The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

Wittgenstein had said something very similar, an echo we encounter in Ruskin: the ladder we use to climb toward our goal ought to be thrown away when it is no longer required. The motto of the Biblioclasts, which I translate here from Latin, reads:

  Man is the scaffold, Books are the complete Building;

  Subtract and remove the impure Cause from the virtuous Effect.

  Despite the raft of philosophical objections that may arise in their understanding of linear succession and how their idea of causation can produce purity from impurity, their guide is science; namely, chemistry. In some reactions where a catalyst is involved, there is no trace of the catalyst in the final solution. Hence, to ensure the purity of the books, there should be no trace of Man, except by references in the books thereto.

  The question remains as to why the Biblioclasts have opted for such an extreme measure to permanently divide cause and effect, Man and Book. What kind of theology actively destroys its God, and does so under the banner of love? I believe, ideally, the Biblioclasts would prefer to steal the books and seal them away forever from the hands and eyes of Man. However, upon deeper reflection (a reflection already antedated by their own philosophical finessing) it would be impossible. To merely hide the books keeps open the possibility that they may one day be found – even guarding them makes it possible that said guards could be overtaken by a stronger force of men. Also, to be consistent with their principles, the Biblioclasts cannot take ownership of the books for fear of violating the books' purity (not to mention that the temptation for any member to commune with a piece of their God would always present a danger). The only certain way to preserve the purity of their God is through deicide, and this through fire. So, it is safer and best to rid the world of books to rescue them from possible impurity.

  Although bibliophiles would revile the acts perpetrated by the Biblioclasts and think their doctrine despicable anti-intellectualist savagery, the Biblioclasts themselves must endure a more horrifying comprehension. For them, God multiplies everywhere, for men will continue to contrive books. The possibility for the sullying of their God is eternal.

  In their previous incarnation as an elite literary ensemble, they espoused all the vices of scholarly egotism they now revile: thinking themselves the most adept and worthy readers, hoarding books, keeping knowledge a strictly exclusive affair, taking selfish pride in the books they owned or claimed to understand...but these are our crimes, too. The Biblioclasts began by forsaking this egotism, setting aside the vanity of academics and librarians who covet books as subordinate objects of status. The Biblioclasts are perhaps the true bibliophiles; how else to explain this sacrificial love that prevents them from enjoying any access to books for the very sake of books themselves? For them, books are God, and God must remain pure, and so their function of biblioclasm can be explained by a supreme love of that which they have no choice but to destroy.

  A postscript appeared at the end of this text that was addressed to me specifically:

  Gimaldi:

  In the book that names us both, we are both named exactly 416 times each (or, if you prefer, sixteen times the number of letters in the alphabet).

  22

  Excerpts from 7th Meditation

  Where the artist and the scientist meet in the actual

  For in truth, painters, even when they use the greatest ingenuity in attempting to portray sirens and satyrs in bizarre and extraordinary ways, nevertheless cannot give them wholly new shapes and natures, but only invent some particular mixture composed of parts and various animals.

  -René Descartes, Med. 1

  Leopold regarded his canvas carefully, observing how tightly its composite parts, its interwoven and interlaced stitches formed the unitary screen of white. But it was, upon closer inspection, marked with very tiny peaks and valleys which were designed to capture and snag paint from a moving brush. Leopold rolled the once finely tipped brush in his hand, its hairs a bit frazzled and hard on the edges from an infinity of washings and dryings. His eyes followed up the hairs to where the aluminum pinched the wand and beyond to where the pointed tip of the wand lodged into his teeth. Beside him, on a roughshod table, was a book by Leibniz that he found by chance in a recycle box, a collection of metaphysical writings some student got fed up with. One could tell that Leopold had been reading it, for he had a section bookmarked on one idea in particular: that of each singular substance expressing every possible event that could ever be visited upon it. Yes, Leopold would paint today with the concept of infinity as his inspirational source, even if he hadn't the cognitive apparatus to comprehend this concept, how it differed in mathematics to philosophy. Enamoured already as he was by deserts and uncountable nouns, such concepts found likely fundament in him. There was a sense of brazenness and urgency to his creative fervour on this day, and he felt feverishly animated for the first time in a while. Whether this was to be attributed to his strange dream, he could not say, nor was he going to risk offending what was sparking his sudden output with any ungrateful questioning. He was determined to ride out what short burst of creativity had been mysteriously gifted unto him.

  Backward-playing voices in his mind went into a growling crescendo as he worked, a garbled harmony of terrifying alien throat-songs. Thinking this to be a strange but pardonable part of the creative surge he was experiencing, he thrust it brutally upon the canvas. He felt as though what he was creating was enough to snag the eye of any onlooker, capture the gaze and rub it raw against the infernal texture brought about in the marriage between canvas and brush. What he desired, fully, was that the work upon completion would cause a viewer to convulse spasmodically like an electrocuted pig. The more excited he became, the faster his brush made its transit between canvas and palette – all until it all suddenly died out: the surge, the voices, the manic spark that so brazenly prompted him to slash with conviction upon the once blank space. He threw the impotent brush across the room, resulting in an unsatisfying click against the wall, the sound of small and hollow wood against the solid impenetrability of the wall. Leopold put his hands against the floor and could now hear the return of more internally derived voices; this time, he felt them as they seemed to course up through his bent arms, his sunken chest, his bleary head. And he knew: it would take much more to bring his creation to term, perhaps even an unthinkable sacrifice. He began to pound against the floor, laughing in erratic fits. Falling silent again, he left his apartment in its pitiful state, tubes of half spent oils curling with the appearance of grubs gone dry in the sun and turning metallic. The door was left carelessly open as he passed to the outside. The streets seemed to quietly hum his name. He needed no canvas, for his art was twofold: the best paintings were hung in the gallery of his mind, and his body was the greatest exhibit on earth. This feeling of personal largesse was all that stood between him and the acceptance of the fact that he had given up, that the inspiration that had possessed him had, in its fickle way, abandoned him once again.

  Meanwhile, Dr Aymer was back in his laboratory, overseeing a demonstration on dysgenesis by one of his graduate students. They were both tackling a most strange anomaly: the progeny of the fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, were born without wings. The experiment, kept under the most strict of controls, was not supposed to produce such bizarre genetic results. But this was not the first instance of such anomalous events in the labs on campus. Dr Aymer suspected that someone was tampering with either the equipment. However, since the last instance and other such strange occurrences that went on throughout that week, the Faculty of Science had been prompted by no mean number of complaints to take action. Soon, the entire floor was under video surveillance. Those charged with the task of reviewing the tapes found no evidence of tampering or sabotage of any kind.

  Dr Aymer felt a strange guilt concerning these anomalous events. Dr Aymer would assume the source of the anomaly could have been due to a wide variety of possible factors: improper procedures, fudged results, inaccurate measurement readings, faulty electronic appar
atus, unsterilized equipment, tampering, a mistake in calculation, or an observational error. Of the million and one things that could go wrong in an experiment, Dr Aymer knew that anomalies were simply errors, and one had only to investigate all possible sources of error in procedural or equipment aspects of the experiment - even if it meant that Dr Aymer himself would have to delegate an outside research group to repeat the experiment. Unlike the unscientific hypothesis that anomalies represented supernatural intervention, Dr Aymer knew there to be scientific reasons for all unexplained phenomena lodged beneath any mystery. Dr Aymer, not out of an implicit distrust of his students' honesty or ability, personally conducted the repetition of the experiment that yielded the wingless flies. He, however, needed to locate the rational solution, for there were many who were seduced by some tendency to declare the event miraculous. Dr Aymer had no patience for miracles, and believed that an economy of thought would eventually lead to a safe and rational explanation.

  Dr Aymer placed two wild types of Drosophila in a tube, about twelve flies in total, and kept them in a separate storage unit with a padlock only he could unlock. By the next evening, seeing as Drosophila attain sexual maturity within twenty-four hours, the flies would have mated. Surely enough, Dr Aymer removed the tube from the unity and came across the same anomaly. He carefully analyzed the DNA of both parent and offspring, and found no reason why the latter would have exhibited this genetic flaw. The flies merely wriggled pointlessly before him, almost taunting him with their impossibility. Dr Aymer replaced the tube in the unit to give the wingless flies a chance to mate. What he found two days later was even more troubling. There was a hundred percent rate of newborn flies that lacked pigment in their eyes. Usually, the wild types had brownish-red eyes, yet the progeny had white eyes. He left the flies to mate again, and puzzled over the results and rechecked the results for two more days. By week's end, the next generation was not only wingless and white-eyed, but had no legs. He could not rationally explain why this had happened, and he watched as the flies without wings or legs writhed impotently at the bottom of the small tube, now incapable without assistance to mate let alone feed themselves. He reasoned that there was a problem with this batch, and so he ordered more flies from the same supplier. The results remained as anomalous as before, so he then ordered from another supplier, yet there again was no change. Meanwhile, other students who were working on similar projects complained of the anomaly. But Dr Aymer was determined to solve the puzzle - to which he reasoned that perhaps the laboratory environment itself was tainted, perhaps irradiated - and so set about to breed the flies naturally, i.e., leaving a banana peel to rot in the open air of his home as to invite the domestic and local variety of Drosophila. Again, the results were the same.

  As quickly as these flies could breed, these results were spreading quickly across the world in isolated labs. A friend and colleague of Dr Aymer's in Stockholm had complained of the same problem. Genetics periodicals became swamped with articles on this finding from all over, and it soon became the most talked about issue in genetic science. No one could adequately explain the phenomena, but everyone had their theories, and not all of them relied on core scientific principles. Some alarmists eager to turn the event into a crisis for which they could be named heralds postulated that the fundamental principles of genetics were, in light of these findings, in need of a serious reassessment. Others stated that there was a hidden evolutionary force that was somehow causing Drosophila melanogaster to suicide itself, some hidden mechanism of epigenetics that was causing a process of mass extinction. Of these theories, the most far-fetched claimed that this phenomena could be a new explanation for the dinosaur extinction, UFO interference, and a variety of other crackpot speculations. It seemed as if, with the lack of concrete evidence, the anomaly was dragging in scientists from diverse disciplines to dredge up strange theories to cover this heterogeneous situation. They all banded together in marshaling whatever hasty theory they could to their aid, for there was a lot to lose in the failure to explain. The person who could explain it best, regardless if it was true, would win.

  Dr Aymer was just one among a very large chorus of scientists very concerned with the new data pouring in from flabbergasted labs all over the world. In his process journal, he wrote:

  Nov. 11 -

  I am very disturbed with these new genetic phenomena, which not only suggest that we may be wrong about some core assumptions in genetics, but this may have some further implications on the development of other species – including our own.

  We have long since completely mapped the DNA of Drosophila melanogaster, and are quite confident that we can predict any immediate outcome of any brood in a variety of circumstances. And owing to the overwhelming amount of literature on d. melanogaster experiments alone, one might say that this fly is common currency among us geneticists. It is no wonder that we are all so concerned with this new development.

  But despite all this, and despite the threat this poses to our previous assumptions, I am still a capable scientist, and I will get to the root of the problem. Solution is at hand, but a steady and controlled course is necessary.

  Dr Aymer received a call from his friend, Cindy, and she persuaded him to come out from his investigative creche for an evening of cocktails and dinner, despite the magnitude of the genetic situation that was consuming his every attention. It would be then that he would meet a man he had met before, but in a different place... perhaps in dream.

  Leopold was manic at his canvas by the time a deep purple eased into evening sky, bleeding with the first seeping plumes of the night. An inspiration out of nowhere, a concept that had been mysteriously consuming him, Leopold painted one after another in a series of red lions without any rational explanation - not that he questioned the motives of his muse, a muse that seldom paid such sustained visits. Red lion on textured grey, red lion in Warhol multiples, red lion with an aureole of fruit flies, red lion frolicking in library stacks. Once this spurt of creativity was spent, he went out to a quiet, cheap restaurant, never going beyond the last few seats near the door, as if ready to pounce on any opportunity to escape back home, just in case the urge to create would visit him again. The tables were square, their tops stable upon steel stems. Around him was a modest array of patrons, most of them chatting in intimate pairs.

  He could hear the voices again, and despite the fact that no recognizable words were being formed, the tone was as though jeering him. He did his best to ignore the cacophony in his head and tried to fix upon something else, eavesdropping on conversations for distraction. It was then that he heard a distinct voice two tables away.

  “Oh, c'mon!” a woman playfully insisted. “It isn't that bad. They fry up a good halibut here. Think of it as slumming.”

  “The tabelclothes are stained,” a male voice returned. “This will have to do. Anyway, as I was saying -”

  “Can't you just leave your troubles at the lab and just enjoy yourself?” the woman pleaded with a slight chirrup of friendly irritation.

  “But it's just so perplexing,” Dr Aymer defended. “This anomaly is consuming me, but I just know that there has to be a solution, a simple one, one without any hocus pocus. Why, just yesterday I read an article by Thomas Peel – you know Peel, right? He's the most imperturbable, staunchly skeptical researcher in the field. If he had been around centuries ago and told the earth was round, he would demand more empirical research be done to confirm it. Anyway, he is not given to wild-eyed speculations, but...”

  It was then that Leopold and Dr Aymer locked eyes; however, the latter seemed too absorbed in thought to focus on what his eyes were seeing. The voices that had encroached upon Leopold had died clean away as he tried to remember where he had seen this man before. He hit upon it quickly: the scientist in his dream. What was his name? Kramer? Daimler? Perhaps it had all been a dream, for the events in the white room progressed in such a fashion, in the typical dream speed of stutters and unconnected moments.

  Leopold w
as interrupted by a young woman with several facial piercings, dressed in plaid tights and an oversized leather jacket with punk band patches: “sorry to disturb you, but I recognize you from somewhere. The 'Re-envisioning Chiaroscuro Exhibit,' Kludge Gallery, right? You had a few works for sale.”

  She appeared nervous, not in the mood to talk about art, and this contrived introduction hid something more pressing.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, um...” she stammered in an obvious attempt to keep solid composure against emotion, “this is probably pretty stupid, but did you know an Ian Plenkowitz?”

  “No, should I? Does he hang around the gallery? If he does, then I wouldn't know. I don't know anybody here.”

  “Oh,” she said, deflated. “Well, maybe you knew him by his artist name. He called himself Abraxis sometimes, his signature on some of his work. He had some works at the same exhibit.”

  “Nope. Can't say that I know him,” Leopold said, now more impatient that the woman should leave so that he could retrace the steps of his dream where he had met the scientist, try to make the right connections in his mind. “Besides, that was months ago. June or July, maybe. I'm not what you'd call a people person; I'm not into the art hobnobbing scene.”

  “Well, he shot himself at a bar a while ago... “

  When she said these words, she broke down. This made Leopold feel very uncomfortable, as he always felt in the presence of genuine human emotion – especially issuing from a stranger. He felt callous since his first thought was to reply with, “Why should I care? I'm not a subscriber to local art news.”