PAUL WEST
555
People expect too much, you see. Their heads flame with the names of
the great enclosures of our collective culture-
Anayevo,
Ozerny,
Sel'khoz,
Lepley,
Sosnovka,
Lesnoy,
Vindrey,
Yavas,
Lesozavod,
Barashevo-
and of the diseases therein isolated-Kalnins, Sado, Galanskov, Ivanov,
Ginzburg, Kapitsins, not to mention such complete recoveries as Babel
and Pasternak, and such partial recoveries as Siniavsky and
Solzhenitsyin-and they want to know everything, simply in order to
rejoice over it. But KoioK precludes that, much as you would prevent
your child from handling corrosive chemicals. There are limits. Now,
as
to
the installation you are about to visit, bear in mind that KoioK
wishes to protect you from what, in top circles, are known as Inaccu–
racy Generators, which means seeing something in such a way that you
get a distorted idea of it. Unfortunately, our latest researches have
conclusively proved that to perceive at all is to ill-perceive, a point
made, I believe, by some of your eighteenth-century philosophers.
Nonetheless, KoioK, which revisionism of the highest caliber is now
redrafting as K-u, meaning K unperceived, would like you to visit with
us, even though, in the interests of factuality, you are to see nothing at
all.
My mind boggles. I tell him so:
I'm afraid I don't follow.
-No one ever does, it is so difficult to instill the peaks of
metanoetics into the minds of the commons, if you will pardon the
expression. What I have in mind is a tour, in the French sense that you
will have a little stroll at the end of which, having perceived nothing,
and therefore having misconstrued nothing, you will part from us on
excellent terms and commend us
to
your own government for our
prudence, recommending that they do likewise. In this way, the
Unseen-by-itself #1 will be able to get on better with the Unseen-by–
itself #2, neither of the Unseens having been seen by the other. This,
surely, is how the myth of God has endured for so long: to be seen at all
is to lose face, whereas to remain unseen is to win believers wholesale. I
