The Absolute, page 33
“Are you talking about . . . ?”
“Isn’t it an astonishing paradox that although we’re an almost infinitesimal fraction of this planet’s total mass, our fate is to worry about the cosmos? If man has been able to alter the biosphere, with an expansion of his talents one might also expect transformation at a universal scale. In any case, I’m somewhat pessimistic about our possibilities. Maybe we should have been born a few million years ago: we would have had time to truly develop our brains . . .”
“When you say catastrophe, is that a kind of allegory?”
“No. I’m sure about the existence of a direction, not a destiny. And I’ve observed that something like the end of times . . . is approaching. In Alaska at the Edge of the Pole, my colleague Jacob Tujacevich wrote about how we’re experiencing the slide of Earth’s mantle and crust over the liquid nucleus of the planet. The movement is growing progressively faster. As this displacement makes the equator move over new regions of the Earth’s surface, these will begin to suffer changes in their centrifugal force and sea level, which will produce new distributions of sea and earth, meltings of glaciers that keep the crust’s tectonic plates in position, seismic and volcanic calamities. In addition, it won’t be long before the sun begins a cycle of unusual activity, generating more spots, launching enormous gas clouds into space, basically acting as it hasn’t since the start of the last Ice Age. This is probably due, although it’s not the only reason, to a modification of the Earth’s magnetic field, and therefore to its gravitational field. Of course, the Earth-Sun attraction works both ways. Luckily, until now we’ve been saved from burning to a crisp since the effect of both masses dissolves over distance. Is the increase in effect, the proliferation of sun spots, due perhaps to a change in our planet’s alignment? Could we be leaving our orbit? Getting too close to the sun? It’s not absurd to think that . . . Ultimately, even with its size, our sun is no more than an immense flaming globule to which we remain joined through the effect of gravity, one that is susceptible to the tugs and pushes of the harder, denser, colder planets that orbit it. Like Earth.”
“Do you think this double attraction will end up throwing our planet off its axis . . . ?”
“Yes. The sun will come up against it, just as an elephant’s backside comes up against the mosquito that stings it. Before this kind of coupling takes place, of course, the Earth will have first burned to a cinder. Usually what happens is that the sun doesn’t lean or fall but wobbles and expands in the direction of the center of the solar system mass. The stronger the gravitational effect, the greater the probability that there will be fissures or tearing in its surface. If this happens, it will release an incredible amount of the radiation trapped inside the fireball. Imagine that explosion in interstellar space! A spectacle worth contemplating, though obviously we won’t manage to enjoy it for more than a millionth of a second. Naturally, I don’t think of the Apocalypse in religious terms, although the Sumerian astronomers thought that the orbital anomalies of the sun were due less to Earth than to an external gravitational influence, to a binary companion we’ve never yet been able to observe: they called it Nibiru and said our planet will end when it appears in the sky as a red sun. Of course, the feeble-minded courtesans that swarmed around Nicholas I tried to link this prophecy to the ritual appearance of red flags in anti-government protests, but they were too inept even to put together a convincing metaphorical system to explain it. In any case, this isn’t the only danger. Remember the explosion of Irkutsk, a few years ago? Thousands of hectares devastated in a remote part of Siberia, and a single victim, a dead shepherd, testimony to the faulty population scheme of our empire. Well then: this absolutely was not the ‘Death Ray’ Nikola Tesla is supposed to have invented, but the result of a meteorite’s fall. The truth is that every sixty-two million years, the orbit of our solar system passes through a region of the Milky Way that possesses an extraordinary gravitational density. Some sixty-two million years ago, one of these meteorites fell on our planet and extinguished the majority of life, including the dinosaurs, what I supposedly study. And one hundred twenty-four million years ago, there was another similar impact, as the previous fossil layer proves . . . In reality, I am a biogeochemist and eschaton-paleontologist, one who seeks amid the ashes of the past and the deceptive greenery of the present for the traces that herald the end. Here I must repeat a truth that never ceases to be relevant: despite what ordinary perception indicates, the stars are not fixed in space. They move on a colossal journey through the galaxies. The Universe is a romantic date in which like seeks like. Women will talk of the soul, but we men are right when we say that the only motor of love is attraction: the laws of physics themselves indicate it. In this sense, our Milky Way is being attracted toward a massive grouping of stars called the Virgo Cluster. There . . .”
“I’m unable to appreciate the technical details,” says my uncle.
“Briefly, when we’re a few million kilometers away, the process of this approach will undergo a qualitative leap, and the combination of light and gases and color . . .”
“We’ll crash?”
“Yes.”
“That is the end, and you’re satisfied just formulating it?”
“Do you want me to blink to make my uneasiness clear?” says Vernadsky. “I don’t have a wife or kids; I don’t have to worry about descendants.”
“If you study a planet or, going even further, the cosmos to the point of understanding everything, what sense does it make to scorn humanity to the point of washing your hands of its fate?” says my uncle.
“But are you crying, my friend? Why? Before the irreparable, stoicism . . .”
“You seem to possess equal doses of fascination for the achievements of knowledge and the vistas of annihilation, my dear Vladimir Ivanovich. In any case, the announcement of evil does not justify complacence, based on the miserable argument that one has nothing to lose. What we’ve seen . . . what we’ve known . . . I don’t know what might be at the limits of the Universe, I don’t know what will happen to us. But no worthier task occurs to me now than to wager everything on the preservation of our species.”
“Do you really think there’s something worthy of being rescued? Your own work, Prometheus: Poem of Fire, encapsulates the dilemma between salvation and condemnation! The flame that Titan raises up to illuminate humanity is the same one lit during the fall . . .”
“True,” says Alexander. “But the question that opened our little chat isn’t simply rhetorical, is it? I think you formulated it as a provocation.”
Vernadsky smiles:
“In the solitude of my laboratory, I hear the notes the stars produce through their vibrations. The sun sings. The stars sing. Ghostly whistlings, drummings, buzzings. In the case of the sun and other radiant bodies, they express the passage of energy from the inferno of the nucleus toward the surface, and its escape into space. The entire Milky Way oscillates and vibrates like a drum. But this sound has become . . . out of tune, and therein lies the danger.”
“So,” says Scriabin, “the harmony of the spheres exists . . .”
“Existed. The relationship has been destroyed. The question, my dear savior of humanity, is whether we can succeed in restoring that lost order.”
16
Why does a musician, just a musician, no more or less than a musician, decide to set in motion the impossible? How can someone transform into a savior of the cosmos, a crusader of humanity? There’s no question that with Prometheus my uncle had made his first great effort to transform the consciousness of our species (even if it was limited only to those who happened to listen to it). But ultimately, that had been no more than a game for children, compared with the task Vernadsky had entrusted to him: to modify the structure of reality, thus restoring the Universe to its harmonious order to prevent the final Apocalypse.
Now then, how could he do so? Was it about augmenting the previous techniques, intensifying them to an unthinkable level until the extraordinary occurred? If Vernadsky was right, it was a matter of pure logic: life is a cosmic process, a progressive colonization in which the self-conscious elements work radical reforms upon the ones that lack knowledge. The Universe, in contrast, works in ways that may be amusing or terrible, but are always involuntary: it may be a Great Thing, but it’s not a Being. It was from this point, and from his own actions, that my uncle had to start, assuming his mission (like Prometheus). Of course, he had to consider the extent of it: one man, One against the faulty tropism of the Universe. But what means did he have? His mystic chord, perhaps? It hadn’t even given results with Rasputin’s harmonic shield! The challenge couldn’t be compared with any other; the probability of success was tiny, but the result wasn’t determined beforehand. Perhaps this is why my uncle decided to give his project of transformative mega-composition, which would be projected into the infinite abyss, the name Mysterium. The title alludes, of course, to Johannes Kepler’s Mysterium cosmographicum.
Posterity has collaborated to cast this activity into the shadow through the deceptive light of myth and legend. The disciples of Madame Blavatsky, both the orthodox and the unconventional, share a great deal of the responsibility for this. The following narrative has an air of undeniable theosophical exoticism.
According to this version, my uncle planned the performance of the Mysterium in the Himalayas. For seven days, an orchestra made up of two thousand musicians, situated near the peak of Mount Everest, would play the composition, while a multitude of chromolas or tastieras per luce spread out at different heights across the neighboring mountains (Annapurna, Shishapangma, Makalu, Cho Oyu, et cetera) cast their colors into the sky. Flames of blue-gold-red-blue fire would shoot up over them, as machines like modern sprinklers released perfumes for the rapture and elevation of a crowd of participants dressed in white togas, who would follow the concert and let themselves be mystically enveloped by its effects, or braid themselves into ecstatic-orgiastic forms with Indian dancers. Every dawn would be a prelude, every nightfall a coda. But this wasn’t all: hanging from the skies (no doubt held by the invisible mahatmas), bells of alchemical gold shining like mirrors would make the celestial spaces vibrate. And at the end of the seven days, like a sudden rainfall, the entire Totality would change.
Of course, since this event did not take place, the Blavatskyites argue that a few months before the culmination of his work, fully engaged in the task of editing the draft of his Mysterium—titled Final Sketch, Preparation for the Final Mystery or Preparatory Action—Alexander Scriabin had an illumination: the work he planned to carry out was contradictory in its aim, and so he had to abandon it.
It seems madness to think that my uncle imagined for even a moment that his coherency as an artist depended on relinquishing his work, but on this matter, the lapse by Madame Blavatsky’s disciples isn’t without a certain sound judgment, at least going by the assumptions of theosophy. According to them, what happened is that a radiance spilled over him, instantly flooding everything, such that he suddenly grasped the Truth, once and for all. And this Truth revealed to him that the material attributes of the phenomenal world are only apparent. In this sense—he’d have thought—music, his music, all music, was a concept, but first and foremost it was also material, the acoustic expression of an idea transmitted through physical objects that vibrate at their own spectrum of frequencies. Hence both the initial outline, the Preparatory Action, and its next step, the great work of the Mysterium, would be just as illusory, weavings of the veil of Maya they themselves were attempting to tear apart. The idea (or Idea) would thus be: if the phenomenological world is a deception, the only way for the Mysterium to find success as a means of universal transformation would be for it to remain in the sphere of the absolute concept, because once translated into sound, its power would fade.
Having understood this, my uncle would thus have taken the only coherent next step: his artistic transfiguration and physical death, resigning the corporeal nature of his being and the material of his work to a dissolution in prolonged Nirvana, a delightful insubstantiality.
The only problem with this theory (as idealistic as it is moving) is that it’s false. We could even say that Alexander Scriabin’s great wager was for an extreme materialism: the construction of a great musical-physical-acoustic system to alter the course of reality. Whether death took him before or after he achieved the results he sought . . . is the question we’ll take up next. But there isn’t the slightest doubt that his purpose was neither mystical nor ineffable but aesthetic, political, cosmic and cosmological. What importance does it have if material is a form of energy, or the opposite? What he proposed was to generate a steady musical ray transmitted in the form of a constant luminous vibration, which, projecting itself toward the farthest reaches of the Universe, would generate a shock wave able to realign all the planets with its impact.
Energy? Matter? Music? Wave? Vibration?
Now, at last, the moment has come to take up the Mysterium.
17
In the Middle Ages, Rudolf de St. Trond (Quaestiones in musica) attributed a color to each musical mode. In the sixteenth century, Franchinus Gaffurius touched the soul of more than one damsel by comparing the effect of a glissando with the image of a rainbow, because in both, sounds and colors follow each other in an interrupted metamorphosis. In the eighteenth century, Marin Cureau de la Chambre and Marin Mersenne designed new acoustic-chromatic scales, and Isaac Newton laid the scientific foundation for the existence of a musical division of the luminous spectrum according to seven natural sounds, on whose chromatic base Louis Bertrand Castel invented his “ocular harpsichord,” the instrument for which Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote some of his compositions. Alexander Scriabin picked up the tradition of joining colors to sounds and gave it an extraordinary turn when he decided to appeal to the first and primordial symbol of all colors, their source of origin, the step prior to the decomposition of the prism, light itself, with the aim this would transmit every one of the notes composing it to all the corners of the Universe.
In that sense, the metaphor of the Himalayas might be useful as a testament to the dimension of its ambitions, but nothing more. What’s true is that to reach his objective, my uncle had to turn to the science and technology of the period for help. Because, as we all know, unlike light, sound cannot travel through a vacuum. “Luminous music.” Maybe the explanation should be brief. Light waves are electromagnetic energy and sound waves are mechanical energy, and due to their nature, the latter are able to change their range. A telephone: the transmitter contains a coil of wire and a magnetic field, which turn the sound wave—the speaker’s voice—into an electric signal that can be transmitted through the telephone cable. The receptor coil receives the electric signal and generates a second field, which makes a slender membrane—an ordinary and effective simile for the marvelous human ear, with its fossa and lobule and delicate pinkness and golden layers of wax—vibrate in response to the electric signal, changing it back to sound.
Now then, the planets lack a similar system. The Universe exists but doesn’t speak. Maybe the time has come to reveal that the bells that would hang from the Himalayas, “shiny as mirrors,” were, in fact, mirrors. The ones my uncle would use to transpose the key of his music. And that the machine used to launch the Mysterium into the depths of heaven . . . that machine was built.
To do so Vernadsky had to draw on his resources, among them deceit and flattery. The funds a useless minister collected for the restoration of the Pulkovo Observatory building and the improvement of its telescope were diverted toward assembling a cannon that could shoot the most powerful luminous beams history had ever known, something unique of its kind, although technically it was no more than a practical application, colossal in size but theoretically identical in aim, of the design of the photophone invented in 1880 by Alexander Graham Bell.14
Of course, Vernadsky couldn’t deceive his colleagues for long about the true character of the machine he was building, and he had to use a good part of his prestige and the weight of his authority to silence grumblers and avoid the spread of rumors. Even so, buried though they’d been, voices were heard whispering, almost always reaching ears not properly trained to interpret the contents of the message, so that over the years the version that ended up prevailing—the most ludicrous, but also the one most in keeping with the spirit of the period—alleged that my uncle had managed to convince Vernadsky of the need to build a device able to establish communication with ghosts and apparitions. It isn’t strange this occurred. Spiritism is no more than a dark appropriation of the clear technical solution genuinely found—or perhaps it’s the opposite, and science makes the absurd dreams of our species a reality: Thomas Alva Edison tried to profit from his venture by claiming that thanks to the telephone, it was possible to speak with the dead, such that Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, ordered loyal followers to bury one of these devices with her, in case she wanted to transmit new revelations from the afterlife. Following this logic, Alexander Scriabin would have used Vernadsky in order to speak with Julian again.
