And so Pope Stephen paid very close attention to everything that entered his field of perception.
At the time of the Irish Pope's death in 1940, obituary writers all over the world compared him to every saint and sage in history: Buddha, Whitman, Plotinus, Rumi, Dante, Eckhart, John of Arc, St. Terrence of Avilla, and so on, and on; but the one who came closest to categorizing how Stephen's mind worked was an obscure Canadian professor of literature who wrote, "The only mind in history comparable to Stephen's was that of a fictitious character-Mr. Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street."
Like Tobias Knight, Pope Stephen had spent all his life "trying to find out what the hell was really going on," although he never expressed it that way.
He had decided that what was going on was that everybody was very carefully avoiding paying attention to what was going on.
The Stephenites called themselves "Seekers of the Real" and were always watching very closely to see what was going on. They all had posters in their rooms with the sainted Pope's famous remark: "If you don't pay attention to every little detail, you miss most of the jokes."
When Dr. Dashwood went out to lunch that day, he was stopped on the street by a haggard and wild-eyed minor bureaucrat who said his name was Joseph K.
"They have everybody mind-warped," Joseph K. said, clutching Dashwood's sleeve desperately.
"Yes, yes," Dashwood said, trying to disentangle himself. "But I really must hurry-"
"What are the charges against me?" Joseph K. demanded. "What are the charges against any of us? We all try to obey their rules, don't we? Of course we do; we know what will happen at the slightest, the most minute, the most microscopic infraction, do we not? Not that I mean to imply that they are wrong, necessarily, or unjust- you won't find any subversive literature or pornography in my room, I can assure you absolutely-no, certainly not unjust or in any way unfair, but it must be admitted that in the application of the rules, in the application, I say, they are sometimes overfinicky, a bit strained and literal, if you take my meaning."
"Certainly, certainly," Dashwood said, struggling to remove Joseph K.'s fingers from his sleeve. "But if you were to see a good counselor-not a psychiatrist, necessarily… I don't mean to imply-"
"We are all guilty," Joseph K. said flatly. "They have established so many rules, and recorded them in archives that the ordinary citizen cannot consult, that we must all, the most loyal and decent of us, stumble on a mere technicality occasionally. Not that I mean to assert that technicalities are not necessary, you understand, since it is important to spell out in detail the exact meaning intended in a statute, don't you agree, George?"
"Frank," Dashwood said automatically.
Joseph K. suddenly looked sly. "Oh," he said slowly, "you claim that you are not George Dorn? How clever of them, although I can't imagine how they persuaded you, but of course a man of your moral principles would not be bribed, certainly. They must have convinced you it was for my own good in some absolute metaphysical sense, right?
Certainly. You would not work for them out of malice, would you?' He released Dashwood with a poignant, despairing gesture. "You mean well, he said. "They all mean well, I know. But I am innocent, I tell you!"
He backed away. "And you are George Dorn, and I am not deceived," he added bitterly.
Then he turned and ran.
PARAREALISME
The big news of the 1985 season in the art world was that Francois Loup-Garou had abandoned Neo-Surrealism and founded a new school of art called Pararealisme.
This was only partly the result of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg; it was also a matter of economics.
For nearly a century, it had been very important for an artist to belong to a "school," and it was even better to be the founder of a "school." This was not just a case of "In Union There Is Strength"; it was also a shrewd marketing strategy. It might take an individual painter ten or twenty years to be "discovered"-if he were original, it might take much longer, and he might not be alive to enjoy it-but when a School of Art was formed, that was News, and all members of the school were discovered simultaneously.
There had been an Impressionist school, a Post-Impressionist school, an Expressionist school, an Abstract Expressionist school, a Cubist school, a Futurist school, a Pop school and an Op school, and so on. Francois Loup-Garou had noticed that the commercial life of each school was getting shorter all the time, due to the accelerated intensity of competition: Neo-Surrealism was already being eclipsed, as an object of news and debate, by the Neo-Cubism of the American, Burroughs.
He decided it was time to launch a new school.
After the experience of the Rehnquist in the Lobster Newburg, Pararealisme seemed appropriate to him.
According to Standard Operating Procedure, he got a few friends together and they began issuing Proclamations denouncing all other schools (especially Neo-Cubism) as obsolete and reactionary. This got them into the Art Journals and into some newspapers.
Then they held their own first show, and that got them into the international news magazines.
They were news; it didn't really matter if their paintings were any good at all.
In fact, their paintings were rather good, in a fey sort of way.
They had revived traditional "representational" art (everything they did was as naturalistic as a news photograph), but with a difference that made a difference.
The largest canvas at the first Pararealiste show was Loup-Garou's own What Do You Make of This, Professor? An enormous work it was, covering two walls, bent in the middle on a special hinged frame. It showed a cerulean-blue sky, with hailstones: thousands and thousands of hailstones, six months' painstaking labor, and each hailstone had a tiny image of the Virgin Mary on it.
Puzzled viewers might have found some enlightenment in the First Pararealiste Manifesto:
We of the Pararealiste movement, recognizing the meaninglessness of this chaos that fools call life, find the relevance of existence only in its monstrosities.
But we are not Existentialists or anything of that sort, thank God; and besides, the perversities of humanity have grown boring. After the Fernando Poo Incident, what can a mere man do that will shock us? It is the abnormalities of nature that we find illuminating; that is what distinguishes us from sadists, New Leftists, and other intellectual hoodlums.
We are delighted that Pluto, Mickey, and Goofy are all at odd angles from the plane of the eight inner planets. We are thrilled with Bohr's great principle of Relativity, which shows that to look out into space is also to look backward in time. WE ARE THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY!!!
Some said that the Pararealistes were even better at writing manifestos than at painting pictures; but they meant what they said. The hailstones in What Do You Make of This, Professor? were no image of dream or delirium-"We spit on surrealism! Fantasy is every bit as dreary as Logic! It is the REAL that we seek!" the First Manifesto had also declared. What Loup-Garou had so painstakingly depicted was an occurrence that actually happened at Lyons in 1920. Xeroxes of the old newspaper stories about the event ("PEASANTS SEE VIRGIN ON HAILSTONES") were distributed to the press, emphasizing again that Pararealistes only painted the real, or as they always wrote, the REAL.