The Four Luxembourgs Civitas Peregrina (From the diary of a traveler Pseudo-Vladislav Todorov)

Vladislav Todorov

Department of Slavic Languages
University of Pennsylvania
vtodorov@sas.upenn.edu

 

The explorers of Luxembourg usually designate its four stages according to the four possible etymologies of its name. The first three: the Luminous one, the Dissipated one, and the Twisted one stem from the Latin: Lux, Luxuriosus, Luxus. The fourth is usually derived from the name of the legendary revolutionary Rosa Luxembourg. The present exploration shall adhere to these interpretations of the name thus established through tradition.

 

I. The Luminous City of Luxembourg

 

Some travelers also refer to it as the City of the Sun. This city encloses an enormous hill. Seen from afar its architecture resembles a gigantic mesh that has caught and subdued the upheaval of the mighty masses of earth which had inflated with gas and lava the earth’s crust and left behind the mountains as monuments of their provocative erections towards the sun. The city is segmented into seven circles or rings that grip the hill in concentric circles towards the top. It resembles a formidable crinoline that repulses any rascal who might crawl up the hill. A grandiose temple is erected at that very top. To be precise the temple itself is the top. It springs up into an extraordinarily large dome on the top of which rises another smaller dome in whose center gapes an orifice that looks straight on the middle of the temple where the altar is placed. The dome is painted inside with the map of the celestial constellations, as if the sky repeats itself only lower down and smaller than itself. It has stooped down to the temple like a mystical constellation, a cipher that locks the meaning of the earthly events. The orifice is the threshold at which the maximal cosmic space is turned over into the minimal symbolic space of the temple. It is precisely through this orifice that the cosmos discharges its own superfluity for it to descend as the sacred order of the temple. Thus, the temple resembles a Cyclops’s skull turned towards the sun which has scorched his eye in order to illumine him from inside. In this sense the illuminated-the internally luminous city is blind. Thus built the temple manifests through its figure the original sin of man towards the sun. Because before he stood on two legs, before his forehead bulged out like a church dome, before his eyes turned radiant, before he became sunlike man was turning up towards the sky and its luminaries, his scarlet and cracked like an enormous sore ape’s ass. It is precisely this original anal openness of man towards the sun that some travelers saw manifested in the architecture of the shrines. The radiant–the seeing eye, the organ of light that bathes in rays will always drag after itself like a tin can the embarrassment of being once an anus. Thus the central aperture of the temple, respectively the city expresses the ambivalent openness of the citizens towards their ruler–the Sun. Anyone entering the temple seems to cave in an ass through whose anus the Sun down-casts its stern and all-pervasive gaze. It is the source of the total illumination of the city. In general, the whole city is arranged in such a way that it culminates spatially in the aperture. Thus the whole city bathes its guilt in light. That is an all-encompassing luminescence in which you cannot help but wallow. This is the city of the total vertical transparency emanated by its center (the aperture). An all-pervasive solar gaze descends downwards as a guillotine. Man who stares against this gaze glows completely illumined from inside. Man stops casting a shadow. The city corpus is in fact the terrestrial figure of this super-terrestrial gaze. The very body and structure of the city are the terrestrial incorporation of the downward gaze of a super-power. The city itself represents the total exteriorization and exhibition of life before this gaze. The descending transparency of the world manifests the epiphany of the Eye of the supreme supervisor–the Sun. Any kind of opaque negativity is usurped by the center. It is located there beyond and above the aperture of the city. Inside and below the aperture all is positive-transparent. The people are neighbors for they are totally illumined and all-pervaded by the self-same luminous substance. They bathe in this totality and thus they prosper. Completely transparent and weightless they seem to lack bodies with tunnels flatulent with heavy slops. This is the city of the completely erect and utterly projected outwards and upwards man who baths in the descending divine gaze. The emblem of the city is the Obelisk. Its erecting corpus is the spiritual gaze enacted in the matter of the world. The Eye-Sun as phallus.

 

II. The Dissipated City of Luxembourg

 

This city rises not completely built and not completely demolished. A grand bust happened and the crowd bustles around the city somewhat rowdy, somewhat corrupted, somewhat raped, somewhat exhausted, promiscuously fornicating, having once transformed plummets into maces. The demolished city gapes like a cold volcano resounding from time to time with damnation. Once the people had grown defiant and started erecting a Tower City in order to reach God. They tried to look upwards and see God. They wanted to erect the vertical (upwards) transparency of the world. It was an attempt to establish surveillance over God. To catch God on the spot. So God got furious and segmented, that is, demolished their language. He dismantled it into a multitude of mutually impenetrable languages. A total incongruity set in that demolished the corpus of the city. The demolished Tower City stands for the demolished human look advancing upwards to make transparent the world space. The fragmentation of language manifested an opaqueness that descended from above. This figured the absence of God, i.e. the absence of a center in the space of the City that could fully absorb all negativity in itself and thus make the people neighbors. God abandoned the Babel. The God-forsaken city developed an exclusively horizontal vision and strategy. The neighbor turned stranger. The space between people hollowed out. When God desolated the city He, so to speak distributed the negativity among the citizens. He turned everyone into something partial, strange, alien, something “other” than everyone else, into a capsulated particularity. The only possible interest became the horizontal interest between the incompatible particularities. Everyone lusted after power, strove to achieve self-made and self-fashioned Deiformity. The space of the city became a space of internecine strife. Thus the negativity discarded by God burst forth and desolation occurred.

 

Each desired the other in order to possess and abuse him, to subdue and mastered him. The space between thee and me was reduced. The city life demonstrates the desolation as a common condition. The corpus of the city that had started threatening erection towards God was castrated and went limp as a gut–the cesspit. God forced man to bend over. He twisted his bold gaze downwards. Thus God reinstated man’s guilty position. Bent over in guilt man met the eyes of his fellowman and desired him. He desired his neighbor. The Cross became the emblem of the castrated city corpus. The broken up obelisk.

 

III. The Twisted City of Luxembourg

 

Before they lived in their city, the people were engulfed in the intestines of a Bull. The Bull was God. And then one day the Hero appeared and led them out by killing the Bull-God. Before this happened, the world was split in two chambers, into physical and allegorical space. The allegorical space was the Labyrinth, whose tunnels always led towards the mouth of the Bull. The physical space was the Bull himself. The Labyrinth allegorically represented and exhibited the Bull’s intestines. The mouth of the Bull was the aperture which connected the two spaces. Exactly there “the one” began and ended in “the other”.

 

The mouth was the threshold. The world was set up as a two-chambered device engulfing the people from one space into the other. The allegorical space (the Labyrinth) continually collapsed into the physical one (the Bull’s mouth). This way the procession of Death was performed. The physical space was God himself. The allegorical one–His phony presence outside His own natura. In order to succeed the Hero had to walk back this same lethal path, to do an act opposite to the engulfing. It was precisely for this reason that the Hero did not appear among the living ones in the allegorical space in front of the mouth of the Bull-God. He appeared in the rear of the physical space or at the aperture opposite to the mouth–the anus of the Bull-God.

 

From there he entered the physique of the intestines and led out the people engulfed there back to the mouth. He led them out. Thus the Hero liquidated the Bull-God. He abolished the physique of the God and as a consequence of this he found himself together with his people in the allegorical space of the Labyrinth which survived as the One space. This turned out to be the virtual City of their liberation. The liquidation of God reduced the world to the omnipresence of the allegorical space. Nothing could exist beyond it. The tunnels of the figurative reality did not lead to any apertures. They were blind. The liquidation of God came as a radical denaturalization of existence. The Labyrinth is by itself a twisted construction. The corpus of the Labyrinth City does not resemble any bold exalted erection. It can never be straight, nor can it be broken. Its natural joints are twisted so that it cannot stand up. It drags its spreading horizontality. The transparency is reduced to the direct visibility in the convolutions of the tunnel. The global allegorical space could be recognized in the fact that the Labyrinth is exactly the same in all its cells and can be surveyed without moving about. It is a self-duplicating sameness. The citizens live in one and the same allegory without being able to see each other because of the vertebral-like structure of the Labyrinth. The physical space was absolutely shredded up and so busted. The allegorical one opened unlimited and thus became omnipresent. There was no power able to justify this endless allegorical order. The Labyrinth has no center. Every place in it is absolutely identical to every other place. In each cell of it emerge exactly the same things as in every other one. There are no heroically privileged places. When the Hero led his people into the Labyrinth he himself disappeared. He took a place in it and became like everyone else. He acquired the anonymous existence of everyone else. The Labyrinth as an emblem signifies nothing but the torso of the world after God was wrested off it. Nothing is present to testify to the sense of life, nothing exists to justify the order of the world but it is total. The Absurd. It is conspicuous the final de-gradation of the phallus into a colon. The erection is supplanted by constipation.

 

IV. Luxembourg–the Phantom City

 

Comrade Luxembourg–this is a woman

 

–Platonov

 

Most travelers describe it like this: a gigantic corpus, slowly augmenting, because it inflates and at the same time blackens. Having reached the point of bursting, exactly when its crust is ripping frightfully, threatening to let out slops and gases, the corpus starts slowly to soften and lighten up until it turns into a pulp. It is a necrotized womb stuffed up by dead substances. A womb turning into a vampire. This is the city of the most incredible metamorphose, mutation and vicissitude.

 

This city is organized according to the grammar of an instructive language. In contrast to the Tower City, here the language has not been demolished, but nevertheless, no tower has been built, no “Common Home”. This language propagates and agitates people to perform the sublime act–to claw the earth in exaltation. It was necessary to dig harder and more cunningly in order to transform the earth interior into a “Common Home”. The main effort of the subjects was to dig out a colossal pit, a gigantic aperture–sanctuary, an organized subterranean eternal sun-trap.

 

The total language projected reality of the Phantom City. In the space of the City reverberated thunder like proclamations. The people became heralds of stunning proclamations, of verbal maltreatment because the proclaimed reality was a bruised piece.

 

Reality dispersed in panic chased away by its own proclamations.

 

Language was the virtual reality and all things real peek out of it as phantoms. The Last Judgment was proclaimed real in order for a phantom to be punished–the bourgeoisie. Communism was proclaimed real in order for the other phantom to be immortalized –the proletariat. It was realized by being proclaimed. Do you recollect the story of the madman, who believed he was a hen, so They fed him with raw corn. He did not stop being insane but he stopped pretending to be a hen, so that he wouldn’t have to gnash his teeth on the raw corncobs. Someone proclaimed himself God and proceeded to feed on soil. The sun was proclaimed to be the Universal proletarian. Language. In the language there was no center nor horizontal or vertical coordination. It performed twisted parables according to the rules of its grammar. Language was a radioactive instrument that caused monstrous mutations in the city. Uncanny, melancholic longing engulfs the souls of the citizens. A longing for reality. And only through longing could reality open itself in the minds. Through this longing did the unnamed reality rush into the phantom figure of the city. The longing became the aperture through which reality made known its own presence. One thing sustained the population and the militants of the City–the fact, that there had to be a super point of view, one might say a central herald of the proclamations, for whom, everything that happened was observable, manageable, and goal-oriented. There existed the certainty that the life of the City is performed before the gaze of one centralized Eye-Mind. A certainty, that one surveyor observes and supervises the correct going on of the grandiose ceremony called Proletarian Revolution. Otherwise to every glance from inside life passed as an arbitrary dispersal or merging of phantoms and names. The despair came with the suspicion that this super Eye-Mind is also a phantom. A high density phantom arbitrary authorized with a centralized ontological presence. The certainty that the transparency of the City descended from above was a sham. This “see-through-all” Eye was also proclaimed. Through renaming its realities the Phantom City assembled and disassembled itself like an animated toy puzzle before the amazed eyes of the greatest Dadaist of the world (proclaimed to be such in Zurich). Like a real hero this Dadaist succeeded in getting to the bottle and letting loose the genie of the most imbecile Hocus-pocus. And with an exalted babble it penetrated the City and proclaimed it. Another Dadaist of the same rank constructed a machine for executions with quite artistic and precise functions. Then he himself jumped into it and thus became the requisite matter for its function in order to demonstrate its exquisite perfection. At night, tired by the excessive work of the Hocus-pocuses, the citizens of the Phantom City sulked and listened to the lamp fuse sucking in the kerosene. And in order to stifle the rumbling of their empty stomachs, they nibbled the wall plaster. This city had no special emblem. It was emblem itself. For there existed no sign that could stand for it. Everything got proclaimed–interned into the Cit.

 

* * *

 

All travelers observe a strict tendency towards de-naturalization of Luxembourg during its four stages:–passing from a vertical into a horizontal symbolism and its vanishing into crooked parabolas;–an ever more irreversible dislocation of the natural joints and apertures of the city corpus;–presence, then absence, then abolishing and at the end turning into a vampire of the city center;–from emblem representing the essence of the city–to a city emblem of itself.

 

Usually the travelers evade the teleological interpretations, because they lead life unto a certain destination and in this sense to certain utopia or anti-utopia. Others speak of the cyclic recurrence of the herein described stages. Still others to whom we pertain are convinced of the principle of the back and forth momentum. According to this principle the City of the Sun and the Phantom City are respectively the upper and lower dead-point between which historically acts the piston of Luxembourg.

 

IMPLETA CERNE! IMPLENDA COLLIGE!