Pablo Maurette translated by Andrea Rosenberg

In the winter of 1904–1905, in Beijing, a bodyguard named Fuzhuli was accused of killing his master, a Mongol prince, with a butcher knife. The punishment set forth by the Qing code[1] for crimes of such a serious nature (regicide, patricide, matricide, and other “enormicides”) was the infamous execution by lingchi, which had been practiced in China since the time of the Liao dynasty (tenth century). Lingchi, commonly translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” consisted of tying the condemned man to a post and cutting him into pieces. On that winter morning in the Beijing vegetable market, before a silent crowd, the executioner began carving large slices of flesh off Fuzhuli’s chest, biceps, and thighs; then cut off his limbs; and finally decapitated him. Once the process was over, the executioner ... Read More »]]>

Pablo Maurette
translated by Andrea Rosenberg

In the winter of 1904–1905, in Beijing, a bodyguard named Fuzhuli was accused of killing his master, a Mongol prince, with a butcher knife. The punishment set forth by the Qing code[1] for crimes of such a serious nature (regicide, patricide, matricide, and other “enormicides”) was the infamous execution by lingchi, which had been practiced in China since the time of the Liao dynasty (tenth century). Lingchi, commonly translated as “death by a thousand cuts,” consisted of tying the condemned man to a post and cutting him into pieces. On that winter morning in the Beijing vegetable market, before a silent crowd, the executioner began carving large slices of flesh off Fuzhuli’s chest, biceps, and thighs; then cut off his limbs; and finally decapitated him. Once the process was over, the executioner uttered the standard declaration: “Sha ren le” (“This person has been executed”). Lingchi did not involve an interminable torture session; it generally lasted only a few minutes, and usually the executioner, after making a couple of cuts, stabbed the condemned man in the heart to put an end to the nightmare. Contrary to what a scandalized Europe chose to believe, the cuts numbered not a thousand but only a few dozen. It was also customary to offer the prisoner large quantities of opium so he would not suffer. Soon after Fuzhuli’s execution, which was photographed and circulated in Europe thanks to a book by Louis Carpeaux (and later thanks to the morbid aestheticism of Georges Bataille in The Tears of Eros), China abolished lingchi.

Despite the misapprehensions of the Norwegian, English, French, and Spanish chroniclers who attended these executions and were fascinated by the idea of “Chinese torture,” the purpose of lingchi was not the infliction of inhuman suffering but instead dismemberment. Lingchi was the form of execution reserved for the most aberrant crimes in the Chinese penal code because its objective was to dismantle what one Sinologist and legal historian called “somatic integrity.”[2] The human body is a collection of parts—limbs, organs, muscles, tendons, and so on—that make up an organic whole. The perception of that wholeness is owed in large part to propioception, a type of haptic perception. Humans perceive themselves as being a sum of parts, but that perception is enforced by a fundamental undergirding experience: that of being an indivisible and inalienable unit. Lingchi is an assault on that fundamental experience, revealing it to be only a belief, an act of faith. The process of dismantling the body exposes its true nature—divisible, fragile, and contingent—by transforming the person, the “human being,” into a pile of pieces of flesh. The fact that the condemned man was given opium to anesthetize him is all the more revealing. Protected by the poppy’s magical narcotic and analgesic powers, Fuzhuli becomes numb to the agony: it is intangible. Before the executioner makes the first cut, Fuzhuli has already ceased to be a sentient body and has become a heap of flesh to be cut into pieces. Touch is the only sense we cannot lose, because losing it means ceasing to be a person and becoming mere flesh. Fuzhuli, drugged and tied to a pole, is like a cadaver on the table in an anatomical theater: a didactic spectacle. Anyone who observes the execution, who observes the ease and speed with which a person is reduced to a pile of lumps of flesh, returns home not just with a brutal memento mori but having learned a valuable lesson about the true laws that govern human life: the laws of physics. If everything is the body and the body is, fundamentally, divisible, pieces and textures are all that remain.

I read about Fuzhuli’s execution for the first time during a break at the National Library in Paris. I had been awarded a scholarship to spend a month comparing Renaissance editions of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, which I would use in the first chapter of my thesis. On occasion, while waiting for the librarians to retrieve the books I’d requested, I would browse the stacks in the basement. It was thus that I came across Louis Carpeaux’s book and the chilling photo of Fuzhuli. The subject of my research was the discovery of Lucretius’s work in Renaissance Italy, and especially its influence on the writings of a pioneer of epidemiology named Girolamo Fracastoro, who lived during the first half of the sixteenth century. As tends to happen when one is totally immersed in a topic, a powerful monothematic (if not monomaniacal) tendency led me to associate the history of capital punishment in China with that of the rediscovery of the Roman poet and philosopher in Italy. The more I thought about Fuzhuli’s execution, the better I understood the forbidden fascination that Lucretius aroused among Renaissance intellectuals. To prevent this unusual association from running aground on the shoals of absurdity, we must begin our discussion at the relevant moment.

In the summer of 1549, Giambattista Bussini, one of the innumerable humanist clerics who abounded in Rome under Pope Paul III, was present at a curious event. It might be going too far to declare it emblematic of the secularism that was to characterize modernity, but what happened in the meeting that Bussini described to his friend, the art historian Benedetto Varchi, is manifestly a postcard from the future of science and Western culture; a future that the church itself, which had organized the meeting, did not even suspect and about which it doubtless would have been scandalized. During that 1549 meeting, attendees discussed which new works to include in the infamous list of banned books that would be formalized a decade later under the title Index librorum prohibitorum. Faced with the growing Protestant threat, and only four years before the Council of Trent began, the intransigence of the Catholic church had reached its apex. The list of forbidden books written by atheists, heretics, Lutherans, antipapists, and pagan sympathizers grew ever longer, and someone at the meeting suggested including De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), the philosophical poem in dactylic hexameter by the ancient Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus. The nomination was hardly unjustified. Lucretius was an Epicurean who believed the universe was eternal and infinite and that the human soul was material, divisible, and therefore perishable. As for the divine, he was little interested in its existence and claimed that, if the gods did exist, they too were material beings, but composed of such delicate atoms that it was impossible for their actions to affect us. For Lucretius, concepts such as providence, rewards and punishments from beyond the grave, and divine intervention were lies cooked up by priests and theologians to keep the masses fearful and subdued. Lucretius’s verses are dazzling; his arguments, solid: Lucretius is convincing. De rerum natura may be the most virulent and beautiful anticlerical manifesto in the history of the world. The work had already been banned in the schools of Florence by 1517, and the term “Epicurean” was synonymous with “atheist” in the sixteenth century. And yet, when someone suggested including Lucretius among the forbidden authors at that meeting in 1549, incredibly, miraculously, absurdly, the suggestion was not well received. Cardinal Marcello Cervini argued that banning the book was unnecessary, as the pagan myths it contained were utterly harmless.[3] In the decades and centuries that followed, Lucretius’s work in particular and atomist materialism in general would profoundly influence and shape the thinking of figures such as Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon, Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, Denis Diderot, Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schrödinger, among others. Antiprovidentialist materialism and the conviction that nature conceals within it the keys that can unlock its secrets are pillars of atomist thinking and helped lay the foundations of modern science. Though Cardinal Cervini’s pragmatic attitude did not increase the importance or influence of the work—Lucretius had already been an influential author among the Italian pioneers of the new science for more than a century—it is a clear demonstration of the inevitability of the secular path that modern thought would take. And this secular turn was in great measure inspired by ideas disseminated by Lucretius, a poet and philosopher for whom the cornerstone of existence and perception was the sense of touch.

The second book of On the Nature of Things begins with the image of a man on a cliff watching a storm rage over the sea. The poet reflects on the strange sensation of satisfaction and fear experienced by someone witnessing a catastrophe from the safety of shelter. Lucretius explains that the pleasure that person feels is not the product of someone else’s suffering (Schadenfreude) but simply the consequence of knowing himself to be momentarily safe from harm. Similarly, reflects the poet, drawing an analogy, a person who is able, through philosophy, to elevate his knowledge beyond that of all other men will understand the nature of things and loses irrational fears that govern his life—in particular, two of them: fear of death and fear of the gods. Observation from a distance produces pleasure. The adjective that Lucretius uses, and that guides this, the fundamental book of On the Nature of Things, is tactile: suavis—that is, “smooth” or “pleasurable.”[4] Here we have the famous pleasure exalted by the Epicureans, the pleasure of avoiding suffering through knowledge, the pleasure of distance and detachment, a smoothness that caresses every atom of the body and spirit. So that young Memnius, to whom Lucretius dedicated the poem, will learn to enjoy this Epicurean smoothness, the poet devotes the second book to untangling the complex ontology and epistemology of atomism. Both center on an idiosyncratic notion of haptic perception.

Lucretius composed his poem sometime in the mid-first century BC. We know that the work enjoyed fame among his contemporaries. Cicero and Virgil read and admired it. In the first centuries of the Christian era and for the whole of the Middle Ages, however, the poem was almost entirely forgotten. In 1417 a humanist adventurer, rare book hunter, and explorer of forgotten libraries, Poggio Bracciolini, happened across a manuscript of Lucretius’s work in a German monastery. He knew at once that his find would capture the interest of his friends in Italy. He was not wrong. Not only did Lucretius become part of the classical canon, but also, surreptitiously, his ideas ended up shaping the discourse of secular science. This is the Lucretian miracle: despite its staunch anticlericalism, its dogmatic sensualism, its denial of the afterlife, its ideas on the eternity of the universe and the infinity of worlds, On the Nature of Things is rescued from censorship. Two of the greatest poets of the late fifteenth century, Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pontano, revere it. Pontano says, “Lucretius takes his readers where he wants to go”[5]; Ficino, Machiavelli, and the editor Aldo Manuzio, among others, succumb to the contagion of Lucretianism as well. They are not only captivated by the poetry but also galvanized by the ideas. Pious Ficino, fascinated by the text, writes a commentary that he later burns in a fit of guilt. “I offered it to Vulcan,” he tells a friend, with combined embarrassment and relief.[6] Sometimes, Lucretius explains, the doctor must sweeten the cup that contains the bitter medicine so that the child will drink it and be cured.[7] Poetry is the honey that sweetens the cup of knowledge. Human beings are like children who are afraid of the dark: to help them lose their fear and become free, one must explain how nature works, convince them that the supernatural does not exist, that everything is material, atoms falling for ever and ever through the void. Lucretius uses an unusual verb to confess that he has infused his cup of knowledge with the honeys of epic poetry: the verb is contingo, a compound of tangere, “to touch,” and the preposition cum, from which the word “contagion” is derived. Contagion is a touch that brings something with it, that leaves something behind, that transforms and influences. Equating the emergence of Lucretius with the spread of a contagion is fitting because his poetry and his thinking—which are inseparable, almost indistinguishable from each other—entered the bloodstream of European humanism like a disease that upheaves and transforms. Europe was infected by Lucretius, by his haptic poetry and his philosophy of the tangible, the way one is always infected: without realizing it.

* *

El sentido olvidado (The Forgotten Sense) was published by Mardulce Editoras in July 2015. 

Image via the Charmet Archives of the National Library of France.

7. There was an old person whose zeal Made him bug-eyed and tense at the wheel. He wasn’t much fun, and they said he was un- representative of their ideal.

* *

19. There was an old man from Sichuan, Who directed the kids on his lawn. He was rather aloof, and would sit on the roof, And descend only when they had gone.

* *

40. There was a young person named Wheeler, Preserved in a jar of tequila. “I’m a gnat! I’m a gnat!” was the comment of that Hymenopterous person named Wheeler.

* *

52. There was a young man from St James, Who consigned all his work to the flames. When asked why he did it, he sadly admitted It’s one of his dumb little games.

* *

69. There was an old man from Seattle: Four fifths of his life was a battle. He argued and ... Read More »]]>

7.
There was an old person whose zeal
Made him bug-eyed and tense at the wheel.
He wasn’t much fun, and they said he was un-
representative of their ideal.

* *

19.
There was an old man from Sichuan,
Who directed the kids on his lawn.
He was rather aloof, and would sit on the roof,
And descend only when they had gone.

* *

40.
There was a young person named Wheeler,
Preserved in a jar of tequila.
“I’m a gnat! I’m a gnat!” was the comment of that
Hymenopterous person named Wheeler.

* *

52.
There was a young man from St James,
Who consigned all his work to the flames.
When asked why he did it, he sadly admitted
It’s one of his dumb little games.

* *

69.
There was an old man from Seattle:
Four fifths of his life was a battle.
He argued and fought, but eventually thought,
“It is time to desist from the battle.”

* *

Images: Michael Hollander

Interview by Eliana Vagalau

Jeffrey Goldstein’s life took a very dramatic turn when he came into the possession of a large part of Vivian Maier’s artistic legacy. Now the Director of Vivian Maier Prints Inc., Jeffrey is a Chicago-based artist, carpenter, and collector who has dedicated the last couple of years to promoting Vivian Maier’s photography around the world. He has also been able to use the project as a springboard for vibrant discussions about art and new collaborations.

*

Eliana Vagalau: An artist yourself, as well as a collector, you are, today, the name behind Vivian Maier Prints Inc., a project which you run passionately and which will serve as our starting point. Tell us in brief how it was that you first came into contact with Vivian’s work.

Jeffrey Goldstein: I’ve been collecting since college. As an artist, ... Read More »]]>

Interview by Eliana Vagalau

Jeffrey Goldstein’s life took a very dramatic turn when he came into the possession of a large part of Vivian Maier’s artistic legacy. Now the Director of Vivian Maier Prints Inc., Jeffrey is a Chicago-based artist, carpenter, and collector who has dedicated the last couple of years to promoting Vivian Maier’s photography around the world. He has also been able to use the project as a springboard for vibrant discussions about art and new collaborations.

*

Eliana Vagalau: An artist yourself, as well as a collector, you are, today, the name behind Vivian Maier Prints Inc., a project which you run passionately and which will serve as our starting point. Tell us in brief how it was that you first came into contact with Vivian’s work.

Jeffrey Goldstein: I’ve been collecting since college. As an artist, I think it’s important to collect other people’s work, as an influence, but also as sensibilities’ checks and boundaries. It’s always nice to find works that reinforce what you’re doing; I think that’s why a lot of artists’ collections look so much like what they do. I’m also a rabid flea-market-goer and antique-buyer, and spontaneously a garage-sale goer—I’m curious, so I’m always looking for things, and there are a lot of wonderful things out there.

The long and short of it is that I knew some people from a flea market I go to who were at the original auction where the Vivian Maier material came—there was no Vivian Maier at that point, she didn’t even exist. One of the original buyers owed me a substantial amount of money, and so what they did, was they made good with Vivian Maier original vintage photos, which at that time were just starting to have some value. Now that I think about it, I don’t think that a single photo had yet been sold. And so we based the original value on what one gallery owner thought that they could sell them for at a show in New York. And so that was maybe the first established price of a Vivian Maier vintage work, which at that time was $250 per print. So that’s how I started segueing into this, and I thought that would pretty much be it. Normally, ten out of ten art projects fail, and this is just different from anything else, vastly different.

EV: When did you first sense that that was the case?

JG: I was guarded for the first couple of years with this, even after we’d had a few successful shows. The concern I had was that it was just the human interest story that was propelling it forward and that the work itself was going to get overlooked. Because, ultimately, the art has to stand on its own, without the backstory. You know, when you walk into a museum, and the piece is on the wall, there isn’t somebody standing next to it telling you the history or the story of the artist. I always thought the work had tremendous qualities to it. I have this inner bell that goes off when I see pieces of work that just strike me as being masterful. And these had that quality.

As far as a defining moment, I think it was when other media started showing interest in the work, not just photographers, but other artists—musicians, authors, film makers…. Somehow, the sensibilities in the photography breached through the world of photography further into the larger world of art, and usually those different pools of art interests don’t mix: painters stay with painters, photographers with photographers.

EV: As a matter of fact, I know that you had been collecting for a long time, long before this—were you collecting photographs specifically?

JG: That’s a good question, because I’ve gone through this incredible learning curve. What I’d collected in the past were mainly prints, but not photography, lithography and etching, you know, the idea of multiples, so with those sensibilities I could segue, in a physical sense, towards the multiples of photography. But I did have to go through this curve – besides the project unfolding, reading about the history of photography, photographers, becoming more aware of perhaps more obscure photographers and photography movements. In some ways, it’s far more condensed a timeframe than, say, for painting, which goes back to prehistoric times, and through many more periods and changes, whereas photography has a well defined start date in the 1830s. And in some cases, it really shifts when the digital age starts, so that timeframe is relatively short. So, learning about that, learning about the dark room process, learning about the sensibilities of photographers, which are different from painters’.

I had a carpentry and cabinetry business that I ran for 32 years previously to this, and I worked for some of the best-known Chicago based artists, who were also friends, and gallery owners, and collectors, so there’s this triad—and I imagine it’s a very dysfunctional triad, a lot of distrust—and each element of this three-pronged wheel needs the other in order to survive and move forward. So, I’ve navigated between those three entities—both in art and cabinetry-making—and have great empathy for all three, because they each have an upside and a downside that you have to deal with. And I enjoy working with gallery owners, because I constantly hear stories about how hard they have to work, how many times they do these things that don’t work—the financial loss, the time loss, the difficulty of dealing with quirky artists. So, knowing all that, it makes things easier for me to navigate through these people.

EV: And also, I imagine, to navigate the different roles that you are now taking on as well…

JG: Yes, and they’re pretty extreme. Everything from the physicality of packing and shipping, which I enjoy, because I suppose it’s reminiscent of cabinetry work. One thing I’m sometimes frustrated with is that there’s not a tangible product at the end of my day, at the end of my week, or at the end of the year, like there is with cabinetry-making or painting. I do everything from cutting the material for packing—I have a laser machine to make the stamps that we use for packaging—setting up the frame orders, putting the frames together, and then shipping. Two days ago, we had packages at FedEx that were going to Minneapolis, Cleveland, Shanghai, and Toronto, and there are all sorts of paperwork that go with that, different packaging systems… And I have to do contracts with gallery owners, sometimes international. And then international travel, which I love to do. So, my wardrobe is very interesting, because it’s morphed from construction, over time, to suits, and coats, and pants. I just got a pair of Italian dress shoes! I have to look the part, I represent the project.

There isn’t anyone in the project who is any more or any less than another, it’s really more of a group effort, so actually the title on my card is changing. I’m officially president, because I had to incorporate a company, and I feel that that’s really ostentatious and presumptuous, and so I’m changing it to director, because it’s not such an overpowering-sounding role, and I like to maintain a great deal of equity between the people who are all part of this. Although I do have Italian shoes, and they don’t!

EV: Italian shoes notwithstanding, one thing I noticed when I had the chance to spend a little time here was that you make a concerted effort to make this project a people’s project. You make an effort to impart responsibility, delegate, and, in a sense, use it as a ramp. Where does this impulse come from?

JG: I almost want to say from not wanting to accept full responsibility, in a certain sense… But I think in this kind of a project, you’re far more fortified as a team and, given the expanse of this, I know my limitations, and the idea is to bring in professionals. This is a multifaceted project, and you bring in people who have been working with a certain facet for a lifetime. And I’m really happy to say this, and appreciate the question, because I’m a very collaborative person by nature, and I don’t feel that anybody really owns a piece of artwork, or owns a collection. You’re the caretaker, the provider for it, the idea is that each generation takes over. It’s like archaeology, there’s a job of preservation, and, if done right, it allows the next owner, or generation to glean new information from it. The idea is that of a collective coming together. The new person coming in is in her twenties, Anne is in her thirties, I’m in my fifties, Sandy, one of the printers, is in her fifties, Ron is in his seventies, we have someone here who is in her sixties, the only age-range we were missing were the forties. I think this is important because times are changing so quickly that each of these ten years is almost a generation. And they say Vivian Maier is the people’s photographer, across the board, and I think that having people from these different age-groups is instrumental in assisting that.

EV: And probably also in understanding the different stages of her work…

JG: Surely, there are different insights. When you read a photograph, you’re saying something about your personal experience, you’re projecting, and so certain photographs may be far more appealing to certain age groups.

EV: It’s interesting to hear you speak about the idea of ownership, or, rather, non-ownership of a work of art. And I am wondering if that has anything to do with the fact that Vivian Maier really did not take ownership of her work in a sense, never planned on displaying or showing her work. Did that have an influence in the way you are presenting this project?

JG: No, there is a certain sense of non-possessiveness that she has, and maybe there’s just a parallel. I’ve gone through this process once before when my close friend Ed Pashke, a famed painter, died, and I had to dismantle his studio. And it’s like dismantling a friend, a person, and archiving his work, which is, in a sense, also a dismantling process, so that experience has really helped me with this. Morally, the question that has been asked is whether this is the right thing to do, would she have wanted it. And I think that at this point it is totally irrelevant. An artist has the option, and they should exercise the option, of editing throughout their life. Her body of work is completely unedited. They also need to make arrangements towards the end of their life, or at any point of their life. If I die next week, what happens to my work? And if it’s important to them, they need to make arrangements. Most artists don’t, and they end up dumping it on their kids. There’s just no proper way of handling it. She made no arrangements; it was obviously very important to her because she kept it throughout her lifetime. Whether she had ultimate goals with it or not, I don’t know, but it was very important to her. So my job is to maintain that level of importance.

EV: Her work having been excavated so recently, what, from your perspective, has made of it such an explosive phenomenon?

JG: I think there are a handful of reasons. Part of it is that she was such a miraculously good photographer. She was able to see an image a moment before it happened. There’s a timing element. Over and over, she captures the pinnacle or epitome of what might just be a small drama in the street, but she captures it exactly at the right moment, which means that she would have to click the shutter a nanosecond before it happens, which means that she was able to see that two nanoseconds before. So she had this uncanny ability to compose, and shoot, and hit the mark with one shot. She rarely, in fact, never bracketed, it was one shot and then on to the next thing. So in part it’s the quality of her work, but also the change in technology. Photography is so explosive on its own now; anyone can take a hundred photographs now and discard ninety-nine of them at no expense. So I think it’s also the recognition of how incredibly unique and rare it is for someone to go through the process of film, and dark room, and be able to capture shots of that quality. And the imagery is very compelling, and very informative. She hits into, in a certain sense, the world of fashion, architectural photography, the gamut of what she shot—people, animals, gardens, flowers. She shot things that all of us have seen, on a day to day basis, but we never have considered shooting, and most of us could not shoot those things as beautifully as she has. A couple of examples are tomatoes on a windowsill, or a pair of dish gloves sitting by a sink. And to make those into a metaphoric statement… Last but not least, Vivian Maier gives many of “us” a sense of hope. A sense of hope in that if we don’t achieve a certain degree of recognition in our lifetime that perhaps someday, somehow, somewhere, someone would recognize through what we have made and left behind, the indications that a noble and worthy life was led.

EV: I remember looking at one of the photographs with you representing a hand clutching a dollar bill behind a person’s back, and you saying that that would be more appealing to an American audience. And yet you have had so much international travel of late—Shanghai, Poland. Have you noticed a lot of cultural difference in terms of the reception of the work, or have you developed an eye for that?

JG: I think that there’s a classical, universal quality to the work that is appealing, whether you’re in Shanghai or in ParisThe hardest thing for me with this entire project, and there have been a number of difficulties, from financial, to sleep deprivation, to getting things to places on time, was public speaking. It’s the most common fear, and I had it. But one of the most important things I’ve learned in the arts, from Ed Pashke, was that if you want something, you just have to jump off the cliff. So the acquisition of this was totally jumping off the cliff; the public speaking, totally jumping off the cliff. And, in many ways, I’m still falling, not knowing where I’m headed, but I can’t think of a place I’d rather be. And, concerning the public speaking specifically, the response of the audience is very inviting, because it’s constantly been good. I don’t think we’ve had to defend points, but people ask us genuine questions, so it’s an opportunity to describe what we’re doing, and once we do, I think people have an even greater appreciation of what’s taking place. We’re always nervous before the talks, but we realize that these are fellow human beings who have a love of art and who are curious, just like we are.

EV: As you are travelling and opening all these conversations about art, about photography, about street art, and seemingly using this project as a springboard for others, where do you see it all going? In other words, is there a secret agenda, and are you trying to take over the world?

JG: If I told you, would it be a secret? This is a really great question, and I haven’t quite yet been able to verbalize an answer yet. Somehow this project hits the chord of what is supposed to be profound about art. It’s a level of communication and interconnectedness. A level of non-verbal communication that takes place in the world of art that creates fraternity, this brotherhood, beyond gender, race, creed, religion. There is a divine feeling to this- and I’m not a religious person- of an interconnection of how close we all really are. So the one thing I may be doing right about this is releasing it, and giving it a life of its own. People are connecting with it in different ways; it’s like a snowball going downhill. People are getting on board the snowball, adding something to it, it’s getting bigger, bringing in different media, and then somehow we’re all interconnected, in this case through the work of Vivian Maier. I think it’s a profound role that art plays, adding order and beauty to our lives on many levels, and that is maybe is easy to overlook in today’s digital age. But again, I haven’t quite yet found the right words for it- profound or cosmic- they sound a bit over the top, but there is something universal about this that strikes a human chord. I’ve never seen so many people so interconnected around something, it’s magnetic.

EV: I was struck by something in your biography, which mentioned that you see collecting as an extension of your artistic practice. Seeing your experience with this project, is there really much of a boundary between the two?

JG: Not for me. Not any longer. This project has impacted me so greatly, I no longer have an idea where things start and stop. My private life and my work life, as an artist or a collector… honestly, I don’t even know what my role is. I don’t know what I do, and I don’t know what title to give myself. It’s like the tide has come in.

EV: Then would you maybe like to end with an attempt at describing to us who you are?

JG: Yes, I can tell you who I am. I am the luckiest person I know, and I felt that way for years and years, way before this Vivian Maier project. Maybe because I had a rather unusual life style and unusual events have happened to me. Being born in Florida, moving to Las Vegas in the 60s, my mother died when I was young, we moved here to Chicago two days after the worst snowstorm in the history of Chicago… Becoming friends with my heroes, who were artists and whom I’d studied in college, which is why I’d come to Chicago. I’d moved here because of the artists, and became friends with them. And I had something to offer by way of cabinetry that was different from what they were offering. I’d worked in steel plants, I’d worked for a living, I’d worked with my hands, I’d traveled fairly extensively, so I had something different to bring to this art world that was otherwise somewhat insular. I’m fourth generation carpenter, and the first one who had the luxury to be able to go to college, to study art, which is what I have the most passion for, to be able to make a living, to collect art. What more could a person really ask for? And then this project comes along and brings it all together, and there’s also something completely new that comes out of that. If I were struck by a bolt of lightning right now, I’d be fine with it.

* *

Images by Vivian Maier courtesy of the Jeffrey Goldstein Collection

Adam Z. Levy

For all the theories of translation one disavows or keeps tacked above the bed, there remain certain unscientific gut-level questions like: Have I gone too far? Have I gone far enough? During the year that I spent working on Hungarian writer Gábor Schein’s first novel, The Book of Mordechai, I approached my author often with such questions. We met on Friday evenings to drink fizzy lemonades at an outdoor café in the Budapest district where we both lived. If it is possible to condense a year’s worth of meetings in a single phrase, it might be most fitting to call them dry interrogations: I pointed to places, in my own text and in the original, and asked whether I had understood the implications of this word or that phrase. It is one of the privileges of ... Read More »]]>

Adam Z. Levy

For all the theories of translation one disavows or keeps tacked above the bed, there remain certain unscientific gut-level questions like: Have I gone too far? Have I gone far enough? During the year that I spent working on Hungarian writer Gábor Schein’s first novel, The Book of Mordechai, I approached my author often with such questions. We met on Friday evenings to drink fizzy lemonades at an outdoor café in the Budapest district where we both lived. If it is possible to condense a year’s worth of meetings in a single phrase, it might be most fitting to call them dry interrogations: I pointed to places, in my own text and in the original, and asked whether I had understood the implications of this word or that phrase. It is one of the privileges of working with a living writer to be able to ask even the most trivial things.

Schein, whose second novel, Lazarus!, was translated by Ottilie Mulzet for Triton in 2010, puts his formal inventiveness on display in The Book of Mordechai: it is a retelling of the biblical Book of Esther, woven into the story of three generations of a twentieth-century Hungarian family. The narrative shifts in time and place from paragraph to paragraph and is filled with anecdotes, family reminiscences, source documents, and meta-narratives on translation that defy easy classification. It is as much about a country’s—and a family’s—difficult history as it is about the limits of language in preserving the memory of it.

At the novel’s center, though in many ways it has more than one, is a young boy named P. who spends the summer learning to read and write under the supervision of his grandmother. The text his grandmother has him read is the Book of Esther. She brings out an old yellowing edition that belonged to his mother, and which was translated at the beginning of the last century by Leopold Blumenfeld, a rabbi from the town where she, P.’s grandmother, was raised. (The Blumenfeld translation is an invention of Schein’s, based on an edition of the Book of Esther that Schein produced at one of our meetings; its translation credits belong to the very real Mór Schwarz.) Blumenfeld’s translation, the one presented in The Book of Mordechai, raises questions about where we draw the line between translation and interpretation: the reader learns early on that “in certain places [he] changed the text”—in one instance, by “arranging the letters of the Hebrew text from an unquestionably hard-to-understand sentence in a way that departed from the original, namely by inserting one letter, a surprising but seemingly-correct reading was attained.”

For Blumenfeld, the manipulation of the text is fact an attempt to stabilize it: his amended version flows—to borrow Péter Pázmány’s phrase from three centuries before—“fluidly, as though it had first been written by a Hungarian, in Hungarian.” Something similar happens when Blumenfeld replaces the stake on which Haman hopes to impale his rival Mordechai with a tree, so as to have him hanged. Blumenfeld goes one step further, changing the unit of measurement in the text from cubits to ell, in effect doubling the height of the tree. With the new measurements, we are told a hanging would have been impossible. The already fable-like tale is taken from the exaggerated to the absurd, since the hanging still takes place. In Schein’s vision of the book, it is necessary that it does: a translation cannot outrun the shadow of its source.

Blumenfeld’s translation of The Book of Esther poses subtler difficulties as well. There are many more modifications to the Schwarz translation than Blumenfeld (or Schein) lets on. Words are omitted or replaced with more modern equivalents; the tone of entire lines is amplified or dampened, leaving their translator to navigate between four texts rather than two. For example:

In the English translation of the Hebrew bible that I used, a section from Esther reads: “Some time afterward, when the anger of King Ahasuerus subsided, he thought of Vashti and what she had done and what had been decreed against her. The king’s servants who attended him said, ‘Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for Your Majesty.’”

The Blumenfeld translation reads: “When King Ahasuerus’ anger subsided, he thought of Vashti. He was reminded of the pleasantness of her touch, the pleasantness of her voice. But the king’s servants said, ‘Let beautiful virgins be sought out for Your Majesty.’” Most notable is Blumenfeld’s insertion of the second sentence: “He was reminded of the pleasantness of her touch, the pleasantness of her voice.” It replaces the juridical with the sentimental, allowing the buffoonish king a moment of nostalgic self-reflection not present in the original: he recognizes what he has lost and what he will not be able to bring back. The tone has also changed as a result: the formality is softened as “the king’s servants who attended him” becomes the more colloquial “the king’s servants.”

In order to match the register of Blumenfeld’s translation I tried to smooth out the edges of the biblical Book of Esther while preserving the integrity of its form. The modifications within the translation metanarrative are, in most cases, intended to go unnoticed. The changes shouldn’t stand in the light of the original; they should remain hidden in the text. And yet, in each section of the book, the intertextual framework, the constant undoing and redoing of language, reveals itself just enough for the reader to watch Schein quietly build the axis on which the novel spins. On each revolution, it asks: What is the language required for the stories we pass on?

* *

Image: Alejandra Seeber, “Consider not understanding,” courtesy of miau miau

Paul Scheerbart translated by Joel Morris

The tall trees groped more and more intensely in the air with their long branch arms and could not calm themselves down; they wanted to know for certain what they once were, back when they did not yet have branches.

The asteroid Juno was a thick round disc. It resembled an earthly pancake. The diameter of this pancake measured no more than 200 kilometers; it was at most five kilometers thick, but it was only that thick in the middle—towards the edges it became thinner and thinner.

The only inhabitants of Juno were immensely tall tree creatures, whose roots entwined together in the middle of the planet. The trees reached extremely high up into the ether—in the middle nearly a hundred kilometers high—just as much on one side of ... Read More »]]>

Paul Scheerbart
translated by Joel Morris

The tall trees groped more and more intensely in the air with their long branch arms and could not calm themselves down; they wanted to know for certain what they once were, back when they did not yet have branches.

The asteroid Juno was a thick round disc. It resembled an earthly pancake. The diameter of this pancake measured no more than 200 kilometers; it was at most five kilometers thick, but it was only that thick in the middle—towards the edges it became thinner and thinner.

The only inhabitants of Juno were immensely tall tree creatures, whose roots entwined together in the middle of the planet. The trees reached extremely high up into the ether—in the middle nearly a hundred kilometers high—just as much on one side of the pancake as on the other. But towards the edges of the pancake the trees grew smaller, so that when seen from a distance the entire planet gave the impression of being a sphere.

The tree creatures’ branches were not as hard as the branches of trees on Earth. The Junoians were able to move their branch-appendages easily in every direction, as if they were rattlesnakes. Many moveable little snake-limbs protruded from the trunks and in place of leaves and blossoms, the tips of the branches had very complex tactile organs, with which the Junoians perceived an indescribable number of things in the air and ether—even things very far away—so that earthly eyes and ears were not lacking on Juno.

Naturally one did not hear clear sounds whenever the Junoians spoke with one another; if an ear had been present, it would have only heard a quiet crackling beneath the tree bark. Nevertheless, on Juno everyone communicated very quickly and without trouble.

Often enormous balloons would form, whenever the Junoians wanted, in the tree-giants’ upper boughs. They looked like blossoms, and in a few seconds they quickly lifted the bough up high, often many kilometers.

The balloons glowed as though lit inside by an electric light, but the Junoians could not see this glow, since they didn’t have any eyes.

The thinking organs were set in the roots of the tree-giants, and with these thinking organs—which processed indescribably complex tactile impressions—the Junoians constantly reflected on their past. They were firmly convinced that they had once led a completely different life. But as much as they groped, searchingly, in the air, they could not remember that other life.

*

Apart from their tactile organs, in the Junoians’ tree bark were numerous pores that also had the characteristics of organs and resembled earthly animal noses. Most Junoians did not concern themselves with their pore-noses. Only the two tallest Junoians, who could stretch their appendages nearly a hundred kilometers high in the middle of the planet, exercised their pore-noses. And so one day the tall Junoian in the middle said to the one below him on the other side of the planet who also stretched a hundred kilometers high:

“My dear antipode, if I just think about my pore-noses and forget for a moment the organs of touch in the fingertips of my branches, it is as though my ability to remember has been utterly transformed.”

The antipode said that the same thing happened to him.

And there was a crackling under their tree barks.

And the other Junoians marveled at the lively conversation in the middle of the planet.

And then both antipodes in the middle of Juno suddenly sensed an intense smell, one that reminded them of something old—something ancient. They didn’t immediately know what it was, but they spoke to each other more and more intensely until finally one of the antipodes said in his quiet crackle-language—crackling in the bark of his roots and palpable throughout the whole of Juno and for each Junoian—“Antipode, I smell roasting meat in my pore-noses!”

“Me too! Me too!” said the antipode.

And all the Junoians drew their snaking branch arms near to the planet’s middle, so that the planet suddenly took the form of a pair of flower bouquets—a cone up top and down below. The edge of Juno stood empty like a cuff.

“The smell of roasting meat!” resonated through all the tree barks.

And it crackled loudly everywhere.

“What could it possibly mean?” asked the smaller Junoians, who did not live far from the edge and were used to reaching over the edge to the other side of the planet with their snaking appendages.

“The smell of roasting meat!” both antipodes in the middle said once more quite clearly. And the other Junoians opened all of their pore-noses and after a while said again, “The smell of roasting meat!”

Then there ensued such a lively conversation that for hours no one could understand his own words (of course no words were actually “spoken” in the earthly sense). The reminiscences of the Junoians had suddenly taken an entirely new direction. And the entire planet became more and more lively—all of the balloons glowed like colorful flowers so that now both the planet’s cones truly looked like two giant bouquets of flowers.

And finally one of the middle antipodes said in summation: “Indeed, my dear friends, we have finally discovered it: we were once beings who were furnished with a so-called ‘mouth.’ And with this mouth we once ate things that we called ‘roast meat.’ We also know what these roasts were: they were other beings that we roasted with fire! We once used to eat one another!”

A general crackling of “Ohs” and “Ahs” followed this speech, and all of the Junoians bent themselves towards the edges, so that the planet no longer resembled two flower bouquets.

*

The antipodes in the middle jutted high up into the air, entirely alone; the other inhabitants of Juno had withdrawn from them. Then they all heard the voice of the second antipode, who said loudly and clearly, “My dear friends, the story is not so simple. Each tree-giant once represented an entire people. We consist of an indescribable number of smaller, even miniscule beings who at times confronted each other, full of fury and hate. And now and then it came to the smell of roasting meat. But now we see that these little peoples all live together unified in us, and that it no longer means anything to us that our little beings once feuded and at times even ate one another. Now all of these little ones are peacefully unified within us, and we are completely justified in seeing our former life as a little joke.”

After this an entirely new crackling could be heard on Juno, one that sounded like an earthly laughing.

And the Junoians on the edges said, “Our lives were once a little joke. It is utterly regrettable that we have not yet made our present life into a big joke.”

“Oh,” came a resounding from the middle. “That’s something we can make up for.”

And they made up for it in the following way: They recalled their former lives more and more clearly, in which they represented great multitudes of people, and their life back then—with all its savagery and opposition—seemed silly to all of them. And on Juno they could not allay the thought that they had once taken that entire life—with all of its brawling, zeal, and smells of roasting meat—so seriously.

“But do we not also keep taking our present life as tree-giants whose roots are harmoniously entwined too seriously?” A good many Junoians asked this question. And they pointed to a life to come and cautioned everyone to keep what they had experienced good and fixed in their memories, so that later such long periods of searching would not occur again. Times of discord could certainly occur once more, and if so it would be very important that the times of unity remained firmly stuck in their memory. Most of all, they were not to forget the comical in everything.

“But it is also terribly silly that there once used to be so many oppositions within us,” said the Junoians on the edge once again. “Now that all of these oppositions have been amicably unified, we don’t even notice that they once behaved with such hostility toward one another. We can also live so completely within another that the other no longer is an other for us. Our antipodes are so familiar with us. We believe that soon all of us together will be just one single giant collective being.”

“It will not happen so quickly!” the antipodes in the middle said.

“It would be too bad,” a few other Junoians noted, “if we did not make the most of our current, harmonious condition.”

And all the Junoians lived on peacefully as tree-giants, full of reminiscences, and under their barks the crackling rang, often very bright and merry. 

***
read this in German
***

Ben Merriman

Costa Rica’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) is located in a disused liquor distillery in the capital city of San José. The building still looks like a factory—unlike, say, the case of the Tate Modern, little has been done to convert the building from its original purpose. The museum is not air conditioned, and like the rest of San José it is warm and humid in all seasons. Wasps buzz in the rafters and tar sweats from the beams. On my visit, I walked in past an unstaffed front desk and looked at art unmonitored by guards or proximity sensors. MADC is a national museum that is neither isolated nor protected from the everyday life of its country. It is this contiguity, along with a vigorous engagement with the styles of the historical avant-gardes, that ... Read More »]]>

Ben Merriman

Costa Rica’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MADC) is located in a disused liquor distillery in the capital city of San José. The building still looks like a factory—unlike, say, the case of the Tate Modern, little has been done to convert the building from its original purpose. The museum is not air conditioned, and like the rest of San José it is warm and humid in all seasons. Wasps buzz in the rafters and tar sweats from the beams. On my visit, I walked in past an unstaffed front desk and looked at art unmonitored by guards or proximity sensors. MADC is a national museum that is neither isolated nor protected from the everyday life of its country. It is this contiguity, along with a vigorous engagement with the styles of the historical avant-gardes, that made MADC one of the most exciting museums I have visited in several years.

Costa Rica has not produced artists or writers of worldwide renown as other Central American countries have done. One could connect the lack of artistic visibility with its placid political history. The country is enviably stable, and though bullet holes from the brief 1948 Civil War are still visible in parts of the capital, this conflict is less a historical trauma than it is a point of national pride: the Civil War ended with the abolition of the military and of racial segregation, with universal suffrage and the creation of a constitutional republic. Perhaps uniquely in Latin America, the United States has maintained close economic and political ties to Costa Rica without meddling or invading. The country has many social problems, but no social catastrophes, and in accordance with this, few émigrés.

One of Costa Rica’s most vexing social problems—sex tourism and its consequences—was at the center of MADC’s major display of new work, “Rein@s de le Noche” (2011), by San José artist Eugenio Murillo-Fuentes. The exhibit comprised twelve large mixed-media pieces on the topic of sex work. The cycle bears a marked debt to Neue Sachlichkeit and the Berlin Dada. Murillo’s subjects—assault, police harassment, drug use, and lustmord—are lurid, his colors garish, and his human figures distorted and aggressively depersonalized. In these formal and thematic respects, the work does not advance past the styles of Interwar Modernism. In other ways, though, the work is joltingly contemporary: San José is best known as a hemispheric focus of sex tourism, and the country is struggling to balance its Catholicism, national traditions of civic tolerance, and economic dependence on foreign visitors. Though the works present few specific markers of place, the exhibit suggests that it is about San José. Murillo’s use of the @ symbol, in Spanish a relatively new typological means of signaling gender neutrality, is an acknowledgment that transgender sex workers are as visible on San José’s street corners as ciswomen. (A literal translation into English, “Queens of the Night,” might convey a similar ambiguity.) The featurelessness of his human figures similarly blurs the matter of gender, which is largely beside the point: Murillo’s work emphasizes (and implicitly criticizes) the reduction of sex workers to interchangeable objects of masculine fantasy. A second meaning of the exhibition title drives home this phantasmagoria: “Reina de la noche” is also a colloquial name for a toxic, night-blooming cactus.

It is not unusual for contemporary art to address a difficult social issue, but Murillo’s choice of medium, and his impersonal style, affords the viewer a less fraught space for moral reflection. Without ducking the ugly realities of sex tourism, Murillo shields viewers from the specificity of particular workers and clients in a way that a medium such as documentary photography would not. Depersonalization, though not the present norm for politically engaged art, avoids both the ethical conundrum of taking aesthetic pleasure in the unhappy lot of another human being, and the economic problem of making a profit from a freely given image. This step back from immediate reality would run the risk of over-aestheticizing a social problem, save that no visitor to the museum could fail to be aware of sex tourism in Costa Rica. (Even the government acknowledges the particular dilemmas; outside the museum were posters from a state-sponsored anti-transphobia campaign, a laudable project also altogether unimaginable in the United States.) The cycle is therefore a context-specific installation—it is not conceived for the specific exhibition space, but for its social environs, and would lose its intelligibility elsewhere.

Murillo, like most artists on display at MADC, suggests the continued adequacy of modernism to our present moment. For the most part, the contemporary art on exhibit proceeds as though Pop and Conceptualism had never occurred, and the most memorable pieces make sense of Latin American reality primarily with the formal resources of expressionism, Dada, and surrealism. Cecilia Paredes’s sublimely useless “Navigation Device” (Instrumento de Navigación) calls Kurt Schwitters to mind, but also drives home a criticism of Neocolonialism. Patricia Belli produces a high heel (“Shoe”/ “Zapato”) with an insole of thorny, poisonous Guanacaste bark, a work suggestive of Meret Oppenheim, but also making a clear point about masculine culture. Visitors from more cosmopolitan locales might take the reliance upon these styles as a sign of relative isolation. The great achievements of the historical avant-gardes are nearing their century mark, and the artists do not seem particularly driven to produce formal novelty.

However, the work at MADC can be understood in precisely the opposite way. Modernism sought to make things new, and treated the styles of the past as contemporaneous with the present and the products of all cultures as a shared store of artistic achievement. The first fruits of Modernism are now old enough to be history, farther from us in time than Modernism itself was from the academicism of the early 19^th Century. The turn toward Modernism on display at MADC is earnest rather than appropriative, and suggests a union of the substance of Modernist styles with the spirit that first informed them. The result is something quite rare in contemporary art: work capable of surprising the viewer, and inviting a changed perspective on the world outside the museum walls.

* *

Image: Eugenio Murillo-Fuentes, “Disputas esquineras” (2011)

 Paul Scheerbart

Die großen Bäume tasteten mit ihren langen Astarmen immer heftiger in der Luft herum und konnten sich gar nicht beruhigen; sie wollten durchaus wissen, was sie einst waren, als sie noch nicht Astarme hatten.

Der Asteroïd Juno war eine dicke runde Scheibe – so wie ein großer irdischer Eierkuchen sah er aus; der Durchmesser dieses Kuchens betrug noch nicht einmal zweihundert Kilometer, dick war er nur in der Mitte, den Rändern zu wurde er immer dünner.

Die Juno wurde nur von riesig großen Baum-wesen bewohnt, deren Wurzeln sich in der Mitte des Sterns durcheinanderschlangen. Sehr hoch ragten die Bäume in den Äther hinauf – in der Mitte fast hundert kilometer hoch – sowohl nach der einen Kuchenseite wie nach der andern. Aber nach dem Kuchenrande zu wurden die Bäume immer kleiner, so dass der ... Read More »]]>

 Paul Scheerbart

Die großen Bäume tasteten mit ihren langen Astarmen immer heftiger in der Luft herum und konnten sich gar nicht beruhigen; sie wollten durchaus wissen, was sie einst waren, als sie noch nicht Astarme hatten.

Der Asteroïd Juno war eine dicke runde Scheibe – so wie ein großer irdischer Eierkuchen sah er aus; der Durchmesser dieses Kuchens betrug noch nicht einmal zweihundert Kilometer, dick war er nur in der Mitte, den Rändern zu wurde er immer dünner.

Die Juno wurde nur von riesig großen Baum-wesen bewohnt, deren Wurzeln sich in der Mitte des Sterns durcheinanderschlangen. Sehr hoch ragten die Bäume in den Äther hinauf – in der Mitte fast hundert kilometer hoch – sowohl nach der einen Kuchenseite wie nach der andern. Aber nach dem Kuchenrande zu wurden die Bäume immer kleiner, so dass der ganze Stern aus der Ferne gesehen doch den Eindruck eines Kugelsterns machte. (67)

Die Äste der Baumwefen waren nicht so hart wie die Äste irdischer Bäume; die Junowesen konnten ihre Astglieder so leicht nach allen Richtungen bewegen, als wären’s Klapperschlangen. Viele bewegliche kleinere Schlangenäste ragten aus den Hauptstämmen heraus. Und die Spitzen der Äste hatten an Stelle der Blätter un Blüten sehr komplizierte Tastorgane, mit denen die Junonen unfäglich viele Dinge in der Luft und im Äther wahrnahmen – auch weit entfernte, so dass irdisches Auge und Ohr gar nicht entbehrt wurde auf der Juno.

Wenn die Junonen zu einander sprachen, so vernahm man natürlich nicht helle Töne wär’ ein Ohr dagewefen, es hätte nur ein leises Knistern unter den Baumrinden bemerft. Trotzdem verständigte man sich auf der Juno sehr schnell und ohne Mühe. In den höheren Zweigen der Baumriefen bildeten sich oft, wenn es der Junone wollte, umfangreiche Luftballons; wie Blüten sahen sie aus, und sie hoben den Zweig rasch empor – oft viele Kilometer hoch – in ein paar Sekunden.

Die Luftballons leuchteten, als hätten sie elektrisches Licht in sich; aber das Leuchten sahen die Junonen nicht, da sie ja keine Augen hatten. (68)

Die Denkorgane saßen in den Wurzeln der Baumriesen.

Und mit diesen Denkorganen, die nur unsäglich komplizierte Tasteindrücke verarbeiteten, dachten die Junonen unablässig über ihre Vergangenheit nach: sie waren fest davon überzeugt, daß sie früher ein ganz anderes Leben geführt hatten.

Aber sie konnten sich nicht an das andere Leben erinnern, so viel sie auch suchend mit ihren Astarmen in den Lüften herumtasteten.

***

Außer den Tastorganen besaßen nun die Junonen in ihren Baumrinden sehr viele Poren, die auch Organcharakter und mit irdischen Tiernasen viel Ähnlichkeit hatten.

Die meisten Junonen kümmerten sich nicht viel um ihre Porennasen.

Nur die beiden größten Junonen, die in der Mitte des Sterns fast hundert kilometer hoch ihre Gliedmaßen aufrecken konnten, bildeten ihre Porennasen aus.

Und do sprach eines Tages der große Junone der Mitte zu dem, der sich unter ihm nach der anderen Seite des Sterns auch hundert Kilometer hock aufreckte:

„Lieber Antipode! Mir ist doch so, als wenn mein Erinnerungsvermögen ganz vermandelt wird, (69) wenn ich nur an meine Porennasen denke und die Tastorgane in meinem Astfingerspitzen momentan vergesse.“

Da sagte der Antipode, dass es ihm genau so ginge.

Und es knisterte unter ihren Baumrinden.

Und die anderen Junonen wunderten sich über die Lebhafte Unterhaltung in der Mitte des Sternes.

Un dann empfanden die beiden Antipoden in der Mitte der Juno plötzlich einen intensiven Geruch, der sie an etwas Altes – gans Uraltes erinnerte – sie wussten nicht gleich, was es war – aber sie sprachen immer heftiger zusammen, bis zuletzt der eine Antipode in seiner leisen Knistersprache sagte – in den Wurzelrinden knisterte es da – und es wurde fühlbar in der ganzen Juno für jeden Junonen:

„Antipode, ich bemerke Bratengeruch in meinen Porennasen.”

„Ich auch! Ich auch!” rief der Antipode.

Und alle Junonen näherten ihre Astschlangenglieder der Mitte des Sterns, so dass dieser plötzlich die Form zweier Blumenbuketts erhielt – ein Kegel nach oben und nach unten; der Junorand stand wie eine Manschette ganz leer da.

„Bratengeruch!” gings durch alle Baumrinden.

Und es Knisterte überall sehr laut. (70)

„Was mag das wohl heißen?” fragten die kleineren Junonen, die nicht weitab wom Rande lebten und gewohnt waren, sehr oft mit ihren Schlangengliedern über den Rand hinüberzufaffen – zur anderen Seite des Sterns hinüber.

„Bratengeruch!” sagten die beiden Antipoden der Mitte noch einmal ganz deutlich. Und die anderen Junonen öffneten alle ihre Porennasen und sagten dann nach einer Weile auch:

„Bratengeruch!”

Nun entwickelte sich ein derartig lebhaftes Gespräch, dass man viele Stunden hindurch kaum sein eigenes Wort verstehen konnte; natürlich: Worte im irdischen Sinne wurden dabei gar nicht „gesprochen”.

Die Erinnerungen der Junonen hatten plötzlich eine ganz neue Richtung bekommen. Und der ganze Stern wurde immer lebhafter – alle Luftballons glühten wie bunte Blumen, so dass jetzt tatzächlich die beiden Kegel des Sterns wie zwei riesige Blumenbufetts ausfahen.

Und da sagte dann schließlich der eine der mittleren Antipoden – zusammenfassend:

„In der Tat, liebe Freunde, wir habens endlich entdeckt; wir sind früher Wefen gewefen, die mit einem sogenannten Maule versehen waren. Und wir haben mit diesem Maule Dinde in (71) uns aufgenommen, die wir Braten nannten. Was diese Braten waren, wissen wir auch: es waren diese Braten andere im Feuer geröftete Lebewegen! Kurzum: wir haben uns früher gegenseitig aufgefressen!”

Ein allgemeines Oh- und Ah-Geknister folgte dieser Rede, und die Junonen bogen sich alle nach dem Rande zu, so dass der Stern nicht mehr wie zwei Blumensträuße wirkte.

***

Die Antipoden in der Mitte ragten hoch in die Lüfte – ganz allein; die anderen Junobewohner hatten sich von ihnen zurückgezogen.

Da vernahmen alle die Stimme des zweiten Antipoden – der sagte laut un deutlich:

„Liebe Freunde, so einfach ist die Geschichte doch nicht gewesen. Jeder Baumriese stellte früher ein ganzes Volk vor – mir bestanden asus unfäglish vielen kleinen – winzig kleinen Lebewefen gegenübertraten. Und so kam’s zuweilen zum Bratengeruch. Jetzt merken wir aber, dass diese kleinen Völker alle zusamenn in uns vereint leben – und dass es gar nichts mehr zu bedeuten hat für uns, dass sich unsere kleinen Lebewesen frühermal befehdeten und auch zuweilen einander auffraßen. Jetzt find ja all (72) die Kleinen in uns friedlich vereint, und wir fin durchaus berechtigt, unser früheres Leben für einen kleinen Scherz zu halten”

Danach hörte man auf der Juno ein ganz neus Geknister, das sich wie ein irdisches Lachen anhörte.

Und die Randjunonen fagten:

„Unser Leben war früher ein kleiner Scherz. Es ist durchaus bedauerlich, dass wir unser jetztiges Leben nicht zu einem großen Scherz gemach haben.”

„Oh,” tönte es da aus der Mitte heraus, „das können wir nachholen.”

Und sie holten es folgendermaßen nach: Sie erinnertensich an ihr früheres Leben, in dem sie ganze große Völkerscharen vorstellten, imeer deutlicher, und es kam allen immer wieder das damalige Leben mit all dem Hass – all der Wildheit und Gegensätzlichkeit – sehr spaßhaft vor. Und man konnte sich auf der Juno gar nicht darüber beruhigen, dass mann früher das ganze Leben mit all dem Zwift, Eifer und Bratengeruch so ernst genommen hatte.

„Nehmen wir auch nicht unser jetziges leben als Baumriesen, deren Wurzeln ganz harmonisch durcheinandergeschlungen sind, abermals zu ernst?” (73)

Also fragten sehr viele Junonen.

Und sie wiesen auf ein späteres Leben hin und ermahnten alle, doch ja das, as sie erlebten, recht fest in der Erinnerung zu behalten, damit nicht später abermals solche langen Zeiten des Suchens entstünden. Es könnten doch später auch wieder Zeiten der Uneinigkeit entstehen – und da wär’s doch so wichtig, wenn auch die Zeiten der Einigkeit fest in der Erinnerung haften blieben. Hauptfächlich dürfe man das Scherzhafte in allen Dingen ja nicht vergeffen.

„Es ist aber auch wirklich furchtbar drollig,” meinten da wieder die Randjunonen, „dass es früher so viele Gegenfätzte in uns freundlich wieder vereint haben, merken wir gar nicht mehr, dass sie ‘mal was Feindliches gegen einander hatten. Man kann so vollkommen auch im Andern leben, dass der Andere gar kein Anderer mehr für uns ist. Unsere Antipoden sind uns so vertraut. Wir glauben, dass wir bald alle zusammen nur ein eiziges großes Gesamtwesen sein werden”

„So schnell geht das nicht!” meinten danach die Antipoden der Mitte.

„Es wäre auch schade,” bemerkten dazu einige andere Junonen, „wenn wir unsern gegenwär(74)tigen harmonischen Zustand nicht genügend auskosten könnten.”

Und alle Junonen lebten ruhig weiter als erinnerungsvolle Baumriesen, und das

Knistern unter ihren RInden klang oft sehr hell und luftig. (75)

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