imaginary lives

 Marcel Schwob’s preface to his Vies imaginaires makes a plea for the vita as art, instead of history. History, Schwob writes, aims at the general, and puts the stress in the meaning of human lives in their connection with greater events. For history, “all individuals have value only because they have modified events or made them deviate.” Art, on the other hand, “doesn’t classify; it de-classifies.”

The preface carries out the argument, such as it is, with brio. But the imaginary lives do not all carry out that de-classifying imperative. The life of Herostratus, for instance, distinctly lacks a certain detail – or rather, Schwob lacks a certain wonder at this detail.

Herostratus was famous, or infamous, for having torched the temple of Artemis in Epheseus. Schwob does an interesting, proleptic thing about Herostratus by describing him from the beginning in terms of the tortures to which he was subjected after his act. This proleptic magic act is nice. I applaud it. But then, when we read the end of the life, we get this:

“The twelve cities of Ionia forbad, on penalty of death, the announcing of Herostratus name to future ages. But the murmur has come just as far as us. The night when Herostratus torched the temple of Epheseus, Alexander, kind of Macedonia, was born.”

For those of us more historian than artist – or who reject Schwob’s division – there is much lost in that “murmur.” How is it that, somehow, the agent of this particular fait divers was able to avoid a suppression that seems, given the time, the lack of news save by messenger and singer, and the penalty, to have more appropriately submerged that pyromaniac fameseeker?

How do secrets get passed along?

Pessoa wrote an essay on Erostratus in English, which was discovered, like much of Pessoa’s work, after his death. The English is a bit brushed up and too too British, but Pessoa makes a deep remark about Erostratus’s, so to speak, existential figuration.

“His act may be compared, in a way, to that terrible element of the initiation of the Templars, who, being first proven absolute believers in Christ – both as Christians, and in the general tradition of the Church, and as occult Gnostics and therefore in the great particular tradition of Christianity, had to spit upon the Crucifix in their initiation. The act may seem no more than humanly revolting from a modern standpoint, for we are not believers, and, when, since the romantics, we defy God and hell, defy things which for us are dead and thus send challenges to corpses. But no human courage, in any field or sea where men are brave with mere daring, can compare with the horror of that initiation. The God they spat upon was the holy substance of Redemption. They looked into hell when their mouths watered with the necessary blasphemy.”

Pessoa no doubt read Schwob. The Templar story was, of course, a legend transmitted by way of the trials of the Templars, who were overthrown in a power struggle that sought justification, as so many do, in a courtroom padded with lies and crooked lawyers. But secret calls to secret – the initiation of the Templars was a secret kept within the group, and yet it forced itself out – a necessary blasphemy – to future generations.

It is hard to keep a secret. And it is hard to say why it is hard to keep a secret.