exquisite frame for it,â elucidated Right.
âGlamour infuses the breath of life into Discourse and prevents it from drying up,â added Left.
âThink of it like this,â advised Right: âGlamour is the Discourse of the body â¦â
â⦠while Discourse is the Glamour of the spirit,â finished Left.
âThe point where these two concepts meet is the genesis of all contemporary culture,â said Right.
âWhich thus reveals itself as the dialectical unity of Glamorous Discourse and Discursive Glamour,â concluded Left.
Baldur and Jehovah pronounced both âGlamourâ and âDiscourseâ with the accent on the wrong syllable, which lent them a sort of pseudo-professional air â much as veteran Gazprom sharks, for instance, like to talk about âpet rol â rather than â pet rolâ. It was intended to inspire confidence in their knowledge and admiration for their experience; however, the confidence and admiration I felt did not prevent me from rapidly falling asleep.
They did not wake me up since, as I was subsequently informed, intellectual matter is assimilated four times more quickly as a result of irrelevant mental processes being blocked when one is asleep. Several hours passed before I awakened. Baldur and Jehovah seemed tired, but content. I had absolutely no recollection of what had occurred during this time.
Subsequent lessons, however, were very different.
Talking was kept to a minimum. Very occasionally my teachers would dictate to me something that needed to be written down. At the start of each session they laid out on the table identical plastic racks reminiscent of DNA testing equipment in a laboratory. The racks housed short test tubes with clear liquid and elongated black stoppers, and the tubes were labelled with stickers giving either a description or a number.
These were the preparations .
The procedure was simple. I applied two or three drops of the clear liquid to my mouth and added to them another clear, bitter-tasting liquid known as the âfixativeâ. The result was that my memory was invaded by an explosion of hitherto unknown information â something like a cognitive aurora borealis or a firework display of self-unpacking data. The process was similar to my first tasting, the difference being that the knowledge was now retained in my memory even after the initial effects induced by the preparation had worn off. This was the contribution of the fixative, a complex distillation that acted on the chemistry of the brain. It was damaging to health to be exposed to its influence for long; this was why instruction had to be restricted to sessions kept as brief as possible.
The preparations that were the subject of my tastings were an elaborate cocktail of red liquid from a great number of people, the eidolons of whose personalities overlaid one another in my perception like a crystalline chorus singing various kinds of information. Along with this I was burdened with often distasteful and boring details of their personal life. The secrets thus revealed provoked no interest in me â rather the reverse.
The way I absorbed the information contained in the preparations was different from the way in which a student absorbs a chapter of a textbook or a lecture he attends. I was drinking from a source more like an endless television programme in which instructional material coalesced with soap-opera realism, family photograph albums and amateur pornography usually of a repulsive nature. On the other hand, the manner in which any student assimilates useful knowledge is inevitably accompanied by approximately the same proportion of irrelevant trimmings, so my training could be regarded as essentially similar.
In itself, this swallowing of large quantities of information added nothing to my store of wisdom. But I found that when I started to think about any given issue, new facts and perceptions would rise up
âGlamour infuses the breath of life into Discourse and prevents it from drying up,â added Left.
âThink of it like this,â advised Right: âGlamour is the Discourse of the body â¦â
â⦠while Discourse is the Glamour of the spirit,â finished Left.
âThe point where these two concepts meet is the genesis of all contemporary culture,â said Right.
âWhich thus reveals itself as the dialectical unity of Glamorous Discourse and Discursive Glamour,â concluded Left.
Baldur and Jehovah pronounced both âGlamourâ and âDiscourseâ with the accent on the wrong syllable, which lent them a sort of pseudo-professional air â much as veteran Gazprom sharks, for instance, like to talk about âpet rol â rather than â pet rolâ. It was intended to inspire confidence in their knowledge and admiration for their experience; however, the confidence and admiration I felt did not prevent me from rapidly falling asleep.
They did not wake me up since, as I was subsequently informed, intellectual matter is assimilated four times more quickly as a result of irrelevant mental processes being blocked when one is asleep. Several hours passed before I awakened. Baldur and Jehovah seemed tired, but content. I had absolutely no recollection of what had occurred during this time.
Subsequent lessons, however, were very different.
Talking was kept to a minimum. Very occasionally my teachers would dictate to me something that needed to be written down. At the start of each session they laid out on the table identical plastic racks reminiscent of DNA testing equipment in a laboratory. The racks housed short test tubes with clear liquid and elongated black stoppers, and the tubes were labelled with stickers giving either a description or a number.
These were the preparations .
The procedure was simple. I applied two or three drops of the clear liquid to my mouth and added to them another clear, bitter-tasting liquid known as the âfixativeâ. The result was that my memory was invaded by an explosion of hitherto unknown information â something like a cognitive aurora borealis or a firework display of self-unpacking data. The process was similar to my first tasting, the difference being that the knowledge was now retained in my memory even after the initial effects induced by the preparation had worn off. This was the contribution of the fixative, a complex distillation that acted on the chemistry of the brain. It was damaging to health to be exposed to its influence for long; this was why instruction had to be restricted to sessions kept as brief as possible.
The preparations that were the subject of my tastings were an elaborate cocktail of red liquid from a great number of people, the eidolons of whose personalities overlaid one another in my perception like a crystalline chorus singing various kinds of information. Along with this I was burdened with often distasteful and boring details of their personal life. The secrets thus revealed provoked no interest in me â rather the reverse.
The way I absorbed the information contained in the preparations was different from the way in which a student absorbs a chapter of a textbook or a lecture he attends. I was drinking from a source more like an endless television programme in which instructional material coalesced with soap-opera realism, family photograph albums and amateur pornography usually of a repulsive nature. On the other hand, the manner in which any student assimilates useful knowledge is inevitably accompanied by approximately the same proportion of irrelevant trimmings, so my training could be regarded as essentially similar.
In itself, this swallowing of large quantities of information added nothing to my store of wisdom. But I found that when I started to think about any given issue, new facts and perceptions would rise up
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