The Infinite Library

by Kane X Faucher

  The other element I came to learn was the lesson of the synthesis. It was not Ensopht who was the true facilitator of it, but rather he was just another static object among the six. What was missing was the author, that external relation which brings the six toward unity, threaded together by the narrative I was obligated to construct. I now know that a great evil has been unleashed, and it was unleashed partially by accident. The greatest evils humanity has ever known always come about this way, by a banal concatenation of otherwise innocuous circumstances and events, and it was essential that I - the unwitting author - would not know how it would all turn out lest I impose a different narrative to sabotage what would come to pass. Authors are never the masters of their own work, but rather are handmaidens or conduits through which the narrative must pass. The author merely breathes expressive life into a lump of clay that has already been formed in advance. That section of the 7th Meditation was not lost on me where I am directly implored by the Third Man to breathe life into the golem, into the clay bird.

  My guilt, my evil, far surpasses the product, for I have been its circumstantial progenitor. I will not commit the atrocities of Dr Edward Albrecht, but my part in this tragedy is in being his author. There is no special place of forgiveness, no salvation reserved for those who would repose upon the false innocence of merely reporting what will come. Prophets and writers alike will be culpable for their utterances, and no excuse of merely chronicling a series of events will redeem them. It does not matter that I had been, without knowing it, secretly penning the Ars atrocitatis all this time for history will always weight our actions more on the side of consequences rather than intentions.

  At times, I doubt that any of you - Setzer, Angelo, Leopold, Jakob, the Devorants - were real and not just products of my pen. The Library teaches us that the division between imagination and reality is a false one, and that certain characters live as if real, and certain living beings live as if fictions. Truth is a tenuous and multiple thing, arrayed with perspectives that are so numerous as to render the entire project of locating the one truth that defines existence as possible and meaningful as counting grains of sand on a beach. It is this terrible cliche that springs to mind for I do not have any other way of expressing the magnitude of this confused and hydra-headed truth. I imagine to myself - for that is all that I can really do - that each of you were episodic elements in my narrative conscious. The Cartesians like to insist that a real world exists outside of us, guaranteed by certain laws we cannot self generate which is proof that we are not all merely bobbing along in some demon's dream. However, I believe that the undisputed laws of mathematics and physics are red herrings designed to cajole us into a kind of lie, to suspend our disbelief in the real world. I do not subscribe to the false alternative that Descartes puts forward, that there is an evil genius running the show; no, there is no mind that governs and dispenses existence, but rather a collective concert of minds, events, and things that construct these patterns of the real we take for truth.

  I am not much for the bloodless sport of philosophy, I'm afraid. I will freely commit open-handed fallacies if only because narrative seems to me the higher law. The world is diegesis: it is the tumbling and pouring out of constant contents from the multiple sources of narrative structure. These things that pour out of the clocks, the books, the walls, the libraries inundate and overwhelm us. It is folly to think that any person or secret order can staunch or control this existential wound, redirect its flows, or trace them back to a single truth.

  I am not particularly gifted in writing, but my task does not require any measure of poetic eloquence, the ornamentation and embroidery others need to weave their tales with. No, my inspiration and style is solely that thing called the prose of the world, and so requires nothing fanciful, rhetorical, or any of the devices so relied upon by those with more desire to write than substance upon which to draw.

  Castellemare, I do not despise you for all that you have done, nor am I still irritated by the cryptic affectations you put on. I do not pity you, and I do not admire you. There is no envy or malice when I think about you. I know that you were, like me, following that prose of the world that forces us to play at some roles, or be guided by the demands of character. To blame you would make as much sense and result in the same effect as to blame the narrative for what it is.

  It will seem a bit strange to some that I dedicate this book to you. It is a book that the events of my life transcribed upon paper and not the conventional method writers employ. The book was made a gift to me from the Library itself, and it has my name as its author. This I cannot dispute, for upon reading it I come to realize that it is written exactly the way I would have done, in my idiolect, my style, even the particular way I see the world or the expressions I would use to describe it. I did not physically write it, this is true, as it was foisted upon me already written by the Library. It does not matter since my life wrote it, and it is how I would have written it, and so despite the mundane person's clinging to the uninteresting world of logical facts, I may as well have authored it - and, in the Library's view, under the right possible conditions, I did.

  This writing to you here and now did not appear in the original and it is entirely the invention of the Gimaldi that lives in this particular world. But, I suppose, even that is hard to distinguish since it feels as though all the Gimaldis I have encountered in the Library's books have fused together into one rather than me having to debate which one has more reality than the other. Each Gimaldi was an aspect, a perspective, of an infinite series of Gimaldis stretched out in a long blur across multiple possibilities - very much like an image inside the room of mirrors your villa is said to possess in the Backstory.

  What is it to be empty, delicate? To either be flooded with light or hollowed out by darkness, a curious yet resigned shell or but a loose fragment tossed upon a dirty pile of things to do, things that will never get done, things the world would rather bury under layers of other spoiled intentions. To be as a city under cancellation, an exurb, a great stretch of strip malls like mausoleums and boarded over homes as paper once crumpled in paroxysm by the approach and retreat of a flame... Or perhaps to keep oneself in a rattling kind of emptiness, as I now sit, keeping sustained and linear gaze upon the narrowest slivers of spines on shelves upon my now majestic—and, consequently, very dead—library. Perhaps the painter of this scene would show a touch of his patron’s cliché preferences by adding a few more brushstrokes, a touch of brown for a mantel festooned with faux-safari elephant gun ammo, a box of dusty cigars, wooden photo-portraits of grey relatives in lightly gilded frames... and perhaps a flickering fire on the verge of slipping into the absence between trenches of ash... and a large armchair facing this fire, in the evening, the walls humming with a melancholy dirge, the last tridents of flame adding that dark orange and maroon hue to the now foreboding books that seem to enclose the space as though the great walls of night have failed against its insistent siege. Upon this chair should be none other than myself, eyes blank in reverie, but a reverie that loops with the quilt of a paradox resolutely fixed without resolution... a reverie unbroken, yet unfocused, looping, while I sit resignedly and passively, watching the inner experiential lens blur. The man on the chair is thousands of miles away from me, and his stare seems to pick a coincidental spot above the fire. By his side, by my side, an extinguished pipe, perhaps... a few loosely strewn and half-pecked books of some considerable antiquarian value... carelessly beside a dainty crystal sherry glass, still cold despite its appearance of having absorbed all heat in the room within its finely wrought facets. Should the painter add a light’s sparkle to even this glass, I would protest. A dismal murk ought to be ground into the canvas, an atmosphere of Poe or Baudelaire, but nothing so grand. It should be a scene... unremarkable. The unremarkable man, a man who had made too many remarks without the puissant fire of conviction, should have the skin tone of a mannequin or of flaked plaster... a reverse fresco where the colours hemorrhage their vivacity an
d vividness in a wounded way. I have known people whose lives were so full, whose persons were so vivacious, that they appeared bruised... A bruised life and being, a dark purple-brown mottling that bears its blood-welled tinge with a sort of erotic pride—an erotic impulse of life. However, I ought to be depicted in the opposite, as a kind of aged Rococo doll, wig askew, an arm slumped ungracefully on one side of the chair as if in half slumber or the throes of life’s fatigue. Please, paint me in the accurate stages of torpor. Above all, do not paint me with the strewn litter of my memorabilia, any objects that may above all tell what I was since it is my principal desire to be nothing...

  Empty. Delicate. A dying doll before a waning fire. And then, maybe...

  I have never attempted to lengthen the evening or the lifespan of the fire with so much talk, with a tale, but perhaps I will indulge this small one. I do not seek to make apologies or extend regrets for deeds done and not done. I do not seek understanding except as a pretense. A tale it is, then. Sadly, it has already been written, verbatim, in a book, but I should not be forlorn about this... there is no tale ad libitum, since they are all captured in text, every possible variation, but it took the nefarious librarian, Castellemare, to prove this point. I hazard to call him a librarian when more bilious terms spring to mind, that diabolist of books! How can any such pardon befall him? But he slipped away, you see, and he slips to and fro at will like some fugitive reflection in the mirror with its mocking age that you deny could possibly be you.

  Librarians have always appeared strange to me, but rarely interesting. Had I been born with the gift of laughter, rather than to have learned a kind of cynical mirth through the regular trials of experience, I might have erupted in a kind of joyous incandescence whenever a librarian came into view. Their habits can be aptly described as “bookish”, in accordance with their occupational subject matter, with the screwed-in bulbous eyes of the meticulous cataloguer, that inveterate ability to shelve texts with startling alacrity. I always found the process of organizing texts by their synoptic contents - reduced to a string of incomprehensible numbers and letters - to be on point with the obscene. To seize a stack of books with their diverse contents, channel them through the Dewey decimal system or Library of Congress Control Number, apportioning them to particular prefab shelves according to their details - floor, shelf, row, etc. - is akin to constructing divisions in a forest…That is, to impose a taxonomy on a continuum for a silent majority of rectilinear specimens that can only resist by crumbling over the moving wedge of time. Their tolerance for constructing order is admirable. But, then, librarians are also gifted in all manner of textual surgery, to mend a few loose pages, to rip off a spine and rebind the book with one of their hard stock monochrome covers with the white letters denoting author, title, and call number. Reshelve, and forget about it. Librarians are the torturers of books, their real keepers, for all books return to the master after the borrowing limit is at an end (presumably) lest fines be charged for extended services rendered. Librarians are cruel in the way that they keep the books caged in this false categorical unity, in the way that the books are never allowed to die but must submit to age-preserving modifications. But I am being sentimental over inanimate things, and I do believe order is useful even if it is absolute fiction. Although all order is fiction, not all fiction is ordered - a cover that embraces the content of the pen’s production is no surer sign of unity and order than to throw a blanket over the sea and call it a bed.

  My feelings about librarians in general have not changed, but there come notable exceptions in each field, even the most mundane--especially within the sheaf of the mundane. One can tell a gardener by the flora he chooses to tease from the soil, by his selective method of cultivation. It is no different with librarians who are more often than not demanded to tend the entirety of a library’s diverse and hodge-podge contents without specialty, rescinding any claim to specialization. The librarian I want to speak of was not such a vessel of ambiguous textual landlordism, but a true specialist. My travels with him have left their indelible mark, one of suspicion and foreboding. I can no longer stroll through the libraries as I once did as a student or a curious traveler in search of an intrigue, for there are far too many intrigues in the library that even the librarians have no knowledge of. What happens in the library always occurs between the books, just as a meaningful silence emphasizes the notes we hear in a concerto. But these negative spaces, these silences, are as real and positive--nay, more so--than the crude spine faces we peer over. This is one of the lasting lessons a particularly enigmatic librarian imparted to me – you, my dear Castellemare. Yours has been the lasting opaline glimmer of paradox ever incarnated in man. I wonder if you find it amusing or a matter of the most unpardonable betrayal that I have become, in so many ways, your author, superseding your importance and position at the Library we have both willingly let ourselves become beguiled by?

  I will not seek your pardon, Castellemare, for I have been empty and delicate for far too long. Forgiveness is something so easily sought, so rarely given, and so perhaps you may find your solace and justice in this narrative that I have been given to pilot. Is there more to tell you? Yes, but I couldn't in good conscience ruin your surprise. You are, after all, at the other end of the pen now – my pen. That work to which I am entrusted having already been authored by a phantom force of a collective superego, moral conscience now expires and can say no more. In marches the id to take its position and thus dominate the ego until, maybe, the ego will wrest itself from the rapacity of the id, rising in false triumph for it will be empty and without meaning. By the end, the question of what it means to be empty and delicate will be answered by an ego that no longer has its two steersmen of passionate drives or dictatorial moral reason.

  Cetera desunt,

  Alberto Gimaldi

  (to be continued... )

  This appeared in the second edition of Ars atrocitatis, an accusation of plagiarism against Gimaldi – author unknown:

  It being a kind of armed interpretation, or worse, the telltale dyed hands of one who writes as some interloper, crying for the shadow to peel so that his true identity could be revealed…

  These are the words I have couched and hidden in the mouth of a character. This character is nested x pages into a wending tale that will doubtless receive much literary attention, accolades, prizes. But my pride is buried, secret, for the name to which it shall redound positively upon will not be mine – and never was.

  Alberto Gimaldi professed only to me his woe of having no talent at the written word, but having a deep yearning to be recognized as an eloquent author. His ruse, as I later discovered, was also my own, but let us begin this in proper sequence.

  You see, I was first tapped by Gimaldi for a very generous fee to write his novels and poems. He may have heard me recite a few lines at the tavern, and, immediately smitten with my talent at being a wordsmith, invited me to sit with him to discuss what he called a “prosperous piece of business, a fair transaction between two men in need.” In sum, he wished to purchase my talents to be in his service, to be his personal ghostwriter. The deal was very lucrative, and he drew up a contract stipulating I would continue churning out pages and be paid to do so, but only on two conditions: 1. that he would claim full authorship, and; 2. that I would never make my own work public for fear that it would either call his authorship into question or outpace his own work. I consented to his proposal, for I was a man in dire financial need. And, to me, the life of the writer did not possess the glamour he seemed to think it did.

  The work of a ghostwriter is only reward at a distance. My work was highly acclaimed, yes, but under another man’s name. The only reward due me was of the monetary kind, and that in secret. I could take a measured delight in the praise of my work, a praise directed at him. I don’t bemoan not being able to lay claim to my own productions, for I am not so vain in my desires.

  At a certain point, after his fourth book, he requested of me ever more material, m
uch more than I thought myself possible to produce in such a short time. Perhaps under the pressure of a publisher’s contract, he required a more steady supply of manuscripts. I worked feverishly in that shadow while he attended galas and prize ceremonies, invited to interviews and having his works spoken of at length in glossy magazines. I grew weary with my task, and despite negotiating an increase in my pay, I could not keep up. But I grew to rely on this source of income, and I could tell that he was starting to become exasperated with my failure to produce at the volume he required.

  Acknowledging my own limitations, I sought outside help. I essentially subcontracted to another figure like myself, another ghostwriter I found through silent channels. It was not long until I was sending several fresh manuscripts to Gimaldi, for which he was pleased. I had no moral qualms about my actions since I was already an active participant in this industry of forged names. His name was Henry Weissman, a semi-accomplished author in his own right that was not above dipping his hand into the ghostwriting trade to supplement his own finances.

  I began to notice after a year that only about a quarter of the manuscripts that I had sent to Gimaldi were being considered for publication. I queried Gimaldi about the whereabouts of the other manuscripts, to which Gimaldi replied with some hostility that it was not my business, that he had paid me to do a job and never mind the fate of a product already in the hands of its purchaser. I learned, from a few trusted sources, that his sales were beginning to slump, and that he needed more money to pay for my services. It was then that I found out that he was ghostwriting for another person. But for whom, I could not yet be certain. There was something a bit estranged about the whole operation, for it was now a process of ghostwriting for a ghostwriter, my works appearing at yet another remove from my name. It meant that I was effectively ghostwriting for two authors, only one of which knew that I was the original author. But even that was problematic since some of the manuscripts I was ferrying along were written by Henry’s pen. I was trafficking in text both my own and someone else’s.