Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (63 page)

Faith knows before anyone else when her master is coming to the office. Half an hour before the Marquis arrives, she will lie down by the front door. She won’t sleep, only grunt now and then to herself.

When I was a child, I had a German picture book called
Tiere sehen Dich an.
The shining black gaze of an ostrich from the height of its long neck and the round, thoughtful eyes of a monkey dressed in a colorful children’s jacket. The convict gaze of a fox being farmed for its fur, trapped behind the chicken wire of its cage.

Victims, friends, collegues, housemates, pets . . . Even when we live together, we live in different worlds. They live in the universes of other senses and perceptions, but our gazes and deeds connect our fates. We feed them and feed on them, we hunt them and clothe ourselves in their skins. Our power over them is terrifying.

The gaze of other species defines humanity, gives us our bearings. How could our own language give us this information? Only in the eyes of a stranger can we read who we are and what we are like.

A Lesson

I was looking at the dust on my desk and thought that maybe it was time to do some cleaning, for the sake of my own health if for no other reason, when Ursula, the building janitor, walked in. I was expecting her.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Just dust,” I said.

“Do you know what dust is, where it actually comes from? From volcanoes, distant stars, the cloaks of ancient kings . . . ”

“I’ll just wipe it off,” I said. “Then we can begin the lesson.”

Ursula, who had studied yoga meditation for decades, had promised to teach me some mind-centering techniques.

“Western people believe in the subconscious, but don’t even know the superconscious exists,” she said.

“The key is what people focus their attention on,” she said. “To become conscious of consciousness, to perceive the perceiver, that takes real skill.

“Our goal is to reach a state of pure consciousness,” she said. “It’s a lofty goal, but you have to aim high. You have to control the flow of your consciusness and attention and learn to direct it.You do know that you can’t focus attention on many things at the same time, don’t you?”

I nodded absent-mindedly. I was thinking about an article that had been sent to us, which I’d have to cut. It dealt with how the phases of the moon affect the luck of Las Vegas gamblers.

“Try to focus your attention on the center of your brain. If you lose focus, hold your breath for a while. That usually helps to refocus on the essential.”

I did as I was told, held my breath for a while, but it wasn’t all that easy to find the center of my brain. I had to let my breath flow again, and I soon became sleepy, forgetting even Las Vegas.

“Sooner or later you will hear sounds at different pitches. They aren’t just the hum of your ears and it’s not just your ears that you’re hearing them with.”

I didn’t ask her what the sounds were, as I was trying hard to follow her instructions. But a tram turned somewhere on the other side of the block and the screech extinguished all my potential inner sounds. A toilet was flushed upstairs, and someone whistled outside the window, as if giving a prearranged signal.

“Focus on the highest sound and let it lift you higher and higher. Don’t listen to it with your left ear, use your right. Move it to the center of your head, where the Sahasrara chakra lies.”

“What chakra?”I asked.

“That’s not important now. The more you concentrate, the better you can hear that sound. When you learn to follow it, it’ll fill your body, your whole environment, and some day, when you open your eyes afterwards, everything around you will be blindingly bright, even at midnight.”

I remembered the nocturnal lights that I’d seen with my eyes closed and not open. I wondered whether I had unwittingly practiced the method Ursula was now teaching me. But the sound that she was talking about, that I didn’t remember having heard. Only a whistle.

“If this technique doesn’t work, close your eyes and focus on the spot that is between your eyebrows, the place that’s called the center of the third eye. Can you see different colored figures floating in the dark?”

As I watched them, I happened to remember an interview with a woman, who had recently lost her sight. “People think that the blind see only darkness,” she’d said. “That’s not true. I’m never in the darkness. Shapes of various colors swim in front of me in a mist. I try not to pay any attention to them.”

With my eyes closed, I kept thinking about blindness and how, if you were blind from birth, you wouldn’t be able to know that you were missing something unless you knew someone who could see.

“Are you listening to me?” Ursula asked.

“Sorry.”

“Can you see figures?”

“Yes, pale rings or loops.”

“Follow their movement and transformation as if you were watching a film. Focus on the smallest one and push through it.”

I tried to do that, but the figure expanded into a cloud of mist and I opened my eyes. I didn’t feel like I’d gotten much out of the lesson, and I think Ursula sensed my disappointment.

“It’s a process that takes a lot of time and determination,” she said. “It couldn’t really be any other way. Pure consciousness is divinity. If you’re patient, if you learn real focus, you’ll get closer to it. Did you know that chakras are like flowers, like flower petals of spiraling light?”

When she said that, I thought about the datura. There was something sacred about that plant.

After Ursula had gone, I vacuumed and emptied the trash can.

“It sure is clean in here today,” said the Marquis, who came in just as I had organized the papers on my desk into three comparatively neat stacks. I hadn’t heard his usual knock. He looked around with approval.

I looked around as well. I was fairly content with what I saw. The office actually looked cozy.

“There were too many cloaks of ancient kings in here,” I said.

He didn’t ask what on earth I was talking about.

“I see you’ve fought against disorder and entropy. That is the right path, the purpose of mankind on this earth.”

I looked at the Marquis, surprised. He didn’t ordinarily talk in such a pompous and preacherly manner.

“But have you ever thought that chaos might be the sum of order, that sensible details could build a senseless whole, and not the other way around, as we’d so much like to believe. Quite a terrible thought, isn’t it? Think about it,” he said and left again before I had time to say anything.

But I agreed that it was a terrible thought.

Half an hour later there was a knock on the door, the Marquis returned, and said again, “It sure is clean in here today. Have you finished the article on the Voynich manuscript?”

“Not yet,” I said. “First I have to cut down that Las Vegas article. But what was it that you were talking about earlier?”

“I’m sorry, when?”

“Half an hour ago. You said something about the fundamental senselessness of the universe . . . ”

“This is my first visit here today,” the Marquis said and looked at me slowly. “You’re not making any sense yourself. Maybe you should take some time off.”

My heart ran cold. He was lying to me. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t want to consider the obvious and even more repellent alternative: that he was telling the truth.

Nicola’s Formative Years

Nicola Tesla has been dubbed the man who invented the twentieth century. And yet this scholar and inventor, the father of the radio, alternating current, wireless communication, the induction motor, and many others, was forgotten for decades. Now those who chase after free energy and believe in perpetual motion machines swear by Tesla’s name, and online you can order Tesla mosquito repellent, Tesla biomagnets, and Tesla space oil.

Nicola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Croatia, in 1856. Already as a child he was clearly an extraordinary individual of unusual skill. A powerful imagination and awe-inspiring memory, clarity and purity of thought defined his life from his early years on. His orthodox father wanted Nicola to become a priest, while Nicola himself set his sights on becoming an engineer.

He was hypersensitive to smells and other sensory stimuli. A piece of campher somewhere in the house gave him fits of extreme disgust. If Asperger’s syndrome had been known in his time, he probably would have been diagnosed with it.

“I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver,” he once wrote.

Tesla could certainly be said to have had hyperhearing. Nicola saved his neighbours from fires several times, as his hearing was so sensitive that he could not only hear the ticking of a clock several rooms away, but also the small crackles made by a fire igniting miles away.

According to his own claims, Nicola could also levitate. In his short autobiography he wrote:

“Like most children I was fond of jumping and developed an intense desire to support myself in the air. Occasionally a strong wind richly charged with oxygen blew from the mountains rendering my body as light as cork and then I would leap and float in space for a long time.”

Already at an early age, Nicola’s mother led him in memory exercises, the quality of which Tesla doesn’t specify. He later continued mental exercises, demonstrating admirable self-discipline. The catalyst for these exercises was a novel by the Hungarian author Jósika. According to Nicola, it awakened his willpower.

“After years of such discipline I gained so complete a mastery over myself that I toyed with passions which have meant destruction to some of the strongest men,” he—otherwise such a modest person—boasts.

Tesla does not specify the nature of the passions he refers to. His autobiography does mention gambling, to which he was addicted in his youth for a time. On sexual matters, Tesla is silent. As far as is known, he never had relationships with women, nor did he have homosexual ones. His whole being and life was marked by a sort of innocense and puritanism, also extending to his financial matters.

After seeing an avalanche form from a small snowball, he wondered at how great events can grow out of small deeds. This awe inspired by the laws of nature stayed with him to the end of his days.

Nicola had an exceptionally developed ability of visualization. From early on, he could see with his mind’s eye all the details of entire systems with motors and generators that didn’t yet exist. He saw them functioning, he could make out their material, the shining and hard metal. The images or films were as real as any object before his eyes.

These visions soon began to flow in front of his eyes in an endless stream. In less than two months he invented several new types and variations of motor.

Tesla writes of having once strolled down a riverbank with his uncle. The sun was setting and trout seemed to be playing as they were hunting. Now and then one of them would leap into the air, and its shimmering body would stand out against the rock face on the other side of the river.

Nicola told his uncle what he intended to do. He would hurl a stone at a trout, so that it would slam against the rock and be cut in two. He picked up a stone and in the next moment did exactly what he’d promised. His uncle was so thoroughly frightened that he yelled: “
Vade retro, Satanas!
”

Days went by before he spoke to his nephew again.

When studying at the higher Real Gymnasium in Carlstadt, Croatia, Nicola lived with his aunt, who fed him like a canary. The meals were refined and delicious, but very frugal. Tesla writes that he suffered like Tantalus, but turned this, too, to his advantage.

At the Polytechnic School in Gratz, Tesla completed an unbelievable number of degrees in a short time. His professors wrote to his father and asked him to take his son out of the school, so that he wouldn’t kill himself from overexhaustion.

In Budapest, Nicola suffered a severe nervous breakdown. His senses were sensitized to the point of it being an illness. A fly walking on the table was like a hollow hammering in his head. He had a hard time walking under bridges, because he felt their crushing weight in his skull. The whistle of a locomotive engine thirty miles away made the chair underneath him tremble so that the pain was almost unbearable.

Nicola felt that the ground beneath him was constantly shaking. (This reminds me of Strindberg, who complained while living in Paris that the city was continuously trembling.)

His eyesight also became so acute that he could make his way in the darkness like a bat and could distinguish objects at a distance before anyone else noticed the first sign of them.

Tesla’s pulse fluctuated strongly and could rise up to 260. He was pestered by muscle spasms. He could recite complete novels from memory. One day Tesla was reciting
Faust
to his friend, verses that described the evening sun: “
Sie rückt und weicht, der Tag ist überlebt, Dort eilt sie hin und fordert neues Leben . . .
” He then describes having had a flare in his brain like a lightning bolt, a new vision. He drew a diagram of the induction motor in the sand.

”I cannot begin to describe my emotions. Pygmalion seeing his statue come to life could not have been more deeply moved,” Tesla wrote.

The Second Seed Pod

The Pendulum Man and Un-Me

Before eating anything, even at a restaurant, The Pendulum Man would always use his pendulum, a four-inch-long piece of string weighted with a five mark coin on the end. He claimed that this instrument told him whether the food was edible and if it was suitable for his digestion.

“I have a very sensitive stomach,” he said. “It starts growling very easily.”

And, indeed, at that very moment, I thought I heard a sound like an irritated dog growling somewhere out of sight.

The Pendulum Man had written us a short article about his experiences of being a pendulum man. He said that I could treat him to a good lunch, as he wouldn’t accept payment for his article.

I took him to an Italian restaurant, where he ordered just soup. I watched him dangle the pendulum above his minestrone. The coin swung lazily back and forth, back and forth. I watched both amused and nervous. He had explained to me that if the pendulum started making circles, he would unfortunately have to decline eating the food. But the coin didn’t change its path, and I gave a sigh of relief when he finally picked up his spoon.