The Book: -I- -II- -III- -IV- (V)
V
LEANING OVER that Book, my face glowing like a rainbow, I flushed quietly in ecstasy upon ecstasy. Absorbed in my reading, I forgot about dinner. My intuition had not failed me. This was the Authentic, the holy original, albeit in such deep indignity and degradation. And when in the late twilight, smiling blissfully, I placed the fragment in my deepest drawer, covering it with other books so that it would not be recognised, it seemed to me that I was putting the sunset to sleep in the chest of drawers, a luminescence which burned over and over again from within itself, which passed through all flames and crimsons, and returned once more, not wanting to end.
My books had all become so unremarakable to me!
For ordinary books are like meteors. Each one has its own moment, that instant when it flies shrieking into the air like a phoenix, all of its pages ablaze. And for that one moment we love them, although they are already mere ash by then. And sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, insisting with their wooden clatter, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ.
Exegetes of the Book maintain that all books aspire to the Authentic. They live a merely borrowed life, which returns, in the instant of their ascent, to its old source. This means that while books wane, the Authentic grows. But I do not wish to bore the reader with a lesson on Doctrine. I merely want to turn his attention to one thing: the Authentic is alive and growing. And what of it? Behold, who knows where, when next we open our fragment, will Anna Csillag and her faithful be? Perhaps we will catch a glimpse of her, the long-haired pilgrim, sweeping Moravian highways with her coat, wandering through a faraway country, through white little towns submerged in the everyday and the prosaic, distributing samples of Elsa-fluid balsam to God’s simpletons tormented by incontinence and scabies. Ah, what now will the bearded worthies of the little town do, immobilised by their gigantic growths of facial hair; what will its staunch populace do, condemned to the tending and administration of their inordinate growths? Who can say that they will not buy authentic Black Forest barrel organs and head off into the world after their apostle, to seek her out all over the country, playing Daisy, Daisy wherever they go?
O Odyssey of the bearded, blundering from town to town with their barrel organs, in search of their spiritual mother! When will a rhapsody be found, worthy of that epopee? To whom have they surrendered the stronghold consigned to their care — to whom have they entrusted rule over people’s hearts in Anna Csillag’s hometown? Could they not have foreseen that the town, bereft of its worthy elite, its magnificent patriarchs, would succumb to doubt and apostasy, and open its gates — to whom? — ah, to the cynical and perverse Magda Wang (Institute of Anthropology, Budapest) who will found a school there for the training and breaking in of gentlemen?
But I shall return to my pilgrims.
Who does not know those old Guards, those wandering Cimbri with dark brown hair, with bodies powerful to behold but made of a tissue with no brawn or juices? All of their energy, all of their power has gone into their hair. Anthropologists have long racked their brains over that odd race, always clad in black, with bulky silver chains on their stomachs and huge brass rings on their fingers.
I am fond of them, those surrogate Caspars and Balthasars with their deep seriousness and funereal decorativeness, those magnificent male specimens whose beautiful eyes have the glossy sparkle of burnt coffee; I am fond of the noble lack of vitality in their luxuriant and spongy bodies, the morbidezza of dying out families, the wheezing from their powerful chests, and even that whiff of valerian that their beards exude.
Like angels of the Countenance, they occasionally appear at our kitchen door, enormous and out of breath, and inordinately tired; they wipe the perspiration from their bedewed brows, rolling the blue whites of their eyes, and, in that instant, forgetting their mission, bewildered and searching for a reason, a pretext for being there — they hold out their hands for alms.
I return to the Authentic. Not that I have ever left it. And here I indicate a strange feature of the fragment, already clear to the reader by now — that it grows in the reading, that on all sides its borders are open to all fluctuations and currents.
Now, for example, no one is offering Harz Mountain finches for sale there any more, because those feather-dusters fly out at irregular intervals from the barrel organs of those dark-haired men, from the breaks and turns of their melodies, and the market square is showered with them, like coloured lettering. Ah, such a shimmering and chirruping propagation... Around all the pinnacles, poles and pennants, veritable traffic-jams of colour are formed, flutterings and squabbles over a perching place. And it is enough to poke the handle of a walking stick out of one’s window to draw it back, covered with a fluttering and heavy cluster, into the room.
I am now approaching with rapid steps that magnificent and catastrophic epoch in my story, which in my biography bears the name, the Gifted Epoch.
In vain would I deny that I feel that seizure of the heart, that blissful unease, the holy nervousness which preceeds conclusive matters. I shall soon have run too short of colours in my crucibles and radiance in my soul to lay the highest stresses, to deliniate in painterly fashion the most luminous and transcendental contours within it.
Just what is the gifted epoch — and when was it?
Here, I must turn rather esoteric for a moment, like Signor Bosco of Milan, and lower my voice to a penetrating whisper. I must make my claims by insinuations and evasive smiles, and rub the delicate material of imponderables between my fingertips, like a pinch of salt. I cannot help it if I occasionally take on the appearance of those purveyors of invisible fabrics, demonstrating with elaborate gestures their trickster’s merchandise.
And so, did the gifted epoch happen, or not happen? It is difficult to say. Yes and no. For there are things which cannot fully, conclusively happen. They are too immense, too magnificent to be contained within an event. They merely attempt to happen; they test the ground of reality — whether it will bear their weight. And then they quickly draw back, afraid to lose their integralness in the deficiency of realisation. And if they do happen to break into their capital, and lose something or other in their attempts at incarnation, then they soon jealously retrieve their property, call it back in again; they are reintegrated — and then in my biography those white smears appear, pungent stigmata, the lost, silver imprints of the bare feet of angels in enormous strides over my days and nights, while that plenitude of glory waxes and is unceasingly replenished, and culminates above me, surpassing rapture after rapture in triumph.
And yet, in a certain sense, it inhabits, intact and integral, each of its deficient and fragmentary incarnations. Here creeps in the phenomenon of representation, of vicarious being: some event might be poor and small in terms of its provinence, its own resources, and yet, brought up close to the eye, an endless and radiant perspective opens up in its interior, for inside it, shining vehemently, a greater Being is striving to express itself.
And so I will gather up those allusions, those earthly approximations, those stations and stages along the roads of my life, like the shards of a shattered mirror. I will gather up the pieces of that which is all one and indivisible — my great epoch, the gifted epoch of my life.
Perhaps, in a reductive impulse, terrorised by the immeasurability of the transcendent, I have too much circumscribed, questioned and undermined it. For despite all of my reservations — it was.
It was, and nothing can shake my certainty of it, that illuminated taste which remains to this day on my tongue, that cold fire on my palate, that sigh as broad as the sky and as fresh as a gulp of pure ultramarine.
Have I prepared the reader to some extent for the things which are to follow — might I now hazard a journey into the gifted epoch?
My own anxiousness has infected the reader. I sense his misgivings. Despite appearances of high spirits, my heart too is heavy, and I am filled with trepidation.
In God’s name, then — let us embark and be on our way!