The Melancholy of Resistance (16 page)

push aside a grinning figure who tried to insinuate himself next to Valuska in the dark. He heard hundreds of exhausted feet scraping the ground behind him, he saw the stray cats at his own feet as they scattered in fear before the silently advancing mass of raised iron stakes, but he felt nothing except the weight of the hand on his shoulder steering him through the army of fur caps and heavy boots. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ the other man repeated. Valuska gave a quick nod and glanced up at the sky. He glanced up and suddenly had the sensation that the sky wasn’t where it was supposed to be; terrified, he looked up again and confirmed the fact that there was indeed nothing there, so he bowed his head and surrendered to the fur caps and boots, realizing that it was no use to search because what he sought was lost, swallowed up by this coming together of forces, of details, of this earth, this marching.

‘It all adds up. You have to get the details right. Focus on the details,’ Eszter determined without any particular feeling of anger, as if distancing himself from his own clumsiness when the hammer hit his hand for the twentieth time while he was putting the final touches to the complex barricade he was erecting at this decisive juncture of his life. Gripping his painfully throbbing finger, he surveyed the chaos of boards and planks that covered the windows and, since there was nothing he could do about his shortcomings regarding this sorry sight, resolved that even if he, through countless decades, had shamefully neglected the art of putting hammer to nail, now that he had practically reached the end of the task he would avoid all such painful experiences henceforth. Having personally collected firewood from the yard on his return home—after a few minutes breather, that is—and piled it up between the bookshelves, he now selected one that would more or less do and, carefully considering the possibility of minor adjustments—a consideration that sprang from the apparent senselessness of being here at all, which in turn was a natural concomitant of the line of thought he had pursued in the gateway some three hours ago, a line that caused him to revise and re-evaluate all his previous opinions on the subject and which he therefore considered to be of almost a ‘revolutionary’ nature—he fitted the plank to the space left at the bottom of the jumble of boards covering the last window, but having raised his hammer and bit his lip, determined to carry the matter through in the distant hope of striking the nail-head perfectly the first time round, he immediately lowered it, perceiving that sheer ferocity of will would not ensure both the proper direction and the power of the blow. ‘The arc to be controlled is the one that determines the relationship between the head of the instrument and the head of the nail …’ he decided, contemplating the problem for a few moments, and while his thoughts slowly returned to the matter of ‘minor adjustments’, using all the power of his injured left hand to thrust the plank up against the window-frame, he blindly swung the hammer with his right. This did not result in any greater damage than had already been inflicted and, what was more, the nail-head sank a little further into the wood, but as to the previously rational-sounding idea of channelling the remnants of his already wandering attention into the genuinely valuable effort of observing the so-called arc, he thought better of it. After all, the hammer in his hand felt increasingly unsteady and the results of such experimentation would become ever more unpredictable, so, after the third effort, he had to admit that the fact that he hadn’t missed the nail in three successive goes, far from being due to his level of concentration, was probably down to sheer luck, or, to employ his own formulation, to a certain ‘benevolent grace’ that offered him ‘a moment of respite’ before he ‘systematically beat his fingers to a pulp’; indeed, it was obvious from his failure so far that concentrating on nothing but the desired path of the instrument was precisely the best way of ensuring that he would get it wrong, since, he added, to control the trajectory of the hammer meant that to embark upon the hitherto undervalued operation so drastically reassessed at that fateful turn in his thinking was, according to his own gift for the mot juste, ‘like daydreaming oneself into a situation that does not yet exist or determining the course of something which has yet to come into being’, thereby repeating the exemplary and patent error that sixty years of idiotic blundering had not prepared him for on the last few yards of his way home … And this was the moment when something whispered to him that he would certainly be doing better to bring greater powers to bear on this issue, greater powers (he said to himself) and never guessing that this distancing of himself from the minor dilemma that had absorbed his entire being was actually bringing him closer to it, the utter senselessness of his presence in this place at this time not having excluded the exercise of practical thought, his mind began to focus once more on what lay nearer to hand. It was now his view that even if he felt weak at the knees, he need not wholly abandon the notion of concentrating on the arc, since the reasons for his failure up till now were ‘no doubt errors due to lack of method rather than of substance’, and so his gaze passed from hammer to nail and back again as he examined first the one then the other, searching for some point on the notional arc on which he might focus all his attention and thereby direct the course that would result in the two points meeting; then, having quickly located two such possible points, nothing remained but to decide which of the two he should focus on. ‘The nail in the plank is stationary while the position of the hammer is variable …’ he meditated, looking up to heaven, and this meditation appeared to suggest that he should concentrate upon the latter, but on considering the question further with a clearer head, having observed the angle of the hammer as he tried to bring it down again, he was forced sourly to acknowledge that even should the hammer feel more secure in his grip his chances of hitting the nail on the head were no better than one in ten at best. ‘What matters,’ he corrected himself, ‘is where I want the contact to take place … Is … what it is I want to hammer in.’ The idea was appealing. ‘It is in fact the only thing that matters.’ And like someone who instinctively knows that he has finally discovered the right answer he stared at the target, the intensity of his gaze almost boring a hole in it, and, full of confidence, raised his hand. The aim was perfect and what was more, he noted with satisfaction, it could not possibly be more perfect; and as if to confirm the certainty of his control over the direction of the blow, all the other related manoeuvres suddenly appeared clear to him: he realized that his grip on the instrument had been quite wrong, that holding the handle at the end was much more comfortable; he now knew how much effort was required in a single stroke and from what distance the stroke should be applied for the full effect; and this moment of clarity also revealed to him that if he supported the nail with his thumb from below he really need not throw his whole body weight behind the hammer … Controlling his grip and movement in this way it was no wonder that the last two planks were affixed at lightning speed, and when he made a tour of the house to survey his handiwork (a considerable achievement, he thought) he corrected a few far from minor errors and returned to the hall, which swam in the low lamplight, regretting the sad fact that having finished the job he was in no position really to savour the smell of success. He would have liked to carry on hammering; he was intoxicated with ‘the smell of success’, with the discovery that after hours of clumsy failure in the realm of hammer, nail and arc, he had, albeit at the last moment, resolved his difficulties; furthermore, somewhere near the end of his tour of inspection, he was given a sudden unexpected insight into how the technique, because and indeed despite of which he had entered the modest outer chambers of the mystery, had so uniquely and confusingly directed his progress and resolved the ‘revolutionary thought’ that had seized him on his return from that shocking excursion and turned him into ‘an Eszter new-born, an utterly simplified Eszter’. It was indeed a sudden awakening, but, like all such awakenings, not wholly unheralded, for before he set out on his tour he had been aware only of the plainly laughable nature of his efforts, the chief of which was to prevent his left hand being battered to pieces, a piffling task to which he applied the whole might of his considerable intellect and only immediately after that realized that even if he employed his full visual powers it would still prove a vain enterprise, or at least, laughable as it was, indeed taking that laughability into account along with his earlier ignorance of tools and their application, that there was a deeper, more complex issue at stake, the nature of which was to allow him to master the art of banging in nails. He recalled various stages in his frantic efforts and the fact that even then, in what was imposing itself as a general frame of mind, he had suspected that any eventual resolution would not be due entirely to taking rational thought in the matter, a suspicion that had in the meantime become a certainty, for in divorcing the heavy artillery of his intellect (so typical of him) as he was, metaphorically, edging forward, or, in his own words, divorcing ‘the ostensible fire-power of a determined general’ from ‘the chain of practical action and reaction’, he had achieved mastery not through the application of a logical experimental process but through constant, wholly involuntary adaptations to the moment-by-moment nature of necessity; a process that no doubt reflected his intellectual bent but took no cognition of it. To judge by appearances, he summarized, the clear lesson was that the serious issue underlying this apparently insignificant task had been resolved by a persistent assault embodying a flexible attitude to permutations, the passage from ‘missing the point’ to ‘hitting the nail on the head’ so to speak, owing nothing, absolutely nothing, to concentrated logic and everything to improvisation, to an ever new set of exploratory motions, or so he had thought as he set out on his tour of inspection of the house to check whether any loose boards needed more secure fixing; there was nothing to indicate that the body’s command mechanism, that well-oiled part of the human organism focused on the reality principle (he entered the kitchen) had imposed itself between the legislating mind and the executive hand and remained so well hidden that it could only be discovered, as he put it, ‘between, if such a thing were possible, the dazzling object of illusion and the eye that perceives that object, a position that entailed conscious recognition of the illusory nature of the object’. It seemed it was the very freedom of choice between the range of competing ideas that actually decided the angle, the height, and experimental path between the top of the arc and the point of the nail; on the other hand (he examined the two small windows of the servants’ room next to the kitchen), it was the conduct of the experiment employing the range of options open to him, his mechanical ability to orientate himself among an infinitely precise set of possibilities, or, to put it crudely and simply, the process of experimentation itself, which resolved itself and decided on the correct course among ‘the free choice of options’, a choice that was neither free nor allowed for the act of choosing, since apart from intervening in the order of events the only active option was the perceiving and evaluating of the upshot of the various experiments, the only conclusion to be drawn from which (‘To make a fine distinction… . ’Eszter considered, making a fine distinction in the process) is that the process had been instantaneously anthropomorphized, so that, as so often in the humblest of instances, as for example in the hammering in of a nail, one immediately put down one’s success in the search for a solution to some ‘wonderful’ idea or particulary ‘brilliant’ insight. But no (he continued his tour through Valuska’s room on the way to the drawing room) it was not we who controlled the process, it controlled us, this process that did nothing to disturb the appearance of our controlling it, not at least while our heads, our heads so full of ambitious ideas, fulfilled their modest obligations of perception and evaluation; as for the rest (he turned the handle of his door and smiled), the rest did not lie within the head’s scope (and thinking this he felt like a blind man suddenly able to see and therefore descry the true relationship between things, and remained rooted to the spot in the open doorway, his eyes closed, quite forgetting where he was). He was aware of millions of propositions, an eternally restless seething mass of events conducting an austere and eternal dialogue between themselves, every one of the million incidents, each of those million relationships, million but uniform and therefore in one single uniform relationship along with everything else, uniting in a single confluence of conflicting elements, between things that simply by existing resist and those which by virtue of being themselves strive to overcome that resistance. And he had a vision of himself as part of this saturated, living immensity, just as he had seen himself in the hall before the last window, and understood for the first time the power he had surrendered himself to, the kind of phenomenon he was being absorbed in. Because, at that moment, he comprehended the driving force behind all this: necessity providing the momentum for existence, momentum bringing forth preparation, preparation in turn paving the way for participation, a positive participation in the relationships thus prescribed, the point at which our very beings try to choose whatever is favourable through a set of predetermined exploratory reflexes, so that accomplishment should depend on them, and the question of whether such a relationship really existed naturally enough presented itself to him in passing, and it depended on patience, on the fine particulars and accidentals of the struggle, since the success of the enterprise, the achievement of a depersonalized sense of mere presence, he now acknowledged, and indeed saw, had a decidedly hit-or-miss kind of significance. He surveyed this endless, sharp, clear prospect and it shook him with its supremely exclusive reality, shook him because it was so hard to see that this world produced by his anxiety, a world of infinitely capacious reality had—for humankind at least—to come to an end, an end despite the fact that there was no end, and by that token no centre either, and we simply
are,
one element in the beating pulse of a space containing a million other elements, with which we harmonized and interacted with all our guiding reflexes … But of course on examination none of these things lasted longer than an instant and as soon as the glimmering vision cohered it splintered in the blinking of an eye; it splintered, its significance reduced to that of a spark which perhaps did no more than alert us to the dying of the fire in the grate which glowed once then disintegrated, as if aware of the worthlessness of its existence, dying in a single flash of light if only so its brief intensity might illuminate everything he had regarded on the way home, in his fateful decision, in the moment of judgement by the gate, as a ‘potentially fatal mistake’. He stepped over to the grate, examined the embers and did his best to bring them to life again, threw three logs on, then took a step towards the window, a pointless journey, since however hard he looked, instead of the boards and nails, all he saw was his own reflection. He saw himself in front of the Chez Nous Café, by the uprooted poplar, with the rubbish at his feet, for on this extraordinary day, this dramatic early afternoon, when he found himself chased, yes, that was the right word, chased from his house into the street, that was the point at which he faced defeat, the point at which he was forced to surrender and had to admit that however well primed his guns were, however coolly he appraised the situation, however he tried to apply whatever is normally referred to as ‘sober judgement’, whatever forces he brought to bear on the serried ranks of the opposition lined up against him were bound to fail. His first failure was the failure to