All this, however, could only go on for so long, and the refusal to grow old, to settle down and be transformed into a fat mother was, a few years later, to impact the immigrant populations in their turn. When a social system is destroyed, this destruction is definitive, and there can be no going back; the laws of social entropy, valid in theory for any human-relational system, were rigorously demonstrated by Hewlett and Dude two centuries later; but they had already, for a long time, been understood intuitively. The fall of Islam in the West curiously echoes that, a few decades earlier, of Communism: in both cases, the phenomenon of decline was to take shape in their countries of origin, and in a few years sweep away the organizations, however powerful and wealthy they were, that had been established in the host countries. When the Arab countries, after years of being insidiously undermined, essentially through underground Internet connections, could at last have access to a way of life based on mass consumption, sexual freedom, and leisure, the enthusiasm of their populations was as intense and eager as it had been, half a century earlier, in the Communist countries. The movement started, as is so often the case in human history, in Palestine, more precisely in a sudden refusal by young Palestinian girls to limit their existence to the repeated procreation of future jihadists, and from their desire to take advantage of the moral freedom enjoyed by Israeli women. In a few bursts, the transformation, to the accompaniment of techno music (as rock music, a few years earlier, had been the accompaniment to the move toward the capitalist world, and with an effectiveness increased by use of the Web) spread to all the Arab countries, which were forced to face a mass revolt by their youth, in the face of which they could obviously do nothing. It then became perfectly clear, in the eyes of the Western populations, that all of the countries of Dar-el-Islam had only been kept in their primitive faith by ignorance and constraint; deprived of their bases in the rear, the Western Islamist movements collapsed at a stroke.
As for Elohimism, it was adapted perfectly to the leisure civilization in which it had been born. Imposing no moral constraints, reducing human existence to categories of interest and of pleasure, it did not hesitate, for all that, to make its own the fundamental promise at the core of all monotheistic religions: victory over death. Eradicating any spiritual or confusing dimension, it simply limited the scope of this victory, and the nature of the promise associated with it, to the unlimited prolongation of material life, that is to say the unlimited satisfaction of physical desires.
The first fundamental ceremony to mark the conversion of each new follower—the taking of a DNA sample—was accompanied by the signing of a document in which the postulant bequeathed all his possessions to the Church, after his death—the latter reserving the right to invest them, while promising to return them to the follower, after his resurrection, in their entirety. This came across as all the less shocking as the objective being pursued was the elimination of all natural bonds, and therefore all systems of inheritance, and because death was presented as a neutral period, simply a stasis in anticipation of a rejuvenated body. After intense lobbying of the American business world, the first convert was Steve Jobs—who requested, and was granted, a partial derogation in favor of the children he had procreated before discovering Elohimism. He was closely followed by Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and then a growing number of leaders of the most important firms in the world. The Church thus became extremely rich, and only a few years after the death of the prophet it was already, in terms of capital invested as well as the number of its followers, the leading religion in Europe.
The second fundamental ceremony was the entry into anticipation of resurrection—in other words suicide. After a period of hesitation and uncertainty, the custom was gradually established of carrying it out in public, according to a simple, harmonious ritual, at a moment chosen by the follower, when he felt that his physical body was no longer in a state to give him the joys he could legitimately expect from it. It was embarked upon with great confidence, in the certainty that resurrection was near—something that was all the more surprising as Miskiewicz, despite the colossal research funding at his disposal, had made no real progress, and, even if he could in fact guarantee the unlimited preservation of DNA, he was for the moment unable to create a living organism more complex than a simple cell. The promise of immortality made at the time of Christianity rested, it must be said, on even shakier foundations. The idea of immortality had basically never been abandoned by man, and even though he may have been forced to renounce his old beliefs, he had still kept, close to him, a nostalgia for them, he had never given up, and he was ready, in return for any explanation, however unconvincing, to let himself be guided by a new faith.
Daniel1, 22
Then, a transformable cult will achieve over a withered dogma the empirical predominance that must prepare the systematic ascendancy attributed by positivism to the emotional aspect of religion.
—Auguste Comte, Appeal to Conservatives
THERE WAS SO LITTLE of the believer in my nature that I was, in reality, almost indifferent to other people’s beliefs; it was without any difficulty, but also without attaching any importance to it, that I gave Isabelle the contact details for the Elohimite Church. I tried to make love with her, that last night, but it was a failure. For a few minutes she tried to chew on my cock, but I had the strong sense that she hadn’t done this for years, that she didn’t believe in it, and anyway, to do this kind of thing properly you need a minimum of faith, and enthusiasm; the flesh in her mouth remained soft and my drooping balls no longer reacted to her halfhearted caresses. She gave up and asked me if I wanted some sleeping pills. Yes I wanted some, it’s always a mistake to refuse, in my opinion, it’s useless torturing yourself. She was still capable of getting up first and preparing the coffee, that was one thing she could still do. There was a little dew on the lilacs, the temperature was cooler, I had reserved a seat on the 8:32 a.m. train, and summer was beginning to loosen its grip.
As usual I took a room at the Lutétia, there too it took me a long time to call Vincent, perhaps a month or two, for no precise reason. I did the same things as before but I did them in slow motion, as if I had to break down the movements in order to carry them out in an almost satisfying manner. From time to time I sat down at the bar, imbibed tranquilly, phlegmatically; quite often, I was recognized by old acquaintances. I made no effort to encourage the conversation, and this didn’t bother me at all; truly this is one of the few advantages of being a star—or rather a former star, in my case: when you meet someone else and you arrive, as you might normally expect, at a point when you’re both bored, even though neither of the two is precisely the cause of it, in some way by common agreement, it’s always the other who bears the responsibility for it, who feels guilty for not having kept the conversation at a sufficiently high level, for not having known how to establish a sufficiently warm and sparkling atmosphere. This situation is comforting, and even relaxing as soon as one truly begins not to give a fuck. Sometimes, in the middle of a verbal exchange in which I contented myself with nodding my head in a knowing way, I would indulge in involuntary daydreams—moreover, generally rather unpleasant ones. I thought back to those casting sessions when Esther had had to kiss boys, to those sex scenes she had acted out in various short films; I remembered how much I had taken it personally, uselessly as it happens, I could have made a scene or burst into tears but that would have changed nothing, and I was well aware that I could not have survived very long under those conditions anyway, I was too old, I had no strength left; this observation did not, however, diminish my sorrow, because from the place I now found myself in there was no way out other than to go on suffering right to the end, I would never forget her body, her skin, nor her face, and I had never felt with such clarity that human relations are born, evolve, and die in a totally deterministic manner, as inexorable as the movements of a planetary system, and that it is absurd and vain to hope, however slightly, that you can modify their course.
I could hav
e stayed at the Lutétia for quite some time, perhaps not as long as in Biarritz, because I was starting in spite of everything to drink a bit too much, anxiety was slowly burrowing into my organs and I spent whole afternoons at Bon Marché looking at pullovers, there was no sense in going on like that. One October morning, probably a Monday morning, I phoned Vincent. From the moment of my arrival at the house in Chevilly-Larue I felt as though I were penetrating a termite nest or a hive, an organization in which everyone had a precisely defined task, and where things had begun to operate at full capacity. Vincent was waiting for me at the door, ready to leave, his cell phone in his hand. He got up when he saw me, shook my hand warmly, and invited me to accompany him around their new offices. They had acquired a small office building, the construction was not yet finished, some workers were installing soundproofed walls and halogen lights, but about twenty people were already settled in their offices: some were answering the telephone, others were typing letters, updating databases, or whatever, in short I was in an SME—frankly, it was really a big enterprise. If there was one thing I would not have expected from Vincent the first time I met him, it was to see him transform himself into a business leader, but after all, anything was possible, and what’s more he seemed at ease in the role; sometimes improvements happen, in spite of everything, in the lives of certain people, the process of living cannot simply be reduced to a purely declining trajectory, this would be a deceptive simplification. After introducing me to two of his colleagues, Vincent announced that they had just won an important victory: after several months of legal battles, the Council of State had finally made a judgment authorizing the Elohimite Church to buy for its own use the religious buildings that the Catholic Church no longer had the means to keep up. The only obligation was that which already applied to the previous owners: to maintain, in partnership with the National Office for Historical Monuments, the artistic and architectural heritage in a well-preserved state; but, as far as the nature of the religious celebrations within these buildings went, no limitation had been imposed. Even in eras more aesthetically distinguished than our own, Vincent remarked to me, it would have been unthinkable to bring to fruition in only a few years the conception and realization of such a display of artistic splendors; this judgment, in addition to putting at the disposal of the faithful a good number of highly beautiful places of worship, was also going to allow them to concentrate their efforts on the building of the embassy.
Just as he was beginning to explain his vision of the aesthetics of the ritual ceremonies to me, Cop entered the office, wearing an impeccable sea-blue blazer; he too looked in stunning shape, and energetically shook my hand. Undoubtedly, the sect seemed not to have suffered at all from the death of the prophet; on the contrary, even, things seemed to be going better and better. Nothing had happened, it was true, since the staged resurrection at the beginning of the summer on Lanzarote; but the event had had such a media impact that it had proved sufficient, requests for information were continually flooding in, many followed by applications for membership, the numbers of the faithful and of available funds were constantly increasing.
That same evening I was invited to dinner at Vincent’s, in the company of Cop and his wife—it was the first time I had met her, and she came across as a levelheaded, solid, rather warm person. Once again I was struck by the fact that one could easily have imagined Cop in the guise of a business executive—let’s say, a director of human resources—or a civil servant responsible, for example, for the distribution of agricultural subsidies in a high mountain region; nothing about him suggested mysticism or even simple religiosity. In fact, he actually seemed particularly unimpressionable, and it was without any apparent emotion that he informed Vincent of the emergence of a worrying tendency, which had been reported to him from certain zones recently touched by the sect—in particular Italy and Japan. Nothing in the dogma indicated the way that the ceremony of voluntary departure was to proceed; all the necessary information for the reconstruction of the body of the follower being preserved in his DNA, the body itself could be disintegrated or reduced to ashes without this having the slightest impact. An unhealthy theatrical tendency seemed to be gradually developing, in certain cells, around the dispersal of the constitutive elements of the body; particularly implicated were doctors, social workers, and nurses. Before taking his leave, Cop passed a file of twenty-odd pages to Vincent, as well as three DVDs—most of the ceremonies had been filmed. I stayed over, and accepted a cognac while Vincent began to read. We were in the living room that had belonged to his grandparents, and nothing had changed since my first visit: the armchairs and the green-velvet settee still had lace antimacassars, the photos of alpine landscapes were still in their frames; I even recognized the philodendron near the piano. Vincent’s face darkened rapidly as he went through the file; he gave Susan a summary in English, then quoted a few examples for my attention:
“In the Rimini cell, the body of a follower was entirely drained of its blood; the participants smeared themselves with the blood before eating his liver and sexual organs. In the Barcelona cell, the man had asked to be hung from a butcher’s hook in a cellar for a fortnight before being put at the disposal of everyone else: the participants served themselves, cutting off a slice that they consumed between them there and then. In Osaka, the follower had asked that his body be crushed and compacted by an industrial press, until it was reduced to a sphere twenty centimeters in diameter, which would then be covered with a film of transparent silicon, and could be used in a game of bowling; he was apparently a bowling fanatic in his lifetime.”
He stopped, his voice was quavering slightly; he was visibly shocked by the extent of the phenomenon.
“It’s a social trend…,” I said. “A general trend toward barbarism; there is no reason you should escape it…”
“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know how to put a stop to this. The problem is that we have never talked about morality, at no point…”
“There are not a lot of basic socioreligious emotions…,” Susan interjected in English. “If you have no sex, you need ferocity. That’s all…”
Vincent was quiet, he reflected and served himself another glass of cognac; it was at breakfast the following morning that he announced his decision to launch a global campaign: “Give People Sex. Give Them Pleasure.” In fact, after the first few weeks following the death of the prophet, the sexuality of the followers had rapidly diminished, stabilizing at a level roughly equal to the national average, i.e., very low. This decrease in sexuality was a universal phenomenon, common to all the social classes, to all developed nations, which did not spare teenagers or very young adults; homosexuals themselves, after a brief period of frenzy following the liberalization of their practices, had calmed down a lot, they now aspired to monogamy and a peaceful, settled life, as a couple, devoted to cultural tourism and the discovery of local wines. For Elohimism it was a worrying phenomenon, because, even if it bases itself fundamentally on a promise of eternal life, a religion considerably increases its attractiveness as soon as it is able to give the impression of offering in the here and now a life that is fuller, richer, more exalting, and more joyful. “With Christ, you live more”: this had more or less been the constant theme of the advertising campaigns organized by the Catholic Church immediately before its disappearance. Vincent, therefore, had come up with the idea, beyond the Fourierist reference, of reviving a practice of sacred prostitution, classically attested in Babylon, and in the first instance he would appeal to those among the former fiancées of the prophet who might be willing to organize a sort of orgiastic tour, with the aim of setting the followers the example of a permanent sexual gift, and of spreading throughout all the local branches of the Church a wave of lust and pleasure capable of hindering the development of necrophiliac and murderous practices. The idea seemed excellent to Susan: she knew the girls, she could phone them, she was sure that most of them would accept enthusiastically. During the night, Vincent had penciled a serie
s of sketches intended to be reproduced on the Internet. Openly pornographic (they represented groups of two to ten people, men and women, using their hands, sexes, and mouths in almost all manners you could think of), they were nonetheless extremely stylized, with very pure lines, very different from the disgusting photographic realism that characterized the productions of the prophet.
After a few weeks, it became obvious that the campaign was a real success: the prophet’s fiancées’ tour was a triumph, and, in their cells, the followers strove to reproduce the erotic configurations thrown down on paper by Vincent; they took real pleasure in it, to such a point that, in most countries, the frequency of meetings had multiplied threefold; the ritual orgy therefore, unlike other sexual propositions of more profane and recent origin, such as swinging, would appear not to be an outdated formula. More significantly still, conversations between followers in everyday life, as soon as they had established a minimum of empathy, were accompanied more and more often by touching, intimate caresses, if not mutual masturbation; the resexualization of human relations, in short, seemed to have been achieved. It was then that we became conscious of a detail that, in the first moments of enthusiasm, had escaped everyone: in his desire for stylization, Vincent had strayed some way from a realistic representation of the human body. While the phallus still bore some resemblance (although more rectilinear, hairless, and devoid of any apparent network of veins), the vulva was reduced in his drawings to a long, narrow slit, devoid of hair, situated in the middle of the body, which prolonged the curve of the buttocks, and which was certainly able to open wide to welcome cocks, but was rather less appropriate for any excretory function. More generally, all the external organs had disappeared, and thus the beings imagined, while they were able to make love, were obviously incapable of feeding themselves.
The Possibility of an Island Page 27