The Book of Life

That the new manifesto of the Badoch Empire should be written by its most remarkable novelist did not come as a surprise to Kratochwill, who accepted his role in the Emperor’s great plan without hesitation. After a lengthy audience with the supreme head of state, Kratochwill went back to his villa, sat before his typewriter, and started to fulfil his obligations.

The Badochs had recognised the pattern of life. Their philosophy, which had rejected systematically the existence of gods, and the prevalence of chance, had produced a system of thought that, universally accepted, decreed that human existence was a simple formula, with an obvious course.

‘We are not slaves to random chance, we are masters of our will and therefore of our destiny, the end is never unknown to us, for we invent it with every day of our lives, and so should be able to predict it,’ the great Emperor had said, and how the prostrate Kratochwill had been inspired to genius by these words. He had at that moment decided that he would write the perfect manifesto.

He was a well-read man and understood the many permutations of other manifestos. He thought of the terrible bloodshed that had been carried out by men who had idiosyncratically interpreted the essentially pacifist Bible and Koran. Some scholars believed that only the reader’s interpretation of a text was viable, but Kratochwill railed against these people; what, then, was a writer, if only the reader could interpret his work? Were the author’s conceptions of his own text worthless? Of course, the man in the forest can see the forest, if he understands that the large number of trees he sees before him comprise a forest. To Kratochwill, distance from an object did not equate to a benefit for the inquiring mind. One had to seek the eye of the storm, and look out, to see the destruction with a clear eye.

He did, however, have some truck with the scholars who accused the original mortal authors of the Bible and the Koran of having being schizophrenic, or at least so legion and disparate that the whole text, when compiled, was incoherent. There were indeed, according to these particular scholars, messages of cruelty and racism, voices clamouring for fascistic war, the praise of slaughter and of power, embedded in those old holy texts, embedded in such a way as to be invisible to those who did not already feel some compunction to wage war. Because of this, Kratochwill knew that his manifesto, the only one that had been sanctioned by the great Badoch Emperor himself, would have to be utterly without permutation: a pure text that could only be interpreted in one single way.

That text had to be infused with the great Emperor’s concept that he, and his people, were masters of their destiny, that they controlled their lives, and their fates. Kratochwill agonised for days and nights, neither eating nor sleeping until, in a stupor, the solution emerged whilst reading an old text of proverbs.

There was a very old one, written by Giloq, which had always been one of his favourites. It read, simply:

Hope
only
produces
ecstasy.

At the time of writing, Giloq had been considered a madman and a brilliant visionary. He had written long, obtuse passages about fate and destiny, and, since both elements were anathema to the Badochs, these had long since fallen into obscurity. His early poetry had been formulaic and romantic. By the time of his death, he had taken to writing brief apothegms. It was one of those apparently simple puzzles that Kratochwill read now (of course, in translation from the ancient French language into modern Badoch).

There had been few studies made of these short, infuriating poems. Indeed, Kratochwill himself had made the one main contribution to the field in his ‘Giloq Exploded’, a long essay on the philosophical complexes of the long-dead poet. He had focussed on the quoted poem for his introduction, and returned to it in his conclusion.

In later Giloq, every word was pure. It had only one meaning. This had made it extremely difficult to translate into other languages, as different cultures charge certain words with different meanings and intonations. All in all, Giloq’s Badoch translator had done a fine job, in Kratochwill’s opinion.

The poem meant simply, that Hope was a placebo. It did not command fate and it did not invoke a god’s power. It produced, as a chemical reaction might produce, the sensation of ecstasy.

There was more to it, of course. Giloq, an artist, understood the importance of ecstasy to a culture which was, as his had been, ultimately pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent and short-sighted. It was all people wanted, that feeling of sudden pleasure. It meant nothing, could achieve nothing on its own, and yet it could drive the individual to great heights. Ecstasy could reward the visionary for his efforts and thus, it was the carrot before the donkey: its promise would encourage him to strive for greater insights.

Kratochwill had been proud of his achievements in the scholarly field pertaining to Giloq; in particular, of his discourse on the precise meaning of ‘produces’: “In the society of Giloq, the mechanisation of the world was greeted with ambivalence. Some rejected the new factories, others embraced the death of the old world. Agriculture became mechanised, carpentry became mechanised. No longer would a child walk past a barn and see, inside, a man working at a lathe. From the moment of mechanisation onwards, that boy would walk past an iron building, and see a vast, steaming and dark machine, curving over the subject of its endless toil.”

Of course, the word ‘produces’ meant something different to the Badochs, who had come to terms with technology. This had prevented many of them from correctly interpreting the connotations of Giloq’s apothegm. But Kratochwill was an exemplary scholar and could flit from the mindset of the present epoch into the mindset of another quite easily, such was his erudition (fame had allowed him to construct a wonderful library in his villa).

He had also deciphered, from that short poem, the secret of the poet’s religious beliefs.

Giloq had written at length about the non-existence of god, often with a vehemence more common to the religious than the atheist. Kratochwill had always thought that this marked the poet out as a believer, or at least an agnostic. It was not until he finished the short addendum to ‘Giloq Exploded’, entitled ‘Giloq the Mysotheist’, that he finally realised that he had succeeded in turning one of the most profound atheists of ancient history into a confused and embittered Christian.

In this brief note, Kratochwill returned to the word ‘produced’. No factory could produce an object without instruction; no chemical reaction could take place until the required elements had been put together. Possibly without even being aware of it, Giloq had given himself away in his acrostic. He had conceived of a production line, yet had not grasped that a guiding hand was needed to set that line in motion; robots cannot decide for themselves what they are to build or demolish. Even Giloq had to recognise the crucial importance of a foreman. The word ‘produces’ was a complex that included the hidden face of a god who had set the world in motion. Kratochwill had transformed Giloq into a man of god.

Such were the perils of the written word: a later scholar can turn a writer into many things that he never was. The Badoch manifesto would not have the same loopholes.

Kratochwill decided that he would adopt the acrostic of Giloq, yet would go one step further. In order to prevent any erroneous decoding of the text, he would develop the concept of the acrostic so that the text was a cube. The first four pages would lie side by side, with each line of text running onto the same line on the following page (rather than the last line running on to the first line of the next page). The lines of the fourth page would run on to the corresponding lines on the first page. The fifth and sixth pages would be the top and the bottom of the cube, and would run on to the text of the first four pages.

The text on each page would have to be a grid of symbols which would read the same up, down, left and right. It would require a new alphabet, and a key. Kratochwill saw that this would prevent anyone from reading the text in a new way. One would be able to start on any side of the cube’s six sides and read the same story, the story of Life according to the Emperor’s philosophy, which dictated that one’s fate could be predicted, and shaped through conscious decisions made during one’s existence.

The new alphabet would be made up of words that could not mean anything else but that which Kratochwill intended. By creating new symbols that would read the same upside-down or left-to-right or right-to-left, he would be able to develop a key that explained, with each definition of a symbol, the exact meaning of the word denoted, and the only meaning that was ever intended by the author. No future scholar would be able to reinterpret the text, as he would have full control over the sole meanings of his words and their symbols. He would systematically decry other interpretations of a particular word by explaining, in the key, those possible other interpretations and their abolition from the conscious mind of the writer. If one is aware of permutations, one can guard against them; X might also mean Y, but in this case, it means solely X.

Now that he had his model, Kratochwill realised that there would be a difficulty. The text, he realised, could only run on from page to page regardless of the direction in which it was read (up, down, left and right) if it was symmetrical. It would have to have perfect horizontal and vertical symmetry.

This was no great obstacle. He simply amended his code. The symbols now meant different things depending on what symbols had gone before. The preceding symbol would give meaning to, or rather identify the intended meaning of, that symbol which followed it.

When he had not only written the manifesto – which was lofty, poetic and inspirational in tone, just as the Emperor would want, and which fitted current Badoch tastes to perfection – but encoded it, completed the long and arduous key, thought of every possible alternative meaning for each word and carefully explained that these other meanings were not intended to be part of the text in any way, he was able to build the Book of Life.

He then, with the glorious object winging its way by courier to the Imperial palace, went to bed and slept a sleep without dreams or interruptions. Yet he awoke with a terrific start, having realised that he had utterly failed.

The Emperor believed that one could control what happened next by understanding the present action. Fate was malleable in the hands of man. Had the text of the Book of Life, by the great Kratochwill, not perfectly realised this in the only pure form possible?

Yes, it had, but it had also done the opposite. When read from one edge to the other, the text developed in such a way as to illustrate how a symbol or event could only be understood when the previous symbols and events had taken place. Yet, what happened if one started reading from left to right, and then switched, mid-line, from right to left? Or started reading from top to bottom, then turned ninety degrees, and continued reading from left to right? The meaning would change completely. And what about diagonal readings? What of that interpretation?

In his attempt to abolish all interpretations save one to show how fate can be predicted and manipulated, Kratochwill had in fact multiplied the possible interpretations beyond human comprehension. He had, unwittingly, created some ancient god’s plan for the world, which meant everything and nothing.

Kratochwill threw himself from the top window of his villa, and was found lying dead in a broken heap by a prostitute returning home after her night’s adventures. It was a fate the great writer would never have predicted.

By Christopher Hobday

Copyright November 2006