The Golden Age

The last island

Although, as I said, I learned to like the flavours of the island, still there were times when I could not get a morsel of the meals I was offered past my lips, when my gorge would rise at the smells wafting in from the kitchen, when I would dream of goulash and schnitzel with potato salad. Strange to say, Karael experienced such periods of disgust, too. I do not know whether all inhabitants of the island were affected like this and kept this information to themselves or whether it was Karael’s proximity to me which created disorder in how she perceived things. I have to say that it usually seemed she was as resistant to foreign influences as the islanders in general, who had succeeded in chewing up and swallowing Christianity just as they had technological civilization. That the only one on the island forgetting the assumptions of his own world was me; that only I was developing an ever-stronger liking for half-rotten food, for listening to the murmurs and observing the nonsensical, undulating shapes.

As the case may be, at dinner at her house in the upper town Karael would sometimes push away her plate of violet purée and crimson jelly and begin to complain quietly about the island, about its world, about how this was modelled by the island’s grammar, about how the island’s perspective made itself manifest, how the hands of the island touched and the tongues of the island tasted. I had to lean towards her over the bowls and plates in order to catch her quiet lament. She whispered, “Everything always congeals and runs, runs and congeals, it’s so tedious, it’s so grim.” And then, “How I hate all these disgusting purées! If there’s no difference between rotting and maturing, everything is rotten, every flavour is the flavour of death…”

Then she would plead with me. “Take me with you to Europe. Promise me we’ll leave on the next boat. I could work as a shop assistant, as a cleaner. I don’t want to live on this horrible island any longer. The time that passes here is decaying time, rotten time. Past and future ooze out of the runny present…” At her back the world trembled, dissolved in the ever-changing carpet of the wall of water. I took her in my arms and soothed her; I told her that tomorrow a boat would be leaving the harbour, in the morning we would pack our things and go down to the lower town, we would be in Europe in a few days and the island would be just a memory. But the next day we never spoke of what we had said to each other in the evening and we avoided looking towards the harbour and the white boat.

When I complained about the character of the islanders and she defended it, Karael and I would often quarrel. But at these times I never reminded her of the moments when the charges she set against the islanders were graver still than mine, when she thought the island on which she was forced to live was a hell. The moments when she saw the islanders as freaks were nothing but the dark underside of the moments of serene happiness which gave our life on the island its texture. I never saw the islanders as freaks. I had no particular love for them, but I believed them to have the same right to their way of life as we had to ours, that theirs was neither better nor worse than the kind of life we led in Europe. As I had lived it since my childhood the European way of life was closer to me, but it was not that much closer. And after I had been on the island a year, and the sources of new emotions had got into my blood and my eyes had begun to perceive the weavings of rays of light in a different way, I was aware that I was beginning to distance myself from the language of European life and culture.

And when I returned there were many things I no longer understood. All the complex syntaxes which determined roles within the family and within society as a whole seemed to me as distant and tedious, as bizarre and incomprehensible as the islanders’ grammatical categories and the rules of their games, and somewhat more stuffy and awkward. It was only after I returned to Europe that I found myself on the most distant and strangest of islands, an island from which there is no return because it is home. This was the Ithaca of the Odyssey, which someone had rewritten as a silent-screen comedy. (Screenplay: Odysseus, having for ten years consorted with monsters and demons, is himself more of a monster/demon than a man, and he discovers that he no longer understands much of the language of his homeland.) On the last of the islands all that home can provide is the role of the confused ethnologist, looking on as all around him perform mysterious rituals, some inducing depression, others imbued with a moving, nonsensical beauty.

But whoever thinks I am complaining, is wrong. I neither invented nor chose the protagonist who reaches out to the world through my mixed-up gestures, but I am happy with it and have no intention of exchanging it for any other; after all, it has grown out of my travels and encounters, out of the spaces outlined in my memory which perhaps only opened up at stations and in harbours in order to help in its making. I have heard the slow growth of this protagonist within the cocoon of landscapes; it is of no particular importance whether this long, patient childhood was the gradual genesis of the Self in the body of a stranger or some kind of macabre transformation within a monster. It is important to fuse with the rhythm of these changes, to be in thrall to the time when we are born on the islands and in the towns and countries we visit; it is not important to think about the legitimacy of a motion which makes sense only in and of itself, in the development of its rhythms, in the melody which leads up to no finale. This motion cannot accept vindication from anything outside itself: probably it is one of the very first beams of current to pass through the nothingness, which formed on their way the universe of stars, rocks, plants, bodies and consciousness.

Perhaps psychologists and psychiatrists would consider themselves competent to comment on my island in central Europe, but both would be wrong. The loosening and unravelling of the tissues of the world to reveal the womb beneath is a motion older than Man and, I believe, older than life itself. It is one of the motions that explains, among other things, psychology and psychiatry; for certain it is not the other way round.

Apart from all this, the silent-screen Ithaca is a great place to live; I am ever more aware of how much I like this last island, and I tell myself I would not wish to live anywhere else even if it were possible for me to leave it. It is true that nothing here makes any sense, but this is no great misfortune; I learned from the islanders that sense is not of any particular importance, that its presence may even disrupt the clean lines of certain pictures and cast a cloud over their fine light, while laments on the absurdity of being struck me as self-indulgent and objectionable even before my stay on the island. Once you get a little used to a terrain cleansed of sense, you realize that there is amusement enough to be had here, and that only in its emptiness can the magic crystals of beauty originate. And in this space something is revealed: the silent dignity of people, animals, plants and objects, that is able to stir graciousness, compassion and reverence.