Or else it was I who asked: ‘What direction was it flying in? I didn’t see it! Did it vanish over here or over there?’ because I hoped the birds would show me the way to reach Or.
There’s no use my telling you in detail the cunning I used to succeed in returning to the Continent of the Birds. In the strips it would be told with one of those tricks that work well only in drawings. (The frame is empty. I arrive. I spread paste on the upper right-hand corner. I sit down in the lower left-hand corner. A bird enters, flying, from the left, at the top. As he leaves the frame, his tail becomes stuck. He keeps flying and pulls after him the whole frame stuck to his tail, with me sitting at the bottom, allowing myself to be carried along. Thus I arrive at the Land of the Birds. If you don’t like this story you can think up another one: the important thing is to have me arrive there.)
I arrived and I felt my arms and legs clutched. I was surrounded by birds; one had perched on my head, one was pecking at my neck. ‘Qfwfq, you’re under arrest! We’ve caught you, at last!’ I was shut up in a cell.
‘Will they kill me?’ I asked the jailer bird.
‘Tomorrow you’ll be tried and then you’ll know,’ he said, perched on the bars.
‘Who’s going to judge me?’
‘The Queen of the Birds.’
The next day I was led into the throne room. But I had seen before that enormous shell-egg that was opening. I started.
‘Then you’re not a prisoner of the birds!’ I exclaimed.
A beak dug into my neck. ‘Bow down before Queen Org-Onir-Ornit-Or!’
Or made a sign. All the birds stopped. (In the drawing you see a slender, beringed hand which rises from an arrangement of feathers.)
‘Marry me and you’ll be safe,’ Or said.
Our wedding was celebrated. I can’t tell you anything about this either: the only thing that’s remained in my memory is a feathery flutter of iridescent images. Perhaps I was paying for my happiness by renouncing any understanding of what I was living through.
I asked Or.
‘I would like to understand.’
‘What?’
‘Everything, all this.’ I gestured towards my surroundings.
‘You’ll understand when you’ve forgotten what you understood before.’
Night fell. The shell-egg served both as throne and as nuptial bed.
‘Have you forgotten?’
‘Yes. What? I don’t know what, I don’t remember anything.’
(Frame of Qfwfq’s thoughts: No, I still remember, I’m about to forget everything, but I’m forcing myself to remember!)
‘Come.’
We lay down together.
(Frame of Qfwfq’s thoughts: I’m forgetting . . . It’s beautiful to forget . . . No, I want to remember . . . I want to forget and remember at the same time . . . Just another second and I feel I’ll have forgotten . . . Wait . . . Oh! An explosion marked with the word ‘Flash!’ or else ‘Eureka!’ in capital letters.)
For a fraction of a second between the loss of everything I knew before and the gain of everything I would know afterwards, I managed to embrace in a single thought the world of things as they were and of things as they could have been, and I realized that a single system included all. The world of birds, of monsters, of Or’s beauty was the same as the one where I had always lived, which none of us had understood wholly.
‘Or! I understand! You! How beautiful! Hurrah!’ I exclaimed and I sat up in the bed.
My bride let out a cry.
‘Now I’ll explain it to you!’ I said, exultant. ‘Now I’ll explain everything to everyone!’
‘Be quiet!’ Or shouted. ‘You must be quiet!’
‘The world is single and what exists can’t be explained without . . .’ I proclaimed. Now she was over me, she was trying to suffocate me (in the drawing: a breast crushing me): ‘Be quiet! Be quiet!’
Hundreds of beaks and claws were tearing the canopy of the nuptial bed. The birds fell upon me, but beyond their wings I could recognize my native landscape, which was becoming fused with the alien continent.
‘There’s no difference. Monsters and non-monsters have always been close to one another! What hasn’t been continues to be . . .’—I was speaking not only to the birds and the monsters but also to those I had always known, who were rushing in on every side.
‘Qfwfq! You’ve lost me! Birds! He’s yours!’ and the Queen pushed me away.
Too late, I realized how the birds’ beaks were intent on separating the two worlds that my revelation had united. ‘No, wait, don’t move away, the two of us together, Or . . . where are you?’ I was rolling in the void among scraps of paper and feathers.
(The birds, with beaks and claws, tear up the page of strips. Each flies off with a scrap of printed paper in his beak. The page below is also covered with strip drawings; it depicts the world as it was before the birds’ appearance and its successive, predictable developments. I’m among the others, with a bewildered look. In the sky there are still birds, but nobody pays attention to them any more.)
Of what I understood then, I’ve now forgotten everything. What I’ve told you is all I can reconstruct, with the help of conjectures in the episodes with the most gaps. I have never stopped hoping that the birds might one day take me back to Queen Or. But are they real birds, these ones that have remained in our midst? The more I observe them, the less they suggest what I would like to remember. (The last strip is all photographs: a bird, the same bird in close-up, the head of the bird enlarged, a detail of the head, the eye . . .)
Crystals
If the substances that made up the terrestrial globe in its incandescent state had had at their disposal a period of time long enough to allow them to grow cold and also sufficient freedom of movement, each of them would have become separated from the others in a single, enormous crystal.
It could have been different, I know—Qfwfq remarked—you’re telling me: I believed so firmly in that world of crystal that was supposed to come forth that I can’t resign myself to living still in this world, amorphous and crumbling and gummy, which has been our lot, instead. I run all the time like everybody else, I take the train each morning (I live in New Jersey) to slip into the cluster of prisms I see emerging beyond the Hudson, with its sharp cusps; I spend my days there, going up and down the horizontal and vertical axes that criss-cross that compact solid, or along the obligatory routes that graze its sides and its edges. But I don’t fall into the trap: I know they’re making me run among smooth transparent walls and between symmetrical angles so I’ll believe I’m inside a crystal, so I’ll recognize a regular form there, a rotation axis, a constant in the dihedrons, whereas none of all this exists. The contrary exists: glass, those are glass solids that flank the streets, not crystal, it’s a paste of haphazard molecules which has invaded and cemented the world, a layer of suddenly chilled lava, stiffened into forms imposed from the outside, whereas inside it’s magma just as in the Earth’s incandescent days.
I don’t pine for them surely, those days: I feel discontented with things as they are, but if, for that reason, you expect me to remember the past with nostalgia, you’re mistaken. It was horrible, the Earth without any crust, an eternal incandescent winter, a mineral bog, with black swirls of iron and nickel that dripped down from every crack towards the centre of the globe, and jets of mercury that gushed up in high spurts. We made our way through a boiling haze, Vug and I, and we could never manage to touch a solid point. A barrier of liquid rocks that we found before us would suddenly evaporate in our path, disintegrating into an acid cloud; we would rush to pass it, but already we could feel it condensing and striking us like a storm of metallic rain, swelling the thick waves of an aluminium ocean. The substance of things changed around us every minute; the atoms, that is, passed from one state of disorder to another state of disorder and then another still: or rather, practically speaking, everything remained always the same. The only real change would have been the atoms’ arranging themselves in
some sort of order: this is what Vug and I were looking for, moving in the mixture of the elements without any points of reference, without a before or an after.
Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold my newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there’s an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpenetration of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.
Before it was worse, of course. The world was a solution of substances where everything was dissolved into everything and the solvent of everything. Vug and I kept on getting lost in its midst, losing our lost places, where we had been lost always, without any idea of what we could have found (or of what could have found us) so as to be lost no more.
We realized it all of a sudden. Vug said: ‘There!’
She was pointing, in the midst of a lava flow, at something that was taking form. It was a solid with regular, smooth facets and sharp corners; and these facets and corners were slowly expanding, as if at the expense of the surrounding matter, and also the form of the solid was changing, while still maintaining symmetrical proportions . . . And it wasn’t only the form that was distinct from all the rest: it was also the way the light entered inside, passing through it and refracted by it. Vug said: ‘They shine! Lots of them!’
It wasn’t the only one, in fact. On the incandescent expanse where once only ephemeral gas bubbles had risen, expelled from the Earth’s bowels, cubes now were coming to the surface and octahedrons, prisms, figures so transparent they seemed airy, empty inside, but instead, as we soon saw, they concentrated in themselves an incredible compactness and hardness. The sparkle of this angled blossoming was invading the Earth, and Vug said: ‘It’s spring!’ I kissed her.
Now you can understand me: if I love order, it’s not—as with so many others—the mark of a character subjected to an inner discipline, a repression of the instincts. In me the idea of an absolutely regular world, symmetrical and methodical, is associated with that first impulse and burgeoning of nature, that amorous tension—what you call eros—while all the rest of your images, those that according to you associate passion with disorder, love with intemperate overflow—river fire whirlpool volcano—for me are memories of nothingness and listlessness and boredom.
It was a mistake on my part, it didn’t take me long to understand that. Here we are at the point of arrival: Vug is lost; of the diamond eros only dust remains; the simulated crystal that imprisons me now is base glass. I follow the arrows on the asphalt, I line up at the traffic light, and I start again (today I came into New York by car) when the green comes on (as I do every Wednesday because I take) shifting into first (Dorothy to her psychoanalyst), I try to maintain a steady speed which allows me to pass all the green lights on Second Avenue. This, which you call order, is a threadbare patch over disintegration; I found a parking space but in two hours I’ll have to go down again to put another coin in the meter; if I forget they’ll tow my car away.
I dreamed of a world of crystal, in those days: I didn’t dream it, I saw it, an indestructible frozen springtime of quartz. Polyhedrons grew up, tall as mountains, diaphanous: the shadow of the person beyond pierced through their thickness. ‘Vug, it’s you!’ To reach her I flung myself against walls smooth as mirrors; I slipped back; I clutched the edges, wounding myself; I ran along treacherous perimeters, and at every turn there was a different light—diffused, milky, opaque—that the mountain contained.
‘Where are you?’
‘In the woods!’
The silver crystals were filiform trees, with branches at every right angle. Skeletal fronds of tin and of lead thickened the forest in a geometric vegetation.
In the middle there was Vug, running. ‘Qfwfq! It’s different over there!’ she cried. ‘Gold, green, blue!’
A valley of beryllium opened out, surrounded by ridges of every colour, from aquamarine to emerald. I followed Vug with my spirit torn between happiness and fear: happiness at seeing how every substance that made up the world was finding its definitive and solid form, and a still vague fear that this triumph of order in such various fashions might reproduce on another scale the disorder we had barely left behind us. A total crystal I dreamed, a topaz world that would leave out nothing: I was impatient for our Earth to detach itself from the wheel of gas and dust in which all the celestial bodies were whirling, ours should be the first to escape that useless dispersal which is the universe.
Of course, if he chooses, a person can also take it into his head to find an order in the stars, the galaxies, an order in the lighted windows of the empty skyscrapers where between nine and midnight the cleaning women wax the floors of the offices. Rationalize, that’s the big task: rationalize if you don’t want everything to come apart. Tonight we’re dining in town, in a restaurant on the terrace of a twenty-fourth floor. It’s a business dinner: there are six of us; there is also Dorothy, and the wife of Dick Bemberg. I eat some oysters, I look at a star that’s called (if I have the right one) Betelgeuse. We make conversation: we husbands talk about production; the ladies, about consumption. Anyway, seeing the firmament is difficult: the lights of Manhattan spread out a halo that becomes mixed with the luminosity of the sky.
The wonder of crystals is the network of atoms that is constantly repeated: this is what Vug wouldn’t understand. What she liked—I quickly realized—was to discover in crystals some differences, even minimal ones, irregularities, flaws.
‘But what does one atom out of place matter to you, an exfoliation that’s a bit crooked,’ I said, ‘in a solid that’s destined to be enlarged infinitely according to a regular pattern? It’s the single crystal we’re working towards, the gigantic crystal . . .’
‘I like them when there’re lots of little ones,’ she said. To contradict me, surely; but also because it was true that crystals were popping up by the thousands at the same time and were interpenetrating one another, arresting their growth where they came in contact, and they never succeeded in taking over entirely the liquid rock from which they received their form: the world wasn’t tending to be composed into an ever-simpler figure but was clotting in a vitreous mass from which prisms and octahedrons and cubes seemed to be struggling to be free, to draw all the matter to themselves . . .
A crater exploded: a cascade of diamonds spread out.
‘Look! Aren’t they big?’ Vug exclaimed.
On every side there were erupting volcanoes: a continent of diamond refracted the Sun’s light in a mosaic of rainbow chips.
‘Didn’t you say the smaller they are the more you like them?’ I reminded her.
‘No! Those enormous ones—I want them!’ and she darted off.
‘There are still bigger ones,’ I said, pointing above us. The sparkle was blinding: I could already see a mountain-diamond, a faceted and iridescent chain, a gem-plateau, a Koh-i-noor-Himalaya.
‘What can I do with them? I like the ones that can be picked up. I want to have them!’ and in Vug there was already the frenzy of possession.
‘The diamond will have us, instead. It’s the stronger,’ I said.
I was mistaken, as usual: the diamond was had, not by us. When I walk past Tiffany’s, I stop to look at the windows, I contemplate the diamond prisoners, shards of our lost kingdom. They lie in velvet coffins, chained with silver and platinum; with my imagination and my memory I enlarge them, I give them again the gigantic dimensions of fortress, garden, lake, I imagine Vug’s pale blue shadow mirrored there. I’m not imagining it: it really is Vug who n
ow advances among the diamonds. I turn: it’s the girl looking into the window over my shoulder, from beneath the hair falling across her forehead.
‘Vug!’ I say. ‘Our diamonds!’
She laughs.
‘Is it really you?’ I ask. ‘What’s your name?’
She gives me her telephone number.
We are among slabs of glass: I live in simulated order, I would like to say to her, I have an office on the East Side, I live in New Jersey, for the weekend Dorothy has invited the Bembergs, against simulated order simulated disorder is impotent, the diamond would be necessary, not for us to possess it but for it to possess us, the free diamond in which Vug and I were free . . .
‘I’ll call you,’ I say to her, only out of the desire to resume my arguing with her.
In an aluminium crystal, where chance scatters some chrome atoms, the transparency is coloured a dark red: so the rubies flowered beneath our footsteps.
‘You see?’ Vug said. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’
We couldn’t walk through a valley of rubies without starting to quarrel again.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘because the regularity of the hexagon . . .’
‘Uff!’ she said. ‘Would they be rubies without the intrusion of extraneous atoms? Answer me that!’
I became angry. More beautiful? Or less beautiful? We could go on arguing to infinity, but the only sure fact was that the Earth was moving in the direction of Vug’s preferences. Vug’s world was in the fissures, the cracks where lava rises, dissolving the rock and mixing the minerals in unpredictable concretions. Seeing her caress walls of granite, I regretted what had been lost in that rock, the exactness of the feldspars, the micas, the quartzes. Vug seemed to take pleasure only in noting how minutely variegated the face of the world appeared. How could we understand each other? For me all that mattered was homogeneous growth, indiscerptibility, achieved serenity; for her, everything had to be separation and mixture, one or the other, or both at once. Even the two of us had to take on an aspect (we still possessed neither form nor future): I imagined a slow uniform expansion, following the crystals’ example, until the me-crystal would have interpenetrated and fused with the her-crystal and perhaps together we would have become a unity within the world-crystal; she already seemed to know that the law of living matter would be infinite separating and rejoining. Was it Vug, then, who was right?
The Complete Cosmicomics Page 18