Credits

First published by
Fiktion, Berlin, 2014
www.fiktion.cc
ISBN: 978-3-944818-67-2

Project Directors (Publishing Program)
Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann

Project Director (Communications)
Henriette Gallus

Editor
Alexander Scrimgeour

Proofreader
Sam Frank

Graphic Design
Vela Arbutina

Web Development
Maxwell Simmer (Version House)

The copyright for the text remains with the author.

Fiktion is backed by the nonprofit association Fiktion e.V. It is organized in cooperation with Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and financed by a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

Fiktion e.V., c / o Mathias Gatza, Sredzkistraße 57, 10405 Berlin

Chairs
Mathias Gatza, Ingo Niermann

Registered association VR 32615 B
(Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, Berlin)

Momus
HERR F
(Everything Living
Forever Is Screaming
Forever)

1

I don’t know as much about nothing as I thought I did. This has become clear to me following my death on Tuesday.

I can confirm that nothing is very big. It seems to stretch out in all directions forever. Its texture is no-particular-texture, and its shape no-particular-shape. There isn’t any particular smell that I can identify, and the lighting seems to be even, without any particular source. There’s no sense of days or nights passing; no weeks, months, years, centuries, millennia, no flux or wane, no hot or cold, no winter or summer, no weather.

Food and drink obviously don’t make any appearance in nothing, nor are there any sights or sounds. There’s no punctuation. I pass the time by thinking, but no particular thoughts occur to me, and so it’s more a case of just passing the time by passing the time.

I don’t need a personal organiser. It doesn’t pay to plan ahead or think forward, and when I try to think back I feel a lazy vagueness gluing up my mind, as if specific memories were being drowned in an unknown quantity of thick, clear shampoo. If I ever had a personality, it’s pretty much gone, and that’s not, in itself, a problem. If I ever had hurts and struggles and victories, they’re blurring and just not particularly relevant any more. They might as well belong to someone else.

What time is it? It doesn’t matter, here in the middle of nothing. This is going to go on for quite a while, so I’m just going to settle back and get used to it. It’s not unpleasant. I’m living forever, after a fashion. That can’t be bad.

I remember a phrase I read somewhere: Everything living forever is sooner or later screaming forever. That sounds frightening, but so far everything’s under control. There’s nothing worth screaming about. Unless people really do scream with boredom.

Probably that’s how it will begin, the screaming. I’ll start screaming just to pass the time, just to hear a sound, a voice, my own. And then in a while the screaming will contain a little genuine agony as well. And some time after that – but really, who knows how long? – it will be full-on, full-throated terror, which will just go on and on and never stop. Possibly the volume will increase a little from time to time, but essentially it will become a fixed and permanent thing, or, rather, two things: the nothing, and the screaming.

The sun will expand, become a red giant, dry up the oceans then burn up the earth, and go out, and I will still be there, screaming in the dark. The universe will keep expanding until every individual body in it is infinitely far from every other, in an unimaginably cold void, and one by one the stars will disappear, and I’ll still be making this tiny, piercing screaming sound, somewhere out there, to absolutely no effect.

I’m not looking forward to it, but there’s no point in getting anxious either. At this point it’s all still quite a long way off.

2

Mephistopheles comes to different people in different forms. For me, he’s a film producer sitting at the head of a long table in a garden restaurant in the gay district of Tel Aviv. It’s a warm evening in June, and a dozen of us are gathered in a back garden punctuated by citrus trees. Propped between two chairs – one for my head, the other for my feet, very good for the stomach muscles – I’m wearing the green robe I keep for the character within me I call Agnes, loosely modelled on the late Louise Bourgeois.

I’m in Tel Aviv to sing, not as Agnes but in the role of Bianca Castafiore from the Tintin books. The dinner is supposed to be in my honour. But it seems a much more important guest is expected: a powerful film producer who’s birthed many Hollywood successes. Sure enough, when Mephisto arrives he greets his friends with beams and bear hugs before taking, like a birthright, the cardinal seat.

Mephisto launches into a monologue about how he’s decided to chuck in film production and become a forest ranger, but in Venice, so that he can still attend the film festival.

– But there are no trees in Venice! protests a drunken blonde woman on his right.

– Sure, but there are plenty of films.

Everybody laughs. Mephisto, by the way, is the man who birthed Betrayal Park, Avalon, and the Black Hulk sequel.

As I prepare my pitch I zone out of the ambient chatter (half-English, half-Hebrew) and chug at a chilled glass of Carmel Sauvignon.

At last the moment presents itself: my nervous glances towards the top chair have been noticed, and Mephisto himself is summoning me, magnanimously.

– Heinrich Faust, he says, pull up a chair! I’ve been wondering about your prosthesis.

I should explain that I have a prosthetic limb. Mephisto wants the usual story, which he’s no doubt already half-heard: the angry dolphin, the swallowed calculator, the botched operation on the tombstone and the near collision of the two naval helicopters.

I tell the tale as entertainingly as I can. When I get to the bit about stuffing the dolphin, Mephisto claps his hands in delight, and the whole table laughs along. This is my chance.

– I wanted to pitch an idea to you, Mr Mephisto.

The great man looks indulgent. This moment comes often, of course.

– Shoot, he says, making no effort to conceal a hint of weariness.

– Okay, I just wanted to know how you’d react if . . . well, let’s say someone comes to you with a really boring idea. He’s an author who’s had no success at all. He’s written a book about . . . about moss. Chapter 1: Moss. Chapter 2: Moss Growing. Chapter 3: Moss in a Room.

Mephisto snorts.

– That does sound boring! Me, I like Die Hard 3.

You can believe it.

– Okay. But wait, there’s a catch: this writer has sold his soul to Satan in exchange for enormous success. No matter how boring The Book of Moss is, it’s going to top the New York Times best-seller list for years. That’s written into the blood pact. The film rights are sure to be sold, and the film is guaranteed to be massive. What I want to know is, could you be compelled to back a project like that, if you knew it was going to be huge? How easily could you be controlled by the forces of evil?

Mephisto begins to look uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to play my game; he doesn’t like the implications. He lays a hand on my prosthetic arm.

– You know what, Faust? The world is full of ideas. Everyone has them. Coming up with an idea is the easy part. The hard part is making it fly. Me, I would back Die Hard 3.

– So you’d wait to see what happened with Moss 1 and Moss 2, and if they flew, you’d back Moss 3?

– Maybe, Faust, maybe! I might make you change the title to Moss Hard 3, though.

Laughter again. Mephisto wins the round, as he wins them all. I didn’t say the writer was me, but whatever. I head back down to the far end of the table and drag what’s left of the Carmel Sauvignon out of the ice bucket.

I’ve pretty much forgotten this conversation when, two months later, I receive an email from Mephisto. He wants to back Moss, and already has two lawyers and a haematologist working on the contract.

3

Mosses, lichens and algae are some of the most ancient forms of life known to man, dating back over three thousand million years. Moss belongs to the plant class Bryophyta, which also includes liverworts and hornworts.

It would be less anthropocentric to say that man is one of the youngest forms of life known to moss. And yet that too would be wrong, because moss certainly doesn’t ‘know’ in the way that we mean when we use the word: that purely human form of knowing typified by, for instance, our tedious need to distinguish plants from fungus and photosynthetic bacteria, or our quibbles about the correct classification category of liverworts and hornworts.

Here’s a story which may help you to remember how to classify the various organisms. Hornworts, Fungus and Photosynthetic Bacteria are having an office party. It begins to rain, but this is no ordinary rain: parallel lines start slamming hard as lead bars into the concrete surface of the car park in which Hornworts, Fungus and Photosynthetic Bacteria have erected a small marquee and arranged a circle of metal-framed folding stools with red, white and blue seats on which puddles, drawn in the style of abstract manga artist Yuichi Yokoyama, now begin to form.

Suddenly Moss and Liverworts arrive in a 1985-vintage black Fiat Panda, a car I admire because the windscreen is a completely flat sheet of glass and not bulbous at all. The others are embarrassed because they realise they haven’t invited Moss and Liverworts to the office party, despite the fact that they all work for the same advertising company. On the spur of the moment, they count to four and shout:

– Surprise!

That’s the story. Now you will always remember the correct taxonomical relationships between these life-forms.

Anyway, as I was saying, in my view moss intuits. It has gut feelings, without, of course, having guts. Since the evolution that produced us began, essentially, with moss, we should respect our earliest ancestors. We should replace those Sunday-school ciphers Adam and Eve with moss: Old Father Moss, Dear Mother Moss.

By the way, moss does have genders: a female egg-producing part called the archegonium and a male sperm-producing part called the antheridium. But – unlike us – moss has a choice; it can also reproduce asexually. When bits of moss break off they can regenerate spontaneously, creating a new plant wherever they happen to fall. The reproductive options of moss are spongy and flexible.

4

One afternoon Mephisto invites me kite-flying with him. I’m a bit worried, because a thunderstorm is building up and I’ve heard it’s dangerous to fly kites near lightning. Nevertheless, I show up on time, wearing my bottle-green robe and driving my bottle-green Volvo from the year 1975.

Mephisto is already dangling his massive black kite in a violent thunder cloud, laughing insanely as the killingly white energy of billions of wild volts of electricity flows through him and discharges down to the underworld.

– I’m glad you could make it, Heinrich, he says. Here, take the string!

Later, the great Hans Magnus Enzensberger will write a poem about the scene:

Sometimes I regret

that compared to the power pylon

I vacillate.

The good-natured moss

disarms me

when I lust for revenge,

and the rhino’s thinking –

straightforward as it is –

I can only admire.

While I hold the kite string, Mephisto tells me that, should some cataclysm (all-too-probable, given our violence and shortsightedness) wipe humans out and leave a gap which only moss can fill, sphagnum will be perfectly capable of stepping into the breach, making a much better job of dominating the planet than mankind has.

Spreading quietly across forest floors, coating rocks and tree bark, hushing and softening everything it touches, this restful organism will create a world as classy and comfortable as ours is crass and spiteful. Inherently peaceful, the Age of Moss will see the world transformed into a well-upholstered library or a discreet hotel lobby. This is what Mephistopheles claims, anyway. Did I mention that his first name is Giorgio?

5

Moss might be silent, but it’s not a silence that can be bought. I once saw a television documentary in which a couple were building a charred larch structure on the Isle of Wight. Certain concrete-board sections of the outer wall looked ugly, and the couple attempted camouflage by applying a mixture of cow dung and yoghurt concocted to attract moss. But no moss ever came. Everything else in a house may have its price, but moss is unbiddable. Please bear this in mind, it will be important later.

My friend Chieko was studying to be a manicurist in a beauty college near a leaking nuclear-power station in Japan’s beautiful alpine Nagano region when she first discovered Peter Handke’s wonderful anti-theatre piece Offending the Audience. Now, the whole point of art is that it isn’t just about what can and cannot happen in a theatre; you can apply its conclusions to any domain of life, for art burns like a bright filament of possibility, a torch of eternal human freedom.

Chieko was very taken with the idea of offending the people who make one’s entire profession possible, and so she began to integrate some of Handke’s insults into her patter as a manicurist. Like many jobs, manicure and pedicure have their theatrical side; for instance, it’s normal for the beautician to improvise some kind of calming monologue during her work on cuticles and corns, to place the customer under a kind of mesmeric spell. The mesmeric state, and not the perceived increment in beauty, is the real reason the customer comes back.

Chieko began working in insults from Handke’s play, which she had downloaded from the Internet and rendered into Japanese using an imperfect machine-translation tool. And so she would be complimenting a customer on her beautiful half-moons, when suddenly she would slip in:

– You don’t think. You think of nothing. You think with. You don’t think with. You are toothless. Your mind is open. By saying this, I am sneaking into your open mind.

The customer would usually be paying attention to Chieko’s tone of voice, which was invariably soothing, and would fail to notice the freight of insult.

Moss is this sort of person too. Even when it disapproves, privately, of your actions, moss can be a friend, a comfort, a deep-green shoulder to lean on.

I happened to be visiting a shrine today, a shrine on the top of a mountain. A sequence of red gates led me to an open area under immense pine trees where the ground was mossy underfoot. Ahead lay the shrine, with its angry guardian foxes and silly dangling bells, hanging like the testicles of a tomcat. But instead of approaching the ropes and ringing the bells, I decided to worship the moss instead. I fell to the ground, soiling my purple robe.