Stefan Sullivan

Sibirischer Schwindel: Zwei Abenteuerromane
(The German translation of the Final Slum: Two Siberian Stories)

Excerpt
XI

Aftertaste: a sensation (as of flavor) continuing after the stimulus that caused it has ended.

When you bite off more than you can chew, and chew up more than you can swallow, and swallow more than you can digest, all the unprocessed excess will congeal to form an aftertaste, in my case, a thin film of hyperacidity, wonder, and guilt. I would hope that the ingredients of this film were sufficiently illustrated in the above account to not merit further discussion here. Let me just say that when I returned to Paris I tried to disburden myself of, at least, the last ingredient. For guilt, even the most trivial kind, can leave a terrible taste in the mouth. In my case, I felt guilty of charlatanism, that sordid act of pretense and impersonation, of allowing appearances to deceive. Like a man in military dress uniform, from a distance you cannot tell whether he is an army physician, an army chaplain or a common soldier, my soiled navy blue suit had served me well in my charlatan’s role. When you drop down from the sky into an alien world, and no one knows why you came there, you can literally, as a U.S. army recruiting slogan once rang, be all that you can be.

When I returned to Paris, unshaven but my oiley hair smoothed back neatly, I was still wearing the suit and could have, from appearances alone, been any number of things to any number of people. And, in my hand I held my black leather bag still bulging with content which I could not really figure out how to unload. What about Gilles St. Clair and the fashion photos? All the Red Shaman notes? My bear bile samples and mammoth tusk souvenirs? It was a ball and chain around me, but one not easily released, like a box of wedding gifts stored in the attic, too awful to openly display, too sentimentally symbolic to throw away.

The bag became a little lighter when I delivered the package to Prof. Laforestiere at the Institut de Medicine Tropicale. In our meeting, I played the respectful junior scholar updating him on the latest developments in folk medicine revival in Yakutia, mentioning that the role of neurochemical processes in fighting disease was also a subject of great interest to me. I wished him a most successful collaboration with his local counterparts and continued on my way. And I mustered this act of decorum without revealing what I suspected was the real source of my nagging guilt. Namely, I had, since this journey had ended, come to the realization, how strange it seems now, that I had never cared much for shamanism in the first place. Yes, I may have collected some of the shaman’s more unseemly character traits, as charlatan, huckster and quack, but I was not about to run off and join new agey freaks and drink herbal tea and practice yoga in some dry, mountainous area. Carlos Castaneda, and his Don Juan, or Don Coyote, all those craggy faced old men with authentic wrinkles and beatific smiles warbling on about large birds and crooked trees, and rocky trails and power animals to guide me toward an altered state. All that, it finally dawned on me, was just a kind of candy for California college drop-outs. Buddhism being too alien and expensive (considering the foreign travel involved) and Christianity too familiar (it reminded them of their parents).

Perhaps I had traveled far to learn very little, that Christianity actually offered its own share of ecstatic moments, transcendent reverie, or cool solemn beauty. Or, perhaps it was not to learn but to remember. In particularly, I remembered now that one cannot wander in Paris for very long - wander in the most truly aimless fashion - without instinctively ending up in front of ones favorite church. After I delivered the package, I drifted westward toward an old haunt, the Church of St Sulpice. As a student, some years ago, I had often practiced the organ in the St. Sulpice crypt because I found it so empowering to make large pipes perform in a dark holy place. And it was comforting that heavenly music could be played with such little need for invention, with only a serene and humble reading of the score. And, after such practice sessions there was no replicating the calm gravitas which I imagined played off my features as I re-entered the city’s pedestrian stream. The expression was perhaps not a particularly Christian one, but it was certainly spiritual. It was as if the turmoil of life offered an infinite number of facial expressions, but piety just one, a very slight and middle distant smile.

I felt that same smile creeping up on me as I installed myself at the outdoor café across from the church. But unlike before, it crept up without any affectation, the way that I had affected gravitas before to set myself off from the others on the street. No, this time it crept up as if it were a nervous tick, the heart of an old man playing out on the face of a young one. It was not the smile of wisdom but perhaps of plentitude. The plenitude of having, in a short space of time, waded through so many dimensions of human experience. There was even, or least so I imagined, something of the benevolent deity in this smile. When you are full, it is easier to give, to not only feel pleasure in the smallest things, but also openly display it. For how else could I explain this change in character, that I now found myself smiling at things I had never smiled at before, at things that I would, in an earlier state, have haughtily ignored. Why, for example, was I now so happy to watch a toddler lurching forward through the fallen leaves, so happy, in fact, that as the baby tumbled into a giggling precious lump, I instinctively shared the bending mother´s laughter? Why did I smile so intently at the student couple cuddling, so intently that he gripped her arm tighter than he had to? I took no offense at his possessive reflex. My dear son, I thought to the young man, caress your woman, express your love, but do not hold her arm so tightly. They are never taken away, they always leave under their own volition.

Without any sense of embarrassment, I calmly looked away and turned toward the church. St. Sulpice was, I noticed for the first time, something of a baroque monstrosity. Its fortress-like foundation and chunky towers seemed uncomfortably squeezed into its namesake square. It was a decorative display of monarchical power and merchant wealth, an alderman´s vanity piece, squatting closer to the ground to better please the human eye, not the heavens. It was, by no means, an obsequious temple to a wrathful God. The pious might well claim that this architectural shift already marked the beginning of the end. When the fear of a wrathful God disappeared, man sank into his earthly Inferno. And the romantics will claim that when reason banished alchemy, quackery and poppycock, we lost touch with some deeper meaning beyond our daily lives. And the restless will claim that deeper meaning is there beyond the horizon, anyplace but Home.

But even all this terrain has been traversed before. For hundreds of years already, errant sons have returned to the Church, returned to the womb after an overdose of lifeblood, hungering for the plain comforts that the Religion of art or the senses or the ego’s whimsy could not provide. This was all thoroughly addressed, even too thoroughly, by Huysmans of the Decadent School. He has a novel in which St. Sulpice figures quite prominently. Part of a trilogy on sin and redemption, all from the end of the 19th century, it features a guilt-ridden aesthete who, after years of wandering the salons and bordellos, seeks to retrieve his Catholic roots. Like some extremely focused tour guide, he visits all the monasteries and cathedrals in and around Paris, methodically grading the tone quality of their choirs, the rhetorical gifts of their priests, and the success rates of their rehabilitation programs for wayward sinners. I forget now how it ends mainly because once the charm of the details wore off, that, for example, the St. Sulpice boy’s choir navigated the upper reaches of the De Profundis with “balsamic freshness”- I put the book down. The narrator’s mission had started to bore me.

That’s the problem. It is perhaps that recovery is less interesting than discovery. Or, like Dante’s Paradiso, with its tedious exaltations of placid, doe-eyed angels, that good is far less interesting than bad. Yes, indeed, Inferno is a spicy place. The journey is the story. And the journey’s end the story’s end. For though redemption may be beautiful, it is probably not worth describing at any great length.