NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/alt/prose/1525

Internet Message Format | 1992-11-15 | 27.0 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!darwin.sura.net!spool.mu.edu!olivea!charnel!psgrain!ee.und.ac.za!ucthpx!uctvax.uct.ac.za!hornpete
From: [e-mail] (Peter Horn)
Newsgroups: alt.prose
Subject: The Greenhouse Effect
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 15 Nov 92 06:40:16 GMT
Organization: University of Cape Town
Lines: 496

The greenhouse effect

Grandduke Pawel Ivanovich Manilov, the grandson of a R, whose grandfather and
father had made their money first
in the rag trade, but soon had bought a number of factories and
farms, and finally enriched themselves by large scale
speculation on the stock exchange, in the insurance business and
in merchant banking, had offered the South African government a
considerable sum of money to sell him Robben Island where he
proposed to build his palace in the middle of an existing nature
reserve, which he intended to expand by demolishing all
buildings which reminded him of the time when Robben Island was
the university of the revolutionaries. When the South African
government refused to sell him Robben Island, and after an
equally unsuccessful attempt to buy Seal Island in False Bay, he
persuaded the municipalities of Strand and Gordons Bay to give
him permission to construct his own island in False Bay. This
permission was granted despite large scale protests by the
ecology lobby, and grandduke Pawel Ivanovich Manilov spared no
expense to erect an artificial island and a splendid palace in
the waters of False Bay. Thus separated from the herd, as he
expressed himself, he created his own completely artistic and
aesthetic world, which, however, carried in its conception the
future catastophe. Because one thing is certain, the green lobby
was finally vindicated: in whatever small and insignificant way
the very building of the island, the burning of petrol and oil
used in driving the machines to transport and prepare the
material, contributed to the final calamity to which it
succumbed.

I had to thank my invitation to the soie which the Grandduke
gave to celebrate the discovery of the manuscript of the late
medieval anonymous choral work Herre got, dir sungen schne by
Constantin du Plessis, professor of music at the University of
Cape Town and expert in late medieval choral music, in his
palace on the artificial island to the fact that the grandduke
was very interested in a relique of the French Revolution which
had been in the possession of my family for nearly two hundred
years: the blade used in the guillotine with which Robespierre
had been beheaded. The grandduke had a considerable collection
of memorabilia and implements used by revolutionaries to murder
legitimate heads of state and other revolutionaries of whom they
no longer approved. His greatest treasure was the gun with which
Tzar Alexander was shot by the Russian revolutionaries. While I
was tempted by his considerable offer, I pretended to be adamant
that I would never part with this family heirloom, because I
wanted to see if I could not raise the price even further. The
invitation was an attempt by the grandduke to further these
negotiations. In turn, for a young and as yet unknown writer
like me, such an invitation had all the possibilities of opening
up doors to the inner circles of culture both in this colonial
outpost of European culture and, of course, where it really
mattered, in Europe. It was my particular bad luck that this
very party to which I was invited wiped out in one fell swoop
the entire cultural elite of South Africa. All the more
important is therefore this report of the only survivor of this
catastrophe about the proceedings of that most memorable
evening, of which by the way the Times Literary Supplement gives
an entirely erroneous impression.

Since the Grandduke had an allergy against the barbaric sound of
motorboats and had successfully lobbied with the municipality of
 Gordon's Bay to ban all motor driven boats in the vicinity of
his artificial island, and had succeeded in lobbying Parliament
to make this municipal byelaw a national law, the only way to
reach his island was by a fleet of rowing boats which ferried
his guests from Gordon's Bay harbour to the island, a very
uncomfortable ride when the incessant South Easter whipped up
the waves in False Bay. But even the great poet Ben Waters who
became sea sick even in the calmest waters as soon as the rowing
boats manned by half a dozen black servants left the harbour
stoically braved the harrowing ride to this last outpost of
European culture, over the sea, separated from this barbaric
slab of a continent by the purifying waters of the ocean, as did
the culturati from Bishop's Court and Upper Newlands, shrieking,
it is true, whenever a wave threatened to capsize the boat.

When I walked over from the place where I had parked my
Volkswagen Golf to the harbour on that fateful evening, I met
Waters whom I knew from a few poetry readings in a very elite
circle in Llandudno. He greeted me, and when he heard that I had
been invited to the island, expressed his surprise at my
selection with a monosyllabic "Oh!" At the harbour we met
Professor Paul Kruger van der Merwe (not the well-known
Indogermanic linguist but the expert on Francesco Manfredini)
who had been flown in from Durban by the Grandduke, and Dr.
Marianne Haferstroh, the art historian from Pretoria, whose
monograph on Karl Friedrich Schinkel had brought her worldwide
recognition amongst Schinkel experts. Professor van der Merwe
attempted to draw us into a discussion on the authenticity of
the find of his colleague from Cape Town (which he very much
doubted, and rightly so, as Professor. Mandelstrom from the
university of Ohio was to prove only two year later), Dr.
Haferstroh enquired from me whether the boat ride to the island
was safe, to which I could only reply: I suppose so, since this
was my first invitation to the island. Waters who had overheard
her question while listening to van der Merwe, uttered an oath
to the effect that this boat ride was pure hell, and the
horrible price one had to pay for admission to the most
exquisite cultural events in South Africa.

Waters, the only South African poet ever invited to the island,
never referred to any South African object in his poetry, be it
the astonishing flowers of the veld, the varied and interesting
fauna of the Kruger Park, or God forbid, its barbarian white and
black inhabitants. When he spoke about South Africa at all then
as his Tomi, the place of exile and cultural deprivation,
despite the fact that he was born and educated in Cape Town. In
this sentiment he agreed with all those who belonged to the
Inner Circle. His poetry, informed by the austere formal beauty
of Petrarchan sonnets and Russian formalist literary theory,
used external objects as symbols of exquisite psychological
experiences, and showed a studied disdain for anything as vulgar
as life or nature. In his one and only critical essay, The
ecstasy of pure being, he had argued that any narrative, because
it essentially embraced becoming and thus change, was a
compromise with vulgar taste and that Tolstoy's great novels
were nothing but the forerunner of such inanities as the
American TV serials.

At this moment he expounded to van der Merwe the idea that the
aesthetic experience had been undervalued since that boor of a
German philosopher, Hegel, wrote his sthetik. The barbaric
over-valuation of theory and knowledge, he said, was the very
evil which was a sign of modernity. He spoke the word modernity
as if it was an unutterable swear word.

Our conversation was cut short as soon as the rowing boat left
the harbour of Gordon's Bay by the howling South Easter, the
lurching motion of the rowing boat in the large waves with white
horses on them, and the continuous vomiting of the great poet,
who attempted but did not always succeed in directing his
expectorations over the bow of the boat. Van der Merwe, Dr.
Haferstroh, and I presume myself, were cowering with paper white
faces in the boat which to our untrained eye gave the impression
that it would founder in every wave. But the well-trained rowers
brought us through the tempest to our destination where we were
greeted by the grandduke on the steps of the little harbour
directing us across the large piazza surrounded by the palace
and its two wings. We had arrived on the charmed island of
Prospero.

As we entered through the classical portico into the spacious
entrance hall where we left our nautical outer shells and made
our way through the throng of guests towards the concert hall,
Dr. Haferstroh introduced me to Priscilla Clock, the renowned
critic who wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. Ms Clock
studied me for a while with her lorgnon as if I was a specially
repulsive species of cockroach and then deigned to address me:
Ah, I believe you also dabble in the art of writing short
stories. And then with a tone which indicated her bottomless
contempt: - South African short stories, I hear, not that I ever
read such things. Ms Clock only reviewed Italian, Portuguese and
Spanish poetry which had not yet been translated into English:
Translations are so awful, so vulgar. A concession to the
illiterate, really. Ms Clock also was a member of the Inner
Circle of the grandduke, that is she belonged to the select
group of two dozen cognoscenti who were invited to the intimate
evenings of poetry reading and chamber music which the grandduke
arranged every Wednesday night between the es
to which he invited the about one hundred and twenty people in
South Africa whom he considered sufficiently well bred to
appreciate his exquisite taste and the always extraordinary
artistic events he arranged for them. It did not look as if Ms
Clock would open up doors to the Inner Circle of culture for me.

Drifting away from the stern disapproving face of Ms Clock I was
hailed by Martin Westermoore, the world-famous sculptor, whom I
had met at a rather bohemian drinking party in Observatory,
where he had undressed his girlfriend Lucia in a great act of
passive strip tease. While Westermoore, having no taste for
Music or Poetry, did not attend the meetings of the Inner
Circle, he was invited to the es, at which he, once
a year exhibited his three best sculptures. The Grandduke's
island was the only place where he deigned to exhibit in South
Africa. His regular yearly exhibitions were held in the Horologe
in Paris, a small but very influential gallery where besides
Westermoore the three other sculptors of the Non-Realist
movement, Fjodor Stepanovitch, Klaus Zur Strassen-erdom, and
Italo Calvo exhibited regularly.

Of course I would never be as gauche as to mention to him the
fact that I had visited the recent Cape Town exhibition Images
of a burning revolution, but strangely enough,  he mentioned
this exhibition himself, asking me whether I had seen it, but
without waiting for an answer from me, he launched into a long
and rather intricate denunciation of struggle art, concluding
with the bonmot, which was used by the art critic of the Weekly
Mail the next Friday (so he must  have spoken to Westermoore at
the exhibition) as the introductory sentence of his review: It
is such a struggle for them to produce art at all that they have
to use art as a weapon of struggle to produce art. I did not
find the aphorism all that funny, but smiled good-humouredly,
because it is very dangerous for any aspiring artist not to find
Westermoore witty and geistreich.

The concert hall was a medium-sized, intimate hall seating about
a hundred and fifty people in the style of late eighteenth
century rokoko with mirrors on the wall instead of  windows. The
walls between the mirrors were covered by pictures which would
have had pride of place in any European art gallery. While he
did not exhibit his one Rembrand (he would have considered that
ostentatious), there were pictures by Lucas Cranach the Elder,
Jan Gossaert, Rogier van der Weiden, Albrecht DDirk Bouts, Barthol Spranger,
and Signorelli. Its acoustic was a
marvel of sound engineering and its blend of reflecting surfaces
and sound absorbing curtains and chairs gave it a delicate
reverberation which transformed the most inane music into a
magic experience and even coloured any everyday conversation
carried on by the people waiting for the concert to begin. As
Westermoore and I entered the concert hall we were met by
Professor Pferdemann, a remarkably good-looking man in his late
sixties, himself a work of art of Jugendstil qualities, the
famous Novalis expert and art lover.

Oh Westermoore, he said, you know that I have just bought that
divine little statue of the meditating Zen warrior you had on
exhibition in Paris. I was immediately struck by this exquisite
tension between the way he carries his armour and his weapons
and the complete concentration and submission in the way he
meditates. Exquisite.

I had seen the statue before it had been sent to Paris in
Westermoore's studio. It did not look like a warrior or like
anybody in meditation to me at all, and I had secretly dubbed it
 Existential nonverbal blob, although, of course, I would never
have been as coarse as to voice such a sacrilege.

What did you think of Singh's performance of Webern's
Passacaglia for Orchestra, the professor continued. I myself
found the first few bars very, how shall I say, fumbling. Like a
child searching for the keys. He entered into a long and
detailed analysis of the performance, while I slowly moved out
of earshot, leaving the unmusical Westermoore to suffer on his
own.

It was then that I ran into the Grandduke himself. The
Grandduke's remarkable massive balding head, what Ms Clock in
one of her reviews of the cultural events on the island had
called his Russian Charakterkopf, rose out of a long flowing,
Russian style cassock, which emphasized his rotund and massive
body, covering everything except his bare feet in leather
thongs. He deigned to recognise me, and immediately launched
into an attack on the most recent anthology of South African
poetry.

You will not believe it, he said. But I am to blame myself.
Again and again I tell myself that this land does not produce
anything which one should or could call art, sorry, nothing
personal implied, of course. But driven by the insatiable thirst
of the discoverer of new art I subject myself to the pain of
searching for the perhaps one unacknowledged talent in South
Africa besides Waters.

He paused and looked intensely into my eyes: The pigsty did not
reek!

He lifted his hand triumphantly: The pigsty did not reek! You
will not believe it, but that is a line from the poems selected
to represent the best in South African poetry. I cannot get over
it. Not to talk about hippos roaming the ghetto streets. That is
the mysticism of an art supposed to lead us to a higher level of
insight into the mysteries of existential being: pigsties and
hippos! Where, I ask is that tension of the soul in
adversities, which alone trains us in strength? Where in this
miserable country is there any depth, any secret, a mask of
tragedy, mind or greatness?

Pigsties and hippos! he repeated. He broke into a roaring
laughter which filled the hall with delicate reverberating
musical echoes: Pigsties and hippos! Everybody turned to look at
us and I became aware of the envy in the faces of some who had
not been singled out to be addressed by the host personally as I
had been.

Pigsties and hippos! he laughed again. No freedom, no delicacy,
no courage, no dance, no mastery. It is sad! But every lift
which humanity has experienced towards the heights of culture
were the work of an aristocratic society, and there is nothing
aristocratic about South African society. But I do believe we
have to prepare for the performance, you will excuse me. Oh,
have you changed your mind about the guillotine blade?

It sounded like an afterthought, but it was the only reason I
had been invited at all, and the only reason why I was granted
this lengthy interview with the Grandduke.

I am still thinking about it, I said. I find it hard to part
with such an old family heirloom.

He shrugged resignedly, but knowing that in the end he would get
what he wanted, and motioned to one of the black servants in
eighteenth century servant's liveries, who then sounded a gong,
while walking through the crowd of guests, and within a few
minutes everybody was seated on one of the rokoko chairs facing
the podium, on which the choir and the soloists gathered,
waiting for Professor Constantin du Plessis,  expert in late
medieval choral music, who was even then led onto the stage by
Grandduke Pawel Ivanovich Manilov, and introduced by him. When
the doors of the hall were closed it became apparent that the
hall was completely sound proof because even the softest sound
of the waves which had reached us before through the open door
was now shut out, and an eerie silence hang over the hall for a
second or two, before the Grandduke began to speak warmly of
Professor Constantin du Plessis.

Professor Constantin du Plessis then launched into a long and
boring description of how he found the score of the late
medieval anonymous choral work Herre got, dir sungen schne in a
monastery near Teplice in Chekoslovakia, where it was moulding
in a dusty cellar full of other remnants of the medieval period,
which had been dumped there by the unartistic fanatics of the
Reformation, whom he compared to the barbarian Communists of
more recent origin, and forgotten. Of course all of this was the
invention of professor Constantin du Plessis, who as Professor
Paul Kruger van der Merwe (not the well-known Indogermanic
linguist but the expert on Francesco Manfredini) had suspected
but could not prove, and as Professor Mandelstrom from the
University of Ohio was to prove only two year later, had written
the manuscript himself, relying on the well-known reluctance of
most scholars to crawl through dusty and mouldy cellars of
medieval monasteries in Chekoslovakia, in order to add this
brilliant discovery to his research record and publication list.
(It must be added that Professor. Mandelstrom undertook the
journey to Teplice merely because his lifelong adversary,
Professor. Cellini from Amherst College, who had visited Cape
Town two months before the performance, and had been present at
one of the rehearsals, had written an appreciative review for
the International Review of Music History, a journal which
Professor. Mandelstrom considered to be unscholarly trash).
After professor Constantin du Plessis had ended his introductory
remarks, there was polite but enthusiastic applause, and he
immediately took the choir into the opening bars of Genad,
heiliger herre mein. For some time the performance proceeded
without indication of the imminent catastrophe, through the solo
aria for soprano, In dem himmel der engel chron, and the trio,
Der stern weist uns di recht strab, to the choral piece, Des ich
der erst moecht gesein.

ot, who had been flown in
specially from Tokyo where he was giving a guest performance,
had just started to launch into the a capella solo Magi videntes
stellam when there was a slight tremor which nearly
imperceptibly rattled the mirrors on the wall, leaving a faint
tinkling sound in the air for several minutes. Some of the
guests sat up on their straight rokoko chairs with questioning
glances, but since the great majority of listeners simply
ignored the commotion, and seemed to be totally engrossed in the
mellifluous voice of the tenor, they soon settled back and began
to listen again to the endlessly winding and monotone Et stella
precedat eos, sung by the choir and the famous basso Hans
Froehlich from the Vienna state opera, who was a house guest of
the Grandduke during the summer months of that year. Without a
pause the choir then launched into the slightly frivolous
Caspar, durch dein tugent.

The choir was just winding its way through the complicated beat
of the choral Fobvious Arabian influence in the way it treated the drumlike
bass line - as my neighbour Mrs. Lynette Grace-Jones pointed out
to me in a subdued whisper - when a far off rumbling as if from
a thunderstorm added its contradictory beat to the complexity of
the chorus. In fact, some of the guests who had not seen the
score before the performance for a moment believed that that was
part of the choir's attempt to create a specific grandiose
effect.

Just as the choir reached the grand finale of the first part,
the jubilant Ir herren, wir schullen froeleich sein, I noticed
the first disjointed little pools of water on the floor. The
later explanation of the disaster pointed to a host of
contributory factors: the main factor was undoubtedly the
inexperience of the builder who had contracted to create the
island in False Bay and who had neglected to adequately account
for the later consolidation of the rock and sand piled on the
sea-floor between the concrete retaining walls and pillars; but
there is reason to believe that the sea floor itself under the
enormous weight of the new structure had sagged by about half a
metre just before the finale of the first part. Professor.
Walter Cinders, the renowned Oceanographer, pointed out that
probably the main reason for the catastrophe, however, was that
coincidentally with these local events the large ice covering of
the Southern Ocean which had melted from below for the last
fifteen years because of the greenhouse effect had finally
dissolved completely within a week and had freed the way for the
glaciers of the interior to slide into the sea, increasing the
sea level by one metre and twenty five centimetres. The effect
of this rise of the global sea level reached False Bay and was
made more pronounced by the narrowing of the sea in the bay and
the galeforce South-Easter at just the moment when the Soprano
Mariekie van den Heever intoned the brilliant Venite adoremus
Deum quia ipse est Salvator noster over the subdued humming
harmonies of the choir. By this time the isolated pools of water
had coalesced and formed one continuous sheet of water which by
now had reached the ankles but was creeping continually up our
legs towards our knees. There was some unrest by now in the
hall, but nobody dared to get up.

Even when the hall soundlessly began to tilt towards the stage
so that the singers were standing in water which already reached
their belly, while I was still just over kneedeep in water, the
choir continued into Treun ich will folgen dir and all of the
guests remained seated as if glued to their seats, except for
Mrs. Lynette Grace-Jones, who took off her shoes and nylon
stockings and wrung out the stockings behind the back of the
chair in front. It was at this moment, in a short pause before
the next solo aria for Mariekie van den Heever, Ich sprichs auf
die treu mein, that an ominous gurgling sound was heard in the
hall.

I could no longer hold myself down on the chair. As I leapt up,
and overturned the chair on which I had been sitting, everybody
in the hall turned to look at me with a most disapproving scowl
on their faces, and their disapproval followed me as I made my
way towards the passage in the middle and up the passage towards
the door. "Barbarian!" whispered the poet Waters soundlessly but
distinctly, as I passed him. Walking over the slimy tilted floor
was extremely difficult, and I nearly slipped and fell twice,
but I made my way upwards towards the door braving all the stern
and disapproving faces. As I turned at the door, the gurgling
increased and I saw that the choir was already standing up to
their necks in water, the smaller members of the choir had to
stretch to hold their heads above water, while where I was
standing the water already reached my belt.

As I opened the door, a torrent of water rushed into the hall,
obliging everybody to get up from their seats. The thunderous
roar of the sea suddenly drowned out the singing of Mariekie van
den Heever, and despite great efforts on my side, I was unable
to close the door again. I hastened towards the portico, but
found my progress hindered by both the slipperiness of the floor
and the pressure of water, but after a few anxious minutes I
reached the entrance, opened the door, and was nearly bowled
over by a wave which travelled down towards the concert hall
unabated. Battling through the waves I reached the other side of
the piazza just in time to jump into the last boat manned by six
sturdy black rowers leaving the little submerged harbour.

While the men rowed desperately and tried to keep the stern of
the boat aligned with the direction of the waves so that the
waves slowly pushed us towards the shore, they shouted to me to
use the tin on the floor of the boat to pail out the water which
constantly rushed over the sides of the boat. Sweating and wet
through and through I concentrated on this uncomplicated but
tiring task until a sudden lurch and a crunching sound told us
that we had run aground. Somewhere ahead of us through the spray
of the waves we saw the lights of Somerset West, and as the boat
was overturned by the next wave, I was borne on the crest of
that wave towards the sandy shore. All six rowers, none of whom
could swim were washed ashore more dead than alive.

As I gasped on the shore I saw before my inner eye how the
throats of the singers on the grandduke's island filled with
water while they were singing the resounding final Amen Amen
Amen. By that time it was too late to flee, all boats had gone,
and the palace was sliding into the shallow waters that
surrounded it.

Next day I asked a friend, the owner of a motorboat and totally
uninterested in the arts, to take me over to the island, but
when we reached the place, only one turret still breached the
waves. Police boats, marine rescue and many private craft
swarmed around the place which once had been the haven of art at
the Southern tip of Africa. But alas, none of the one hundred
twenty guests escaped the drowning of art on that fateful night.
Many divers were busy trying to recover the bodies of the guests
and, after I had spoken to the police major, most of the
irreplacable treasures of European art, sadly damaged for ever
by the sea waters. The magnitude of the event, nearly totally
ignored by South African media, who were concentrating on a
slump in the gold price and the current cricket test against New
Zealand, was best captured in the next edition of the Times
Literary Supplement which carried a three page memorial article
surrounded by black bars mourning the final demise of culture in
South Africa.



The famous tenor Jean-Louis Far--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Horn
German Department, UCT
43 Trevor Road, Lansdowne 7764, Cape, Republic of  South Africa .
Phone Home ZA-[phone]        e-Mail: [e-mail]
      Work ZA-[phone]        Fax ZA-[phone]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Horn, Walking through our sleep (Poems), Ravan Press 1974
Peter Horn, Poems 1964-1989, Ravan Press 1991
Peter Horn, An Axe in the Ice (Poems), COSAW Publishing House 1992
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ravan Press, P.O.Box 31134, Braamfontein 2017, Republic of South Africa
COSAW Publishing House, P.O.Box 421007, Fordsburg 2033, Republic of
South Africa.
USA: Ohio University Press Fax [phone]
Britain: Central Books, Fax [phone]
Australia: New Era Books, Fax [phone]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------