Leena Krohn: Collected Fiction (109 page)

The nuns of
Hotel Sapiens
(2013), only half biological carers, and the Restored, great men conjured up from history, are also new species brought about by synthetic evolution.
Hotel Sapiens
describes the period after two singularities, when computers (or, more accurately, data networks) have overtaken Homo sapiens in both intellect and ethical intuition.
Hotel Sapiens
is just one of the possible last shores on which humankind will perhaps one day tread.

In
Tainaron
(1985), the world of insects lives in its own city and time, in which the traveller finds herself and in which she finally overwinters in her cocoon-cradle, like the other citizens. I took as the motto for
Tainaron
a line from Angelus Silesius’s hymn: “You are not in a place; a place is in you.” This is one of those phrases that have changed my entire worldview. It means the same as I referred to before: reality is inherent in us.

As we know, aesthetics is the study of beauty as well as the philosophy of art. I see beauty as one of the most enigmatic characteristics of the universe. When the viewer disappears, beauty remains, and it is not only in his or her eyes.

My short novel
Erehdys
(
The Mistake,
2015), has an inner story in which the old photographer Viktor says: “Believe me, Beeda dear, it was not the German aestheticians who invented beauty. Beauty, Beeda, is a basic principle of nature. It is a truth that penetrates all existence. That is why everyone on earth is parched by the thirst for beauty. Beauty is the universe’s most enduring quality, it is repeated in atoms and galaxies, numbers and relations and the way a tree grows.”

Translated by Hildi Hawkins

Would I believe my eyes

The invisible light of the nectar-guides is the bumblebee’s map.

It dances along a marked path to the flower.

A beam of light hits the queen’s ommatidium, and she knows.

In her eye is a crystalline cone where the comb-honey glitters.

In her eye are many eyes. They see what they need, what we do not.

All the things we see

are found between the highest

and lowest bands of the rainbow.

Longer, violet; shorter, red.

Why wouldn’t I believe my eyes?

What I see is what I know.

What I watch watches me.

When I look, I confront.

A glance gives location, direction, range.

Like a bird among seeds, a glance pecks at the images of this world.

People have image-eyes, insatiable in their thirst for images.

Without images, without dreams, there would be no people,

just machines, insane, defective.

In the beginning was the image, the imperfection.

A perfect image cannot exist.

Every image is a mirage.

The sleeper’s eye moves ceaselessly.

The brain plunders new images from the void of night, always more.

We see in the dark, see without light, eyelids closed.

My dreams at night, most private of all, shared with everyone.

Waking, we dream a shared dream.

The day reveals the present, the night shows the watcher what has passed, the golden years.

One sees with her eyes–thinks she sees–

another with his body.

How do I look?

The blind do not even ask.

What does darkness look like?

There is no darkness for the blind.

Who do they envy? What do they miss?

Only among the seeing do they learn they are blind.

If you, sighted, found yourself in a world of the born-blind,

would they think you a charlatan, a liar?

Would you pretend you couldn’t see?

Why would I believe my eyes? I do not see with them.

I think I see; I remember, I imagine, I dream.

Length and breadth, depth and time. These four, only these four.

Our senses are our shackles,

their limits the walls of our prison,

their powers our shortcomings.

You see. You co-ordinate signals from your eyes,

you collate information, you flip an image.

You recognise movement and shape, size, colour and depth.

You interpret. You say what and where.

Do you know? What do you know, and how much?

When we give what we see a name, we call it knowledge.

What is observed is measured. Everything is immeasurable.

Particles oscillate in strings.

Energy levels light up and die,

wavelengths roll,

the bands of the spectrum are the halo of the land.

Lens, iris, cornea.

I am a window: you can see everything through me.

A light-wave propagates: luminosity, colours, vibrations.

I am bathed in beams of visible and invisible light.

The sky radiates colourlessness.

Reality is something else. We dream it.

The reality of colour is the reality of dreams.

How does observation become knowledge, mirage truth?

Learn the inevitability of illusion,

the fate of mankind.

A glance, bound in time.

Things change, but we do not see if we do not know.

What we have never seen, we will never see.

A photon excites an atom. I see colour.

Do I see it, or just think I do?

Is it there or not?

Umbra, cyan and siena.

The autumn leaves have a glow of saffron, a transience.

Tell me, is colour part of my eye? Or of light?

Of material things?

Is it a marvellous interplay of all of these?

Mauve and ultramarine.

A tree rises from the gulf of sunset

growing with confident

faith in tomorrow.

All light is the eye’s light.

All darkness the eye’s darkness.

There is no landscape, no sun without eyes.

Just burning needles of ultraviolet.

Ochre, sepia and gold.

The reed-bed changes colour, swaying

in the breeze, from light to shade.

At the edge of the forest, the edgeless sky.

Tomorrow’s bread sings in the quiet waves of the wheat-field.

Fuchsia and indigo.

There are no colours,

only illusion gleams, trembles.

There is your reality: a reflection in a membrane.

Winter’s light falls

in truth and in innocence, in peace and in sorrow.

All sounds, all colours bound together in its roar,

all present, absent.

The snowflakes remain.

The crystal hexagons remain,

with their icy precision,

their fractal flowers.

Translated by Bethany Fox