The average length of a good tyranny is a decade and a half, two decades at most. When it's more than that, it invariably slips into a monstrosity. Then you may get the kind of grandeur that manifests itself in waging wars or internal terror, or both. Blissfully, nature takes its toll, resorting at times to the hands of the rivals just in time; that is, before your man decides to immortalize himself by doing something horrendous. The younger cadres, who are not so young anyway, press from below, pushing him into the blue yonder of pure Chronos. Because after reaching the top of the pinnacle that is the only way to continue. However, more often than not, nature has to act alone and encounter a formidable opposition from both the Organs of State Security and the tyrant's personal medical team. Foreign doctors are fiown in from abroad to fish your man out from the depths of senility to which he has sunk. Sometimes they succeed in their humanitarian mission (for their governments are themselves deeply interested in the preservation of the status quo), enough to enable the great man to reiterate the death threat to their respective countries.
In the end both give up; Organs perhaps less willingly than doctors, for medicine has less in the way of a hierarchy which stands to be affected by the impending changes. But even the Organs finaUy get bored with their master, whom they are going to outlive anyway, and as the bodyguards ^ra their faces sideways, in slips death with scythe, hammer, and sickle. The next morning the population is awakened not by the punctual roosters but by waves of Chopin's Marche Funebre pouring out of the loudspeakers. Then comes the military funeral, horses dragging the gun carriage, preceded by a detachment of soldiers carrying on small scarlet cushions the medals and orders that used to adorn the coat of the tyrant like the chest of a prize- winning dog. For this is what he was: a prize- and race- winning dog. And if the population mourns his demise, as often happens, its tears are the tears of bettors who lost: the nation mourns its lost time. And then appear the members of the Politburo, shouldering the banner-draped coffin: the only denominator that they have in common.
As they carry their dead denominator, cameras chirr and click, and both foreigners and the natives peer intently at the inscrutable faces, crying to pick out the successor. The deceased may have been vain enough to leave a political testament, but it won't be made public anyway. The decision is to be made in secrecy, at a closed—that is, to the population—session of the Politburo. That is, clandestinely. Secretiveness is an old party hang-up, an echo of its demographic origin, of its glorious illegal past. And the faces reveal nothing.
They do it all the more successfully because there is nothing to reveal. For it's simply going to be more of the same. The new man will differ from the old man only physically. Mentally and otherwise he is bound to be the exact replica of the corpse. This is perhaps the biggest secret there is. Come to think of it, the party's replacements are the closest thing we've got to resurrection. Of course, repetition breeds boredom, but if you repeat things in secret there is still room for fun.
The funniest thing of al, however, is the realization that any one of these men can become a tyrant. That what causes all this uncertainty and confusion is just that the supply exceeds the demand. That we are dealing not with the tyranny of an individual but with the tyranny of a party that simply has put the production of tyrants on an industrial footing. Which was very shrewd of this party in general and very apt in particular, considering the rapid surrender of individualism as such. In other words, today the "who-is-going-to-be-who" giessing game is as romantic and antiquated as that of bilboquet, and only freely elected people can indulge in playing it. The time is long since over for the aquiline profiles, goatees or shovel-like beards, walrus or toothbrush mustaches; soon it will be over even for eyebrows.
Still, there is something haunting about these bland, gray, undistinguished faces: they look like everyone else, which gives them an almost underground air; they are similar as blades of grass. The visual redundance provides the "government of the people'' principle with an additional depth: with the rule of nobodies. To be governed by nobodies, however, is a far more ubiquitous form of tyranny, since nobodies look like everybody. They represent the masses in more ways than one, and that's why they don't bother with elections. It's a rather thankless task for the imagination to think of the possible result of the "one man, one vote" system in, for example, the one-billion-strong China: what kind of a parliament that could produce, and how many tens of millions would constitute a minority there.
The upsurge of political parties at the turn of the century was the first cry of overpopulation, and that's why they score so well today. While the individualists were poking fun at them, they capitalized on depersonalization, and presently the individualists quit laughing. The goal, however, is neither the party's own nor some particular bureaucrat's triumph. True, they turned out to be ahead of their time; but time has a lot of things ahead, and above all, a lot of people. The goal is to accommodate their numerical expansion in the non-expanding world, and the only way to achieve it is through the depersonalization and bureaucratization of everybody alive. For life itself is a common denominator; that's enough of a premise for structuring existence in a more detailed fashion.
And a tyranny does just that: structures your life for you. It does this as meticulously as possible, certainly far better than a democracy does. Also, it does it for your own sake, for any display of individualism in a crowd may be harmfuclass="underline" first of all for the person who displays it; but one should care about those next to him as well. This is what the party- run state, with its security service, mental institutions, police, and citizens' sense of loyalty, is for. Still, all these devices are not enough: the dream is to make every man his own bureaucrat. And the day when such a dream comes true is very much in sight. For bureaucratization of individual existence starts with thinking politics, and it doesn't stop with the acquisition of a pocket calculator.
So if one still feels elegiac at the tyrant's funeral, it's mostly for autobiographical reasons, and because this departure makes one's nostalgia for "the good old days" even more concrete. After all, the man was also a product of the old school, when people still saw the difference between what they were saying and what they were doing. If he doesn't deserve more than a line in history, well, so much the better: he just didn't spill enough of his subjects' blood for a paragraph. His mistresses were on the plump side and few. He didn't write much, nor did he paint or play a musical instrument; he didn't introduce a new style in furniture either. He was a plain tyrant, and yet leaders of the greatest democracies eagerly sought to shake his hand. In short, he didn't rock the boat. And it's partly thanks to him that as we open our windows in the morning, the horizon there is still not vertical.
Because of the nature of his job, nobody knew his real thoughts. It's quite probable that he didn't know them himself. That would do for a good epitaph, except that there is an anecdote the Finns tell about the will of their Presi- dent-for-Life Urho Kekkonnen which begins as follows: "If I die ..."
1980
The Child of Civilization
For some odd reason, the expression "death of a poet" always sounds somewhat more concrcte than "life of a poet." Perhaps this is because both "life" and "poet," as words, are almost synonymous in their positive vagueness. Whereas "death"—even as a word—is about as definite as a poct's own production, i.e., a poem, the main feature of which is its last line. Whatever a work of art consists of, it runs to the finale which makes for its form and denies resurrection. After the last line of a poem nothing follows except literary criticism. So when we read a poet, we participate in his or his works' death. In the case of Mandel- starn, we participate in both.