Flaubert's Castle

7/30/2019 Flaubert's Castle

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FLAUBERT’s CASTLE

A project by Ceel Mogami de Haas and Liudvikas Buklys for the HISK OpenStudios 2011.



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The Babylon Lottery

Jorge Luis Borges

Like all men in Babylon I have been a proconsul; like all, a slave; I have also known omnipotence, oppro-brium, jail. Look: the index finger of my right hand is missing. Look again: through this rent in my cape youcan see a ruddy tatoo on my belly. It is the second symbol, Beth. This letter, on nights of full moon, givesme power over men whose mark is Ghimel; but it also subordinates me to those marked Aleph, who on moonlessnights owe obedience to those marked Ghimel. In a cellar at dawn, I have severed the jugular vein of sacredbulls against a black rock. During one lunar year, I have been declared invisible: I shrieked and was notheard, I stole my bread and was not decapitated. I have known what the Greeks did not: uncertainty. In abronze chamber, faced with the silent handkerchief of a strangler, hope has been faithful to me; in the river

of delights, panic has not failed me. Heraclitus of Pontica admiringly relates that Pythagoras recalledhaving been Pyrrho, and before that Euphorbus, and before that some other mortal. In order to recall analo-gous vicissitudes I do not need to have recourse to death, nor even to imposture. I owe this almost atro-cious variety to an institution which other republics know nothing about, or which operates among themimperfectly and in secret: the lottery. I have not delved into its history; I do know that the wizards havebeen unable to come to any agreement; of its powerful designs I know what a man not versed in astrology mightknow of the moon. I come from a vertiginous country where the lottery forms a principal part of reality:until this very day I have thought about all this as little as I have about the behavior of the indeciphe-rable gods or about the beating of my own heart. Now, far from Babylon and its beloved customs, I think ofthe lottery with some astonishment and ponder the blasphemous conjectures murmured by men in the shadows attwilight. My father related that anciently - a matter of centuries; of years? - the lottery in Babylon was agame of plebeian character. He said (I do not know with what degree of truth) that barbers gave rectangularbits of bone or decorated parchment in exchange for copper coins. A drawing of the lottery was held in themiddle of the day: the winners received, without further corroboration from chance, silverminted coins. Theprocedure, as you see, was elemental. Naturally, these "lotteries" failed. Their moral virtue was nil. Theydid not appeal to all the faculties of men: only to their hope. In the face of public indifference, the

merchants who established these venal lotteries began to lose money. Someone attempted to introduce a slightreform: the interpolation of a certain small number of adverse outcomes among the favored numbers. By meansof this reform, the purchasers of numbered rectangles stood the double chance of winning a sum or of paying afine often considerable in size. This slight danger - for each thirty favored numbers there would be oneadverse number - awoke, as was only natural, the public's interest. The Babylonians gave themselves up to thegame. Anyone who did not acquire lots was looked upon as pusillanimous, mean-spirited. In time, this disdainmultiplied. The person who did not play was despised, but the losers who paid the fine were also scorned. TheCompany (thus it began to be known at that time) was forced to take measures to protect the winners, whocould not collect their prizes unless nearly the entire amount of the fines was already collected. TheCompany brought suit against the losers: the judge condemned them to pay the original fine plus costs or tospend a number of days in jail. Every loser chose jail, so as to defraud the Company. It was from thisinitial bravado of a few men that the all-powerful position of the Company - its ecclesiastical, metaphysicalstrength - was derived. A short while later, the reports on the drawings omitted any enumeration of finesand limited themselves to publishing the jail sentences corresponding to each adverse number. This laconism,almost unnoticed at the time, became of capital importance. It constituted the first appearance in the

lottery of non-pecuniary elements. Its success was great. Pushed to such a measure by the players, theCompany found itself forced to increase its adverse numbers. No one can deny that the people of Babyloniaare highly devoted to logic, even to symmetry. It struck them as incoherent that the fortunate numbers shouldbe computed in round figures of money while the unfortunate should be figured in terms of days and nights injail. Some moralists argued that the possession of money does not determine happiness and that other forms offortune are perhaps more immediate. There was another source of restlessness in the lower depths. Themembers of the sacerdotal college multiplied the stakes and plumbed the vicissitudes of terror and hope; thepoor, with reasonable or inevitable envy, saw themselves excluded from this notoriously delicious exhilira-tion. The just anxiety of all, poor and rich alike, to participate equally is the lottery, inspired anindignant agitation, the memory of which the years have not erased. Certain obstinate souls did not compre-hend, or pretended not to comprehend, that a new order had come, a necessary historical stage . . . A slavestole a crimson ticket, a ticket which earned him the right to have his tongue burned in the next drawing.The criminal code fixed the same penalty for the theft of a ticket. A number of Babylonians argued that hedeserved a red-hot poker by virtue of the theft; others, more magnanimous, held that the public executionershould apply the penalty of the lottery, since chance had so determined . . . Disturbances broke out, therewas a lamentable shedding of blood; but the people of Babylon imposed their will at last, over the opposition

of the rich. That is: the people fully achieved their magnanimous ends. In the first place, it made theCompany accept complete public power. (This unification was necessary, given the vastness and complexity ofthe new operations.) In the second place, it forced the lottery to be secret, free, and general. The sale oftickets for money was abolished. Once initiated into the mysteries of Bel, every free man automaticallyparticipated in the sacred drawings of lots, which were carried out in the labyrinths of the gods everyseventy nights and which determined every man's fate until the next exercise. The consequences were incalcu-lable. A happy drawing might motivate his elevation to the council of wizards or his condemnation to thecustody of an enemy (notorious or intimate), or to find, in the peaceful shadows of a room, the woman who hadbegun to disquiet him or whom he had never expected to see again. An adverse drawing might mean mutilation, avaried infamy, death. Sometimes a single event - the tavern killing of C, the mysterious glorification of B- might be the brilliant result of thirty or forty drawings. But it must be recalled that the individuals ofthe Company were (and are) all-powerful and astute as well. In many cases, the knowledge that certain joyswere the simple doing of chance might have detracted from their exellence; to avoid this inconvenience theCompany's agents made use of suggestion and magic. Their moves, their management, were secret. In the inves-tigation of people's intimate hopes and intimate terrors, they made use of astrologers and spies. There were

certain stone lions, there was a sacred privy called Qaphqa, there were fissures in a dusty aqueduct which,according to general opinion, lead to the Company; malign or benevolent people deposited accusations in thesecracks. These denunciations were incorporated into an alphabetical archive of variable veracity. Incrediblyenough, there were still complaints. The Company, with its habitual discretion, did not reply directly. Itpreferred to scribble a brief argument - which now figures among sacred scriptures - in the debris of a maskfactory. That doctrinal piece of literature observed that the lottery is an interpolation of chance into theorder of the world and that to accept errors is not to contradict fate but merely to corroborate it. It also

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observed that those lions and that sacred recipient, though not unauthorized by the Company (which did notrenounce the right to consult them), functioned without official guaranty. This declaration pacified thepublic unease. It also produced other effects, not foreseen by the author. It deeply modified the spirit andoperations of the Company. (I have little time left to tell what I know; we have been warned that the ship isready to sail; but I will attempt to explain it.) Improbable as it may be, no one had until then attemptedto set up a general theory of games. A Babylonian is not highly speculative. He reveres the judgments offate, he hands his life over to them, he places his hopes, his panic terror in them, but it never occurs tohim to investigate their labyrinthian laws nor the giratory spheres which disclose them. Nevertheless, theunofficial declaration which I have mentioned inspired many discussions of a juridico-mathematical nature.From one of these discussions was born the following conjecture: if the lottery is an intensification ofchance, a periodic infusion of chaos into the cosmos, would it not be desirable for chance to intervene at

all stages of the lottery and not merely in the drawing? Is it not ridiculous for chance to dictate the deathof someone, while the circumstances of his death-its silent reserve or publicity, the time limit of one houror one centuryshould remain immune to hazard? These eminently just scruples finally provoked a considerablereform, whose complexities (intensified by the practice of centuries) are not understood except by a handfulof specialists, but which I will attempt to summarize, even if only in a symbolic manner. Let us imagine afirst drawing, which eventuates in a sentence of death against some individual. To carry out the sentence,another drawing is set up, and this drawing proposes (let us say) nine possible executioners. Of theseexecutioners, four can initiate a third drawing which will reveal the name of the actual executioner, twoothers can replace the adverse order with a fortunate order (the finding of a treasure, let us say), anothermay exacerbate the death sentence (that is: make it infamous or enrich it with torture), still others mayrefuse to carry it out . . . Such is the symbolic scheme. In reality, the number of drawings is infinite. Nodecision is final, all diverge into others. The ignorant suppose that an infinite number of drawings requirean infinite amount of time; in reality, it is quite enough that time be infinitely subdivisible, as is thecase in the famous parable of the Tortoise and the Hare. This infinitude harmonizes in an admirable mannerwith the sinuous numbers of Chance and of the Celestial Archetype of the Lottery adored by the Platonists . .. A certain distorted echo of our ritual seems to have resounded along the Tiber: Aelius Lampridius, in his

Life of Antoninus Heliogabalus, tells of how this emperor wrote down the lot of his guests on seashells, sothat one would receive ten pounds of gold and another ten flies, ten dormice, ten bears. It is only right toremark that Heliogabalus was educated in Asia Minor, among the priests of the eponymous god. There are alsoimpersonal drawings, of undefined purpose: one drawing will decree that a sapphire from Taprobane be throwninto the waters of the Euphrates; another, that a bird be released from a tower roof; another, that a grainof sand be withdrawn (or added) to the innumerable grains on a beach. The consequences, sometimes, areterrifying. Under the beneficent influence of the Company, our customs have become thoroughly impregnatedwith chance. The buyer of a dozen amphoras of Damascus wine will not be surprised if one of them contains atalisman or a viper. The scribe who draws up a contract scarcely ever fails to introduce some erroneousdatum; I myself, in making this hasty declaration, have falsified or invented some grandeur, some atrocity;perhaps, too, a certain mysterious monotony . . . Our historians, the most discerning in the world, haveinvented a method for correcting chance. It is well known that the operations of this method are (in general)trustworthy; although, naturally, they are not divulged without a measure of deceit. In any case, there isnothing so contaminated with fiction as the history of the Company . . . A paleographic document, unearthedin a temple, may well be the work of yesterday's drawing or that of one lasting a century. No book is ever

published without some variant in each copy. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, interpolate, vary. TheCompany, with divine modesty, eludes all publicity. Its agents, as is only natural, are secret. The orderswhich it is continually sending out do not differ from those lavishly issued by imposters. Besides, who canever boast of being a mere imposter? The inebriate who improvises an absurd mandate, the dreamer who suddenlyawakes to choke the woman who lies at his side to death, do they not both, perhaps, carry out a secretdecision by the Company? This silent functioning, comparable to that of God, gives rise to all manner ofconjectures. One of them, for instance, abominably insinuates that the Company is eternal and that it willlast until the last night of the world, when the last god annihilates the cosmos. Still another conjecturedeclares that the Company is omnipotent, but that it exerts its influence only in the most minute matters: ina bird's cry, in the shades of rust and the hues of dust, in the cat naps of dawn. There is one conjecture,spoken from the mouths of masked heresiarchs, to the effect that the Company has never existed and neverwill. A conjecture no less vile argues that it is indifferently inconsequential to affirm or deny the realityof the shadowy corporation, because Babylon is nothing but an infinite game of chance.

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Night

I am ready. Just. It is not the last, nor rst. An attempt at primarycorrespondence. A knock. There’s been many. To begin, one starts rom thebottom. The foor. We are swelling ever closer. A beanbag and a thin

sponge mattress orge as one. A mirror to lay into. Cushioning a livingcorpse. Upon these pieces o elastic, prone, my concern is to seep conscious-ness into unconscious-ness. I ponder what it is like to enter the staticspace o sleep, to move rom the time o thinking, o grasping, to not.

My trail o thought is interrupted by a rotating murmur approachingrom the world outside. The drit o a boats motor across the canal rearsinto the oreground. It’s resonance peaks, then passes and ades out again.Tracing itsel rom the outside to the inside and to all sides o me, its tremororcing me to stand awake. I stand still and contemplate the shudderand movement back down towards the foor.

Then, with the verve o the motors tic on its way out o shot, restingback upon my refective membrane and in the rst conrmation oa orm o silence, another sound prompts an arising. Its echoing semi-metalicbuzz circulates the room. My contorting hand reaches out and up rombeneath a blanket o dust and seeks to sni the buzz out o the darkness.Vertigo ventriloquizes my mind and travels through to the tips o myngertips. My hand, now disorientated in the stillness o the blank air mimesthe circulating electric static that is ever present. ‘Is it a noise betweenmy ears I ask mysel? A fy perhaps?’ I try to put it out o my mind. I can’t.

It’s still there.My eyes open. Nights misty glint, like that o a carbon sheet,

conronts me through the barrier o a reinorced glass window. It has a clearace, the night, tonight, lune and opaque, or I saw the day today, butthe stars, in this moment, are never open to me. You see, my cornea whenwithout its lens is like a camera with the cap on. The switch cannot click.

But what to turn to now In this otherwise vacant passage o motion?Sound. A screech rom a passing gull. The feeting wat o its fappingwing. Water fowing through a pipe. A closing door reverberating in thedistance. Dust and its aint touch surrounding my vicinity. The refective

nuance o a chairs aluminium rame. I plunge ever urther into theinsignicant. Placing mysel and the things around me alongside the distant.Coherent and incoherent. I’m beginning to veer again. I must departbeore disappearing into the state o an unknown statue. It is not whollypermanent, more viscous, but still temporal, able to cut back into...

A ragmented reminder yields itsel that tomorrow is coming. Timepasses. Many words to move, but now? ‘No, not all at once.’ You’veheard it all beore, and again. I’ve ailed. Will try to nd you tomorrow.Mysel also.

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Im at my work place - The Petach Tikva Museum Of Contemporary Art. Its ahot day today.I just came back from 4 days of camping in The Dead Sea.

Being back at work feels strange. But what makes everything a tiny bitmore surreal is the festivity going on outside.There are sounds of marches and horns. A symphony music is now playingheroic marches and tunes. A lady with an aunts voice is shouting with amegafone «Left! Right! Left! Right!»

. She now thanks the people or children marching. I see nothing of this.I am in the little caravan that has been transformed into a workshopspace. Here we give the children workshops.Its memorial day or week or month outside. Last week was the Holocaustmemorial day. In a few days it is the memorial day for IDF soldiers whodied in wars throughout history. The lady outside is probably the pro-ducer of events related to the ceremonies that will talke place in themuseum complex. Now some national anthems and songs are being playedout.

Im suppose to sit now and prepare a year-long series of lectures about

contemporary art for visitiors of the museum. I cant. While the musicgets louder and louder I think of K.Not K from Kafka but K from «what the fucK?»

How did I arrive here? What am I to do in this humid caravan whilst themarches are being rehearsed outside?

I am in a museleom. I am a museleom.

I am a dinosoar in a museleom and the grand fiasco will be played out

before my eyes the moment I step out of this humid caravan. «Halleloyeah say the speakers outside.»

«Halleloyeah?», I ask myself when I hear the lady shout out loud onceagain «Left!, Right!, Left!, Right!».

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LeonardodiserPierodaVinci,knownasLEONARDODAVINCIVinci,1452–Amboise,1519

Portrait of LisaGherardini ,wife ofFrancescodel Giocondo,knownas theMona

Lisa(the JocondeinFrench)c.1503-06

Wood(poplar)H.0.77m;W.0.53m

AcquiredbyFrancoisIin1518DepartmentofPaintingsINV.779MuséeduLouvre,Paris,France

VincenzoPeruggiaDumenza,1881–Saint‐Maur‐des‐Fossés,1925

Theft August21,1911

MuséeduLouvreEmptyspace

August21,1911–December1911PhotographL’Illustration,September2,1911CollectionReworks–AlexisGuillier



alexis guiller Flaubert’s Castle

FrédéricAugusteBartholdiColmar,1834–Belfort,1904

LibertyEnlighteningtheWorld ,knownasthe StatueofLiberty 1886Copper

H.46.50m

LibertyIsland,NewYorkCity,NewYork,U.S.

DavidCopperfieldMetuchen,1956

TheMagicofDavidCopperfieldV:VanishingTheStatueofLiberty1983Televisionevent

StillfromTheMagicofDavidCopperfieldV:VanishingTheStatueofLiberty2011CollectionReworks–AlexisGuillier



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In the copy I own Gerstäcker gives his arm to K and lead him away through the darkness. Onecharacter I must not pass over in silence. He is a cutler from Magdeburg, called only “thegiant“. Let the reader imagine to himself an Herculean figure of colossal frame, with a curledbeard, ruddy cheeks, and bright good-tempered looking eyes, only a little too portly; a man,therefore, who would have been conspicuous by his size alone, but who attracted still greaternotice by his dress and accoutrements: a green blouse, light trousers, and a grey wide-awake;round the body, a white leathern belt five inches broad, from which were dangling a hugebroadsword dragging noisily on the pavement, and besides it, a cutlass; and, moreover, a clasp-knife about eighteen inches long; and if this were not enough, there were sticking in it pistolsand a dagger, the handle of which served as a pocket pistol. The wild and ludicrous effect of

his appearance was still further heightened by the companions of our hero. These were threediminutive individuals, here called “the satellites”, who sport round their huge leader as the pilot-fish does round the shark. These three little fellows likewise wear green blouses, wide-awakes, and white belts; they look exactly like young giants, only that instead of thebroadsword, very short knives or cutlasses adorned their sides. I have not seen anything half soodd for many years.

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Flaubert's Castle

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