The Infinite Library (62 page)

And others... “Femme Fascist”:
A genesis of anti-culture that preserves the old ruins of a collapsed Reichstag... A post-mortem pastiche of media bonhomie...
“Femme Nihilo”:
A Byronesque debonair ad nauseam worthy of the mausoleum or an ornate kind of suicide between the teeth of a Cheshire Cat's grin... She is a pious depiction of her abuses... The phallic rise pf neo-substantiality, the urban 'urbine' turbine engine of ideology.
“Femme Chemi-Pious”:
She's a well-worn insignia, a drug-poking priestess pointing the way to nihilist salvation, a chemical juggernaut... She's the junky pharaoh with the ankh syringe, or perhaps much later with the rood syringe of a Heroin-Christ... The icon slowly grows iconoclast of itself
. And “Femme Fatale”, “Femme Urbanus”, “Femme Pharaoh”, “Femme Peni$ Envy”, “Femme Nova”, and “Femme Ephemera”.
And where are you in the club mosaic?
was written across the top of the page with bright blue and desperate strokes, pleading with the panoply of women in this age to fit themselves neatly into these new categories, these types. “I must have written all of this so many times before,” Leopold thought to himself, deluded. “I must become this man, setting myself at the dawn of the possibilities he provokes.”

Alone in his unkempt apartment, Leopold gave voice to an inner tangent that was burbling in that kind of way that felt as if despite him, the airs of a broken shaman:

“A dream of dogs without flesh... Nothing in the world is proscribed except morally. Deviance is the moralist's magical fish - their word, not mine, a word they use to pinion me, to coerce me into the arena of guilt. They react, and I act... creatively, with affirmation, by being different. They and their cheap, empty words like 'deviance' tries to limit what I can do... But , I will make myself worthy of what happens to me. To be an artist, one must not have patience for dogmatism and the stagnant complaints of whining moralists. In art, all is permissible, there are no taboos. No act should be valued in the narrow binary opposition of right and wrong, for those terms have lost their currency. If I choose to murder a man, remove his entrails, and arrange them in the name of art, no state authority should prohibit or punish me - No! I should be praised as a genius, loved like a physician. Wherever my creativity brings me, no boundaries should impede me. Let my art song, my invincible creative spirit, shatter all the stones of the law... those petty and inert laws... The might of the artist is the only true divinity... “

The words, although he took ownership of them, were not entirely his – emerging from the reservoir of the other five figures of the synthesis.

Leopold approached the canvas by way of an intoxicated siege, a kind of infernal bloodlust to apply the mixed principles of the sketchbook as it felt to thrum through his hands. He felt as though a glory of inspirational arcs were animating his limbs, the hesitance in his brush was gone, the weakness consumed by the fiery passion of pure will divested of weakness. Suddenly, he was deluged by an endless succession of creative possibilities. One after another, he slapped paint on the canvases in an inexhaustible fury, but he paused on the completion of one painting he was particularly pleased with. There were two figures, a man and a woman, emaciated and naked. Their hands held crosses with puppet strings. These strings - more like fishing wire - were attached by way of piercings that were in turn connected to erogenous zones and the miscellany of the body. Their faces twisted in agony and pleasure. “I will attach three to the penis, two to the testes, one for each nipple, four to each ear, and three to the lips. This will be the man, the one name Adam whom I created from the mere clay and shaped with my spirit of creation! I will attach two to the the clitoris, three to the labia, one for each nipple, three to each ear, three to the lips, five to the glans... And this will be woman, Eve, as born from the rib of pleasure. I will then draw in secondary wires that will directly connect the erogenous zones of the man and woman. There, yes... they are interconnected, attached in the intricate relation... The immanent plane of morbid sexuality par excellence!”

Although it could not fairly be said that Leopold had achieved anything as outre as it was orthodox in the domain of contemporary art, and although his application of the sketchbook's principles was juvenile and amateurish at best, it had broken the long and sleepy spell of his inability to commit himself to this fiery act of making.

His next cavalier act of inspirational fury involved a projector and a canvas scrawled with the caricatures of every member of the alleged synthesis, harsh-angled and severe. The only missing member in this diorama was himself. From stock footage he had of red paint falling in long streaks down a white backdrop, this was projected unto the scene while a camera filmed him standing in front of the projection with arms out as if in crucifixion. The projection gave the appearance that it was his blood flowing over the faces of the to-be-synthesized. Leopold was in a state of ecstatic trance.

There is an ancient practice among seafaring folk, now defunct, known as the “Baptism of the Line”. It was usually an initiation rite played on a fellow sailor who was crossing the equator for the first time. An elaborate and mischievous ritual, five participants would dress up as a cask, a courier, the Devil, a hairdresser, and a miller, respectively. These masqueraders would then proceed to hassle the uninitiated (whom was called the Virgin). The origin of this practice is enigmatic, patchy, and for the most part unknown, as are the reasons why these specific parts are played. Their significance has been lost to us. That Leopold had passed into the equatorial region of his creativity was most likely prompted by external forces, and these forces all have their faces. A line was indeed being crossed, and the synthesis was the baptism of an age, an avatar.

8

Where the Scientist Succumbs to a Metanarrative Moment

A motley of musical transgressions besieged his mind, and the sea gull squawk of a saxophone finally gave way to the flatulence of passing trucks. In the corner of his eye, he saw small hallucinatory images, tumbling cylinders that changed colours and flared their ends before retracting into the tight, collapsed yellow cornea ring it began with. The mirror's frozen face was full of the greasy prints of careless fingers, this mirror stuffed full enough of the faces that had been poured ritually into it. He saw himself in it, old, worn, a leathery vessel of fatigue. It would be fair to say that he was, indeed, losing it. It? Himself, perhaps, dissolving into that pool of the others, melting and fusing into that one being the alleged Prophet spoke of. Entirely absent from his thoughts were the concerns of the laboratory, the fruit flies multiplying winglessly, eyelessly. He tugged at his sagging cheek and was assailed by images unsavoury, a vast grey realm of cubicles, ergonomic chairs and gel padded wrist rests and paper nameplates and random pictures of their putrid children and forsaken lunch fruit and paperclips and coffee spotted mugs and awful personalized coffee cups and insincere birthday cards given by pseudo well-meaning coworkers – and, suddenly, that vast arcade of computerized and cubiclized hot flashes was sucked into itself, forming a dense and swirling dot like a neutron mass. From the center of this emerged a bloody hand grasping at the air. Glass shards showered down, obscuring what was left of the low-pile hypno-patterned office carpet. A series of manuals and textbooks formed a treacherous orbit around the now enormous hand that was beginning to look gnarled, misshapen, like that of a beast. The hand formed a fist and a geyser of blood sprouted from between the clenched fingers, refusing to adhere to the glossy surface of dry-erase boards frescoed with primary colour equations and PLO messages in hasty block capitals. The carpet edges were beginning to blacken as if burning from an invisible fire. The shards of glass were now seemingly suspended for a moment, electrified and entering into the orbit of office debris around the large fist. He saw someone who looked like him loping from desk to desk wearing nothing but his underwear, clawing at the air, his face, leaping on the furniture like an enraged ape. That vision of himself was unplugging wires from computers and trying to attach them to his body. His inner eyelid finally slammed shut on this scene and he was back in the bathroom, breathless at the mirror.

I'm sick, he thought. “Cetera Desunt” had been psychographically written with the smudge of his fingertip on the glass. The tousled hair and gaunt face of Leopold, the artist, eddied its way for dominant mental attention. The inner Leopold wanted stroking, pets of affection to make him or it purr. Dr Aymer saw Leopold in the mirror approaching. Was it him?

“I had some hell of a fucking time getting here,” Leopold said, shutting the front door behind him with a nudge of his dirty designer sneaker. “Cabbie lost his way four times – four fucking times! Can you believe it? He was lucky I paid him anything at all.”

It was Leopold, but Dr Aymer could not recall inviting him. Leopold was carrying a great deal of equipment and a canvas partially wrapped in brown paper.

Noting the confusion on Dr Aymer's face, Leopold said, “What? You commissioned this, didn't you? D'you have a place I can set it up? It beats the piss even out of what Jubal Brown does.”

He didn't know who that was. He didn't remember commissioning anything. Why was Leopold in his home? Who was Jubal Brown? He merely gestured impotently to the living room, and Leopold took this as his cue to set up the projector there.

“The others'll won't be too far behind, I bet,” called Leopold from the living room amidst a few frustrated expletives and the sound of setting up equipment. “Shit, how many crusty old textbooks on fruit flies does a man need? You need a maid.”

Then came the sound of a video from the speakers, Leopold's recorded voice:
“The rapturous day will come when the dogs of every Hell, clothed in solid blood and the flesh of souls, will devour the sun and moon and stars. The sound of a great bull with four thousand eyes and four thousand mouths will rupture the skin of the world. And from this fissures will flow the most odious of bile and puss and excrement. And when the seed of the Returned King
Satyr is planted in the whore, the cry of the infant hybrid will resound with a great keening that will dislodge the carbuncle of the heavens which will descend upon the world with the heat and intensity of a thousand million flames.”

“Could use an edit, I know,” Leopold called out in apology. “I was just letting the narrative flow, know what I mean? Let it roll fresh and uninhibited, whatever was in my head at the time. I doubt Ensopht will call it jejune, but I think the whole piece together is polychrome thinking, if you catch me.”

Knock-knock. Knock-knock.

“Gonna answer that, doc?”

Dr Aymer floated as if in a daze to the door. He wasn't even properly dressed. He opened the door, and there he saw Wally Wyman with the Philosopher and Ensopht. It was Ensopht who took charge.

“We're here for the opening, Dr Aymer. I brought along a few guests. Hope you don't mind.”

He let them in and turned to Leopold and said without concealing his confusion, “Did I... invite you over here? I don't remember.”

“You don't remember? Shit, doc, whatever you're taking, gimme some! We talked for like over an hour on the phone. Must've been an hour and a half ago. Say, you got any hooch? - This thing is better with the mind just right and tight.”

Wally, the Philosopher, and Ensopht were already making themselves at home, sitting on the leather couch and continuing their discussions from outside.

“Is this your piece de resistance, Leopold?” Ensopht asked.

“Well, we'll see. It was a bit of a chop job, but hopefully you'll get the general idea of what I'm trying to do.”

“All good art is raw,” Ensopht rejoined. “I'm sure it has legs.”

Wally, as disheveled as usual, was already licking the end of a 'D' dry cell.

“Come and watch with us, Dr Aymer,” Ensopht appealed. “Leopold's work no doubt promises to showcase the symbolic fruit of our union.”

With that, Dr Aymer sat with the others, watching as the vivid red streaked across the screen of the canvas with Leopold standing before it, his face twisted in rapturous, leonine bliss.

29

Good Fences Make Good Neighbours

L
eopold. His name, in machine-made calligraphic font upon the front lobby buzzer. Apartment 333. Just another “troubled” artist, one that was fascinated by deserts. Seeing as I was a night owl, prowling book auctions online, I was not disturbed by the sound of his late night commotions, the occasional howl or the unmistakeable smashing of a bottle on the wall. I had never set foot in his apartment, nor did he ever invite me to do so. We had one of those neighbourly relationships where it was unnecessary to visit each other's intimate spaces, and yet we were on good speaking terms, a casual relationship with low maintenance. On occasion, we would speak of some intellectual or artistic matter, and it was perhaps just enough to know that there was someone of similar mind in this building that we didn't need to pester one another. Most people have neighbours similar to these: the ones that can engage in light chit chat and go no further, feeling socially fulfilled by these events without obligation, privately acknowledging it was chance that made people neighbours and nothing more. Other neighbours feel that pressing and urgent obligation to turn chance into necessity, to develop a close bond despite the fundamentally arbitrary placement of bodies in congested habitats.