Читать книгу Fireflies - Luis Sagasti - Страница 8

2. Haikus

In the winter of 1943, one of the cruellest in living memory, perhaps because no one had anything in their bellies, the Stuka being flown by the officer Joseph Beuys was hit by a Russian fighter plane after a brief combat in the skies above Crimea. Beneath them, the cold was turning the pine needles into crystals, transforming the trees into a translucent forest of blue mirrors that smash the aircraft into hundreds of pieces before it even reaches the ground. Beuys’ face, already shattered, streaks past the tiny mirrors of ice hanging from the branches. Mirrors of ice like perfect, diminutive haikus. Everything takes just a few hundred years that somehow fit into the blink of an eye. It has been snowing steadily for almost two days, scattering particles of silence over the branches and across the ground. The snow absorbs part of the noise of the plummeting aircraft, but the sound of thousands of breaking mirrors reaches the alert ears of the Tatars. The pilot’s skill or luck meant the plane didn’t land on its nose and explode. Officer Beuys, gravely wounded, unconscious and near-frozen, is rescued by a group of nomad Tatars who know nothing about the war. They’ve come to understand that when there’s thunder above but no storm, it’s best to take refuge beneath the biggest trees. The co-pilot has broken his neck. His name was Karl Vogts. His body is never found.

For a period of time Beuys cannot calculate, he is stalked by death, which is only kept at bay by the Tatar shaman who smears the pilot’s wounds with animal fat and wraps him in felt. Hare skins are the best choice when it comes to protecting someone from the cold. He recites the prayers he’s learnt on one of the three nights when the moon disappears. Days pass, and death leaves to maraud elsewhere. When he regains consciousness, the aviator starts to speak in an unintelligible language made up of words born of fever, inseparable one from the other, even for the shaman, who knows the tongue of the animals. The man who fell from the plane has blue eyes and full lips. He is too dazed for fear to express itself in his face. The Tatars keep him awake for most of the day, always wrapped tightly in the felt blanket, like a mummy. He lies trembling before a hearth where the fire is never allowed to go out. He is not sure when he is dreaming and when he is awake, if it is cold or if it is warm. He thinks he wakes up in the middle of the night. He sees things. Or perhaps he sees nothing. It is more likely he sees nothing. His mind is a burning pot. Neurons like thousands of still mirrors reflecting without judging – this is their fidelity. The Tatars pass in front of him, blurs of light. The faces come from above, as if falling before his eyes. Some smile, others look at him in amazement. The shaman appears when night falls and Beuys sees that his head is on fire. Years later, he would recall being inside a large tent. The roof was faded blue and he could make out a series of – painted? embroidered? – yellow and white stars.

‘I tried to identify a constellation but I couldn’t: the stars shifted every time I looked at them.’

Once, the shaman points to an empty space between the stars and says something Beuys is unable to pronounce. But this word, which the shaman repeats again and again, pointing to the empty space between the stars, calms him.

What they give Beuys to eat is also a mystery, but the strength gradually returns to his body. One day he gets up, leaves the tent and is able to walk a few steps unassisted. The Tatars follow him with their eyes. A little boy hides behind his mother, peeking out at the pilot. Beuys turns around, and the shaman smiles back at him.

Two or three days after this, he is rescued by a German patrol. Beuys completes his convalescence in a field hospital. The man who a month later returns to the front is a changed person, who will be successively decorated for bravery, demoted for rebelliousness, captured by the British and finally repatriated to Germany once the war is over. The scars on his head will be covered by a felt trilby hat. Long leather coats, and sometimes fisherman’s vests, complete his outfit. Very few pictures show him without this uniform. Twenty-five years after the events in Crimea, Joseph Beuys had become one of the most influential artists in the world.

In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse-Five. The flagship of my little fleet, he declares in a news item. However we read it, and there are many ways of doing so, it will always be counted among the top five candidates for the Great American Novel of the twentieth century. In 1944, Vonnegut was taken prisoner by the Germans following the Battle of the Bulge. He was transferred and locked up in slaughterhouse number five in the city of Dresden.

The beauty of this city was a magnet that attracted the Allies’ wrath, and the Florence on the Elbe, as it was known, was destroyed by bombs in February 1945. The Germans had shown no mercy with Coventry a few years earlier, and now they would learn their lesson: never touch the crown jewels. Vonnegut was one of seven Americans to survive. One week before the bombing, his mother committed suicide in Chicago. Vonnegut would make his own attempt, without success, in 1985. The cocktail of pills and alcohol he prepared was the same as that his mother had taken. After the war, Vonnegut settled in New York. More than a cynic, the war had turned him into a chronic depressive, who drank and smoked to excess.

The protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five is called Billy Pilgrim, and it’s self-evident that he’s an alter ego of Vonnegut. Billy can travel to different moments, both past and future, of his own life. It happens to him involuntarily. In the novel’s first pages, Vonnegut writes that many years after the war, the aeroplane carrying Billy Pilgrim from Ilium to Montreal crashed into the peak of Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. All those on board died except Bill. The accident ‘left him with a terrible scar on the top of his skull’.

After this accident, Billy Pilgrim began to say that he had been kidnapped by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.

In October 1992, the state museum of Gelsenkirchen published a selection of work by Joseph Beuys entitled Mensch, Natur und Kosmos. The volume includes a short introductory study by the art historian Franz van der Grinten, and consists of a series of watercolours painted by Beuys between 1948 and 1957, sketched on file cards or in notebooks. The largest measures thirty-two by twenty centimetres and, even though it’s a high-quality publication, the pencil outline of most of them is so faint that the forms are hard to distinguish. Crows, women, water and trees, painted as if with moonlight. In the earliest drawings, however, the lines and the colours are more dynamic. On the cover there is a particularly energetic drawing: a crow, the first in an unseen series, two women, perhaps, and in the background an erupting volcano or a tree, who knows, all sketched out with abrupt, blue, nervous lines.

There is a sometimes astonishing similarity between the watercolours painted by Beuys after the war, around 1955, and the sketches for The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. A yellowish-amber hue predominates in both, and the figures are weightless and unsupported. The bodies are barely defined by patches of colour. In the case of Saint-Exupéry, who was not a painter, it is obvious that they are sketches, a first attempt at something that is far from definitive. In contrast, Beuys, who by now has returned from the war, knows he can do nothing but sketch, nothing but promise what will never be realised; his watercolours are an image of what is to come (and what it is hoped never does come). One of Saint-Exupéry’s drawings is of a sleeping fox; the marks delineate the restless outline, over and over, the line itself vacillating; or rather, the fox is not sleeping, though it gives the impression of doing so; or, to put it better, no fox could ever sleep with such an agitated, hesitant body. Beneath it on the same page is something that looks like a puma. It is upside down, as if it were buried underground and digging itself out to meet the body of the fox.

Beuys prefers to draw other animals. Elks, for example. Beneath the deer on the front cover of his Early Watercolours, there is a sun, its rays piercing the animal. Many of Beuys’ drawings are barely decipherable, just charcoal on tracing paper. Even so, his confident hand is always in evidence. For the German artist, an animal is a kind of angelic being. This idea comes not only from his reading of Rudolf Steiner, founder of the philosophical current known as anthroposophy, but also from his time with the Tatar nomads. Indeed, while he was delirious with fever in the forests of Crimea, wrapped in felt and smeared in fat, an elk appeared to him. A giant one, like the megatherium species. A megatherian elk or megaelk that starts to dance before his eyes. Beuys hears the Tatar tambourines and flutes made with the bones of these very elks. He said later that as soon as the melody ended, the elk transformed into a shaman. He shivers because he’s hot and he’s cold. The Tatars begin to pack up the camp swiftly and silently. It seems someone has warned them the Russians are approaching. They damp down the fires. From above, a stampede of fireflies appears. The Tatars flee towards the west, which is where Beuys’ plane came down. They put him on a horse, laying him crosswise over the horse’s back and tying him down. Beuys presses his stomach against the animal’s flank, and when it begins to trot he abruptly vomits.

‘I vomited up the stars from the shaman’s tent. Yellow and white stars.’

Everything is thick and shiny.

Billy Pilgrim will return to Dresden, to the slaughterhouse five where his life was saved, on several occasions. On one of his journeys through time he has the bad luck to be abducted by an alien civilisation that takes him to the planet Tralfamadore, where he is exhibited in a kind of intergalactic zoo together with a woman named Montana Wildhack. Vonnegut tells us nothing about how they got there, nor about how they freed themselves. Pilgrim’s daughter thinks the war has driven her father crazy.

Slaughterhouse-Five can be read in many different ways. The three leading candidates are: as the hallucinations of a soldier injured in the war, as the ramblings of an old veteran, and perhaps as an extraordinary tale of autobiographical science fiction – if such a thing could exist outside of the work of Philip K. Dick. However it is approached, though, the most interesting pages of the book are those dedicated to explaining the literature of Tralfamadore. ‘Brief clumps of symbols separated by stars […] each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message, describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other.’ Without causes or effects: ‘what we love in our books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time’.

In some sense Joseph Beuys never left the forests of Crimea, and some of his most celebrated performances bear witness to this fact. In May 1974, in the Block Gallery in New York, he performed I Like America and America Likes Me. In protest against the Vietnam War, Beuys decided to avoid setting foot on U.S. soil as far as possible. He arrived at John F. Kennedy airport, was put straight into an ambulance and then taken directly to the room containing a coyote, where he remained for three days. Beuys covered himself with a felt cape. He carried a stick and never took off his hat.

A few years earlier he presented his most famous performance: How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. This is the first time Beuys appears in public without a hat. With his head covered with honey and sprinkled with gold dust, he holds up a dead hare and tries to explain the meaning of art to it. His head is illuminated, as if a soft, sweet light were emanating from his war wounds.

Light is coming out of Beuys’ head.

Like the horns of Michelangelo’s Moses: a marble light that transforms him into the Devil, into Lucifer.

Shamans travel into the skies in search of the sick person’s soul in order to return it to their body.

Where did the hare’s soul go? Is there a heaven for hares? When you’re little you imagine there must be a heaven for animals. Never a hell. Your pet dog doesn’t go to hell. Though the only thing we are sure of is that hell is full of monstrous, repugnant animals. Not heaven, though; there are no animals in heaven. Except for in clan cultures: the great bear, the great reindeer.

Fly up to the heaven of the golden hares.

Sometimes, the return to Crimea is more traumatic: Beuys suffers from severe convulsions, exhausting spasms, which he ends up turning into performances. One of these becomes the December 1966 work Manresa, in which Beuys presents one half of a cross wrapped in felt and the other drawn on a blackboard. Felt and fat are placed at each corner. As he paces about the room, Beuys asks after the third element; that is, the precise midpoint between intuition and reason.

Months earlier, he had visited the Spanish city of Manresa, where in 1522 Saint Ignatius wrote his Spiritual Exercises. There, Beuys suffered a sudden attack, a kind of nervous breakdown. Draped over the back of the horse trotting through the wood, he has nothing left to vomit. It’s not only his stomach that feels empty but his whole body, as if he had no organs. Dozens of hares accompany him. The scene resembles a panel from the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. The procession is led by a hare that is sometimes an elk and that never loses its light. Beuys’ head is swathed in felt. It is throbbing. And the pain is like boiling water running down the furrows of his scars. Behind him he hears voices closing in on him. There is no snow on the trees. Everything is mud and noise.

He wakes up in the hospital in Manresa. Beside him is Per Kirkeby, the artist he had come on holiday with. Beuys looks at him and smiles, unconcerned. The ceiling of the room is pale cream in colour. He wants to leave.

The haiku is the closest we have come to writing the way they do in Tralfamadore. Expressing in an instant what happens over time. The motionless stone that shimmers in the light: this stone both is and is not this stone and so it will go on, regardless of the fact that 2500 years ago the Greeks began to argue about the nature of things and the discussion has never let up since.

How many words can be read at once without shifting the gaze? Two, three, maybe four. It has to be a prime number. Five is too many. Three, then, is a safe bet. Any more and the gaze clouds over, the words escape around the edges and form a virtual, magnetic zone of attraction that pulls the eyes to one side or the other. The gaze cannot rest on the present moment of the sentence because it seeks symmetry. Four words are two plus two, for example. The sequential character of language is an impassable barrier in our alphabetic systems. Only a haiku written in Japanese can halt the train of language and cast an anchor into the present, the motionless stone lit up by the sun in the morning and the evening. And as we follow the words with the gaze, how many words is it possible to read without punctuation marks? How far can we carry on before we lose the meaning or get lost in the meanders and have to go back? There, in the middle of the river, who is responsible for ensuring the ship does not get trapped in the weeds? The writer? The reader?

How many words without shifting the gaze? Perhaps pairs of words that have been fused by their sound. What’s up? for example.

A Japanese haiku comprises seventeen moras, which are something like the atoms of language. Phonemes are smaller still and have no real body to them, like electrons and other theoretical particles that vibrate nervously in the imagination. Pure formal abstraction.

Are these seventeen moras the measure of the present moment?

Etymology bursts with meanings. The word mora comes from the Latin for ‘linger, delay’ and was used to translate the Greek word chronos in its metrical sense.

The seventeen moras are divided into three verses of five, seven and five. An expert calligrapher can lay down the Japanese characters in such a way that they are taken in almost at a single glance. Language and perception conjoined. So it is impossible to translate a haiku, to write a haiku. Our language dilates, delays, demurs what should be a clean tock! on the Zen wood. These three words that can be perceived at a glance: that is as far as the impossible translation of a haiku can go. Conventionally, versions of haikus in Western languages use three verses of five, seven and five syllables each. But this is a pretty poor and distant imitation of their true attributes, even though curiously enough they tend to be shorter when read out loud.

In 1682, after spending two days shut up in the cabin his disciples had built for him on the other side of a raging river so he could cultivate his poetry in solitude, Matsuo Basho, the most celebrated author of haikus in Japan, which is to say the world, set it on fire. The only thing he had with him when two disciples helped him to cross back over the river was a sheet of paper on which he appeared to have written a haiku. No one verified the story. The fire was accidental. Around this time, Basho had received the news that his mother was dead. And it was believed that these two strokes of misfortune were somehow connected. But one of the twenty disciples let slip many years later, when Basho was more interested in frogs jumping into pools, that he had seen someone leave the cabin as evening fell, the day before the fire. And it was not just anyone.

Matsuo Basho was born the son of a samurai in 1644 and lived for fifty years. The closest he came to his father’s destiny was joining the service of another samurai, with whom he would later write poems. His real name was Matsuo Kinsaku. He adopted the name Basho when his disciples planted a banana tree (basho in Japanese) beside his cabin. After the fire, Basho embarked on the first of his four journeys through Japan. He abandoned his disciples and all vestiges of social life and began an austere pilgrimage that steadily whittled away at his poems until they reached the most complex of simplicities. His final work is entitled Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North) and is a kind of diary of the fourth journey he undertook, with a disciple named Sora. Over five months they travelled more than 1,200 miles, visiting the furthest reaches of northern Japan. A pilgrimage where Santiago de Compostela could be found in the most unsuspecting cherry tree.

At that time it was widely believed (and many scholars still believe it today) that Kioyi Hatasuko, a contemporary of Basho, was the greatest calligrapher of haikus. His lines were produced in a single motion, wrist and forearm moving to and fro like those of an orchestra conductor. Involuntary lashes of a whip; Jackson Pollock chasing a fly with his paintbrush. When Kioyi Hatasuko wrote his own haikus, he would spend almost the whole afternoon sitting facing a landscape. Then, with two or three gestures, he laid down the ink on the paper. What is curious is that his own haikus were not considered good enough. The meaning of the poems could be captured immediately, and in this sense his technique was astonishing, but the content, the poetic vision if we can call it that, was lacking. Hatasuko knew the value of his haikus; there was truth in the spontaneity of his lines, but sometimes truth can be a bit insipid. He never achieved the simplicity of Basho. His best-known haiku reads:

Between the lightning and the thunder

A bird

Seeks refuge

Basho took a different approach, in which perception and creation were almost irreconcilable. The sure hand evident in his calligraphy was the fruit of strenuous effort, and this wasn’t easy to disguise.

If we ignore what the disciple claims to have seen the day before the fire, Basho and Hatasuko – who were nearly the same age – never actually met. But there is another version of the story. It is said that one day Hatasuko was so moved by one of Basho’s haikus that he decided to visit him, though he knew the poet rarely received anyone in his cabin. As for Basho, he admired Hatasuko’s calligraphy but knew that his haikus were less than brilliant.

The poets met one morning beneath the banana tree. Autumn was in the air. Basho had been contemplating the river since the morning, wearing a simple tunic. They went inside the cabin. The host served tea. At some point, Hatasuko asked Basho for a blank sheet of paper, a brush and some ink.

‘I want you to show me your haikus. It is my wish to write my own haiku based on the impressions they evoke,’ he said.