Departure
"The Chrysalis" had been his most recent work to date and as
the ship eased gently out of the harbour he felt akin to its
protagonist, bound for a new life in a new world; as he gazed out
at the palace that stood upon the hill across the bay, he recalled
the frescoes, chambers and corridors on which he had based the
story. Theory and practice he thought, the final stage.
The breeze stiffened as the
ship entered the choppier waters of the deeper channel, entrusting
itself to the mercy of the four winds and to the skill of the
captain with his charts, while he himself sounded the deeper
waters of his imagination.
[Translation]
With this iambic, he plotted their course towards the axis
drawn by the North and South winds, where East meets West in
timeless certainty.
The palace was getting smaller
now and he decided to remain on deck a little longer to watch the
undulations of the rolling hills and green pastures turn grey, and
recede into the distance of the murky waters. "The Chrysalis",
too, had started from amongst the cloudy waters of uncertainty
before finally projecting the adult stage of its imago. "Once upon
a time ...
... there stood upon a hill, a
large palace. Inside, a tired soldier wandered from room to room.
The palace was enveloped in the midst of a snowstorm, from which
the soldier had taken refuge. He was alone in the large empty
rooms, whose contents and inhabitants had all been evacuated at
the beginning of the war. The rooms of the palace were decorated
with frescoes of plants and animals, so that as the soldier went
from one room to another, the natural world was presented to him
in a seemingly endless procession. Slowly, his dazed mind began to
grasp the organisation behind the cavalcade that passed before his
eyes. The palace was divided into four sections, each section
depicting the flora and fauna of one of the four continents.
Different rooms then showed the different sub-dominions of the
vegetable kingdom, this also serving as the frame for classifying
the subjects of the animal kingdom, who were thus classified by
diet. Prominent in the foreground of many frescoes were plants
with healing properties, which had their less well-known
properties listed in Greek next to them.
Passing through the rooms, the
soldier could feel the labyrinthine structure of the way in which
this presentation of the natural world was organised; this being
such as to induce in him speculations of a philosophical nature.
He reasoned that there were many ways of dividing up and
classifying what we call "the World", each one legitimate and
useful from a certain point of view.
While he was thinking these
thoughts, he came upon an ornate stove. It was a stove such as he
had never seen before; taller than himself, it tapered upwards
towards the ceiling, its freely flowing forms containing birds,
plants, and animals in abundance. The monumental construction
prompted further philosophical speculation and he began to see the
palace, and the stove in particular, not just as a hedonistic
meeting-place or simple heating device for the aristocracy, but
more as an encyclopaedia of the age in which it was created,
showing the world for the people at that time, how they saw it,
categorised it and lived in it. Continuing along this line of
thought and wanting to know the reality behind our encyclopaedic
divisions of it, the soldier opened the door of the stove, only to
find an emptiness within. Baffled by this absence, his thoughts
returned to more practical matters as he realised that the stove
was big enough for him to crouch-up in and so spend the night
above the draughty floor. Wrapping himself in his greatcoat and
blanket, he squeezed himself in. Shutting the door, the darkness
that enveloped him was not the darkness of cold, damp cellars; it
was warm and intimate, and as he rested his head against the
inside of the stove, he felt the warmth of his body for the first
time that day.
Now that he was inside, he
could feel that, although empty apart from himself, the emptiness
was not the nothingness he had first supposed on opening the door.
The outside of the stove was a representation of the world, a
categorisation of it. The reality behind this representation was
not a nothingness but was rather the infinite field of such
possibilities. As this idea gained conviction in his mind, the
soldier, sitting in the darkness, began to perceive the idea of
his self more strongly. Previously his world had been one of
"billiard-ball-type" atoms in which the self was only an ethereal,
passing phenomenon; but now, sitting in the darkness of infinitely
many worlds, he saw the self as that which was permanent, and
objective worlds as fleeting and transitory. The stove and the
world it represented faded away from him and he felt himself, that
is to say his self, as like a seed growing in the darkness,
putting out new stems and roots in preparation for life in new
worlds, new labyrinths of representation. Different worlds and
lives flashed before his mind's eye, i.e. I, which became a single
enduring entity, no longer a microcosm within the macrocosm of
reality but rather something coextensive with, but not identical
to, this reality.
At this point, with the
exhaustion of his body, the soldier fell into a deep sleep. On
awakening the next day, he found everything to be exactly the same
as before, only it was not the same. Something had changed...
Imago."
imago Pl. imagines and imagos. 1. a. Entom. The final and perfect stage or form of an insect
after it has undergone all its metamorphoses; the 'perfect
insect'. First used by Linnæus, Syst. Nat. ed. 12
(1767) I.II. 535. (as) a modern
application of L. imago IMAGE, representation, natural shape,
etc.
But which image, he wondered, would come to represent this, his
new self, that was now beginning to emerge from its chrysalis as
he started out on the passage from one continent to another?
Perhaps the image was now, at this very moment, being transferred
from the heavenly spheres of the astrologer down into the depths
of Alveus Oceani, the realm of the cartographer. His questioning
eyes searched the restless waves as if expecting a sign of
annunciation - nothing, Terra Perusta. Above him, Eurus, Aquilo,
Auster and Favonius circled in mockery, hinting at his fate as
they raced through the rigging; but he could no more understand
these clues that hummed in the ship's shrouds than he could read
the ever-changing configurations of foam that lay in its wake.
Terra Incognita. Nevertheless, he smiled for he knew that time
would tell. There was always Old Father Time. Frigida.
Türkenkugel
The waves lapped peacefully against the gentle gradient of the
beach, only intermittently swamping the fluted cavities of which
the calcified fragment consisted. After they had drawn back, the
liernes of coral would be left, transfixed in the still clearness
of the water that glazed the gill-like ribs. Enhanced under this
vitrine of surface tension, the fragile forms would be magnified
into a virtual image, actual and yet elusive to the straining
eye.
It was a perfect day. Not a
cloud in the sky - and as the fragment lay, bathed in the waters
of the Mediterranean waves, the new arrival embarked on his first
excursion into the heart of the town. Later on, he would walk
along the beach, find the little piece of coral and keep it. The
first image of his first day. But now he is wandering aimlessly
through the labyrinth of streets, following the twists and turns
of the cracked walls and flaking paint, passing the planks and
rusty nails of boarded-up windows and bolted doors. Every so
often, an unequivocal trace of the twentieth century (the leg of a
plastic doll, the torn page of a newspaper blowing in the wind)
imbues the area surrounding it with new meaning. He thinks of
Schwitter's Merz pictures, assemblages nailed and glued together
from the scraps and off-cuts of circumstance. Here too there is
Merz, he decides. "Kommerz" has long since died.
Stray cats slink away at his
approach and small children watch his passing with staring eyes as
their brothers pose questions awkwardly in that foreign
tongue.
"Where from you?"
"You America?" He smiles and
answers their simple questions simply. Otherwise, the streets are
mostly empty. A woman passes silently, trying to ignore his
presence. Then two men deep in a conversation that pauses, their
eyes gliding over him inquisitively ...
The street is getting narrower
now, as narrow as the alleys and doorways that lead off from it,
so that it is difficult to say exactly where the street ends and
the domain of privacy begins. From an upstairs window, the
tattered remnants of a mosquito net flap in the breeze.
"Finish," a voice calls. He
retraces his steps back to the last turning and tries a different
direction. It reminds him of the mediaeval part of another town,
where the centuries have also blurred the boundaries between
"house" and "street", higgledy-piggledy extensions having changed
cobbled streets into corridors, and courtyards into beer cellars.
There, tucked away among such winding lanes as these, had been the
café where his eastern voyage had been conceived after he
had chanced upon a large stone girthed by a belt of iron and
hanging, suspended from a chain in the cramped space of a dusty
niche. A strange exhibit. The inscription below had proclaimed:
Translation: In year 1683 - that of such evil - this
stone was thrown here by a mortar from the Turks in the Leopold
town. Weight 79 pounds.
A part of Vienna's memory
of a siege withstood, a proud mascot against an empire seeking to
expand; for him however, the projectile had been a sign and a
metaphor. East he would have to go, beyond Europe and the crushing
weight of her crumbling boundaries; eastwards from whence the
firers of the mortar had come, over Hungary's sweeping plains,
across the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea, to a continent
that had lain dormant these three hundred years since. As if in
verification of the sign's authenticity, he had spent the rest of
the day with the guidebook tracking down further cannonballs that
had become woven into the city's fabric during the bombardments of
the siege. Some were proudly displayed (Fleischmarkt 11,
Gösser Bierklinik, Sieveringer Straße 99, Linke
Wienzeile 172) while others could only be disentangled from the
surrounding architecture by the knowing eye (Stephan's Dom,
Bognergasse 11, Bankgasse 3). Now, a year later, he was picking
his way through the web of yet another foreign city's fabric,
cutting through the dark shadows to catch glimpses of the minarets
and palm trees that emerged from behind shambled rooftops only to
vanish around the next corner.
"Where you want to go?" A
round face with large brown eyes was looking up at him.
"The sea."
"I take you!" The boy sets off
and obediently he follows. After a few corners they come to a
square and an archway brings them out onto a promontory that
overlooks the sea's glistening swell.
"Here" says the boy, proudly.
A few coins and he is happy, running back towards the maze of
streets from whence they had just emerged.
From the vantage point of the
fortifications that overlook the harbour, he watches the clusters
of people who gather about the freshly docked fishing boats;
tourists, merchants, old men and housewives, while the sons of the
fishermen begin the work of unloading the day's haul. Later he
will examine the piece of coral that he has found and the grains
of sand lodged between its filagree of ribs and tubes will remind
him of the Turkish cannonballs that have impregnated the fabric of
that other city. One, pitched among the gargoyles and pinnacles of
the cathedral, has been carved into the grinning head of a Turk
who gapes down from the height of his lofty perch; much as his
counterpart in the East gazes now at the busy scene spread out
below him.
He stops gazing and starts
slowly down the steps, while the waves lap peacefully against the
gentle gradient of the beach, intermittently swamping the fluted
cavities of which the calcified fragment consists; presently he
will come across the little piece of coral that is waiting for
him. A strange catch.
Türkenkugel: Turkish
canon ball/projectile
Prologue | Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III | Chapter IV | References | Table of Contents
