The Meridian
The Haunted Meridian
It all began long ago.… 1650, the year the Harvard Corporation was founded, when zhids were permitted to return to France and England—the year marking the birth of the European café, when a woman called Ann Greene was hanged for infanticide in Edinburgh and woke up on an autopsy table—the year, too, when to commemorate the Hapsburgs’ victory over Königsmark’s square-heads, thereby precipitating the Treaty of Westphalia and the end of the Thirty-Years War, mariolater Ferdi III decreed a 16½ metre column be erected on the east side of Altstadtplatz, facing the clocktower beneath which the pariah Jan Mydlár, since grown old (fourteen years still left in him—not the sickly melancholy type at all), had shortened the necks of the Bohemian aristocracy. Atop said column, a likeness in all but immodest respects of the Blessèd Virgin (fact-checked by our own in-house photojournalist in an Orwell MkII Timemachine,* kids—as seen in National Geographic): her noontide shade decreed to mark, and for two-and-a-half centuries hence, the Golem City Meridian, so-called, Mitteleuropa’s Greenwich Mean: all timepieces synchronise! Until, that is, one cold November evening of 1918, a week after the Declaration of Cheskoslovnikian Independence (as the father of the Oedipus Complex once said, The first requisite of civilisation is that of justice), anticipating from a safe distance the final apotheosis of the Hapsburg Empire, soon to melt into air at the end of the Great War, a mob of patriots assembled by the old tramline at the foot of the column, led by an anarchist crank who’d made his fortune smuggling sugar—one Franta Sauer a.k.a. František Kysela a.k.a. František Habán, loyal drinking partner of the Bolshevik, traitor and notorious bigamist, Jaroslav Hašek. Climbing onto the column’s pediment, Franta S. denounced, to a bemused crowd that’d gathered around to watch, the Baroque grandiosity of this overblown sundial as a symbol, obscene as it was arcane, of three hundred cretinising years of Hapsburg oppression of honest Sklavs. I ask you, Franta S. screamed. What’d the BLOODY Krauts ever do for us? Hašek, erstwhile Rasputin and propagandist to the Š.V.E.J.K.—that pseudo-secret society of perennial jokers and contumacious pissants whose non serviam was a half-arsed spanner in the works, as heroic as a fart in a jar—egging the mob on from the sidelines. They’d rehearsed this bit in a Žižkov pub over pints of the local dishwater: on the agreed signal (being the flagrant display of Franta S’s nude buttocks, belt unbuckled, britches down around bootstrapped ankles), in rush a brigade of patriotic fire-fighters (more Žižkov drinking pals in costumes borrowed from a theatrical props department) shouldering ladders, ropes and pulleys, ‘roused’ (for the sake of a sympathetic public) to vent their righteous indignation at this flagrant Habspsburgian triumphallus—Truth will be Victorious!—seizing the moment, their shouts drowning out the protestations of a distraught prelate, hazarding upon this scene of most unrepentant sacrilege (can’t quite believe what his eyes and ears are telling him). Yeehaa! Up rises the firemen’s ladder, Franta S., bare-arsed, legs astride, riding it—above his head he’s twirling a lasso, loops it ranchero-style up and over, rope hovering a moment like a tawdry halo before dropping down, down, around the Celestial Virgin’s head, hijab and all, yanked tight. Got the hussey! The mob heaves, the top of the column inches eastwards at an angle 
to its base.
Franta S., arms and legs akimbo, launches himself bodily from the end of the ladder at the Christ-Mother’s effigy. Geronimo! A handful of prime bub, he plants a sloppy kiss—and Yaahoo! down they go, toppling into the crowd, screaming head-over-heals and buggered into bits. Hašek meanwhile’s stretched-out in a flowerbed, too plastered to stand any more—the whole spectacle’s gone to his head, like shooting that bearded pontificator back in Shitsville, Siberia, caught blessing machineguns for Kolchuk’s Chesko-fecking-slovnik Legions, those idiots—slurring a last Ty vole! before passing out. He’ll write about it all tomorrow, pen a glowing obituary for the boys at Rude Pravo—‘just remember, Jesus Christ was innocent too!’—then shout himself a couple of rounds, bed Jarmila in the afternoon on that settee her father gave her, begrudgingly, as a dowry—get Shura to slap up some borscht—dabble for a while with his collection of imaginary animals—then off to the night’s committee meeting at U Kalicha. Meanwhile, still at the scene, whistles and bells as the cops finally make an appearance on the Square and, sure enough, no sign of the troublemakers anywhere now, like rats up a drainpipe, firemen, the lot—only the martyrised Franta S., post-coitally flat on his back, shattered bliss-filled eyes staring up, humming Bluegrass on the Sázava River.
The debacle of the Marian Column’s not only made it onto the front page but into all the supplements too, and by the time Hašek hauls arse next evening to their regular wateringhole, he finds the Š.V.E.J.K. central committee’s lost no time in his absence drafting, debating, approving and amending whole swathes of a Provisional Constitution for the Cheskoslovnikian Soviet Socialist Republic, declaration immanent and with immediate post-dated effect, at least as soon as conditions for full-blown Revolution have been achieved, etc., being only a matter of days now, perhaps even minutes and hours (no doubt about it, they’re in a state of feverish expectation, downing pints at a rate of knots)—plotting the final overthrow of church, government and the spoken tongue, each (‘Anarchist Bombthrowers’, ‘Immoral Desecrators’, ‘Contemptuous Rabble’ and ‘Heroes of the National Revival’ respectively), eyes already on the prize of one or other ministerial portfolio, hatching schemes for getting there before the next guy, anticipating future schisms, purges, show-trials—castles in the sky, all. Hašek, in a major funk over spilt beer, rises at the head or ipso facto foot of the table, where he’s managed with a few deft well-practiced manoeuvres to ensconce himself, pointing across at the quiet young man seated in the corner of their meeting room, been diligently taking notes the whole time—a blush-of-youth Klem Gottwald lookalike if ever there was—belching in forceful undertone: Can’t you idiots recognise an undercover cop when you see one?
God’s Ear
Unbeknownst, a very different committee (in constitution if not in spirit) is at that very moment gathered in a crypt beneath Tyn Cathedral: a weird cenacle of algebrists, industrialists and Opus Dei, to discuss contingency plans for a top secret radio broadcast station, codename T.E.S.L.A.—plan A having been nipped unceremoniously in the bud by yesterday’s shenanigans. No one present at the anarchist’s daylight orgy of destruction had noticed the blue red black intestines of electrical wiring spilt from the entrails of the defiled Virgin, spirited away after the fact by three agents disguised as café waiters. The Column—who would’ve guessed it?—was the intended relay station, the central receiver, the node and nexus of a giant antennae—linked by invisible sound waves to a semicircle of tall spires in this city of thousands, ranged from Kepler’s astronomical eerie above the Klementinum, to the belfries of St Jiljí and St Havel, all the way round to the old Powder Tower, like a giant tympanum, a transceivered ear to listen-in on the heavenly spheres, background radiation blips and—very hush hush this—extraterrestrials. Edisson himself had material proof, patents pending, of alien broadcasts coming from Mars—Kepler, too, had foreseen it all, the constellationibus coelestibus, the Geometriam in the radiis as in the vocibus, that is to say, in Musica: ‘We have the technology’, they told themselves, ‘to do what no man has done before! To set out upon the Great Unknown! This Last Frontier in telecommunications! To be the universal bearers of the Word!’ In this dawn of a new Enlightenment, their bold enterprise has the imprimatur of prophesy made manifest, almost, very nearly—and now this! Fools! Imbeciles! And with the whole political situation thrown into chaos, indemnities out the window, premiums running to highway robbery—just at that very moment, so close, no hope of recouping their investment if the whole thing went belly-up—well.… We must pray, brothers, yes pray I tell you, for nothing short of a miracle!
The Time Keepers
But as Kepler could’ve told them, every binary implies a ternary (most emblematical of numerates, Holy Trin., Geometry of All) and so—though unsuspected by the former two, quasi-Marxists and neo-Hegelians** (yet well appraised of both)—a third committee is also presently in session. Chaired by the formerly Royal, now Republican, Keeper of the Clocks, this is the ‘ancient’ (est. 1348) Society for the Maintenance of Universal Time. The headache confronting the eminent gentlemen of S.M.U.T. is of a much less speculative nature: the reinstatement of the Meridian. Older members of the Society—luddite rosicruces!—had feared (and periodically continue to do so) that Time itself might even come to a stop if the S.V.E.J.K. were permitted to succeed (as in fact they have) with their slapstick machinations (known well in advance and to a greater or lesser extent colluded-in by the newly devolved Interior Ministry, old habits dying hard) to demolish if not dematerialise the Marian Column (a.k.a. The Dial) and so flood the city with untold quantities of Temporal Entropy. Countermeasures had been put in place but in the event—as so often the case in S.M.U.T.’s long history—proved ineffective against a conspiracy of dunces and madmen. Apprehension over T.E.S.L.A.’s radio wave experiments, on the other hand, has even S.M.U.T.’s more circumspect members (so-called Abominationists) worrying their mustachios about some rumoured impending warp in Time’s very fabric should not these nightly occult transmissions be brought to a halt forthwith—a warp certain to expose everyone and everything to what one member (a short-legged rotund chappy with a beard dewed around the mouth with constantly refreshed supplies of spittle) quaintly insists upon calling aberrations: a hocus-pocused reverse induction of signals rumoured in the ionosphere, colliding and interfering, diminishing and amplifying in constant oscillation since the Dawn of Creation itself—spectral voices in the sky, perhaps even the original command—
—zapping them all back to some pre-Fall speleologism. Fidgeting with infinity: not for the lighthearted. But all’s well that ends well, and waking bleary-eyed and hungover to the inevitable sun-up with their entropy-meters ticking over the same as usual, and nothing more aberrant than the sight of themselves in the bathroom mirror, the gents of S.M.U.T. can breathe a collective sigh of relief: the timely destruction of the Dial, in ways few of this most august club dare acknowledge, even to themselves, is a godsend.…
The Biggest Clock in Town
Who construed all these infernal time machines? God, if he’d blinked, might’ve missed everything—was it for His sake the bells rang, to be sure He wasn’t sleeping? Deep down under the flagstones, clay, basalt, the City’s most ancient orloj, the Holocene clock, dendrochronograph of time immemorial, ticked—sleeper cells in the circulating currents of an evolutionary submind, from first paleo-cinematography to the sunset-at-midnight crepusculum of the Red Peril… Zodiacs of the ages, coursing and recoursing, the migratio gentium of Cro-Magnon to Celt to Kraut to Sklav—Závist oppidum to Marcomanni to Magna Germania—conjugating the great continental flux, from cave-dwelling kin to folklored Völkerwanderung, Sklavenes to Sklavani, Sklavesians to Sklavenoi—all brewed back down into the primal stew, the sedimentary gene-pools percolating over into the stream of blood-consciousness, the mirthless melting pot of war, flood, fire, plague.… To end here, among the martyrs and heretics, the real and metaphysic monuments to the eternal momentary, excommunicating the hours: the procession of Father Death and his Apostles, the moon months, the pre-Copernican universe on a dial—Rome a thousand years deceased and last dark-age antipopes future-shocked as Šindel’s mechanical astrolabe becomes a proto-causality machine—dark, iridescent cogs, wheels, mills producing time-space, quantum relativity weirdness disturbing the God-sleep, celestial entropy, anachronic glitches in the very stuff of Creation—catastrophe if the clock failed, though not for lack of trying. The Nazis shot it to pieces during the ’45 uprising—took three years to get it working again. Too late—by then, figured by the history book, the shadows had lengthened irreversibly and the world had stopped.
*Patent pending.
**Notwithstanding.
Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy
ISSN 2200-8616