The Absolute, page 26
Within the terribly stratified model found in Russia at the time, Alexander found himself occupying some of the lowest rungs on the scale. Neither the communal settlement where he lived nor the activities in which he spent his time encouraged his growth and personal development. We can imagine how his sensibility of an extraordinary budding artist was affected as he found himself compelled to share his days with a bunch of hoodlums and criminals. In that environment, he didn’t even have his short-term survival guaranteed. Making a wise decision, he opted for the path that opens for young people with great ambitions and slender prospects, and taking advantage of his winsome appearance, started work as a bellboy at the Stropanovich, a travelers’ hotel near the Bolshoi Theater. Twelve hours of work, accommodation in a room barely larger than an attic, a uniform, changes of clothes and two meals a day. In the salon-bar, there was a fairly decent piano, on which he worked out some ideas when he had free time.
He took care of bureaucratic procedures for the manager; oversaw the cleaning of rooms; helped serve breakfasts, lunches and dinners; filled glasses and lit cigars for gentlemen; closed or opened baggage for ladies; and carried dirty plates to the kitchen. Limited as it was, a milieu like this could encompass the interests of an entire life that aspires to the peaks of modesty: excellence in service, an ascent within hierarchies, secondhand experience (the tales of passengers). Alexander, in contrast, absorbed everything from above for what it was, a structure of relations, a blueprint. This way of seeing distanced him from the facts, and at the same time allowed him to capture them in their true dimension. Obviously the blueprint had movement: sounds and colors and temperatures. Sometimes he felt tempted to transcribe it on music paper, as in fact he ended up doing in his first composition, Small World . . . Nor did he abstain from other pleasures that a certain degree of liberalism permitted between staff and clients. But that is of no importance.
One day, the concierge sent him to room 1234, an involuntary homage to the sacred numbers and a display of megalomania by the owner, since the building had no more than forty rooms. There the task awaited him of satisfying the requirements of a difficult guest. The lady in question was accustomed to returning foods because they were dry, raw, overcooked or greasy; she protested because the towels weren’t hot enough and the sheets were too cold; she broke mirrors, moved furniture, slammed closet doors, made noises, howled and conversed at the top of her lungs with nonexistent beings until the wee hours of the morning. If she hadn’t been a faithful habitué, one of those who punctually settled bills (with inflated costs), the administration would never have tolerated her stay. She wasn’t even a distinguished visitor, a Polish princess or English singer. She was merely a fat Russian, a diabetic and lame fifty-something who pushed her snobbery to the limit with her request that she be called Madame.
“You’ll address me this way. Madame. Madame Helena Petrovna,” she said to Alexander as soon as she opened the door. “My last name is Blavatsky, but almost no one calls me that, in theory not even my husband, whom I haven’t seen for over ten years now. Speaking of seeing. I saw you. In the hallways. With that sneaky manner. You don’t fool me, little mask. You’ve been called to do great things. There’s a portion of being in you . . . an octave, ascendant toward the sun. Do you understand what I’m saying? It doesn’t matter now. But don’t get confused. To be is not to be perceived, except by chance. In this world, fame is the consequence of an error. The great men, the gurus, the saints, the mahatmas, are often directly intangible. Your mission . . . It’s not the moment either. What’s your name?”
My uncle said his first and last name, added “ma’am” (the lady blinked) and then asked what she needed. Madame Blavatsky took a seat in a somewhat rickety Louis XVI chair and gestured to the seat beside her. Alexander preferred to remain standing.
“Let’s understand each other,” Madame Blavatsky said. “The idea of the wheel of life as a cycle, a perpetual return, is the permanent revolution on which a thousand reflections have been spun by the Sumerians, the Buddhists, Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the list goes on. In contrast, the channeling of thought based on an oriented turn, in which history develops from a unique start to a definitive and irreversible end, is Zoroastrianism, which has transmitted its dualist perspective and unilateral orientation to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, simultaneously passing it in a different way to Mithraism, Manichaeism and Gnosticism. From which of these waters do I drink? Well . . . Maybe it’s time for me to introduce myself, so nothing will lead you into a confusion that doesn’t depend on my will. You could say I’m a transmitter of knowledge, and at the same time an inveterate seeker. The mahatmas speak to me of great truths. But why you . . . ? What I saw . . . I know what you need. Let’s start from the beginning. Obviously, sometimes I can be wrong. I travel from place to place, spreading . . . And then, as you can imagine, I don’t go around carrying giant libraries. My invisible friends ‘bring down’ to me whatever I need to know, so I can then communicate it to you. I see those words floating in the breeze, pages and pages, books of revelations. There can be errors, of course. Sometimes one reads in the mirror, in darkness. A six becomes a nine, Sanskrit appears as Latin. How is it my fault if I’m not given things already prepared? Anyway, the letters look like each other. That said, even if it’s expressed only partially, a truth can never lead to confusion. Except . . . But I shouldn’t speak to you of this, yet. Everything in proportion. Melody. Counterpoint. Geometry. Arithmetic. And with harmony.”
Madame Blavatsky took out a gigantic Havana cigar from her little raffia handbag and stretched it toward Alexander, who rejected the invitation.
“I want you to light it for me,” the woman said. Alexander excused himself. Madame Blavatsky took a couple of drags and watched how the fire burned the tobacco leaf, forming a layer of soft reddish ash. Then she continued:
“Where is the origin of our horror for the infinite? Everything starts with Pythagoras. Or even further back. Fundamentally: Where are we when we listen to music? Where do we go when we listen to it? Where are we guided? Pythagoras. Pythagoras! Of Ionian origin, he was born on the island of Samos in approximately 582 BC. At twenty years of age he was already familiar with Thales and Anaximander, but having heard of the extraordinary knowledge of the Egyptian priests and their mysteries, he decided to go in search of them with the aim of having himself initiated at Memphis. There he could pore more deeply over sacred mathematics, the science of numbers and the universal principles at the center of his philosophical system, which later he would formulate in a new way. His initiation lasted twenty-two years under the pontificate of the high priest Sonchis. Then came the invasion and conquest of Egypt by Cambyses, king of the Persians and the Maedi. Cruel and despotic, after having decapitated thousands of Egyptians, Cambyses took him prisoner. Following a brief and instructive period in prison, similar to the one your father experienced . . . Don’t make that face. How do I know? No, no one talked to me about you. I’ve seen it in the air; I’ve read it in your book. After some time, Cambyses banished Pythagoras to Babylonia. There he made contact with the inheritors of Zoroaster (‘The number three reigns the Universe, and the monad—one, unique, unity—is its principle,’ says one of his oracles) and with the priests of three different religions: the Chaldean, the Persian and the Jewish, which enabled him to widen his philosophical and scientific horizons. While he was instructed in the sacred rites of the region, he also perfected his knowledge of astrology, geometry and mathematics, and learned that the movements of the stars are regulated by numerical laws. After this, our friend knew more than any of his Greek contemporaries. It was time for him to return to Greece to carry out his mission . . . Pythagoras headed for Delphi, a city located at the foot of Mount Parnassus. There he founded the Temple of Apollo, famous for its oracles. In this temple Pythagoras transmitted the secrets of his doctrine. After a whole year, he left for Crotone, a city in the south of Italy, in Calabria. As soon as he returned to his native land, he founded his own secret society: the Pythagorean sect. The initiates were divided into two categories: the Mathematicians (‘knowers’), young people especially gifted for abstract thought, and the Acousmatics (‘auditors’), simpler men who recognized the truth in an intuitive form, through dogmas, beliefs, apologues, indemonstrable oral remarks lacking any grounds, moral principles and aphorisms, the kind of fisherfolk my good friend Maestro Jesus gathered up when he wanted to divulge his more straightforward teachings. The hard nucleus, the firm defense of the Pythagorean doctrine, was clearly made up of the Mathematicians—committed to the totality of knowledge—while the Acousmatics were entrusted with protecting the gate to the entrance of the temple and with looking after the Sacred Veil. Esoteric and exoteric. Now. Back to Greece. The Pythagorean Arcadia had to do with cultivating mysticism and philosophic thought, whose foundation was a conviction in the possibility of achieving immortality as a series of infinite reincarnations. If you think of this order as not a successive but a combinatory form, you will have summarized the whole of musical possibility . . . But let’s go to the numbers. Pythagoras dedicated himself to exploring Everything, the aggregation of all elements, which he named the Cosmos, starting from the assumption (of Eastern root) that this aggregate had certain proportions governed by laws that men can know and understand through the Number, which is the most basic foundation, ‘the essence of all things.’ Taking it as a given that the cosmos in its totality is subject to progressive and predictable cycles, he decided to measure it with these instruments or first principles. He also claimed that numbers, used to represent mathematical values, are separate from the qualities and characteristics they represent, and have another function: to operate in the spiritual plane. If you don’t understand anything, Alexander, just ask me. Your asking something doesn’t necessarily imply I can explain it to you. So: for Pythagoras the essence of the number is prior to any tridimensional body and is divine in origin. His premise: ‘God geometrizes.’ What he learns with the geometers of Egypt and the Babylonian astrologers, added to his own experimentation with musical instruments, helps him establish that the number is the essence of the Universe and the root and source of eternal nature. Therefore, while the Greek thought of the period took for granted that the earth was at the center of its universe, held up by tortoises and elephants, Pythagoras already knew that Earth and other planets turn around the sun. He also thought that celestial bodies move in a harmonious way in accordance with a numerical scheme, separated from each other by intervals corresponding to the length of harmonic chords, whose movement generates a vibration . . . And that vibration is a note. But since every celestial body is in relation with some other at a specific fixed distance, set inside its little glass box like a gear inside a watch . . . What he argued was that the distances between these planets have the same proportions as those existing between the sounds of a musical scale considered ‘harmonic,’ or consonant. This is starting to interest you a little more now, isn’t it? From the Earth to the Moon would be one tone, from the Moon to Mercury a semitone, from Mercury to Venus another semitone, and from Venus to the Sun a tone and a half. Therefore, between the Sun and the Earth there would be a separation corresponding to a fifth interval, and between the Moon and the Sun a distance corresponding to a fourth interval. Give me a glass of water, please. No. The phrase isn’t of water, it’s with water, on this planet. On others . . . I can’t remember if Pythagoras also said that at the same time the Earth revolves around the Sun, the rest of the planets turn around Earth . . . Who cares? So much time has passed . . . Anyway, all this philosophy had no further object than the purification of the soul, and so . . . Obviously some people will understand anything by purification. Some even drink their own urine. Disgusting. To sum up . . . the tones emitted by spinning planets depend on the arithmetical proportions of their orbits around . . . the Earth? the Sun? The length of the strings of a lyre determines its tones the same way. The spheres closest to . . . the Sun? the Earth? produce deep tones, which grow more high-pitched as the distance increases. In such a way that, have you ever been to a concert? No? Holy mahatma! This boy is a hymn to ignorance! Then just imagine it: you focus your opera glasses into the black velvet depths. It’s the firmament. At the start the theater lights seem turned out, and only silence can be heard. Then, slowly—you have all of time ahead of you, eons to get used to it—you start to make out the radiance of stars, dead or not, who knows? Imagine you are eternity itself, to help you settle nice and calm into your seat. Next, tune your hearing. You hear a violin here, a horn there, the bellows of an organ. The instruments breathe. Obviously they aren’t real instruments. Every planet spins around other planets, and on its own axis, in accordance with its relative position and velocity and angle of spin, to produce a sound or series of sounds that combines with those of the other planets in remarkable synchrony: this is what Pythagoras called ‘the music of the spheres.’ Of course, all this is a mathematical deduction: no human ear (except the auricle of thought) can hear such blessed music, because it resonates at a frequency impossible to capture. The stars produce ghostly whistlings, tappings, hummings, booming noises. I myself, during one of my astral trips, saw these movements; I heard this concert, conveniently amplified. But I also saw other things. Lots of stellar dross, arias drifting across space, compositions written by those yet unborn. I found myself witnessing the moment a neutron star suffered from a massive earthquake. The poor celestial body vibrated like a bell and let out a note we could define as A major. And that’s not all. If you pay attention, you’ll realize that everything vibrates at its own frequency. Us, and the cumuli of stars and galaxies. Going no farther, our Milky Way oscillates with music like the head of a drum. So . . . Ah, after so many trips, I’m so tired . . . I need foot massages, an affectionate lover . . . Would it be all right if I put out the cigar I didn’t smoke in the water you didn’t bring me?”
3
The theosophist made him a very tempting offer, in terms of the amount of payment and work, but also warned him that accepting it might involve him in a few complicated situations. Some understood she was a visionary, but most considered her to be a simple fraud.
They traveled around Russia. There’s no need to list the cities. My uncle took advantage of his spare time to fill the gaps in his education. It was obvious that Madame Blavatsky had offered him a summarized version of fundamental topics.
Collating his own readings with what his patroness had told him, he found that she’d been at once succinct and confused. Maybe it was due to strategic motives. In the esoteric tradition, revealed knowledge must possess an appearance that is simultaneously chaotic and incomplete, an overwhelming and obsessive character; the revelation must be the mirror image that the sky casts upon the waters. In this sense, Helena Petrovna had shown herself to be an ideal pedagogue. Alexander threw himself into digging into the ruins of Pythagoreanism to find any fragments of knowledge yet to be drawn out. In Chapter 5 of Book I of the Metaphysics, Aristotle recalls the Pythagoreans claimed that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things, and that things themselves were numbers—meaning not that numbers were a metaphor, but that things and beings were truly made, composed, by them. The number is the elemental principle, the essence of what exists, like atoms for Democritus but with size and extension. And what was impressive was that Pythagoras had reached this conclusion by discovering the numeric base of the musical intervals (1/2, 3/2 and 4/3)! Therefore, since numbers were the key to musical sounds, whoever knew their properties and relations would grasp the laws responsible for the existence of nature and the mechanics of the entire Universe. They were also the foundation of the spirit and the means by which reality presented itself. In a certain way, this derived from mysticism: if numbers possessed reality as a substance that allowed one to discover both the qualities and the physical aspects of things, then this meant they were also hieroglyphs, with which one could perform metaphysical operations of great symbolic significance. Numbers and their sacred character. Numerical mysticism. The cabalistic properties of numbers. Their special attributes. One, monad, principle and foundation of all that exists, unique God, Solus, Sun. Two, dyad, passive principle, symbol of diversity, expression of nature’s contrasts (night and day, light and dark, health and illness, et cetera). Numbers. Numbers. Numbers, and so on until ten, which of course was the most sacred of all, because the first four numbers contained the secret of the musical scale (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10) and its total formed the number of the Universe, the sum of all possible geometric dimensions: one is the point; two is the line; three, the surface; and four, space. The Tetractys.
A little patience. Sometimes, while reading, Alexander wondered whether ultimately he wanted to devote himself to geometry, music or cosmology. A matter that wouldn’t be resolved immediately, in any case. If veneration for the number ten (the first quadruple) had a transcendental cosmological implication for the Pythagoreans in their doctrine about the arrangement of the Universe (considered for the first time in a non-geocentric way), then it isn’t strange their love for proportions and equivalences led them to claim that ten planets were moving through the sky. But since at first glance only nine could be observed (Earth, the Moon, the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the outer Sphere of Fixed Stars, all turning in concentric circular orbits around the Throne of Zeus, the central fire), they saw themselves forced to discover or imagine a tenth planet. Invisible but influential, this shimmering black stain closed the account: it was the Anti-Earth.
A perfect representation: Alexander understood the schema. His brother and himself, at two extremes. Earth and Anti-Earth. United. The telepathic link and its interferences (minimal dissonance). And the Sun (if it was the father) no longer at the center of the Universe, but spinning like the others around the central fire. The mother also far away. All of them burning, dancing in the cosmos. Earth and Anti-Earth, Sun and Moon. Plump Madame Blavatsky had to be Jupiter.
