Róbert Gál: Agnomia (excerpt 2)

“It seems undignified,” says Jan, “to accept congratulations for the past, as if the context of that past, not worth remembering, is totally irrelevant. This isn’t a criticism of heroism, but a criticism of the need to hang your heroism out for adulation, as if every heroic act is equal. You can’t just equate an act of socially defined heroism with an act of highly individual—and therefore socially indefinable—heroism. Where is the boundary between the social need for heroes and the accidental hero, a partaker in a heroic deed, who doesn’t feel the need for a social proclamation of his heroism?” Jan is the hero of an invisible terror. Every opportunity for rebellion is punished. And because each rebellion is already punished while still in a state of potentiality, it’s never able to reach actuality in any other way but wounded. This is true for all Jan’s relationships, which never have happy endings. We’re talking about the hidden side of Jan, something one-sided, which is by definition already invisible, because it’s in the shadow of our hero. What occurs in the shadow can be only seen from inside the shadow—which means that we only learn about it when the shadow begins to speak. And then it’s necessary to differentiate what the shadow says from the fact that it’s being said by a shadow. Character isn’t built on the soft horizon of a sob, says Father, based on his beliefs, which he forces into my head by simply rejecting all of my objections. And this forces me to start up my defense mechanisms, so that inward screams, piled one on top of the other, gradually prevent my exterior from having its own face, a face that might reveal the character of my interior. This is how the need arises to compare one’s inner state with the exterior world of this or that environment. Errors posed as truth command the truth. Is a proof of belief confirmed by intransigence? And then there are all those unexplored areas of an incorrectly posed question. Standardized obsessions that fit the scheme of some ism, or others gulping down their breath in attacks of clairvoyance. The stirring of tensions between the two brings up a third type of obsession, the search for and discovery of order in chaos, which it shatters by following a single line of thought toward one final outcome. To reveal one’s color to others means to multiply the contrast, to bestow sweaty T-shirts to the backs of generations that will silently tag us as our own perpetrators. A circle is always one-sided and that side always depends on the direction of its spin. Spinning it faster means, in practice, that a glimpse of its end naturally blends with the vision of its beginning. To push oneself off from any point on a circle is possible, though it never happens entirely at random. Transformation of form through content is not a linguistic game. It has to do with the inevitability of sustaining form and thus displaying its content. As in music, here it’s not about thoughts, but about the permanent tension caused by the need to think, about belonging to this or that content to the point of accepting it in the form of parasitism. Because the scalpel of intellect isn’t able to adequately discern between operation and autopsy, the object of its incision is abstract at first and only during the act itself does it emerge from the fog of unconsciousness into the sphere of understanding to gradually acquire the face of a conscious reality. A reality whose essence is deadened by autopsy, but is not actually dead, because it still exists. When Blevin showed up in Jerusalem with a huge suitcase, I was there by accident. I recall the burning heat in his eyes. It grabbed me at once because it contrasted whatever fragility marked his personality—just as Blevin’s smallish figure was in such stark opposition to the size of his luggage. Felix and I sit in a small pizzeria, waiting for him, and as soon as he shows up we order some pizza for everyone. Felix is very happy to see his friend after so many years and, right away, he starts explaining something to him. It has to do with the fact that the two of them actually have no place to stay, but “that doesn’t matter, the important thing is that you’re here.” I also remember my second meeting with Blevin rather well. It was in a small house in the leafy and lush Jerusalem district called Ein Karem. I went there invited by Felix one spring day shortly after noon, and after a series of forceful knocks on the door (and some silent communication with the dog tied to its doghouse next door), a wooden gate opened and Blevin, with a sleepy look, invited me in, as if he didn’t recognize me at all. His heavy eyes looked bleary from sleeping, but I was soon told how tired he was from hours and hours of meditating in the dark of his windowless room—specially built for just this purpose—in the attic of his house. On a wooden secretary near a wall, dozens of labels were glued with various maxims, imperatives, and simple advice for living. Carefully spaced, yet somewhat limiting the use of the desk, they were arranged in compartments-- a regular structure of neurotic order. The labels were supposed to repeatedly remind Blevin of the strict differences between the desirable and the undesirable, as if some authority before him had engraved them into words and thus made them eternal in these very formulations. In a monastery park in the middle of Prague, a family of peacocks walks about freely. The majesty of the much-admired father peacock is suddenly disturbed when one of the park visitors opens a bag of birdseed, just like the old lady last time, who first frightened the peacock, then ostentatiously fed him her crumbs, and then finally, as if all that wasn’t enough, exclaimed in surprise: “Geez, he shat on me!” But let’s get back to Jan. Jan is a terrorist without a cause. He’s a hundred times brighter than most mortals, yet still missing that something which would make him wise. He’s like a lion with caged eyes, beaming his stare into eyes that are equally caged. This system of cages upon cages is a manifold product of his own caged brain. It is the language he opens with every word, so he can repeatedly lock it down into one and the same thought. Jan shaped his little missy in his own image, “to have her gain value,” but then she wanted to breed and so she married a tractor driver. Yes, anyone seeing Czechs and Slovaks abroad in the world has the tendency to think: What did these people come here to represent? And then a second question immediately follows: Can a Slovak comfortably experience democracy anywhere but in Slovakia? And soon other sequential questions stem from these, in which one can ask himself and immediately answer; understanding now why most citizens of small, meaningless countries remain stuck in those countries as though there were no other options. It’s precisely in small and meaningless countries that one finds writers who naturally think of themselves as “reproducers of reality,” but why this reality needs to be amplified in their writing, they don’t say. If we claim—and we do claim precisely this—that such reality must be produced in an artistic way, not simply re-produced, then we need to separate the work of art from art. Someone like Eli Roth shows up, a controversial Jewish film director, and simply shoots his chainsaw massacres in tiny Slovakia, to which Slovaks react first with rage, before realizing that this is a perfect way to get Slovakia some publicity. Roth, a young Tarantino, accomplishes in a single moment what dozens of elite intellectuals have attempted. Yes, people sense what other people are feeling and act toward them accordingly. They can be malicious that way. And in this sense, those of us whose destinies are to struggle in the waters of our own restlessness will always find ourselves at a disadvantage. Jan introduced me, one by one, to all his hostages. He drew me into his cunning conversational maneuvers, the results of which were more and more frightened looks from his girl, one of six current girlfriends. He liked to situate me between him and whichever of his girls as part actor and part observer, thus indirectly imitating my own situation of being unable to reach one because of the other, which may have something to do with the famous complex named for old King Oedipus. In this sense Jan functioned as my psychologist, yet more subconsciously than consciously, because that’s not how sadists think. Jan always has six girls, with one of the six receiving special attention, and who’s then rotated out. That is, so to speak, one is always manifest and the other five latent. They’re all so devoted to him that none of them dares to have another boyfriend. Jan would only find out about it anyway, they tell themselves, and spend their evenings masturbating, thinking of Jan. Meanwhile, my father, who simply thinks that Czechoslovakia should never have been divided, tells some anonymous person in a political discussion on the Internet what a wonderful person I am. My father, the most wonderful of all people, who for years has based his beliefs exclusively on his exertions within the need for their own implementation. This is the definition of a man of action, though how could such a term ever be defined when the result of an action is precisely a change of definition? Unless it’s the other way around, actions taken precisely to prevent some other action and thus sustaining the original definition (such as the political unit called Czechoslovakia). But if ideals are abstract, the actions corresponding to such ideals must be equally abstract. Thus, any previously defined words, around which the aforementioned process of recycling an action revolves, must gradually turn into memes, and thus lose their definitional substance. What’s left are dead-end streets, those snakes of well-meant, calculated reality, which always, for whatever reason, unseen by the scientist’s eye, manage to defy calculation. Yes, we all want to be oh-so understood! And yet we know very well that some of the things we try to understand are simply incomprehensible, and this precisely because of their essence. Why do we so stubbornly look for locks in every door—even the ones that are already open? This is also one of the questions regarding Buñuel and The Exterminating Angel. Mightn’t the existence of a lock on an opened door change the status of its openness? And so on. To create a culture necessarily means in most cases to be acultural. For why should a creator need to know what others create, for the purposes of his own creation? A widespread and blind groping about is sufficient for a creator, since as he knows very well that no groping can be without limits or else it would spill into something else. The role of the creator is to sustain the spill within one’s own character, preventing it from ever spilling into something else. As such, we’re dealing with the permanent maintenance of the desired flow, which for this reason becomes a flow of thought in the sense of a tautology—that is indisputable. A flow of thought in the sense of a realization of the act of thought, the flow of what’s being thought continually melting into the flow of thinking. This isn’t philosophy, just the gradual process of a creative undertaking—with jackhammer in hand. A creator is always more of a worker than an intellectual. A man forced to observe is learning to observe; a circle inside a circle, repeatedly burst like a bubble. The lure of traps—traps that even traps fall into. I say: only people who are perverse in their body and soul can perform great deeds! claims František Drtikol in one of his letters, adding: But it must be a pure, beautiful, original, free-spirited perversion, bubbling up from the man’s own depth! It may not be a plagiarism, an imitated thing . . . One thing has a name, another is looking for a name. And it’s discovered that the name doesn’t belong to the named, but to the designation. The leap into the identity of that name, which is legitimate, because it’s already legitimized. The leap into the illusion of a break—for it is an illusory break—it never ceases appearing as a fault-line. Like a thought that isn’t thinking about itself, but about what it doesn’t want to think about, and from which it tries to separate itself. The mental process of the unfinished intention of desire. Shouts of an unknown nature. The claustrophobia of concerning oneself with them as a certain type of limit. Is this a sense of humor about the humorless? But jokes must come with humor, no? I’m sitting on a bench, a little before midnight, thinking; I settle down. And suddenly a girl sits next to me. I think intensely of lighting a cigarette and in the end I actually do it. The tension between us didn’t last long. I wanted to give her a chance, but she was impatient. She leaped up in a rage (I only then noticed her delicate nose and glasses with elegantly thin rims), just so that she could turn on her heel in front of my eyes and stamp out the cigarette butt of her desire with a disdainful gesture. But I survived it. And a day later she appeared again in the form of a different woman. An equally intemperate intellectual with tortoise-shell glasses and good skin. After a few days of getting to know each other, she informs me by cell phone that I need someone more refined. Laughter, like a dog barking, is a reply, an outburst, a response to my feeling for her; let’s call that feeling “resignation.” Response as a designation, a marking. Response—Narcissus’s echo to the silent companion of his doubled desire. My relationship to women is monomagical. To enter every situation unprepared, as though in the remnants of a dream. Building up the vibrations of what’s already been lived through, the tension generated by the possibility of survival. To find a window of a moment. To fail a test, an indicative sentence of contradiction. A human gets a taste for another human—cannibal. Images of fertility, geysers exorcizing ghosts. The sun winding through empty deposits of anxiety. A cohort of useless resolutions meeting behind enemy lines. The order-loving movement of a tumor of the spirit toward healing, away from one’s own body. And from every pain a question mark jumps out: Is this pain the right one? Defocusing the invisible toward greater and greater visibility. An escape manipulation, the coordinates of a spiderweb thrown into space. The insatiable cameras of untalented people, who float wherever they walk. Only to open their beaklike mouths, from which seeds of hatred are propelled by pressure. A guy with three mobile phones like three cocks and across from him a big-breasted babe who’s trying with all her might to look serious, as if it were possible in her case. Two toughs behind her back react to a remark by the aforementioned macho man who gets up for a moment to enact the screen-test of a gunslinger without a gun, because now he’s having a good time. His chick has been in the restroom for the last ten minutes. A fat boy from the next table sits in her place. The mirror of a window, through which I’m observing all this, is slowly fogged by the unexpected course of the evening. Spurred by nothing I can see—one, two, three—they all wink at me in succession. I’m in the groove. I’m tapping this nonsense into my head and don’t pay attention to the people I’m talking about. In one of the illustrations—self-portrait photos of naked L., depicting herself searching and in some places even in spasms, finding the right form of her corporeality—there are two spots on her neck, photographed from behind her back, which seems in this photo even more androgenic than it does in reality. The spots were of course painted on for effect, the photo wasn’t meant to be a document and yet for me they are always a memento, a visual meme, triggering an entire sequence of chain reactions: accusations and self-accusations. (To what degree must we provoke change in a human being while they are already being changed?) To bring out feelings as if internally hiding something. Controlled denial of wanting, which isn’t based on anything, nor is it justified by anything. The emptiness, which frightens us immediately, is barred by the structure of the net and breathing in it. Empty cans of what’s been drunk rattle through a street of static sculptures of the just restored. The looks of tourist children, their chirping cameras capture what was, angels included, and transform it into other materials. Time shifts between expectations and disappointments—unsteady, almost invisible. This is an annihilation of the sun and other such hermits. This is a tautology of every moment, as if every moment was necessarily a tautology. “If I knew she was so mentally unstable, I definitely wouldn’t have married her,” Ben says. And the vision of Ben’s interest in my work surpasses the consequences of my expectation. I need to reintroduce myself, years later, for he no longer walks around my place with a funnel in his ear to eavesdrop on me. What do Jan and Ben have in common? Nothing and much. Jan thinks of himself as a gourmet of life, to the point of having the need to lecture others about how to live. Jan still hasn’t lost his belief in reproduction, although preferring to constantly produce new things himself. Ben doesn’t talk about reproduction yet, but he’s also as an author, almost unproductive. Despite that, one can feel in him the need to change this state of affairs. Ben is insured against obvious loneliness through his paper marriage, though this evidently never much suited him. The illusory security of this status, which he imposed on himself and his wife, is primarily intended to hide something. But even Ben doesn’t believe in the irreversibility of his fate—and yet his actions, which all seem to haunt him, don’t support this confidence. We might point to the fact that he’s the younger of the two by a bit, because even Jan, when he was Ben’s age, perceived things similarly. Jan ran away from a childless marriage, stating that he was good enough to deserve other women. Ben probably thinks the same. At a certain stage of their lives, both could be seen walking around Prague in long black coats, cloaking the solidity of their pose even when walking. One flirted with artistic inclinations, the other only theorized over them. They both liked cats, but neither knew why. Both carefully maintained their daily bachelor rituals during relationships. One is convinced that women are supposed to tyrannize him; the other believes the opposite, a belief he practices fearlessly in private. They each have rock-hard reasoning behind their convictions, as demonstrated when push comes to shove. At that moment, they pay attention, focus their senses and, giving out the refined screams of intellectuals, recklessly disown themselves as well as anyone close. For every secret is generated by the revelation of something similar. Is there an urge to create the similar? But the similar thing is always equidistant to its original. It is the movement of illusion that displays the patterns to images, by which they are perceived. This is overstepping the boundary of necessity to return to the form, which the noise of contrast shed of its color.

Translated from Slovak by Michaela Freeman

First published in Exquisite Corpse, March 2010