III. To Awaken in the Garden of Delights. We’ve forgotten our former human existence and thus conclude that we have always lived in the Garden. One day, the serpent whispers the terrible truth in our ear; we break through the membrane, open the door, and discover our own nakedness.
When the veil is drawn back, we take those who control us from the center of the universe or the center of ourselves by surprise. (Isn’t it amazing that we have such a peculiar vision of our own bodies? We see a hand covering a sheet of paper with irregular marks and our view of that image is blurred by a protuberance just beneath the eyes — which we call a nose. Aren’t we concealed within this body? Isn’t it true that we “inhabit it” and spy on the world through its eyes like Ulysses’s men through the blind sockets of the Trojan horse?)
IV. To be Cast Out of the Garden of Delights. But every world has its real ending, like a program infected by a virus that will activate at 00:00 hours on Judgment Day. The Creator has allowed us to glimpse this truth, which presupposes an ending to our pleasant existence (the flaming sword) and the beginning of the anguished scientific quest (the iron balls Galileo threw down from the Leaning Tower of Pisa). Let us begin, then, to wander through a labyrinth overflowing with “prehistoric” skeletons that are nothing but the false evidence of a theory of spontaneous generation, the idea that we are the product of a simple confluence of natural factors. This fallacious “scientific” theory only manages to delay our arrival at the true solution, the SUMMA TECHNOLOGIAE, for as long as the undoubtedly true hypothesis of an act of creation is refuted by the rigged proofs of a process of “evolution.” The only merit of the scientific progress that ensues is to clarify the development of TECHNOLOGY and the arrival at the SUMMA: the belief in ghosts, the creation of reality by the image, the achievement of the imagined paradise. The return to the Garden.
T
TEA. An inexpensive infusion readily available to all, TEA enjoys great popularity across the IMPERIUM, where the practice of taking TEA with little cookies and homemade jam is widespread. The distinctly foreign climate required for the cultivation of TEA saved it from becoming a Siberian crop, “very much our own,” along with the potato and the tomato which are both obviously and notoriously indigenous to Russia. The best TEA was imported from Ceylon in tins decorated with landscapes of verdant rolling hills. Bad TEA was perfidiously hacked atop the mountains of Georgia. Muscovy never had any particular problem with tea, at least not during my stay in the country. Other less innocent infusions, characterized as delicacies (дэликатэссэн), were frowned upon for the aspersion of inefficiency they cast upon the IMPERIUM. For a period of five years, cocoa was entirely absent from the stores. The People’s Comissariat organized a vast defamation campaign featuring a poster with these lines by G. K. Chesterton (translated into Russian, of course):TEA, although an Oriental,Is a gentleman at least;Cocoa is a cad and coward,Cocoa is a vulgar beast.
Followed by a brief text in boldface: “It is a well-known fact that as a boy Volodia Ulianov (LENIN) loved TEA. During his childhood in Simbirsk. .” et cetera.
THELONIOUS MONK. As if I were called THELONIOUS MONK and she were LINDA EVANGELISTA.
I knew how to lead a false existence under those names; we had only to believe in our metamorphosis, leap onto the magic carpet of a perfect life, and contemplate from there the ciphers that denoted a bad year, any bad year—1990, 1991—as if it were 1819 or 1099 or some other historically significant combination of numerals, viewed from a distance.
Folded up inside THELONIOUS — a name that sounded like a Nordic mammal, followed by MONK, the dull thwack of its tail against the water — I was acquiring an incredible facility for generating limpid musical phrases, melodies that found their place in the teeming universe of songs that seem to have a natural life of their own, as if they’d been resonating through the air since the beginning of time. One such song had loaned me the necessary tone for this history. Two melodies that alternated throughout the composition: an initial one that came unstrung like a series of glass beads clinking against a rock crystal vase (perfectly reproducible with an arpeggio on the celesta), followed by another, pregnant with hope, that waited half a beat after the final la of the silver bell to break into the torrential whirl of a spring thaw: blue ice floes floating past, the cry of seagulls audible in the tune raised by the brass ensemble, the anguished lamentations of the English horn (the landscape, its Faustian distances).
That was the motif for the sunny, careless days. When I recount the genesis of this novel, my visit to the (CHINESE) PALACE, the music subsides into the graceful contours of a violin pizzicato, the sun and its shimmering reflection on the canals, the tender green of the gardens, a merry lightness that also serves as background to THELONIOUS’S hopeful stroll along Nevsky Prospekt in search of LINDA. The crucial moment of recognition when the face of LA EVANGELISTA peers out from the features of a busker playing the FLUTE is signaled by a return of the initial phrase, which then takes flight, the opening of a window. .
I. Let us conceive, therefore, of a very expensive book, product of an advanced TECHNOLOGY, whose pages are capable of determining what paragraph the reader’s eyes will alight upon. Your stereo would simultaneously produce a certain melody, a central theme with its corresponding variations, written expressly for this novel. There might be other books, as well; that remains to be seen. We would have examples of LINDA’S silvery voice, MONK’S hoarse and melancholy laughter, cars racing through the streets of Saint Petersburg, the distant whisper of rain against the flagstones. (In fact, the computer software for this novel has been duly developed, and the interested reader can receive by return mail a CD with the soundtrack of P.O.A., its principal theme a continual bass line from which all other motifs ramify, restrained violins at moments of tension. It’s called The MONK.) I visualize poor MONK fighting against a malady that, page after page, plunges him further into the unfathomable abyss of an excess of lucidity. A terrible thing. Lend me your ears: second introduction to The MONK.
MONK suffered from a strange malady.
U
ÚLTIMO VERANO DE KLINGSOR (KLINGSOR’S LAST SUMMER or KLINGSORS LETZTER SOMMER). Stripes of light fanned out over the sea, and there was a wind. When we stopped our PACKARD, LINDA kicked her feet over the edge of the door (the window was down), and jumped out onto the gravelly clifftop. Through the telescope mounted on the terrace of our DACHA, we had discovered mountain lilac in that small meadow across the bay. We had analyzed it minutely in the disturbing proximity granted by the telescope’s prisms, and this cliff had seemed an ideal place to go and view lilacs. In my dossier I had located a military map of the littoral, a военная карта or voennaya karta, and studied various means of egress. We could get there by car, though my karta warned of a dangerous stretch of road. I showed it to LINDA: “the lovers’ precipice,” the name by which cartographers would henceforth label that anonymous spot in honor of our deaths.