I. In this partial analysis of the IMPERIUM, I shall focus on the following aspects: a) Destinyb) Fearc) Mortal danger
a) Destiny. Russia, the great country that constituted the nucleus of the IMPERIUM, possesses a universal destiny that is the sum of all individual destinies. The topside or visible portion of this great destiny, this ineluctable Russian destiny, makes its way like an icebreaker through the frozen armor-plating of the years, leaving behind a jagged wake of truncated lives. The currents of this destiny come from very far and cross through the IMPERIUM’S lives like fossilized radiation left over from the Big Bang. And these narrative threads, invisible and inescapable, are destiny. Everyone is crisscrossed by these lines of force, fate’s ultrapowerful magnet, drawing them to their death. With room for small fluctuations, fruitlessly heroic efforts, the world as will and representation, and other such trivialities that bother us only when we’re young, after which, tired of rowing against the shifting tides of destiny, we extend our arms in a cross and float painlessly.
Russia (or the IMPERIUM) is struggling against its destiny, but the shadow of this fatalism pursues it. Many historic dates can be adduced to confirm the certainty of its predestination. Hence there is no increase in human morality nor absolute progress, but only the infallible pincer lowered from the sky which, from among the panicked and fleeing multitude — unaware that the danger does not exist for them — selects the idiot seminarian, with his bangs and wire-rimmed glasses, for its appalling fulmination, without motive, without cause, without delivering any verdict.
Destiny makes use of blind executors of its will who, as such, merit our comprehension more than our contempt. Russia is an old country and there one breathes the frozen air of multiple histories that bear out this theory of destiny. They know it and that’s enough. They go out into the snow barefoot to face the firing squad’s nine spurts of flame: merely the means chosen by destiny to send a concise message of utmost importance.
b) Fear. I’ve jerked the strings of small fears—my cruel half-smile — without knowing I was being watched on high by the omnipresent pupil from which all the underlying fear irradiates, and I have felt vertigo when I raised my eyes and discovered that fact. Each person’s performance as the petty tyrant of our own tiny realm is a necessary movement of the soul, a display, a rattling of chains. Whether we like it or not, an icy wind blows from the Hesperides, inhumanly. Like God himself, fear is given a name and endowed with the limbs and torso of a state institution; this fear accumulates in the multiple guises of jails, the secret police, ministerial directives — only a few of the many incarnations of its absolute being.
This latent terror binds every organic compound; it can be found in all of them just as oxygen is found in chains of carbon. You are fear and something else, anything else. And through this intermediary, the inhabitants of the IMPERIUM enter into reaction, they function, agitating their blind pod-limbs and secreting the hard coral efflorescences of the State, which are interlaced with fear.
Though fear cements the imposing fabric of the IMPERIUM, life under the dominion of this fear is ethereal and unreal. Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны. (We live without feeling the country beneath our feet. Mandelstam.) The man who has experienced the terror of hearing his own guilty name shouted out in a formation loses faith; his image in the mirror dissolves and he closes his eyes and listens in anguish to the thud of the hobnailed boots as they come to a halt before him. I’ve discovered once-beautiful souls deformed by the abyssal pressures of the IMPERIUM, the unfathomable sea where they live out their one-celled lives. Hence the HAM’S violent tempests, the ravages of AQUA VITAE.
The divinity of fear gazes down upon the lamentable tableau of the IMPERIUM and smiles in satisfaction from its celestial box seat.
c) Mortal danger. The enthusiasm generated by the IMPERIUM shortly before its collapse was the nervous grin, the last dying hope of the hunted man who, corralled at the edge of the abyss and about to be devoured by the monster, sees it stop short in wonder over the flutter of a passing butterfly, a sight that attenuates the fury in its eyes and creases the blue skin of its formless snout into a human grimace. In the brief instant of the miracle, the prey has a moment to give thanks to God, reevaluate the monster’s perversity (“No, you’re not bad, it was the years of isolation, the terrible conditions, I knew the change would come, I had faith in you”), and sidestep the monster’s charge. Once on safe ground, shielded by an overhang, the escapee shouts the truth to the monster and spends all necessary funds to capture it, so as never to have to put the goodness of its nature to the test again.
INDIGO (the color). Lying back on my deck chair, the red PACKARD parked only a few meters from an intensely blue sea, I devote myself to studying the golden glints in the air churned by the bronze thighs of women emerging from the water. Seeing them, I thought of a superb slogan for a brand of shampoo or conditioner: “Mientras por competir con tu cabello, / oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano. .” a line from Góngora that could have been put to excellent use by Vidal Sassoon, the celebrated California hairstylist: “A rival to your hair, the sun / flashes on burnished gold in vain. .” The bathers were advancing with that special clumsiness of terra firma, sirens dragged to shore by the sea to exhibit their magnificent colors, their backs treated with vitamin-fortified creams, their taut bellies, visually centered by the dark point of the naveclass="underline" ideal graphic statements for the great cover photos of the nineties which, dreamed up in distant international centers, reached every beach in the world with the mandatory force of a ministerial directive. For a second, I imagined an impossible collision between the motley decor of the beach before me and that same bathing resort at the beginning of the century, its sepia tones entirely incompatible with this pure indigo. The terror those beige ladies would feel if confronted by the color pale TTE OF THESE VERY BLONDE GIRLS, ALL OF THEM FORMER KOMSOMOL MEMBERS, DELIVERING CARELESS KICKS TO BEACH BALLS THAT WERE VERY RED AND BLUE AND YELLOW. Full, vivid colors, straight out of a magazine printed on expensive coated stock; the metallic glitter, the fine film that overlay their human souls with the finish of an industrial product, the high sheen of an inanimate object that the hard gazes of certain fashion models seek to copy, the distant bearing, the contrived expression. Already we were being blinded by the first flashes of the neon look with its tremendous artificiality, and those girls on the beach, made up in indelible lipsticks and pencils, were all resolved in an infra-human gamut of color, cruel mannequins. As for me, educated by long years of watching a multichromatic Trinitron TV, I observed them without any particular astonishment, taking note of the season’s colors, those “natural” tones we believe have been captured documentarily when we leaf through a fashion magazine or go to the movies. Perhaps you are unaware that it was French couturiers who, in the wake of World War I, imposed the fashion for tanning and spread the fallacy of its healthful effects? Nowadays you’d do well to wonder whether the vivid, blinding yellow of this sun is the same as it always was; perhaps it was launched two seasons ago by an influential fashion house, a “canary yellow” sun, “very youthful”—or whether the greens of the palm trees were “Panzer green” or “Chevalier green.” And, of course, for a very long time now we’ve had a blue that is “Prussian.” Prosit!