“Natural forms,” wrote Djerzinski, “are human forms. Triangles, interweavings, branchings, appear in our minds. We recognize them and admire them; we live among them. We grow among our creations—human creations, which we can communicate to men—and among them we die. In the midst of space, human space, we make our measurements, and with these measurements we create space, the space between our instruments.
“Uneducated man,” Djerzinski went on, “is terrified of the idea of space; he imagines it to be vast, dark and yawning. He imagines beings in the elementary form of spheres, isolated in space, curled up in space, crushed by the eternal presence of three dimensions. Terrified of the idea of space, human beings curl up; they feel cold, they feel afraid. At best, they move in space and greet one another sadly. And yet this space is within them, it is nothing but their mental creation.
“In this space of which they are so afraid, human beings learn how to live and to die; in their mental space, separation, distance and suffering are born. There is little to add to this: the lover hears his beloved’s voice over mountains and oceans; over mountains and oceans a mother hears the cry of her child. Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds, while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit. All that exists is a magnificent interweaving, vast and reciprocal.”
Hubczejak rightly notes that Djerzinski’s great leap lay not in his rejection of the idea of personal freedom (a concept which had already been much devalued in his time, and which everyone agreed, at least tacitly, could not form the basis for any kind of human progress), but in the fact that he was able, through somewhat risky interpretations of the postulates of quantum mechanics, to restore the conditions which make love possible. It is important here to evoke once more the image of Annabelle: though Djerzinski had not known love himself, through Annabelle he had succeeded in forming an image of it. He was capable of realizing that love, in some way, through some still unknown process, was possible. This was probably his guiding thought in the last months of his theoretical work, about which we know so little.
According to the testimony of those few people who visited Djerzinski in Ireland during those final weeks, he appeared to have made his peace. His anxious, changing expression seemed to have been stilled. He often took long, dreamy, aimless walks along Sky Road with only the sky itself as witness. The road snaked west across the hills, some gentle, others steep. The ocean glittered, refracting a shifting light onto the last rocky islands. On the horizon, the mass of cloud seemed luminous and confused, its presence strangely physical. He walked effortlessly for a long time, his face bathed by the delicate mist. His work, he knew, was done. In the room he had converted into a study, its window overlooking Errislannan Point, he had put his notes in order. There were hundreds of pages on an extraordinary diversity of subjects. The results of his actual scientific work were contained in eighty typed pages. He had not thought it necessary to include his calculations.
On 27 March 2009, in the late afternoon, he went to the central post office in Galway. He sent a copy of his work to the Académie des Sciences in Paris, and another to the British magazine Nature. No one can be certain of what happened next. The fact that his car was found near Aughrus Point led many to think of suicide—and indeed neither Walcott nor his colleagues at the center seemed surprised by this. “There was something about him,” said Walcott, “something monstrously sad. I think he was probably the saddest man I have ever met, and even the word ‘sadness’ seems inadequate; there was something broken in him, something completely devastated. I always got the impression that life was a burden to him, that he no longer knew how to make contact with any living thing. I think he held out for exactly as long as was necessary to finish his work, and I don’t think any of us will ever know the effort he had to make in order to do so.”
Djerzinski’s disappearance remains a mystery. When a body could not be found, rumors sprang up that he had gone to live in Asia, probably in Tibet, to compare his work with Buddhist teachings. This hypothesis is now discredited. In part because there is no trace of his leaving Ireland, and in part because the drawings on the last pages of his notebook, which some had interpreted as mandalas, were later found to be combinations of Celtic symbols much like those in the Book of Kells.
We now believe that Michel Djerzinski died in Ireland, where he had chosen to live out his last years. We also believe that, having completed his work, and with no human ties to bind him, he chose to die. Many witnesses attest to his fascination with this distant edge of the Western world, constantly bathed in a soft shifting light, where he liked to walk, where, as he wrote in one of his last notes, “the sky, the sea and the light converge.” We now believe that Michel Djerzinski went into the sea.
Epilogue
Though we know much about the lives, physical appearances and personalities of the characters in this book, it must nonetheless be considered a fiction—a plausible re-creation based on partial recollections, rather than a definite, attestable truth. Though Clifden Notes—a complex blend of memories, personal impressions and theoretical reflections jotted down by Djerzinski while he was working on his theory between 2000 and 2009—tells us much about the events in his life, and the choices, conflicts and dramas which were to shape his distinctive view of existence, there are many areas in his biography and his personality which remain obscure. What follows, however, belongs to History, and the events which followed the publication of Djerzinski’s work have been pored over, commented on and analyzed so often that a brief résumé seems sufficient.
In 2009, the magazine Nature published a separate section entitled “Toward Perfect Reproduction,” eighty pages synthesizing Djerzinski’s last works. This was to send shock waves throughout the scientific community. Around the world, dozens of molecular biologists tried to duplicate his experiments and verify the details of his calculations. After several months, the first results came in and then, week after week, more and more experiments confirmed his original hypotheses with exact precision. At the end of 2009 there could no longer be any doubt: Djerzinski’s conclusions were valid and could be considered to have been proven. The practical consequences were dizzying: any genetic code, however complex, could be noted in a standard, structurally stable form, isolated from disturbances or mutations. This meant that every cell contained within it the possibility of being infinitely copied. Every animal species, however highly evolved, could be transformed into a similar species reproduced by cloning, and immortal.
Hubczejak was twenty-seven when he, like hundreds of researchers all over the world, discovered Djerzinski’s work. He was completing his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge and was nervous, distracted, always on the move; for a number of years he had been roaming Europe, where he studied at the universities of Prague, Göttingen, Montpellier and Vienna—searching, as he put it, “for a new paradigm, yet also for something more: not just a way of seeing the world but a way of situating myself within it.” He was certainly the first and, for many years, the only defender of the most radical of Djerzinski’s proposals: that mankind must disappear and give way to a new species which was asexual and immortal, a species which had outgrown individuality, separation and evolution. It is superfluous to note the hostility with which such a project was greeted by the defenders of revealed religion; Judaism, Christianity and Islam were for once agreed, and heaped derision and opprobrium on work which “gravely undermines human dignity in its unique relationship with the Creator.” Only Buddhists demurred, noting that all of the Buddha’s teachings were founded on the awareness of the three impediments of old age, sickness and death, and that the Enlightened One, if he had meditated on it, would not necessarily have rejected a technical solution. Nonetheless, Hubczejak could count on little support from organized religion. It is perhaps more surprising to note that traditional humanists also rejected the idea out of hand. Though it may be difficult for us to understand this now, it is important to remember how central the notions of
“personal freedom,” “human dignity” and “progress” were to people in the age of materialism (defined as the centuries between the decline of medieval Christianity and the publication of Djerzinski’s work). The confused and arbitrary nature of these ideas meant, of course, that they had little practical or social function—which might explain why human history from the fifteenth to the twentieth century was characterized by progressive decline and disintegration. Nonetheless, the educated or semieducated classes, having more or less succeeded in inculcating these ideas, clung desperately to them. It is hardly surprising that Frédéric Hubczejak had such difficulty in making himself heard in those early years.
The story of the period in which Hubczejak finally managed to have his project, initially greeted with unanimous disgust and condemnation, accepted by a growing proportion of global opinion to the degree that it was eventually granted funding by UNESCO, reveals an extraordinarily brilliant and pugnacious individual, a pragmatic and agile mind, the archetype of an intellectual propagandist. Certainly he was not of the stuff of great researchers, but he was capable of turning to his advantage the enormous respect the scientific community had for Djerzinski and his work. Though he was neither an original nor a profound thinker, in annotating and prefacing Meditations on Interweaving and Clifden Notes, he presented Djerzinski’s thought with precision and incisiveness, making them accessible to a wider public. Hubczejak’s first article, “Michel Djerzinski and the Copenhagen Interpretation,” is, despite its title, a long meditation on a quotation from Parmenides: “That which is there to be spoken and thought of must be.” In his next paper, “A Treatise on Concrete Limitations,” and the more soberly titled “On Reality,” he attempts a curious synthesis of the logical positivism of the Vienna circle and the religious positivism of Comte, and he is not averse to flights of lyricism, as evinced by the oft-quoted passage “There is no endless silence of infinite space, for in reality there is no space, no silence and no void. The world we know, the world we create, the human world, is as round, smooth, simple and warm as a woman’s breast.” Whatever his failings, he understood how to communicate to a growing public the idea that humanity in its current state could and should control the evolution of the world’s species—and in particular its own evolution. In his struggle, he had the support of a number of neo-Kantians who, making use of the sudden unpopularity of Nietzschean ideas, had taken control of the wellsprings of power among the intelligentsia, the universities and the press.
The general consensus is that Hubczejak’s real genius lay in his precisely calculated ability to marshal the confused, bastardized, late-twentieth-century ideology known as “New Age thinking” to his advantage. He was the first of his generation to see beyond the ridiculous, contradictory and outmoded superstitions it adopted to the fact that New Age thought appealed to a very real suffering symptomatic of psychological, ontological and social breakdown. Beyond the repellent mix of fundamentalist eco-babble, attraction to tradition and the “sacred” which they inherited from their spiritual forebears, the Esalen commune and the hippie movement, New Agers had a genuine desire to break with the twentieth century, its immorality, its individualism and its libertarian and antisocial aspects. It testified to the anguished awareness that a society cannot function without the unifying axis of some kind of religion; it was, in effect, a call for a new paradigm.
Hubczejak was keenly aware that some compromise is essential. And when he founded the Movement for Human Potential in late 2011, he did not hesitate to openly recycle some New Age themes, ranging from what he referred to as “the formation of the cortex of Gaia” to his celebrated comparison “ten billion people on the face of the planet, ten billion neurons in the human brain,” from his appeal for a world government based on a “new alliance” to the almost commercial THE FUTURE IS FEMININE. This was done with an agility which generally drew admiration from commentators. He was careful to avoid any drift toward the nonrational and the sectarian and, on the contrary, secured strong support from the scientific community.
A certain cynicism in the study of human history tends to identify “artfulness” as a key component in success, although in the absence of strongly held convictions it is by itself incapable of producing any significant change. All those who had the opportunity to meet Hubczejak, or to debate him, are agreed that his persuasiveness, magnetism and extraordinary charisma were all rooted in a profound simplicity and an authentic personal conviction. He said exactly what he believed, regardless of the circumstances—and to his critics, tangled up in the limitations of outdated ideologies, such simplicity was devastating. One of the principal objections to his project concerned the suppression of sexual difference, which is so central to human identity. To this Hubczejak responded that his intention was not to re-create the human species down to the smallest detail, but to create a new, rational species, and that the end of sexuality as a means of reproduction in no way heralded the end of sexual pleasure—quite the contrary. The coding sequences responsible for the formation of Krause’s corpuscles in the embryo had recently been identified. At the time, such corpuscles were sparsely spread on the surface of the glans penis and the clitoris. There was nothing, however, to prevent these from being multiplied in the future to cover the entirety of the epidermis, offering new and undreamed-of erotic possibilities.
Probably the most profound criticisms focused on the fact that every member of the species created by making use of Djerzinski’s work would carry the same genetic code, meaning that one of the fundamental elements of human individuality would disappear. To this Hubczejak responded that this unique genetic code—of which, by some tragic perversity, we were so ridiculously proud—was precisely the source of so much human unhappiness. To the notion that human personality was in danger of disappearing, he proposed the concrete example of identical human twins who, through their individual experiences and despite their shared genetic code, developed different personalities while maintaining a mysterious fraternity—which, as Hubczejak pointed out, was exactly the element necessary if humanity were to be reconciled.
There can be no doubt that Hubczejak was sincere when he presented himself as a logical successor to Djerzinski, like an executor whose sole purpose was to put into practice the ideas of his master. Evidence for this might be found in his staunch loyalty to the bizarre idea proposed on page 342 of Clifden Notes: the number of individuals in the new species must always be a prime number; it is therefore necessary to create one person, then two, then three, then five . . . in short, to scrupulously follow the sequence of prime numbers. The purpose of having a population divisible only by itself and one was meant to draw symbolic attention to the dangers which subgroups constitute in any society; but it would appear that Hubczejak accepted this at face value without having the slightest idea what it might mean. More generally, his relentlessly positivist reading of Djerzinski led him constantly to underestimate the extent of metaphysical change which would necessarily accompany such a profound biological mutation—a mutation which had, in truth, no precedent in the history of humanity.
This gross ignorance of the philosophical subtleties of the project, and even his inability to recognize philosophical subtleties in general, in no way hampered or even delayed its implementation. This reveals the extent to which, in all Western societies and particularly in the most advanced segments represented by the New Age movement, there had been an acceptance of the idea that a fundamental shift was indispensable if society was to survive—a shift which would credibly restore a sense of community, of permanence and of the sacred. It is also a measure of how little the public understood or cared about questions of philosophy. The global ridicule in which the works of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida and Deleuze had suddenly foundered, after decades of inane reverence, far from leaving the field clear for new ideas, simply heaped contempt on all those intellectuals active in the “human sciences.” The rise to dominance of scientists in all fields of thought became inevitable. Even the occasional, sporadic
and contradictory interest which New Age devotees pretended to take in this or that belief or “ancient spiritual tradition” was nothing more than further evidence of a poignant, almost schizophrenic despair. Like others in society, and perhaps more so, they truly believed only in science; science was to them the arbiter of unique, irrefutable truth. Like others in society, they believed in their hearts that the solution to every problem—whether psychological, sociological or more broadly human—could only be a technical solution. Thus it was without any great risk of contradiction that Hubczejak launched his 2013 campaign—the first to unleash public opinion on a planetary level—with the slogan THE MUTATION WILL NOT BE MENTAL, BUT GENETIC.
The first fund of credit was voted through by UNESCO in 2021, and a group of scientists immediately set to work under Hubczejak’s direction. In practice, from a scientific standpoint, he had very little to do with the project, but he was to prove himself stunningly effective in the domain of public relations. The extraordinary speed with which the results came in was a surprise; only later did it become apparent that many of the scientists, already members or sympathizers of the Movement for Human Potential, rather than waiting for the green light from UNESCO, had been working on the project for some time in laboratories in Australia, Brazil, Canada and Japan.