Victor Pelevin - Helmet of Horror

No, he doesn’t.

Nutscracker

Maybe he does, but you just don’t understand. Maybe the Minotaur’s actually the dead rat on the ceiling.

Organizm(-:

Maybe. Anyway, if you don’t touch these stones, and avoid doing a couple of other things, you can walk right round the labyrinth without any bother. And then you realise fairly quickly it’s not a real labyrinth at all, just a big concrete cellar with plywood partitions.

Nutscracker

Have you tried breaking down the partitions?

Organizm(-:

If you shift them even slightly, the whole thing freezes instantly. Then you have to find your way out in the dark and listen to those voices. It’s better not to touch anything.

Nutscracker

Have you reached the centre then?

Organizm(-:

Yes, I have.

Nutscracker

And what’s in it?

Organizm(-:

A little room with the words ‘Open GL’ on the wall. The real screen-saver has the same words, but they hang in the air there, and here they’re daubed on the plywood in gloss paint. What does that mean, anyway?

Nutscracker

Do you know, Monster?

Monstradamus

Open General License. Or maybe Open Great Labyrinth.

Nutscracker

So there’s nothing but those words in the central room, Organism, is that right?

Organizm(-:

There’s a chair as well, with a mirror in front of it.

Nutscracker

I can guess. Tarkovsky’s Mirror.

Organizm(-:

I sat there for ages and ages. I had the feeling I was about to understand the most important thing of all at any moment. But I didn’t understand a thing.

Monstradamus

That’s always the way.

Organizm(-:

What do you mean? Always the way when you sit looking into a mirror for a long time?

Monstradamus

Always the way when you feel you’re just about to understand something important. It’s like the whistle of a bullet or the roar of an aeroplane. If you can hear them, it means they’re already zooming past you.

Nutscracker

Organism, why are you so sure the centre of the labyrinth is where the mirror and the chair are?

Organizm(-:

Because of the mirror and the chair. What else would they be doing there?

Monstradamus

That seems pretty obvious.

Nutscracker

So what have you got, Monster? I’m dying of curiosity.

Monstradamus

You go first, we agreed.

Nutscracker

Okay. I’ll tell you what I’ve got. It’s a bit like a TV editing room. Professional equipment – a Betacam VCR, a special monitor, all sorts of mixers for functions I don’t really understand. The whole works. There’s a weird-looking poster hanging on the wall, a picture of a dog in an empty white room. On the wall in front of the dog there’s something like a distribution board with a few little lamps screwed into it. Two of them are lit up – a red one on the left and a blue one on the right. And below the lamps there’s a bell, surrounded by drawings of sound waves – it’s obviously ringing. There’s an electrode inserted into the dog’s head, with wires leading from it to the distribution board. And there’s a cut on its belly stuck together with sticking plaster and a rubber tube leading down out of it into a glass flask standing on the floor. The dog’s right paw is raised, its tongue is hanging out, its ears are pricked up and its eyes are full of love. The text underneath it reads: ‘Put it there, bro!’ The first time I saw it I just froze. I wondered how the moderators could have found out. It was only afterwards I remembered I told you all about ‘Pavlov’s Bitch’. Standing under the poster there’s a safe full of Betacam tapes with episodes of ‘The Hornists of Plenitude’ – that’s a kind of chic international TV programme, it has these interesting titles, with the globe flanked by two bugles. The tapes all contain pretty much the same thing: a television address by someone putting himself forward for the job of Theseus. In most cases the candidate is a middle-aged man with a pleasant face and good diction. He’s sitting in front of some kind of symbol, with a dozen microphones standing on a table in front of him. He promises to deal with the Minotaur and lead everyone out of the labyrinth. Before that, naturally, he expounds his own vision of what the labyrinth is and who the Minotaur is.

Monstradamus

What kind of visions are they?

Nutscracker

All sorts.

Monstradamus

How about an example?

Nutscracker

Well, take the last one for instance. The candidate was a tall man with grey hair. A professor of history, very distinguished looking, stylishly dressed. And his symbol was beautiful, a bit like a knight’s coat of arms: a bull’s skull in a net against a hatched ground. The man said the labyrinth is a symbol of the brain. An exposed brain and a classical labyrinth even look very similar. The Minotaur is the animal part of the mind and Theseus is the human part. The animal part is stronger, of course, but the human part triumphs in the end, and this is the meaning of evolution in history. At the very centre of the labyrinth there is a cross that symbolises the intersection of the animal and human principles. That is the site of the initiatory passage, where Theseus meets and conquers his enemy. He said you can only conquer the Minotaur in yourself. We must strangle the beast without mercy, and then we will be morally justified in renaming the Helmet of Horror the Helmet of Civilisation and Progress.

Monstradamus

And what was his program like?

Nutscracker

In the labyrinth you have to turn twice to the right and once to the left, then twice to the right and once to the left again, and so on right to the end.

Monstradamus

Tell us about another one then.

Nutscracker

The last but one. A Frenchman. He was definitely the cleverest of the lot, and his appearance was very picturesque – a threadbare Chinese field jacket, with a pipe and a wild shock of hair. His symbol was a red and white chessboard with butterflies on the white squares and letters from various alphabets on the red ones. For the first few minutes he just stared into the camera, then he ruffled up his hair and announced that he would start with a truism. The major achievement of contemporary French philosophy, he said, was its success in establishing a non-contradictory unity of liberal values and revolutionary romanticism within the bounds of a unitary sexually aroused consciousness. After that he glared out of the screen for at least a minute without speaking, then he raised a finger and explained in a whisper that this declaration, despite its crystal clarity, is already a labyrinth, for a labyrinth comes into being in the course of any discussion with yourself or others, and for that period of time each of us becomes either the Minotaur or his victim. Although there is nothing we can do with this, he continued, there’s nothing we can do without it either. Specifically, however, we can introduce a broader concept than the labyrinth – we can declare a discourse.

Monstradamus

Oh Mama! When I hear the word ‘discourse’, I reach for my simulacrum.

Nutscracker

According to the shaggy professor, a discourse is the place in which words and concepts, labyrinths and Minotaurs, Theseuses and Ariadnes all come into being. Even the discourse itself can only come into being within the discourse. But the paradox is that, although the entirety of nature arises within it, the discourse itself is not encountered anywhere in nature and was only developed quite recently. Another tragic dissonance is that, although everything comes into being within the discourse, without funding from the state or private individuals the discourse itself only lasts for three days at the most and is then extinguished forever. And so there can be no more urgent task for society than to fund the discourse.