The Infinite Library (72 page)

One of the domains is a traditional library that has no boundaries; composed entirely of tall shelves, these contain all the books that are possible (and perhaps many that are not). Hooded, silent figures called the Devorants are resident there, compiling their sources and committed to a research project that has gone on for several generations and would continue perhaps countless generations more. There is a Librarian whose task it is to catalogue the books, shelve whatever has been borrowed or misplaced, or upgrade the cataloguing system. The Librarian is blind, but finds that sight of a different kind is what is necessary to understand the Library. It offers him no impediment.

Another of the domains is of a finite variety, a meeting room carved out of the first domain to serve as a quiet study room. There are perhaps an infinite number of these smaller spaces, each being enough to seat twelve members around a large table comfortably, and everything in the room being of a most brilliant and clean white. These white rooms must be booked by the Librarian, for there are no doors to gain entry either in or out beyond specified times when a door will appear.

One of the domains is a tesseract upon the earth itself and is only accessible at a very specific angle of approach at a very specific time of day, for otherwise it cannot be seen or entered. This domain is in the midst of a yawning desert, and very few people have ever successfully located it. Those that have reached the tribal ground were always brought there unconscious, as though the key to the lock of this domain's door is to become lost in, and succumb to, the heat of the desert. The tribe, calling themselves Orthographers, are each a guardian of the letter and have dedicated their lives to their specialized task of study, research, formation, and appearance of their appointed letter. Behind their workshops is a gated region that none dare enter, for it is a kind of labyrinth left there – according to their lore – before time itself. Some have suggested that the tribe is that of the mystical Tlön, while others claim they are holdovers from the sunken region of the fertile crescent, home to the first peoples that made the migration from Africa into the Middle East circa 100,000 years ago, and its disappearance ensconced in several deluge narratives in several devotional texts.

The last domain of which it is safe to speak would be the Babelian Library, also infinite. The details of this library – composed of hexagonal galleries stretching out infinitely – is already described in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges entitled “The Library of Babel,” which faithfully gives an accurate account of this domain.

Understanding the purpose of the Library in its entirety, it is essential to point out that the value of its contents as a repository of all possible knowledge (as well as mis- and disinformation) is only expressible when that information is in motion, actively circulating. When it ceases to circulate, either temporarily or permanently, it is stored in the Library. To illustrate the importance of circulation without delving into the dry particulars of information theory, we turn now to a small story plucked from the Library that illustrates this point by means of an analogy. A coin or a book are the same insofar as they are composed of signs and begin with passive materials upon which is impressed an inscription. So, to this we must turn:

I dream of a coin that remains in circulation eternally.

At first, the coin was struck by a careless hand that, in following its proper and repetitive duty, fixed the dye by hand (since when this was done, all striking was performed manually rather than by the precision of a machine). The uneventful sound of metal striking metal, the former shaping the latter, rang out, and the newly minted coin was deposited in a basket with the other rough facsimiles. Form impressed upon a copy that was granted value if only because the crown so had it, and the exchange of it for the agreed upon product or service. The Romanic profile of the monarch was garlanded with truncated Latin phrases that lent each coin its monetary legitimacy, as if each coin was a fragment or portion of the wealth and value of the monarch, or the gold he possessed.

Midway through his shift, the same careless hand hoisted the now full basket containing the coin we have already mentioned. The basket was carried to an adjoining room, and another pair of hands took over, weighing each coin and inscribing a small mark in a book when a certain number of coins had been weighed. The coins were then passed along to another set of hands that dum
p
ed the baskets into caskets which were then taken to a waiting carriage and eventually making their way to the Treasury. There the coin sat until it was required, and soon the day came when a transaction gave this coin the excuse to be taken from the Treasury and passed along with many of their kind to another pair of hands. This pair of hands was raising an army in service to the King, and these glittering coins would be pledged to the service of hiring able men, purchasing arms from weapon smiths, food items, and other necessary purchases for the financing of a war.

It should be noted that the manufacture of this coin occurred prior to the standard practice of milling, which was a means of producing a raised edge on coins to prevent the illegal act of clipping (shaving a small sliver of metal off several coins and then producing counterfeits with the melted shavings – a process that created slower inflation than the King's occasional act of recalling all the coinage so that they could be debased with cheaper metals and thus expand the treasury in times of financial need to fund a war).

The coin made its way into the hand of an appointed halberdier who was moderately gifted in the ways of combat, having offered his hands to battle before. Before the regiment was to depart in another adventure, the coin was given over to the hand of the halberdier's wife who was instructed to make the most of it for necessities.

The Hands of the halberdier's wife unconsciously fondled the small treasure bequeathed to her from her husband. She travelled to the marketplace and, at the point of sale, the coin changed hands in exchange for a loaf of black bread. The filthy hand of the baker did not hold the coin long before it was dropped into a metal box and eventually given to a landlord. The landlord's hands were very soft. By this time, the coin had lost some of its initial mint lustre, changing from gleaming copper to a darker brownish hue, ridged in places by fingerprints. The portrait of the King had seemed to become cloudy, and the heraldic shield of the nation as well.

So there the coin sat, inconspicuously in a small tower with others of its denomination. Sometimes the hands of the landlord would caress them briefly while counting and recounting them. The coin above it had been minted four years prior and was a very dull grey-brown. The coin below was minted in the same year but had not travelled as much and had not changed as many hands.

A decade passed and a new hand was now bringing the coin back into active service. The landlord's son was quite busy selling off his father's assets to finance a high risk sea merchant scheme. The coin, among many of its ilk, changed hands to a group of brigands hired according to the shadier and more corrupt whims of the landlord's son. The coin was passed from one dirty hand to another until it came into the possession of a failed counterfeiter who engaged in the act of clipping. And, hence the coin's edges were lightly clipped, damaging some of the dentition.

The coin's history is buried for a few decades after that, but it traveled from one end of the empire to the other, and then, with the change in political climate, from one end of the republic to the other. The monarch emblazoned upon its obverse had long since been deposed, but another of his line would grace the obverse of a whole new minting run, thereby rendering this coin obsolete.

The hand of a grandfather carefully placed the coin in the careless and ahistorical hand of a young grandson who irreverently tossed it in a cigar box of inane treasures only children could find delight in. The coin was becoming severely worn, the monarch appearing upon it as if in a distant fog or the way a world appears to one whose eyesight was steadily deteriorating. The date upon it was still clearly visible, but one of the numerals was melting and fusing into the heraldic shield. The shield itself had lost much of its definition, blurring into a kind of blurred arabesque of indistinguishable and blended loops. In a time of financial strife, the grandson - now a young and hungry man - thought to sell it to a collector who rapaciously cheated him on the value of it. It stayed in the shop for ten years until a woman purchased it for her husband who had a mild interest in antiques and numismatics. The husband's hand clutched for this lucky coin when he was called off to war where he was grievously killed by a German rifle. The coin lay in the field among the dead, oxidizing and gaining a deep green patina that further obscured its features.

A young girl's hand came upon it and delicately caressed this foreign curiousity. An attempt was made to clean it to better identify its place of mintage. Harsh abrasives etched its now well-worn face, its features little more than hazy and eye-less blobs, the Latin inscription a congealed and hidden litany of bygone monarchic power. After another lonely thirty years, the coin was rediscovered among the abandoned effects of the young girl who had found it on the killing fields, in a jar of inconsequential notes and bobby pins in the heating duct of a house that had now changed hands twice. The coin was raised to the light once more by a hand that did not have any estimation or care of its history, its value, or its long travels. This coin, ferried from hand to hand, perhaps being caressed or pinched by more than a thousand different hands: rough and working hands, soft and manicured hands, scaly hands, arthritic hands, hands marked with pox, hands gnarled with age, hands pillowy with fat, hands that committed atrocities in war, hands that once held new-born babes, hands that formed fists in pointless tavern brawls, hands that held signs in marches for change, hands that fidgeted during overly long sermons on Sunday mornings, hands that broke bread or went without - all of these hands this coin had touched in times of plenty and times of strife. This one coin had buried within itself the contact point of so many histories.

The last hand to touch it was the one that would end its long currency. After the coin was given to the bank, it was sent to the mint. There, the coin once again felt the heat of the forge, the return to its point of genesis. Among other coins that had served more or less long terms in this world, each having been handled by so many, it was melted down, only to be resurrected with mixed parts as a gleaming new coin that would be circulated once more.

Stories and coins are identical.

37

Excerpts from
7
^th
Meditation

II: Synthesis

15

Synthesis

T
here was nothing evidently protean about the combined gentleman that couldn't be settled with a series of strokes and dashes; who smoked, smiled, made wry and playful gestures with the ballet of his hands and eyes. His presence had the peculiar effect in others for them to turn away, to hold dark thoughts at arm's length in the daylight, to be troubled by enigmatic nightmares as vivid as those experienced only in the vividness of childhood, to bear the unmistakable taint of seeing oneself reflected too honestly in another. But the world would give sway to the man, for there was a charisma about him, a terrible charm. In every life, there are those we meet whom we just know carry in them a destiny; it is in their bearing – what more mystically minded people may call an aura. People of this stripe are unsettling at the best of times, and so magnetic. There is that tacit understanding that it is they who will one day come to rule, pressing their dark and deep tracks in history. Such people had free passage, for there was no obstacle as they relentlessly pursued their vision.

And what perhaps irked others about the man, the man who had celestial music playing in his head, was his chosen way of viewing the world. It was his process of abstracting from the most complex to the smaller and more simple, a movement from an outer enclosure of generality to the particular, and then striking back out again to the contours of the concept. The man did not have the need or capacity to love in any petty sense, for love to him was merely an analyzable structure, at times biologically and socially determined by preconditions continuously reinforced by the glut of compounded experience. The love he respected was the blind and transcendental adoration he would inspire in others, a love no less itself a kind of fear. He knew that
amor
and
timor
were one and the same thing, a parallel act of cognition. The man found the subconscious most fascinating, the dark and hidden twin of mind. Most people only occasionally heard its whispers. The artist had the courage to turn and face it, to engage it. The zeal to repress it was incongruous with the mounting hunger to release it. Instead, far too many people floundered in a world now designed for the tepid, the weak, the untroubled, the mediocre – all of these damp newsprint wrapped around that which would not be mummified. Beneath the surface surged a rhapsody blindly seeking a leader, someone to give the amoebic drives a purpose and direction. Until now, the desire to emancipate the atrocity in each being had merely been seething to no effect. It needed to be teased out, trained, put to a definitive end under one who would act as its conductor.