Seventeen

 There he was, children. It was quite some time ago, but he was there, buried alive—willingly. Oh, he could leave, but didn’t care to. He made a pact with the world to disappear, to remain to it invisible, in forgiveness of the world for what it made visible. He disappeared.

There were many attempts by him to begin something, it seems—at least we cannot quite figure on what it was that he was actually doing. We are stuck with several hypotheses—guesses, children, we can only make guesses. Everything I explain to you, therefore, rests upon some guess or other. The closer we step to this man, the further and further away we drift from him, his life, what he did, what he thought, what he willed. We want to know, for he is our only hope. If we are ever to return to that world from which escaped only to bury himself, willingly, alive in order for its salvation—if we are ever to return to it, we must somehow solve the puzzle he left us. At least, dear children, that’s the game I’ve established for myself, and the one I’ve brought you into. The whole house have I dedicated to it. Every room. Every staircase. Every hallway. The gardens. Everywhere stands as a great yes! to this crazy invisible fool of a man. Meanwhile, each thing he wrote seemed to say no! to everything we take as ordinary, basic, plain, common … to our lives he seems to be saying forever no!

If you allow me to take you with me inside his hovel, then allow yourself to think of what it must have been like, alone, inside, without friend or even enemy (except that he took the visible for his enemy—but what is that, children? Nothing!). Let us choose a random day to examine.

What, though, must our hypothesis be, in order to explore the question in specific terms? We must assume that, hunched over a table we assume he used for both writing and eating, we must also assume that the placement of the various objects described in his journal by him on this particular day, corresponds to a text we discovered in a distant room in this labyrinth of a house. Furthermore, we must assume that the first and last letters of the most common names for the items so described correspond to concepts he develops in that text. And, that the order of the concepts is itself significant in some way, and that they exactly follow the arrangement of the objects arrayed upon his table that day described in his journal in such exacting detail. You see, dear children, he never was always exact; rather, his journal is fragmentary, with long pauses between entries. But occasionally, it’s like he’s struck by something and then for days on end the journal entries get larger and larger and more exacting and specific. We choose here only the most specific and the largest as our example for the moment.

Now, the corresponding text itself was fragmentary, and I’ve been quoting from it here and there, as our game advances. In this case, the corresponding bit of text we discovered for this table-top enigma was a strange and even obscure description of someone—a woman it seems. She began to haunt our researches. Here is the text we found…

She had the countenance of an iron-age wanderer, loosed from her family long ago, baked bronze under the wanderer’s sun, and with a consciousness so dispersed by the windless intrepidity of her frantic motions roving, that she was become wind itself, perceptible only when in motion, inscrutable to any corporeal eye and to all who would try undertake an inquest into her inner nature (for to try to capture wind seems an impossible venture, except in the abstract). This creature was fortunate enough to have gone through countless curatorial ages without becoming entombed within the curiosity cabinets of those hooded fools who made their daily habits out of the decaying scrolls of glories they would never know but which, in naïve and vain attempting, they sought, somehow, to win for themselves, and for posterity, through their own contributions to the oubliette, baited with knowledge, which slowly swallowed them whole, a whale that would never yields this meal even back in bone. 

She had deep, thick and blackened lines worn into the leather of skin wrapped around this rarified, winded soul—too restless to cling to the garbage cans and trash heaps from which she flitted, to and fro, deriving, sometimes, a fly’s sustenance, essence of decayed and disregarded matter, distilled death made by her into life-giving, life-prolonging nourishment. She had eyes of milky glass that shone with a gaze that blew fast through those who hazarded a direct glance in her direction. There seemed, to her audience, nothing solid to attach the vision to, for their glances, sliding off the visible countenance, always were reflected back to a concomitant inward monologue exploring the meaning that this wisp of a creature roving could have. 

She pushed a garbage cart, a lifeless metal camel with a microcosm upon its back that was the only population in her caravan. Her body looked puffed, but it was from the repetition of clothes that encumbered her movements so that she was bloated stiff, as a swollen invalid or a hapless child doomed to an impossible snowsuit for an impossible trek across a tundra of sadness for the promised joyful exuberances of snowplay. But this woman, housed underneath strata of textiles, would cross tundra and desert alike, protected, shielded from sun, storms, snow, ice, wind—for these were her very own metaphysic (and one of the hooded fools struck gold when he wrote, under cover of night: ‘… for sun does not illuminate sun, rainstorms do not rain upon themselves, snow does not snow itself, ice does not freeze ice, wind does not blow itself but each touches upon another, and she was the origin of it all, a sun to others, a cool rain amidst summer’s sun, snow to carpet and then silence the frenzy, ice that would put staid to the rushing torrent of desolation around her, wind to give lift to the sails of their imaginations—yes, all this she was protected from because these were her very own things, and things these were of her’). 

And so indeed—she looked vested for a course through snowy plains, yet banished, somehow instantaneously, to our desert-hot land where she appeared to us as some hallucinated fantasy, concentrated into this column of wrapped bones-and-flesh, an opaque ghost, frightful but alluring at once. She seemed to be intoxicated by a strange potion, which she had acquired sometime before this apparition, fondling it with care, rhythmically pulling it up to, and putting it away from, her rusted orange-burgundy lips, parched but for the rivulets forming from this drink. In between draughts there seemed gathering some notions, and suddenly, but inconstantly, her now-moistened lips began quivering and soon established a repetitious movement, inaudible incantations, mumbled furiously. She intoned verses obscure in the sheer quietude; she whispered to some inward deity, or was manufacturing a mystery for a cult of one—or of one yet to come. 

Bequilted as she was in a heavy blue cloak swollen from these many layers from the inside out, somewhere they yielded flesh, adhering to her body by some occult power, magnetized by the bones which kept this creature upright. She wandered obsessively between the many garbage heaps which, in her shadow, sat longingly, treasured outposts that gave freely its loot to this solemn pilgrim, almost ready to find a long repose in a foreign bog, unifying with the refuse that now, somehow, is her nourishment. 

Her hair was white, yet retained a suggestion of blond or some yellow color long ago soaked with the light of many suns risen and now set. She had cheeks red with earthy vitality that, even though the nights and many passing days brought a whiff of death in constant reminder to her that this sojourn (as for all) has but one destination, remained immune to such horsemen of dark truth (and the fool inscribed upon his scroll, ‘…yet does the light of suns ever die? the wind truly cease? Nay, but a change in form brings the truth of death and life to one common form, a unity above all finality.’). Her caravan already hitched death, and pulled it along for a long journey with no known end or beginning. Neither notion—that of beginnings or of endings—seemed appropriate to her nature; her steps, a desert wandering, took her altogether outside our spaces and our times, and thus beyond a first or last thing. She simply was, and sometime later would not be gone so much as have been returned (she was a living repetition having no need of a first or last thing), finding her nuptials, at last, underneath the soil, the dirt, the refuse, the things obscure to us now.

The woman as it turned out, upon further scrutiny of the text, was a kind of impression, an abstract form of something much grander which this strange hermit had been working upon, and who finally recorded in his bizarre way as text and activity (or rather as a sort of complicated dance between the two). This woman was a consequence, a result of having taken an action not sanctioned by the hermit’s system, for this, in fact, is what least we could discover about his strange habits: that they amounted to an elaborate system, a gigantic bureaucracy. As with anything, there was of course the sheer thing-ness of it, and it’s opposite. What was its opposite? The Heresy. There was the System and the Heresy, the One or the Other—and there was only one other. Yet both had structure—else what could have kept this fellow alive and working for so long (we supposed)? He entire life was devoted to just these two things, and we can only assume that, given the protracted nature of his work, his indefatigable energies thrown at the task, and his absolute fidelity to it, that he worked not only on the One or the Other—but on both simultaneously. Indeed, we found evidence to suggest that he worked not merely simultaneously, for how, exactly would you accomplish that? No, we found extensive evidence that he created an elaborate system whereby he took his work on the One, and then on the Other, captured it, the replayed them on yet another system of complicated apparatuses, so that both could be witnessed in operation together, synchronously. So it seems that he had to create the two, separately, then join them in synchrony by means of this complicated apparatus, be witness to the spectacle, then, reflect, return to the work on the One or the Other, and only then repeat the whole process again—but with the work of the previous iterations firmly in mind. It grew into not merely a system of some profoundly elaborate kind the world had never known; but it became a layered world, an embryo of an entire cosmos, a whole life, spheres within spheres of life, working to produce both the System and the Heresy, its opposite. The enormity of the resulting work inevitably led not only to exhaustion (and this we could only suppose, as he simply had died into his soup), but it also led to the construction of things and documents of such complexity that, by the end of his many decades of toil, what was achieved eradicated any remaining difference between the System and the Heresy. Here, as the asymptote of work trailed off to infinity, as the differences between the two became so refined, in-differentiation resulted. As he drove the differences to their extremes, and as they were refined in light of counter-positions, and as those counter-positions produced more objections that had to be internalized into the original position, the result was—at infinity, of course!—only one thing. Yet, in truth, if that one resulting thing did, as we were to discover, contain every difference as nuance and passing notion, then while everything was there, all you had to do to recover any one thing in particular was to magnify one spot and it opened up into a microcosm. It was more or less hidden, but it was there, all of it. All ready was the secret of a hologram present here in the text itself. We had to discover this, but only after the fact of another amazing discovery…

In the Heresy, you weren’t punished, and it wasn’t a bad thing. Or at least good and bad were themselves found within each—hence the terms were clearly, in the hermit’s world, relative in a very specific way. This duality was actually, we soon hypothesized, the hermit’s ingenious means of letting everyone in. He gave everyone a choice, a fork in the road everywhere you turned, so that you always found a way forward, no matter what. The Heresy just meant that you went somewhere else; and if, when arriving at that somewhere else, you happened to make a decision that aligned back with the System? Well, then you just got to return—the doorway appeared, and a stairwell if necessary, and in no time you were back. With all of the change and alteration, what you even wanted or desired—and this was a peculiar preoccupation with the hermit at all times in his work, and it’s what actually fueled, formally, the activity that animated the text with which someone not in the System or in the Heresy worked—this too became something else altogether. That’s what really surprised us: at least in the hermit’s world, in itself, desire and want themselves changed so that effectively they were abolished, at least in the form we, who never had known the System or Heresy, knew them. What it was about the System/Heresy duality that accomplished this was a central mystery to us, as we excavated and analyzed all that we came upon in this sunken hovel.

As he turned to face the children, he found them fast asleep. He immediately saw the absurdity of his present situation—he was facing a wall, and as the children had fallen asleep, he now was speaking to it. Not just speaking. He spoke animatedly, gesturing rapidly here and there as he was wont to do. To a wall.

So, dearest children (he was now addressing the unconscious), even though we discovered this System/Heresy idea of his, and even a strange figure who embodied and ensouled the essence of it in her own person, a figure, an emblem of it, we still had to approach an even greater question than this—the question that will possibly put an end not only to our present researches for the end of this journey today, but also an end to your own childhood itself. If we try to answer or even explore the question, you will no longer be who you were. You will be someone else…and this is exactly what must happen, for the answer to the question is finalized only by you in your own self. Without it happening to you, you would never know anything worth knowing. And this is the one thing truly worth knowing.

Then the snoring began. And it echoed a bit, as there were some several doors ajar, leading into a rather cavernous hallway which in turn led to other rooms with doors ajar, and so on indefinitely (he liked to think so). He continued nonetheless, expecting that he could exactly reproduce the explanation sometime later. This was the trial run, he considered.

Now as it happens, an old text was found that had apparently undergone much abuse over the years. The spine was tattered and frayed, and was so unlike the others that it stood out quite obviously. Inside the pages were heavily annotated quite meticulously and carefully in very minuscule script. Indeed, an apparatus was necessary in order to read it and, we assumed, in order to put it to the page. Somehow only a telescope would do the trick, fitted with a kind of sun filter. This took us some time to figure, and when at last we did, we could not accept that this was indeed the case, that no other apparatus would do. It was as if the hermit managed to convince the laws of nature to suspend themselves just for the technical intricacies required to read the text, and resume otherwise.

One passage was particularly heavily annotated. We were struck by its beauty, concision and its starkness: “There must be something simple before all things and this must be other than all the things which come after it … it is also said to be beyond being…”. His annotations on this page alone amounted to some thirty-thousand words as we could count, and amazingly were flush with footnotes that were themselves often given to evolve into entire texts in themselves. And each of these supplemental texts were marked with an icon, a symbol of some sort. It was a beautiful foiled impression carefully laid into the title page, which prosaically announced the point in the original annotation where the footnote was relevant. Now, these texts happened to be legible with the unaided eye, and so we read them as such. But the foil impression baffled us because it seemed to be intricate but uninteresting to us. One afternoon light happened to strike the foil as we were pursuing one of these texts, trying to understand a particularly difficult point of interpretation in the original annotation, and the foil seemed to come alive with a rainbow of colors. We still couldn’t find anything interesting beyond this seemingly trivial display of prismatic colors, when one of us suggested we view the thing through the telescopic viewing apparatus we had concocted for the reading of the annotations. Of course! we all shouted. We then hurried over, set it upon the viewing dais we had contrived, and in a moment the foil revealed a hidden inscription of a sort: it was a hologram, and it required yet another apparatus to magnify and examine its details.

Now, as it happened, the apparatus that would seem to be required for the magnification and examination of the extraordinary details of this foiled impression, so carefully impressed into the surface of this first page, could not be a microscope or anything like one. Of course, seeing the page from the telescope put what was close very far away from us, and only then did the hologram, glinting in the sunlight of the morning, begin to reveal itself to us. But now, it appeared that magnification was required for examination—distance could not longer suffice. But the moment the page with its clandestine, foiled holographic surface was brought physically near, the entirely of this apparition disappeared, and the page resumed its ordinary, prosaic and rather uninspiring appearance. Only in distance did the holographic nature of the page appear; but we had to close that distance for more exacting examination—thus, magnification. Since we could see the hologram itself only from afar, and only through our inverted telescopic apparatus that we had (rather ingeniously!) devised, we decided on a simple, and perhaps quite elegant—even obvious—solution … treat the telescopic image as the object that needed magnification! That is, put the image under microscopic magnification. And for this we had to invent yet another contraption in order to achieve the desired results.

And for this, he decided to rouse the children who’d been sleeping this whole time. He decided that a performative demonstration, and even a recreation of the moment of discovery, was in order for them, for in truth their innocence was a necessary component for the authentic recreation of the moment of discovery.

He thought that the act of assembling the necessary apparatuses, which would no doubt involve lots of clanging and clacking, doors opening and closing throughout the house, stomping down steps and creaking up others, would be enough to wake them. Since this would likely take some time, for he had even to remember where all the necessary apparatuses, and components for the apparatuses, actually were (scattered as they were throughout the house—some upstairs, some in the basement, others possibly in drawers long forgotten in staircases he could perhaps barely even remember), he decided to play some of his favorite music from an ancient phonograph he’d set up in one of the rooms overflowing with books and his endless manuscripts. What shall I choose?

These days the convenience of everything everywhere instantaneously found him oppressed. The sheer mountain of choice was itself daunting. Rather, he opted for the spontaneity of browsing his (or rather, his long-deceased friends’) collection of plastic records—such a rare item, made even the more valuable by the scarcity of the materials themselves, arguably more valuable than their weight in water. Oddly, this experience of physically browsing physical objects sitting there before you, though not nearly as rich in endless variety that the other contemporary forms of storage allowed for, actually allowed for more decisive choice. See the full extent of even a vast collection meant that you could, hypothetically, reach the end. And the end meant some kind of fulfilment. Conclusiveness was a valuable but fleeting experience. Ah, this is it! He chose a duty album containing an ancient recording of the last piano sonatas of Haydn. They had this almost aleatoric meandering to them, a final exploration of the ends of his harmonic understanding, a kind of critique of pure harmony, so sparse and bare that the limits, and yet even the evolution, of his musical style could be disclosed. Perfect.