The Golden Age (30 page)

So ended the story of Tana and Nau, Taal and Uddo, Fo and Mii, Gato, Hios and Ara—one of the many episodes of the transforming, disappearing
Book
, one of the works of art created by the islanders, or perhaps a constellation of thousands of works of art, in which the reader forever encounters new books and fragments of old books no longer in existence and lost to the past like the fragile scrolls of the Egyptians. But the reader also encounters sonatas and symphonies for string, wind, water and fire instruments, and ballets, in which the dancers are people, animals, phantoms and mechanical dummies; and he encounters statues made of water and jelly, pictures painted on canvas, in sand and in water, mosaics composed of gemstones, luminous beetles and hallucination-inducing lights.

I can imagine that in today’s
Book
there are none of the figures I read about when I was on the island: no Tana, no Dru, no Gato, no Hios. They have been replaced by other characters, whose stories perhaps bear echoes of the heroes I knew. And certainly in the features of these new heroes, the faces of the heroes who will replace them will be germinating. The giant squid has disappeared. So, too, has the statue in jelly. Perhaps the whole archipelago has been claimed by the sea, and new islands and continents have sailed out onto the
Book
’s pages. Perhaps new stars are shining in the galaxies of its universe, and there are new planets on which unknown civilizations will thrive and expire, circling in this imaginary universe born out of the practically imperceptible breath of its script, for as long as it takes for the
Book
to devour them. And because islanders have bad memories, the heroes, towns and islands, planets and galaxies that were described in the
Book
at the time I sat on the terrace of Karael’s house, do not even exist in anyone’s mind.

During my stay on the island I learned from its inhabitants many bad and also several good things. But I have never been able to welcome change and extinguishment with the same joy as they did. It was my secret hope that the characters disappearing from the island’s
Book
would live on at least in my report about the island. But my memory is the not the best either; it was so often mistaken that I am afraid the characters and deeds of my telling have little in common with those I read about on the island. It sometimes happened while I was writing that I remembered something from the text of the
Book
as I first experienced it; but when I returned to the passages I now believed to be wrong in the hope of rewriting them, I had to laugh at the futility and ridiculousness of such efforts. It dawned on me what nonsense it was to strive for fidelity in something that was constantly changing shape, that no one could confirm, that lived on only in my memory, which had failed me several times already.

Karael no longer telephones or writes, so I have no news of what has happened to the
Book
since my departure. It is possible that its stories have crumbled, leaving nothing but isolated sentences and words. It is even possible that they have been erased by the soaking into its pages of the water of the upper town or the waves of the sea, that the islanders now pass from hand to hand a
Book
with blank white pages filled only with phantoms, on which the contours of new shapes and bodies are beginning slowly to beat out the rhythms of new stories.

Was the
Book
a genuine work of art? Now I would probably hesitate before I answered that. Part of art is constancy and invariability, but not because it should raise itself above time and approach the world of eternal shapes and values: art must descend to constancy because only from the chasm of this descent, from the misery of non-variability, can it face the challenges of the endlessly transforming, which is what art yearns for, adores and sings about; only a motionless statue that immerses itself in the current of time can address the undulations of transformation. And a work of art should have a single author. It cannot be written by a multitude of anonymous islanders—not because it is an expression and a celebration of individuality, but because it must descend to the poverty of a single voice; only out of this poverty can it respond to the abundance of voices of the world, in which it wishes to dissolve itself. Only in its misery and impotence can the uncertain echo of these voices arise, and all the sonorous voices of the world can reveal themselves only as the tremor of sadness in a single voice for its inadequacy.

As a work of art, the island’s
Book
was a failure from the very beginning. It is fairly certain that it was this failure the islanders were striving for. There was no need for Ino of the white ankles to fly to the island: the people that lived there knew very well what she had to impart, it was written in their blood. Now I believe that the
Book
was ridiculing art, was a parody of art. The islanders did not like art because its shapes stood in the way of their eddies of shapelessness, and its sounds drowned out the music of silence. To begin with I wondered if Mii, Fo and all the other artists who kept appearing on the pages of the
Book
, were the expression of some kind of islanders’ dream of real art, a permanent, unchanging work of art, but then I realized that for the islanders such characters were laughable or pitiful, that their often woeful fates were meant to show where a yearning for shape could lead. I know now that the
Book
was not just a parody of art; it was a parody of our world as a whole, fragments of which would arrive on the island in each ship that came into port.

The supposition that the
Book
was a work of art was also based on the view that the island’s literature was a response to the summons of shapeless murmurs and eddies that yearned for the release of the images concealed in them. But having returned to the
Book
and drawn from my memory certain of its passages, I was no longer sure that its roots contained the desire of the shapeless for shape, and if so, then only as a part of the circling that both the shaped and the shapeless contain and overlap with. Now I would explain the origins of the stories of the
Book
more simply and in a way more in keeping with the character of the islanders: at the core of the shapeless there is a blind, irresistible pressure to expel images, so that after some time the purity of the shapeless is clouded by a sediment of images, which are at various stages of development. If this were so, the writing and reading of the
Book
would be a cleansing process by which the shapeless would rid itself of sediment, draining away all the shapes and images that had settled in it. Renewing the limpidity of the
Book
would make it possible for the islanders to bathe in pure streams of the shapeless. The
Book
was not an end in itself but a mere by-product; it was a filter that caught the dirt of shapes and images.

On my travels around Prague I have yet to spot in a travel agent’s window a colour photo of the island. It seems that there is still no modern hotel on its shores. But even if there were, this would not have to mean the destruction of the island’s culture. I have written of how hitherto the islanders have always been cunning victors over the culture of Europe. Perhaps this time it would be different; perhaps in time the streets of the lower town would fill with restaurants, souvenir shops and ice-cream stands; perhaps loud music would drown out the island’s murmurs and rustlings. But it might happen that a fresh encounter with Europe would lead to another victory on the part of the islanders; let us remember that the islanders have always won as easily and unwittingly as they draw breath. We know how the European invasion of long ago ended, and it is more than likely that the colourful emblems of multinational corporations would penetrate the streets of the lower town only to transform in the same way as the conqueror’s geometric drawings and devotional pictures—they would be overwhelmed by stains and webs of cracks, the music playing in the streets would be infiltrated more and more by rustlings and murmurs, so that all would be overgrown as surely as the once-proud buildings were covered in creeping plants. And things might not end here—the changes might spread to Europe and America, they could transform whole continents; whole world civilizations might come to resemble the life of the island. And then my book would be for nothing, as it would speak of banalities known by all.

I am glad that I succeeded in making this second, imaginary journey to the island without succumbing to the Sirens of sense, ideas and guidance. Everyone has his own magical library and in it his eposes of the bizarre, the pages of which sometimes gleam in the dark. The girl in Michle encountered a luminous Iliad woven from TV advertisements. My second journey to the island became an odyssey at whose beginning lay a ghostly Ogygia of the past and at whose end was a phantom Aeaea of language; it became a journey from the nymph of blissful forgetting to the sorcerer of purposeless metamorphosis.

Although at the beginning of this travelogue I boasted of my power to resist absurdities, perhaps when I did so I was clinging to the hope that I would glimpse some purpose in my stay on the island. I have not been able to shake the feeling that journeys should bestow at last some kind of experience. But the writing of this book has brought it home to me that my stay on the island was but a small tear in the great web of experience—a pulsating empty space that sometimes widens and makes threats, that devours everything, that is sometimes overgrown with old connections. The void of the erased face of the island’s king, the void at the centre of the island’s
Book
that skips from page to page, the void of the expiring roots of words, the void of the blank pages of travellers’ diaries.

Perhaps this tear had something in common with the void out of which words arise, a void which always lies silently in the gaps between letters and in their hollows like the cool, treacherous snow blown into the characters of the neon sign on the roof of the Paris department store; the void of this tear called for a book, for a travelogue—not to join together the words, but so that it might look with pleasure in the mirror of sentences, so that in their chinks, tears and hollows it might encounter its own self, so that thanks to a book it might defend its forever-threatened purity. As such my book has become a reflection of the island’s
Book
, which I first dipped into on a terrace in the rock of the upper town, and which exasperated and bored me for so long. This
Book
that has nothing to say and whose author is the last person to ask about its meaning, is actually an empty space, too, just a gulf of emptiness in a world of fullness, one of the places where the knots of reality unravel and where every world becomes a question without an answer.

But I hope that this void does not worry you, dear reader—this is the last time I will address you thus, as the time has come when we must say our farewells. I trust you have read my travelogue with enough attention to realize that I did not drown in the cool void, that I still have my images, that this emptiness does not mean indifference, solitude and the extinguishing of conversation. Quite the contrary, in fact: only out of emptiness may the shapes rise and the words sound, shapes and words hitherto untouched by the fragrances of the void, shapes and words whose breath bears the tremor of an old, elusive message; perhaps in my voice, which draws on the currents of the void, which resonates beneath the pages, something of this tremor that fascinates us all has been preserved, while your invisible face—which somewhere in the dark turns towards me and makes itself known only by breath that has yet to become the matter of words or part of a gesture, but so far just a tremor in the void—is to me a revelation of a world of living absence, which wakes a ripple of utterance on the surface of another eddying emptiness. And so do tremulous emptinesses and their never-ending game create borders between one another, in whose twisted relief are created words, thoughts, dreams and desires, and in which the faces of heroes and gods, the images of animals and plants, palaces, towns and ships at sea appear.

And it seems to me that this is the place to stop. The nameless island in strange seas is evidently deserving of the sleepless nights of the one who returned, and also of his writing a book about it in which he sings his variations on motifs of island life. But it has also earned the right not to be thought about for too long, to be released into oblivion when the time arrives, for the images born on its soil to be scattered to rubble and thoughts of them to be changed to anonymous music in the accompaniment of new thoughts and new journeys.

M
ICHAL
A
JVAZ
is a Czech novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. In 2005, he was awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize. He is a researcher at Prague’s Center for Theoretical Studies. In addition to fiction, he has published an essay on Derrida, a book-length meditation on Borges, and a philosophical study on the act of seeing.

A
NDREW
O
AKLAND
’s recent translations include Radka Denemarková’s
Money from Hitler
, Martin Reiner’s
No Through Road
, and the autobiography of architect Josef Hoffmann.