The Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz [22]
"Look at the anarchist Luccheni, the murderer of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria; look at Draga, the diabolical and unhappy Queen of Serbia; look at that youth of genius, the hope and pride of his ancient family, ruined by the unfortunate habit of masturbation. Oh, the irony of those names, of those pretensions!
"Is there anything left of Queen Draga in the wax-figure likeness, any similarity, even the most remote shadow of her being? But the resemblance, the pretense, the name reassures us and stops us from asking what that unfortunate figure is in itself and by itself. And yet it must be somebody, somebody anonymous, menacing, and unhappy, some being that in its dumb existence had never heard of Queen Draga. . . .
"Have you heard at night the terrible howling of these wax figures, shut in the fair-booths; the pitiful chorus of those forms of wood or porcelain, banging their fists against the walls of their prisons?"
In my father's face, convulsed by the horror of the visions which he had conjured up from darkness, a spiral of wrinkles appeared, a maelstrom growing deeper and deeper, at the bottom of which there flared the terrible eye of a prophet. His beard bristled grotesquely, the tufts of hair growing from warts and moles and from his nostrils stood on end. He became rigid and stood with flaming eyes, trembling from an internal conflict like an automaton of which the mechanism has broken down.
Adela rose from her chair and asked us to avert our eyes from what was to follow. Then she went up to Father and, with her hands on her hips in a pose of great determination, she spoke very clearly.
The two other girls sat stiffly, with downcast eyes, strangely numb. . . .
Treatise on Tailors' Dummies: Conclusion
On one of the following evenings, my father continued his lecture thus: "When I announced my talk about lay figures, I had not really wanted to speak about those incarnate misunderstandings, those sad parodies that are the fruits of a common and vulgar lack of restraint. I had something else in mind."
Here my father began to set before our eyes the picture of that generatio aequivoca which he had dreamed up, a species of beings only half organic, a kind of pseudofauna and pseudoflora, the result of a fantastic fermentation of matter.
They were creations resembling, in appearance only, living creatures such as crustaceans, vertebrates, cephalo-pods. In reality the appearance was misleading—they were amorphous creatures, with no internal structure, products of the imitative tendency of matter which, equipped with memory, repeats from force of habit the forms already accepted. The morphological scope of matter is limited on the whole and a certain quota of forms is repeated over and over again on various levels of existence.
These creatures—mobile, sensitive to stimuli, and yet outside the pale of real life—could be brought forth by suspending certain complex colloids in solutions of kitchen salt. These colloids, after a number of days, would form and organize themselves in precipitations of substance resembling lower forms of fauna.
In creatures conceived in this way, one could observe the processes of respiration and metabolism, but chemical analysis revealed in them traces neither of albumen nor of carbon compounds.
Yet these primitive forms were unremarkable compared with the richness of shapes and the splendor of the pseudofauna and pseudoflora, which sometimes appeared in certain strictly denned environments, such as old apartments saturated with the emanations of numerous existences and events; used-up atmospheres, rich in the specific ingredients of human dreams; rubbish heaps, abounding in the humus of memories, of nostalgia, and of sterile boredom. On such a soil, this pseudovegetation sprouted abundantly yet ephemerally, brought forth short-lived generations which flourished suddenly and splendidly, only to wilt and perish.
In apartments of that kind,