Eleven

 He could not yet find either the voice or (perhaps most importantly for him) the strength to address the children—at least not yet. They knocked at his front door in little rat-a-tat tats, a whole volley of them in quick and haphazard succession. It was a seemingly random but shaped chorus of voices that nosily followed up the knocking. All of this shook him from his quiet but frenzied scribbling (a habit he’d grown proud of whenever it fancied strike him, but which we would always later regret, as the frenzy of an over-zealous and incapable know-nothing whose efforts became tiresome faults that beat him back down into days of languid bed-laying and video-watching. And in those moments, it was all lost—all of it, goddammit, every last word or thought vanished, evaporated into torpor and vain hopes and …).

He was furious, and clenched his teeth, as if to explode into a seething rage. But then he listened to their insistent callings out for him. He wilted, and that spot in his chest leapt and fluttered and he was now in sorrowful need of them. He could not just let their calls go unanswered as he had on other occasions (those when his bed would not yield him up to the follies of trivial banter and childish play).

The violence in him subsided, and he slinked to the door, with a mind still perfumed from his racing thoughts of the future possible. Still, he could find neither the voice nor the strength to address the children directly. He made a plan to halt his ideas, his writings, let them in and let them play freely. They would run into the garden—but today the berries were ripe and he knew they’d be found before he could have a decent picking.

It was all part of the game, their game—of their innocence which plagued him and presented itself like a wall, or a law. They came in, they wanted a story, a tale … anything to make them laugh or scream in terror, to send them running into the depths of his garden. Sometimes they’d want to be found; other times they’d want to play amongst themselves and at still others, they’d return for more tales or toys or tulaberries. Today he accepted (almost willingly) the diversions.

He called to them softly—today, children, dear little ones, I am stuck behind this door! Why? they wanted to know, laughing and whispering questions and disbelief to themselves. It’s because of a great, though unfortunate, event that has transpired, he called out: the locking mechanism has become jammed by a small civilization that has decided to take up residence there—at least for the time being.

They laughed and shouted their disbelief. It’s true! he insisted, now raising his voice slightly, demonstrating to them, he thought, his sincerity (the louder the more sincere—wasn’t this the dictate of practical wisdom?). He moved from the door, smiling but then sinking deeply into his tale. He moved into a room adjacent that of the photographs, and found an old vinyl—Mozart divertimenti. Perfect. He turned up the volume. Over the music—the horns, the violins dancing and hopping around—he yelled: and this is the music they’ve asked me to play for you, dear ones. Listen!

Stunned, they did as he asked and he could, through a partially obscured window set behind shrubbery of ancient design, see their little frozen eyes in rapt attention as the music leapt out through the wide-open windows, striking them with its alien sense of play. They took themselves each by the hand and formed a circle of dancing. He quashed a roaring laugh, and returned to the front door to continue the story.

You see, dear ones—rotten little kids you actually are!—they have taken up residence en masse: their whole civilization, all their people, their little children, their belongings … everything that they have, and that they are, is now to be found right inside the lock mechanism. How can I disturb them? If I twist the door handle, then I will squish them, and throw them—their whole world!—all into chaos. Are you prepared to be called their murderers? No? I didn’t think so. Then are you prepared to hear my plan for getting you in here? Come ‘round, listen up then …

There was a series of somewhat complicated (at least for the children and his own imagination) alleyways and passages that, navigated correctly, led into the basement of the house, and then from a set of stairs, back out into the garden. Of course there was a more direct route, but now the labyrinths of yesterday’s tales, he thought, must be made alive in today’s tasks. That aphorism dried on his pages some years ago…

Ok, listen up again! His announcement was made after a long pause, letting the music finish (it was one of those sublimely playful yet profoundly sad adagios that drifted out of the player; he could not turn out his fables into the wind while it also carried such a master’s beauty to his ears, crafted for him so long ago). I am going to slip the instructions, the map, on how to arrive at the garden’s interior, out through the crack at the bottom of this here door. Here … do you have it? After a skirmish to retrieve it, one of them did.

Good—now let the eldest read it, and you follow them on. I’ll be waiting where the map ends. He knew that they’d have difficulty at first reading the map, but that once they found the right landmarks (berried shrubs, old wooden doors, windows with strange dressing, entrances with gargoyles and old lanterns and such), they’d find themselves in familiar territory, and then make it through the labyrinths effortlessly.

Don’t despair—and never give up! he yelled as he heard them at first quarreling about who should get to interpret the map and lead them through to the end, then quieting down to begin the task of locating the key landmarks. They finally scurried off, rustling the dry leaves left from many an autumnal age of neglect, and he then set down to work on the next patch of ideas that billowed out of those photographs. With the children lost to a paradise of labyrinths, he regained his inferno of slow, plodding toil at his writing desk. More defeat to chart out in exquisite detail, he smirked, addressing himself in that voice that has no vocalization (fitting, isn’t it, to declaim your failure in such an abstract manner?).

He thought he glimpsed the secret of her despair—or was it a joyful wisdom?—in the strange self-portrait that was at the same time a stolen glance of two others: a man, busy working and wholly unknown to himself in any thought, and a woman on the cusp of a day that she seemed to take in reflectively, and who seemed to succeed in getting the world outside of her to move in tandem with her slow and plodding gait up the stairs and out into a world of mundane but necessary toil (would he escape into another world? would she respond to her toil with abandon or with more concerted determination to make something more?).

It was just there—that’s all the picture was supposed to be about, which is to say, nothing at all. Indeed, it was supposed to be shuttered, sealed up and never exposed again to the light. But the tragedy of photography was this dual exposure, which she sought to resist, to fight in an alien way. A picture was already an exposure. In the darkroom, another process unfolded which brought it to a new life—to the world that would scrutinize. That scrutiny she eschewed with all that she was. She therefore retreated to the obscurity of an absent observer, hovering—and with children always (or usually) in tow. She tortured their innocence out of them—perhaps this was why he was profoundly drawn to her works. She stole innocence and beat it into submission, until it became lost—not lost innocence, but simply lost: illusions of being there for this or that, under this or that sign or for this or that reason—all that was beat free of innocence and all that was left was this naked thing itself. The innocence that was lost to childhood itself. Their philosophers, she thought over and over again, could not see this because they looked too closely: at either the things, or their ideas, or only at ideas. It was none of that. And in the vacancy of this earlier innocence, in the flash of the shutter, she restored it—but for no one. The secret of her work was precisely its absence from view. And inside the sealed canisters would be contained neither a promise nor a hope, nor even a new philosophy. It was a jumble of future possible—not what was there, or would be or will be or had been. Just a there lacking a being verb. What she created was not art or anything like that. What she created were the remains of the future.

From this thought he set down to write, in a specially chosen notebook, pages crisp…

And so (he began) my utopistic formula would begin where she left off. She usurped the throne that had been given to art by a world famished for a morsel of artistic substance, of renewed substance—but that’s neither what the world needed, nor deserved. No, it deserved nothing. That was her secret: locking away these unexposed residues that were, in this closure, this refusal to share or reveal or disclose, just secrets, forgotten, truly the lost. That’s what the world deserved—loss. It hadn’t really known true loss, until now. Thus, the dead corpse of the arts and all the rest had to be ditched, and all their vain hopes expelled—but not with a hopeful sojourn into a foreign, but temporary, land—like a flight to Egypt. No, this was not a sojourn with a promise of return, triumphal, into the City of the Vision of Peace. There was no returning to the starting point, or back to the Promised Land. It was a one-way trip, straight into the desert, a highway for our desolation (for our little gods that filled in the chasms and abysses); only then might we—they—finally run out of breath. God ran out of breath the moment he took that mud mound and breathed life into its hole. The mouth of God from which man gained his life breath was the first abyss. Mouth to mouth, God found His abyss.

The formula for utopia here had to be, he thought, an inversion of the three or four fundamental modes of human cultural creativity. Through that, it would be possible—no?— to invert the only form of civilization itself which we’ve known since the rise of world empires—and this in order to produce a different civilization, one we cannot foresee from what is or can be imagined. It must be built upon our refusal to know or to foresee. It must be a primordial refusal. Willful blindness? Turning our back on “history”?

All of this was in those canisters—left unopened. And it would be this incapacity for foresight or foreknowledge that would and must constitute our first anti-axiom: one that counters our epistemological hubris, so that, willfully blinded, we might versify a Homeric hymn that only the blind could find. And it would not be we who discover it—we would have become forgotten, or shrugged off as a stupid interlude that, even so, managed to yield some decent fruit. Founders who would never live in their foundation—builders who’re the first evicted.

How? Practically (which is also theoretically), my formula, he continued, is for science and art to exchange natures, one absorbing the substance and function of the other. Likewise for the rest, philosophy and religion. The final permutation literally yielding a vacancy sign at each of their former temples—a wonderful confusion of rooms and furniture, from out of which someone can begin again.

The foundation would be a new science—not a “new” or “revolutionary” one laden slow with the vapid sentimentality of the R—s, but burning with the furnace of impossible dreams of science itself, the music of art that had taken it over and converted it into a tool into which humanity may enter, only to leave with no understanding or knowledge or awareness of its former self, turned into a thing, the “evil” of nature in God come free at last…

The final shroud that innocence would lose before paradise was regained was the illusion of good and beauty which their God wore in that garden. His act of expulsion was the first of love for His children. He didn’t know anything of the future—he was its creation. All theodicy proceeded from this one, primordially false premise. What He had given to them was this power, to create, from good and evil. Creation was the outward expression of a magisterial, inner, evil that sought perfect expression. Hadn’t S— already realized this? Yes, of course...