-- Do you imagine that this will continue for the long run, these cadavers
we're discovering at dawn...
-- ...or even in broad daylight...
-- ...in these abominable positions? One day or another something will
crack.
-- What are you hoping for? That I'll repent and convert to the love of
young women, to a mundane life, to the pronouncements of the canonists of
Western Literature?
Who'll stop me? You've read tons of detective novels. Oedipus of the
boulevard! Moses of the Grand-Guignol! Pitiful provincial! Poser! Ham! Crossword
puzzler of crime!
Who'll lock me up? The police? Justice? A ferocious, rough breed, a breed of
functionaries, crouching behind their radiators and typewriters, who piss
disclosure and shit their sentences on top of them...
Who'll kill me? What do I care of death, of a career cut short, if have
already left behind examples of inimitable crime. The worst that could happen
would be if a school were set up, or a gross imposter arose, a servile copyist
took inspiration from my crimes and copied them. Those epigones, those
plagiarists...
Who came to the aid of my eighth victim? Who will avenge her? Who will
demand for the widow Blatin, abandoned by Débats, residing at 826 Young Girls in
Flower Avenue, three sentences away from Madame Verdurin, the tenant of number
816? Three sentences, it's all that still make sense in this Proustian Capital
pâté; there are holes in the fabric of language where people, survivors, are
sheltering; it's London after the Blitz, Berlin before its capitulation. By
virtue of our killings the sheltering text does not cease sculpting itself,
notching itself, working itself into a ruin -- eternal, ever eternal: it is not
forgetting but corrosion, it is not the fatigue of readers or their laziness
which makes it grow hollow in abandonment, it is rather death, the invisible
hand of Time, which causes its decomposition.
Who will demand that we remember one poor woman, one stranger who'll have a
tumble in the dead centre of a roadway she tried to cross, on a crosswalk, even
at a stoplight?
You dear reader?
Must I spotlight the disastrous consequences that cruel acts engender
indefinitely for those who don't consider, who don't accept that contemplating a
curious and diverting spectacle, like you did that afternoon in Francoise's
kitchen, where (like that time you complacently listened to me narrate the
assassination of Swann) you had dangerously allowed the fatal growth of,
destining yourself to ever follow, the fatal path of complicity.
"Madame Blatin" wouldn't know, stretching her leg down into the gutter, that
she would be crossing a Rubicon and throwing herself to fate. The third, since
the light has turned red... I cross to meet her. Having passed three while
crossing, I put a slug in her stomach, once, then again, shooting through the
pocket of my overcoat, silencer affixed to the barrel of my trusty old P .38 (a
parting shot -- if you catch my drift -- from Mr. Cadillac). One more time, once
I've got that done, she'll probably drop to the ground. And the concert of
sirens behind me, the impatient roar of motorists while I leave my path, making
a hard right, without haste or turning back, for that would doubtlessly be my
Angelus, my death knell.
The Police regulate the circulation of bodies. As for those who fall, those
who have the indelicacy to suffer and die and blather to us about it cowardly,
not only the pain of acting against out proper pity, but that which stands in
our way, some deviation in our trajectory, we dump them by the roadside for sure
and fuck off past the pigs...
My work continues. I am my own rule, Benedictine, literaturian Anchorite.
Celebrate my baptisms, shape my profane and solitary prayers into a grammar
which generates, besides words, sentences which break the link with this place.
But the task is enormous, paying their perdition with so many people.
Supposing it would even be possible to exhaust all these branches, and do so
without even contemplating the ransom of other novels (they contain entire
bibliographies with themselves, infinite carriers of thanatography), I may
always turn my weapons upon my own story and decompose, as a last resort, The
Decomposition itself, settling on the sentences, generating from them according
to an identical grammar, a new series of murders, thus setting in motion the
sempiternal spiral of redemptive crime...
-- The cadaver isn't enough for you? You need the cadaver of the cadaver!
-- I have the cadaver of the ghost of your cadaver.
Whatever I've perpetrated, what is so abominable, though it may be the most
anonymous annihilation ever, about the continual slaughterhouse of time's
passage? Compared to summary executions and massive massacres and total wars and
artillery barrages and manufactured famines and industrial extermination...
The illimited series of singular murders which parade before us, what about
them in comparison? A scrupulous sacrifice, an art of memory and melancholy...
Proust himself absolves me: We pardon individual crimes but not participation in
collective crimes. At this stage in History, the only Good Death to which we can
aspire anymore is in service of authenticating fiction. As for the rest, these
are just rational and fantastical falsifications of reality: you perish like
rats...
You have the following choice, however.
Street rat, in the stench of epidemics, in panicked suffocation of the
relentless crowds, transported, starving, on the roadside, at the street corner;
your body, carrion abandoned to be devoured by the dogs, in the jaws of
bulldozers, in the quicklime morgue. Or laboratory rat, in your stainless-steel
cage, glass neon tube box, plugged into oscilloscopes, to the fine plumbing of
IV drips; to the iron lung's artificial breath; your body, just a little bag of
cells, is promised to the dissection table, the microscope, the eager sequencers
of your secrets.
What do you think you are? An immortal being, made of principal and eternal
Substance, thrown here and there by its malice or repentance? A ghost of
consciousness, internal statue perched, as though upon stilts, high upon the
haughty column of memory, a core sample from the rich stratigraphy of past time
lost? A unique and original entanglement of subtle threads, whose signature and
code are your individual identity? And hidden at the center, deep down in the
black box behind your eyes, is there the Majesty of an eternal I?
And if you push past the reason and faith on which you have based your
belief, toward the making and last word of existence, what about your body?
Trash, corruptible matter, physical support of a most glorious, abstract
sensorium or infinite code... an atrocious, grievous thing, whatever it may be,
whose brevity scandalizes and insults your intelligence. This obtuse thing after
which all creations of logical intelligence expire, with which they expire: a
singular body. In the terror of its emaciation, you goad it into disembodiment:
this body, this world, you never cease unmaking, exchanging it for the ghostly
doubles of the world, doubles of your body. For this world is indefensible,
bodies swarming there eluding our possession. Our poverty amidst this abundance
is the point. Arraigning that which eludes: a good program. Language, narration,
simulacra: give us each day more powerful, more hallucinatory fictions, with
which we can abandon our bodies. From the borborygmus to hieroglyphs, from
alphabets to bytes, to codons, the successive translations of Words Words Words
Inc. never stop promising us a final symbolic de-corporation.
This replication of the world, this ethereal doubling whose great cost we
have come to terms with, we want to be more indiscernible, more perfect; we
repute them to supply the necessary illusion for every situation, for all our
desires. You grapple with Zeuxis' grapes, you take part in a tournament against
windmills armored only with a shaving bowl, you cast yourselves in unrequited
love at a frigid Lotte, you disperse yourselves in terror when entering La
Ciotat as the racing train comes right at you... At present, you stroll through
the maze of streets in a virtual city where you believe yourself to live. And to
represent yourself in this other world where you're not comfortable in knowing
that you are pure gaze, you evoke a double, an avatar, a virtual vicar chosen
from a catalogue, a borrowed body, a ready-to-go, ready-to-surf mannequin. Your
exchange body, your body floating in virtual cyberspace: bytewise skeleton with
binary ligaments of zeros and ones, a relic in the silicon chasm of artificial
memory. To start, you offer to input some properties in remote servers -- name,
sex, sexuality, colour, morphology... these poor properties dug up from the
wrecking yard of categories -- which you have selected for your double, and
which delivers in return a monstrous virtual "body" which provides transport for
your starving mind and sensorium.
Throw it out there, this avatar, among all the other avatars, multiply
yourself, live twenty other virtual lives at various points in the lattice.
First name ubiquity, last name legion. Follow your creatures' progress, make
anterooms, make salons, do nothing, at a party, in a museum, at a brothel...
All in real-time 3D...
But we have not stopped making these chimeras escape the surface of the
screen, extruding them and bringing them into our milieu. The
computer-controlled hologram will not wait. So, installed in some specially
designed dark room, convoked in the space before you is your ghost, you order
your personal Turing Machine to bestow form and figure -- for want of having the
power to bestow bodies, such inscrutable bodies -- to your extravagance in the
netherworld. You watch yourself walk through the desert, iridescent fata
morgana, born of photons woven by lasers. The galvanic implosion of your brain,
sampled, decoded, and interpreted as so many instructions to the diligent
electronic servants populating the dark room with all the furniture necessary
for sensible, intelligent simulations. You contemplate yourself in the moonlit
night making love with some other avatar, residing on a hard drive in Australia.
In a matching dark room on the other side of the world, in another universe in
the making, the exact replica of your virtual body of gold and purple iridescent
glass, ejaculates immaterially out of your presence.
Our lives will finally be the joined solipsism dreamed up by our old friend
Bishop Berkeley, but in which there is no longer either God nor anyone else,
even discourse, which can assemble the world.
You'll be crazy. But crazy you've always been, and to associate, in this
paradoxical state where you currently are, whilst you are seated, immobile,
reading these lines, leaving the words on the page to foment these ghosts in the
black box of your cranium. The systematically regulated hallucination of your
choice and passion alone.
In attending to the holographic accession, we content ourselves with an
ersatz world under glass in which our eyes and brain are ready to indulge in the
minimal suspension of disbelief. Don't trust that I come around here for the
pleasure of reading conversations, nurturing the avatar-avatar relations, and
weaving social and copulatory atavism. No, this other world is not a replica for
all that, a blueprint where nothing unforeseen is able to emerge if it has not
been programmed to, coded to in advance. Imagination is not so grand that it can
take charge in drawing a completely new life here. It leaves all of its
inclination, with all ease, at the door.
I relax here from my usual informatic labours which consist of wardriving
into electronic libraries, into online databases, to expunge discretely all the
proper names from every single copy of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu I can
find. Solemn archives, austere banks of which it is necessary to bypass locks,
pierce their armor, get over their firewalls, disarm their surveillance systems.
But words are less well guarded than money or secrets and it is less dangerous
and much less tiring to inject into the chambers of their huge virtual memory
the little program for killing the names which will go about mindlessly
perforating the works, that from the beginning I, in pilgrimage, razer in hand,
dispersed from the physical world by cutting them out of innumerable paper
copies of the Proustian oeuvre, throughout the halls of various libraries,
leaving innumerable windows in their places. So many holes, so many traces...
No, even that is useless. Soon the libraries will be deserted, abandoned to
their proper incommensurability, having become massive and vast: fossilized
dinosaurs no longer attainable by paleontological excavation. Meanwhile in the
cybernetic ether, immaterial copies of the ancient works, instantaneously
corruptible, circulate and their proliferating duplicates also imperceptibly
become corrupted.
Imperceptibly? Certainly. Since how can they be read again after our
electronic servants are done sampling them?
But today, dear reader, is the day of the party and my vicar, pseudonymous
and pseudo-corpus puppet, is going to stop by the virtual rave which all
techno-head avatars go to every weekend at zero-three-hundred hours G.M.T. Its
address? Something like www.theatrum-mundi.alt or maybe www.bodydouble.inc/.
We disembark (or hack in to be more precise) in a 3D architectural plan of
exposed concrete. The rendering is kind of crap; they've forgotten the curve
smoothing routines. It's not important though. There are porcelain vases, divans
in all styles, copied from the storefronts of online boutiques, imported into
context, resized and synchronized with the perspective grid... And everywhere,
avatars jiggle, though in a bizzare way, as though gravity in this virtual world
was weaker than on Earth, and pull behind themselves, under the influence of
chopped up beats, their ill-fitted shadows (saturating the network and bringing
to a standstill all movements made and whatever augmented bandwidth capacity had
been apportioned; the ultimate irony being that the incorporeal information
transmission is exceeding the limits of its physical support, the channels of
fibers, wires, cables of all types where the flux of bits throws itself
painfully headlong to assuage our hungry simulacra; the physical support, always
the physical support... Who will deliver us from it?).
I navigate with a joystick, I chat with the keyboard. Nothing but the usual.
I'm just stopping by. Thirty minutes, no more: after that, goodbye to my
incognito. Counting down to blast-off, I drop in the pirate program "A Ball in
the Head" which constitutes: a repertoire of people who appear in the final
scene of Time Regained, an Emcee logically charged with announcing them, a sort
of virtual Angel of Death named B.B. (ah! the incredible habit of taking on
little names of all kinds, in which we invest not knowing the suspicions of our
original intentions), and a monocle, a kind of magnifying glass destined to be
pointed at any avatar in the virtual rave.
I point it so, then click, locking onto the centre of an avatar's head with
a circle inscribed in another circle. At that signal, B.B. trumpets through the
computer speakers like the Last Judgement, the name of the first person on the
list, the sacramental moment: "Little Fezensac!" There, one press of the index
finger against the joystick trigger commands my PC to deliver from within its
circuits, in short bursts of bytes tearing through the modem, phone line, access
server, network until the site on which reside the parameters which amount to
this part of the other world, a little killer program, a sort of Kamikaze virus
I authored, which will go straight for the file containing descriptions of the
inhabitants of the netherworld, make its passage through memory to the
coordinates of my avatar victim, and then blending into the little packet of
information of which can be found there, erases it, pffuitt! and then vaporizes
itself in a puff of electrons.
In the monocle's gunsight, the avatar goes soft, vanishes without a trace,
pffuitt! a puff of photons in the grand ball this evening... Next in the litany
of names intoned by the delicious B.B., my trusty logical Emcee... The Duke de
Chatellerault! Pfuit... Madame de Villeparisis! Pfuitt... Monsieur d'Argencourt!
Pfuitt...
In twenty six minutes of intense concentration I ravaged the nether-worldly
rave. With a little game of Time Lost and Regained, I was time, the great Time
which without a sound, without fracas in a simple effusion of electrons,
depopulates the netherworld, cleansing the ballroom of all its heads.
And since I left myself four minutes before I had to make my escape, and
since nothing remains of my commando operation but virtual walls, hideous
furniture, pictures, and flowerpots, I occupied myself with dislocating Aunt
Leonie's divans, vaporizing the numerically based definitions of masterworks
and, in the final seconds, just before disconnecting, supplying myself with one
make one last stroke and bingo! smash the jar.
