“This place where they are living, as each of them asserts, uninfluenced by neighbors and houses next door, is the foreign place visualized and reserved by them for the duration and for good — though precisely not the kind of foreign place of which a poet’s description was passed down from their forefathers: a foreign place where, when music from afar reached a person’s ears, the sound rent his heart, because it made him realize: Never shall I return to my home. But if music from afar was heard here in the Pleasant Plantation, it ‘heartened’ one and strengthened one in one’s resolve to stick it out in these foreign parts and never to reinterpret them or transform them into something other than what they essentially were and — another of those unwritten laws — should remain: foreign, foreign, foreign.
“Foreign land: another topos of these seekers after a new myth. They see themselves, and again that means each by himself, as people without a country, as stateless people, yet they are also proud of their country- and statelessness.
“We could let this pass, were it not associated with the aforementioned ugliness. To us, in contrast to those down below, beauty is the overarching law in the following sense: What is ugly cannot be good; the ugly is evil and bad, and it must not be allowed to stand.
“And my knightly vagabonds of the Dark Clearing are of an interminable ugliness, even when one considers only their weapons and their bivouacs, an ugliness that is an insult to human dignity and makes a mockery of existence. Does not the aesthetic world order, the law of the beautiful, include the ethical as well, the distinction between good and not good, right and wrong, or am I mistaken? How the appalling ugliness of these crossbreeds — their clothing, their hovels, their rocky gardens, fields, and stables, their greenhouses, their tools, their materials — has pierced me to the quick from the outset, preventing me from living and breathing freely.
“Not that they constantly go barefoot. But why do they always wear unmatched socks, as if on principle and out of malicious, ugly defiance, and possibly unmatched shoes as well, on the left foot a black oxford and on the right foot a yellow pigskin boot? There is nothing they are, have, or do that is not breathtakingly ugly. Even the way these denizens of the Dark Clearing move: where elsewhere people thrust themselves into the foreground, these people, each separately and yet all of them together forming a mass, huddle in the background, as if by prior arrangement.
“The ugly and the bad aspects of those who thrust themselves into the foreground are almost tolerable by comparison, allowing one at least to sense the presence of gaps and the horizon; while the masses huddling in the background block the view, the light, and the sun, and thereby any possibility of seeing the big picture, and once this is thwarted, the ugly crowd, there, and there, and back there, appears doubly ugly, ugly to the second power, ugly to the nth power.
“Whenever I go looking for them and approach them — for that is my mission here, after all — they skulk, hide, huddle in the background. Whether I want to track them down in their hovels or sheep pens or solar collectors or radio shacks, they are always way in the back. And I can never get at them there. They have installed threshold after threshold between us as obstacles, often what may not even be intentional thresholds, consisting of infinite uglinesses in the form of sights, sounds, and smells — and that seems to me the most criminal aspect of their criminal ugliness: that it makes these ugly people of mine even more inaccessible to me. Their ugliness means inaccessibility. Ugliness and inaccessibility, or unapproachableness, grievously sad, and are they not ultimately one and the same after all?
“To this day I have not succeeded in crossing these insurmountable thresholds of ugliness to get to my dear Hondarederos. How ugly even their voices are from a distance. Ravens’ cawing, blue jays’ screeching, and wildcats’ hissing are the most mellifluous harmonies by comparison. It must pierce the heart of every natural enemy of ugliness and make his blood boil when these voices assault him, amplified by the cliffs around here and this vast natural mountain amphitheater.
“And every word spoken, as if spat out, coughed out, vomited from the deepest and most distant background, strikes one’s ear like a giant fist. I am forced to hear distinctly even their most faraway speech in all its ugliness, word for word. Although each of them by now talks almost exclusively to himself, he always expresses himself in a hideous jargon, which, adding to the ugliness, they all use, unwittingly, albeit in the most varied languages — and are not jargon, ugliness, exclusivity, and inaccessibility in the final analysis one and the same?
“And listen: this jargon echoing from the fissures in the rock consists for the most part of obsolete expressions, drawn chiefly from the language of seafarers, as if these re-immigrants wanted to recapitulate and claim for themselves the linguistic formulations of those ancestors who left the Comarca centuries ago to sail the oceans.
“How presumptuous of them to refer to their huddling here in this out-of-the-way mountainous area as ‘lying at anchor’ and their various movements as ‘sailing’; to shout, upon seeing a trout, hardly as long as an arm, leaping out of a glacial pond, ‘Dolphin ahoy!’ or, upon chewing a juniper berry or dipping their toes into the icy water or moistening their eyes with the admittedly special dew of the Pleasant Plantation, to screech, bark, scold, shriek into the granite wasteland: ‘Je suis embarqué! I have embarked! I am on the high seas! I will remain on the high seas! No land in sight! No, no land in sight! Oh joy: no, no, no land in sight!’”
Here the reporter on the rocky island amid the wilderness of broom paused for an eighth to a half a second and then continued in a voice even more shrill, if possible: “After all, our assignment here goes beyond mere observing. We are supposed to investigate the causes of and the reasons for things. For what reason do the people shipwrecked here no longer have a language? Why have they tossed the laws and rules of beauty overboard? Why are they bobbing here in their Dead Sea of inaccessibility?
“So hear me out: the source of this Robinson crew’s terminal ugliness can be traced to the loss of images. And the additional assignment with which my team was sent up here is as follows: to cure, or at least contain, this new image-loss disease, dangerous because it is epidemic or even pandemic. Quarantine hand in hand with therapy. Curing these ominously ugly folk, but how, and by what means? By delivering images, importing images, injecting images, without let-up. Produce, transport, and deliver an image to a person, and his soul will regain its health, his language will be revitalized, his voice will become hearty and his eye clear, accessible, and beautiful.
“For a year or more we have been struggling to steer these denizens of darkness back into the bright world of images. To stop the leakage of images. But how, you ask. Why do you not ask? — First of all we wired the enclave of Hondareda, ran underground cables, set up reflectors all around, and installed image-producing machines every few feet, at a density ten to fourteen times greater than that of the traffic lights in Frankfurt, Paris, New York, or Hong Kong: machines that reproduce images not only from external and outside sources, from civilization, but, above all, images of those Hondarederos who wander into their reception and broadcast area, images of the inside of their bodies, projecting onto this bit of cliff the heart cavity of a passerby, onto the next the inside of the head, onto a third the genital and abdominal region.
“These image-producing devices function as mirrors, reflecting not the person’s face but what lies behind it. Except that none of the immigrants so much as glances at the images, whether external or internal. From the outset, the people up here did not even look away from the images we supplied; they simply ignored them. And yet we had introduced a process by which even the shadows, instead of showing mere outlines, took on shape and color: shadows with the mouth, nose, and eyes clearly inscribed in the shadow of a face, along with the eye color, even richer than in the actual face that cast the shadow, also more glowing and beautiful — the very image of beauty.