I returned to my apartment and scanned what Jakob had given me. Skipping his macabre speculations, I focused on the verifiable details. Ammonius Saccas was indeed the founder of the Neoplatonic idea, Plotinus being the primogeniture of the movement as it has been bequeathed to history. In fine, Ammonius Saccas is generally associated with a plethora of Pagan mysteries of which I was not at all concerned since I believed that there was something of more merit in a less obvious place. Saccas had maintained a tripartite organization of the supreme essence, the emanation of that essence, and the divine soul of man to tame Nature. More interestingly, he had quite seriously advised against placing a too strict definitional division between Christians and Pagans, suggesting, it would seem, that such a line was a blurry one. Or, perhaps, that they were mirror surfaces of one another, inverted or distorted like the image in a carnival mirror. Brave words before punishment for heresy became such an institution where one could not deviate an eyelash from sciptural detail without the implications leading to all sorts of dread theological consequences.
I underlined mention of “emanation”, as it is a critical part of Neoplatonic cosmogony. That which flows from the original and supreme essence. Read in light of the Library, it was indeed the Library that held the position of the supreme essence that, like the Neoplatonic god, was unknowable and unreachable. The books were the emanations from this One-All essence of the Library, and Castellemare was the incarnation of the divine soul that used reason, order, and categorization as the necessary means of taming the wilds of Nature, or chaos. Granted, this was a series of thoughts going on ad libitum, but they were attractive.
Just as I had anticipated, Jakob turned up nothing on “Obsalte”, which, given a preternatural fear of a vacuum in his report, he subsequently filled with his conspiratorial drivel. My own research on this term was equally thin, coming up only with the sketchy proposition of Obs(olete) + old (German: alte).
“Anton Setzer” only turned up an entry on a Swedish mathematical logician of high renown, and Jakob had taken the confounded liberty of hastily connecting the logician to some half-baked conspiracy involving mathematics, the Templars, and Descartes. Given the ease by which I was able to locate Anton Setzer the book-seller via the internet spoke volumes about Jakob's incapacity for depth of research. The more I read the report, the more agonizing it became, the research task having been co-opted by Jakob's desperate need to transform it into a creative writing assignment. If that were not bad enough, he also elected to underline and highlight certain words and phrases with such daunting emphasis – words and phrases that truly required no such emphasis given their irrelevance to anyone but him and his feverish imagination.
The entry on Castellemare was inexplicably blank; perhaps Jakob had failed to find anything of any value, or could not bring himself to sustain his dark musings. His other entries were equally scant, or bloated with his gibberish, including a long polemic on ludic spaces in semiotics (incorrectly defining 'ludic' and not understanding one bit about semiotics). He had completely neglected any of the associated terms I had entrusted him to research.
Idly, I checked my email and found one by Castellemare. It took me a few solid minutes before I had the nerve to open it.
Gimaldi:
I am not the arch-villain your selective reading of history paints me to be. I see you, Gimaldi, walking along the vast, blank, white landscape of a single untouched page. There is no text in view, and the longer you search, the more you succumb to the blindness of white. So, you want your own library, do you? So be it, so be it. You will have all the library you can handle, all the blank pages to paper yourself. Not a clue here, not a clue there, just one long expanse of nothingness... I will drown you in text-text-text, every page blankity-blank-blank. “Non placet” will be the pronouncement in the ever-after-all. All that research... for whom is it good for? Cui Prodest? Cui Bono? You nosy little tart.
Upon reading this email, which I decided not to respond to, I had the unnerving image of Castellemare having composed it without his usual perma-grin. The meaning of his message – that my endless research would be in vain, that I would be blinded by the lack of clues – was also reinforced by something crudely literal in nature.
It began the very next day. Packages full of books and magazines I had not subscribed to started arriving in large quantities. Castellemare had the monetary means to do this, to inundate me with a barrage of unwanted books – most of them pure tripe, magazines for sport fishermen, catalogues for agricultural products, and so forth. More disturbing was one large box of books, 100 in number. A simple black cover on each of them, and half of them numbered from 1 to 50, the other half as well. The first 50 books simply had my name on the cover and nothing more, and the other half, Castellemare's. The books themselves were entirely blank inside. Perhaps this was his cheeky way of inviting, “if you think you will soon come to understand who I am, who you are, then go ahead and write our history.”
16
Excerpt 13-17 of the Backstory
“You've been listening to his corrupt teachings, haven't you?” accused Gimaldi with an unbecoming soreness.
“He had taught me things, yes, I guess, but I wouldn't say that he is 'teaching' me as you say.”
“I have no trustworthy friends in this world,” he moaned. “They have all left me for circus performers and illusionists. Alas, the liars have won.”
“I have not left you.”
“So you will write my book?” he asked me with a sudden surge of insistence and hope.
“No.”
“Then you have left me... far behind, to wither into dust, to be upstaged by heretics, liars, cheats, and robbers. If this is what you want, so be it. I feel a great loss in my heart, for I had such high hopes of you.”
“You don't understand,” I protested, ignoring the clumsy melodrama of his words. “I don't want to write the book because it isn't my place to do so.”
“Your place? Then, whose place is it? That alcoholic, Sigurd? His work is reminiscent of awful wailings in the night! Bedlam! With each sentence he writes, he destroys, confounds, distorts, fabricates, and befouls! That boy has erected a solid and impregnable fortress of imbecility, so my request could never be granted by a man whose mind is a workshop in Hell. He is a walking tomb of useless information. I chose you because you are clear, and because my work touched you.”
“It touched Sigurd, too.”
“But it touched you with sincerity. Sigurd can only be touched by his own fictions, and the pride that results from them.”
The tragedy of Gimaldi was beginning to disclose itself to me in his desperation, the way he pleaded with me, yet resignedly knew that all was lost.
He had asked me to his office at the university. His office was unusually scant of books for someone with such an impressive collection at his home. The office was almost a closet, furnished with a cheap plywood desk, a dying fern in a garish pot sporting some naïve faux-indigenous frieze, a squeaky chair, a badly painted bookshelf with Shakespeare titles and a set of “Proceedings of the Modern Language Society” dated 1972-1979. Why such a dynamic and mysterious man hid in such understated conditions could only be answered by the fact that he was a man who did not want to be found.
“The fact remains that I cannot write the book,” I said.
“Then let despair rule this day. This denial is little more than a repetition. I cannot teach today,” he said as he gathered a few items and began to depart in haste.
I tried to detain him, to explain why I felt unequal to the task. Besides, I didn't see the matter as one that was so urgent or significant. Why couldn't he have written his own book, and if modesty or mystery demanded, write it under a pseudonym?
“Why is it that you want me to write it? Touched or not, it's far too much pressure. I am just not capable of doing it. However, you know your own work best and what would be required to write a suitable prequel... So why not you?”
“Because I never wrote it,” Gi
maldi confessed.
I was astonished.
“Who did?”
“Another Gimaldi. I only have this book because I took it from the Library. It is written by a Gimaldi far more superior than this shallow pitiable excuse of a scholar. I have claimed to have written it, but the truth is that it far exceeds anything I could compose by refined thought or eloquent prose.”
“This is quite the disclosure... I don't fully understand, but why is it so vital for me to write its prequel?”
“Because the book is an allegory. It is an allegory of what will come to pass. If you read carefully and apply some of its lessons to current events circulating around us, you will come to realize that you must stop Sigurd, and you must certainly stop Castellemare. You must write it so that the other Gimaldi is not forcibly attributed as the author of that atrocity.”
“I'm confused more now. What does Sigurd have to do with this? He's harmless, and he's my friend. And what is so dangerous about Castellemare? He just seems to be eccentric, a bit touched in the head. He also seems to be pretty well-off... Have you seen his house?”
“It is not that Sigurd is bad, don't get me wrong. It is what he will be compelled to do that should concern us. We must keep Sigurd away from Castellemare. And, for that matter, you should stay away from Castellemare as well. He is the facilitator of what will happen.”
“What's going to happen?”
“The horror of history.”
14
I didn’t get it. At all. Gimaldi claimed to have written a book that he actually didn’t, and he was asking me to write its prequel to prevent an alternate Gimaldi from being forced to be named the author of the very book I was being asked to author. There was something about a synthesis that was to take place as the setting for the prequel I was to write. I had to write something safe, Gimaldi said, that would function as a block to the real destiny of the synthesis taking place since it depended on the writing - and thus materialization - of the plot to occur. I still didn’t understand; I tried again. A book was going to be written and attributed to someone else, and in this book would be the fruit of a nefarious synthesis. I was being asked by this Gimaldi to write it before anyone else could, and thus prevent the outcome of the synthesis.
[An attempt at a synopsis of key facts. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I could have been directed to this one paragraph. But, owing to the absurd nature of this book, I am sure it could only have appeared at the appointed time.]
Gimaldi was unhappy with the state of Reason and Order in the universe and wanted to revise it, correct it, make it better. According to his book, it was not procedurally rigourous enough – it lacked precision and operational definitions. His book detailed the errors of Reason through a post-apocalyptic parable, referencing a new scholasticism or feudalism (the details are, indeed, fuzzy). Conversely, Castellemare was urging us to abandon the tenets of traditional Reason and embrace his vertiginous paradox philosophy of unreason. I could remember what Gimaldi said of doubting men, that they contained doubts in a clockwork universe that they hoped would preserve them if all mechanical Reason turned out to be wrong – a way of hedging one's bets if the gears chewed themselves to bit.
Castellemare stood as an angry smear on the face of an unavoidable future. Castellemare's views were too chaotic, and asked of any who subscribed to them to dissolve in that preternatural chaos. No, I would endorse Gimaldi on the grounds that his theories were life-affirming and hopeful of human achievement - not because these theories might loosely be based on truth, which they probably were not. Gimaldi's humanism was all-pervading in his character, and it was hard not to feel a touch sentimental about an enterprise that was most likely failed and idealistic. I tended to root for the underdog and cleave to lost causes.
I had a hunch that Castellemare was trying to hatch a chaotic plan to sabotage the linearity of existence. I know that sounds absolutely absurd and even melodramatic and stupid. But whatever this synthesis was that Gimaldi wanted to prevent, it was something perhaps worth stopping. Castellemare was just too much the villain in this case. I had to side with Gimaldi: he was the only one honestly pathetic enough to be the hero. Only heroes are pathetic until they win, whereas the villains are only pathetic in defeat.
Perhaps I had plunged myself into this with little regard to outside concerns. Sigurd's drinking habits were getting worse as he drifted from self-control entirely, and I had been too preoccupied to notice his rapid decline into dissipation. A bottle of bourbon a day became two, then three, and before long there was never a sober moment, no pause between his life floundering in cups. He had an instance of terrible violence, and the police, an event too sad for me to dramatize. I had been present when it all happened, and had I not been there to direct the arm of the law with some shred of sane context, things may have turned out much differently for my helpless friend. The event landed him in the confines of a hospital psych ward for observation.
Now it would be his emaciated body ambling down those sterile hallways, the meal time routines as the semblance of clockwork order, freely mixing with horrible hallucinations and violent bouts of withdrawal. But that place, oddly enough, was home for him. Among the other patients, he could thrive in an institutional version of Castellemare's Tain. I visited him. He complained about the nicotine patch they gave him in lieu of cigarettes, he plotted to steal some syringes and turn the medicinal tables on the orderlies, mumbled incoherent elegies to phantom people wandering in his hallucinatory fog, and was quick to accuse everyone of everything. The threats he issued had no singular target as he aired his vitriolic grievances at the blank, null-stub generality of the world. He insisted that the ward was an impediment to what he, with no mean sense of ego, dubbed his “research.” What this research was about was as focused and real as the intended target of his complaints. Despite the fact that I visited him regularly while he was undergoing observation and treatment, he took the opportunity to make me the target of his berating – but I had to keep in mind that his attacks were for everyone and no one, an attack for the sake of attack.
“You know, with one call, I could make sure we trade places... You think it's fun here? Can't even get a damn cigarette. And no books, either. Only bad condensed volumes of Reader's Digest bullshit. How am I going to do my vital research in this wretched place, this misbegotten son of a whore?... Yeah, they gave me a nice patch, those fucking draconian overlords of my sanity, ragabash poltroons... Slow down, you're getting loopy... Take the other half... Yeah, the blue one... Take the fucking valium! Christ, calm down.” He was performing both sides of the conversation while all I could do was watch and wait awkardly to take my leave.
He harangued the orderlies who were inured enough in this environment to take little notice or not take what patients said as personal. They didn't cajole him, but stayed the course of routine. That was their perfect defense: the passive resistance of maintaining order until the patient yielded to the regime of precision routine in the dull grey matte of the everyday. Sigurd's petulant attacks were patently ignored, and his angry questions and complaints were met by their dispassionate rote replies from hospital procedural rules. Every time I visited him, he conspiratorially confided in me that the hospital was in the pay of some nefarious figures who had every reason to see Sigurd stowed away. He claimed that the ward's single intent was to chemically lobotomize him. The charge nurse had informed me not to agitate him, and that he was on suicide watch. The nurse also alluded to some of his more violent antics against the orderlies and other patients. Fortunately for the staff, Sigurd was far too frail to pose much of a challenge.
This turn of events could not be appropriately be called saddening. No, it was an unnameable feeling. I sought the company and counsel of wiser heads.
Gimaldi sat with searching eyes, imploring me to forget the current plight of Sigurd as if matters of broader consequence should have been at the forefront of my attention. The snowfall was heavy and unrelenting, and he didn't want to go ho
me. The bar was mostly silent and smoky, three elderly patrons drinking while huddled in packed silence at the bar, and us, at a badly scratched table with rickety chairs.
“No doubt you are taken with Castellemare's Tain. I, on the other hand, have no great spectacles to offer. And I will not debase myself in doing so, for a great thinker always regards fantastic and sensationalist things with suspicion, always wondering what the splendour is hiding,” Gimaldi lectured like a kind of drunk Socrates. “Your friend Sigurd's state of mind is a symbol of the result of Castellemare's flawed reasoning. His real reasons I can only offer a slight gesture, but let me tell[... “]
[One leaf apparently torn out as the numbering of the pages indicates that two pages are missing. Text resumes on following recto page.]
“I hope you will adopt the title I have chosen for it,” he said. “I am quite fond of Finis Logos as an appropriate title for the book you will hopefully write.”
“The End of the Word?”
“Precisely. Not world but word. And my counter-book will be the scene of a glorious rebirth. Yours will be closure, finality, what your generation so pines after, the apocalyptic; and mine will be the new beginning, the regenerative history, what someone of my historical proclivities desires most. And how could I begin something when the preceding has yet to end?”
[Another obvious removal from the text that would perhaps give all the information on the contents of the Finis Logos as tantalizingly referenced. The shift here from naming it De Imitatio Calembouri to this also follows a shift to the book being about a rebirth rather than a post-apocalyptic closure. It is probably another red herring. The remainder of this page is blacked out with permanent marker, and the last leaf to end the chapter has been torn out as evidenced by both the gap in page numbering and a scrap of the original page clinging to the binding. I had my doubts that the contents of this book had any relevance to me. It sounded as though this version of me was eager for someone to call the hand of language so that this Gimaldi could be known for its renaissance. It was a trite piece of theatre. At best, the configuration of this Gimaldi and Castellemare was cribbed from G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, in the polarity of that champion of order (Detective Symes) and the champion of disorder (the anarchist Gregory, aka “Thursday”)].
The Infinite Library Page 26
