What this meant I could only guess. The cover of a book was its door, its pages a collection of mirrors, and the attainment of knowledge was the staircase leading up or down. This was what I idly conjectured. I pushed on beyond this door in search of more answers. In a corner, where the mirrored edges of floor, walls, and ceiling met, was a small folded broadside, upon it was printed Tain. It was placed there for perhaps no other reason but for the benefit of my reading. There was no mention of the author, and it ran only a few pages:
Tain
I have been incarcerated here for about a month now, and this I know only by memory of counted wakings since there are no clocks or calendars in this space. My prison has no bars, and its apparent dimensions stretch out interminably, but this is the specular nature of this particular prison facility. I dare not travel too far lest I become lost and starved.
I see myself reproduced infinitely. This is the curse of Narcissus, and perhaps it is a fitting punishment for my crime, a crime I will relate later. First, let me tell you about my cell. When I first awoke here subsequent to my sentencing, I was in a room measuring about 12 feet in height, length and width, or roughly 1688 cubic feet. On one wall was a small slot where food is pushed through on a tray once a day. There are small lights posted at each of the eight corners. But what makes this perfectly square room so much a torment is that the walls, floor, and ceiling are mirrored. I see the cast of my reflection running off into infinity, and it grants the impression of the infinite in a finite space. On my first day, I paced the length of my cell, touched the cool mirrored wall, and was assured despite appearance the dimensions of my confinement. However, this would not remain as I would discover the next day.
You see, every night I become drowsy against my will, and I suspect a soporific gas wafts into the cell from some hidden vent that causes me to fall into the deepest slumber. When I woke up the next day and performed the usual function of boredom of tracing the length of my cell, I had found that the space had increased; my captors artfully removed the four walls to increase its size by an exponent. If this cell was set in a grid, it is as though there were eight more copies of this cell that this cell was nested in. Perhaps more if I consider the height.
I have a worn Chinese coin in my pocket. It is something I was mysteriously gifted with unawares, and I meditate upon its significance. My knowledge of Mandarin is sparse, but I do know the coin’s obverse is from the reign of Kao Tsung of the Q’ing Dynasty, circa 1736-1795. The reverse has a stylized dragon languidly rolling around the square hole. I have tossed this coin in the air to determine the new height of my cell and found that it had tripled. It would have been rather jarring to remove a floor from beneath my sleeping form, so I presume that my captors have compensated by removing two levels from the ceiling so as not to disturb my gas-induced sleep or cause me any injury. I still cannot fathom what it is I am to learn from this coin, and I wonder if there is a lesson I am to discern or if it is my captors’ idea of maddening me with a hoax mystery.
A space like this means everything and nothing. It is the reflection of itself unto itself in perpetuity. As such, the cell looks identical to itself no matter how many walls and ceilings are removed. You will have to picture living in a cube where all the surrounding cells of that cube are removed to increase the size of the central cell. By my mental calculations, the cell now measures 373 248 000 cubic feet. I do not know how big the outer container of this facility is, but I dare not travel too far lest I cannot get back to that one anchoring, singular slot where my food is served every day. It is my stomach that roots me to this one spot despite the fact that the space of my prison continues expanding outward from this central point. It is a multidirectional panopticon. The outer reaches of my cell seem as near as they do far, as they did on the first day. The only difference I can truly discern is aural: the fact that my echo carries that much further with each passing day.
At times, the atrium quality of resonance in this place surprises me with strange noises, the sound of machinery in the distance, or voices that do not belong to the throats of men. Since I am in solitary isolation, I cannot but figure that these noises are occurring outside this wretched mirrored box. I also do not know if they perhaps may issue from my own mind, indicative of a madness that the circumstances have tipped me into. There is also this unbearable vertiginous feeling of being suspended as the central source of reflection, as it looks as though I am floating in the infinite. Sometimes I feel as though I am just another reflection of the real me that is suspended at some distant point.
I keep pondering about this coin in my pocket. It is my only talisman, my anchor to reason. Is it the key or just another element of my captors’ trickery? I have only this coin as my Other, since the only alternative is to reflect upon my eternal reflections.
The length of my sentence has been ruled indefinite. Due to my overweening sense of ego in that now distant place of the real, I have been condemned to reflecting on myself forever. And with myself replicated interminably, I have long since lost any sense of what or who I am other than a prisoner inside myself, in this burgeoning, boxed rhizome. And it is here that I must remain, as meaningful and meaningless as the reflections that stretch outward to the six infinite horizons.
If there was a lesson to the story, and one relevant to this room, it was a bit too abstract for me to consider (vanity? Self-love in mirrors? Was that the motif of the Amor door, or was the mirror more suggestive of the Library’s confining yet infinite expression through reflection?). I hadn't the time, and since my way forward was not barricaded by another code to be figured out, I simply collected the text with the others – the code papers and the torn leaves from the previous room; perhaps, I thought, it might have come in handy.
The second room was a vast theatre of some kind as it sloped toward a centre stage. In place of seating was only the ribbing of steps. Again, I was struck with the physical impossibility of the space, this tesseract where the interior was greater than the container. In the middle of this theatre was an enormous and complicated machine composed of antique parts: gears, wheels, belts, all welded and bolted together in a fashion that did not announce its function. Upon closer inspection, I saw a feeder at the top and a rolling belt at its bottom side. Paper was fed into the top, and out the side was conveyed completed book blocs. The machine, in Latin, bore a placard that read: “for the love of the machine”, or something to that effect. Was this monstrously sized apparatus the same one Setzer used to produce the artificial books? The machine was suffering its rhythmic labours, unassisted by any human intervention. I followed the conveyor belt to a smaller porthole on the right side of the room. Beside it was another door. I decided to follow the path of these books to see where they would end up.
Through that door and into a black space. There was a single walkway with guard rails suspended over what looked to be an abyss. The conveyor belt split in two thanks to a collating wedge; the one branch of the belt continued rolling across the chasm into the opposite wall, while the other came to its end as roughly half the produced books would be consigned into that abyss. A sacrifice of some kind? Paying tribute to nothingness? I looked up and did not see a ceiling – only a dark emptiness that seemed to extend infinitely both up and down. I followed the narrow walkway to the other side where I was greeted by yet another door.
I took stock of my possessions. In my shoulder bag, among the usual quotidian accoutrements, were a few books: the Backstory, 7th Meditation, the excerpted derivative of those 36 books in the anteroom, code papers, and Tain. These texts would prove useless, as nothing could have prepared me for what I found on the other side of this door, any more than I could at the turn of the first page of the second book.
20
Excerpts from 7th Meditation
7th Meditation: Mountains Without Valleys
This Being the Complete Account of Ensopht in Partial Fulfillment of His Duties to Facilitate the Necessity of the Synthesis, and that Sundry Members Conce
rned With This Enterprise May Be Put At Ease By Means of Full Narrative Exposition of the Events Destined to Occur
Printed By Permission of Tho. V. C, G.L.O.T.U.
Anno Zenodotus 2285
I:Convergence
Ad Lectorem:
I resolve now to mediate on myself as a thinking creature (albeit in that questionable sense where perception is a flawed and variable thing, and doubt provides more assurance of one's existence than does the mere act of thinking), and to explore how the hazy fugue of the extended world and my supposedly unshakeable “I” are instances of poor assemblages, of multiple speciation. I have also resolved to remove any doubt that my senses and my ideas are to be held up in the same light of truth, and that at times the kaleidoscope of my sensations are more real than the mind that perceives them. It is not enough to regard the Cartesian wax and confer the understanding upon it that it changes states; we are the wax and we are its perceivers and judges and accusers. Preserve me from both censure and praise that I may impart this tale free of any Judgement.
I hereby also make full disclosure of the events that led up to the satisfaction of all requirements necessary to bring the Synthesis to absolute Realization. As far as my modest skills and talents obtain, I have not falsified this Testament or allowed any pollution of its contents, making selective omissions in the foregoing for the sake of relevance. My reportage keeps to the objectives as stipulated, where my actions as reported are performed according to the directives of my service to the Order. I betray no confidences herein, nor disclose any of our sacred tenets herein, keeping to the Letter of the Law. Should I frequently utilize the devices of prose writers to convey my material, I do beg pardon from those in our Order who find such things base and distracting.
[My Margin Note: The date of publication is indexed on naming the first Librarian of the Alexandria Library (circa 280 BCE). The heavy and tedious prolix used by the author is deserving of some examination. Note to self: investigate references to “Ensopht”.
Margin Note in text (authorship unknown). Opening section that follows seems too reminiscent of a movie by Lars von Trier].
1: Allegoresis
The opening scene always holds the seed of the play's greatest darkness... although the first glint of the blade must appear by the third act or else Justice goes unslaked, the blade left dangling.
The sibyls foretold his arrival; it could be seen in their wan and resigned faces, faces perturbed by the medley of events that they are powerless to prevent, but are obligated by necessity to report. He came with a machine, a kind of attendant ape. From where did he come, this mixture of terrestrial and celestial who might have had his visage preconceived in some sombre portrait slashed into elvascite, perhaps by some lunatic creature hunched over himself in a monitored room while psychoanalysts went about tying and untying the knots of his neurosis?
The scene opened up on a tunnel garlanded with cobwebs and rust and filth, a clamourous belching from rattling pipes. The ceiling was jammed with fixtures, exhaust tubes, pipes of peculiar origin, torn insulation shafts, a metallic fresco extending to the horizon line. A filmmaker would have to sit on a rolling trolley, holding the camera, turning it slowly on a clockwise pivot, while someone else pushed to give the effect that we were corkscrewing through a winding grey artery. The scene would fade to white, and then fade into another scene, a Ted Goodwin tartan print about ten feet square, and out from that would step the foretold man. Perhaps following him, the afterbirth of the arrival, would be the machine of the most deliciously arcane construction. The hybrid machine would be composed of confusing hydraulics, devices for appendages inspired by the medieval mind, a few errant keyboards and circuit boards, a harp for a head, a loom for a torso, wrapped in copper wires coated in fraying plastic – the whole thing a composite hash with no clear purpose in its design. The machine was nothing less than the foretold man's masterpiece. He would wield it and claim that now was the time for creation, for something old and borrowed to return to the light after a seemingly interminable slumber. And, yea, this machine's name was nightmare, and this machine's order was that of horror bright and coppery, sharp and necessary.
He stepped outside, after reaching the tunnel's end. Grey walls gave way to the sore brilliance of a polychromic sky. With a wave of his thin, finely etched hands, lines of erasure would leech the landscape of all colour. These transient colours, those precious hues of emotion and hope, would pool at his feet, the very canvas of a man, before he sucked them through his skin, up through the poles of his limbs, the flag of hard face waving atop it all.
Much ado on colour, for the colour of the foretold man was grey as it was black, black as it was red. A world that had passively surrendered the vibrancy of its own colour for cheap and tacky dreams had fallen under the maudlin spell of washed-out hues, pale derivations of what was once a variegated brilliance. Black, red, white, grey: the most psychologically effective colour scheme for its starkness, as evidenced in the regimes of history. It deserved a replay. A keener and more crisp adaptation.
What cruel coldness there was in the air, and the foretold man brought the machine under his hands, gently caressing the cool metal chassis with the pulsating colour of his body in a discordant concert of sensation. He came to realize his necessity in a world that called upon him in its collective dreams, a world that committed vicious acts against itself without so much purpose beyond a bit of greed here and a touch of misdirected anger there. How the world of fragile reasonable order thrummed like a weak heart with its own fear of its obsolescence.
The faint sound of a train hung in the air. He began to walk. Endless rows of houses stood shoulder to shoulder like stout soldiers with blunt chimneys in a whirling ballet of smoke that dissipated into a pure and empty sky now bereft of colour. Off in the distance, office towers speaking coolly with reflective sans-feature faces, their rectilinear bodies filled with smaller and equally hollow bodies, circuit lines, corpuscular cuts and flows vibrating from floor to floor, and run-on carpets like the tedious sentences of a despairing and drunken poet failing to grasp the emotional impact of a love long gone. Bodies of tall glass, reflective colossi, crested above it all in full plume, their heads kneeling beneath the smog ceiling of sky. The trees were the detached arms of titans, root fingers firmly gripping the earth, a geyser of billowing leaves waving hither and thither from a wound that refused to heal. Some kind of Order had been woven here. The foretold man detected the acrid stench of an era deceitful mostly to itself. This has happened before.
Foretold by whom? Whither the sibyls?
Escher landscapes, reflections of half moons in rounded glass, embossed machines raised on the tinder landscape, the staggering debt peopled owed the machines of their own making. Leather stretched on metal meat, kept in place by steel studs. Smooth flowing glass, or else crenellated and frosted. A pair of eyes opened and closed every few seconds, long enough to absorb the immediate sense of a visual moment, a texture, an object. The foretold man kept walking, cataloguing only that which he saw in those periodic moments of the opened eye, and reflecting in those serial episodic moments when the eyes fell shuttered. All he allowed himself to hear was the beating of his heart. Fish scale silver flashes washed momentarily across the faces of passersby, illuminating in a controlled instant the perpetual risus sardonicus hidden beneath the skin. The foretold man realized that the world was very sick, culture-sick, and that the tightened ball or mass of its neurosis would serve his plans well.
The sibyls, their faces engraved with sorrow, forecasted the man's arrival in tones that did not betray this sorrow. His name was Ensopht. He would pick one place of crisis at the exclusion of all others as the catalyst for the events he had been entrusted to bring to fruition. There, he would place the abstract machine, and a radiating circle of reformation would pulse from its nest, causing the entire world to shimmer in its and uncalculated desire – a desire and hunger for cruelty it hid from itself. The fatigued denouement of peace and politeness
was quickly giving way to more craven, more barbarous urges, and nations – as well as their contents – were once again thinking the unthinkable. He would name this abstract machine “Albrecht, or: The Will.” Although it had to go unnamed now, it would need a name in the future once all of its pieces had been collected, all the gears and fly-wheels of the correct concatenation of personae were fused. It would require the complex calculation of something like planetary dynamics.
Ensopht's eyes were two hanging pendulums of corundum dabbed with two small daubs of obsidian. His face was a burnished taupe, and his forehead appeared slightly crested as if the bone refused to yield from making itself prominent in the overall concert of the skull's form. His lips were thin and pursed and his nose was slightly hooked as if dowsing. With his hands lightly folded into delicate fists resting upon his waist, his eyes peering at the mottled flecks of grey dotting the horizon blotted by buildings, it was nigh time for him – the harbinger and facilitator – to prepare all that was necessary to bring the players unto the stage.
The Infinite Library Page 30