The Golden Age

Ino of the beautiful ankles

When he woke up it was just getting light and everyone else at the farm was still asleep. Soon the cock began to crow, the only sound to be heard in the village. Baumgarten lay on the straw and looked into the yard through the open door of the barn. For a while he thought of his book, but soon he emptied his mind of these thoughts and left it empty. He let his eyes wander over the objects leaning against the blind wall of the building; most of these were farm tools the names of which he did not know, or parts of things of which it was impossible to say what they had once belonged to. By now there was a pink strip of light across the top of the wall, but all the tools and parts remained submerged in the cold shadow that covered the yard. To the left of the gate leading to the square there was a rusty instrument composed of four poles fastened together by rivets out of which there projected soil-covered prongs; he told himself that this was probably a harrow, though he knew very little about the subject. Leaning against the wall to the right of this were two dark beams, crossed, beaten together at their centres to look like a great “X” he imagined these forming part of a framework used in the cutting of wood. Resting against this rotten saltire were the remnants of a dilapidated door, upon which were quivering the flakes of a cream-coloured varnish with which the door must once have been painted; the door’s centre panel still bore a brass handle. Surely, thought Baumgarten, the farm’s manager was an exceptionally frugal character to hold on to junk such as this; at the same time it struck him that what was left of the door looked like a large “E.” He began to see amusement in a game in which one read letters in farm tools etcetera, so he moved on to the next object, a triangular wire sand sieve, but he could not think of a letter to compare this with. Next to the sieve there was the handle of a shovel, an obvious “I,” followed by a rusting construction of some kind made of the type of pipes used in scaffolding, a passable approximation of the letter “H.” The last item in this group of objects comprised three planks propped against the wall, which for some reason had been nailed together; it was not difficult to will himself to see in these the letter “N.”

Baumgarten ceased to find amusement in the game. He had not succeeded in his attempt to transform all objects into letters, nor did “XE” or “IHN” have any meaning to disclose. He was almost ready to get up and walk into the yard when something dawned on him: the harrow and the sand sieve did not resemble any letter of the Latin alphabet, but it was possible to see in them perfect representations of sigma and delta. Which would mean that “X” was in fact “CH” and the “H” of the scaffolding was “É,” so that the complete group of old objects read schedién, the accusative form of the Greek word for raft. Baumgarten resumed his game, this time reading the object-letters in Greek. The first item in the next group was a metal stand that was held stable at the bottom by a transverse bar and had a metal spool attached to its top in which was gathered a steel cable with frayed ends; all this was covered in rust, like all the metal objects in the yard. The stand was a fine representation of the letter “A.” Next to this were two wooden poles joined at an angle by insulating sleeving, whose purpose he could not imagine and which formed the letter “N” (the second in this curious notice); to the right of this was the broken lid of a crate in the shape of an “E,” and in two columns of some kind of plastic that were joined by a rubber belt gone slack, an “M” was clearly visible. At this point Baumgarten became truly agitated: the murmur of a text was beginning to take shape in his head, a text drawn out from the depths of his memory. He closed his eyes and caught hold of the words, which he uttered in a muted voice.

Then it came to him what the text was, and with eyes closed he whispered, “Schedién anemoisi feresthai kallipe…” When he opened his eyes again he was not surprised to see next to the plastic columns in the shape of an “M” a concrete full-round form (“O”), then a stake (“I”), a tool whose function he could not identify (sigma) and another stake (“I”). The tops of the object-letters were by now touched by the pink light. After the last stake there was a gap — a stretch of white, plastered wall which put him in mind of a sheet of paper sticking out of an enormous typewriter whose opening line was covered in typescript. Then came another group of objects: phi was represented by a small gate stood vertically, which on a round piece of scratched tin appeared to bear the remains of the legend “No Entry” the next “E” was a portion of a window. All thirty letters and three gaps were where they should be. Theta was particularly well done in a wooden hatch from which all the laths but the one in the centre had been ripped out, while pi had been produced in a block and tackle.

Schedién anemoisi feresthai kallipe. Leave your raft to drive before the wind. When the gods order the nymph Calypso to set Odysseus free, and after he drifts away from her island on a raft, Poseidon unleashes a fearful storm. With the last of his strength Odysseus clings to the raft as it is tossed hither and thither. As the waves roar all around him, he hears a woman’s voice. Ino, also called Leucothea, the goddess of the slim ankles, has risen before him from the waves. Odysseus was expecting her to come to his aid, he was hoping she would calm the storm, would repair his disintegrating sail, or that she would carry him away to shore. But to his surprise Ino demands of him the most nonsensical thing imaginable in the circumstances. She tells him to quit his raft, his last hope, to give himself up to the wild water. Odysseus is slow to obey; he is hesitant, asking himself if this is a trick the gods are playing on him. In the end the decision is taken out of his hands by Poseidon, who smashes the vessel and casts Odysseus to the waves. Is not Poseidon, who would have Odysseus roam the seas, truly his friend? This is a difficult question to answer. As the case may be, the sea carries Odysseus to the shore of the island of the Phaeacians, where he meets Nausicaä and from where he sets sail for Ithaca, where Penelope, Telemachus and Argos are waiting for him.

Baumgarten smiled. He did not take long to consider what this strangely conveyed message meant for him. And its content did not surprise him as it had Odysseus because he had known it all along. What had befallen him was quite plain: the book he was writing had grown out of the pain of emptiness and gradually it had filled this emptiness, but in so doing it had destroyed the ground that nourished it, and died; such things happen. And the solution, too, was simple: it was enough to return to the territory of the void, to let himself be carried by its waves and to wait. So rather than thinking about the content of the message, he thought about who could have sent it to him. There was no point in his suspecting any of the people of the village. Being a sceptic he told himself that this was nothing more than a strange coincidence; it was improbable but not impossible. Quite simply he had dreamed that a local deity, lord of sad villages around Prague, demon of abandoned bus stops, had spoken to him. In the end he decided to understand the notice composed of objects as a message from Ino of the beautiful ankles, daughter of Cadmus, founder of the seven-gated city of Thebes, who had been transformed into a marine divinity and had now, for his sake, descended on the yard of this farm.

He decided, too, to follow immediately the advice Ino had given him; he threw the part-written book in the dustbin, shortly afterwards abandoned in his Prague flat all books and papers with notes and extracts on the subject, and left the country. He settled in Paris because it seemed to him that this was a place where one could easily lose oneself, and this he wished to do. It was not his intention to become a clochard; he wished to live in a foreign city and try again to be faithful to the void he had once betrayed, to wait for a glimpse of new motions as nonsensical and marvellous as the hymn about the embryology of being he had composed on the dusty streets around Prague and in country pubs.

As he walked the wastelands of the great city, as the faces of men and women unknown to him floated past in the streets like so many incurious fish, as his gaze wandered the facades of buildings and climbed through windows into flats whose furniture was angular and hostile, as he felt on his cheeks the cooling mask of a wind saturated in incomprehensible smells both foul and fine, a new joy was born within him. He changed his job often: he was a messenger and a gallery attendant, a custodian in a museum, a sales assistant. He glimpsed nothing that promised to be the germ of some kind of task; he took joy from the purity of emptiness, from its great airy halls, which he passed through light-footedly. He realized that the most important thing was not the task — a task born, perhaps, out of the emptiness, whose fineness and fragrance it preserved in itself — but the tranquil shelter of waiting for nothing. In this shelter a note of happiness was sounded and gained in strength. Perhaps his task in the great game was to make this realization.

One evening as he was dining in a cheap Chinese bistro in Montparnasse’s Rue d’Odessa, a familiar face appeared in the mirror in front of which he was sitting. It belonged to an associate professor from the Sorbonne, whom he had met in Prague when he was still working at the university. They talked for a while, and then the associate professor remembered that he was looking for someone to translate into French selected essays by Jan Mukařovský. Baumgarten thought the offer over for a while, and in the end he agreed to take the job on. This marked the beginning of his Paris career. After publication of the Mukařovský anthology he went on to edit his own anthologies of Czech structuralism, to which he wrote extensive introductions. He himself began to teach Aesthetics at the Sorbonne. He married a Frenchwoman and they had a son; they lived in a large penthouse on one of the great boulevards. The royal castle of emptiness dissolved. He never wrote the book he had intended to write in Prague. Only rarely did he remember the larva-like motions of being, the lost fragments of the Origins of Beauty and the period of his solitary walks on the fringes of Prague.