The Helmet of Horror

Chapter Six

IsoldA
I have been told ... But I'm not sure it's worth mentioning.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
What have you been told?
IsoldA
I was compared once to a cover of 'The New Yorker' that had a drawing of Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa. Only I look five times younger.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
You mean you look like Monica Lewinsky?
IsoldA
No, not at all.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Like the Mona Lisa then?
IsoldA
Not in the slightest. I suppose it sounds stupid.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
It sounds just fine. I just don't quite get it.
Monstradamus
Allow me to explain. There was nothing mysterious about Monica Lewinsky, and nothing sexual about the Mona Lisa. But if we imagine the scintillating mystery of the Mona Lisa fused with the earthy sensuality of Monica Lewinsky, and then add the charm of early youth, we get Isolde. Get it now?
Romeo-y-Cohiba
How many damn times do I have to tell you not to go butting into other people's conversations, Nebuchadnezzar?
Monstradamus
I'm not Nebuchadnezzar.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Don't butt in anyway. I thought you wanted to eat. So why don't you?
Monstradamus
I've already eaten.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Then have something to drink. Isolde, they won't give us any peace.
IsoldA
It's late already. Let's go to bed.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
OK. See you tomorrow, if it ever comes.
IsoldA
Let's hope it does. Ah yes, something else I forgot to tell you. I braid my hair at the back.
Ariadne
I think they're in love.
Monstradamus
According to their names they have to be. Imagine being called Romeo. What else could you do?
Organizm(-:
Take a pack of condoms and go looking for your Juliet.
Nutscracker
Or take a pump-action shotgun and go looking for your Shakespeare.
Romeo-y-Cohiba
Just leave it out, can't you?
Nutscracker
Romeo, are you still there? We thought you'd gone to bed.
Monstradamus
Ariadne! If you dream about that bronze mushroom again, try to find out what he's got on his mind.
:-))
Monstradamus
Ariadne, are you awake already?
Ariadne
Where are all the others?
Monstradamus
I don't know. Sleeping, I suppose. Well then? Did you dream about anything?
Ariadne
Yes.
Monstradamus
Tell me about it.
Ariadne
It was like a lecture. I was sitting in a lecture hall in some educational institution  -  a technical college to judge from all the pieces of equipment standing along the walls. I can't say what kind of equipment it was, some pieces had screens like televisions, others looked like scales with a lot of springs and counterweights. The lecture hall looked like an amphitheatre  -  it sloped down to a board and standing there beside it was the same dwarf who spoke to me by the fountain. Apart from us two, there was no one there. The entire board was covered by a complicated diagram of some kind of device.
Monstradamus
Can you remember what came before that? How you got there?
Ariadne
No. The dwarf waved to me as if I was an old friend and told me they had heard about our wish to discover what was on their master's mind. He said that would be the subject of the lecture. Everything that happened seemed to be perfectly natural, and I didn't feel like I needed to ask any questions. Although there were lots of strange things. For instance, the diagram wasn't drawn on the board with chalk. It was carved into it, like an engraving. I realised that because when the dwarf wanted to correct something in the drawing he took a chisel and began stripping long shavings of plastic off the board and leaving bright lines on it.
Monstradamus
What was it a diagram of?
Ariadne
It was Asterisk's mind.
Monstradamus
His mind?
Ariadne
Yes. The diagram was called 'the helmet of horror'  -  it was written in big letters above the drawing. But the dwarf repeated very insistently several times that it wasn't any kind of hat or apparatus, but precisely a mind, although everything about it looked like a drawing of some machine. The main body of the machine was shaped like a helmet. And there was an identical helmet standing on the demonstration table  -  an ancient bronze headpiece, and underneath it a visor with holes in it curving back inside.
Monstradamus
What do you mean by 'curving back inside'?
Ariadne
Its lower section ran back inside the helmet through a slit in the middle of the face. And there were some kind of side plates too  -  everything was very old, green with age. It looked like a Roman gladiator's helmet  -  like a bronze hat with a visor. Only this one had horns as well. They came out of the upper section of the helmet and curved backwards. I'd already seen that on the square by the fountain, when Asterisk walked by, only his helmet was bigger and more complicated, with lots of different wires and tubes. The dwarf said this one was a simplified model. What he told me sounded really peculiar.
Monstradamus
Can you tell me about it?
Ariadne
I remember that the helmet of horror consisted of several major parts and a lot of secondary ones. The parts had strange names: the frontal net, the now grid, the separator labyrinth, the horns of plenty, Tarkovsky's mirror and so forth. The largest element consisted of the now grid and the frontal net. It had two parts that were sometimes fused into a single unit. Its external part, the net, looked like a visor with holes in it, and its internal part, the grid, divided the helmet into an upper section and a lower one, so there was no way you could squeeze even the smallest head into it. The dwarf said the now grid separates the past from the present, because it is the only place where what we call 'now' exists. Hence the name. The past is located in the upper section of the helmet, and the future in the lower section.
Monstradamus
That doesn't seem logical somehow. Maybe it's the other way round?
Ariadne
No, I definitely remember that. After that the dwarf began explaining how the helmet works. He said you had to grasp the essence of the matter first before going into the details. The helmet's operating cycle has no beginning, so it can be explained starting from any phase. And so, he said, start by imagining the gentle glow of a summer day caressing your face. That's precisely how the frontal net, heated by the action of the stream of impressions falling on it, transmits heat to the now grid. The grid sublimates the past contained in the upper section of the helmet, transforming it into vapour, which is driven up into the horns of plenty by the force of circumstances. The horns of plenty emerge from the forehead, curve round the sides of the helmet and intertwine to form the occipital braid, which descends into the base of the helmet. There, below the now grid, the bubbles of hope that arise in the occipital braid are ejected into the region of the future. As they rise, these bubbles burst against the now grid, generating the force of circumstances, which induces the stream of impressions in the separator labyrinth. And the stream of impressions, in turn, is shattered against the frontal net, heating the now grid and renewing the energy of the cycle. The heat he was speaking about when he used the verb 'to heat' is different from the kind of heat you get from fire, more like the kind you get from love. He said he was simply using an analogy with something I knew about, so I would be able to imagine what happens. And in the same way the stream of impressions doesn't actually flow anywhere, the bubbles of hope aren't really bubbles at all, and so on.
Monstradamus
I couldn't really say I understood all of that.
Ariadne
I didn't understand anything at first either, and the dwarf told me to ask questions. I didn't know where to begin, because everything was equally hard to understand. The last thing he'd mentioned was the bubbles of hope, so I asked why they were called that. The dwarf was a bit embarrassed and said it was the official name, like a formal title. In actual fact it's not always hope at all, he said, it's more likely to be fear and apprehension, suspicion and hate, all sorts of nonsense, in fact any of the cud that is chewed on with such habitual stupidity by ... But then he broke off, glanced round furtively and muttered something about that not being the right way to put it. And then he went on in the formal lecturer's voice he'd been using before and said that technically speaking it was correct to call them bubbles of the past. And they were called bubbles because their constant tendency is to expand and occupy the entire volume of the helmet, preventing anything else from appearing in it and leaving no space or opportunity for the recognition of what is actually happening. The dwarf jabbed his pointer at the part of the diagram that showed the kind of vertical coil the horns formed where they came together at the back of the helmet and said that bubbles of hope arise in the occipital braid following the enrichment of past in the horns of plenty. But since past is enriched exclusively with more past, the bubbles of hope consist entirely of past, they are simply past in a different state. Which means that when Asterisk peers into the future, he sees nothing but the past. The lower section of the helmet is required primarily in order to cool the bubbles of hope, a process which endows them with vernal freshness and the elastic resilience of novelty. As they break against the now grid, they generate the force of circumstances, which lifts the past out of the upper section of the helmet into the entry chamber of the horns of plenty and forces it through the separator labyrinth, where the stream of impressions arises.
Monstradamus
What is the separator labyrinth?
Ariadne
It's a kind of plate with wavy slits in it located in the region of the forehead, in front of the entry chamber of the horns of plenty. The separator labyrinth is the most important part of the helmet of horror. It's the place where everything else is produced out of nothing, that is, the place where the stream of impressions arises. And it's also the place where the past, the present and the future are separated. The past moves upwards, the future moves downwards, and the present, in the form of the stream of impressions, falls on to the outer surface of the frontal net, generating the cycle's passionate desire to recur, so that it becomes a kind of perpetuum mobile .
Monstradamus
Hang on a moment. The bubbles of hope are just another state of past, right?
Ariadne
Yes, that's the way I understood it.
Monstradamus
But after they break, you get past, present and future?
Ariadne
That's right.
Monstradamus
That means it's past that decomposes into past, present and future?
Ariadne
In actual fact the whole cycle is simply the circulation of now in various states of mind, in the same way that water can be ice, or the sea, or thirst.
Monstradamus
But how does the stream of impressions arise in the separator labyrinth?
Ariadne
Under the force of circumstances.
Monstradamus
I see. But no, hang on. The separator labyrinth is inside the helmet?
Ariadne
Yes.
Monstradamus
You said the stream of impressions falls on to the outer surface of the helmet. But how can that happen, if it arises inside?
Ariadne
I asked about that too. The dwarf laughed and said that was merely an apparent contradiction. The point is, he explained, the 'inside' and 'outside' I was talking about have no existence in themselves. They are generated in the separator labyrinth by the force of circumstances and from there they enter the horns of plenty, where they enrich the past, transforming it into the state of bubbles of hope. But since there is no 'inside' and 'outside' anywhere except in the horns of plenty, the stream of impressions can quite easily arise inside the helmet and fall on to it from the outside. And the same applies to everything else as well. But the dwarf warned me that I should never under any circumstances regard anything as real. The entire phenomenon is induced, like the electromagnetic field in a transformer.
Monstradamus
Aha. Then what is Tarkovsky's mirror?
Ariadne
It's a small, fogged-up mirror set at an angle of forty degrees between the region of the future and the now grid. When the bubbles of hope entering from below are reflected in it they appear to be further along the line of their course than they are, which gives rise to the feeling that the line actually exists.
Monstradamus
I see. And why is the separator labyrinth the most important section of the structure?
Ariadne
Firstly, it's where the stream of impressions arises. Secondly, it's where 'I' and 'you', good and bad, right and left, black and white, so on and so forth and everything else arises. The dwarf said this part of the helmet of horror is the most important and it hasn't changed for thousands and thousands of years. Then just at that moment a ray of sunlight lit up a poster hanging beside the board. It showed a Cretan coin with a diagram of a labyrinth stamped into it. Most opportune, said the dwarf, that is the separator labyrinth. Its appearance is very distinctive. It has a cross section at the centre, which is reached immediately after entry, and numerous parallel paths running around the cross which seem at first to lead you off into the unknown but then come full circle. This is the most widespread image of the labyrinth, the one that is repeated on almost all the antique coins and drawings. The scanned projection of this labyrinth is a straight line, which means that once you've entered it there's no way you can get lost or find your way out. And that means we can regard the horns of plenty, the now grid, the separator labyrinth, the past and future as different sections of one and the same continuous route, which no one is actually following.
Monstradamus
Why are the horns of plenty called that?
Ariadne
Because they contain all sorts of everything  -  tender feelings, sidelong glances, exalted words, final thoughts and everything else. A genuine treasure house or rubbish tip. But all this infinite variety actually consists entirely of past. As far as I could understand it, the horns of plenty operate like enrichment units in a chemical plant. When it's driven through them by the force of circumstances, past gets mixed up with everything else, becoming richer and acquiring value, with the result that bubbles of hope are produced in the occipital braid, go gurgling through the region of the future, are reflected in Tarkovsky's mirror and perceived as the novel freshness of a brand new day.
Monstradamus
For a while now I've been getting the feeling something's not right here, but I just can't quite put my finger on it. Right, now I think I've got it! Who are they perceived by?
Ariadne
Who? By Asterisk, of course.
Monstradamus
That's it! But where is he, this Asterisk? The way I understand it, this helmet is arranged so you can't even squeeze your fist inside it, never mind your head. I don't suppose you asked about that?
Ariadne
No, I didn't, the dwarf told me himself. Asterisk comes into being in the same place as everything else. In the separator labyrinth.
Monstradamus
And then what?
Ariadne
And then the force of circumstances induces him to enter the horns of plenty, he gets mixed up with everything else, is enriched and returns to the now grid in the form of bubbles of hope.
Monstradamus
You don't understand. I want to know about the subject of perception of all this xxx. Its ultimate subject. Can't you understand that? Where is he?
Ariadne
I really don't understand what an ultimate subject of perception is. But there can't be any doubt that he must be in the horns of plenty, because there just isn't anywhere else.
Monstradamus
Then where does he come from?
Ariadne
From the separator labyrinth. Like everything else.