Many ways of blanking attention during the hours of the pose, for me precious hours, when identical with T’s concepts of The Woman. Let mnemonic jingles loose in my head or advertising lyrics. Silently chant mantras and sutras. Mouth the syllable OM mentally. . . . Consider koans, what is the sound of one hand clapping. Attempt to reach a million by counting up in tens. Start a tape-loop of thoughts swinging round my head, doesn’t matter what they are. Start telling myself a story, about anything, never get beyond the opening lines, over and over in new forms seeking perfection. Visualize a light year. Hypnotize myself by staring at a light or a shiny surface till the whole room fades out, only the bright light fills the universe, float up to meet it weightless bodiless. All these techniques taught in Image School.
This is a tape-loop of thoughts, doesn’t matter what they are, in place, on tiptoe in green fins, legs straddled, eyes wide open, seeing everything . . . not heeding . . .
Round the table they’re eating raw live lobster, shells stripped away from neatly-diced foamy pink backs, from which they pluck tiny cubes of flesh with their lacquer chopsticks, intact feelers questing the air vaguely, leg joints flexing in and out gently in a parody of motion.
The lady of the house kneels on the mats beside n each man in turn, splashing Johnnie Walker Black ie Label into the tiny porcelain cups.
The guest, drinking, not eating as much as he ought to, art expert revered by everyone, has been like a father to his corpulent host; who is red-faced and always looks overheated as if somebody is busy cooking him, who secretly prefers a hand of poker.
“So you’re still with this Yokoo brought-to-life thing?”
Quietly smirking.
Turning a shade redder with concern, the gasring under him hotting up, the host looks worried sick. Mistake to say “Why yes, shouldn’t I be?”
“Maybe the market is turning against him,” he theorizes, trying to catch the guest’s suggestion on the wing. If I’m fast I can swap her with one of my less enlightened friends? Hot tips in art are so hard to understand, harder than the I Ching’s hexagrams as used in business.
“Now I didn’t say anything was wrong with Yokoo. He was a good boy. But what’s life that you bring something to it, that’s the irony ...”
“Fill his glass,” the host whispers.
“As if poor Yokoo is some sort of hologram— you know holograms?”
Nod. Of course a businessman knows holography, information storage and retrieval. . . but is he being goaded with his knowledge?
“Holography? yes, so we shoot our laser beams at him, Hey Presto, up he jumps, rescued from flatland. But what is more true art this I ask you my boy, information retrieval—or creation of it!”
Boiling a shade redder, “. . . which is most use to you, storing data or pulling it out again . .
“Exactly! Now you’re catching on. An artist—- or a businessman! Listen my boy while I read you this telex.” Fumbling in his kimono sleeves, for a crumpled photostat. “ANTENNAE OF THIS MULTICELLULAR ORGANISM HUMANITY PROBE THE ENVIRONMENT NOT SO MUCH TRANSMITTERS AS RECEIVERS THE SENSUAL LABORATORY THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE RANDOM SAMPLES WE TAKE OF OUR ENVIRONMENT ARE DEVICES TO EXPAND OUR ABILITY TO ABSORB etcetera etcetera SIGNED MARK BOYLE.”
Urgent need to know, more Johnnie Walker. “When did this message arrive?”
“Sixty years ago! I’ve had it up my sleeve since then.”
Head sunk in hand, to his wife’s alarm. More Johnnie Walker.
“Can’t understand, can’t understand, just a businessman.” Large tears, fat boiled out of his face, sweat of panic as the stocks plunge.
“Art moves in cycles, hope you can ride one!” “Do you mean . . . my Yokoos are done for? Who’s this Mark Boyle?”
“Forget about him, primitive level of technology. I guess he just sprayed plastic on the street then peeled it off in squares and hung them up to exhibit, but we can do something about his ideas now, let me show you . . .” Fumbling in the huge kimono sleeves again, knocking over the porcelain cup, which the wife swiftly sets up again and tops up. Pushing a lobster still questing its antennae to one side, he places a red plastic box on the lacquer table . . .
“It’s a network, covers the whole city, they beam arbitrary squares of environment, change as often as you like, but one has no more value than any other because they ALL have total value.”
Pressing a button, a square of fuzzy lines springing up in front of the alcove where the girl poses in The Gratitude of Aeschylus, blotting her out, swimming into focus as . . . a patch of gritty ground, some pebbles embedded, a used matchstick, a slurred footprint.
“Arbitrary art the art of true impermanence. . . because this site no longer exists in the same form, and the computer will never beam the same site twice. Twice unrecoverable, and that’s what true art is—the unrecoverable moment. Mistake up till now has been to try to keep the supposedly significant moment alive for ever and ever, but look, this site is as significant as any other so it contains all significance, the same can be said of the next site . .
Johnnie Walker, stabbing the button again, The Gratitude of Aeschylus briefly visible, a new site hazing in, focussing . . . a square of concrete with turd in one corner, grainy crumbling texture excretion of thick sand . . .
“. . . changes the site automatically every 24 hours in case you get attached to it!’’
... in place, on tiptoe in green fins, legs straddled, eyes wide open, seeing everything bathed in green by my contact lenses . . . not heeding the dinner party, WHERE IS IT?
So fashions change. Now it’s my turn to join the Manet girls and Utamaro girls on the country fair and store roof circuit. My Master has put me out with the trash.
All the costumes and plastic figures to be sent to Dream Island our rubbish reef in the bay, and I am standing by them, free to claim them now they’re trash . . .
But how much can I carry away—and where can I carry it to—and what’s the use?
It’s almost worth going to Dream Island myself. Why, I could live on the discarded food-gifts that pass direct from the Store to the Rubbish Island (almost) without any intervening stage of being opened by recipients (such is our wealth). Dress up in my roles against the backdrop of rubbish and feel at home—for I am rubbish now, in the eyes of fashion. A failure of nerve? Gradually allowing my poses to relax, moving a little at first, then a lot, till at last I was actually running about the island dressed as T’s girls? Seems attractive—luridly attractive—but it wouldn’t be my art as I know it—it might be something else, nearer to madness ... Yet with more purity by far than the show booth or the store roof! I’d soon be respected by the outcasts—the other outcasts—who ferry the rubbish barges to and fro from the City, become maybe their Madonna, Mona Lisa, Angel, Onan Partner, in blue and red stockings with a pinned up skirt, hairy armpits and silver total-reflection contact-lenses. Set up the beachguard and the red devil with the flintlock musket and the wedding guest as if for gunnery practice on the hills of compressed cans and buildings of bottles, image sentries of our life. Straddle the plastic horseback with fish skeleton in my teeth. Bare my breasts and brush them with toothpaste peering through the smog for a vision of Mt. Fuji. The huge cut-out train in the oily surf lapping the metal rocks of the island, bearing me on its buffers waving the barges in with a giant plastic flower. Clipping on the tiny plastic breasts of Bardot I’d suckle the mice that scamper over the food-hills. With my striped sunshade by the striped water I’d wait for faceless people to admire me.
To live T’s scenes at last in their totality!
The Grid moves over the City, at random, sectioning it into areas two meters square, beaming images of these to discerning homes where they are reproduced flat and vertical in the places of honor. Sectioned roofing, crowd heads, tire marks, footprints, flat spaces, rough spaces, rubble, hats, railway line, stone, glass, metal, turd.
. . . The City can’t be said to be dirty or clean, chaotic or ordered, natural
or unnatural. Each two-meter section is what it is, includes all the others in itself, is part of TOTAL REALITY. The new art is popular with industrialists, the sanitation department, the town planners. The City cannot be spoiled ever again. The City IS. Its molecular geometry is innocent, elemental.
The Grid sections off the head and shoulders of a girl with total-reflection contact lenses in her weeping eyes reclining on a heap of crushed soft drink cans and cabbages traveling in a barge on a black greasy waterway. For 24 hours she halts in the grainy screening of the image, and hangs in the place of honor, till the computer selects another section at random, scuffed earth with a trail of impact craters arcing across it left by drops of dog piss.
But she is already on Dream Island, grinning, with her tongue sticking out.
OUR LOVES SO TRULY MERIDIONAL
Obi Nzekwu, age 35, profession: teacher of Geometrical Religion in a small school in Eastern Nigeria in the mid-Euro-Afro Conglomeration— that’s me.
Till five years ago I was teaching common or garden geometry and algebra, there was nothing religious about Maths at all . . .
Then, need I say, the glassy Catastrophe Barriers appeared and we found the whole planet divided up neat as the segments of an orange. Bless Great Circle! Bless Greenwich Meridian! Bless Barrier!—we exclaim in joy.
It wasn’t so much of a catastrophe for us, you see, as it must have been for those “less fortunately placed” ... A euphemism, one doesn’t speak in terms of “Elsewhere” nowadays, it’s not done. (Non-names for non-existent places such as America, Australia, China and Japan. . . . !)The Education Ministry in Lagos has stopped issuing globes of the world with everything painted black apart from the single segment of the sphere that is mid-Euro-Afro. They’re introducing a new design; the single segment alone. Visualize a bow with a fat bow-belly tapering to a point at top and bottom—a steel bow string taut between North and South. That’s what the world looks like now, officially. (Besides, it uses less material, that way.)
And I have to teach this nonsense! I tell you, it offends me, logically!
We can see through the barriers, can’t we? Eastward and Westward! Landscape doesn’t just vanish into void. Or people. Or towns.
There’s just no passing through physically. Or shouting with the voice. Or radioing. Aircraft that tried to fly over have slid to the ground in ruins. Nuclear missiles that the Euros tried to punch a hole through with went bang in the sky over the North Atlantic, but that was all. Tunnelling hasn’t worked either. I’m not sure if wind and rain and such pass through—but I suppose they must, somehow, or there’d have been drastic climatic changes by now. . . which I haven’t noticed. The Yam Rains have gone on falling at the right time for planting.
It’s not actual glass. Though it looks like glass and feels like it to touch. Some force field, they say.
Of course being translucent we can read signs held up on the other side and talk in sign language—like bloody savages!—and I suppose theoretically news could be shuttled round the whole world from segment to segment by this mean. But it’s discouraged, this contact thing. Irreligious, would you believe? By the time mid- Euro-Afro had banded together after the chaos and wars of the first two or three years, the proselytizing Church of Mathematical Geometry was in charge in most states of the Conglomeration.
Because, being “well-placed,” we’re quite happy with the situation, would you believe?
We have to cross the Sahara to reach Euro, there’s no sea route any more. But set against this, the Nigerian and Libyan oilfields; the industrial heartland of Euro; its best farmland; the forests of Scandinavia. All this in one unified Conglomeration! Then, politically, we Africans saw Namibia automatically liberated—and the remnant of White South Africa duly cut down to size! (The Catastrophe Barriers fell neatly into place on the Greenwich Meridian, then 20 degrees east of Greenwich, presumably following the same pattern all the way round and back again. From which you may deduce, if you like, that whatever put them there was perfectly familiar with our old way of mapping the world! I’d say at this point, consult a globe or an atlas, except that there aren’t any, only under lock and key!)
Politically, the Euros are happy too. They can be friends with us, since the White Africa problem was solved by our Nigerian army in the first year. Then no more Soviet threat (for that matter, no more American imperialism!) and the inhabitants of the western sectors of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia were delirious at their enforced separation from the USSR—even though they lost half their friends and kin in the process, and the tanks of the Soviet-Arab Alliance are parked up against the Barrier in plain view; another reason i why we turn our heads the other way! Those may have wiped out the bulk of White Africa and earned our gratitude for it—but alas for Israel and so much else locked up in that segment! Much bloody chaos on our right-hand side, I assure you, which we learnt about from pathetic refugees clamoring up against the barriers with their signs like hitchhikers.
Our left-hand side was a sad case. England, sliced through Greenwich, with the East End of London included in our prosperous Conglomeration as a useless backwater town. The once powerful City of London itself in total decay, and the rest of the country a surly dictatorship obsessed with tilling the land. What else do they have in their segment? A few French fields, most of Spain, the poverty of Morocco, Mali, the Sahara . . . then northwards three quarters of Iceland, excluding Reykjavik: which must be almost totally isolated in a huge ocean along with a knob of Brazil. (I’ve scraped the blackout paint off an old globe to check—then hurriedly painted it back again.) Hard cheese, on our western flank! But we’re doing very nicely, thank you, in mid-Euro-Afro. A heaven-sent blessing, the Barriers! So teach Mathematical Religion, count your blessings, don’t squint east or west, pray the Barriers stay up. Don’t ask who put them there. Say it was God. Or Allah. Or Forest Head. Some Alien Superbeing. Or even an all-too-human ABM Doomsday System. Paint the Globe black, except for your segment. Fine it down to a single steel bow-belly of a world.
THAT MIGHT BE ALL RIGHT FOR SOME PEOPLE!
All segments have to come together at the Poles. They must join together there. The Church has suppressed all mention of flights to the North or South Pole, to see. But there must have been flights. I’m highly suspicious about this silence.
So'how about seeing for myself?
Not so impractical as it sounds. I can emigrate North. They need skilled labor in the Euro factories. Then, even if I have to hijack an airliner, we shall see what we shall see! Screw the Church, screw the Censorship. I’m for Truth. Me, Obi Nzekwu!
There must be others like me.
A tall Negro wearing a lightweight Euro-import suit that had come by lorry convoy all the way down the Sahara highway, with the segment emblem of the Church of Mathematical Geometry in his buttonhole, having thrown up his teaching post in the hot prosperous market city of Onitsha on the banks of the Niger, climbed aboard a lopsided mammy-wagon with the legend SEARCH YOUR SEGMENT FOR SUCCESS! painted along one side.
At Lagos he signed on with a Ruhr recruiting agency, receiving a one-way ticket to Euro in return.
The Caravelle flew due north across the great desert, the glass walls still hundreds of miles distant on either side, though he imagined them progressively narrowing the further they flew.
His seat neighbor was a Hausa similarly bound for a Euro factory, who confided that he had taught in Koranic School once. He too wore the segment emblem now.
“How could I go on bowing to Mecca?’’ he asked sadly. “Mecca is gone. The Kaaba, the Black Stone, is forever black and vanished.”
“Maybe it’s a test of faith?” suggested Obi buoyantly. “Besides, you never really bowed to Mecca. Not accurately. Did you ever take the Earth’s curvature into account? Your prayers were forever flying off at a tangent into space.”
“In that case, maybe they were heard. By whoever it was. At least it has made the world a pleasanter place.”
Obi was on the point of
asking, “how do you know?” when he realized that for this man as for so many others the word world simply meant segment nowadays. Life was fine in mid-EuroAfro so long as you didn’t think of the exigencies to the westward, or the bloodshed to the east. . . .
I lost my love when the walls came down. He was left on one side, I was on the other. We’d even been holding hands a moment earlier. An inexorable force squeezed us apart. His hand became rubber then jelly and slid away to join the rest of his body over there. Let me remember this moment carefully. We were all taken by surprise. Taxis were crashing headlong into the sudden invisible obstruction. Such chaos and fire and broken vehicles and bodies. At first we all thought it was an earthquake. So we tend to forget certain things. Such as this very important fact: of what exactly happened to human beings such as Ichiro and I, who weren’t riding taxis or trains but only standing quietly, a little apart, but in love, hands joined.
I felt a repulsion. Not emotional, but perhaps the sort of repulsion the butterfly feels for the chrysalis it separates from. Ichiro’s hand seemed to become a pseudopodium—a protoplasmic tentacle thinning out and flowing back towards his body. A rope of cells. Then a string, a gossamer. Then nothing. Whereupon suddenly it was a proper human hand again, beating on the glass between us. I repeat, it’s only an impression, this. Perhaps I was hysterical. So much noise and crashing of taxis and the suddenness of it! But I really think the Walls weren’t designed to hurt us individually in the flesh if we were just standing about quietly, in love for instance.
I think of them as an experiment—a test, like an entrance examination. In my case, of Love. In other cases (there must be others), of human will, or dedication. Of the fine human qualities.
So, when we found we couldn’t speak to each other, Ichiro and I, because this Wall was a wall of silence too, we scribbled characters in the air to make our minds clear to each other. Easy enough for us Japanese. We’re used to misunderstandings, ambiguities in our words, that can only be cleared up by the invisible smoke signals of Chinese characters traced in a coffee bar, in the street, in a bus, upon thin air by our fingers . . . We vowed, by that means, to make our way to where the Wall ended, and be reunited.
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