But the one that had just occurred to him was still alive and kicking, and needed only to be spoken. “Do you think I take all this scarlet seriously?” He tried to summon up the laughter of an interlocutor whose face he’d seen recently in a newspaper. Laughing eyes, a strong jaw …It was the face of the American president. The phrase that had taken shape in his mind somehow or other in order to be addressed to someone or other — perhaps Chiang Kai-shek, or Tito, or Haile Selassie, or the Pope — had now fallen to the lot of the American.
“Do you think…?” No, he didn’t really believe in all that red. If it came to that, he preferred the ruddiness of the marihuana to the riotous colour of the flags. It was still too soon to say so yet. But it wasn’t too soon to think it. It might even be a bit late.
He swiftly looked around. The guards were nowhere to be seen. He could almost believe they didn’t really exist, and that his rural existence was protected only by plants — maize, cabbages, soya.
Fields sown with dreams, with senselessness…Not so, gentlemen! he exclaimed inwardly, When people can’t sleep, don’t they take sleeping tablets? But what we were dealing with was the disturbed mind of a whole planet. A lot of nonsense was talked about the way human affairs should be ordered, but no one really bothered about it seriously. People went in for every kind of philosophy, but forgot that what was necessary to one man was equally necessary to a thousand, a million, to the five billion inhabitants of the world. They agreed that one individual whose mind was overwrought might need tranquillizers, but when the mind of the whole race was involved they condemned these fields as full of dreams and senselessness…
As for Mao himself, he wasn’t very impressed by all those — isms. He had his own opinions about the evolution of things and the future of the world. Unlike most people, and in contrast to what he himself had thought a few years ago, he’d recently come to the conclusion that the world had developed further than it ought to have done: this was one of the causes of mankind’s present ills, and of the catastrophes that would overtake humanity in the future if something wasn’t done. It was urgently necessary to take steps to bring the mind back within its former limits. If the human brain were not restored to its elementary simplicity it would destroy the world. This was one of the universal truths that Mao had discovered.
One day when he was having tea with Guo Mozo, Guo had told him the debate about the human mind was one of the oldest in the world. Didn’t Greek legend present it as the origin of the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus?
“So you might say,” Mao had answered almost jokingly, “there were two party lines on the subject on Olympus?”
“Exactly, Chairman,” said Guo Mozo. “Zees wanted to replace humanity by another species with a less complex brain; in short, as we say nowadays, to create a new man.” (Mao had a fleeting vision of Lei Fen.) “Prometheus took the opposite point of view.”
“Let those who want to go along with Prometheus,” answered Mao. “We’re on the side of Zeus.”
Guo Mozo had looked at him reverently. “And who more suitable than you, Chairman,” his eyes seemed to say, “to play the part of Zeus?”
Mao’s narrowed gaze encountered no obstacle on all the vast expanse before him. These glowing plains would be part of the arsenal in his great campaign. The reports he’d read four days ago on China’s secret exports of marihuana had been encouraging. Hundreds of tons had already been sent to Europe, and hundreds more were on their way there. But more still was needed. How many tons would it take to drug the whole population of the world for twenty-four hours? No one yet knew. But start with Europe, Jiang Qing had advised him a little while ago, and the whole world will be high: it’s Europe’s brain that is the most dangerous. That’s what I’m trying to do, he’d answered, but it’s not as easy as it looks. If sown on a soil composed of sobriety and wisdom, hundreds of tons of dreams or nonsense — call it what you like — would melt like snow in the sun if not backed up by other, more devious measures. The brainwashing of the human race was a titanic undertaking. If you didn’t destroy the things that fed and stimulated the mechanisms of the mind, it would be like trying to drain a lake without stopping up the rivers running into it. Then he’d told her about his plan to destroy the existing educational system, to close the universities, to reduce the number of books and go back to the era when they were copied by hand. No one needed to read more than a dozen books in a lifetime, and most of those ought to be about politics. Mao had managed to do all this in China itself during the Cultural Revolution, but what was the good? — he hadn’t been able to carry it further. True, he’d done so in Cambodia, and tried — unsuccessfully — to do the same in Ceylon, but those two countries were still only in Asia. And his dream had been to extend his policy much further. Into Europe, Yes, Europe …
He would rather not have thought about Albania on a day like this, but it came into his mind unbidden. He’d had such high hopes of Albania! But be patient, he told himself: all things come to him who waits…It was too soon to give up hope. He’d issued new instructions, and there was to be a complete overhaul of the official attitude towards Albania. Something must be done; the lynx would soon be tamed.
In Cambodia, on the other hand, things were going quite well — better even than he’d expected. And all over the world his followers were supporting him and had gone over to the attack. For the first time ever, the thrones of such supreme masters as Shakespeare and Beethoven were toppling. Someone had suggested that a Chinese pianist who had played a Beethoven sonata should have his arms cut off. That might sound barbaric, but it was not. Monsters like Shakespeare and Cervantes were more harmful than any emperor. They wielded absolute power; they were tyrants of the mind, colonizers of the brain. Kings could easily be overthrown, decapitated, or relegated to oblivion; but those other scourges managed to survive through the ages with their power unscathed and even enhanced. But now their supremacy was about to end. He, Mao Zedong, had come into the world to challenge them. Their time was up. Like the kings and the tsars, they would be given their marching orders: Chairman Cervantes, Prince Beethoven, Generalissimo Shakespeare, Count Tolstoi, and so on…Compared with him, Mao, what a poor figure other, minor world-changers cut: they had merely overthrown some monarch or prime minister, while he alone had stood up to the evil Titans and would deliver the whole human race from the unwholesome spell of art.
He’d had scores of thousands of individuals put on trial and punished, but he still wasn’t satisfied. Some had been sent to the provinces, consigned to muddy ditches and rice-fields. They’d been beaten and spat upon. They’d been made to forget they’d once been writers, and then terrorized by being reminded of some novel they’d written, as if it had been a crime. As for those who couldn’t forget, they’d been driven to suicide. And yet he felt he hadn’t done enough.
Every so often he would rehearse in his mind, like a kind of play, a meeting which resembled sometimes a gathering of the Greek gods on Olympus and sometimes a session of his own Politbureau, For the next point on the agenda, I call first upon Prometheus…Then on Chen Pota.