Last night, Joseph Ferrarius visited me in my dreams. He is sailing, he said, with his brothers toward the north to find an island that does not exist. Go ahead and laugh, you twerp. That doesn’t surprise me. They have sailed from the lousy world of facts and will find an island which will, in their world of faith and mine, become a fact. No one else will know of it. How else can one save oneself from the upcoming onslaught of researchers, adventurers, archeologists, geologists and oceanographers? Why, here in another two hundred years or so they will find America. For now, Grossman, America is not a fact, remember that, and therefore it doesn’t exist. If you were to tell someone that, across the way from Normandy, there is a world as big as ours, they would think you are a lunatic. And it does exist. But you will tell that to no one. You are a conformist! Pardon me, Sire, would you please repeat that last word. No, there’s no point in it. It’s too early for that word. Listen to what I am saying: There will come a time when people will no longer believe that God exists. That’s impossible, Sire. It’s possible, unfortunately. Just as you, brainwashed by Ptolemaic geocentrism, think that I’m babbling about another continent, so will future Grossmans, because God is not a fact, think that God was concocted by man in order to be less afraid. God is the eighth continent, Grossman. He is neither good nor evil, neither great nor small. God is something different. Always something different. And, please, spare me your ecclesiastical footnotes denouncing me to the future generations and accusing me of heresy.
And wait till you hear this. Your jaw will drop in amazement. Margot came to me last night. Not with her bleeding head under her arm as she appears to you and other superstitious twits like you. I was just getting ready to retire for the evening, prepared for my showdown with the evil spirits awaiting me on the boundary between dreams and wakening, when Margot burst in. Her presence. Not her ghost, mind you, but her presence, a bit unpleasant in the light of her infidelity and my vengeance. What do you want to tell me? I thought, and Margot answered: Charles, I am so lonely. You’re looking at me with suspicion, majordomo, you’re thinking that the Hideous is jabbering, seeing things; the queen is dead and she cannot possibly say anything. Half-wit, words do not exist for us to communicate; remember the book of Genesis when the Lord confounded the languages. Words exist to cause misunderstanding. And yet, they are so powerful. You are just a word — Grossman. Take out the ‘o’ and ‘a,’ the soul, and all you have left are consonants — Grssmn, or your skeleton, like the ones we saw in the monastery labyrinth. But let’s leave the mantra aside. Alone, you say, Margot, I said somehow, and she confirmed it. I could have explained to her that loneliness is our destiny, that nothing can be done about it, but out of piety toward her death (which she has taken so seriously) I said nothing, but rather adjusted my presence so that she could feel some kind of sympathy. I say presence because even you know that the thing the courtiers and plebes hold to be my presence is just hanging about miserably on the throne, dusty, covered with mildew. The soul is closest to the body when it is not equated with it, that must be clear to you. The body is necessary so that everything is not ethereal, too ethereal for rogues like you and the other dropouts that you studied Patristics with. Habet mulier animam, Grossman? Habet, Sire. You keep hanging on to your errors, but that improves your reputation in my eyes. That’s the only thing you have approached like a man, overcoming your fear. That error makes you a man. But you see, as time passed even I, having learned something new, have changed my point of view. I will not say that a woman has a soul, certainly not, but something like a soul, that’s possible. Hand me that parchment. I’ll draw you a representation of the male anima and the female animula:
You see? The horizontal line is missing. I could tell you about that for hours, but it’s no use. You won’t understand, and anyway Jung will write about it better one day. And anyway, we’ve got business to do. Write! God loves radical changes. Write down what Meister Eckhart will say about that, because his books will be burned. “If a man completely rises above his sin and renounces it, then God, who is true to his promise, will act as if the sinner never sinned. He won’t allow him to suffer for a moment because of his sin. If he committed his sins even as much as all people sinned all together, God will not force him to atone for them. In doing so, God established a closeness to man that he created with no other being. He will not consider what a man used to be. God is the God of the present.” And now, Grossman, let’s get down to work. We need to write history. Every moment is precious. While I’m here lamenting Margot, in the blink of an eye, some son of a bitch is born and tangles all the threads. The Schism has already occurred; so, the split ad acta. The Reformation must be prepared for. The what? The Reformation, you idiot. I’m sorry, Sire, I don’t know that word. I don’t know the details, either. Martin Luther is only four years old right now. But it’s not my business to deal with the details. I already said that God loves radical changes. As opposed to the Pope and his flatterers who have built into the heart the same thing the pharaoh built in stone — a pyramid, Grossman, an Egyptian pyramid. In doing so they committed blasphemy because the Spirit is not building material. They want to withdraw inside, to hide from God, but it will do them no good. God is always inside. We’re the ones on the outside. It’s a mistaken projection, that’s all. Here, I see a new split in the church. That’s why I walled up all the doors at the monastery of St. Panfucius. Do you think the split between Constantinople and Rome came about because of such a sophisticated theological question as the Filioque? No. “You think that I have come to bring peace on Earth!” the Lord says. “No, I say unto you, I come to bring discord.”
Do you understand? No, Sire. Even better. Write. The division in the churches is necessary because of historical progress. The Eastern Church mustered the strength to bear the cross and become a martyr. The deadly sin of her sister, the Roman curia, was not debauchery, not Simony, not the sale of indulgences, but architecture. It will spread in the west in order to raise its buildings, in order to spread its earthly kingdom. Will Maxim the Confessor discover America? No. Christopher Columbus will find it. But not before the Renaissance. Sire, you keep mentioning the Renaissance. Yes, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes reality. That’s the everyday magic of words. Just as I kept repeating Grossman, Grossman, Grossman, until you finally appeared at my side in that damned tavern, full of quotations and rage, real, but also false. So I keep repeating the Renaissance, the Renaissance, the Renaissance. And the result? In 1369 — Bogdan Suchodolski will write — Leonardo Bruni will be born. That’s the wrong date. The real date is 1368. But that changes nothing. Write, so that Suchodolski will have someone to copy from: 1380 — the birth of Poggio Bracciolini, 1377 — Filippo Brunelleschi, 1378 — Lorenzo Gilberti; in 1386 the famous Donatello will be born, Fra Angelico circa 1390, Jan Van Eyck in 1397, that same year (underline it) Johann Gutenberg. The material basis of desacralization is, essentially, laid; the dates are perhaps not accurate, but there’s not much use in chronology anyway. We have to wait for the year 1401 for one of our own to be born, Nicholas of Kues. And don’t ask superfluous questions. Do not try to discover that which you cannot find out. Remember once and for all, Grossman, we are not interested in history. We are interested in its ruin. Others are here to see that history is made. We are meant to undermine it. Don’t forget that the characteristic of our time, according to Suchodolski, and I quote, is “the mystical hope of fixing the world by destroying it.” I don’t understand, Sire; these contradictions aren’t clear to me. You don’t understand, Grossman. You have a German name with two ornate Ss, and you don’t know that the WEST in German is ABENDLAND — the land of twilight. No, Sire. What language are we speaking then? What alphabet are you using to write down my words? Nothing can be confirmed with certainty. Why is that so, Sire? Because everything is relative. Does that mean anything to you? No, Sire. Let me explain: Everything is relative because E=MC2.