A Void (15 page)

a gift for both showing and masking, both giving and taking

away."

"Larvati ibant obscuri sola sub nocta
," murmurs Olga, who was,

as is obvious, no classical scholar.

'Thus," adds Amaury, tactfully ignoring Olga's Latin, "on

occasion it's
Moby Dick
or a postwar work by Thomas Mann or

a fiction by Isidro Parodi initially brought out in 1950 or so by

La Croix du Sud.
But Vowl's diary also contains a quotation from

Kafka, an allusion to a 'McGufiin', to a King and on occasion

to Rimbaud. I found, in all of that, a point in common: an

apparition (if you'll allow my using such an oxymoron) of

a blank, a Void."

"A Void!" shouts Augustus B. Clifford, dropping his crystal

glass and spilling aquavit on his rug.

"A Void!" moans Olga, smashing a lamp in agitation.

"A Void!" roars Arthur Wilburg Savorgnan, swallowing half

his cigar.

"A Void!" brays Squaw in a shrill and jangling whinny, atomis-

ing a trio of matching mirrors.

"A Void, right, that's what I said," affirms Amaury: "it all turns

on a Void. But, by constantly writing about 'a Void', what do

you think Anton was alluding to?"

From a cupboard Augustus pulls out an album in foolscap

format bound in sharkskin.

"This is what our postman brought us from Anton a month

ago day for day."

Doing a rapid calculation, Amaury says:

"In short, just two days prior to his abduction."

"That's right. You won't find a word in it, though, but for

what I think you call a 'small ad' which Anton probably cut out

of his
Figaro
and stuck in."

Olga, Clifford and Savorgnan form a group around Amaury,

9 6

who starts scrutinising Anton's album. It consists of 26 folios,

all blank but for a solitary column, without any sort of illustration,

stuck on to folio No. 5, a column that Amaury runs through in

a faint murmur:

DOWN WITH OBSCURITY

(Homo w*sh*s wh*t*r th*n P*rs*l)

ANYTHING can look virginal, for It will wash

ANYTHING AT ALL: your pants, stockings, T-shirts,

your shifts, smocks and cardigans,

your saris and Arab burnous.

ANYTHING AT ALL: your cotton pillowslips and cotton

sailor suits,

but also your woodwork, your black puddings, your raisins,

your spirits, your hands, your pains

your worms, your swords

your big fish in small ponds, your small fish in big ponds

your hair, your coal

your nights without 40 winks, your connubials without 69

your savings put away for a rainy day,

your billows, your too famous flaws, your fabrics without a scar

your omissions, your gaps, your lapsus

your manuscripts

your aims and ambitions, your months in a shopping plaza,

your notations for hautboy, your abominations for Tarzan,

your bars and bistros, ad infinitum, a Void, a Void, a Void!

D O W N W I T H O B S C U R I T Y

"Alas, only a Champollion would know how to clarify that,"

murmurs a downcast Amaury.

"It's my turn now," says Savorgnan, who can hardly wait to

add his contribution. "A month ago I too got mail from Anton

9 7

Vowl. It had on it no distinguishing marks indicating who it was

from, but it was obvious that it had to do with our missing

companion" - adding, "although I still can't work out why Vowl

was so stubborn about maintaining his incognito . . ."

"What was in yours?" asks Amaury, as jumpy as a cat on a hot

tin roof.

"I'm coming to that. Look."

Unzipping his holdall, and rummaging through it, Savorgnan

pulls out a card and holds it up in front of his trio of companions.

"It's a 'kaolin' card (kaolin is a kind of clay found in China),

black as tar from a coating of Indian ink, at which a skilful local

craftsman ground away with a sharp scraping tool (or possibly a

vaccination pin), his inspiration for such a cunning notion no

doubt arising from a contraption thought up by Jarjack, who

was imitating that sad circus clown, that 'August', to whom (prior

to him) Oudiys arch-rival had brought immortality. And this

craftsman, by judiciously stripping off parts of its black back-

ground, finally had a diagram of a high-quality finish akin to

bamboo inscriptions such as you'll occasionally find on wash-

drawings from Japan."

"Is it from Japan?" Olga wants to know.

"Yup, it's from Japan all right. I instandy shot off for a

talk about it with my boss," says Savorgnan, "to wit, Gadsby

V. Wright. And with him I took a train to Oxford to

show its inscription to Parsifal Ogdan. This is a transcription

of it:

Kuraki yori

Kuraki michi ni zo

Usuzumi ni

Kaku tamazusa to

Kari miyum kana

"Sounds charming," says Augustus.

"It's a ha'ikai," says Savorgnan, "or should I say a tanka, but

not, as you might think, by Narihira. No, it's by Izumi Shikibu

9 8

(scholars, in fact, claim that it's probably his final work, his swan

song); or, if not, by Tsumori Kunimoto who, though just as

important, isn't as famous. Its initial publication was in
Go shu i

shu,
a compilation drawn up in honour of Japan's Mikado. Parsi-

fal Ogdan's word-for-word translation of this tanka is, in my

opinion, of an astonishing purity and proportion, particularly as

I was told by a chap from Tokyo's National Library, a man Anton

Vowl had known during his sojourn in Japan, that a tanka always

has 3, 5, 6, on occasion as many as 8, distinct connotations. But,

as Parsifal was to show us, such ambiguity, though crucial to

Japan, to its quaint way of thinking about things, has, for an

inhabitant of Paris or London, no charm at all about it, with

our traditional antipathy to all notions of obscurity, incongruity,

approximation and intangibility. A tanka must boast clarity,

concision, incision, candour, vivacity and unity of thought: in

translation, that's worth any amount of arguably major

omissions. So this is just a translation among many that Ogdan

thought up:

Out of tar-black

In a black tracing

By a point so sharp

Inscribing a sign which isn't black:

O look! an albatross in flight

"Too, too charming," sighs Amaury, "if not too, too illumi-

nating."

"I'm afraid my own contribution risks not advancing us much

in our task," says Olga, following an instant during which, as

though in growing discomfort, nobody says a word. "I say I'm

afraid, for if, in your diary, card and tanka, you found allusions

to a common point, a Void, my manuscript is as lucid, limpid and

unambiguous as yours, Amaury, or yours, Augustus, or yours,

Arthur, was cryptic, allusory and hard to grasp . . _."

"But," says Amaury, "that sounds as if it has a solution for

us . . ."

9 9

ft

Olga won't allow him to finish. "No, no, you don't follow. In

what I'm about to show you, you'll find no sign, no allusion of

any kind. For it's not an original work but a sort of anthology

comprising 5 or 6 works by various hands - various famous

hands, I might add - but containing nothing of any import to

u s . . . "

Now it's Augustus's turn to cut in. "Olga, my darling, has

nobody told you about cutting a long story short? Why don't

you just stick to facts?"

"All right, all right, I'm coming to that. Six days prior to that

odd postcard with its fascinatingly ominous postscript, I too got

mail from Anton - a bulging jiffy bag. And what I found in it

was:

a) a short story by a
soi-disant
Arago, 'An intriguing tour of our

country'. I was full of admiration for such a charming octavo

with its Arabic motifs and its morocco binding inlaid with gold.

Strictly as a work of fiction, though, it didn't, in my opinion,

amount to much;

b) six highly familiar madrigals, which most of us had to study

at school in our childhood: Anton's painstaking transcription,

word for word, without any annotations, any marginalia at all,

of:

• William Shakspar's 'Living, or not living5 soliloquy

• PBS's
Ozymandias

• John Milton's
On His Glaucoma

• Thomas Hood's
No

• Arthur Gordon Pym's
Black Bird

• Arthur Rimbaud's
Vocalisations.

"Now and again, in an odd stanza or two, you'll find an illusion

to Anton's hang-ups: obscurity, immaculation, vanishing and

damnation. But I was struck most of all by how random it

was . . ."

1 0 0

"Possibly," says Amaury, "and, again, possibly not! For, if

Anton thought fit to copy it all out so laboriously, it's now our

job to find an indication in it as to his motivation."

Mumbling about proofs and puddings, it's Savorgnan's pro-

posal that only by a thorough study of Anton's transcriptions

will anybody hit upon such a motivation. "And who knows -

you, Amaury, or you, Augustus, or I may spot a crucial missing

link?"

Thus:

L I V I N G , O R NOT L I V I N G

Living, or not living: that is what I ask:

If'tis a stamp of honour to submit

To slings and arrows wafi'd us by ill winds,

Or brandish arms against a flood of afflictions,

Which by our opposition is subdu'd? Dying, drowsing;

Waking not? And by drowsing thus to thwart

An aching soul and all th' natural shocks

Humanity sustains. T is a consummation

So piously wish'd for. Dying, drowsing;

Drowsing; and, what say, conjuring visions: ay, that's th' rub;

For in that drowsy faint what visions may disturb

Our shuffling off of mortal coil,

Do prompt us think again. Of that calamity, to wit,

That is our living for so long;

For who would brook duration's whips and scorns,

A tyrant's wrong, a haughty man's disdain,

Pangs of dispriz'd ardour and sloth of law,

Th' incivility of rank and all th' insults

That goodly worth from its contrary draws,

If such a man might his own last affirm

With a bald bodkin ? Who would such ballast carry,

To grunt and wilt along his stooping path,

1 0 1

But that his horror of th' unknown,

That vast and unmapp'd land to which

No living man pays visit, is puzzling to his will,

Making him shrug off what now assails him

And shrink from posthumous ills?

Compunction thus turns all of us to cowards;

And thus our natural trait of fixity

Is sickli'd through with ashy rumination,

And missions of much pith and import

With this in mind soon turn awry,

And from all thoughts of action go astray.

W I L L I A M S H A K S P A R

O Z Y M A N D I A S

I know a pilgrim from a distant land

Who said: Two vast and sawn-ojf limbs of quartz

Stand on an arid plain. Not far, in sand

Half sunk, I found a facial stump, drawn warts

And all; its curling lips of cold command

Show that its sculptor passions could portray

Which still outlast, stamp'd on unliving things,

A mocking hand that no constraint would sway:

And on its plinth this lordly boast is shown:

"Lo, I am Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, O Mighty, and bow downI"

Tis all that is intact. Around that crust

Of a colossal ruin, now windblown,

A sandstorm swirls and grinds it into dust.

PBS

1 0 2

ON HIS G L A U C O M A

Whilst I do think on how my world is bound,

Now half my days, by this unwinking night,

My solitary gift, for want of sight,

Lain fallow, though within my soul abound

Urgings to laud th} Almighty, and propound

My own account, that God my faith not slight,

Doth God day-labour claim, proscribing light,

I ask; but calming spirits, to confound

Such murmurings, affirm, God doth not dun

Man for his work or his own gifts, who will

But kiss his chains, is dutijul, his gait

Is kingly. Thousands to his bidding run

And post on land and bounding main and hill:

Tour duty do who only stand and wait.

J O H N M I L T O N

NO!

No sun - no moon!

No morn - no noon!

No dawn - no dusk - no hour of night or day -

No sky - no bird in sight -

No distant bluish light -

No road - no path - no "'tis your right o* way"-

No turn to any Row -

No flying indications for a Crow -

No roof to any institution -

No nodding "Morning!"s on our constitution -