Jean-Marie Blas De Robles - Where Tigers Are at Home

ON A PIEDMONTESE, Chevalier de Revel, who at the time was the Sardinian ambassador in The Hague: “He claims that God, that is, the creator of ourselves and of everything around us, died before completing his task, that he had the grandest projects for the world and the greatest implements; that he had already set up some of these implements, as you erect scaffolding for a building and that he died in the middle of his work; that everything we have at present was made for a purpose that no longer exists and that we in particular feel destined for something of which we have no idea; we are like clocks that have no dial and whose works, endowed with intelligence, go round and round until they are worn out, without knowing why, but all the time telling themselves: since I turn I must have a purpose. This idea seems to me the most spiritual and most profound madness I have ever heard and far preferable to the Christian, Mussulman or philosophical madnesses of the first, eighth and eighteenth century of our era.” (Benjamin Constant, letter of June 4, 1780, Revue des deux Mondes , April 15, 1844)

THE IMPORTANT THING IS neither to deny nor to assert the divine, but to despair of it. In its place leave the undecidable, don’t bother with it, just as we couldn’t care less how many mites will feed off our dead skin.

ALL MODERNITY, when it suffers the pains of metamorphosis and questions its own existence, needs to go and find in the preceding centuries a big brother it can identify with. Without warning, the age of gold becomes the precursor, or even the founder of ours, depending on the rhetorical skill of the person undertaking that kind of demonstration. As if it were absolutely necessary to find the causes of an illness or of good health to be able to treat or understand it. This return to the origins of our ills is symptomatic of our societies, symptomatic of Kircher. But it explains nothing. Knowing where everything started to go wrong is of interest to those alone who suffer those ills.

KIRCHER will have been my golden fleece, my own quest for the origins.

“IT IS SOMETHING I CAN PROVE TO YOU,” Alvaro de Rújula concedes, “but that I cannot explain to you. It is one of those profound things one cannot really comprehend intuitively.’ It has become impossible, even for the physicists themselves, to be able to imagine the universe other than by mathematical formulae, that is, by a device that allows anything you want apart from seeing , from grasping reality through our senses or our intellect. Until the theory of relativity came along, everyone could visualize the real, apprehend it with a greater or lesser degree of clarity. The way Aristotle or a nineteenth-century geographer such as Élisée Reclus saw the world was not much different from the way a sailor or farmer of the time did. Even if ‘wrong’ it had the advantage of being precise, of forming a picture in people’s minds. Our knowledge of the universe is certainly closer to the ‘truth’ but we have to content ourselves with taking the few chosen ones who have managed to master the equations on which this certainty is based at their word. All that leaves us with is a little bundle of metaphors: puerile stuff about a big bang or astronauts who have grown younger or bigger during their stay in space, lifts going crazy, fishing rods that shrink when turned to the north, punches that never reach their target, stars whose light itself never manages to escape — and of which we know nothing except that they could contain more or less anything, including the complete works of Proust … Our notion of the world can be entirely summed up in the set of fables that scientists fabricate from time to time to explain to us, as if to little kids, that the results of their work are beyond our understanding. Kircher, Descartes or Pascal were still in a position to handle the sciences of their time, to falsify the hypotheses themselves, to formulate new ones. But who can boast of being able to embrace enough of the current sciences to be able to visualize the universe they account for? What can one say of a population that is incapable of visualizing the world in which it lives except that it’s on the road to ruin for lack of landmarks, of reference points? For lack of reality … Is not the way the world has of henceforth resisting our efforts to represent it, the mischievous pleasure it takes in escaping us, a symptom of the fact that we have already lost it? To lose sight of the world, is that not to begin to be happy with its disappearance?

WE HAVE PRECISELY THE WORLD that we deserve, or at least that our cosmology deserves. What could we hope of a universe abounding in black holes, antimatter, catastrophes?

TO SERVE AS a television, a pocket calculator, a desk diary, an account book, a commercial catalog, an alarm system, a telephone or a driving simulator is the worst that could happen to a computer. However, Ernst Jünger had warned us: “The importance of robots,” he wrote in 1945, “will increase as the number of pedants multiplies, that is, in enormous proportions.”

LIFTING UP the bird-eating spider to clean it, I freed its disconcerting progeny. Myriad minuscule spiders that disappeared in the house before I realized what domestic hell their escape was exposing me to. Soledade is packing her bags …

“Are you asleep, Governor?” Santos asked, leaning over the back of the seat in front of him. “Can I have a word?”

Moreira turned his tired eyes toward his assistant. He looked worried but ready to grant him a few minutes to talk.

“The program for the next couple of days … Would you like to check it over?”

“Of course. Come and sit next to me.”

Santos changed places, pulled down the tabletop and opened the file with his notes. “ETA at Fortaleza half past ten,” he said, adjusting the little pair of round glasses on his nose, “then transfer to the Colonial Hotel. One o’clock: dinner in the town hall with the mayor — here’s the summary of the index cards you asked me for. Four o’clock: presentation of an honorary doctorate to Jorge Amado, in the presence of Edson Barbosa, Jr., then a reception in the education offices. I’ve prepared a little speech for you, but it’s up to you to …”

“What’s it about, your speech?”

“Literature and popular realism. Something simple but fairly punchy. Intellectuals and politicians ought to work together to get the country out of the mess it’s in, that kind of thing.”

“I’ve every confidence in you, Santos. You do that kind of talk very well. Will the television be there?”

“Only regional.”

“Doesn’t matter, I’ll say a few words to them anyway. You never know, they might put the ceremony on the news.”

“OK, I’ve got that. To continue: tomorrow, around seven, working breakfast with the minister followed by a meeting with the Social Democratic Party councillors and some local employers. Subject: investment and the northeast. You’re speaking at ten. TV channels, journalists, the lot.”

The Governor nodded with the expression of a man perfectly aware of his responsibilities.

“Following that, lunch in the Palacio Estudial with the minister and the junior minister of education. Then you go off together to fire the starting gun for a jangada regatta and you all stay together until the election rally. It will be outdoors, from what the head of protocol says. Since the television will be there, they’ve arranged for the whole works: walkabout, handout to the crowd, the lot — but there will be appropriate security.”

“My speech is ready?”

“Jodinha’s just putting the finishing touches to it, you’ll have it by this evening. After the rally, a dinner-dance at the sailing club with the crème de la crème of Fortaleza, return to São Luís the next morning at 8:05—”