The Physics of Sorrow (18 page)

There is no other surviving evidence of this civilization.

C
ARRIERS

A few years ago I decided to back-up my archive due to security concerns. I put the most important information on a disk, then hid the disk in a small box made of gopher wood, sealed with pitch on the inside and outside. I followed the Old Testament instructions, even though Noah’s arks have gone through quite a few changes thanks to new technologies. The original was three hundred cubits long and fifty wide, with a height of thirty cubits, divided into three stories. Now it’s a single disk.

At first, I was considering some fireproof box, but I decided it would be best to follow the description in that book. Pitched gopher wood keeps the water out and always floats to the surface, unlike a metal lockbox. The Book has thought of everything.

Of course, I don’t count on disks alone. They’re unreliable and if the least little thing goes wrong, the whole thing is shot. The more advanced the technology, the more irreparable the damages are. I read somewhere that paper, especially acid-free paper, turns out to be a far more reliable information carrier than any digital device. Its manufacturers say it’ll last up to 1,000 years. That’s surely more than we can say for this world. For this reason, I continue to rely on my boxes full of clippings and old-fashioned notebooks. Just in case the world turns analogue again. The likelihood is not at all negligible.

Since other capsules depicted the world like a postcard—kind, pretty, dancing, endlessly inventing various trinkets—the capsule in my basement had to contain the signs and warnings, the unwritten stories, such as “The History of Boredom in the 1980s,” or “A Brief History of the Ephemeral,” or “An Introduction to the Provincial Sorrow of Late Socialism,” “A Catalogue of the Signs We Never Noticed,” “An Incomplete List of Fears During 2010,” or the stories of Mad Juliet, Malamko, Chingachook, the anti-historical person, my grandfather, the abandoned boy, the stories of all those coming of the void and going into the void, nameless, ephemeral, left out of the frame, the eternally silent ones, a General History of That Which Never Happened . . .

If something is enduring and monumental, what is the point of putting it in a capsule? Only that which is mortal, perishable, and fragile should be preserved, that which is sniffling and lighting matchsticks in the dark . . . Now that’s what will be in all the boxes in the basement of this book.

N
OAH
C
OMPLEX

I imagine a book containing every kind and genre. From monologue through Socratic dialogue to epos in hexameter, from fairytales through treatises to lists. From high antiquity to slaughterhouse instructions. Everything can be gathered up and transported in such a book.

Let him write, write, write, let him be recorded and preserved, let him be like Noah’s ark, there shall be every beast, large and small, clean and unclean, thou shalt take from every kind and every story. I’m not so interested in the clean genres. The novel is no Aryan, as Gaustine always said.

Let me write, write, write, let me record and preserve, let me be like Noah’s ark, not me, but this book. Only the book is eternal,
only its covers shall rise above the waves, only the beasts inside, between its pages swarming with life, will survive. And when they see the new land, they will go forth and multiply.

And what is written shall be made flesh and blood and shall be brought to life in all its perfection. And “the lion” shall become a lion, “the horse” will whinny like a horse, “the crow” will fly from the page with an ugly croak . . . And the Minotaur will come out into the light of day.

N
EW
R
EALISM

I hadn’t left the Underworld for a long time, so recently I decided to take a bit of a stroll. I waited for evening to fall, at this time of year it’s almost dark by five in the afternoon. That makes my transition from the basement easier. Unfortunately the Christmas lights were already up and the darkness had retreated into the corners. I chose the darker streets, breathing in the cold air, and found myself in front of a gallery I used to enjoy going into. The gallery was still open, I had caught the last few days of an exhibit showing “The New Realism.” There were no visitors at that hour, so I decided to go in.

I peered into the small glass containers, stuffed full of wine corks, useless odds-and-ends, into the traces of worn-away posters by Raymond Hains, Arman’s long ribbons of paint, squeezed out of the tubes and stretched out like colorful snakes taxidermied in glass. I stood for a long time in front of the remains of a dinner by Daniel Spoerri, glued to the table and hung on the wall like three-dimensional pictures—a frying pan with dried grease, a table for two with two empty coffee cups, the grounds still in the bottom, two glasses and an empty bottle of Martini from the 1970s, a burned-down candle, only wax left in the holder, a crumpled napkin . . . Someone was here and has left. A conversation has taken place,
something was said, something was left unsaid, they sat for a long time, the candle was burning, they were enjoying themselves, they got up and left. Did they have sex in the other room? Was the coffee before or after that? If you look even closer, you’ll probably see lipstick on one of the glasses. From forty years ago.

Those people are most likely gone now. Only the coffee grounds remain. The new realism—new Noah’s arks from the already-old twentieth century . . .

It was in the air. They all had a premonition of apocalypse in the late ’60s and ’70s, these new realists. Sometime around then, Christo started wrapping the world. As if getting ready to leave. Everything has to be packed up. We gather up our luggage, we take off. From the little wrapped rocking horse (his saddest work, in my opinion), to the bridge at Point Neuf. Come onnn, we’re moving ouuut . . . They’re going to knock down the house.

M
EMORIES OF
M
OVES

I’ve known it ever since my childhood, because of our frequent moves from apartment to apartment, that strange feeling when objects are removed from everyday use, the chair is no longer a chair, the table is not a table, the bed has been taken apart. The dresser is nothing but drawers and wooden shelves. The books are stuffed into white plastic bags stamped “crystallized sea salt,” as if they were fish needing to be salted. I wonder if it will sting afterward when I page through them.

You stand amid all that chaos, mooning about, you don’t know where to turn, the adults don’t either, they’re stressed out, waiting for the truck and smoking. Then everything is loaded up, but all of you are still fussing around, you don’t want to shut the door,
your mother goes to check for the twentieth time to make sure you haven’t accidentally forgotten anything, your father has wandered off somewhere in the yard to water the two cherry trees and the rose bush, because who knows whether the new tenant will take care of them at all. I hug one of the cats, the other is hiding somewhere.

     
Farewell.

     
A new apartment.

     
New farewells.

     
The moves of my student years.

     
Moving out after divorce.

     
Moving to other countries.

     
Coming back.

     
A new apartment.

A whole life can be told as a catalogue of moves.

T
HE
M
OTHER
C
APSULE

After that exhibit, I go back home to my boxes and bags.

At every moment (including this one), somebody is burying a time capsule somewhere. The trend peaked in 1999. Then there was a certain drop in interest. The apocalypse of 2000 didn’t come about. People were disappointed, which is understandable after all that waiting. In the meantime, Facebook cropped up, a new time capsule. Now you’re a half-human/half-avatar, a strange sort of Minotaur, no a Min-avatar. I got distracted there, that’s what Facebook does, it distracts.

What I wanted to say was that of the tens of thousands of capsules being buried in the ground annually, over ninety percent will be lost forever. The people who have buried them forget, die, move.
A mother-capsule needs to be created, which would contain the coordinates of all the capsules buried around the world. And so that its coordinates wouldn’t be forgotten, a special person needs to be hired whose only job is just that—to remember them.

B
UNDLE AND
B
OTTLE

The unlikeliest things can turn out to be time capsules. The largest is surely the city of Pompeii, which was preserved under ash. I prefer the smaller ones, myself. Like the bottle of brandy my grandfather set aside the day I was born. That bottle must be forty-four years old now. If I find it and open it, I’ll have distilled the whole of 1968, at least for southeastern Bulgaria. The number of sunny days that summer, the early autumn rains, the humidity in the air, the quality of the soil, the vine diseases, the year’s whole history written inside a glass bottle.

Or that bundle of clothes my grandma kept for “the end.” A kerchief, an apron, a cherry-red vest, wool socks for winter, or pantyhose—in case it’s summer—a pair of patent-leather shoes . . . A bundle to be opened on the day of her death. Even though she would open it every other day, to make sure moths hadn’t chewed holes in the clothes or simply to look at them. That’s a way of getting used to the idea of death, too. Once a month, she would put them on. She would replace her old black kerchief with the new one with its big, dark-red roses, her everyday brown woolen vest with the unworn red one, which had been given to her for some birthday. She would look at herself in the narrow rectangular mirror, bemoaning how pretty she had been back in the day, what a slender waist she had had. How can I show up there like this, she would cry. Only death awakened her vanity. More people were waiting for her there than here.

. . .
AND
H
EXAMETER

The unlikeliest things can turn out to be . . . Hexameter, for example. If something is said in hexameter, then historically and practically speaking, it has an infinite expiration date. The whole of the Trojan War is preserved in the capsule of hexameter. If that story had been stuffed into any other form whatsoever, it would have given out, gone sour, gotten torn up, crumbled . . . Hexameter turned out to be the longest-lasting material.

Hesiod, in his
Works and Days
, has left behind a true survival kit with instructions. If something happens to the world and people come who don’t know anything, thanks to this book they will learn which month is good for sowing, which for plowing, when a boar or a bellowing bullock or a hardworking donkey should be castrated.

It also includes these favorite instructions:

             
One should not urinate facing the sun while standing erect, but

             
One should remember always to do it at sunset and sunrise.

             
Nor should you piss on the path or next to the path when out walking;

             
Nor should you do it when naked; nighttime belongs to the blessed.

For everything, there should be a good book giving instructions. I add it to the box, too.

B
EES AND
B
ATS

At the end of every year I open up the boxes, carefully look through all the publications from January to December, sometimes that is precisely what fills up my days until New Year’s Eve, and I set aside only the most important things that need to be preserved . . .

I have my own system for sorting.

Often, the most important bits of news turn up on the pages of thin, irregular periodicals printed on cheap paper, such as
Modern Beekeeper
,
Gardening Time
,
Houseplant Diseases
,
Taking Care of a Small Farm
,
Bull and Cow: Newspaper for the Novice Farmer
,
Home Veterinarian
,
All About Cats
, and so on.

Sometimes those five lines from the “Strange News from around the World” column can turn out to be important, especially when they’re describing the strange behavior of several colonies of bees in some remote North American town. The bees flew out of the hives in the morning and never came back. Now that’s what I call a sign and a revelation, even though nobody noticed it at the time. People don’t make the effort to read signs. They chalked up the bees’ mysterious disappearance to the Varroa destructor, the Varroa mite to be precise, also called the “vampire worm,” a tiny red tick that sinks its little hooks into the bee’s body. I wrote a letter to the newspaper, explaining that this was something else entirely, that this was only the beginning, I even quoted Einstein, people are impressed when they hear Einstein: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years of life left.”

They weren’t impressed.

It seems to me that the year was 2004, the winter of 2004, yes. A whole two years had to pass before people figured out that this wasn’t some one-off case and that something strange was happening to all the bees around the world. Only in 2006 would those few lines from my beekeeping newspaper become front-page headlines in the
New York Times
, the
Guardian
and so on. And only then would they dub this strange disappearance of the most responsible and disciplined part of our holy family here on earth “Colony Collapse Disorder” (CCD). Hives are being deserted. One of the most domestic of creatures has lost its ability to find its way home, it gets lost and dies. Remember that diagnosis. Colony Collapse Disorder. The disintegration of the apian family . . . If this is happening to
them, what is left for man and his unstable family? There’s more apocalypse in that than in all the other hocus-pocus. The bees are the first sign. The buzzing angels of the apocalypse. We’re expecting the trumpets of Jericho, but the only thing that can be heard is bzzzz . . . bzzzz . . . bzzzz . . . growing quieter and fading away. That’s the signal. Don’t you hear it? Just take out your iPod earbuds for a minute.