Mind and enlightenment, said Korin.
And what he meant by this, he continued unremittingly, was that it was the conflict between the irresistible power of the mind and the enlightenment that unavoidably followed from it with uncanny force; it was the clash of this irresistibility and unavoidability, in his opinion, that led directly to the conditions obtaining today. He couldn’t know what had actually happened of course, for how could someone like him, a mere local historian from the back of beyond, hope to find an answer to a question that lay so far beyond his capabilities, but it was exhausting just to think of those good few centuries of nightmarish triumphal march whereby the mind ruthlessly, step by step, eliminated everything that was deemed not to exist and stripped humanity of anything it had mistakenly but understandably posited as existing, in other words ruthlessly stripped bare the entire world until suddenly there was nothing but the naked world with the hitherto unimaginable creations of the mind on the one side and the enlightenment with its killer’s instinct for destruction on the other, for if one agreed that the creations of the mind were unimaginably great one had all the more reason to grant that the enlightenment’s capacity for destruction was laced with a killer’s instinct, since the storm that broke over the mind truly swept everything away, every support on which the world had until then depended, simply wrecked the foundations of the world and in a way that proclaimed that such foundations did not exist, nor, it added, had they ever existed and there was no chance of them being resurrected from non-existence at some vainly hoped-for point in the vague and distant future. The loss, according to Korin, was immense: immense, unimaginable and impossible to recover from. Everything and everyone that was noble, great and transcendent could do nothing but stand by, if he might so put it, stand at this point where one could have no idea of the true impenetrable depth of the moment, and try to comprehend all that did not exist, that had never existed. They had to understand this and accept as a first principle that — to begin at the top — there was no god, no gods: this was what the noble, great and transcendent had to grasp and resign themselves to before anything else, said Korin, though they of course were incapable of this, simply could not understand it — believe it, yes; accept it yes; but understand it, never — and so they just stood there, uncomprehending, not accepting, long after they should have taken the next step, that being, to use an old formula, he said, to declare that if there is no god, if there are no gods, then there could be no goodness or transcendence either, but they did not take it because, or so Korin imagined it, without a god or gods they were simply incapable of moving, right up until eventually — possibly because the storm that raged around the mind drove them to it — they finally shifted and immediately did realize that without a god or gods there was nothing good or transcendent, at which point they also realized that if these really no longer existed, then neither did they themselves! His feeling, said Korin, was that this might have been the moment they disappeared from history, or rather that from the historical point of view this might have been the time from which we must acknowledge their slow passing, for that was what actually happened, they gradually passed away, he said, like a fire left to burn by itself and turn to ashes at the bottom of a garden, and the result of all this, from this image of the garden that suddenly appeared before him, was that he was now troubled by a terrible feeling that it was not so much a matter of a continuous process of appearing then gradually disappearing but of simple appearance and disappearance, but who knows what precisely happened, he asked, no one, at least not him, though he was as certain as could be about how the current holders of power had slowly and determinedly come to occupy their positions of power because that process had a kind of symmetry, a kind of infernal parasitic symmetry: for as one order slowly faded and decomposed until eventually it vanished, so the other gained strength, assumed a shape and finally gained complete control; while one retreated step by step into mystery so the other became ever more overt; as one continually lost so the other continually gained, and so it went on, defeat and triumph, defeat and triumph, and that was the way of things, said Korin, that was how one order disappeared without trace and how the repulsive other took possession of the throne, and he himself had life to realize, he said, that he had been mistaken, gravely mistaken, in believing that there hadn’t been nor could there be some revolutionary moment in life, for such a revolution, he had come to see that day, had happened, had undeniably taken place. The old beggar in the nook behind him let go of the old woman’s hand. But only for a moment because he immediately drew closer to her, body to body, and began passionately to kiss her cracked lips. The old woman’s expression showed neither acceptance nor rejection of this advance: she put up no resistance but did not respond either. It seemed to be more that she simply had no strength left, that she was some kind of wounded bird that a shot had brought down, her head thrown back, her eyes wide open, her two arms, like wings, hanging helplessly, in other words as if she had collapsed into the other’s embrace, her coat gathered round her neck to form a curious shape as the old man seized her. It was curious but all it meant was that the sudden movement had forced the coat, which was in any case too big for her, to ride up, the collar rising above her head, the effect of the embrace being to more or less wrap her head up in the cloth while the rest of her body took on the appearance of a package, a package in a coat, so from a distance it looked as if the old man were hugging a coat, for the only evidence of a body was the crown of hair rising above a thin hollow face that had quite collapsed in the blinding light, or rather its cheek as the old man’s tongue flickered feverishly over it.
Moon, valley, dew, death.
Behind the counter the refrigerator shuddered and gave a loud crack as if wanting to give up the ghost but then decided against it, and started up again, rattling as it painfully resumed its business, and the two liter bottles of COCA-COLA that must have shifted in the convulsive movement now found themselves next to each other and began to tinkle and chime with the vibration.
Revolution—Korin proclaimed as the four words in his head, like four rooks circling in the darkness, were slowly absorbed into the vanishing horizon.
What is more, a revolution of world historical moment, he said, and having made this grave announcement, it was as if his strange manner of speaking were striving for some consonance, for there came a change, a change that the ravages and predictable consequences of drunkenness had made entirely predictable, a change, whereby the mind had hitherto been strapped into place, and the continuity between throat and tongue that had been maintained only with the utmost effort to prevent the words falling apart, shifted key as it was bound to do. For while the words had till now been broken up like stones into distinct syllables, there now began a complete reversal of the process so that they ran into each other, the power that had hitherto disciplined and ordered them having suddenly run out of steam, and his speech was held together only by some bitter compulsion, a compulsion that after three ill-fated days of searching for the appropriate celestial luminaries he should at all costs now finish what he had to say, what the finally and painfully located emissary of such luminaries should, in his opinion, at all costs have to hear, and his capacities being such as they were it was like watching a train crash, the engine hitting the stationary vehicle while the phonemes, like the cars piled into each other, required the notary of heaven and earth to whom the speech was addressed, to descry the word “revolution” from the ruins of “rvshon” and the sense “world-historical” from “wrldstical.”