B007P4V3G4 EBOK (31 page)

No greater Jezebel than Clio. Written history is cobbled together
from lies and falsifications. Chatterton falsified Rowley. The angelic
poet in whose name you have come to indict me is a falsified
Chatterton. But you would not give even a penny to the historical
wonderboy. Don't you deny it: I am sure of this! The counterfeits
of Chatterton and Ossian are read and discussed in every salon:
original mediaeval poetry is something for dusty archaeologists. In
painting the story is perfectly similar. Most people think copies
more real than the original works after which they have been
made. Copies flatter contemporary taste. They make a cosy costume drama out of that strange, distant past. And I don't wish to
present myself as being better than I am: the little fake castle we now sit chatting in so cosily suits me infinitely better than any
authentic mediaeval draught-pit conceivable. We need falsifications
to make the past inhabitable.

Let me tell you something: at this very moment, under this
same roof, my typographer Kirgate is busy reprinting those expensive books on the sly, the ones published by my Officina Arbuteana.
He can't even restrain himself until I'm dead, the ungrateful
scoundrel. Gray's Odes go for five guineas in London at the
moment. But I'll have my will changed this very week. I'll soon see
to him!

Ah well, I do understand the necessity for that Chatterton myth.
Because of a suicide the remaining relatives feel despised and
rejected. They appear to have failed, post hoc and propter hoc, which
is why they are all too prepared to point an accusing finger. One,
that nameless all-powerful creature one, has decided that I am
Chatterton's executioner. Not one of all of those who throw
stones at me wish to realise that the same goes for them. Or they
throw harder than ever because they do realise this. The fools.
Suicide, dying as a public gesture - what folly, what vanity! Is it
not bluffing on the grandest possible scale, to invest yourself with
the authority of the Unknown? But they fall for it, they're affected
by it. When now, in my autumn years, I happen to venture forth
outside, I am shaken by my reputation. A long, black intangible
shadow walks ahead of me and darkens the faces of the people I
meet. My history has been written: I am Chatterton's murderer.

All that I have done is as naught compared with that which, in
'69, 1 did not do. All I know is as naught compared with what then
I did not know. I didn't know that Chatterton was an insane poet. I
believed him to be a vulgar fraudster. Everything else I have meant
is no longer of any importance whatsoever. My friendships - my
friendships are ones with those deceased who can no longer testify
on my behalf. This house I have been building my entire life, these
curios I have collected with boundless patience - when later no
one knows any longer who were the owners of my Apostle
spoons, my snuffboxes, my moth-eaten gloves, then this place will
not distinguish itself in any way from a common-or-garden junkshop. People will laugh at me when they hear that I kissed those
silver spurs over there when the dealer came to bring them to me.
Go on, laugh! I kissed them, Sir, because King William the Third
wore them at the Battle of the Boyne.

My misfortune is that I'm not dead yet. I'm standing in the lobby to the House of Life. I can see inside how the party goes on
without me. I am waiting for Clio and her carriage. A frail little
man is still connected to that monstrous reputation of mine. I can
still suffer, young man; your rage at my name still strikes at this
greybeard, too. In the past, I never hankered after power. Only
now I'm a helpless wreck, the desire gnaws at me, the desire to
make people quake, to have them fawn and compromise themselves. To see everyone jump to attention as you approach - how
wonderful that must be!

When, later on, you leave and you cross the river, you will
come past a ruined archway. In the past, the palace of Sheen lay
behind it, where our Queen Elizabeth died. She was gone on sugar,
a rare delicacy in those days, and suffered hideous toothaches. For
fifteen hours she stood dying in that palace, standing rigid and
straight, like a post, the knuckles of her hands pushed into her
mouth. No one of the court was allowed to sit down as long as
the Queen was standing. The entire court stood upright for fifteen
hours and when finally her heart gave way and she dropped dead,
her entire court fell down with her. I, too, should wish to die like
that.

What was it you said? Oh yes, you did say something. 'I, too,
cannot resist smuggling a bit of life into Yes, you do
have a point there, indeed. And do you know why that is? Because
death is so utterly uninteresting. There's no scent or glory to it.
We cannot speak about it without tittifying it up a bit. But
certainly, you are right: I ought not to mirror myself in such false
images, not at my age. With the passing of each day I gain more
admiration for your Marie Antoinette. When the riff-raff asked her
whether she still had anything to say before she lost her head, she
merely said: Rien. No mean feat,

Far more stupid, however, is to smuggle boring, sleep-inducing
death into life, and this is what you do, with your deyit for the
world, with your cult of genius. Thus you condemn yourself to
loneliness. Loneliness is quite as bad as death, at the very least. To
yourself you're nothing. Let me give you a good piece of advice:
don't be a scorpion, don't be a Rousseau. That way leads to
insanity. You know what happened to Rousseau in the end. Don't
take up battlestations against the entire world for in that case the
world might well turn its broad back on you. If you absolutely
must be subversive, then be so on the sly. Cloak yourself in the
garb of hypocrisy and flattery. Jump and gabble even though your ears are revolted by that which comes forth from your mouth.
Borrow money from the world, then you won't be from its mind
for a moment. Only in its mind do we have our soul. Only by its
tongue are we given shape. The bear licks her cubs, the poet his
verses, Joe-Public-and-his-mate lick you. Allow yourself to be
licked by that great, rugged tongue, no matter whether they speak
ill of you or praise you: that warm wet tongue will make you
grow, grow so large they can no longer get round you. The name
is all. Where one or two be together in your name, there be you.
What does your Chatterton have in common with that sot roaming
the streets of London but his name? And yet he exists, more so
than during his lifetime. And through him, I exist. God grant that
one day some softy will get up who shall commit himself to the
restoration of my honour, and with more success than the way I
have done on Richard the Third's behalf.

There. I have spoken some home truths to you and now I shall
bestow on you an exceptional favour. I will show you my house,
in person. Where's my cane. No, don't trouble yourself: I've got it
already. The last one I did this honour was my old friend Lady
Diana Beauclerk. A versatile woman. I named one of the towers on
the North side after her. In it there is a cabinet containing seven
bistre watercolours she painted. They are illustrations to a tragedy
from my pen. My only tragedy. Doubtless you will already have
written ten, young as you are. My talent lies more in the comic.
As I have said in the past: life is a tragedy to one who feels, a
comedy to one who thinks. Now I must get up very carefully.
Tha-aa-aa-at's it. Ouch! Alas, there's no escaping from feeling
when you are as old as I am. Now lend me your arm. When I am
dead, my house, like my body, will fall prey to putrefaction. The
junkdealers will wrestle their way down the corridors like maggots
and worms, and gnaw my collections to bits. You are privileged.
You are just in time for the last glimmer of my light of life. By that
light you will be able to see everything for just a moment in its
true context and full significance. And we'll take a look at Kirgate,
too. Such a fright he'll have! Should be a laugh. Now, don't stand
there dawdling like that. Give me your arm. Oh, those darned feet
of clay of

Your arm! Come, lend me your arm!'

Anton Koolhaas

If I wasn't a spider, I would love to be one, thought spider Baldur
D. Quorg, and he thought this not without reason, for he had just
made his first descent from the top edge of an iron fence to the
first crossbar, half way down. He was now sitting on this crossbar
he had ended up on with a bump. With a very funny feeling in his
hindquarters - because of the speed with which that first thread
had appeared - yet, it has to be said, especially with one of
satisfaction. When he had begun to let himself drop, he had in no
way borne in mind the downward distance he had to cover, for
this was simply a fever: he had to descend, now.

He had started by walking some way across the ground, until he
had ended up by that fence and, wild and possessed, he had
climbed it. Without pausing for breath, he had then run along, on
to the top edge of the fence, to the point where there was a lump
in the paint with a hair from the brush the painter had used
sticking out from it. Without a moment's thought, he had cast the
first beginnings of his thread round that hair and, hot-headed, had
hurled himself down.

At first, he only dropped seven and a half centimetres, and then
all appearances indicated that no more thread was to hand internally. For a moment, he was taken aback by this, for though
spiders occupy themselves with the future more than other animals
do, and tend to put their trust in it, it did occur to him that these
seven and a half centimetres were possibly all the thread he could
manage to produce, and this was not much, or of much promise.

Nervously, he thought about what it was he must do, should
this meagre length prove to be all, but it was then, without him
making a plan to this effect, as though something had happened to
the apparatus in his hindquarters with which he was then able to
spin. Before setting out to make a thread in proper earnest, he had
practised and wondered at the curious feelings this evoked in him,
but these exercises had really not brought him much more than the
insight that it was truly possible to produce a thread. But something was now happening in that apparatus of his, and suddenly Baldur
D. Quorg dropped further at fearsome speed. Quite a relief, for at
seven and a half centimetres below the top edge of that fence, he
had been made to think for a moment that it was all just nonsense,
what he expected from life, and that this would keep him on a far
shorter leash than his over-confidence had presumed. Such thoughts
had now been wiped out again, however, and Baldur dropped a
further sixty centimetres at a stretch. Then a short interruption
again, but this passed so quickly that it did not lead to fresh panic
- and then the spider landed with a bump on the first crossbar.

Baldur D. looked up along his first thread, being waved very
elegantly in a curve by a zephyr. And when he had looked a long
time, and not without emotion, at this first piece of handiwork, he
spoke the words that indicated that he would gladly have come
into the world as a spider should this not have been the case.

Outsiders, had they spotted this terribly measly little thread
among those iron bars of the fence, would certainly have smiled,
but to Baldur this was a different matter. He was not remotely
struck by the difference in dimensions between the bars and his
thread, for this was his thread and with all its length it had come
forth from him, and this made him so extraordinarily proud, rightly
so, that he sat back a bit in order to consider his work once again,
somewhat more leisurely now. That thread belonged to him and
nobody else. 'And,' said Baldur D. Quorg inwardly, with an
amount of grim determination, I make an issue of this. Never you
fear,' he now said out loud, 'it's not lost on me that this thread
belongs to me and not to anyone else at all!' At times, when the
wind was more powerful, the thread would bend way out beyond
the bars of the fence and then it would glisten and twirl a little;
and when the wind vanished again, the thread would fall back
between the uprights and hang there, quite motionless. Baldur D.
would then climb up it a little way and calmly let himself drop
again. This went very well.

And when Baldur D. Quorg had done this sixty-odd times, he
went and sat even further back to look with even greater satisfaction now at his thread which could quite legitimately be called
something colossal.

Having sat there like this for a good while amidst feelings of
which quiet pride and a restless urge to act fought for precedence,
he suddenly fell asleep.

This was no cause for surprise, for as his first effort, Baldur had delivered a very fine thread with a slight thickening at seven and a
half centimetres from the edge, a barely noticeable thickening at
sixty-seven and a half centimetres and otherwise as straight and
flawless as can be imagined. And that this must have left him dogtired was clear.