Of course, the island’s script developed through its interaction with other scripts as well. Thanks to its precious stones, the island always had contact with the outside world. Sometimes I even think I see traces of the island’s viewpoint and manner of thinking in European culture — in Novalis’s meditations on shapes that generate sounds in wood shavings, for example, or in the origins of abstract painting, or in the letter-pictures of Klee. It’s far more difficult, on the other hand, to find manifestations of the spirit of Europe on the island. Although the islanders have always been very accepting of everything, in the end things always turn out the same way, as they did with the language, science, and religion of their erstwhile conquerors from Europe: all of these borrowings were perfectly absorbed into the rhythms of the island and thus transformed into everyday parts of island life, indistinguishable from any other. Nevertheless, it is still possible to find deposits in the island’s script that indicate several old encounters with the Latin alphabet, each of which led to the siphoning off of some of its letters. Marooned among the native letters, these orphaned Latin characters experienced a bizarre metamorphosis: they expanded, they hurled out offshoots in all directions, slowly revealing images of tigers, birds, and fantastical trees. (Was this not, in fact, a return to their mystical origins? A partial revelation of their enduring, hidden power?) Whenever the script of the island swallowed up foreign letters in this way, it would transform them so perfectly in the course of its digestion — into the aforementioned animals, or tangles of lines, or geometric shapes — that on second encounter they were unrecognizable. And it would accept the same letter again and again, and so seem to have grown a new symbol with a distant similarity to the existing one, when in fact what had happened is that the same alien character had been swallowed up by itself, by its own rampant form, which it had initially acquired after first being disfigured by the island’s contagion…
But, none of these transformations could explain the island’s script’s most striking feature: the strange lack of unity among the characters. This disunity arose as a consequence of the fact that the restless tangle of forces urging the letters to undergo their continuous metamorphoses was not distributed equally across all letters; for example, the force that impelled the transformation of letters into thin, frayed, and randomly twisted threads might strike violently in one place — within a single letter or a group of letters — and would pick at and crumple its target quite furiously, without noticing the fact that at the same moment, in another part of the text, a force was at play which was beating the letters into solid pegs, while, simultaneously, in yet another section, the letters had become translucent and were transforming into dull smears (but this force had already almost burned itself out), and then, finally, in yet another place, a force thus far unidentified seemed to be staking a claim for symmetrical ornamentation. At any given moment a letter was tugged at by a variety of forces at various stages of development; some of these were tentative, hesitant, just starting out, some were now at the height of their strength, while others were almost entirely spent. And where these forces abutted each other, they collided, made alliances, applied indirect influence, held themselves back, and gathered their strength.
And then it seems there was a long period when all such forces were asleep and the island’s script was frozen, after which came a new awakening and a time of even wilder transformation. Although in the days when I was on the island, a tendency towards a pictographic script was predominant, one could see many other tendencies dormant under the surface of their texts — some on the wane, some just being born. The islanders also had a kind of literature, of course, not least their Book (which I will get to presently, I trust), but I sometimes think that the story of the island’s script makes up a more interesting narrative than all the stories contained in their literary works.
The café on Rue des Beaux-Arts
The islanders’ letters were so restless that from time to time they produced a longing to pass out of the territory in which script is enclosed; indeed, they began to doubt where the border between script and non-script lay. And so it occurred that the script passed through stages in which it was impossible to say for sure whether its figures were still letters to be read or whether they should be looked at as pictures. And there were other times when the script cast into doubt a border more remote still, that which exists between symbol and object. The letters thought of their depth and accentuated this; they transformed themselves into three-dimensional forms that retained traces of the old life of the letter, but at the same time they were objects in which were born relations to places, to other objects and to certain purposes — which to begin with only glimmered through, but which later gradually established themselves and grew with their hosts. And in echoing this movement another movement was awakened; in the world of objects — in stones, in trees, in machines, in bodies — the germ of an ability to be a letter announced itself. This ability, which until now had kept its peace within, suddenly generated avenues of text, strange sentences which oddly enough were not entirely incomprehensible.
I had occasionally encountered in the cultures of Europe and Asia this fuzziness on the borders between letters and pictures, but the growing together of letters and objects is something known perhaps only to the inhabitants of the nameless island. I have heard only once of a similar fusion of letters and pictures in Europe, and this came in a story whose truth I have never been able to verify. It happened several years after my return from the island, at the Czech Centre in Paris’s Rue Bonaparte. I was present at the opening of an exhibition of the work of Josef Váchal, where I met a man of about sixty who came from Prague but had obviously lived for many years in Paris. We struck up a conversation at the buffet; it turned out that he was interested in Váchal’s wonderful typography. We went on to speak of the letter-pictures of Klee and Michaux and I was reminded of the script of the island. I mentioned that its letters occasionally release a yearning to transform themselves into objects. He considered this information before telling me that a friend of his in Paris, who had also been born in Prague, had experienced two incidents — one in his homeland and the other in Paris, each by different means — in which letters and pictures were in fusion. This was of considerable interest to me and I asked him to tell me about it. He said that it was a story long in the telling, and he invited me to accompany him to a small café that was just around the corner in Rue des Beaux-Arts.
Once the waiter had brought us our coffee, my new acquaintance began to tell me the story of his Parisian friend. Naturally my first thought was that he was employing the banal tactic of talking of himself in the guise of another, but it may have been so that — as in the famous Jewish joke about trains — he was speaking of someone else so I would believe he was speaking of himself while all the time he was speaking of a third person. Completing his studies in the mid-Sixties at Prague’s Faculty of Arts, the hero of the story began to work as a junior lecturer in the Department of Aesthetics. The narrator did not tell me his name, but let us call him Baumgarten. He began to write a book, because this was expected of a young academic. He chose its title somewhat at random; let us say it was “The Beauty of Nature in the History of Art and Aesthetics,” “Art and Society,” “The History of the Golden Ratio” or “Kant and Schiller.” By staying on at the university as a teacher after completion of his studies, above all he was able to prolong the life without roots of his student years, a life composed of many flaming and fading encounters with people, things, places and ideas. His world was restless, constantly entangling itself in and extricating itself from a web of academic, amicable, social and erotic ties, which transformed themselves from one to another and then evaporated.