Rich Text Document (draft of December 2008)
A Treatise on Mannequins
or, The Other Book of Genesis
‘THE DEMIURGUS’ said my father ‘had no monopoly on creation — creation is the privilege of all souls. Matter is given to endless fecundity, an inexhaustible vital force, and at the same time the beguiling power of temptation that entices us to be creators. Deep within matter, barely perceptible smiles are shaped; faces freeze agog — congealing attempts at figurations. All matter ripples with endless possibilities, which pass through it in sickly shudders. Awaiting the invigorating breath of the soul, it overflows endlessly into itself; it tempts us with its thousand sweet encirclements and the pliability it dreams up out of itself in its blind reveries.
‘Bereft of its own initiative, voluptuously acquiescent, yielding in the feminine manner, compliant 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 demiurgic manipulations. Matter is the most passive and defenceless essence in the cosmos. Anyone can knead and shape it, and 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, new forms. Murder is not a sin. Often, it is a necessary infringement in the face of 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 the starting point of 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. ‘Lifelessness is a mere outward show, behind which unfamiliar forms of life lie hidden. The range of these forms is endless, their shades and nuances inexhaustible. The Demiurgus had in his possession valuable and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to these he summoned a multitude of self-perpetuating generations into being. 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 heretical and illicit methods.’
The nearer Father came from these general principles of cosmogony to the terrain of his narrower interests, the quieter his voice grew, to a penetrating whisper, and the more difficult and convoluted the lecture became, while the conclusions he came to were lost in ever more dubious and daring environs. His gesticulations took on 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, and by the cynicism of that look he uncovered and ravished 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 understanding and laughter had been tickled out of them — laughter of admission and agreement that makes capitulation inevitable in the end.
The girls sat motionless; the lamp smoked; the cloth under the needle of the sewing machine had slipped off long ago, while the machine went on rattling emptily, stitching black and starless cloth unwinding from a bale of the winter night outside the window.
‘Too long have we lived under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge,’ said my father. ‘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; in a word, we crave Demiurgy.’ I have no idea in whose name my father proclaimed these postulates, what community, guild, sect or monastic order conferred pathos on his words by its solidarity. For myself, I was far from any demiurgic ambitions.
Nonetheless, my father proceeded 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 only for a moment, for the sake of a single gesture or a single word. We openly admit it: we place no emphasis on the permanence or the solidity of the workmanship; our handiwork will be provisional, as it were, made for only 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 — the one, namely, that they require in their role. It would be pedantic to worry about the other leg, not coming into play. From the back they can be patched with canvas, or whitewashed. We shall announce our intentions by this proud motto: “For each gesture, another actor.” In the service of each word, each action, we shall summon a new character to life. This is our fancy — it will be a world according to our taste. 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, lacquered colour, straw and sawdust? — It is’ he said with a woeful smile ‘our love for Matter itself, 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 and rag doll ungainliness. Behind each gesture, behind each movement, we like to see its exertion, its inertia, its sweet ursinality.’
The girls sat motionless, with glazed eyes. Their faces were drawn and bewildered from listening, their cheeks were powdered with flushes and 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 this point in the lecture, and which I attach no importance to. This incident, altogether incomprehensible and nonsensical in this 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:
Just as 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 raised 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 this way all through that scene, fully upright and with great, fluttering eyes, deepened by the azure of atropine, Polda and Paulina at her sides. All three looked wide-eyed at Father. My father coughed, fell silent, went limp and suddenly turned very red. In one instant the lineation of his face, only just now so animated and full of vibrance, 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. Patting him lightly on the back, she said in a tone of gentle encouragement: ‘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 rose 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...