Artificial Light
Page 4
My name is Fiat Lux. I work in the main library downtown. I actually went to college for that, if you can believe it takes a college degree to learn how to look after books. Of course that’s not why I went to college, but it’s what I studied. The reason being my already-stated near rapturous relationship to books (I grant the possibility of some unknown thing provoking in me greater heights of passion, but the way I live the chance of unknown things is slim). I picked Library Science, though, because I hate selling, which is what you have to do if you work in a bookstore. I tried working in bookstores. Plus side: you’re around tons of books. Minus side: you have to sell. Library Science rather than Literature, though, because I hate theories about books. I hate mediation, generally, but especially with regard to things I hold dear, which are few.
Interestingly, you don’t call yourself a librarian, anymore. Librarian, to most people, conjures an image of a fusty middle-aged spinster scouring the stacks to eliminate traces of pornography or, worse, Communism (you’d be surprised how long people cling to a shopworn shibboleth—we get all types at the library). And while it’s true there’s a disproportionate number of middleaged spinsters, and even young-aged spinsters, on the whole we’re discouraged—and this is part of a general trend of discouragement—from using the word librarian in regard to ourselves. We are not moth-ball perfumed custodians of wormy, well-forgotten tomes: we are highly trained technicians who specialize in parsing complex strands of fragile sense into manageable bits. We are scientists, each with a particular specialty in the endlessly subdividing organism called, for sake of argument, Book.
My field is Information Science. I specialize in the ordering of information. I am an archivist, a good one. Organization and cataloging, the ability to instantly find or know where to find a particular item—the precise thing required by the reader, whether scholar or child. Not the closest approximation to that item but the res ipsa. Sometimes we don’t have the ipsa; sometimes we don’t even have the res; but we know where it’s hidden, we can ferret through the tunnels of any number of neighboring or not-so-neighboring libraries, linked like lovers’ arms from here to eternity, and by use of the telephone or something called electronic mail with which I like to pretend I’m not familiar, request the item in question, which request is often granted, or else the whole system would collapse and I would have to find a new job.
In one sense, then, I’m an enabler. I enable people, whether artist or amateur, to exercise their epistemologies. Without regular exercise, these native philosophies tend to atrophy, and once that happens, I don’t care how carefully you watch your diet of ideas, you’ll go flabby and soft. In another sense, I’m an addict. The sensual rush I enjoy every time I have an excuse to wander through the closed stacks, down on the second floor, has only intensified with repetition. I don’t mean the intellectual thrill of finding oneself surrounded by a dizzying assortment of the finest thinking available to humanity, but the actual sense-pleasure available to eyes (the combinations of colors), ears (the absolute silence), nose (the papery smell), mouth (the taste of the dust in your throat), and, most important, fingers: the texture of the buckram, in its infinite and infinitely subtle grains, dimensions, pliability, and heft.
Removed of their dust jackets, removed of the plastic casing that protects the dust jackets from dust, most latter-day volumes consist of any number of acidfree paper pages sewn or glued to buckram bindings in varying hues, from midnight black to virginal white. Arrayed on the steel shelving in our own modest stacks, the effect’s overwhelming. I’ve yet to travel outside of Dayton, but I’ve seen pictures (in books) of some of the Greater Libraries of the world, and the sheer scope suggested by those pictures unmoors my brain. I’m honestly scared by magnitude—magnitude in everything, but magnitude in books just brings me, frankly, a little too close to the face of human ignorance.
In the Yule-Cordier edition of The Travels of Marco Polo, you’ll find, somewhere in the footnotes, this explanation, here paraphrased: What was buckram? In the modern sense, sure, a coarse open texture of cotton or hemp, loaded with gum, used to stiffen certain articles of dress. But the medieval sense? A quotation in Raynouard’s Romance Dictionary has, “Vestirs de polpra e de bisso que est bocaran,” where Raynouard renders bisso as lin. It certainly was not necessarily linen, nor velvet, nor … I can’t remember nor what else, but you see my problem. Either Colonel Yule or M. Cordier has provided a very good definition of the things buckram’s not, or wasn’t, but its origins, not only etymological but phenomenological, remain shrouded in velvet or linen.
I know: fascinating. The evolution of the librarian’s role through history—the evolution of the library through history—is a fascinating subject, serious books have been devoted to thorough explorations of these evolutions, or revolutions, or what have you. In sum, I’m glad to say, these histories back my prime directive: Things as precious as books should not be sold but given away or at least lent. Ancient authors—in the days when books were scrolls or wood-bound codices—had to pay for copies at their own expense, and booksellers employed troops of scribes to produce further copies, which, when sold, derived no profit to their authors. You wrote a book: you made a few presentation copies for friends and patrons: and you were done. In other words, to find readers you had to pay, from your own pocket, to make copies of your manuscript, or direct the would-be fan to the nearest store. Imagine the slighted sensibilities of those so directed! Untenable. In time, then, the library, at first an empty beau geste by emperor or king bent on bolstering his profile, then a religious scholar’s refuge, and still later, after too much irrational blood and burning (nearly as many books have been burned or buried or pulped as have been printed, and every book burned or buried or pulped is a murderous act, both in the obvious, hate-fuelled fact and in the fundamental irreplaceableness, word choice, of the book-as-artifact), a publicly funded institution whose methods and purpose have been vigorously debated over the last couple of centuries, came to occupy a place in the common consciousness so ubiquitous and welldeployed as to have achieved the height of stability: an unarguable good, a necessity. Even when underfunded and overlooked, even when closely circumscribed by the whims of autocratic rulers or (not so very long ago) pernicious race laws, the library survives.
At the library, we almost never have to sell anything. The only exception is the annual discard sale, where we get rid of books that have outlived their usefulness for one reason or another (superseded textbooks, outmoded translations, dogeared classics). But even then—I’ll tell you another secret—I feel bad for the unwanted discards at the end of the sale, the two or three cartons overflowing with torn and soiled and unloved books. I’m supposed to haul them to the recycling center but I never do. I keep them in the spare room of my threeroom apartment on Hickory. I keep them arranged in an abstruse filing system of my own device—I’m frankly sick of the alphanumerical Library of Congress method, as well as dropsical Dewey Decimal, and I’m convinced my system’s more intuitive and commonsensical, and generally better, but try telling that to the Library Administration or the Board of Directors. These orphans, though, sheltered in orderly ranks on planks of wood balanced on cement bricks, are the only books I permit myself to own.
Because no one else wants them, you see. They have no value except what I’ve given them. I would not have picked many of them—I’ve got fifteen volumes on botany, for instance, and no garden. I have a nearly complete paperback collection (twenty-three luridly decorated books) of the Western novels of Red Hand (pen name of Armitage Shanks, of Uxbridge, England). I hate Western novels. I have graffiti-filled high school calculus textbooks in triplicate, a police manual on crowd control from the ’50s, and four different Spanishlanguage vegetarian cookbooks. I’m not a vegetarian. I don’t read Spanish.
There are some treasures, however. I have a book in German called Das Bienenzüchter sucht nach Ruth [Beekeeper Seeks Ruth], by an Austrian biologist called Wilhelm Kneissl, privately printed (and much damaged b
y water; the cover and first few pages are missing) in 1963, which may be the finest love story ever written. I also have a beat-up two volume set of Gargantua and Pantagruel, and a copy of R.L. Stevenson’s Memories and Portraits, Chatto and Windus, London, 1904, Pott 8vo, cloth binding, gilt top. But I don’t rank the books, most of the time. I would never hurt the other books’ feelings by considering them somehow inferior to the ones I (privately) cherish, because everything I keep, every book—every one I don’t keep, too—that’s written with any kind of open mind represents human striving toward its unnamable essence, right? So nothing’s wasted, and nothing’s worthless. I’d advise you to bear that in mind.
Notebook Three
Record 1 (1:49)
The Hunt for Proper Diction (Abandoned)
Context
An Epic Poem
Come here. Look, do you see that? There, past the small stand of hickory trees, past the cornfields baked the color of straw in the buttery sun, past the empty office buildings and the cracked asphalt of the downtown sidewalks. We’re close enough now to smell the sickly sweet cloud from the corn syrup plant, to hear the train lowly moan through town. But mostly it’s the view: a sky like shaved soap, ashes from imaginary bonfires floating in lazy gusts from the dingy brick warehouses on Third Street to the webbed clouds, the veiled sun, and the horizon of the next thousand years.
Welcome to Dayton, Ohio, Nineteen Something and Five (by the old reckoning), birthplace of aviation, home of Orville Wright, whose extant mansion sits on a small hill not far from our apartment; and of Hangar 18, reputed storage site for the Roswell, NM alien crash remains; and of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where the Bosnian peace talks were held. Origin, too, though no real proof exists, of the Great Change. But we’re not here to speak of recent events. Our concern is a thing no longer much accounted useful: history. Not history in the old sense, of course, because we’ve done away with that, and good riddance. Better to say context.
Few of us are left who remember the days before the change. Which is why we have decided, before we take our leave, that a record should be inscribed for those among us still interested in peering through the lens of time at the patterns imprinted on the palimpsest of what we once called the past. We have no further use for our memories, and we can’t imagine any better general use than as an artifact, a Thing, to use the old nomenclature, or a Tool, in the modern parlance. So we have set ourselves this task: to reproduce as faithfully as possible, given the inherently liminal nature of human recollection, the fabric of a certain (to our mind) turning point in events, which went almost without remark at the time and which, after a few decades of tumult, proved crucial to the progress of our common humanity.
No one who reads this now will need to be reminded of the way in which our society changed, or how quickly, and with what confusion and hope we greeted the dawn of a new era in human relations. That we can now trace this change to the collapse of the entertainment industry in the third decade of the new millennium is, we think, a widely shared view; we have moved far and fast from such an inauspicious beginning, through a global economic collapse, a period of confusion and chaos, even violence and fear, to the slow dawn of realization that our nature itself had somehow subtly but dramatically changed, that we were no longer enchained by the petty desires of our individual ego and that, further, by liberating ourselves from that ego we need not destroy our individual essence, that we were enhanced by the connections that grew in place of our fetters.
We mention this only to prepare those who might wish to read further, and who did not live through those turbulent times (nor the turbulence preceding the turbulence), for the strange rhythms and language you will encounter here. Terms long out of use, references to people and places that no longer exist—more importantly, to forms and functions that no longer exist—you will find in abundance, but that is part of the reason we have decided to record them, before they pass out of all living memory. It may seem an odd thing to do—it is an odd thing to do—but you will perhaps be surprised that it was once the custom to record the thoughts and deeds of a particular person for the use of posterity. At least, in its initial intent. You will not be surprised that this practice swelled to absurd proportions not long before the change, and some will even remember the deluge of memoirs (that was the term), sometimes from children and pets, or sometimes ghost-written (another term) on behalf of these people or animals if they were not judged sufficiently skilled memoirists (may not have been an actual term).
What follows here has been extracted from a book we were engaged in writing at the time, a book we had been contracted to write—in other words, that we had promised to write in exchange for money, which as many will remember was the word for the currency then in use. While we have tried to the extent possible to expunge as many remnants of ego as we could, the ghosts of Capital I are everywhere in these pages, and for that we apologize. We were convinced, then, that what we were writing was important, that what we had to say would fall on receptive ears, and that, frankly, we would be lauded and rewarded for our ability to shed light on what, then, was an abstruse subject (and which is now merely irrelevant). In an irony that we would even then have appreciated, the importance of what we wrote now seems purely accidental—a footnote to what we considered our real subject: a specific sub-genre of rock music, then at its apex, soon to fall, for specific and general reasons, out of favor with the consumer.
You will also note a jejune obsession with the consumption of alcohol, a widespread practice of abusing which afflicted too many of us in those days, as we attempted to reach through habitual intoxication those altered states of being now obtainable easily by any of us through simple application of proper focus. We ask you to forgive us, as our ignorance had the best part of our better nature. Apart from that, we have tried to present an undiluted excerpt from a diluted time. We begin, as all stories must, with a tragedy.
Named after Jonathan Dayton, a U.S. Senator from New Jersey, who was one of four out-of-state worthies deeded the land—which occurs in the southwest corner of Ohio, about fifty miles north of the Kentucky border—in 1789, Dayton was first formed as a township in the winter of 1796–97, and incorporated in 1805. The area had originally been settled by different tribes of Indians over the millennia, some of whom left elaborate and imposing burial mounds (most famous is probably the Serpent Mound in Adams County, concerning which all sorts of occult theories have sprouted) which exist, still. Prostitution was legal until 1915—the city’s most famous madam, Elizabeth Richter, better known as Lib Hedges, died in 1923 and is buried in Woodland Cemetery alongside the cream of Dayton’s crop. Plagued over the years by periodic flooding of the Great Miami River, the town raised two million dollars in the aftermath of the catastrophic 1913 flood (which was followed by an equally disastrous fire) to help construct a series of five dams. Pictures of the flooding are obtainable with a minimum of digging at the Dayton Public Library.
In addition to the invention of the airplane by favorite sons Orville and Wilbur Wright, Dayton has contributed these several items to American culture: the cash register; welfare; ethyl gas; the portable electric generator; the electric ignition/electric self-starter; the original pop-top. We are justly proud of these inventions, if only because their legacy is a reminder of the sort of individual achievement no longer viable (or, perhaps better: no longer desirable). We were even more justly proud of them decades ago, when they were all we had left after an economic downturn that had severely depressed the entire region’s economy. Nowadays, when no one bothers to study economics anymore (a lost art, and sadly so, we think), the causality of the downturn lies shrouded in a fog of meaningless terms and phrases—interest rates, inflationary pressures, job claims index, the Fed—and those of us old enough to remember can speak only to effects, which were certainly widespread, and noticeable. Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. We were never so lucky.
Most importantly, for our purposes, the general economic slump left do
wntown lying fallow. Which was good for us, for youngish people who disdained regular employment and liked to drink a lot and pretended to aspire to more important things than material success. Decay and emptiness once lent the area a seedy romance of the sort that engenders bad music and worse poetry. We had a lot of the former, not so much of the latter, because poetry was considered fey and affected by most Midwesterners. On winter afternoons, the late light snagging on the edges of a broken window high up in a deserted downtown church could make you a believer in nonreligious things.
Several decades ago, in the year we’re thinking of, the church we’re thinking of—an honestly majestic Roman Catholic semi-cathedral of stone—was torn down and replaced by a parking lot. A few general facts concerning Dayton in the decade before the last millennium: Population: 948,000 (including the General Metropolitan Area); median age: 32.9 (10.6% between 18 and 24); average annual income: $24,572; number of churches: 900; percentage of vacant office space: 22; number of drive-by BB gun shootings: 1; number of decent bars: 3; number of okay record stores: 3; number of rock bands: at least 100; number of decent rock bands: 2. Nicknamed the Gem City for obscure reasons, once called “an American microcosm” by a national magazine, Dayton was at that time largely dependent on two industries, auto manufacturing and defense, for its citizens’ employment.
Although its proximity to the University of Dayton provided Brown Street with a vaguely collegiate air, very little of the usual “college town” atmosphere infected the relentlessly lowbrow town. UD was a Catholic-run school (Catholicism was a religion whose main themes were: belief in a trinity of Gods; belief in the teachings of Jesus Christ, filtered through the Apostle Paul, whose main writings can be found, still, in what used to be called the New Testament of what used to be called the Bible; and a somewhat perplexing opposition to any type of birth control), dominated by a conservative faculty and students who considered the town itself more or less grubby and beneath them. UD’s inmates, in general, regarded the weekend keg party as the highest culture to which one might aspire. Natives with a shred of intelligence or ambition left town as soon as able. Those who remained were held in place either by inertia or by the lure of cheap rent and cheaper alcohol.