulletins, now on the front page in large type; every time they shaved off another fraction of an inch, tens of thousands more tickets were snapped up.
The elbow-eater’s determination—inspiring a universal belief in the attainability of the unattainable and swelling the ranks of bitableists—rattled even the stock market. Briefly. One day the fractions of an inch separating mouth from elbow so diminished (triggering yet another surge in ticket sales) that at a secret government meeting the ministers began to fret: What if the impossible were to happen and the elbow were to be bitten? To redeem even a tenth of all the tickets at the advertised rate of 11,111 to one, the finance minister warned, would leave the treasury in tatters. The bank trust president put it this way: “A tooth in his elbow would be a knife in our throat, revolution in the streets. But short of a miracle, that won’t happen. Remain calm.”
And indeed, starting the next day the fractions of an inch began to increase. The elbow-eater seemed to be losing ground to his triumphant elbow. Then something unexpected happened: The elbow-eater’s mouth, like a leech that has sucked its fill, let go the bloodied arm, and for an entire week the man in the glass cage, his glazed eyes fixed on the ground, did not renew his struggle.
The metal turnstiles by the cage turned faster and faster, thousands of anxious eyes streamed past the dephenomenoned phenomenon, the grumbling grew louder every day. Ticket sales stopped. Fearing unrest, the government increased police squads tenfold, while the banker’s trust increased the return on subscription tickets.
Special keepers assigned to No. 11111 tried to sic him on his own elbow (the way tamers encourage reluctant lions with steel prods), but he only snarled and turned sullenly away from the food he had grown to hate. The stiller the man in the glass cage became, the greater the commotion around him. And no one knows where it might all have led, if not for this: One day before dawn, when the guards and keepers, despairing of ever getting elbow and man to fight again, took their eyes off No. 11111, he suddenly fell on his enemy. Behind his glazed gaze, some sort of thought process had evidently occurred over the past week, prompting a change in tactics. Now the elbow-eater, attacking his elbow from the rear, rushed straight for it—through the flesh in the crook of his arm. Hacking through the layers with his hooklike jaw, forcing his face deeper and deeper into the blood, he had nearly reached the inside of his elbow. But before that bony junction, as we know, comes the confluence of three arteries: brachialis, radialis, and ulnaris. From this severed arterial knot, blood now began to gush and fountain, leaving the elbow-eater limp and lifeless. His teeth—so near his goal—unclenched, his arm unbent, and his hand dropped to the floor, followed by his whole body.
The keepers heard the noise and raced to the cage only to find their charge sprawled in a spreading pool of blood, stone-dead.
Insofar as the earth and the rotary presses continued to turn on their axes, the story of the man who wanted to bite his elbow does not end here. The story, but not the fairy tale: Here the two—Fairy Tale and Story—part ways. The Story steps—not for the first time—over the body and goes on, but the Fairy Tale is a superstitious old woman and afraid of bad omens. Please don’t blame her, don’t take it amiss.
1927
1. The possible is for fools. (Spanish)
2. Enough for the wise. (Latin)
3. And enough for fools. (Latin)
YELLOW COAL
1
THE ECONOMIC barometer at Harvard University had consistently pointed to bad weather. But even its precise readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its own energies. Oil wells were running dry. Black, white, and brown coals were producing less and less power every year. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snowcaps melted by the perennial summer could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine generators would stop.
The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun’s yellow whips, it whirled around like a dervish dancing his last delirious dance.
Had nations ignored political strictures and come to each other’s aid, salvation might have been theirs. But adversity only exacerbated jingoism, and soon all the New and Old World Reichs, Staats, Republics, and Lands—like the fish on the desiccated bottoms of erstwhile lakes—were covered with a viscous sheath, swathed in borders like the filaments of cocoons, and raising customs duties to astronomical levels.
The only international agency was the Commission for the Access of New and Original Energies: CANOE. To the man who discovered a new energy source, a motive power as yet unknown on earth, CANOE had promised a seven-figure sum.
2
Professor Leker was too busy to notice people. Blinkered by diagrams, thoughts, and pages from books, his eyes had no time to reflect faces. A frosted screen standing before the window shielded him from the street; the black casket of an automobile, window curtains drawn, did likewise. At one time Leker had delivered lectures, but he gave them up so as to devote all his time to his researches into quantum theory, ionization, and the vicariate of the senses.
Thus Professor Leker’s twenty-minute stroll, his first in ten years, was pure chance. Leker set out in the company of his thoughts, without noticing places or faces. But the very first crossroad threw him into a quandary. The scientist was obliged to raise his head and gaze about to get his bearings. For the first time, his pupils were rubbed round by the street.
A dingily bilious sun was seeping through a tent of black clouds. Passersby, spitefully elbowing elbows, were rushing along the pavement. People thronging the doorways of shops tried to pummel their way through and stuck fast, their faces flushed with spite and fury, their teeth bared.
The running boards floating along the tram tracks were jammed with passengers: Chests tried to climb up on backs, but the backs, brandishing spiteful shoulder blades, would not give an inch; tangles of hands gripped the vertical handrails with a predatory vigor, like flocks of carrion crows fighting over prey.
The tram passed by, like a curtain sliding back to reveal a new scene unfolding across the street: Two fist-shaking men were assaulting each other with words; they were instantly surrounded by a circle of gloating pupils, another circle and another; above the jumble of shoulders shoving, raised sticks threatened.
Looking about him, Leker walked on. Suddenly his knee knocked against an outstretched hand. Poking out of filthy rags, the hand was demanding a donation. Leker dug in his pockets; he had no money on him. The open palm continued to wait. Leker again searched himself; nothing except a notepad. Without taking his gaze off the beggar, he stepped aside; the cripple’s eyes, half blinded by pus, oozed with an insatiable, impotent spite.
Feeling more and more apprehensive, Professor Leker surveyed the agitated street, the gnashing steel rims and humming human swarms. The people changed, yet remained the same: jaws clenched, brows butting the air, elbows endlessly elbowing their way. The famous physiologist first raised his eyebrows in surprise then knit them together, the better to contain a nascent thought. Leker slowed his step and opened his notepad, searching for the exact words. But then someone’s elbow stabbed him in the ribs; he staggered sideways, hit his back against a post, and dropped his pad. Yet even the
pain could not stop Leker from smiling: His thought, tightly tied with associative threads, had been flung to the bottom of his brain.
3
The contest announced by CANOE netted nearly a hundred proposals, complete with mottos. Among the competing projects was that of Professor Leker. Most of the proposals contained theoretical or practical impossibilities; a few others, considered in more detail, offered some semblance of a solution but required too great a capital investment. The competitor who came up with the motto Oderint[1] might well have lost out to the witty and scientifically sophisticated idea of forcing the sun itself to pay for the damages it had inflicted on the planet: Heightened solar activity in some parts of the world should, this project said, be boosted to temperature levels capable of doing work by converting heat into mechanical energy. The idea of harnessing the sun to rebuild the globe’s half-ruined industries was close to winning the seven-figure prize, but . . .the corners of the commission chairman’s eyes looked a little yellow, while the lenses of the deputy chairman’s pince-nez had a prickly glint.
Both men favored the sun-harnessing project, but the chairman, who hated to agree with his deputy, switched his vote at the last minute to spite him—and Oderint tipped the scales.
To its next closed meeting, the commission invited Professor Leker. Asked to briefly state his idea, Leker began:
“The pattern of my project is simple: I propose to use the spite scattered among countless individuals as energy. On the long keyboard of feelings, you see, the black keys of spite have their own distinct, sharply differentiated tone. Whereas other emotions—tenderness, say, or affection—are accompanied by a certain loss of muscle tone and relaxation of the motor system, spite is muscular to the core; it’s all tensed muscles, clenched fists, and gritted teeth. But this feeling has no outlet; it is muted, muffled, and socially dimmed, like an oil lamp, which is why it produces soot but no light. So then, remove the mufflers, let that bile burst the social dams, and this yellow coal, as I call it, will set our factory flywheels spinning again, a million lamps will shine with electric bile and . . .I must ask you not to interrupt . . . How can this be done? If I may have a piece of chalk, I will draw you a diagram of my myeloabsorberator: AE perpendicular at 0; here, at an angle along the panel’s surface, we have a stipple of absorbent pores.
Autobiography of a Corpse Page 16