As a work of art, the island’s Book was a failure from the very beginning. It is fairly certain that it was this failure the islanders were striving for. There was no need for Ino of the white ankles to fly to the island: the people that lived there knew very well what she had to impart, it was written in their blood. Now I believe that the Book was ridiculing art, was a parody of art. The islanders did not like art because its shapes stood in the way of their eddies of shapelessness, and its sounds drowned out the music of silence. To begin with I wondered if Mii, Fo and all the other artists who kept appearing on the pages of the Book, were the expression of some kind of islanders’ dream of real art, a permanent, unchanging work of art, but then I realized that for the islanders such characters were laughable or pitiful, that their often woeful fates were meant to show where a yearning for shape could lead. I know now that the Book was not just a parody of art; it was a parody of our world as a whole, fragments of which would arrive on the island in each ship that came into port.
The supposition that the Book was a work of art was also based on the view that the island’s literature was a response to the summons of shapeless murmurs and eddies that yearned for the release of the images concealed in them. But having returned to the Book and drawn from my memory certain of its passages, I was no longer sure that its roots contained the desire of the shapeless for shape, and if so, then only as a part of the circling that both the shaped and the shapeless contain and overlap with. Now I would explain the origins of the stories of the Book more simply and in a way more in keeping with the character of the islanders: at the core of the shapeless there is a blind, irresistible pressure to expel images, so that after some time the purity of the shapeless is clouded by a sediment of images, which are at various stages of development. If this were so, the writing and reading of the Book would be a cleansing process by which the shapeless would rid itself of sediment, draining away all the shapes and images that had settled in it. Renewing the limpidity of the Book would make it possible for the islanders to bathe in pure streams of the shapeless. The Book was not an end in itself but a mere by-product; it was a filter that caught the dirt of shapes and images.
On my travels around Prague I have yet to spot in a travel agent’s window a colour photo of the island. It seems that there is still no modern hotel on its shores. But even if there were, this would not have to mean the destruction of the island’s culture. I have written of how hitherto the islanders have always been cunning victors over the culture of Europe. Perhaps this time it would be different; perhaps in time the streets of the lower town would fill with restaurants, souvenir shops and ice-cream stands; perhaps loud music would drown out the island’s murmurs and rustlings. But it might happen that a fresh encounter with Europe would lead to another victory on the part of the islanders; let us remember that the islanders have always won as easily and unwittingly as they draw breath. We know how the European invasion of long ago ended, and it is more than likely that the colourful emblems of multinational corporations would penetrate the streets of the lower town only to transform in the same way as the conqueror’s geometric drawings and devotional pictures — they would be overwhelmed by stains and webs of cracks, the music playing in the streets would be infiltrated more and more by rustlings and murmurs, so that all would be overgrown as surely as the once-proud buildings were covered in creeping plants. And things might not end here — the changes might spread to Europe and America, they could transform whole continents; whole world civilizations might come to resemble the life of the island. And then my book would be for nothing, as it would speak of banalities known by all.
I am glad that I succeeded in making this second, imaginary journey to the island without succumbing to the Sirens of sense, ideas and guidance. Everyone has his own magical library and in it his eposes of the bizarre, the pages of which sometimes gleam in the dark. The girl in Michle encountered a luminous Iliad woven from TV advertisements. My second journey to the island became an odyssey at whose beginning lay a ghostly Ogygia of the past and at whose end was a phantom Aeaea of language; it became a journey from the nymph of blissful forgetting to the sorcerer of purposeless metamorphosis.
Although at the beginning of this travelogue I boasted of my power to resist absurdities, perhaps when I did so I was clinging to the hope that I would glimpse some purpose in my stay on the island. I have not been able to shake the feeling that journeys should bestow at last some kind of experience. But the writing of this book has brought it home to me that my stay on the island was but a small tear in the great web of experience — a pulsating empty space that sometimes widens and makes threats, that devours everything, that is sometimes overgrown with old connections. The void of the erased face of the island’s king, the void at the centre of the island’s Book that skips from page to page, the void of the expiring roots of words, the void of the blank pages of travellers’ diaries.
Perhaps this tear had something in common with the void out of which words arise, a void which always lies silently in the gaps between letters and in their hollows like the cool, treacherous snow blown into the characters of the neon sign on the roof of the Paris department store; the void of this tear called for a book, for a travelogue — not to join together the words, but so that it might look with pleasure in the mirror of sentences, so that in their chinks, tears and hollows it might encounter its own self, so that thanks to a book it might defend its forever-threatened purity. As such my book has become a reflection of the island’s Book, which I first dipped into on a terrace in the rock of the upper town, and which exasperated and bored me for so long. This Book that has nothing to say and whose author is the last person to ask about its meaning, is actually an empty space, too, just a gulf of emptiness in a world of fullness, one of the places where the knots of reality unravel and where every world becomes a question without an answer.
But I hope that this void does not worry you, dear reader — this is the last time I will address you thus, as the time has come when we must say our farewells. I trust you have read my travelogue with enough attention to realize that I did not drown in the cool void, that I still have my images, that this emptiness does not mean indifference, solitude and the extinguishing of conversation. Quite the contrary, in fact: only out of emptiness may the shapes rise and the words sound, shapes and words hitherto untouched by the fragrances of the void, shapes and words whose breath bears the tremor of an old, elusive message; perhaps in my voice, which draws on the currents of the void, which resonates beneath the pages, something of this tremor that fascinates us all has been preserved, while your invisible face — which somewhere in the dark turns towards me and makes itself known only by breath that has yet to become the matter of words or part of a gesture, but so far just a tremor in the void — is to me a revelation of a world of living absence, which wakes a ripple of utterance on the surface of another eddying emptiness. And so do tremulous emptinesses and their never-ending game create borders between one another, in whose twisted relief are created words, thoughts, dreams and desires, and in which the faces of heroes and gods, the images of animals and plants, palaces, towns and ships at sea appear.