The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  “What is your memory, Gimaldi? Could you say that your memory is more real than this Library? How could you possibly believe that when anything you have created or could create with your mind already exists here? Would not the Library be more real than what your piddling memory thinks is real?”

  “Reality is not quantitative. I don’t believe that some things are ‘more real’ than others.”

  “Then I suppose you will repose on that sophomoric choice between a real that is total Absolute and absolute relativism. Really, Gimaldi, you’re just being lazy today! We really must get back to work; we can't sit here and have silly philosophical discussions.”

  Perhaps he was right. If the Library contained within it the very totality of all my possible thoughts and inventions, why would it not be more real than me…Or at least more necessary? It was like a niggling memory of some now long-distant philosophy class on possible worlds: if I exist in every possible world, then I am a necessary Being. This was prima facie true in the logical sense, since a possible world with the same Being recurring – l’idee recue – would be unthinkable and so therefore impossible without that Being. Of course, this would attribute to existence a precondition of something being thought, the old rationalist grab-bag of tricks. But there I was, in a Library that promised, as far as anyone could tell, the immeasurable absolute. The Library was but the compendium and outer casing for all possible worlds, in text.

  With that in mind, I buttonholed Castellemare again: “Is it possible for us to slip into the worlds that some of these texts reference?”

  In cryptic flourish, Castellemare replied, “I know that to lose oneself in a book is a portal to the interior of its narrative, a whole other world. Physical translocation is superfluous.”

  “Another question,” I said.

  “Yes?” he replied, the tone sharp and mildly exasperated.

  “Why all this concern about me, what I think? It isn't necessary for my job, is it?”

  “No, it isn't. I take interest in you because you are a fine dope. You are one of those adorable little anachronisms who puzzles over trifles. Your scholarly approach to life is just another walled garden. I find it hilarious. Okay, enough – let's have on with it, shall we?”

  In this great casino of textual chance, there were no clocks. They would be entirely out of place in a “space” such as this one. The immensity and awe of it unsettled me, as was only natural when confronted with something truly infinite and outside of conceptual understanding. But before we left that Library, I did the truly unthinkable, allowing my curiousity get the better of my judgement: I stealthily pocketed two books that were of interest to me. They were two books that were to be spaced apart by one of the books I was to shelve, and it was as though, on some level, the Library wanted me to see these books… wanted me to pluck them for my very own, like they had some kind of attracting glow. How long would it be until Castellemare was warned by the Library that these books had gone missing, and how much longer did I have after that until he realized where they were, in my possession? I could hardly think that he would show mercy to an employee given such exclusively privileged access committing an act of heinous theft and endangering this world with contraband realities. Would he send Angelo after me like a mercenary? Would I be cast out like Setzer before me, forever nagged by the prospect of never setting foot in the Library ever again? Perhaps, like Setzer, to indulge in a mad fascination of fabricating my own version of the Library, to recreate it via exhaustive permutations of letters. Making gibberish machines that produce gibberish books, in the hopes that by happy accident some form of sense or reason emerges from that largely impotent labour. Was this some sort of test? A way of sizing up my capacity for overriding my own narcissistic curiousity in favour of being employee of the month? Was this temptation placed there deliberately by the Library to determine my loyalty? Two books: both referenced me in the subtitle: The Backstory of Gimaldi’s Finis Logos, and 7th Meditation: Mountains without Valleys – Gimaldi’s Secret Overture. They were pocket-sized and attractive in their daunting minimalism, a cover done up in that aesthetic for books we know better not to touch, but will anyhow. Did Castellemare already know that I would commit this breach of regulations? And what could I say in my defense when the rather menacing Angelo came for me on some dark night? That I was overcome by my own vanity, that insatiable curiousity to know ever more about my own possibilities? Perhaps it was defensible in the light of entitlement: if these possibilities were indeed properly my own, then they should be in my possession. But such thinking was myopic. If the Library has taught me anything, it is that we don’t own all our possibilities – we have access to a few fragments, the rest belonging to that infinite number of substances that belong to Spinoza’s god.

  I reasoned that Castellemare would indeed discover that the books had gone missing, and the name these books referenced would leave no doubt as to whom took unlawful possession of them. But I also reasoned that Castellemare would not act immediately, but would rather take delight in the torment I would feel at the very uncertainty of being discovered. Everything I was enduring was some kind of object lesson. Or, perhaps, he would be amused at the vertiginous madness that would result when I consumed these books, a kind of moral lesson in never again dabbling in things I could never possibly understand.

  As it stood, I could never really know if Castellemare trusted me. In bringing me into the Library itself, that may have suggested trust, but it could also have been for other reasons; his motivations always went masked. If this was part of some very elaborate plan on his part, it remained to be discovered, for the mystery had only just begun to deepen its frescoed hue and complicate its intricate arabesque pattern when I regretfully elected to read those two books. I suppose this is where my story’s engine is kickstarted, and the plan laid out for me begins in this one act I foolishly thought was sovereign.

  7

  Excerpt 1 from Backstory of Gimaldi's Finis Logos

  I was immediately struck by the first line: Our friend, Gimaldi, who enjoyed declaring himself an apoplectic in times of great boredom, had written a daring counter-book. What made it daring was that he postdated the publication date to the year 2099, and there was no book in existence that he was refuting against. It stood, in all atemporal majesty, a magnum opus without a causal beginning… arguments that were reductio ad absurdum about the tactile metaphysics of hydrochloric acid found in the depths of undisturbed tidal pools. I knew that, in Castellemare's infinite Library that books which mentioned me by name were possible, but I had to contend with how the Library offered it up to me, almost as though daring me to give into the temptation to pluck it, rifle through its pages, and highlight every mention of my name with an incurable narcissism as my headlight. According to the first few pages of the book, which mostly centered on an unnamed narrator, the featured Gimaldi had written a counter-book, countering something that had not yet been written. This sounded ridiculous, but I was willing to momentarily consider that the book being refuted did exist, but only in that ethereal and untouched realm of the Library. Another glaring problem was that I was being positioned as someone who had any credible ability to wax on metaphysics – I only knew what I dimly read and remembered during my undergraduate years. I read on:

  According to the wild stories Gimaldi told us in confidence, he had visited an uncharted island that had been effectively cut off from mixing with other species. Allospeciation of sorts. He claimed to have found archaean stromatolites, ancestral jellyfish, and hooked belemnites. We had thought that he had gotten into the Lovecraft again, for the story was as clumsy and paradoxical as it was implausible. But the counter-book was sheer genius, and it just went to show that stories without a beginning could be just as impossible to translate as any cryptographic work. It wasn't like Serafini's Codex Seraphineanus with all its detailed descriptions of another world written in an indecipherable script. Gimaldi had created a puzzle within a known language. Perhaps by 2099, Gimaldi would be reno
wned as The Philosopher, much in the way Aristotle had been in the Thirteenth Century, misquoted and misunderstood by many.

  Embroidering further upon the absurd conditions of this book I was purported to have written, there stood mocking me reference to another book that had dogged me: the fateful Codex, one of several books my clumsy hands could not fully unlock. Was this an innocuous reference, or meant to highlight my failure?

  A copy of John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica was by my right hand, where it belonged. I tapped my index finger upon it. There was a plan involving this book – of that, I was certain.

  But this chrome world had only antipathy towards the beauty of tragedy and all its discursive, perspectival force. The strength of tragedy was in chains, made mute and muzzled under the heavy layers of optimist excrement. But a tragedy of the Cyclops was definitely in order to quell the awful despair of the chrome world. And I took the Cyclops to be science, the confused love child of theology and philosophy – superstition and aimless daydream unduly complicated by a weighty lexical apparatus. What was that other kind of science, the unspoken kind which detailed some lubricious sort of horror? I knew that, in some dark lab, tended by a more tenebrous mind still, laboured someone with the precedent of history as his justification, someone who knew tragedy was necessary... and perhaps knew that the Age of Atrocity would begin soon. A science so wicked and morally despicable that it may have had some manifest effect on Dr. Albrecht – we would do very well to remember that name. Remember, remember, the art-science of Dr. Edward Albrecht.

  Gimaldi, as a scholarly professional, felt himself far removed from us - as he truly was. The battle for an audience was over for him, his prattling now seen as revered and indissoluble to us with less noble concerns. Sigurd (my brother-in-arms) and I never pursued the academic road to its end, feeling that it only entailed useless sword rattling and shows of hollow force. Perhaps Gimaldi, in the way he dropped these obscure hints to incite us to take up arms in research, was doing some sword rattling of his own, some vicarious puppetry, to involve the degenerates, the clowns, in this black comedy. In Gimaldi, there was little by way of redeeming characteristics – he was as fossilized and ossified as the subjects of his achingly lumbering ponderousness and meticulous study. He had nothing of the vibrant in him, no spark like I would discover in the likes of Castellemare. Gimaldi was hardly the type to be the proper progenitor of a dynasty, a kind of meta-narrative avatar, but he was. Castellemare as well, for different reasons.

  The narrator then digressed to speak of his predilection for stealing books from the university library, but mentioned more as a resigned fact than to showcase some kind of cleverness or some misguided classist victory of the have-nots over the haves. Was this another knock against me and my act of theft? The frequent and careless mention of Castellemare and some kind of dynasty unnerved me. I did not recognize myself in these descriptions, but according to the text, Castellemare and I were somehow responsible for some pivotal event.

  In one of my bouts of absence, I was met with a most nagging absurdity, inflamed by an impromptu visitation by Gimaldi in the market square. He approached me like a gun-toting poet, with a smug look upon his smarmy and stubbled face that was boiling with some urgent mischief - that unshorn mien painted in Seurat dreams, or made into a menacing Da Vinci study of the grotesque. He was an ugly man, made more so by the way he twisted across space rather than walked. And though Gimaldi, a man who proclaimed to have been born too early, predisposed to speak in the cryptic prose of the fortune cookie, spoke with a liar's tongue, this didn't mean that what he said wasn't true.

  “Why have so many dynasties gone by without avatars?” he asked me directly without the usual introduction and useless otiose need for small talk, as if a brace or cushion for the impact of what desire in communication really strove for.

  It was like the whole world was waiting for me to respond. Eyes stared at me from all angles - the boozehounds, the passersby, the street musicians, the produce-handlers, men in suits, fashion-obsessed youths in all manner of restrained barbarity. I had hesitated too long. A loud crescendo of polka music blasted forth from the musicians, drowning out any chance for my reply. Gimaldi shrugged his knobby shoulders and walked away, entering the mural of passing bodies from whence he came, vanishing by way of some illusionist trick.

  Avatars and the lack thereof. The answer would become clear once I located the writings of Obsalte: avatars never begin a dynasty; rather, avatars end them. This answer could be seen written upon the faces of so many people, so many candidates passed over by a finicky Vishnu. Then who began dynasties? Perhaps the avatar was like a gardener, and the dynastic epoch a growing weed that had grown too big for itself, choking the life out of the crop. Perhaps dynasties were aberrations to be cut down, to be pared into simplicity again.Perhaps none of these sloppy metaphors would serve the understanding, but instead impede it. I knew someone - or a consortium of a kind - had to be responsible in being the architects of the avatar.

  It was clear to me that the narrator would allow himself the luxury to maunder and munch away in speculation, regarding well the pleasure of his writing and paying no care to the pleasure of the reader. The picture painted of me kept returning to portraying me as some decrepit, grotesque, nearly pederastic old scholar. In this world and life, I was merely dull, not wizened and cryptic. The multiple worlds theory now seemed ever to be afflicted with lapses in judgement over its central casting division. I was a shambling young fart, and hadn't the social skills to beard young people and pose questions impregnable to sense. Well, I had very little redeeming social skills at all, but I made the occasional effort.

  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 pu
re 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.