Status Updates From The Other City (Czech Liter...

...All conversations are fed from the great conversation between those who live within the homeland and what wafts over the border: a murmur, in which the rustle of fabric mingles with the howling and whining of monsters and musical compositions played by an orchestra of exiles for the space of several days.

Departure does not mean breaking off the discourse. In fact true discourse is only possible between those who have left and those who remain. Conversations with members of one’s tribe are always only a tedious echo of one’s own words...

Some stay, some leave. Some spend their whole lives unaware of the music of rustles and whispers that accompany our words, while others are absorbed by the patterns on a carpet or the intoxicating interiors of closets—their families sit for several weeks by the open closet door awaiting their return but then they all forget about them.

Now I knew that the other city can only be entered by someone who leaves in the awareness that the journey he is undertaking has no purpose, because purpose means a place in the fabric of relations that create the home, and that it is not even purposeless, because purposelessness simply complements purpose and belongs to his world.

...Eventually it totally undermined my feeble performance, so that I preferred to fall silent and retreat to a corner of the stage—and yet up to that moment I had been in constant fear of throwing away the script and exiting to the darkness of the wings. I used to exit but would still regard my exit as my last role, the role that would eventually, in some strange way, involve me in the play after all.

I never understood the purpose of the play being performed and the roles of which I was supposed to choose one; sometimes I tried to assume one of them and play it, but I would always rattle off the prescribed part parrot fashion, with distaste and a sense of awkwardness and embarrassment...

I have lived my whole life on the periphery and have been more at home in the world of stains and cracks on old walls than in the world of shapes acknowledged as meaningful and alone important.

To really leave one must leave everything behind and go smiling and empty-handed with no thought of return. Those who depart while counting on returning do not leave home, even if they reach the white cities in the depths of the jungle and repose on the marble of its squares: their journeys remain woven into the tissue of the objectives that create the space of home..

...I had encountered the words and gestures of the inhabitants of the other city, the screeches of its creatures, and the stiff poses of its statues like a hieroglyphic text, whose shapes from time to time have been penetratingly and almost painfully cut through by the incandescent discharge of unifying meaning, but every time it had been extinguished before I managed to grasp it.

I was weary from living on the border: on the border of a homeland, whose events, in which the sap of meaning has dried up, have gradually been changing into a meaningless ritual, and foreign parts whose order constantly eluded me. ..

There is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end over which there breaks unrelentingly a shifting wave of laws.

The curious secret is that there exists no final center, that no face is hidden behind the masks, there is no original word in the game of whispers, no original of the translations. All there is is a constantly turning string of transformations, giving rise to further transformations. There is no city of autochthons.

In the library turned jungle I came to the realization that the letters in those broken books and in a new book on a bookshop counter are simply specks like others with which burgeoning life adorns the surface of existence and with which it merely expresses its monotonous and unintelligible whisper.

...what I could see here was that books and signs remain rooted in reality and governed by its unknown currents, that our signifying and communicating is embedded in being, which signifies itself, its secret rhythms, and that original signification, that original dull glow of being keeps alive our meanings while at the same time threatening to swallow them again and dissolve them in itself.

I read somewhere that books treat solely of other books and that signs likewise refer to other signs; that a book has nothing to do with reality, but instead reality itself is a book since it is created by language. What was depressing about that doctrine was that it allowed reality to be hidden by our signs. The realization that wafted from the decaying library was far more somber, however:...

what gave rise to increasing anxiety was rather the fact that the dreamlike transformation of books into dangerous and unemotional vegetation laid bare the malignant disease secretly festering in every book and in every sign created by humans.

I must go on towards the other city; the old order will not bear any more patching; it was always full of holes through which shone the pulsations of primordial currents of some kind. And everything indicates that those currents flow from the other city and my hope is that in its center I will discover the spring that is the source of our order and which alone can renew it.

The yearning for the beginning and the home is a monster’s trap: once we turn back again it is impossible to halt in time. We realize too late that the home we are returning to is not the familiar home but the primeval forest and swamp that were here before the home, and whose breath permeated the house’s foundations, took possession of its atmosphere and cunningly penetrated the order of the home.

It is the importunate proximity that dominates our daily lives, which prevents encounters and conceals the monstrous that disrupts our world and brings a strange salvation. Proximity space is a stage on which we see only the roles and masks that are part of the play in which we are performing.

Can there really exist a world in such close proximity to our own, one that seethes with such strange life, one that was possibly here before our own city and yet we know absolutely nothing about it? The more I pondered on it, the more I was inclined to think that it was indeed quite possible, that it corresponded to our lifestyle, to the way we lived in circumscribed spaces that we are afraid to leave.

Out of the tangle of anxieties that were aroused when I looked at the pages of the book covered in the alien letters, the strongest and strangest anxiety of all stemmed from the suspicion that there was nothing to understand or seek answers to, anxiety from the feeling that some dreadful victory constantly lurks in wait for us, and we dread it more than the greatest defeat.