20

Excerpts from 7^th Meditation

 

7^th Meditation: Mountains Without Valleys

This Being the Complete Account of Ensopht in Partial Fulfillment of His Duties to Facilitate the Necessity of the Synthesis, and that Sundry Members Concerned With This Enterprise May Be Put At Ease By Means of Full Narrative Exposition of the Events Destined to Occur

 

Printed By Permission of Tho. V. C, G.L.O.T.U.

Anno Zenodotus 2285

 

I:Convergence

Ad Lectorem:

I resolve now to mediate on myself as a thinking creature (albeit in that questionable sense where perception is a flawed and variable thing, and doubt provides more assurance of one's existence than does the mere act of thinking), and to explore how the hazy fugue of the extended world and my supposedly unshakeable “I” are instances of poor assemblages, of multiple speciation. I have also resolved to remove any doubt that my senses and my ideas are to be held up in the same light of truth, and that at times the kaleidoscope of my sensations are more real than the mind that perceives them. It is not enough to regard the Cartesian wax and confer the understanding upon it that it changes states; we are the wax and we are its perceivers and judges and accusers. Preserve me from both censure and praise that I may impart this tale free of any Judgement.

 

I hereby also make full disclosure of the events that led up to the satisfaction of all requirements necessary to bring the Synthesis to absolute Realization. As far as my modest skills and talents obtain, I have not falsified this Testament or allowed any pollution of its contents, making selective omissions in the foregoing for the sake of relevance. My reportage keeps to the objectives as stipulated, where my actions as reported are performed according to the directives of my service to the Order. I betray no confidences herein, nor disclose any of our sacred tenets herein, keeping to the Letter of the Law. Should I frequently utilize the devices of prose writers to convey my material, I do beg pardon from those in our Order who find such things base and distracting.

 

[My Margin Note: The date of publication is indexed on naming the first Librarian of the Alexandria Library (circa 280 BCE). The heavy and tedious prolix used by the author is deserving of some examination. Note to self: investigate references to “Ensopht”.

Margin Note in text (authorship unknown). Opening section that follows seems too reminiscent of a movie by Lars von Trier].

 

1: Allegoresis

The opening scene always holds the seed of the play's greatest darkness... although the first glint of the blade must appear by the third act or else Justice goes unslaked, the blade left dangling.

The sibyls foretold his arrival; it could be seen in their wan and resigned faces, faces perturbed by the medley of events that they are powerless to prevent, but are obligated by necessity to report. He came with a machine, a kind of attendant ape. From where did he come, this mixture of terrestrial and celestial who might have had his visage preconceived in some sombre portrait slashed into elvascite, perhaps by some lunatic creature hunched over himself in a monitored room while psychoanalysts went about tying and untying the knots of his neurosis?

The scene opened up on a tunnel garlanded with cobwebs and rust and filth, a clamourous belching from rattling pipes. The ceiling was jammed with fixtures, exhaust tubes, pipes of peculiar origin, torn insulation shafts, a metallic fresco extending to the horizon line. A filmmaker would have to sit on a rolling trolley, holding the camera, turning it slowly on a clockwise pivot, while someone else pushed to give the effect that we were corkscrewing through a winding grey artery. The scene would fade to white, and then fade into another scene, a Ted Goodwin tartan print about ten feet square, and out from that would step the foretold man. Perhaps following him, the afterbirth of the arrival, would be the machine of the most deliciously arcane construction. The hybrid machine would be composed of confusing hydraulics, devices for appendages inspired by the medieval mind, a few errant keyboards and circuit boards, a harp for a head, a loom for a torso, wrapped in copper wires coated in fraying plastic – the whole thing a composite hash with no clear purpose in its design. The machine was nothing less than the foretold man's masterpiece. He would wield it and claim that now was the time for creation, for something old and borrowed to return to the light after a seemingly interminable slumber. And, yea, this machine's name was nightmare, and this machine's order was that of horror bright and coppery, sharp and necessary.

He stepped outside, after reaching the tunnel's end. Grey walls gave way to the sore brilliance of a polychromic sky. With a wave of his thin, finely etched hands, lines of erasure would leech the landscape of all colour. These transient colours, those precious hues of emotion and hope, would pool at his feet, the very canvas of a man, before he sucked them through his skin, up through the poles of his limbs, the flag of hard face waving atop it all.

Much ado on colour, for the colour of the foretold man was grey as it was black, black as it was red. A world that had passively surrendered the vibrancy of its own colour for cheap and tacky dreams had fallen under the maudlin spell of washed-out hues, pale derivations of what was once a variegated brilliance. Black, red, white, grey: the most psychologically effective colour scheme for its starkness, as evidenced in the regimes of history. It deserved a replay. A keener and more crisp adaptation.

What cruel coldness there was in the air, and the foretold man brought the machine under his hands, gently caressing the cool metal chassis with the pulsating colour of his body in a discordant concert of sensation. He came to realize his necessity in a world that called upon him in its collective dreams, a world that committed vicious acts against itself without so much purpose beyond a bit of greed here and a touch of misdirected anger there. How the world of fragile reasonable order thrummed like a weak heart with its own fear of its obsolescence.

The faint sound of a train hung in the air. He began to walk. Endless rows of houses stood shoulder to shoulder like stout soldiers with blunt chimneys in a whirling ballet of smoke that dissipated into a pure and empty sky now bereft of colour. Off in the distance, office towers speaking coolly with reflective sans-feature faces, their rectilinear bodies filled with smaller and equally hollow bodies, circuit lines, corpuscular cuts and flows vibrating from floor to floor, and run-on carpets like the tedious sentences of a despairing and drunken poet failing to grasp the emotional impact of a love long gone. Bodies of tall glass, reflective colossi, crested above it all in full plume, their heads kneeling beneath the smog ceiling of sky. The trees were the detached arms of titans, root fingers firmly gripping the earth, a geyser of billowing leaves waving hither and thither from a wound that refused to heal. Some kind of Order had been woven here. The foretold man detected the acrid stench of an era deceitful mostly to itself. This has happened before.

Foretold by whom? Whither the sibyls?

 

Escher landscapes, reflections of half moons in rounded glass, embossed machines raised on the tinder landscape, the staggering debt peopled owed the machines of their own making. Leather stretched on metal meat, kept in place by steel studs. Smooth flowing glass, or else crenellated and frosted. A pair of eyes opened and closed every few seconds, long enough to absorb the immediate sense of a visual moment, a texture, an object. The foretold man kept walking, cataloguing only that which he saw in those periodic moments of the opened eye, and reflecting in those serial episodic moments when the eyes fell shuttered. All he allowed himself to hear was the beating of his heart. Fish scale silver flashes washed momentarily across the faces of passersby, illuminating in a controlled instant the perpetual risus sardonicus hidden beneath the skin. The foretold man realized that the world was very sick, culture-sick, and that the tightened ball or mass of its neurosis would serve his plans well.

The sibyls, their faces engraved with sorrow, forecasted the man's arrival in tones that did not betray this sorrow. His name was Ensopht. He would pick one place of crisis at the exclusion of all others as the catalyst for the events he had been entrusted to bring to fruition. There, he would place the abstract machine, and a radiating circle of reformation would pulse from its nest, causing the entire world to shimmer in its and uncalculated desire – a desire and hunger for cruelty it hid from itself. The fatigued denouement of peace and politeness was quickly giving way to more craven, more barbarous urges, and nations – as well as their contents – were once again thinking the unthinkable. He would name this abstract machine “Albrecht, or: The Will.” Although it had to go unnamed now, it would need a name in the future once all of its pieces had been collected, all the gears and fly-wheels of the correct concatenation of personae were fused. It would require the complex calculation of something like planetary dynamics.

Ensopht's eyes were two hanging pendulums of corundum dabbed with two small daubs of obsidian. His face was a burnished taupe, and his forehead appeared slightly crested as if the bone refused to yield from making itself prominent in the overall concert of the skull's form. His lips were thin and pursed and his nose was slightly hooked as if dowsing. With his hands lightly folded into delicate fists resting upon his waist, his eyes peering at the mottled flecks of grey dotting the horizon blotted by buildings, it was nigh time for him – the harbinger and facilitator – to prepare all that was necessary to bring the players unto the stage.

 

Leopold Castor was busy tracing wobbly circles in the air with a numb finger. In his current state he found it hard to trace even such a simple shape. Yet he tried again and again until the fatigue of failure set in as it always did, incapable of overcoming the erratic trembling of his hands. A light piano could be heard emanating from the CD player's speakers, encrusted though they were with stickers from old and now defunct flash-in-the-pan bands that once captured Leopold's interest but fell into the rubbish bin where the odds and ends of disconnected memories go. He was unable to marshal his suffering and narcissistic self-destruction into motion, to convert the general character of his common malaise into work. There would be no further development, but rather a deeper entrenchment of his mood, sublimating his frame of mind to anything but an artistic work. The blank canvas was testament to his impotence and neglect. It stared menacingly at him, imploring and goading him to do his worst; for it was only the worst that he could possibly achieve. He was one man and that was one canvas, and though reciprocity demanded his active relationship with it he could not afford to purchase another. “If I had an infinite supply of canvas,” he said hoarsely, “I could summon the courage to experiment freely. A man and his canvas necessitates that there be more of the latter than the former. But financially confined. Infinite canvas: if I fuck up, take it down and replace with a fresh one, forever if necessary... or at least the masterpiece is created and then I can die.”

Of course, he could have painted over all his errata, but there was something in the purity of the untouched canvas that he sacralized, something that – when once effaced – could never be reproduced. The novelty of the virgin face, once touched, banished for all time. And as much as he fantasized that death would take him at the pinnacle of his finest and most triumphant achievement, both ego and curiousity would doubtless bade him to hang on, to see how the next chapter of the tale will unfold. But, since he had not achieved anything remotely masterful in quite some time, and not to his impossible and idealized vision of what that would be, the fantasy's fulfillment or dismissal was rather moot. His was the perpetual argument ad pabulum.

His over-anxious desire to found and ground a new “ism” in art, to become emblematic of a new era, to be its representative icon - all of this was not only presumptuous and egotistical, but a rank impossibility in an age that tired of the hasty series of people declaring “new” anything, the chasing after phantoms, the making of supply with no corresponding demand. Much that was mere cultural and historical recycling bore these bloated titles of largesse, of being new and novel, but hardly deserving of it. Would it be any doubt that even if Leopold had succeeded in making something truly new that it would be held under suspicion or dismissed by disinterested silence? Stagnation supreme, and he was as victim to it as anyone else. The more he thought of art's purpose, art as a whole, art's future, the further he distanced himself from creating – a self-fulfilling emasculation. The market had peaked without warning, and all that seemed left were old fragments that would be stitched together in different ways. He had no artistic prowess for repetition. The call had gone out: art is dead, so long live art. But even this was the repetition of resurrection, and what art needed was a touchstone with the real, and the real was a vicious place. What art needed was a a salient her to rally around, or maybe a charismatic villain.

Stumbling to his feet on unsteady legs, he resolved to make another attempt at something potentially meaningful. Squeezing the tube of chrome blue on his chipped and crusted palette, he bolstered himself before the canvas with the false sense of courage that he could overcome its mocking blankness and not merely slink away. As soon as he brought that tired and frayed brush to the canvas' face, he would soon regret it.

After this regret, what was left to him but that nocturnal bosom that freely accepts all failures without prejudice? Leopold made his way, as usual, to the pub.

 

Ensopht penetrated the inner city and its coagulated antisocial bubbles, pedestrian traffic whorls and hubs of panicked commerce... A dazzling array of dizzy scenesters and endless chatterers dotting the grey. Sitting quietly in a pub booth near a table surrounded by young men who fancied themselves rebellious, he cocked his ear to hear how people spoke these days, their lilting gerunds and burred muzzle-dialects that would froth and boil to no avail before submerging into the flatulent murmur of phonetic depths in the vernacular asshole. So many layers of sound: a slight wheezing strung along with a booming voice from a noble carriage, a shallow mumble here, a piercing inflection there, all voices in different tempos, in a predictable staccato stumbling toward the ideal legato of the fully-fleshed style of oratory.

Some posters of events on the walls. A gaming convention poster sported a virtual woman with enormous digitized breasts. This was not a minimalist era; more meant more. The scramble for some special and sacred identity in a hyperbolic yet homogeneous culture conveyed a different species of alienation – an alienation which had its yet to be developed yearning for some kind of extreme solution. To stab and thrust desperately beyond the thick and sturdy plastic of it all... Ensopht knew what desire lurked in every heart of hearts, what it secretly pined for even if it lacked a name. The people, as a whole, wanted the return of the hero, the tyrant, the cruel, the arcane, the treacherous, the brave. The people, at bottom, craved blood. They craved it to be shed, they craved it to be in an agitated pulsation to reanimate their lives, lives surrendered to a kind of paradoxical mobile inertia. And no non-stop war footage or slasher films were satisfying this need, a desire that demanded the visceral, not more screens.

Ensopht cast his curious peephole gaze at the full environment, this diorama of the failed repeated in so many places. A conspicuously overdressed man wandered drunkenly from table to table, telling any with ears that he was the man who lived with the ghosts of poets. An artist at a far table, agitated with manic activity, was frantically scrawling page upon page of human mutilation in his sketchbook - a sketchbook born from fever. People collected here, collected there, a fractured hall of mirrors where each participant may disperse infinitely in distorted self-reflection.

And then there was silence; all eyes turned to the artist at the far table, his eyes wide with the rising arc of frenzy brought upon by whatever delusions beguiled him, the substances he no doubt took to bolster his sudden stuttering resolve. His sweaty finger was on the trigger, the gun's nozzle was pressed against his head. The circuit of will, weapon, and execution of act were being brought into their balanced alignment. Suddenly, that alignment was punctuated by a shot and the arrangement fell apart as quickly as it come together. Everyone except Ensopht was caught in the freeze frame of horror, paralyzed. In their minds was the same looping image of those few instants before the silence had broken. Calmly, Ensopht was the first to move, walking purposefully to the table where the artist's body was slumped to one side, exposing the gruesome gaping poppy he now had in place of his head. Ensopht primly removed the lifeless hands from the vacated sketchbook and, with an approving grin, placed it under his arm, making a quiet and uneventful exit.

Once he had made a fair enough distance from the scene, he perched himself upon a park bench and straightened himself before the sketchbook as if about to delve into a rare and sacred text. The sketchbook issued a creaking, leather complaint when it was opened, and it was full save for three blank pages at the end. The header page read, in bold, red italicized letters more hacked by a thick-felt tip than written: “THERE IS NOTHING WORSE THAN BEING!” These six words, in their peculiar conjunction, teased a hint of reminiscence upon Ensopht's face. The drawings were all done in shades of red, purple, gashes of blue and black, deeply set and smudged with mad thumbs. These were juxtaposed by the sharp and thin lines of a man who was quite evidently, as modern clinical parlance would have it, “troubled.” The drawings centered on the rather distasteful subject of genital mutilation, mixed with various scrawled portraits of subjects with no trace of emotion or expression upon their faces. At the bottom of each page there was a running footnote. Upon reading through it, two texts were alluded to: Ars atrocitatis, and Ex jure solaris. Ensopht was compelled unto curiousity to explore the reference with more scrutiny, for he found it odd that the first book would be so carelessly mentioned. The second book was of illicit significance, a hopeless mystical hash contrived by a writer beyond any healthy measure of obsession with Cranach, Durer, and Dante. The Ex jure solaris was also extensively quoted in the sketchbook, this particular example of note:

 

 

The reason why this passage seemed to have been of interest to the artist was unclear to Ensopht, although it perhaps fit in quite nicely with the overall theme of the sketchbook itself – it being a kind of catalogue of tormenting items. Ensopht had the acute premonition that one of his players would be making his way into the night, and Ensopht was determined to coincide with him.

 

Leopold cast his tired yet lascivious eyes at two young girls dressed in tight pink and blue shirts and flared pants before they were abducted by some flashy distraction inside a college bar. Nothing but their most cursory glance washed over his unkempt and paint-spattered person. He had not shaved in days, and his fingers were covered in specks of paint. He had, without being given notice, surpassed youth and the attentions thereof, an unemployed 33 year old artist in age limbo.

He ducked into a known and well-worn alley and went into a building through an unmarked door. The filth did not end in the alley, but had been tracked into the building, a place that was lazily outside the radar of public attention, a drinking refuge without a liquor license, frequented by those who had been willfully forgotten. The regulars were mostly lonely old men who had already been kicked out of every other legitimate bar in town, but still in need of somewhere out of doors to nurse themselves. These were the unlovable, those that sank from circumstance or their own doing to wallow in the shadows of their own memories. Leopold knew a handful of them, but only because they had all been thrust together by the accident of drinking together. The one they called Wally for lack of anything else to call him was among the downtrodden, and he was allegedly a professor at the university. Patrons here had called Wally a “Juice-Junky” due to his claim of attaining quasi-religious euphoria by draining conventional dry cell batteries with his tongue. He was positively ecstatic when rechargeable batteries were commercialized. Wally had engaged this habit for twenty years, the results of long-term use showing in the twitch of his nerves. Of course, for Wally, his habit did not stop at batteries, and it was said that he could endure inhuman voltages, with claims of his tolerance for electric fences and the like. His threshold for electricity, a tolerance built up by experience, was nothing short of phenomenal. In his view, Heaven was an enormous electronic dynamo. He was convinced that the people all around the world were increasing what he called “the global voltage”, teasing out maximum yields of electricity, to delight in the electric wonderland. “Electricity is the drug of tomorrow!” he said. “As we speak, corporate men in big towers are juicing themselves to states of ecstasy. If electricity had been used by the Greeks, I am sure that Aristotle would have taught about that instead.” Leopold didn't mind Wally, just another surreal character in the otherwise empty landscape of his social engagements.

Leopold took his place at the bar and ordered a drink. The owner usually found it difficult to keep a well stocked bar which meant that selection was limited. Usually, all there was available was the owner's home-brewed beer. It was a tepid, flat, and somewhat gritty brew with an aftertaste reminiscent of cheap men's cologne. No one questioned the owner's brewing techniques, and no one complained, for they all knew it was “drink what I got or go chug mouthwash at the metro.” And it was half the price of an actual beer.

Ensopht had, by the strangeness of his character and by a general feeling, found this place. When he entered, the patrons immediately fell silent, regarding the stranger with extreme suspicion, or what would look like suspicion struggling to unscrew itself out of drunk, wavering gazes. Noticing the silence, Leopold turned around on his tattered stool to see what was the cause for what could stay those opining tongues. And there was the cause, standing tall in sartorial splendour, with the look of noble expectation cursively written across his face. Having found who he was looking for, Ensopht took a seat beside Leopold.

“A besotted environment, so rife with despair,” Ensopht said, “where a man's idleness collaborates with his misery.”

“Pardon?” Leopold turned.

“I was remarking casually on misery. Surely, this mustn't be alien to any who would come here for a few refreshments?”

The owner, who shared the other patrons' suspicion, frowned and abruptly asked Ensopht what he wanted to drink.

“Only your finest,” Ensopht replied cordially, perhaps not knowing that today's finest also happened to be the worst, and what everyone else was drinking: the home brew.

“This isn't a swanky joint, fella. Ya might wanna try up th'rood,” the owner said, jutting a thick and ugly hairy thumb in the vague direction of downtown's more legal establishments.

“This will do fine,” Ensopht said, regarding the drink in its filthy glass with a sense of amusement. “So,” he began again, “we were talking about misery.”

“No, you were talking about misery,” murmured Leopold who was in no mood to talk to a weird looking man that others might associate with him. If anything, he enjoyed this place for its brute honesty, but mostly for his ability to remain completely anonymous. It gave him comfort to witness that others around him were hopeless and far more worse off than he was. Who but a freak, a serial killer, or a desperate scam-salesman would have the audacity to dress in expensive clothes and strike up a so-called meaningful conversation with a stranger? Leopold half expected the man to continue, and he would have to sit through it until the freak exhausted himself and moved on. The trick was not to argue, not to ask for clarification points, and the freak would eventually go away.

“So what is it that makes you so miserable?”

“Taxes, the crown, drowning puppies, the hard to reach places in the peanut butter jar,” he answered glibly.

“Quite an anthology of lament. Please do not be flip with me; I'm only asking a simple question.”

“I don't like simple questions.”

“Some questions hide their depth and complexity when they go robed in simple attire,” Ensopht said, looking right at Leopold and catching his eyes.

“Ok, then. Sit tight, brace yourself, 'cos I have a whole epic of misery I can dish up right here. I am miserable because I am a failure as an innovator, a joke of an artist, I indulge in a few too many recreational drugs, I never finish what I start, I have terrible nightmares, I hate my mother and father, I don't have a good enough job to support myself, I feel like I'm twisting about in a straitjacket, I have no one who loves me, my ideas are stupid and facile, everyone I went to school with now has six-figure salaries and nice houses, I dropped out of college, I can't seem to shake this fog and lack of inspiration, I regret having been born, and my only pleasure in life these days is booze and masturbation. Fucking satisfied?”

“Now that was a beautiful reply, sculpted from the very depths of a very human condition!” Ensopht applauded. “You, I presume, live in isolation, a very grey kind of isolation... You are sick and without purpose, listless, wholly dissatisfied yet desire to have the means to change your situation. You are alone, but do not want company, catching you in this kind of ambivalence. You wish you could strike out, but are frightened by consequences. You reject the silly responsibility a world has foisted upon you. What do you suppose is the root of this error?”

“I dunno... the mind, the world?”

“It usually is, but that is such a vague and dissatisfying answer. Surely, there must be some more specific cause of misery.”

“Didn't I just catalogue a bunch of examples?” Leopold stated.

“You gave me a list of anecdotal items. You fail to ask the question in its more abstract sense. How easily the things we attribute as causes for our misery only veil a deeper source.”

“Shit, dude, you ought to get a job writing fortune cookies. Everything you say sounds like a fucking proverb. Don't waste your precious talents on me, ok?”

“I apologize. It was not my intention to detain your attention against your will. It is just, well, you seem to bear the mark of someone struggling to understand.”

“Listen, joker, I make it my job to understand. That's why I'm an artist. I try to understand shit: my own, everybody else's. I really don't need some dressed up fop coming in here and telling me that I am struggling to understand, got it? With that, I think we ought to part ways,” Leopold ended with a mock proper English accent.

“An artist?” Ensopht perked up. “Well then, you do know of what you speak... my reverence for the artist is unparalleled. Draw me something.”

“Just like that? I find it hard to draw on command, and without my materials... Fuck, man, I'm not yours or anybody's goddamn monkey. I don't 'do' art to be some amusing, late-night, sideshow spectacle.”

“Bah! Your excuses are pale. An artist is always in a habit of obeying: his impulses, the strange inspirations that take him aloft without his prior consent, the overwhelming surge of his kaleidoscopic emotions - and especially the orders of his patrons. As for materials, only a poor artist cannot create with but the sparsest materials available. To you I say, 'here is a napkin and a pen: now draw!'”

Leopold felt both flush and strangely invigorated. Who was this strange fellow who goaded him on? He was resolved not to take the bait, however. The situation felt too improbable.

“Listen, man, I don't need to justify anything to you. If you walk away thinking to yourself that I'm no artist, that I'm just pulling your leg, I could care less.”

“I am asking you in deference and respect towards your station. You would be hard pressed to encounter any others who would actually be interested in you as an artist.”

Leopold drew a quick sketch and pushed it forward for Ensopht's appraisal.

“Hm. Good understanding of the human form. I find the mouth in the place of the genitalia quite peculiar yet potentially provocative. However, it is still quite jejune. As an artist, you're not very good.”

Leopold was shocked. Of all the likely responses, this uncompromising rejection was not one of them. He more expected, at the very least, some polite acknowledgement of his sketch, or some false praise. Ensopht got out of his seat and left. Leopold went after him.

“What do you mean I'm not good?” Leopold called after him, demanding an explanation for such an abrupt rejection.

“You are simply not that good. That is my opinion.”

“And who makes you qualified to judge art, huh?”

“It is just an opinion. I could explain my opinion in more detail, tell you what formed it, but I hardly think that will be of much help to you. Consider my appraisal just a matter of taste, nothing more.”

“Well, you're judging me on one fucking two minute sketch in a dive. How is that hardly fair? You haven't seen my real work.”

“Real work? Oh? I guess I haven't, and I suppose you can be satisfied in the knowledge that my opinion only concerns that which you produced for my observation, leaving your 'real work' immune from my judgement. My opinion should mean even less given that your 'real work' remains intactly unseen. I suppose you are in the habit, when others request to see an example of your work, to falsely represent yourself with work that is not your real work. You have nothing to gain by proving your artistry to me. I believe you are an artist; I just don't think – given what you showed me – a good one. I can tell that we both abhor the conventional, and what you showed me was not too conventional. But there is something missing... I think it is... courage and a clear idea. Goodbye. Perhaps I will encounter your 'real work' in the future, nestled within some chic gallery where visitors may fawn over it with endless comparisons to other artists in place of genuine flattery.”

With that, Ensopht left Leopold who was smarting and seething. Ensopht knew exactly what Leopold lacked, what he needed... and what he needed had just recently come into Ensopht's possession. Leopold was a keystone in what would need to transpire, but there was no need for him to know this just as yet. This had been a simple reconnaissance mission.

 

Speaking only in short of breath decrees, Leopold was attempting to sample that other life, the detached life behind the veil of abandon, the immanent life as revealed by machines stacked on top of machines at the throbbing dance club. This was the land of the jubilant sadist and the subversive satyr, the fertile ground of corruption... of joyous surrender... all earmarked and decked out in the shifty and unreliable colours of false promises and the glitter of fairy money. A place of youthful exuberance without substance, while Leopold was now too short on youth, and so his lack of substance would be evident if others could peer over themselves. This environment was an affirmation of quiet vengeance, of angry dancers with Bacchanalian smiles on their faces and bodies aloft that always collapsed into silly imitation despair, into shattered narcotic fits and starts and sputtering as if to produce an abomination of meaning while they cleaved desperately to all the old meanings (the youth: simply Aristotelians with a less developed vocabulary). This was yet just another place of the deferred orgasm, of fashion bigotry, and the desperate illusion that loneliness and unhappiness had been vanquished by modern medicine and aggressive retail therapies. Leopold knew this to be yet another vortex of the inane, of plastic repetition, of hapless tarts on display. Why was he here? To test himself? To place his own disgust with such commercial disasters in higher relief, as if he were somehow too clever to be drawn in by its silly blandishments? To be here was already to signal that one had surrendered, despite one's seemingly noble intentions. It would have been disingenuous to describe his distaste for what this club represented, for he was, by his very presence, complicit with it. He was here to draw inspiration from a social tub of lukewarm shit.

It wasn't that Leopold felt alive at the club, for that wasn't the club's deeper purpose in its inveigling nightmare. The club acted as the buffer between long bouts of waiting, a reprieve from responsibility. And this reprieve was granted by the condensation of fast-paced events into one packaged and unbreakable succession of highs, a chain of quasi-orgasmic moments of excitements that grew like bubbles and quickly aborted themselves. The bodies, the music, the fluidity of movement and sound - these were the unparalleled successes of a commercial milieu that never ceased screaming its ecstasy as if in defiance against respectability. If this place could speak of any metaphysical truth, it could only speak it in the present tense, a kind of cosmically ordained episode of vomiting, taking place in a postcard art-deco Hades.

Leopold bent his elbow against the stranger's nagging words that seemed to grow with an amplified echo, battering against the bruised vessel of his fragile ego. Deluged by the manifold sensation of his selected environment. He attempted to cloak himself with the concerns of this place, but found it ill-fitting.

A woman with a closely shaved head and pierced lip seemingly burst out in animal tracks Leopold was determined to follow, to follow despite his lack of nerve. The circus in which he had chosen to make his temporary home had made its demands of him. In a moment of great intoxication he had to seek out the flesh to enact some sort of space age romance that would burn bright and fleetingly like a coil of lit magnesium. His vision broke her down into her component parts: the tapered face, the tense artery in her elongated neck, the indented temples, her crescent moon breasts suspended in a two sizes too small t-shirt, her platform boots, her spiraling motions as she swung herself in rhythmic servitude to the machinic beat, the dagger eyebrows. In that moment, he could have fetishized these components in a way that he wished he could with but a brushstroke caress, in purest admiration for form in conjunction with a devastating lust. The way the light played on her body, wild and opalescent patches of varying hues, it seemed as though her very pulse mimicked the lightening and darkening of the light, the bellows of colour and the lungs of tint.

The tight cosm Leopold find himself in was still busying itself hooting and tugging at itself as if in the throes of an incoherent nightmare. To scream was to dramatize, and the debit cards of the patrons performed endless coitus with the club to produce intoxicants by the glass, the pitcher, the shot glass. The effects of their indulgence completed their perforation from their diurnal selves which now seemed so far away, a phantasm of morning. Equilibrium in pandemonium, lights blurred and softened before arching up and casting sharp and crisp signatures upon this cavalcade of flesh. Flesh, thought Leopold, everywhere flesh. Just flesh. Flesh in clothing, flesh drooping over the bar, flesh on sale, flesh on parade but spoken for, flesh paying its dues to this clubhouse in any way that it could. Still, just flesh... flesh suffocated by the vapid chants crackling over the speakers, mashed together by effusive flashes of magenta and black and sodium light, rising up in a swelling tide as if this would provide the salvaging lift for those gathered in their vacant community. At this point, Leopold would have envisioned the perfect end to this cataclysmic scene where all would fade to white. But, no, the club was a hostage machine. Soon enough, beyond last call, the club would release the hostages, excrete and eject them into a waiting series of taxis, or else unleash them to scarf down fat at chip wagons waiting for their drunken prey. This, thought Leopold, was joie de vivre, shrink-wrapped, available from any machine that would dispense it, like an automat.

Leopold would attempt to dissolve himself within the sartorial matrix, but would find himself unceremoniously and silently ejected once the lights came back on, and the patrons divided themselves equally among the many streets radiating outward into the night. Nothing further for Leopold to do but to return home, home to sleep, perchance to dream.

And so it was that Leopold, shortly after nudging the front door of his third-floor apartment, casting his keys and wallet beside his futon, would become cloaked by slumber, perchance indeed to dream – a dream that was not his own, but shared...

 

[If this Leopold was meant to be identical to my neighbour, this text was telling me what he did with his time, and why he came back so late and made such a racket.There is a reference to a sketchbook once again. I will make a note of it].

 

... A white room with white tables and blue chairs. Six men were seated, three per side, facing one another. Three on one side, engaging in a rambling discourse; three on the other side in a passive and awkwardly expectant silence. The fluorescent lights made their skin seem sallow, sickly. Ensopht, a man in a lab coat, and a rather forgettable man, were on one side. Wally, a man who looked like a university professor, and Leopold, were on the other. Wally quietly ran the positive end of a dry cell battery across his scaly tongue. Ensopht leaned back in his chair with hands folded in front of him, at times leaning forward as if to shade himself from the awful exposure of the overhead lighting. But the lights were inescapable, pan-luminous, oppressive... a room without even one small streak of shadow.

“So, Ex Jure Solaris,” Ensopht said. “Welcome to one shining face of Hell.”

Before Ensopht, the blackest object in the room, was the deceased artist's sketchbook, gingerly divided with small neon tabs.

“Let us talk now of what will come to pass,” Ensopht continued, leaning over his folded hands. “This is very important, and so I would please ask you to pay especial attention while I apprise you of the proper sequence of events, including your part in this whole drama.”

The first man fidgeted in his seat. He was dressed according to professorial type with well-groomed beard and a slash of white hair interspersed with dull brown. He would be the first to reply.

“What will come to pass? Drama? I'm already disappointed with this dream,” he said.

“And who are you?” Ensopht asked.

“I am the philosopher.”

“I am the scientist,” the second man broke in.

“And what are you?” Ensopht asked the quiet third man who was smiling wryly to himself.

“Me? Oh, I'm merely the Third Man. I'm kind of like that guy you don't know where to put, where to seat, that sort of thing.”

“And I'm Wally!” announced a scruffy figure with childlike exuberance.

“Splendid,” said Ensopht. “And so our cohort is complete. We have the philosopher, the scientist, the artist, the Third Man, the madman, and the prophet.”

“And you, I suppose, fancy yourself a prophet rather than a madman?” Leopold interrupted. He was still quite bitter about Ensopht's negative appraisal of his work.

“Why of course, just as you fancy yourself an artist. I will suspend my disbelief is you suspend yours.” After a time: “Each of us has his counterpart, each acting as the shadow of the other. The philosopher and the scientist, the prophet and the madman, the artist and the Third Man. Before I conduct what the prophecy has foretold, it would do us well to discuss the shape and design of what will follow from it.”

“Prophecy? I have serious reservations about this... It sounds hokey,” said the philosopher. “Besides, prophecy assumes determinism, predestination, and the logical problems that follow from that position are legion. I mean, even allowing for but a small shred of it is to deny free will.”

“I prefer to sidestep the determinism and free will argument entirely,” said the scientist. “Events occur according to laws and probabilities, and these can be empirically verified. All else is mysticism. There are predicative events, and these only happen within local contexts according to scientific rules.”

“This dream bites,” said Leopold. “Why couldn't I be dreaming about sex rather than being stuck around a table with a bunch of old farts who want to talk philosophy?”

“I am not a philosopher,” corrected the scientist.

“I take umbrage at your statement,” said the philosopher, puffing himself up. “Did it happen to occur to you that I am the one dreaming you? What am I doing? Why am I bothering to argue with fictions of my own dream imagination? It is so utterly pointless. I am going to try to redirect as best I can this dream.”

“Please, do stay with us,” cajoled Ensopht. “I assure you that our little roundtable chat will prove very interesting. Let us commence with introductions. Leopold, would you start us off?”

“Uh, ok, I guess,” he said doubtfully and feeling very bored. “Name's Leopold. I make art. My dreams are generally a bit more interesting and less like an AA meeting.”

“My name is Russell, and I have dedicated my life to the noble pursuit of truth. I am, by trade, a philosopher. My research interests mostly concern a delving into Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology and how they may practically apply to the better direction of the mind.”

Leopold feigned a yawn.

“Hello!” said Wally. “Truth is so vital, I can't agree more. The truth is the juice, that Holy Electric panacea, Pangaea of current upon current that flows like satin ribbon into our souls! A dark world without the buzzing of hydroelectric God is a dead world! But, I guess, and I suppose, this isn't a discussion about truth. Or Aristotle. Or AA meetings. Let's keep this electric current flowing. Zap!”

“I will introduce myself last,” said Ensopht. “Why don't you go ahead?”

“Hello, my name is Dr Aymer. I'm a genetic researcher. I supervise a laboratory with ten graduate students as my research assistants. My ongoing research has been published in Cell and other such periodicals. As opposed to our philosopher, I believe matters of truth depend on being proven by means of experimentation and evidence.”

“Can we relax making indirect attacks on professions?” cautioned Ensopht. “Let us continue with the next in our dramatis personae.”

“My turn? Nothing much to say... I'm just some guy, that guy you might meet at a party and forget who it was the next morning. I'm that anonymous guy in the group photograph, the blank and numberless face in the crowd, really. Not much to me, I'm afraid. I'm just an average fellow.”

“Surely you must have some sort of profession or interest, or... “ protested the philosopher.

“Don't press him,” Ensopht politely warned. “Our nameless friend here has every reason to remain sparing and vague about his details. Let his mediocrity stand and press no further. In any event, my name is Ensopht and I am the facilitator of the prophecy. You've each been carefully selected to participate in its fulfillment as was preordained. Each of you have a quality that is requisite for the completion of a very vital task. We will have plenty of opportunity to get more intimately acquainted, but for now it is crucial that we discuss what the prophecy entails. Some very odd and disturbing events will be visited upon your waking lives -”

“Are you saying that we six here are all real, and are dreaming this in unison?” asked the philosopher.

“Yes, indeed,” Ensopht said with a smile. “Please, do not expect me to go into some long and complicated explanation on how this is even possible, for it is a trivial matter compared to the real reason why you have all been gathered here. The prophecy concerns the synthesizing of each one of us here – or at least our core fundamental attributes – into one person, a kind of avatar, if you will. Each of you has been paired up with an opposite, sitting directly ahead of you. This dualism is very important so that the synthesis may occur, making these attributes enter into relation and salvaging the most essential ones into the synthesized product. Do not worry: this will not be in any way painful, nor will it spell the end of your lives. Once these features are synthesized, you will go about your normal lives. This is more of a metaphorical synthesis, and each of you will have your say on what elements we should keep, and what we should discard. In this way, our cohort here is more of an advisory committee to ensure quality in the final product.”

“I have a question,” interrupted the scientist. “Under what authority is this being conducted? And, of course, despite your claim that we were preordained, may we opt out?”

“I act under the authority of the prophecy. The name of the one who holds the script is unimportant, but he is among the chief architects of the prophecy and a great Librarian. As for an opt-out clause, I'm afraid I'm to compel you to remain with us.”

“What is this product you keep going on about?” asked the philosopher. “This sounds like some sort of focus group for a time-share.”

“The product is the synthesis of we six.”

“A merger of our personalities?” questioned the scientist.

“Not quite,” Ensopht answered. “More like a merger of our types, what we each represent. I won't bore you with the details, but there is a standing theory of typology where these types wear us like masks and not the other way around. The person who would be artist is 'inhabited' or 'haunted' by the artist type, for example.”

“It sounds very much like we are forming a sort of superconductor,” said Wally. “Or some sort of great type-collider.”

“Something to that effect. At any rate, you've each been selected for reasons only the prophecy and the Librarian know. Gentlemen, we are on the verge of doing something of incredible historical significance. Our merger dares to bring to light all that is best of these types, held within one man who will be the Avatar. In broaching the impossible, embrace that most impossible thought: a mountain without its corresponding valley.”

“This sounds ridiculous,” moaned the philosopher. “Really, what is this? Is this some kind of gimmicky focus group? Is this some cheap marketing ploy for some new brand of soda pop? Count me out.”

Just as the philosopher was pushing his chair out in preparation to leave, Ensopht boomed, “Sit down, Russell. I am far from finished. I am not asking for your participation, I am telling you to participate. You really have no choice.”

“What benefit do we see out of this?” Leopold asked.

“Benefit? That you have been instrumental in the shaping of the future.”

“In other words, we don't get paid. Count me out, too. I don't do volunteer work, and I couldn't give a toss about the future. Fuck history and fuck the future, that's what I say.”

“Your narcissistic nihilism is all too obvious, Leopold. It comes off as petulant and self-serving. I would have thought you, as an artist, would have been enthusiastic about gaining a renown you could not possibly achieve on your own. This is a collaborative creative effort. Consider this your last chance at any measure of success, for it is written that otherwise, in less than a year's time, you will fail in attempting suicide, and spend the rest of your days in abject poverty. You shall never taste the delights of artistic recognition, Leopold. And, I suspect, you know this to be true if you honestly inspect yourself.”

“Written where?” Leopold challenged. “Ooh, you really shake my core and make me tremble with your mighty pronouncements! Give me a break. You're just some fruitcake. I'm going to change the channel on this stupid dream.”

“You go right ahead, Leopold. You will find there is no way out, and this meeting you find so unpleasant will be over much faster if you just play along. Indulge us. The type that you inhabit is the typeface of the script that must be followed.”

“What kind of art do you do?” asked Wally. “I like art!”

“Please, gentlemen, let us bring this back to order. All your questions will soon be answered, but I must petition for your patience and attention. You see, I have access to a very special library, an infinite library that has in its stores every possible work by every possible being at every possible moment. This is how I know what it is that I know. I have read your histories, and I have read your possible histories. I have read your futures, and many of your possible futures.”

“How can such a library exist?” Leopold inquired. He was genuinely interested since it reminded him of Borges, and by lateral association tugged on his interest in the infinite, in deserts, and so forth.

“Well,” Ensopht continued, “let us consider one man. Let us suppose he wrote in every moment of his life, never slept or ate or took time out to do anything else, and compiled a massive collection of volumes. Now picture this same man in different social circumstances like having been born in Russia, or having been born two centuries ago, of having only one leg, of being rich, poor, married or unmarried, as a woman, with diabetes, as a banker or soldier, and so on. Now picture this man being visited by every possible person in every possible place in every possible time, speaking every possible language.”

“That set of volumes would be monstrously large,” said the philosopher. “It would fail to be of any significance for truth, which only orients itself toward possibility from the firm ground of established facts.”

“Yes, it would be vast. Yet we are only considering one man. Picture every being doing the same thing. Include every possible being - those who were aborted or died prematurely by illness or war or murder, the possibility of twins or triplets - being granted an infinite life from the beginning point of time itself. Even then we have not fully grasped the immensity of this library. Each being is in contact with other beings, so what if everyone was in contact with everyone else? What of those stories? The ruling principle of the infinite library is possibility and contingency ad infinitum. What of the possibility of other intelligent species in the universe? Surely this would massively increase the library's contents. Again, a multiplied, exponential possibility would present itself if these species intermingled. What of every combination of phrases, words, or even letters? When the million monkeys rewrite a Shakespearean text with but one spelling mistake, it is still a different text, another text to be catalogued as distinct from the Shakespearean work. What about a book about this library, or a book about that book? Or a book about a man who wrote a book on a book about a story that makes reference to a particular book? It is in the library as well.”

“That sounds wonderful! I'd love to have a card for that library!” beamed Wally. “Give me an example of one of these impossible books.”

“As you wish, Wally. The story goes like this: Alberto Gimaldi wrote a biography of on the alchemist Zeander Mathius who lived in 1602. Zeander's main occupation in his later years was to create a collection of translated codices of the arcane poems of Guarni, who lived in 1477. Zeander was very intrigued with one of Guarni's references to an Arab mathematician of the late 12th Century named Al-Hamadi, who was attempting to prove a geometrical formulation as part of a new metaphysical hypothesis. Zeander devoted an entire codex to Al-Hamadi. Alberto, in the interests of making the biography accurate, located this codex and studied it. He discovered a very disturbing reference, and so contacted an Arab literary historian to verify said reference and to lend him more of Al-Hamadi's writings. Upon receiving the completed works of Al-Hamadi, there was a postscript that spoke of a particular man named Alberto who was writing the life story about a little-known alchemist named Zeander. Upon discovering himself, literally, in the story, it proved too much for him. He abandoned his research and was never heard from again.”

“Another! Another!” Wally said exuberantly, clapping his hands and bouncing in his seat.

“Not right now, Wally. But, still, think of it: have you ever wondered what Shakespeare had written on Hegel or the Nazis or Kafka? It is in the library. Another good book is Christ's emendation to Einstein's treatise on the many virtues of porous plastic, and Julius Caesar's Policies for reducing congestion in airports. And perhaps you would like to read the dialogues between Freud and Plato or Robert Graves' translation of the Mars Republic's political convocations of 2133, or Yeats' poems for the internet, or Napoleon's conquest of Canada. What of Hitler's treatise on the arquebus, or the history of King Geoffrey Chaucer of Spain, or Heraclitus' Protestant reforms of New Guinea?”

 

[This same sensationalist list-making was how Castellemare snared me in the first place, and it was employed again in the Backstory and now here. Even the wording is similar, as if it were just the items in the list that changed, the structure of the seduction remaining. And yet here as well was another cheap attempt to name me - this time as some researcher living in the 1600s].

 

“But history would be one big, anachronistic jumble of displaced causes and effects,” said the scientist. “You talk of these other realities as if they existed as truly as our own - a coexistence of multiple worlds. It is all very fanciful and may make for science fiction, but not science.”

“Not to mention,” added the philosopher who was far from convinced of Ensopht's rendering, “that these speculative fancies are simply absurd and ridiculous. It would be the work of an overactive imagination or a madman. What use would this library serve? Nothing could be known since all is possible. There is no room for truth in a library like you describe. It simply cannot exist. If this library is the only connection to all these possible worlds – a theory I find repugnant – then this would make this library a necessary being. Metaphysically speaking, the library would be god.”

“In deference to the empirical method, I cannot say that this library you speak of is impossible, but highly improbable,” said the scientist.

“Maybe I'm not educated enough to grapple with this or make the right connections here,” said Leopold, “but what does a trippy library have to do with this synthesis?”

“The Library is total. The Library has already foretold what must happen, and it shall happen. I was asked under what authority I am acting, and this is my answer. This synthesis is destined to occur because it was written, and it was written long ago. As for your participation – each of you – you do not have any choice in the matter. This is going forward whether you choose it or not. You can cooperate or be coerced. Consider this our first meeting. I will say no more, but rest assured we will all be meeting again fairly soon. Wake up.”

And with that, the white room dissipated from view, and each of the participants returned to their respective wakefulness. It was not yet dawn when Leopold bolted upright on his futon, finding himself in a sweat. He fished around in the dark for a cigarette and replayed the dream to himself before tiredness recaptured him, and he fell back asleep to be treated with more conventional dreams in a fugitive slumber, all focus redirected to its blurry kingdom of morphing shapes and colours resolving only temporarily into recognizable things.