Rich Text Document (draft of September 2010)
A Treatise on Mannequins
or, The Next Book of Genesis
‘THE DEMIURGUS,’ declared my father, ‘had no monopoly on creation, for creation is the privilege of all souls. Matter is prone to endless fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time a beguiling power of temptation which entices us to be creators. Deep within matter, barely perceptible smiles are formed, faces freeze agog, attempts at configurations coalesce. All matter ripples with endless possibilities, which pass through it in sickly shudders. Awaiting the life-bestowing breath of the soul, it overflows endlessly into itself, tempting us with a thousand sweet swirls, and the softness it imparts in its blind reveries.
‘Devoid of its own initiative, voluptuously pliant, yielding in the feminine manner, acquiescent in the face of all impulses and open to every kind of charlatanism and dilettantism, it constitutes outlaw terrain, the domain of all abuses and dubious demiurgical manipulations. Matter is the most passive and defenceless substance in the cosmos. Anyone may knead and shape it. It submits to all. All arrangements of matter are impermanent and loose, liable to retardation and dissolution. There is nothing wrong in reducing life to other, newer forms. Murder is not a sin. Often, it is a necessary infringement against stubborn and ossified forms of being that have ceased to be remarkable. In the interests of an exciting and valuable experiment, it might even constitute a service. Here is a point of departure for a new apologia for sadism.’
My father was inexhaustible in his glorification of matter, that so astonishing element. ‘There is no dead matter,’ he taught us. ‘Its inertia is merely an outward show, behind which untold forms of life lie hidden. The range of those forms is endless, their shades and nuances inexhaustible. The Demiurgus had in his possession valuable and interesting creative recipes, thanks to which he has summoned into being a multitude of self-perpetuating generations. No one knows whether those recipes will ever be recreated. But that is unimportant. For even should those classical methods of creation prove inaccessible once and for all, there still remain certain illegal methods, a whole host of illicit and heretical methods.’
The nearer Father came from these general principles of cosmogony to the terrain of his narrower interests, the quieter his voice fell, to a penetrating whisper, and the more difficult and convoluted his lecture became, although the conclusions he arrived at floundered in ever more dubious and daring environs. His gesticulations took on an air of esoteric solemnity. He held one eye half closed and put two fingers to his forehead, and the cunning in his expression was simply frightening. He bored into his interlocutors with that cunning. He uncovered and ravished with the cynicism of that look their shyest, most intimate recesses. He pinned them down and tickled them, slipping into their deepest nook. He tormented them with an ironic finger until a flicker of laughter and understanding had been tickled out of them, laughter of admission and agreement that can lead only to capitulation.
The girls sat motionless. The lamp smoked. The cloth under the needle of the sewing machine had slipped off long ago, whilst the machine went on rattling emptily, stitching black and starless cloth unwinding from a bale of the winter night beyond the window.
‘Too long,’ said my father, ‘have we lived under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge. Too long has the perfection of his handiwork paralysed our own creativity. We have no desire to compete with him. Our ambition is not to rival him. We merely want to be creators in our own, lower sphere. We crave creativity for ourselves. We crave the joy of creation. We crave, in a word, Demiurgy.’ I have no idea in whose name my father was proclaiming these postulates, what community, guild, sect or monastic order imbued by its solidarity his words with their ardour. But as for the rest of us, we were far from having any demiurgical ambitions.
My father proceeded nonetheless to outline the programme of that second demiurgy, his image of that other generation of beings that was to stand in open opposition to the prevailing epoch. ‘We are not intent,’ he said, ‘on long-winded creations, long-term beings. Our creations shall not be the heroes of many-volumed romances. Their roles will be brief, concise, their characters having no further plans. Often, we shall take it upon ourselves to summon them to life for only a moment, for the sake of a single gesture or a single word. We openly admit that we place no emphasis on the permanence or solidity of the workmanship. Our handiwork will be provisional, as it were, intended only for a single occasion. If they are to be people, for example, then we shall give them only one side of a face, one hand and one leg—namely the one required for their role. It would be pedantic to worry about the other leg, not coming into play. At the back they might be patched with canvas, or whitewashed. By this proud motto we announce our intentions: “For every gesture, another actor.” In the service of each word, each action, we shall summon a new character to life. Such is our taste. It will be a world according to our appetites. The Demiurgus was enamoured of refined, perfect and sophisticated materials. We give precedence to junk. We are simply enrapt by it, entranced by the cheapness, the paltriness, the tawdriness of the material. Do you understand,’ my father asked, ‘the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for gaudy tissue-paper, papier-mâché, coloured lacquer, straw and sawdust? It is,’ he said with a pained smile, ‘our love for matter as such, for its downiness and porousness, its unique, mystical consistency. The Demiurgus, that great master and artist, hides it away, vanishes it under life’s make-believe. We, to the contrary, love its abrasiveness, its unruliness, its rag doll ungainliness. We like to see behind every gesture, behind each movement, its exertion, its torpor, its sweet ursinality.’
The girls sat motionless, with glassy eyes. Their faces were drawn and bewildered from listening; their cheeks were powdered with flushes; it was difficult at that moment to say whether they belonged to the first or the second generation of creation.
‘In a word,’ my father concluded, ‘we want to create mankind over again, in the image and semblance of a mannequin.’
Here, for journalistic accuracy, I must describe a certain small and trifling incident, which occurred at that point in the lecture, and to which I attach no importance. This incident, altogether incomprehensible and nonsensical in that given sequence of events, might be best understood as a peculiar kind of residual automatism, with no antecedents and no consequences, a particular example of the malice of objects, transposed into the psychic realm. I hope my readers will overlook it, pass over it with the same levity as I depict it. It happened like this:
At the moment when my father uttered the word ‘mannequin’, Adela glanced at her bracelet watch, and communicated something to Polda with a look. Then she drew forward a few inches, pulling up her chair. She lifted the hem of her dress and slowly put out her foot, enveloped in black silk, and tensed it like the tiny muzzle of a snake.
She sat like this all through that scene, proudly upright, her great, fluttering eyes deepened with the azure of atropine, Polda and Paulina at her sides. All three looked wide-eyed at Father. My father coughed, fell silent and limp, and suddenly went very red. In one instant, the lineation of his face, so vibrant and animated only a moment ago, froze on his subdued features.
He, the inspired Heresiarch, barely having emerged from the gale of his exultation, was suddenly enfolded within himself, subsided, and coiled up. And perhaps he had been supplanted by another. That other sat rigid, and very red, with downcast eyes. Polda approached and bent over him, and said in a tone of gentle encouragement, patting him gently on the back: ‘Jakub will be sensible. Jakub will obey. Jakub will not be obstinate. Come along now, Jakub... Jakub...’
Adela’s outstretched slipper shook slightly, and shone like a snake’s tongue. My father got up slowly, his eyes downcast. He took a few steps forward like an automaton, and fell to his knees. The lamp hissed in the silence. Meaningful looks ran hither and thither in the thicket of the wallpaper. The whispers of venomous tongues darted—zigzags of thought...
> -A Treatise on Mannequins, Continued- >