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, smiling blissfully in the late twilight, 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 from within itself, over and over again, passing through all flames and crimsons, and returned once more, not wanting to end.
My books had all become so trivial to me!
For ordinary books are like meteors. Each 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 by then they are already mere ash. 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 whilst 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 — that the Authentic is alive and growing. What of it? Behold — who knows where, when next we open our fragment, will Anna Csillag and her faithful be? Perhaps we shall catch a glimpse of her, the long-haired pilgrim, sweeping Moravian highways with her coat, wandering through a faraway country, through white villages submerged in the everyday and the prosaic, distributing samples of The Fluid With The Swan to God’s simpletons tormented by incontinence and scabies. Ah, what now will the bearded worthies of the village 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, roaming with their barrel organs from town to town, 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 their dark brown hair, their bodies powerful to behold, but made of a tissue without 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, fond of their deep seriousness, their 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, a 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 turn up at our kitchen door, enormous, out of breath, and inordinately tired. They wipe the perspiration from their bedewed brows, rolling the blue whites of their eyes. And at that moment, having forgotten their purpose, bewildered, and searching for an excuse, a pretext for being there, they hold out their hands for alms.
I shall return to the Authentic. Not that I have ever left it. And here I shall indicate a strange feature of the fragment, already clear to the reader by now... that it grows in the reading, that its borders are open on all sides to all fluctuations and currents.
Now, for example, no one is offering Harz Mountain finches for sale there any longer, since 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 there form profuse congestions of colour, flutterings, and squabbles over perching places. And all one need do is 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 in my story, with rapid steps, that magnificent and catastrophic epoch, which bears in my biography the name: The Brilliant Epoch.
I would deny in vain that I feel that seizure of the heart, that blissful unease, the holy nervousness that precedes conclusive matters. There will soon be too little colour in my crucibles, too little radiance in my soul to lay the highlights, to delinieate the most luminous, and therefore transcendental contours within it.
Just what is a brilliant epoch? And when was it?
Here, I must become somewhat esoteric for a moment, like Signor Bosco of Milan, and lower my voice to a penetrating whisper. I must make my claims with insinuations and evasive smiles, and rub like a pinch of salt between my fingertips the delicate material of imponderables. I cannot help it if I occasionally take on the appearance of those purveyors of invisible fabrics, who demonstrate with elaborate gestures their trickster’s merchandise.
And so, did the brilliant epoch really happen? Or not happen? It is difficult to say. Yes and no. For there are things that 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. Then they quickly withdraw, afraid to lose their integralness in the deficiency of realisation. And should they ever happen to break into their capital, and lose something or other in their attempts at incarnation, they soon jealously take their property back, call it in again, and are reintegrated. And then in my biography those white smears appear, those pungent stigmata, the lost, silver imprints of the bare feet of angels in enormous strides over my days and nights, whilst that plenitude of glory waxes, is unceasingly replenished, and culminates above me, surpassing rapture upon rapture in triumph.
And yet, in a certain sense, it inhabits intact and integral each of its deficient and fragmentary incarnations. Here, the phenomenon of representation creeps in, of vicarious being. Some event may be poor and small in terms of its provinence, its own resources, and yet in its interior, brought up close to the eye, an endless and radiant perspective opens up, for within it a higher being is striving to show itself, and to shine vehemently.
And so I shall gather up those allusions, those earthly approximations, the stations and stages along the roads of my life, like the shards of a shattered mirror. I shall gather up the pieces of what is all one and indivisible — my great epoch, the brilliant epoch of my life.
Perhaps I have, in a reductive impulse, terrorised by the immeasurability of the transcendent, too much circumscribed it, questioned and undermined it. For despite all my reservations — it was.
It was, and nothing can shake that certainty, that luminous taste which remains on my tongue to this very day, that cold fire on my palate, that sigh as broad as the sky, and fresh, like a gulp of pure ultramarine.
Have I prepared the reader to some extent for the things to come — might we now hazard a journey into a brilliant epoch?
My own anxiousness has infected the reader. I sense his nervousness. 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!