The Golden Age

Spilled sauce

On the island I often encountered a peculiar shape — asymmetric stains out of which there grew several long, broad lobes; this shape reminded me of a bison on the attack with its head bowed, or perhaps even more so of a lady’s glove hanging limp. I saw flat stones which had been carved into this shape and set on a plinth so that the end of the narrowest of the projections on its bottom side was resting on this. These mini-monuments — examples of a kind of “stain” sculpture — channelled streams of water at the centre of fountains in the upper town, and they stood high on promontories of rock. In the lower town the shape appeared as a bas-relief on the escutcheons of palaces or in faded frescoes; some inhabitants of the upper town would set small coloured stones in their walls and mirrors in this shape reminiscent of a bison or glove. I asked several islanders about the shape: once I learned that it represented a monster that many years ago had devastated the island, another time that it described the outlines of magical, luminous flowers that had grown one night on the floor of the bed chamber of a queen who had lived long ago and whose name was forgotten.

I had little doubt that they thought up such explanations on the spot. It was highly unlikely the islanders knew the origin of the shape. To say that they were lying to me would be imprecise; it was rather that for them the past was of the same realm as dream and imagination, and thus they treated fabulation and vague traces of dreams in the present as legitimate means of penetrating the world of the past, from which objects would emerge still breathing, like pleasant fragrances. This approach was born out of their requirement for a certain exactness, albeit of a kind different to the one on which our own sciences pride themselves. The islanders were offended by the notion of historical research, considering it on the one hand practically indecent (obscene behaviour towards the past), and on the other a strange, even comical bypassing of the task at hand. Karael — who, like most islanders, knew English — once spent a long time browsing a history book in English I had brought with me before laying it aside and announcing, “It puts me in mind of an expedition that goes off to hunt animals that don’t exist, taking a few cooking pots for use as hunters’ tools.” In order to hold on to my good name, I felt it necessary to conceal from the islanders that I was researching the history of the island, although the dearth of available sources coupled with the infectiousness of the islanders’ worldview meant that my research was more about dreaming than comparing, categorizing, judgment and proof.

Evidently objects in which the mysterious shape was repeated had once had a sacral significance. That religion should have existed on the island seemed to me curious. The islanders were of a nation that felt no need for the spiritual and the transcendental; it was extremely difficult for me to imagine a religious islander. Missionaries of various religions were constantly arriving on the island. Naturally the islanders would hear them out willingly enough and were prepared to repeat after them all manner of things (meaning the islanders would draw the visitors into their games). When the missionaries realized what was happening in these games to the articles of their faith and the identity of their god, they thought it better to leave the island. Many considered this the Devil’s island.

I attempted a reconstruction of the lost religion of the islanders, which had perished long before the European invasion, but in my investigations I was not helped along even by the sand-strewn documents in the royal palace. I had very few clues to go on: certain present-day practises of the islanders, the mysterious carving of a man with a fish’s head in a rock overhanging a mountain lake, short dispatches posted by Arabian travellers in the Middle Ages (which I had read before coming to the island), notes in a little-known tractate by Averroes. There are so few of these clues, and their value as documents is so dubious, that my reconstruction of the island’s religion — and its origins, development and end — had more about it of a dream or vision than the revelation of a fragment of the island’s history.

The Arabians write that the inhabitants of the island of Phoenix (which, for some reason, was the name they gave the island) regard marks on walls as a script used by their god to impart his messages and commandments. Some of these communications are reputed to be important — addressing fundamental principles of the universe and ethics — but others are surprisingly vapid, even embarrassing, containing gossip or indiscretions concerning the domestic practises and unspoken thoughts of the islanders; some of these divine inscriptions would be best described as slander. The travel writings of the Arabians also contain a lone, curious mention of how the prophet who founded the island’s religion fought on a rock above the sea with a god or demon with a fish’s head and killed it.

On the basis of these scraps of information I tried to imagine how the island’s religion came into being. It may have been like this: the islanders had once worshipped a deity with the head of a fish; the history of this archaic religion has been lost, leaving behind it nothing more than a carving in the rock in the wilderness of the mountains that is reflected in the water of a lake. I imagine that the prophet of the new religion lived at a time when the original faith was losing strength and changing into dogma, that the vanquishing of the old faith in a struggle to the death between the prophet and the demon with the fish’s head had left traces in the tales of the Arabians. Perhaps the prophet had been a priest of the old religion for whom prayers had become sounds without meaning and the script of the sacred texts had lost the power of speech. The silence of this world abandoned by the gods weighed upon him heavily. One evening his despair was so great that he thought to take his own life. In his abstracted state he upset a bowl containing a red sauce over the open pages of one of the sacred books. As the sauce soaked into the paper it formed a stain that was slightly reminiscent in shape of a bison or a glove. As he studied the stain he realized with astonishment that, unlike the other characters, this mark was not mute; it was whispering something to him with great urgency. He saw the red stain as a hole burned into the cool fabric of the world. What is this? he asked himself. Had he perhaps discovered a secret, divine script?

Then he realized that the whispering of the stain was not the only voice he could hear, that other stains on the walls and on objects had begun to speak; there came a drone from the cracks in the dry earth and seams in the rock. This great awakening of the world went further: all shapes were soon learning the language of stains — shapes, too, were stains, but either they had forgotten this or man had convinced them otherwise. The red stain on the page of a book had fought free of the language man had forced on shapes. Suddenly they were reminded of the ancient shape language and their present understanding of the world was overthrown. And the shape language re-opened the world and filled it with joy.

This was the beginning of the prophet’s mission. He taught the islanders to listen to the voices of stains — perhaps the prophet saw a god behind the stains, perhaps islander disciples of the prophet imagined a new deity who was the author of the text of stains. (It may be that in those days the islanders were unable to imagine something that today is marvellously easy for them to imagine — that the murmurous text of the stains is forever writing and erasing itself.) Maybe this was when the Stain of Awakening — the stain designed by the sauce, the mysterious alfa, the initial of a divine text — began to be shown and worshipped.

I believe that the new religion changed after the prophet’s death. It rid itself of some of its more eccentric features and drew nearer to other religions. That it developed some kind of notion of an afterlife is testified to in Averroes’s tractate, in which the thinker from Cordoba rejects the notion of the immortality of the individual soul, employing in his polemic an anecdote from the island as a kind of reductio ad absurdum. This is the tale Averroes tells: the prophet of the island of Phoenix pays a visit to his neighbour, arriving as the latter is about to whitewash his home. The prophet bursts into tears and pleads with his neighbour to abandon this course of action. When the astonished neighbour asks what it is about the painting of his home that so troubles the prophet, the latter points to a dried stain on the wall and says: “I see in that the face of my late father. I visit you only in order to be closer to him, so that my father may see me and hear my voice. Were you to paint over him, his soul would wander the atmosphere in confusion, looking for another stain to inhabit. Perhaps it would be forced to settle in a place that would bring it great indignity, perhaps on a wall at the other end of the world, so we should never see each other again.”

Averroes writes that the islanders believe that the souls of the dead live on in stains on walls, that they prove this by a curious concatenation of evidence: souls are incorporeal so they must dwell in something with a material volume; volume lacks a two-dimensional form, and as stains on walls are two-dimensional, souls undoubtedly reside in stains. Perhaps the islanders themselves were not altogether convinced of the logic of this, so as a second proof of life after death in stains, they declared that in the half-light we often have the impression we see the outline of a person or an animal.

This story may be based in truth, although plainly it is paraphrasing what Diogenes Laertius tells of Pythagoras (fragment B7 in Diels). It was not so far from Cordoba to the island, and before the original communication was changed into an anecdote and before this anecdote was heard by Averroes, it must have passed through many mouths. I can well imagine the impact the imaginations of sailors and merchants steeped in tales from the Orient would have worked on it.