Miroslav Holub

We have a microsopic anatomy of the whale this gives Man assurance William Carlos Williams We have a map of the universe for microbes, we have a map of a microbe for the universe. we have a Grand Master of chess made of electronic circuits. But above all we have the ability to sort peas, to cup water in our hands, to seek the right screw under the sofa for hours This gives us wings.

Children, when was Napoleon Bonaparte born, asks teacher. A thousand years ago, the children say. A hundred years ago, the children say. Last year, the children say. No one knows. Children, what did Napoleon Bonaparte do, asks teacher. Won a war, the children say. Lost a war, the children say. No one knows. Our butcher had a dog called Napoleon, says Frantisek. The butcher used to beat him and the dog died of hunger a year ago. And all the children are now sorry for Napoleon.

Always just one demon in the attic. Always just one death in the village. And the dogs howling in that direction. And from the other end the new-born child arrives, the only one to fill the empty space in that wide air. Likewise also cells infected by a virus send out a signal all around them and defences are mobilised so that no other virus has any hope just then of taking root or changing fate. This phenomenon is known as interference. And when a poet dies in the depth of night a single black bird wakens in the thicket and sings for all it is worth while from the sky a black rain trickles down like sperm or something, the song is spattered and the choking bird sings sitting on an empty rib-cage in which an imaginary heart awakes to its forever interfering futility. And in the morning the sky is clear, the bird is weary and the soil is fertilised. The poet is no more. In Klatovy Street, in Pilsen, by the railway bridge, there was a shop with quilted bedcovers. In times when there’s a greater need for a steel cover over our continent business in quilted bedcovers is slack. The shopkeeper was hard up. Practical men when hard up usually turn to art. In his shopwindow, open to the interior of his shop, its owner built a gingerbread house of quilts and every evening staged a performance about a quilted gingerbread house and a red-quilted Little Red Riding Hood, while his wife in this quilted masquerade was alternately the wolf or the witch, and he himself a padded-out Hansel, or Gretel, Red Riding Hood or grandmother. The sight of the two old people crawling about in swollen billows of textiles round the chubby cottage was not unambiguous. It was a little like the life of sea cucumbers in the mud under a reef. Outside thundered the approaching surf of war and they conducted their quilted pantomime outside time and action. For a while children would stand outside but soon they would go home. Nothing was sold. But it was the only pantomime at that time. The black bird sang and rain poured into a rib-cage wearing the Star of David. But in the actors under those quilted covers l'anima allegra must have just then awoken and so, sweating and rapt, they acted their undersea commedia dell’arte, thinking there was a backstage until a scene was finished, jerkily they moved from shopwindow to gingerbread house and back, with the exuberance of Columbines stricken by polio, while the music of fifes and drums did not reach them. Or else they thought that such a deep humiliation of the customary dignity of age interfered with the steps of gentlemen in leather coats and with the departure of trains to human slaughterhouses. It did. The black bird sang and the ruined sclerotic hearts leapt in their breasts, and then one morning when they didn’t play and had not even raised the blind - the sky was clear, the soil was fertilised - the quilted bedcovers were confiscated for the eastern front and the actors transferred to the backstage of the world, called Bergen-Belsen. No trace is left of the shop today: it’s now a greengrocer’s with woody parsnips. Always just one death in the village. Always just one demon. Great is the power of the theatre, even if it always does get knocked down in the end and flung backstage. The dogs howl in that direction. And the butterfly pursues the man who stole the flowers. When we did autopsies at the psychiatric hospital in Bohnice, filled with the urban exudations of relative futility, the car would tip us out amidst the ward blocks whose inmates waved from windows with some kind of May Day pennants, and then one went, hugely alone, beyond a spinney to the solitary morgue, where the naked bodies of ancient schizophrenics awaited us, along with two live inmates; one of them would pull the corpses up from underground with a rope hoist and place them upon the tables as a mother might an infant for baptism, while the other was lurking, pen ready poised, in a dark corner to write up the Latin protocol, and he wrote faultlessly. Neither of them uttered the slightest sound, only the hoist shaft moaned...and the knife drawn over skin and dermis made a sound of satin tearing...and they were always enormous and unprecedented pneumonias and tumours big as dragons’ eggs, it rained into the open thorax - and in that roaring silence one had to break the line of an angel’s fall and dictate the logical verdict on a long-sentenced demon... and the schizophrenic’s pen in the corner busily scraped across the paper like an eager mouse. We need no prompters said the puppets haughtily. The air of that anatomical theatre was filled with interferon, it was a great personal demonstration against malignant growth, it was a general amnesty for the walls, entropy was abjured for the moment because there are no bubbles at the bottom to burst under the breeze. The red balloon outside rose up to an unsuspected sky, its chains strained by the certainty that the nearer the inferno the greater the paradise, the nearer the prison cell the greater the freedom. Cantabit vacuus coran latrone viator. And that is the weird essence of the theatre that an actor stripped of everything mounts to the very top of the conflagration and everything else dies down, falls silent like a long-hunted animal, its muscles still twitching but with endorphines and an infinite peace in the brain. Yes, even a whale will sometimes leave the school, hurl itself into shallow water and perish in the sun like a levelled cathedral, with pushed-out penis, and death is instantly buried in a grain of sand and the sea laughs. Go ask the tree-stumps; in broken language they preach about saplings. And in the jargon of galactic white dwarfs the stars of the main sequence shine forever. In the non-Euclidean curved space, which eludes understanding as much as the interference of the theatre, you ceaselessly hear the voices of children from the primary school of death, children from the puppet tragedies of the kitchen and children from the junketings of war, when skewering them on lances with their wriggling little legs provided spice like curry for the mercenaries, voices of children eluding understanding - But we’ve washed behind our ears, we’ve stopped pulling the cat’s tail, we’ve stopped shoving our fingers into electric sockets - What else is there left in the universe of hominisation, slow as the decay of tritium, than the doctrine of the growing sense of shame of demons: since Aztec times high priests no longer offer up sacrifice while dressed in the skin of a freshly flayed prisoner. We need no prompters, they said - Once on St Nicholas’ Day, the man acting the Devil, dead drunk, fell down some stairs and lay there, and a child, experiencing that embarrassing joy mere inches from terror, ran out after the thump and called: Mummy, come here, there’s a dead devil - And so he was, even though the actor picked himself up after another tot. Maybe the dogs howled, but only by a black mistake. In the sky shone the stars of the main sequence, the bird was getting ready in the thicket, the child shivered a little from the chill of three million years, in that wide air, but they prompted him, poetically, you’re only imagining all this, look, the butterfly’s already bringing the flowers back...and there’s no other devil left...and the nearer paradise... He believed, and yet he didn’t.

The bird had come to the very end of its song and the tree was dissolving under its claws. And in the sky the clouds were twisting and darkness flowed through all the cracks into the sinking vessel of the landscape. Only in the telegraph wires a message still crackled: C-.-o---m--e. h...o---m--e. y-.--o---u..- h...a.-v...-e. a.-s...o---n-.

They sap man’s substance as moon the dew. A rope grows erect from the crown of the head. A black swan hatches from a pebble. And a flock of angels in the sky is taking an evening class on the skid pan. I dream, so I dream. I dream that three times three is nine, that the right-hand rule applies; and when the circus leaves the trampled ground will once more overgrow with grass. Yes, grass. Unequivocal grass. Just grass.

On the express train to Vienna she writes in her diary notes about Rome and Naples. Ink marks like parthenogenetic aphids, pages like blood smears of homing pigeons. She is alone, gray, reconciled, a Leda long after the swan's departure, Odysseus retired at Lotophagitis. Back home, in Maryland, the notebook will be interred in the archetypal drawer, among the yellowed love letters, among the infant hair curls, among the dried adult flowers, near the cushion where the castrated cat dreams while Mahler's forever forever forever chokes in the green wallpaper. It is her message to imagined little sons; it is her membership in the club of Swifts, Goethes, Rimbauds, Horatiuses and deathwatch beetles. It is her monument outlasting bronze, five-dimensional reality, the last engraving of primeval man on reindeer bone, the last drop of the fluid soul before evaporation.

To think I might have been dead, he said to himself, ashamed, as if this were a curse of the heart, raising a bundle of bones to a man’s height. As if it were suddenly forbidden to touch even words that had dropped to the ground. Besides, he was afraid of finding his body in a metal press. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. the tram stood jammed above him like an icebreaker’s prow and all that was left of the car was a grotesque pretzel with a chunk bitten off by the dentures of a demented angel. Something dark was dripping on the rails, and a strikingly pale wind was leafing through a book still warm. People were forming a circle and with deaf-mute sympathy awaited the play’s catharsis, like maggots emerging from under the wings of a beheaded chicken. From afar came the approaching wail of sirens, congealing in the jinxed air-conditioning of that day and that minute. Dewdrops were falling on the back of the neck like remnants of atmospheric dignity. Embarrassing down to the capillaries. No, thank you, he said, I’ll wait; for a silent film had started to run without subtitles, without colour and without answers. And what about the magnetic monopoles escaping seconds after the Big Bang, protons violating the irreversibility of the flow of time? What about the giant molecular clouds under the galaxy’s shoulders, conceiving the embryos of stars? What about the loneliness of the first genes accumulating amino acids in shallow primeval pools at the expense of entropic usurers? What about the desiccated starfish like proto-eagles’ talons dug into the bed of a vanishing sea? What about the mortal migrations of birds observing the sun’s inclination and the roar of sex hormones? What about the caged half-crazed orang-utan who vomits because he has nothing else to do? What about the mice which for a thousand years have learned to sing and the frogs balancing on one leg like the thigh of a beauty queen from Mesopotamia? What about poetry, an enterprise so disorderly it twists the rulers and increases the squint of school inspectors? And what about the little girl in the leukemia ward who, on the toilet, tried to show what kind of moustache the kind doctor has, but as her skinny sticks of hands let go of the edge of the bowl, she falls in and so tried again and again? And what about the weak-kneed intellectual, the professor who understood the approximate universe but forgot the traffic rules? No, thank you, he said to some uniform, I don’t need anything. My papers are in my pocket but I can’t reach there. And he tried to smile a little at this embarrassment of complicated creation. It’s all my fault, he said, thank you. And then he died.

You take a kitchen-mallet and a knife and hit the right spot, so it doesn’t jerk, for jerking means only complications and reduces profit. And the watchers already narrow their eyes, already admire the dexterity, already reach for their purses. And paper is ready for wrapping it up. And smoke rises from chimneys. And Christmas peers from windows, creeps along the ground and splashes in barrels. Such is the law of happiness. I am just wondering if the carp is the right creature. A far better creature surely would be one which—stretched out—held flat—pinned down— would turn its blue eye on the mallet, the knife, the purse, the paper, the watchers and the chimneys and Christmas, And quickly say something. For instance These are my happiest days; these are my golden days. Or The starry sky above me and the moral law within me, Or And yet it moves. Or at least Hallelujah!

Given an old woman and given a barrow. I.e. the system old woman O and barrow B. The system is moving from the paved yard Y to the corner C, from the corner C to the Stone S, from the stone S to the forest F, from the forest F to the horizon H. The horizon H is the point where vision ends and memory begins. Nevertheless the system is moving at a constant velocity v, along a constant path, through a constant destiny, renewing its impulse and its meaning from within itself. A relatively independent system: in landscapes from horizon to horizon always just one old woman with a barrow. And thus we have, once and for all, that geodetic unit, the unit of travel there and back, the unit of autumn, the unit Our daily bread, the unit of wind and lowering sky, the unit of the distance home, the unit As we forgive them, the unit of nightfall, the unit of footsteps and dust, the unit of life-fulfillment Amen.

Fish always accurately know where to move and when, and likewise birds have an accurate built-in time sense and orientation. Humanity, however, lacking such instincts resorts to scientific research. Its nature is illustrated by the following occurrence. A certain soldier had to fire a cannon at six o’clock sharp every evening. Being a soldier he did so. When his accuracy was investigated he explained: I go by the absolutely accurate chronometer in the window of the clockmaker down in the city. Every day at seventeen forty-five I set my watch by it and climb the hill where my cannon stands ready. At seventeen fifty-nine precisely I step up to the cannon and at eighteen hours sharp I fire. And it was clear that this method of firing was absolutely accurate. All that was left was to check that chronometer. So the clockmaker down in the city was questioned about his instrument’s accuracy. Oh, said the clockmaker, this is one of the most accurate instruments ever. Just imagine, for many years now a cannon has been fired at six o’clock sharp. And every day I look at this chronometer and always it shows exactly six. Chronometers tick and cannon boom.