Perhaps of more importance was Dr Albrecht's barely concealed hatred of women. He gave this hatred the veneer of academic discourse which better insulated him from being accused of being merely another misogynist zealot. As I read more of his available works, the more certain themes gained in intensity and recurrence as time went on. Male violence and cruelty were, for him, something not only to be preserved as natural aspects of the male psyche, but to be encouraged. It was during this reading that I encountered an article of his that was far more disturbing. It was the makings of an austere sociopolitical program:
It will be the work of a Great Master to give license to that long repressed desire in each of us for atrocity. Only one who can bring together the elements of political action, artistic expression, and psychological engineering will prosper in emancipating the masses from so many decades of enforced repression. This need for violence on a large scale, for committing cruelties, is an innate feature of humanity, and this energy is bottled up, under high pressure, forced into the dark spaces of the subconscious where it festers. What is required is a release, a free squandering of that energy. It will not be enough to contrive pathetic spectacles of popular sports to satisfy this need, nor is it enough for people to go on retreats where they can engage their violent desires on inanimate objects. These hardly go far enough in giving expression to our need to become atrocious in every way. What is needed is an atrocity on the order of the Grand Project, a Grand Politics, such as was in vogue during every historical episode of genocide.
And what of psychoanalysis now? Our domain has been devalued as a feasible practical method for therapeutically assisting the populace because we have not gone far enough. In a way, I agree. The discipline is at fault for showing no innovation or courage, and so it deserves the lower esteem in which it is now perceived. We have feared for too long the possible outcomes of unleashing the subconscious desire for destruction. Surrealism came close, but it still held itself in check by keeping to picture-making and abortive revolutions. Wilhelm Reich also came close with his liberation of sexual drives, but this is still not enough. It is as if we have all internalized Freud's fear, believing that humans must be protected from themselves. How regressive! The human populace is so much easier to control if you direct these destructive drives and guide them under a single will that will satisfy their violent appetites. There is no point in forestalling what will inevitably come to pass, and so the time is nigh for one man with a Grand Politics to emerge, someone to whom the many may rally under. The world needs a man of Will and Vision.
Thus spake the mad psychoanalyst. Granted, despite my disgust, the man sounded intimidating to me. Against all better judgement, I contacted him under the auspices of seeking to be analyzed, although my real reason was to see what this synthesized man was like in the flesh. Dr Albrecht informed me that he was quite heavily booked, but he agreed to contact me in the event of a cancellation – which he did.
When I arrived at his office – a rather Spartan waiting room juxtaposed by an opulent and neoclassical interior with bold lines and strongly evocative colour scheme – I passed one of his patients who happened to be a woman. Her face was unreadable as she went by. The receptionist told me to go into the doctor's office.
“Hello, Dr Albrecht. I'm your three o'clock: Gimaldi.”
He turned to face me and it was admittedly a bit chilling. His hair was dyed black and swept back with gel, his pale face etched with a permanent and imposing scowl. But it was his eyes: sunken with dark rings and a snake's penetrating and non-breaking gaze that was as malicious as it conveyed a sense of power, majesty, and knowing. Those eyes would not let me loose for even a moment and I felt entirely unmasked. His was the kind of frightening aura that reeks of depravity and an unbendable will.
“Gimaldi,” he said, almost savouring the syllables of my name. “Do, please, sit down.”
“You treat women as well?”
“Why, of course,” he said as if the question were a bit ridiculous. “Even women seek to explore their masculinity. As you know, although the masculine psyche is my specialty, most of my patients are women.”
“I apologize if I seem a little unnerved; this is my first analysis.”
“Ah, a virgin. Splendid. Well, let us dispense with the cliché stereotypes of how psychoanalysis is performed, for I do not employ conventional methods.”
I decided to use this time to mask my queries about him behind a contrived difficulty of my own. His fingers formed a steeple and he leaned forward with those unsettling, hungry eyes. There was no way that I could sustain the ruse under that searching gaze that disrobed me for all my intentions to be laid bare.
“Admittedly, Dr Albrecht, I am interested in your practice. I have read a selection of your works and was curious as to your methods and future intentions.”
“Character study. I have been warned before that this would happen. You see,” he said, now lifting himself up and pacing the room. “I received a letter in the post a few days ago that I didn't understand until now. In it, your name was mentioned, and that I should expect you to come sniffing around for answers.”
I froze in my seat.
He continued: “The person or persons who sent the letter left it unsigned, but told me to be at ease that you were not a member of the press hired to write a libel piece. You see, Mr Gimaldi, having new ideas and the conviction to carry them forward is considered dangerous, and no inventor is without a phalanx of enemies ready to cut him down. So, you must also understand that I am generally very cautious and wary when people come to pry my points of view since they will invariably distort them for their own miscreant purposes. It is not that I fear being upbraided in the press, for I stand by my views, but I cannot bear being vilely misrepresented. I have been given assurances from this letter that you are not the sort who would do such a thing, and that you can be trusted.”
“Who would send a letter in advance of me?”
“You would probably know better than I would. Perhaps it was your publisher.”
“My publisher?”
“Are you not writing a book on me? Is this not why you are here, to study my bearing, my manner, the things I say, querying me on my past and plans for the future?”
There was little I could do. I was beginning to see the bigger picture, that I had been led along this far to perform exactly what Dr Albrecht expected: a character study. Was that what the publishing contract was for, the one I was forced to sign in my pained weakness?
I performed my “character study” with surprising thoroughness and duty. Those findings I cannot relate here, for this would be to tell my story out of turn. No, it is more vital that I complete my own story before I reveal what comes next, and the purpose of it all. There are no accidents, all is scripted, and every event – big or small, seemingly crucial or a mere segue – had been arranged so that I would play my part convincingly, honestly.
42
Sanscript II
“The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Somewhere over the Rainbow...
If only human beings understood the rather base and unremarkable origins of what they call the universe, perhaps they might revise their own sense of wonder. If you cast a single beam of light at a pool of sludge or some such material in a mixed solid-liquid state, you might find that it is possible to have this light refracted at large number of angles, thus producing a diffuse prismatic effect.
All that can be sensed has its origins with a task myself and many others do. We tend the slush. We stir it and light catches the individual crystals of it at varying angles and throws off the hues of reality as can be sensed or known.
The current era of humanity, and therefore what I see projected as the after-effect of my stirring of the cosmic slush and the pure, harsh beam that is filtered through that crudités, has succeeded in coming close to the underlying motif of this place
: the pollution of distance.
My sense of play is malicious, negligent to what consequences they may bring to those who know only the projection of the rainbow. I stir the slush and create new variations that humans will so brazenly take authorship of as “discovery” and thus place it in their ballooning archives of their previous knowledge. Little do they know that they hoard images from a kind of eternal kaleidoscope, snapshots of accidental colour thrown up by the passing of a light beam and my action of stirring this slush. And even among those rare few who may glean that these collected images are akin to collecting every chicken and treating them as uniquely separate objects, folly has no better representative than those who assume that behind these colourful projections there is some purposeful, base pattern. They suspect that this pattern is based on math, or physics, or the musical scale, or numerology, or gods. All of these are wrong, for where would the pattern be? It is not in projection, not in the slush, and not in the beams of light that enter at random angles to strike at slush I simply swish about. Light splits and converges, and although light follows laws, it is foolish to believe that a rule is a pattern.
There is an obvious question one might pose to me: why do I tend the slush and not do something else if the action is idle, serves little purpose, or does not grant one satisfaction and contentment. What this inquirer would have to understand is that there is simply nothing else to do: either one stirs the slush to amuse oneself, or one sits and does nothing in the slush.
But I cannot count how many of those stamped with folly who try to approach this realm behind the projections. They are armoured with their weapons of reason, their assumptions of order and purpose, and they continue trying - and failing - to find the patterns they so desire to exist. They try to gain access to this realm through an observation of the stars with special machines that interpret wavelengths or perhaps cloister themselves to give patient study to a single book written in some impossible cipher.
Distance between this realm and the projection has been polluted before, but now with ever more sophisticated instruments and the collapse of the - still inconsequential - distance between individuals in a digital space, I fear a repeat of what I had to endure before. I have heard of one who was able to penetrate to this realm, and another I personally met. I do detest their blind zealousness, their assumption that there must be some common denominator that explains their universe as if there can be no justification for existence without it.
The first was an Alexandrian who tended a library, no longer standing. Taking advantage of some freak slip, perhaps, he pushed through the luminescent membrane and found himself here. A believer in harmonies and order, his discovery of this place was devastating. Upon his return, he continued to carry out his duties of ordering the contents of the library with the same apparent zeal, but perhaps only in a kind of private jest or even the foolish hope that to found an order in one place would spread virally until the entire universe and what was behind it would succumb, seduced by that dominating thing called order.
The second was a man named Tariq. I know this not because I had any interest in soliciting this information, but because he was prone to that pointless habit of announcing his presence as if the very mention of his name should be accompanied by an awed hush. Yes, he was a disagreeable sort, and had found his way here by a special method of reading coupled with some meditative exercise that he believed was the key that unlocked our realm (in actual fact, such things are always accidents - there are no keys and no locks in this place). When I explained to this insistent crusader of reason that there was no substrate of order, but that everything was simply a trick of the light, he responded with a rebuke. Let me retell what was said:
“No, that is absolutely impossible. This must simply be the wedge of plasma that connects the world and its true metaphysical motor. And you, you are most likely a kind of demon placed here to deter any further ingress to the mysteries. Yes, you are one of the guardians of the truth who uses lies to prevent access to truth.”
“Think what you will,” I said, stirring more slush and sending up another of a trillion new projections. “But I know myself to possess no reason to deceive you.”
“I have trespassed where humans are forbidden. You have every reason to try and deceive me,” Tariq responded sharply.
“No one is forbidden from this place, for that would presuppose a purpose to this place. There are only natural barriers. If there was something to be guarded, then this place would have a purpose. But we are not guards. We have no assigned function. We can stir the slush or we can do nothing. Most of us find it more amusing to choose action over inaction if only to quiet our boredom.”
“There is a realm beyond this one that is the source of all order. If you are not deceiving me, then you yourself are deceived or ignorant.”
“I am not impeding you. You are at liberty to search all you like,” I told him, going back to my stirring wand. Irritation is a poor cure for tedium.
And so this Tariq started digging into the slush, pulling up handfuls of it.
“This slush burns my hands with its coldness,” he said in complaint.
“I cannot warm it for you. I do not touch the slush with my hands, but I do not feel the cold. Perhaps this is a lesson for you to stop digging through it.”
“Oh-ho!” he exclaimed hotly. “So this is the ruse. You will not physically prevent me from my quest, but will politely suggest that I stop if I find it uncomfortable! No, I will continue to dig despite any pain it may cause me!”
And so he did. Perhaps for hours. It was a comedic scene, for his agitation increased the longer he set himself to his futile scooping. Without realizing it, Tariq’s fervent scramble in the slush was sending up several interesting projections. Perhaps on the receiving end, some astronomer was being presented with a thrilling and mysterious spectacle of magnetic shift in a galactic cluster, compiling data on a hitherto unobserved phenomenon.
Tariq, his face red and his hands bitten redder by the cold of the slush, panted in exhaustion. The slush he disturbed had already resolved back into its initial position as if it had not been disturbed at all.
“What is the meaning of all this?” he moaned, more to himself.
“I have told you before. It is just slush and all that we see is but a trick of the light as we move the slush around, splitting the light into its many overlapping hues.”
“What is the composition of this substance?”
I get irritated easily by his kind of person, the sort that attempt to find meaning behind the wind or truth in a shadow, but I have to admit that it was a fair question, and one that warranted some exploration.
“I cannot say for sure. I know it only as slush. It receives light and has the quality of variegating it from its many minute crystals.”
“It has the quality of slushy ice but seems to behave differently,” he mused. “How large is this space?”
“I have not seen an end to it. I would think the expanse is infinite.”
“Covered in this slush and tended by your kind?”
“From what I know.”
“Why do we not sink?”
“That I do not know. The slush at a certain depth under my feet feels firm enough.”
“Has anyone attempted to excavate deep into it?”
“Perhaps out of boredom, someone must have. I cannot see that they would have got any further than you have. As you saw, dig it one handful and the rest of the slush rushes to fill the pocket left behind.”
“And the rainbows that stream from it, these are the projections we see?”
“Yes, I suppose they are.”
“And these rainbows form our perception of matter?”
“And perhaps the forces that govern it as well, I would suppose.”
“And you have no idea who or what placed this slush here?”
“None at all. I cannot recall anything before me: out of nothing I must have come, and I came unchanged as you see me now, standing in this
slush with this wand. I was given no instructions.”
“Interesting,” Tariq said, pulling at his well groomed goatee. “To come fully formed with no outside directive... I assume you all came into this realm in the same way?”
“From what I know in speaking with them. None of us are, of course, all that concerned with the deeper meanings you are searching for, so it does not occur to us to pose questions that cannot be answered. We are in a place absolutely devoid of anyone that we know of who knows more than any of us already know, which is that there is this slush, and that we have the choice to stir it or simply do nothing with it.”
“Perhaps whoever or whatever conceived of this place had created your kind and felt it would compromise your essential task by giving you any access to knowledge that there is an outside to this place. I can imagine that it is preferable to have automatons going about their business entirely ignorant of anything else.”
The Infinite Library Page 55