Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven

"Listen," he said, sitting at his desk with his reading glasses on his nose. "Take this. This is very important. Perhaps my patriarchal treatise should begin with this. The Golden Wall is the title. In front of the Golden Wall it's an improvised mess; people teem around in the noisy chaos of everyday life, and the reason things don't go haywire is due to the world behind the Golden Wall. The world of power lies there like the eye of the cyclone, in mysterious silence, controlled, reliable, as ordered as a chessboard, a sort of purified world of Platonic Ideas. At least that's the image that the powerless in front of the Golden Wall have of it. It is confirmed by the dark suits, the silent limousines, the guards, the protocol, the perfect organization, the velvety calm in the palaces and ministries. But anyone who's actually been behind the Golden Wall, like you and me, knows that it's all sham and that in there, where decisions are made, it's just as improvised a chaos as in front, in people's homes, at universities, in hospitals, or in companies. I've never had that impression more strongly than in the archaeological museum in Cairo. Once when I was a minister of state I was given a guided tour by my Egyptian colleague. We looked at the treasures from the grave of Tutankhamen — all those wonderful things that were reverently displayed there. But there were also a couple of large photographs of the state in which the tomb had been found. All the things were piled on each other, like old rubbish in a loft, and the mess had not only been caused by robbers. The wooden shrines that housed the sarcophagus had also been crudely and wrongly assembled; the granite lid of the sarcophagus did not fit and had been broken in two when it had been lowered. The same spectacle was presented by the pitiful human remains that had emerged from beneath that indescribably splendid golden mask of the pharaoh's. All politicians, some civil servants, and some journalists know that it's just as pitiful a junk shop behind the Golden Wall as in front of it, but almost none of the powerless citizens know. Should anyone discover how a policy is made — which is virtually impossible — he will spend the rest of his life with a fundamental feeling of insecurity. So it's a miracle that things don't go haywire behind the Golden Wall too: it points to a much higher power. For you that's no problem; for you that's God. But for me unfortunately not even the functioning of society is a proof of God's existence. How can it possibly have functioned up to now? You won't believe it, but I know. It's because of the existence of that very Golden Wall. The Wall itself is the highest power. Wait a moment. Of course — this is where that quote from Shakespeare belongs, from the opening of one of his sonnets. Where is it? Here: From what power hast thou this powerful might? It's about love, but the Golden Wall is connected with love, too. Look what we've got here: What is the nature of the Golden Wall? The powerless think that it consists of the congealed majesty of the mighty, who in some cases are even worshiped: the Liberator, the King, the Leader. But in reality it is not a product of the mighty but of the powerless themselves: it's the crystallization of their own reverence, awe, and fear. But if the powerless are hence in fact worshiping nothing but their own worship, are in awe only of their own awe, and are afraid only of their own fear, which at the same time excludes them from power, what is left for the powerful? What are they? Once someone has penetrated the Golden Wall, what does he see? Nothing special. Just ordinary people going about their business, no more interesting and no different in kind than the powerless. They exercise power not in some 'powerful,' inevitable, so to speak mathematically, certain way, as the powerless believe, but in just as messy and improvised a way as every powerless person manages his affairs. Dorus and Frans formed a cabinet over lunch; Churchill and Stalin carved up the Balkans over a drink. And yet. . they must have something extra, which the powerless experience, because not everyone can penetrate the Wall by acquiring power. That means, Edgar, that the 'powerful might' of Shakespeare's Dark Lady was also in a certain sense not her quality, because she didn't possess it for all men. So her answer to his question, where she got it from, must therefore be 'From you yourself, Billy.' He gave her that power over him — although. . yes, I'm saying it again: although… and yet.. what does that something extra consist of? Not of intelligence, because there have always been some unspeakable idiots in power. .; there are also always superintelligent people who never rise to power, although they would like to despite their intelligence. That something extra isn't the 'will to power,' because there are countless people who want it and will never succeed in achieving it, just as there are people who come to power who never wanted it but who, to their own amazement, are impelled toward it. So political instinct, you may say: there are lots of people with political instinct who never rise above the level of alderman in a country municipality. 'Charisma,' then? That's simply a Greek word that means gift, 'grace': that doesn't answer the question but asks one. No, something's involved that no one knows about, except me. Now I must write this down, before I forget: Of course the whole of society is as saturated with all forms of power as a sponge, between man and woman, in education, in business, over animals, nowhere is there no power — but what is political power? Political power is the fact that someone can achieve things that he knows nothing about; that he is in a position where he can decide the fate of people that he doesn't know — sometimes on matters of life and death, and frequently beyond his own death. The powerless see the powerful one, but he does not see them. That applies not only to Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or Stalin but also to our own good old Dutch rulers, to Koos and Dorus, and to you of course, and to myself a little too . I don't know what it's like among ravens, but in any case that's what it's like among people. Political power is an abstract, which only becomes concrete outside the field of vision of the powerful person. But what is that something extra that enables them to be in power? What does Dorus have in common with Hitler; what has Koos in common with Stalin? I'll tell you a secret that will make you sit up. In my own days in power I once had dinner at the Elysee; seated opposite me was a French professor of sociology. After Giscard d'Estaing's speech he told me that during the election battles, a couple of his students had hung up the posters with the portraits of Giscard and Mitterand on them in some backward country village in Thailand. The population had never heard of them and no one could read what was on the posters. On the day of the presidential elections they got them to vote, and what do you think? The results corresponded exactly with those in France. That made us laugh at the time — the professor regarded it as a good joke, and I don't believe that he was ever able to draw the dreadful conclusion from it; but I was suddenly reminded of it when I realized what power means. Listen to this: As a boy I identified power with property. My books were mine, but then in a higher degree yours, and in a still higher degree the mayor's; after that everything was yours a second time, as prime minister, but ultimately everything in Holland was the queen's. As an alderman, I thought that political power was simply the power of the word. Whoever had the best ideas and could express them best had the greatest power. Now I know that it's only in the third place a matter of ideas and words, and only in the second place a matter of who expresses them, the person. Most people find even that extremely undemocratic, but it's much worse. Power is the power of the flesh. Power is purely physical. No one has dared face up to that. No one attains power by what he says; his political program is incidental, and so is who he is: someone else may come along with the same program and nothing will happen. Someone gains power solely because he has the physical constitution of someone who gains power. If he were to say something different — the opposite, for example — in another party or movement, he would still gain power. He would always obtain power, Father, even with the Catholics, or the Communists. The powerful person is someone who gains power because he has a physical secret that makes other people say, 'Yes, that's our man'—or woman, of course. The something extra is solely that one thing: the body. I mean, politics isn't a branch of economics, as Marx thought, or theology, as my father thought, or sociology, as other people think, but of biology. That was proved scientifically by those yokels in Thailand. I virtually never read a newspaper, Edgar. I have no idea what's going on in the world anymore — I don't have television, radio, or even a telephone — but when I see a photo of Margaret Thatcher, who appears to be in charge in England at the moment, at a newsstand, then I know immediately: shrewd eroticism. A bourgeoise Cleopatra. Of course, she's intelligent and energetic and what have you, but so are other English-women, who never get any further than head buyer at Harrods. Why is that? Take Hitler. Freud demonstrated that illness must not be understood in terms of health, but health in terms of illness. Similarly, you mustn't try to understand Hitler's absolute power in terms of more or less normal power structures, because you'll never be able to; you must do it the other way around. You can explain Margaret and Dorus through Hitler, but not Hitler through Margaret or Dorus. Suppose Hitler had never existed but someone else had said and done the same things as him from his birth in Braunau— and there were such people. Do you think things would have gone as they did to the bitter end? Of course not! How long could that other person have kept it up? At a certain moment at the beginning of the 1920s Rohm or Strasser would have rounded on him with: 'Why don't you shut your trap!' But he wasn't anyone else — he was the dark man with that dogged face and the 'basilisk's stare,' as Thomas Mann once called it, with a pale forehead, those fanatical cheekbones, those smooth cheeks and pinched lips. That appearance accounted for 33 percent of his effect, and all the neo-Nazis are still in love with it. And Salvador Dali once said, 'I love his back.' You can dismiss that as a surrealist observation by a Spanish lunatic, but it also indicates a sense of all-determining physicality. And what do you think of a remark that Heidegger once made to Jaspers, who wondered how such an uncivilized creature as Hitler could rule Germany. Heidegger's answer was, 'Civilization has nothing to do with it… just look at his wonderful hands.' Apart from that, he had a voice that went right through you, which made everything he said different than if someone else had said it. A second 33 percent of the oratorical impact of his words on the masses can be attributed to that sound. I once saw an X-ray picture of his skull in a book somewhere, and it was observed that he had exceptionally large sinuses, with extraordinary resonance. And the third 33 percent of his power was due to his incomparable body language. On the one hand his terrifying outbursts of rage at the lectern, on the other hand his perhaps even more terrifying silence: his masklike face, the precision of his pose, the tension in even the smallest movement. The way he saluted at a parade, with that slight curve of the wrist, the position of his thumb, the way he brought his hand back to his belt: all of it had bewitching power. All rehearsed in front of the mirror, of course; there are photos of that. Some conductors have the same thing, that absolute control, like a hummingbird hovering stationary in the air and keeping its proboscis fixed motionless in the pistil of a flower. A fleur du mal in this case. Look, you don't feel left out by my mentioning a little bird?