8
Scarabesques
Of the many literary texts that I have encountered, none have been more satisfying to my tastes as those that concern texts themselves – libraries and books more particularly,” said Leopold, a neighbouring tenant in my apartment bloc. “I can rattle them off easy: Perez-Reverte's The Dumas Club springs readily to mind... A lot of stuff by Jorge Luis Borges, too – you've got to read his 'The Library of Babel'... wild, uncanny shit! But not only book-mysteries, but book-related mysteries... or bookish mysteries like Czuchlewski's The Muse Asylum, the only damn good thing to come out of Penguin in years, if you ask me.”
“I've read Borges and some of the others you mention, not all.”
Leopold made puckering faces as he talked; he was hard to look at. I continued: “It can be a dangerous thing to become entranced by the mysteries of books,” I said, holding the door to my apartment open and letting the warm light of my lamps soften the harsh edges of the poorly chosen hallway carpet as it frayed pointlessly over the unvarnished truth of the hardwood flooring's neglect.
“Like being lost in the tracing of an arabesque. Libraries themselves are deserts. Have you ever been lost in the desert and then find yourself dancing in it, going nomad?”
“I don't suppose many have, and, no, I can't say that I can count myself among such people. Sounds a little like going mad, never mind nomad,” I returned at some dismal attempt to make humour with my mouth, but the tortured pun was dismissed.
“There are only two types of people that prosper in the desert,” he went on to tell me. “Warriors and scholars. The desert is the scene of the highest courage and wisdom, cruelty and outward reflection. Real math comes from the desert. Real ideas and the heritage of knowledge come from the desert.”
“As do the big three world religions.”
“Yes... see? The desert promotes big thinking!”
“And oppression, at times. And a lot of dry, airy speculation. And venomous creatures. And stubborn sand in all your belongings.”
“An error in translation, I assure you. Listen, when they say 'what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,' it is the same with desert knowledge. The concept zero, the monotheistic god, all of that got corrupted when it went from the arid expanse of the infinite desert and took root in rich soil. Had it stayed in the desert, it would have remained pure and meaningful.”
I doubted my neighbour's loose roundup and said so, diplomatically by way of a question: “What use is a knowledge that can't stand up to being shipped elsewhere? Bad currency exchange. It sounds a lot like madness. It is only when madness can cross that barrier back into Reason that we can call and evaluate it as genius.”
Leopold was not willing to give an inch: “Whether there be trees and flowers, the desert is all around us, beneath us, lacing itself across the world. In the beginning when there was land, all was desert, and to the desert all will return. I am not distracted by trees and flowers.”
“You are a devout nomad,” I said smilingly. Granted, I was smiling because the situation demanded it: how many could honestly report that they were capable of having some kind of interesting conversation in their own apartment complex with a neighbour? It was interesting, but also absurd; Leopold cleaved to some mystical idea about deserts and their profound effects, and I didn't doubt his journeys into surreal realms was not above using the occasional substance to assist his passage.
“I travel the desert in every conceivable way,” he declared with a slightly unnerving glazed look in his eye. For a moment, I thought he was going to have some sort of transcendence episode, leaving me to explain to the police why there was a man yodeling on top of our apartment bloc with no shoes.
But Leopold, apart from his eccentricities, was not a problematic neighbour. He was one among the many self-proclaimed starving artists, comfortably shrouded in the cliché, and had a genuinely enthusiastic attitude toward many things that populated the diffracted canon of what he deemed of worthy attention. It was better a neighbour like him who was more prone to waking me up in the middle of the night while charging and shrieking with creative fervour at a canvas than jacking my television to supply a meth addiction. In the inner city, all was possible, and most of those possibilities very much sucked. I could, of course, do even better if he wouldn't choose the wee hours to get creative and enjoin his vocal apparatus in the process.
I was not as yet rattled by my inaccurate mention in the books I had secretly plucked from the infinite library. Although I was technically an academic of sorts, I was not the type who had to contend with dead grandmother excuses from students or the usual administrative nothingness of bureaucracy... And I was hardly the scholastic type professing grand theories and other metanarratives. I did, however, shudder at the brief mention of the central and unnamed narrator stealing books. He or she, along with this ridiculously named Sigurd, were most likely grad students overheated by their lexicons that took precedence over depth in scholarship – an all too common scenario. The reportage itself was amateurish and narcissistic, which made for a dull read. The narrator feigned at profundity in his or her conceptual topics, but seemed more intent on delighting in the sound of his or her own voice: another grad student giveaway. Editorializing the literary quality or the characters of the narrative was not something I should have concerned myself with. I needed to dig deeper into this report to find those cues and clues about myself. And, inasmuch as I could accuse the narrator for narcissism, was I not engaging in a reading practice that suffered the same accusation?
Leopold and I detached from our esoteric conversation, and I returned inside to pore over this text once more in search of some clue:
Backstory Excerpt 2
Books should not have happy or unhappy endings; they should just end, free of any purposes and hopes we insist upon. You know: a bit of word play, some clever quips by the characters, the big tying together of a few loose ends in the plot, and time to shut the story down with tidy and total resolution of the old story arc. Nothing new - the world was always going back to the mirror and touching up what it has touched up before.
There I was, traveling past the outdoor patios with the smell of lilacs and lattes and peppermint wafting in the air, this one obscure snapshot moment of my life. I could see the sun setting, its orange fury casting a mellow patina upon the short and cozy buildings. I could see the sun between the trees by an intersection, and with lively steps, I walked across the royal carpet of its light. During any sunset, when one is walking down where the buildings couch the street, there are two types of light I admire: the fiery glint of flickering sunshine insinuating itself between a jumble of leaves, and the surreal, yet warm blue of solid shadow in the quiet damp of evening. Between the buildings, it was all blue shadow, and I felt as if the entire world was only two blocks long and everyone was my friend. What harm was there in finding somewhere to nest, to have a chat with strangers, to have a beer while I waited for the azure sky to change by gradations to ultramarine blue, to violet, to black? Spring was the time to build nostalgia. I tucked myself into the very shadows from which other things tend to emerge, or perhaps they bleed this kind of hazy purple-blue.
A woman with slender wrists caught my eye, and I just started ruminating out loud about things that idly passed my consciousness: “spring is the canvas, my mind is the brush, and my comportment towards the world at any given moment is testimony to the broad strokes I effect in erecting nostalgia.” The woman arched an eyebrow, regarding me queerly. I was talking aloud again. But no matter how hard I tried to revel in the glorious majesty of the season, my thoughts still circulated round the need for exile, the desire to extricate myself from all worldly affairs. I just couldn't wait any longer for a plot to start brewing. But, Lo! Sigurd and his pomp train of loud drunkards had plans for me. I swear, he was insanity with the face of a choirboy.
“You've got to meet this girl,” he said, the sky now black and my thoughts cascading into nocturnal smoke. “She's sublime and deadly; just the type for you.”
“Where?”
“At the pub down the way. Come along and I'll buy us a round.”
So off we went to the pub. We would situate ourselves under the skylight with its wood trim and greasy panes of streaked glass. We sat at an oak table, the varnish worn off by three decades of elbows. As luck would have it, the girl was waiting for us, with a whiskey held in her hand, a hat sitting reluctantly on her head. She held the amber concoction by the bowl instead of the stem, and she appeared to us like some bizarre potted plant that grew from the seat. She tapped out the song that was playing on the speakers with her long fingers, keeping time both mechanically and correctively. By most people's standards, she was a catch. But to me, she wasn't all that spectacular. Her words were saccharin, and though she tried in earnest to get my attention, I just couldn't be bothered. At least she had the presence of mind to stop when I didn't take the bait with all her overarching and obvious in-crowd cues of naming names or waxing provocatively on auteurs of cinema. She may have been a professional hypnotist, a florist, an eternal grad student. I never did get her name (Alexa Richter). She saw some of her friends at another table, and fearing the rabid genius of Sigurd who was speaking in overanimated tones about hermeneutics in film, she took the opportunity to bow out.
“I've got a great idea,” Sigurd slavered.
“Yeah?”
“But we might have to live the part for awhile to gain a discursive understanding. It's going to be about two guys who masquerade as geneticists in the American Bible Belt. In actuality, one guy is a poet, and the other guy works in an abattoir.”
“Blood and poetry. I like it already.”
“Here's the rub: they team up and bottle pig's blood, and sell it to Christian fundamentalists as the genetically reproduced blood of Christ. That way, the churches could go beyond the metaphor during Communion, and the two guys make a fortune. It would be the feel-good entrepreneur film of the decade - and a vicious polemic against religion and science, a reprise of the old role of the relic trade.”
“So you're suggesting that we live the roles, perhaps to furnish the film with some aspect of realism?”
“Fuck realism! We turn the scheme into a film and make a mint both ways.”
And so another distraction from the terrible malaise of our lives. But owing to Sigurd's nature, this would be one of the many ideas that would fail to materialize, his life an infinite collection of unfinished projects and stillborn ideas. And, to be honest, his idea was rather dumb, stale even before it finished developing in his head.
I had just finished this terribly written and meandering excerpt when the telephone rang. It was Angelo.
“Ciao, mate!” he said over a commotion behind him. His voice leered and slushed drunk, and the sounds emanating behind him were most likely pub-related. The connection was poor, which may have suggested that he was calling from very far away.
“Hello?”
“Gimaldi, Gimaldi, it's me, Angelo. How're tricks? Not disturbing you, am I?” - Again, Angelo in the linguistic ethnic confusion of smuggling bad turns of phrase from England.
“Oh, no, not really... “
“Friday night and you're indoors. Quel surprise! Are you sure I'm not disturbing you? Perhaps taking you away from some very gripping, corking good reading?”
I froze momentarily but regained my composure. “Ah, not really, you know, puttering... “
“Well, reading is a fine and generally – and I stress this 'generally' – inexpensive activity, something that doesn't require anything but oneself, eyesight, a brain, and someplace cozy to do it in. Sometimes we discover all sorts of things about ourselves that we may not otherwise learn going out to get righteously pissed. Although, if I could be solicited for advice, getting pissed rather than getting poky with the books would have been much better for you.”
“Um... Angelo, is there a reason why you're calling, or are you merely wanting to wax on about the respective virtues of reading and drinking?”
“Ah, no, no reason what-so-ev-er, mate! Just calling a chum! Seeing how you're doing an' all that, no harm! Just seeing how the other half live, y'know? Blood and poetry an' all that! I'll let you get back to it and we'll catch you on the flip-side!”
Click.
Angelo's tone was jovial enough, but crouching behind it was that hint of knowing malice that caused me to freeze up. What was I doing? I had performed an act of betrayal in visiting Setzer, and followed that up with theft from my employer. I felt as though I had committed these acts with passive ease rather than deliberately malicious design. The consummate danger of having any of these texts from the library out in the open like this was perhaps now manifesting itself. It would be my own peril, the parlous effects of what having these books in my possession may induce. I was not meant to read these texts I had in my possession for they could somehow endanger the delicate veils that separated one existential possibility from another, rendering them somewhat porous.
Like the river Lethe. Like the desert. I dug back into the Backstory, dickering with it, and had yet to summon up the courage to open the 7th Meditation. Having already committed two fatal acts of bad faith against my employer, I let the guilt of my actions prohibit me from reading these two pilfered texts out of sequence.
Blood and poetry. That was what Angelo said. It had been written in the Backstory. Was I being shadowed? I no longer felt safe. Blood and poetry – the phrase outside of its context was virtually meaningless, but it had taken on a curious significance, something about the merger of art, science and atrocity. The thought fled me almost as quickly as it had come on. Another of many loose ends in the rattling metal back stairs of consciousness.
The Backstory was very hard going, I could admit, for beyond the awkward and amateurish attempts at cleverness threaded through the needles of pretentious philosophical references, there were beginning to emerge disturbing undercurrents to the report. The text was very self-referential, only occasionally invoking my name amid descriptions that did not fit me whatsoever, placed there like melodramatic props that belonged to an entirely different actor who just happened to have my name. The narrator did not even bother to conceal his – deciding that the narrator was male - inspiration for the manner in which he unfurls his tale, and even names it: Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. The second invocation of Obsalte was thrown in and left there to rot. I spent the remainder of the evening – despite the scare Angelo had given me – with my fugitive reading. And this is what I read:
Backstory Excerpt 3
Plotinus was taught by Ammonius Saccas whose principal aim was to launch Plotinus for the purposes of making Plato intelligible to the intransigent Pagans, or so our research paper for Gimaldi attempted to prove.
Apparently, a plot hole or some detail I missed. The narrator and Sigurd have suddenly been entrusted to do research for the story’s Gimaldi. Knowing what I have read so far about these two, I wouldn’t entrust any tasks to these self-important dilettantes.
In fact, little investigation (or materials for profitable research) was done on Saccas beyond third-hand anecdotal commentary meant as a straw man to denounce Neo-Platonism, so Sigurd and I had to resort to airy conjecture. Plotinus' notion of the Good and the One was not just an inference made by reflecting on Plato's Forms and making modifications, but had within it some other mechanisms that we imputed to Saccas. Sigurd suggested that Saccas, perhaps fluent in the arcane arts of Egyptian lore, was preoccupied with animal economy--how the conduct and construction of animal natures interpolated with the elements and the spirits. This began a mode of thought in the Plotinian system, so highly revered by the Paganists (in various analogues like totemism and animism), that we found the marked presence of a complete deviation (or a distortion, as some argue) of Platonism. This system was laid to rest courtesy of Augustine, who decided to forego the distinction of the Good and the One in order to bolster Christianity as the dominant truth, thereby distinguishing the concepts of the Good and the One as qualities univocally spoken of God. I wasn't so attached to or fond of the conclusions this collaboration was producing, but I wanted to spare Sigurd's feelings.
I bring up the subject of the Plotinus paper because there was one person who read it: Gimaldi, who was the intended audience. Not only did he read it, but it drove him to hand over a very potent clue: Obsalte. But my life was full enough with mysteries, enigmas, and fruitless research pursuits.
While in this mood, I wrote a name on a paper and underlined it twice.
“Obsalte?” Sigurd questioned.
“Yes. Obsalte. Gimaldi wouldn't just plunk this down in our laps without some probable cause,” I explained.
“Be that cause noble or one that incites madness,” he replied with the contrariety rolling from him in quicksilver motion.
“We never got too far with Plotinus, did we?”
“I don't know about that. I think we opened a window and let in the cool breeze.”
“Okay, I'll fess up,” he said. “I wanted to surprise you. I did find an Obsalte reference on the web. An obscure, out of the way site, really, but marginally helpful nonetheless. Obsalte, according to the site, had in his possession at one point or another--or had the chance to look at--the papyri codex of A.S.”
“A.S.?”
“Clue in, my friend. I'll set up the equation for you: the year is 230, Alexandria, and he is a teacher.”
“Ammonius Saccas?”
“Give this man thirty silver dollars.”
This was too much. I’d half expect such coincidence and smooth motion from one clue to the next to be part of a made-for-TV low-budget mystery potboiler. These references to Plotinus lacked any pivot with the rest of the story, although it was another conspicuous reference for my benefit.
Gimaldi was an aging academic with the empty hands of a crying martyr. Sad, diseased, and despairing, Gimaldi carried his bulky misery everywhere like a heavy cross, always asking himself the “why” of his life, but suddenly encountered with the dishonesty of his internally directed inquiries. I knew this because I felt that way, too. What was I to say to people who knew and saw me in the street in those moments? I was trapped in my own life, relegated to having to repeat my doggerel time and again, being both awkward and terse, taciturn and pretentious.
I once let it slip to Gimaldi that I found his counter-book good, but that it paid no consideration to the reader. He recoiled in disgust and told me that readers never considered him. “To read me isn't the same as to respect me,” he said, “so I feel no compulsion to be considerate to such a faceless sea of eyes that stand like a god and decidedly misinterpret every thought I kindly articulate to them. Unqualified judges all.” And that was when he smiled like a leopard, eyes flashing cobalt blue, lowering his saturnine face level to my own.
“You decide on the truth before you read the book,” he said, pausing to look for that one word he could use to articulate the entire spirit of his counter-book. “With reverence of the flaws in this age, as any, the book stands as a violent reaction to the truths we've all collectively decided upon. I authored the synthesis found in the pages preceding this volume.”
What synthesis?
But the book was, at times, maddening, and sometimes I just wanted to slash at it with the thick, red tip of a marker because for every passage I found logically incorrect, three others were infuriatingly right - and thus offensive. The conclusion of all his belting and batting away at a complex metaphysics of seemingly no import or application? The Library, he said.
What Library?
The One Library, he would respond and then peel off some of the more fanciful dictums to reveal himself as just another species of Neo-Platonist; instead of all coming from that source of One that was God, it was the Library, and its expression was “information”, like the expression of genes poured into the world and decaying, becoming less perfect. He was on side with the cybernetics movement of Norbert Wiener, agreeing that physics is actually a triad, and reality is composed of not only matter and energy, but information as well – information not in the abstract, but manifest in the concrete.
Gimaldi was always pointing... pointing at doubt with accusation and longing. “Certain men make clocks,” he told me. “Doubtful men contain their indiscretions and doubts in a clockwork universe.” Hence, his metaphysics, I suppose. The parable of those tidal pools was just too enticing to overlook, to not actively engage the metaphor as a working hypothesis. But I just couldn't really understand it... It was too abstract, and I had to be in that special state of mind mostly known to philosophers. I was not, by any stretch, a philosopher. The tidal pools, for Gimaldi, represented a closer link to that One, that Library, a purer effluent of information that had not yet succumbed to the many permutations and distortions of generation.
Dinosaurs like Gimaldi had a way of creating atmosphere by carrying it around with them like an odour of gin and cigarettes and tragedies and intrigues, as if defeat and failure were still fashionably heroic pursuits. Despite myself, he brought out the desire to pledge belief and faith. It was like his tour de force could crush everything in its path should he twist himself up in that Leninist mode where negotiations were shorthand for docctrinal lecture, purely dogmatic commands. He had all of modernity under his fat thumb with that damn counter-book, that lifeless paperweight absurdly pinioning the flailing arms of this made-in-a-lab monster of the real. When reality asked for definition and feasible explanation, Gimaldi, like a stone-faced Bishop, would trap it under glass and look at it with the fascination a child has with a captured bug. In that one act of keeping a critter under the glass, containing it in the artificial universe whose walls were transparent, this spoke of Gimaldi's ability to arbitrarily decide upon a new Reason he had devised.
Why was I here in this place, under the strict, unspoken, and vindictive tutelage of Gimaldi? Prometheus gave Gimaldi the forbidden torch. And Prometheus was the first martyr... a martyr of a good, yet precipitous cause. But even martyrs deserted their loves, their followers, abandoning the temples to ruin or under the care of a neophyte. The martyr says, “here is my temple. I remand all my loves for you to hold.” And in this way, the martyr makes his great escape. It is the poor martyrs who stick around for the gory spectacle – Christ on the cross, writhing for our sins; and Lucifer cast down for our freedom. Gimaldi had let fly with some cryptic comment that was spoken like a portent of things to come... Frequent mention was made of a master named Albrecht and his disciple, and how that disciple betrayed him. But the disciple did not have that vigour and vision the master had, and so himself fell from grace with startling celerity. It was something my friend Sigurd would have secretly loved to put into film – as he was a film major – but something he would denounce as cliché if someone else did it instead of him.
At a certain point as the moon crested somewhere behind the jagged teeth of buildings, I had let the book fall from my bed, and was soon lost in sleep. The makings of this pseudo-Franciscan mystery were beginning to weary me.
The mention of the Library felt tacked on, perhaps to goad me. I was beginning to wonder if this book was not from the pen of Castellemare himself, written in such a poor fashion as to punish me for my act of theft.