Empire V (6 page)

The main problem I found at the beginning was that I lost my former verbal orientation. Until memory succeeded in restoring order to my ability to focus, I could completely lose my way. A synoptic became a sinful optician; a xenophobe someone allergic to the ubiquitous TV celebrity Xenia Sobchak; a patriarch a patriotic oligarch. A prima donna turned into an old lady smelling of Prima cigarettes, and an
enfant terrible
– Tsar Ivan IV at a tender age. But the most radical of my distorted insights was this: I interpreted ‘Petro-' not as relating to the city and palaces founded by Peter the Great but as indicating a link to the oil industry. In accordance with this, ‘Petrodvorets' signified not the great Peterhof Palace on the shores of the Gulf of Finland but the sumptuous offices of an oil company. Mayakovsky's well-known First World War line ‘In that never-to-be-forgotten hour / Our Petersburg became Petrograd' was transmogrified into a prophecy – a bitter one, but true.

This confusion extended to foreign words, for example the expression ‘Gay Pride'. I remembered that in English ‘pride' was the name given to a social grouping of lions, and before the lights came on in my memory to illuminate the word's primary meaning, the quality of ‘being proud', I imagined a pride of homosexuals (presumably refugees from homophobic regions of Europe) roaming the African savannah: two lop-eared senior males lying in the parched grass near a desiccated tree surveying the expanse of prairie and now and again languidly flexing their muscles; a slightly younger male pumping his triceps in the shade of the baobab tree while around him frisk and frolic the young cubs, irritating their grown-up companion with their fussing and squeaking until with a roar he sends them scattering for safety …

I developed quickly and without particular effort, but at the same time lost my sense of inner space. Jehovah warned me that my studies would make me older, since the true age of a person is determined by the sum of his knowledge. The acquisition of vicarious experiences must be set against the loss of my own inexperience, which is to say of my youth. But in those days the changes I was undergoing caused me no regret, because my reserves of this capital seemed to me inexhaustible. Parting with some of it was like jettisoning unwanted ballast while an invisible aerial balloon was raising me high into the sky.

Baldur and Jehovah assured me that my study of Discourse would reveal to me the hidden essence of contemporary social thought. An important element in the programme was concerned with human morality, conceptions of good and evil. However, our approach to the subject was not extrinsic, an investigation into what people were saying on the record, but internal, via an intimate acquaintance with what they actually thought and felt. Needless to say, this investigation severely shook my faith in humanity.

Looking at a wide variety of human minds, I noticed one interesting general characteristic. Every individual possessed within him his own personal court of moral judgment, to which the mind would unfailingly appeal whenever a dubious decision needed to be taken. This personal moral court malfunctioned on a regular basis – and I began to understand why. This is what I wrote in my notebook on this subject:

People have long believed that in this world evil triumphs while good receives its reward only after death. For a while this equation produced a kind of balance, providing a link between earth and heaven. In our time, however, the balance has become imbalance because the idea of heavenly reward has come to be seen as an obvious absurdity. At the same time no one has succeeded in challenging the hegemony of evil on earth. As a result, any normal human being seeking the positive here on earth will naturally incline towards evil: a step as logical as becoming a member of the ruling political party. The evil to which the person has thus affiliated himself is contained exclusively within his head. But when everyone has enlisted in the ranks of evil, which is located nowhere else but in the head, what need has evil of any other victory?

The concept of good and evil inevitably ran up against religion. But what my lessons had to teach me about religion (a ‘localised cult', Jehovah called it) genuinely surprised me. As revealed by the preparations I imbibed from the rack of test tubes labelled ‘
Gnosis+
', at the dawning of Christianity the God of the Old Testament was regarded by the new teaching as a devil. Subsequently, in the early centuries of our own era, the interests of strengthening Roman hegemony and political correctness led God and Devil to be united in a single object of veneration to whom the orthodox patriot of the declining Empire was obliged to bow the knee. Primary texts were chosen, transcribed and painstakingly redacted to conform to the new genius, while all those not so selected were, as is customary, burnt.

I wrote in my notebook:

Each nation, as each individual, must work out its own religion and not simply continue wearing out the rags of others, swarming as they are with the lice from which all diseases come … The peoples who are on the rise in our own time – Indians, Chinese and so on – import no more than technology and capital; their religions are purely local products and they keep them that way. A member of these societies may be quite sure that the gods he is praying to are his own loony deities, not the latest totemic importations, scribe's misreadings or mistakes in translation. But for us … to base our world view on a mishmash of texts written by unknown hands in unknown places at an unknown time is equivalent to installing a pirate Turkish version of Windows 95 in a crucially important computer with no upgrade available, completely unprotected against spyware, Trojans and viruses, and with the added bonus – courtesy of an unknown geek – of a fucked-up dynamic *.dll library which causes the computer to crash every two minutes. What people need is a free, uncluttered, open-source architecture of the soul. But Judeo-Christians are extremely crafty and have succeeded in branding anyone who advocates any such architecture as the Antichrist. Truly, to continue crapping so far into the future from a fraudulent arse stuck in the distant past must be counted the most impressive of the miracles wrought by Judeo-Christianity
.

Naturally, some of these maxims may strike the reader as somewhat overconfident for a tyro vampire. In my defence I can only say that these sorts of concepts and ideas never meant much, if anything, to me.

I mastered Discourse quickly and easily, although it set me on a generally misanthropic course. Glamour, however, presented me with difficulties from the very start. I understood almost everything up until the moment when Baldur said:

‘Some experts state that there is no such thing as ideology in contemporary society, because none has been formulated in an unequivocal manner. But this is a delusion. The ideology of anonymous dictatorship is Glamour.'

I was instantly gripped by a sense of terminal bewilderment.

‘But what is the Glamour of anonymous dictatorship then?'

‘Rama,' said Baldur, visibly irritated, ‘this is where we began in the first lesson. The Glamour of anonymous dictatorship is its Discourse.'

The words spoken by Baldur and Jehovah were always in themselves models of clarity, but it was hard for me to understand how images of bimbos with diamond embellishments to their silicone-enhanced tits could represent the ideology of a regime.

Happily, there was an effective method of seeking clarification for knotty questions of this sort. If I could not understand something Baldur said, I would ask Jehovah at the next lesson, and get an alternative explanation. And if something Jehovah said was not completely clear, I asked Baldur. The result was that I forged upwards like a rock climber jamming his feet alternately against the walls of a chimney.

‘Why does Baldur say that Glamour is an ideology?' I asked Jehovah.

‘Ideology is a description of the invisible aim which justifies visible means,' he replied. ‘Glamour may be regarded as an ideology because it provides an answer to the question: “In the name of what was all this done?”'

‘What do you mean by “all this”?'

‘Look at your history textbook and read through the chapter headings.'

By this stage I had absorbed enough concepts and terminology to be able to carry on a conversation at an acceptable level.

‘How then would you define the core ideology of Glamour?'

‘Very simple,' said Jehovah. ‘Disguise. Masking.'

‘Disguise? Changing clothes?'

‘Yes, but “changing” has to be interpreted in a wide sense. Change embraces such things as moving from one part of town to another, say from Kashirka to Rublevka, or from Rublevka to London, transplanting skin from the buttocks to the face, changing sex, all transformations of that sort. In the same way, all contemporary Discourse leads merely to a repackaging of those few topics that are permitted to be discussed in public. This is why we say that Discourse is a variant of Glamour and Glamour is a variant of Discourse. Do you understand now?'

‘Not very romantic,' I said.

‘Well, what did you expect?'

‘Glamour seems to me to promise something miraculous. Didn't you yourself tell me that the original meaning of the word was “sorcery”? Isn't that why people place such value on it?'

‘Yes, Glamour does promise miracles,' said Jehovah. ‘But the promise obscures the complete absence of the miraculous in life. Changing clothes, disguise and concealment through masking are not merely technology, but the unique content of Glamour. And of Discourse as well.'

‘Are there, then, no circumstances in which Glamour is able to produce a miracle?'

Jehovah thought for a while.

‘As a matter of fact, there are some circumstances.'

‘What are they?'

‘For example, in literature.'

This seemed very strange to me. Literature was as far removed from the sphere of Glamour as it was possible to imagine. Also, as far as I knew, it was a field in which no miracles had occurred for a very long time.

‘After the writer today finishes a new novel,' explained Jehovah, ‘he devotes a few days to trawling through glossy magazines in order to incorporate brand names of expensive motor cars, neckties and restaurants. The result is that his text assumes a reflected simulacrum of high-budget expenditure.'

This exchange with Jehovah I transmitted to Baldur:

‘Jehovah says that this is an instance of a Glamour miracle. But what is so miraculous about it? It seems to me a classic piece of masking.'

‘You didn't understand what he said,' replied Baldur. ‘The miraculous transformation takes place not in the text but in the author. We have transformed engineers of the human soul into unpaid advertising agents.'

I found I could apply this bipolar questioning technique to almost any query. But sometimes it produced more, rather than less, confusion. Once I asked Jehovah to elucidate the meaning of ‘punditry', a word which I was coming across almost every day on the Internet, reading about some ‘media pundit' or other.

‘Punditry is neurolinguistic programming in the service of the anonymous dictatorship,' intoned Jehovah.

‘Come, come,' grumbled Baldur, when I appealed to him for comment. ‘It's a good, resonant phrase. But in real life it's very hard to say who serves whom – punditry serving the dictatorship or the other way around.'

‘How is that?'

‘The dictatorship, even though it is faceless, pays hard cash. But the only tangible result of neurolinguistic programming is the salary earned by professors of neurolinguistic programming.'

The following day I was to regret bitterly having asked my question about ‘punditry': Jehovah brought in to the lesson an entire rack of test tubes labelled ‘Media Pundits Nos. 1–18', every one of which I was forced to sample. I wrote in my notebook in the interval between tastings:

Any intellectual today, peddling his ‘expertise' in the marketplace, is doing two things: sending out signals, and prostituting meaning. These activities are in fact dual aspects of a single act of will, which is the sole raison d'être of any work by any philosopher of today, or any culturologist, or expert of any description. The signals announce the expert's readiness to prostitute meaning, while the prostitution of meaning is the means whereby the signals are sent out. The new generation intellectual often has no idea who the future commissioner of his work is going to be. He is like a plant growing on the pavement whose roots feed on unseen sources of moisture and nourishment and whose pollen is dispersed beyond the limits of the monitor. The difference is that the plant does what it does without thinking, but the new generation intellectual believes that he is being awarded life-giving nourishment in return for his pollen, and engages in complicated schizophrenic double-entry accounting. Such calculations are the true roots of Discourse – damp, grey, moss-covered, stagnating in stench and darkness
.

Before many days passed I knew the word ‘culturologist'. True, I did not really know what it meant: I thought it must refer to a urologist whose knowledge of the human urinary–sexual system was so detailed that he had earned cult status and the right to pronounce on spiritual matters. This in itself did not strike me as particularly strange; after all Academician Sakharov, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, had become a universally accepted authority on humanitarian issues, and much the same happened with many other scientists or doctors.

In short, my brains were well and truly scrambled. But this hardly seemed a tragedy to me, since previously they had contained very little of anything.

It was not long before my involvement with Glamour turned sour (much the same had happened to me with Organic Chemistry in school). Sometimes I exhibited nothing short of terminal stupidity. For instance, it took me a very long time to understand what a ‘vamposexual' could be, and this was a core concept of the course. Baldur advised me to understand the term by analogy with ‘metrosexual', and I experienced a slight but distinct shock when I discovered that this was not a person who enjoyed having sex while travelling on the Metro.