At the time, I had been living in Lisbon. I was born into both a German family and that heavy burden known as the German language, and my family decided to relocate to Portugal for rather uninteresting reasons. I had distant relatives in my family tree who had some equally distant connections to Germany's historical shame, but not significant enough to leave any lasting stain on an otherwise mundane family name.
Having left my literary peer group in Munich, I was to be adopted by another in Lisbon, which was quite vibrant at the time. Fortunately, on the strength of an introductory letter written by a man of international well-renown (I will not bring him any shame or embarrassment by revealing his identity here), my passage into the upper echelons of Lisbon's literary elite was secured. It did not matter if what I wrote possessed any merit, but that sort of thing doesn't all that much matter in such circles - just so long as one gains admittance and has some relative degree of shared literary history. We had our meetings in a place called the Chamber.
The Chamber was slightly Bauhausian, the ruthlessly elegant and modernist minimalism that conceals behind its cold facade the fact it had been produced by complicated machinery. Clear glass alternated with frosted glass, silver and black stood at alienated distances. Our salon's decor was proof of what happens when the triumph of aesthetic austerity is mistaken for tastefulness, where opulence is condemned to mere tackiness. This was in contradistinction with the rest of Lisbon's proud architectural pomp - anachronistic holdovers to a bygone Baroque era.
The Lisbon society of letters was very much like societies of their stripe anywhere, filled with amplified and inconsequential intrigues, given over to passionate prejudices of the moment, and concerning itself with myopic discussions on contemporary poetics. The unwritten rules were generally similar as well: new members targeted their flatteries judiciously without seeming like obsequious dandies. Some would undertake to write high-born prose in reviewing the established members that, objectively, would be regarded by history as fatuous puff pieces engineered to curry favour and gain advantage. But there was another new member in the Lisbon clique besides myself, and not once did I ever see him ingratiate himself in any way. Perhaps his aloof comportment, finely threaded by an innate mysteriousness, frozen upon that half smirk permanently etched upon his Mediterranean face was enough to carry him beyond the necessity for baser methods for forging alliances. He was certainly charismatic, affable, and eloquent enough to be quickly held in some measure of esteem. His oratory was tinged with that smooth touch of the exotic, an accent that put me in mind of some Comte de Monte Cristo descending upon us. And, he was certainly a well-bred thinker with a quick-witted creativity. His name was Tariq, and this Lisbon group to which we both belonged was, I would later learn, of middling importance to him compared to the fraternity he pledged most of his loyalty to.
Tariq was a handsome man, with a dark complexion and an ageless face that one felt one could trust - although it was what it visibly seemed to conceal that conveyed he knew much more than he would tell. He participated meaningfully and respectfully to our discussions, in a way that was never too much or too little, contributing just enough to have presence but never fully committing himself to any side in a dispute. He had an objective, clarifying effect when our disputes raged, adding a cool and fresh breeze to any argument. However, to me, it always seemed as though he was just playing, a bit distant and unserious.
It must have been a few months before Tariq took me into his confidence. He was wearing a handsome cut of suit and gingerly sipping a cafe au lait on balmy evening. When I buttonholed him, out of my own curiousity to dispel mystery, he yielded jovially.
“I have tried thousands of times to unwrite my own life,” he began without losing that perma-smirk. “Usually by writing over it, rewriting the past as if the act of writing could abolish the truth of what was, but that is only to multiply and embellish, compounding a lie with an actual event. When this proved to be an artificial act, I sought ways where writing could efface my past without creating a new one in its place. It is a difficult thing to write with the singularly focused aim of removing all traces of oneself. At bottom, it is paradoxical...an enterprise fraught with failure. I could complicate my history, but every word served only to reaffirm its existence. It had to be an act more lasting than a series of scratching strikethroughs...or the denouncement of public record. I began with my family and tried to unwrite them. This proved somewhat easiest, for I could write that I had no relatives - a sure way to remove my lineage, but any persistent researcher could sniff out my lie.”
“This seems counterintuitive to the act of writing,” I said. “Do we not write, in part, for recognition, to leave our fingerprints upon history?”
“I have my reasons, and they are not what you would expect. I do desire recognition, but my effacement will actually achieve this. There was once a story I wrote - one that I have attempted in vain to unwrite - that received praise for the one fantastic element I reported as having occurred at such-and-such street. The street and house I described do exist, but I was asked if that I introduced was also true. I drew from life the house and street, but added that small touch of fabulist fancy that makes for a good tale, to blur that boundary between life and fiction. It concerned a medieval android, a tale peeled from the rumoured accounts of Albertus Magnus. I said it was not true, the android portion, although I had written it so convincingly that it seemed to suggest that it was. My questioner said with a disappointed and derogatory tone, 'Ah, so it's just an invention.' Inventions, it is assumed, have less value than natural and real things. But I would argue that inventions of the mind are as real as the blossoms on the trees of this boulevard. Do not inventions change our way of engaging reality, if not the entirety of reality itself? Not all inventions must be readily and universally useful either; I accord as much value to the inventions of Shelley and H.G. Wells as I do those of Edison or Marconi. But it is this stubborn belief that inventions - especially literary ones - are poor, deficient, and useless that has urged my sad resolve to unwrite myself, as if in protest. I, too, am merely an invention.”
“Or a fantasist. I do not mean this in a pejorative way. There can be much beauty and erudition found in such a genre.”
“I do not take it as pejorative, but I am no longer even this. To unwrite the whole world would be violently arrogant, and I am no Platonist who spurns the terrestrial realm and awaits reunion with the celestial sphere of the Forms. I take responsibility only for myself, and it is myself that I must unwrite, to efface this fiction, this invention. All my memories are merely the ones I choose to keep, or have no choice but to keep. I do not remember every breakfast I've eaten since childhood, every caress every lover has ever given me, or every object I have seen on every street I have traveled. Yes, to remember everything would be madness, and so we abstract from the world and keep the kernel of meaning. Is this not also a form of invention, of fictionalizing? Selection and omission. All my perceptions are merely forged by larger cultural and historical prejudices and my own experience (which is flawed). I inherit a world that is already a historical fiction, and I continue along to make ever more fictions that future generations will also inherit. Nothing I think, remember, or see is entirely real or free from my tainting them with that natural function common to all people - to fictionalize. Even this language we speak, this linguistic inheritance, is an arbitrary way of designating the world and communicating with one another.”
“Would not those who devalue invention also suffer using inventions themselves?”
“Yes. They invent their own system of values that devalues inventions. But so do those who highly value inventions hold an invented opinion.”
“Then there is no right or wrong. All is illusion,” I attempted to clarify.
“To say ' all is invention' is itself an invention. To say that inventions are good or bad, useful or useless, is again just an invention. But I wish to push toward the conclusion of my efforts, how my own invention was embr
oidered by a special knowledge that perhaps, if you are willing, I can share with you. Because it pleases me, and because you are not so rigid in your way of thinking yet since you are still young and malleable of mind, perhaps this would benefit you - or it may be the source of much hardship.”
I listened intently, not breaking the spell with any premature utterance.
“There is more than one way of reading, yes?”
“This I freely grant,” I said. “Interpretation is variable. There are many levels of reading.”
“But all of them play on one side of the black and white.”
“I do not understand.”
“Do you believe in unconscious writing? I do not mean this so heavily on the side of psychoanalysis.”
“Stream of consciousness writing, you mean?”
“No, a truly unconscious style of writing, the kind that unwrites all that we write by adding a layer that we are not aware of. All who write, write double. We inscribe a different writing in the white shadow.”
“White shadow?”
“Look at any text. Black on white. We form each letter, but at the same time, we are carving out the negative space of an entirely other alphabet. I have learned how to read the spaces between letters as being an alphabet of its own, rendering what we actually write the space between the letters that are actually printed, albeit in negative.”
“What you say puts me in mind of steganography,” I said. “Porta had published a book on the subject in 1606, but the practice is much older... Demaratus used to inscribe important dispatches on wooden tablets and cover them with wax so that the receiver need only remove the waxy layer to obtain the message. Porta himself recommended various methods such as using gum-arabic on glass, and of course those methods of invisible ink that only come into view with the aid of fluid or fire.”
“You might say this is somewhat similar, but it is still misdirected. I speak of the unconscious writing that appears between what we consciously inscribe. Once one comes to realize what the unconscious writes, one can take the reins upon it, one may even read the great canonical works fresh since the act of writing is always effectively double. There are always two books to every book, and what we see are but the shades of what is written...The letters we come to visibly recognize our but the cast shadow of a truer writing.”
“A truly remarkable idea, to read between the lines, or, rather, between the letters themselves. How did you become acquainted with this fashion of reading?”
“That in itself is a long story, a story I know to have its own double should it be written in the conventional manner. I belong to a cadre of those who have mastered this art of reading and writing space, and it is by means of the spaces I leave between my written words that I will choose to be remembered. That is the only method to efface myself and, in turn, glorify myself by the only writing that matters.”
“How does one train to read in this way, especially given that we are so accustomed to shape of letters and the way they interconnect?”
“One must learn to understand an entirely different alphabet. Of course, everyone already knows it for it is the alphabet of the unconscious. So, one must learn how to tap into one's own unconscious, for it is always at work, always writing in its own hand as our conscious writes with the other. It is similar to those visual puzzles where we may focus on a picture of a vase in black or see its invert, two facial profiles in white.”
“And what of this cadre of readers you mention?”
“Our principles are partially derived from the learned Galen in that we spurn the accidents of fortune and pay no heed to noble birth, for both are not earned by merit.”
Tariq and I would continue along in this way, me with my curiousity and he with his philosophical generalities. We traded pleasantries often, not merely keeping to the topic of an invisible writing. We grew close in the way two men who frequent the same cafe under a pendulous sun can become. That spring we spent much of our spare and idle hours talking until the evening instead of writing, and by summer he had invited me to stay with him for a month at his summer home in Spain. Again, pleasantries and occasionally deep conversations on poetics and philosophy dominated the humid hours, and it would not be until that following autumn that Tariq would take me into a more personal circle of confidence.
In retrospect, I ought to have been more alert to the way our conversations were designed to prepare me for initiation into that reading rite. I had merely taken our exchanges as something of an innocuous series of novelties, merely being happy as a youth to engage a limber and seasoned mind on topics most others tired of easily. By autumn, however, I would soon regret being taken into Tariq's confidence.
By this time, my family had fallen on hard times after father had made some very rash and poor speculations. It was decided that I would stay on in Lisbon while my parents, younger brother and older sister would return to Munich. I was able to eke by on a small salary acting as a secretarial member of the Lisbon society of letters, much to my shame and humiliation. Most often, my duties would prevent me from attending the soirees in the Chamber, and when the season drew to a close I found myself out of work. Tariq and I continued to spend time when we could at the local cafe, but my once ebullient talk had been occulted by the dark grey of my financial predicament. Sensing my distress, Tariq inquired on my affairs, and I was only too willing to unfurl my flag of difficulties. It was in late October that Tariq offered to take me to see the head of that other group he belonged to. In no mean terms, he assured me that my financial predicament would find its proper resolution. So would begin my tutelage among the group named, with some cheek, Sanscript.
Tariq took the proper pains in priming me for my initial meeting. I was to be dressed in sombre attire and stay silent unless spoken to. He also gave me his facsimile copy of Emanuelle Swedenborg's Summaria Expositio Doctrinae Novae Ecclesiae, the same copy – he said – that he had been initiated with. He would act as my sponsor.
I cannot remember the exact location of their meeting house, but I knew it was tucked deeply in some poor urban pocket amidst buildings with no names and of uniform appearance. It was night when we arrived, and I had my borrowed copy of Swedenborg held nervously in my right hand. We left the cab we had hired and we would enter through a white door set inside a drab tenement. Tariq issued a complicated rhythmic knock, and the door opened a crack so that the inhabitant could safely confirm identity. Once the door was opened, I was met by dimness and an overwhelming scent of burning incense. There were a few candles at the front of a large room, and chairs lined up against the walls. Tariq instructed me wordlessly to take a seat next to him.
“Why,” I whispered, “would a reading club conduct its affairs in such poor light?”
The whites of Tariq's eyes, made more animalistic by the candlelight, nearly bade me to swallow my question, but he said, “It is easier to see the hidden alphabet under these conditions. For now, stay quiet, and all will be revealed.”
The members were already beginning to file in and take their seats on either side of the room, on the same folding chairs lined up against the walls. The centre was covered with an elaborate carpet, but the lighting was too dim to make out the precise pattern. The front of the room had a raised and ornate lectern, and behind were a few guttering candles. The room was deathly quiet, and I had not noticed the head of the group until I heard him shuffling dry sheets at the lectern.
“Lux e tenebris,” the shadowed speaker uttered, followed a chorus of echoing mutters.
“That is our hierophant,” Tariq whispered in explanation.
“I will read from our book of the spaces,” the hierophant announced. “I will read from the first chapter so that we may never forget our chief purpose. 'The eye cannot see until the heart understands. He who sees only in black reads with Ahriman, while those whose hearts the eye gifts unto shall read with Yazdan. We who read in the light know the rites of the consecrated fire. We who read in the light do not share the emblem of ignor
ance given solely to the blind, those who read with Ahriman. All who now read the in the light with Yazdan have followed the Rite of the Fifty Days, as was instructed by Yazdan for all aspirants. Thereafter, each member enters into apprenticeship to the Sanscriptorium for a period of three lunar months by three lunar months by three lunar months. After the apprentice has mastered the light of the demotic, and then the light of the hieratic, and finally the light of the hieroglyphic, may he come to be fully embraced as a member. Afterward, he is accorded with the esteem and privilege of his brothers.' Let us now stand and recite the pledge.”
All the members stood. Tariq gently urged me to stand as well. I heard the strangest kind of glottal burbling issuing in unison from the throats of all in attendance, a language sounding more guttural than mystical. I could not, of course, take part. I would come to realize that this pledge was spoken in their language, the language of the visible yet hidden alphabet. The seemingly Masonic overtones of the meeting were not to my taste, but I would learn that there had been no real converse between this order and that of the Freemasons despite the appearance of some shared phrases.
After a half hour or so of further recitals and spoken hymns, the meeting disbanded from its formality and the members were then allowed to mingle freely. However, each of them spoke that bizarre guttural dialect, so I could not ascertain what was being said. Tariq, in making his proper social rounds, led me to the hierophant and, presumably (they were speaking in that language), my case was discussed.
The Infinite Library Page 52
