Читать книгу Occurrence in the Immediate Unreality - UNIV PLYMOUTH - Страница 11

The Impression of the Theatrical

In small and insignificant objects: a black bird’s feather, a nondescript little book, an old photograph with fragile and outmoded personages, seemingly afflicted with a serious internal illness, a delicate green faience ashtray, moulded like an oak leaf, forever smelling of stale ash; in the simple and elementary recollection of old man Samuel Weber’s spectacles with their thick lenses, in such trifling ornaments and domestic things can be discovered all the melancholy of my childhood and that essential nostalgia for the world’s pointlessness, which enveloped me everywhere, like water with petrified ripples. Gross matter – in its deep, heavy masses of earth, rocks, sky or waters – or in its most incomprehensible forms – paper flowers, mirrors, glass marbles with their enigmatic inner spirals, or tinted statuettes – forever suspended in a confinement that struck painfully against its walls and perpetuated in me, without meaning, the bizarre adventure of being human.

Whithersoever my mind might wend, it encountered immobile objects, which were like walls before which I had to fall upon my knees.

Terrorised by their diversity, I used to think of the infinite forms of matter and for nights on end I would writhe, agitated by series of objects that filed endlessly through my memory, like escalators ceaselessly unfolding thousands and thousands of steps.

At times, in order to dam the torrent of things and colours that flooded my brain, I would imagine the evolution of a single outline, of a single object.

For example, I would imagine – and this as a precise inventory of the world – the chain of all the shadows on earth, the strange and fantastical ashen world that slumbers at life’s feet.

The shadow man, spread like a veil over the grass, with spindly legs that trickled like water, with arms of darkened iron, walking among the horizontal trees and their flowering branches.

The shadows of vapours gliding upon the sea, shadows as unstable and aquatic as transient sadnesses, skimming over the foam.

The shadows of birds in flight, black birds rising from the depths of the earth, from a sombre aquarium.

And the solitary shadow, lost somewhere in space, of our spherical planet…

At other times I would think of caverns and hollows, from the vertiginous heights of chasms in the mountains to the warm, elastic, ineffable sexual cavern. I had procured from somewhere or other a small electric torch and in bed at night, maddened by insomnia and by the objects that kept filling my room, I would crawl under the quilt and examine with taut attention, in a kind of aimless but painstaking study, the wrinkles of the sheet and the little clefts that formed between them. I needed such a precise and trifling occupation in order to calm myself to some degree. On one occasion my father found me at midnight rummaging under the pillows with the torch and he took it away from me. Nonetheless, he did not make any remarks and nor did he scold me. I think that for him the discovery had been so odd that he could find neither the words nor the morals that would have applied in the case of such an event.

A few years later, I saw in an anatomy book the photograph of a wax cast of the inner ear. All the canals, sinuses and cavities consisted of full matter, forming their positive image. This photograph made an exceeding impression upon me, almost to the point of faintness. In an instant I realised that the world might exist in a reality that was more authentic, as the positive structure of its empty spaces, so that everything that is hollowed out would become full, and actual reliefs would be transformed into voids of identical shape, without any content, like those delicate and bizarre fossils that reproduce in stone the traces of some shell or leaf which over the course of time has been macerated, leaving nothing but the sculpted, fine imprint of its outline.

In such a world people would no longer be multicoloured, fleshy excrescences, full of intricate and putrescible organs, but rather pure voids, floating like bubbles of air through water, through the warm, soft matter of the full universe. It was also the intrinsic and painful sensation that I often felt in adolescence, when throughout endless wanderings, I used suddenly to find myself in the midst of a terrible isolation, as if around me people and their houses had all of a sudden become gummed up in the compact and uniform jelly of a single material, in which I existed merely as a void that meaninglessly moved to and fro.

*

In ensemble, objects formed stage sets. The impression of the theatrical everywhere accompanied me with a feeling that everything was unfolding in the midst of a factitious and sad performance. When I sometimes escaped from the tedious, matte vision of a colourless world, its theatrical aspect would then appear, emphatic and old-fashioned.

Within the framework of this overall theatricality, there were other, more astonishing theatrical performances which drew me more because their artificiality and the actors playing in them seemed genuinely to understand the mystifying meaning of the world. They alone knew that in a stage-set universe of theatrical performance life had to be acted artificially and ornamentally. Such performances were the cinema and the wax museum.

Oh, the auditorium of the B Cinema, long and dim like a submerged submarine! The doors of the entrance were covered with crystal mirrors in which a part of the street was reflected. At the very entrance itself there was thus a free show, even before the one in the auditorium, an astounding screen on which the street flickered in a greenish dream-like light, with people and carriages that moved somnambulistically in its waters.

In the auditorium a reeking and acidic public baths sultriness reigned. The floor was made of cement and when the chairs were moved they made screeching noises like brief and desperate screams. In front of the screen a gallery of louts and idlers cracked sunflower seed husks between their teeth and commented aloud on the film. Dozens of voices simultaneously spelled out the titles syllable by syllable, like literacy classes at a school for adults. Directly below the screen an orchestra played, made up of a woman pianist, a violinist and an old Jew who energetically plucked the contrabass. That old man also had the task of emitting various sounds corresponding to the action on screen. He would cry out “cock-a-doodle-do” when at the beginning of the film there appeared the cockerel of the movie company, and once, I remember, when the life of Jesus was being depicted, at the moment of the resurrection he began frenetically to thump the body of his bass with the bow to imitate the heavenly thunderclaps.

I lived the episodes in the films with an extraordinary intensity, integrating myself into the action as a veritable character in the drama. It happened to me many times that the film would absorb my attention so much that all of a sudden I would imagine that I was walking through the parks on the screen, or that I was leaning against the balustrade of the Italian terraces on which Francisca Bertini was acting, with pathos, her hair untrammelled and her arms fluttering like scarves.

In the end, there is no well-defined difference between our real self and our various imaginary inner characters. When the lights came up in the interval, the auditorium would have an air of returning from afar. It was in a somewhat precarious and artificial atmosphere, much more uncertain and ephemeral than the performance on the screen. I used to close my eyes and wait until the mechanical munching sound of the apparatus announced that the film was about to continue; then I would find the auditorium in darkness once more and all the people around me, illumined indirectly by the screen, pale and transfigured like a gallery of marble statues in a museum lit by the moon at midnight.

On one occasion there was a fire in the cinema. The film reel had snapped and instantly burst into flames. For a few seconds, the flames were projected onto the screen, as if a candid warning that the cinema was burning. At the same time it was a logical extension of the projector’s role of presenting “the news”. Its mission had thus, in an excess of perfectionism, led it to present the final and most exciting news item of all, that of its own incineration. Screams erupted from every side, and short cries of “Fire! Fire!” rapped out like revolver shots. In an instant so much noise gushed from the auditorium that it seemed the audience, up until then in silence and darkness, had been doing nothing more than cramming itself with screams and uproar, like calm and innocuous accumulators which explode once their charge capacity is violently exceeded.

In a matter of minutes and before half of the auditorium could be evacuated, the “fire” was put out. Nevertheless, the audience continued to scream, as if they had to exhaust a certain quantity of energy once it had been released. A young miss, her cheeks powdered like a plaster cast, was shrieking stridently, looking me straight in the eyes, without making any movement or taking a single step toward the exit. A brawny lout, confident of the usefulness of his strength in such cases, but nonetheless not knowing how exactly to apply it, was picking up the wooden chairs one by one and hurling them at the screen. All of a sudden a loud and very resonant boom was heard; one chair had landed on the old musician’s contrabass. The cinema was full of surprises.

*

In summer, we would go into the matinee early and leave in the evening, as night was falling. The light outside would be altered; the remnants of the day had been extinguished. It was thus I ascertained that in my absence there had occurred in the world an event immense and essential, its sad obligation of always having to continue – by means of nightfall, for example – its repetitive, diaphanous and spectacular labour. In this way we would enter once more into the midst of a certitude that in its daily rigorousness seemed to me of an endless melancholy. In such a world, subject to the most theatrical effects and obligated every evening to perform a proper sunset, the people around me appeared like poor creatures to be commiserated for the seriousness with which they always busied themselves, the seriousness with which they believed so naïvely in whatever they did or felt. There was but one creature in the town who understood these things and for whom I held a respectful admiration: it was the town’s madwoman. She alone in the midst of rigid people crammed to the very tops of their heads with prejudices and conventions, she alone preserved her liberty to shout and to dance on the street whenever she wished. She went in rags on the street, corroded by grime, gap-toothed, her red hair dishevelled, holding in her arms with maternal tenderness an old coffer full of crusts of bread and various objects picked from the garbage.

She would show her sex to passers-by with a gesture which, had it been used for any other purpose, would have been called “full of elegance and style”. “How splendid, how sublime it is to be mad!” I used to say to myself, and I realised with unimaginable regret how many powerful, familiar, stupid habits and what a crushing, rational education separated me from the extreme freedom of a madman’s life.

I think that whoever has not had this sensation is condemned never to feel the true breadth of the world.

*

The general and elementary impression of the theatrical turned into authentic terror as soon as I entered the wax museum with its mannequins. It was a fear mixed with a tinge of vague pleasure and somehow with that bizarre feeling we each sometimes have of previously living in a certain setting. I think that if the urge for an aim in life were ever to arise in me and if this impulse had to be bound to something that is indeed profound, essential and irremediable in me, then my body would have to become a mannequin in a wax museum and my life a simple and endless contemplation of the display cases of the dioramas.

In the gloomy light of the carbide lamps I used to feel that I did indeed live my own life in a unique and inimitable way. It was as if all my everyday actions had been shuffled like a deck of cards. I felt no attachment to them; people’s irresponsibility towards their most conscious acts was a fact whose obviousness was plain to see. What importance did it have whether it was I or another who committed them, as long as the variousness of the world enveloped them in the same uniform monotony? In the wax museum, and only there, no contradiction existed between what I did and what occurred. The waxwork figures were the only authentic thing in the world; they alone falsified life in an ostentatious way, becoming part of the true atmosphere of the world through their strange and artificial immobility. The bullet-riddled and blood-stained uniform of some Austrian archduke, with his sad, yellow visage, was infinitely more tragic than any real death. In a crystal casket there lay a woman dressed in black lace, with a pale and gleaming face. An astonishingly red rose was fixed between her breasts, and the blonde wig at the edge of her forehead was coming unglued, while in the nostrils the red colour of the make-up flickered and the blue eyes, as clear as glass, gazed on me motionlessly. It was impossible for the waxwork woman not to have a profound and disturbing significance, one known to no one else. The more I contemplated her the more her meaning seemed to become clear, lingering vaguely somewhere inside me like a word that I was trying to recollect and of which I could grasp only its faraway rhythm.

*

I have always had a bizarre attraction for feminine trinkets and for cheaply ornamented artificial objects. A friend of mine used to collect the most various found objects. In a mahogany box he kept hidden a strip of black silk with very fine lace at the edges, to which were sewn a few glinting glass disks. It was, of course, torn from an old ball gown; in places the silk had begun to moulder. To see it I used to give him stamps and even money. Then he would lead me into a salon in the old style, while his parents were sleeping, and show me it. I would remain with the piece of silk in my hand, mute with stupefaction and pleasure. My friend would stand in the doorway and keep a look out in case anyone came; in a few minutes he would return, take the silk from me, put it in the box and say, “Enough, now it’s over, you can’t have any longer”, which was the same thing Clara sometimes used to say to me when the lingering in the cabin lasted too long.

Another object that disturbed me exceedingly when I saw it for the first time was a gypsy ring. I think it was the most fantastical ring ever to have been invented by man to adorn the hand of a woman.

The extraordinary masked-ball ornaments employed by birds, animals and flowers, designed to play a sexual role; the stylised and ultra-modern tail of a bird of paradise; the rust-coloured feathers of the peacock; the hysterical lacework of petunia petals; the wholly unlifelike blue of a monkey’s chops – these are but feeble attempts at sexual ornamentation compared with the dizzying gypsy ring. It was a tin object, superb, fine, grotesque, and hideous. Above all hideous: it assaulted love in its darkest, most basic regions. A veritable sexual shriek.

Of course, the artist who fashioned it was also inspired by visions of the wax museum. The stone of the ring, which was a simple piece of glass melted to the thickness of a lens, wholly resembled the magnifying glasses in the dioramas of the wax museum, in which I used to gaze at sunken ships enlarged to the extreme, battles against the Turks and the assassinations of royalty. On the ring could be seen a bouquet of flowers chiselled in tin or in lead and coloured with all the violent hues of the paintings in the dioramas.

The violet of throttled cadavers next to the pornographic red of women’s garters, the leaden pallor of furious waves within a macabre light, like the semi-obscurity of funeral vaults covered with a pane of glass. All these framed by little brass leaves and mysterious signs. Hallucinatory.

Otherwise, I used to be impressed by everything that was an imitation. Artificial flowers, for example, and funeral wreaths, especially funeral wreaths, forgotten and dusty in their oval glass cases in the cemetery chapel, framing with old-fashioned delicacy anonymous old names, submerged in an unechoing eternity.

The cut-out pictures with which children play and the cheap statuettes from flea markets. In time, these statuettes would lose a head or an arm and their owners, repairing them, would surround the delicate throat with the white scurf of plaster. The bronze of the rest of the statuette would then acquire the significance of a tragic but noble suffering. And then there are the life-size Jesuses in Catholic churches. The stained glass windows cast into the altar the last reflections of a russet sunset, while the lilies at that hour exhale at the feet of Christ the plenitude of their heavy, lugubrious perfume. In this atmosphere full of ethereal blood and scented dizziness, a pale young man plays the final strains of a despairing melody on the organ.

All these things emigrated into life from the wax museum. In the dioramas of a fair I rediscover the shared space of all these nostalgias scattered through the world, which gathered altogether form its very essence.

A single and supreme desire remains alive for me: to witness the incineration of a wax museum; to see the slow and scabrous melting of the waxwork figures, to gaze petrified as the yellow and beautiful legs of the bride in the glass case writhe in the air and a real flame catches hold between the thighs, burning her sex.