Sixteen

 There suddenly was a loud click and the door seemed to become unhinged. But in fact it only became so on one doorjamb; the other moved ajar, like the door was inverting the left and right sides so as to open precisely at the end you wouldn’t have expected, given the placement of the door handle (and so the children saw the  handle at the right but the door now opened from the left. They looked in total puzzlement at this phenomenon, unfolding slowly before them.). The odd mixing of air between the inside and the outer hallway produced a smell of musty rags and mops, with the vague smell of cleaning solution. There was a slight chill to the hallway air. The children peered inside, only to find the ridiculously complicated contraption established for this excruciating reading and unlocking ritual.

The children had long ceased to keep up with this endless recitation. Not being able to contemplate their escape, on account of its seeming impossibility (for the trip was not, it appeared, reversible), they simply fell in resignation to the chill ground, gathered some old rags, boxes and ancient-looking material bags, and collapsed in fatigue. Some of them took to playing games with the odds-and-ends they could find around them. The eldest looked on, dejected.

He wasn’t there, as they stepped through the doorway and into the room on the other side. In his place was another complicated bit of machinery—an old-style tape recorder, which to the children looked as baffling and dimly comprehensible as the inside of a great mechanical clock. It was faded olive green, with beige and off-white keys, one with a red square in the middle, and a series of lights, one of which, bright cherry red, was illuminated and now blinking.

“Hey mister!” the eldest shouted. “What gives here? Where are you? We went through all this reading and…”

Just a minute, children! His voice seemingly came from everywhere, for in this second basement, there were more empty rooms than filled, but all were connected one way or another: either directly through a door, or indirectly through passageways and a series of hallways. The only items that each room had were books, and stacks of records with no obvious pattern. Some rooms found them all neatly arrayed and assembled (and thus one could have deduced that there might be some pattern, if one chose to investigate), in others, a jumble of books and records with the occasional machine of some unknown function, tangled up with coiled wires and other gadgetry creating a haphazard perimeter.

There is a secret here. I am not here—or there. But you are. And this brings us to the secret. I cannot be with you for the secret, but I must tell about something the secret knows but which, since I cannot be there to tell you about it in person, can only be shown to you from a distance. Look through the end of the telescope you look out of, and things close seem very far off. This is how you must look for me.

The eldest found the telescope. It had bent its head down, falling toward the ground like a puppet who lost his animating spirit, left to just the being there of things, alone, sad for want of soul. It seemed to be weeping. Find the opening and look through. Now, you can all recall the games that you play, can’t you? “Yes mister, of course we can. What does it have to do with anything? We’ve been waiting to get through that door for like an hour or something, and you’re not even there. Well, here, where it sounded like you’d be. Are you really there?” Yes of course children. I am always there, where I am. But you must think about the games you play. “Ok so what about them?” They have rules, right? But you have to keep them kind of quiet, in order to really play the games, right? “I guess, yeah.” So what if you had to always talk out the rules, what would become of the game? “I guess kind of stupid, maybe boring. You can’t just play a game that is nothing but rules all the time, right?” Well, yes—and no at the same time. The children let out a great chorus of laughter.

They spread throughout the room into which they had been led by the welcomed activation of the lock mechanism. Besides the strange and antique electronic equipment, which lent to the room a sense that it had been completely forgotten long ago, there were other oddities. Tiny total, miniature furniture, and even smaller odds-and-ends that might populate a small village in a little country that had grown up upon a tiny world, tucked away inside this room within a secondary basement, buried into a hill—the n-th level of someone’s lost dream.

The game you play has rules to it, which makes it sort of special, a special time and place—otherwise what would you be doing? And the rules are like this too, they give the game a special thing, special and certain and very specific things to do. So as you keep the rules tucked away in your head, and as you stay within that special place … the more you do this the more wondrous and joyful and brilliantly fun the games become. Don’t you think so? “Well, yeah, I suppose that’s got to be true, ‘cause if we’d forget the rules or the special place the game needs from us, we wouldn’t be playing it. That’s when you get angry, ‘cause somebody stops, or trips up and does something against the rules.” So the whole thing with a game, a good game, is that rules are there, with force, but best when silent and just in your head, so you don’t have to think about it all the time. Yet I am gone and I’ve got you thinking about me, don’t I? “True, yeah that’s true. We’re not too happy about that, either.” So, but you see, this is the thing about the secret. I have to tell about something that is like the silent rule. But it’s about a person I’ve tried telling you about before, and this person has to be tucked inside our heads for me to really tell you the most important thing about him, which is the story he tries to write. The soup he died into was only the last thing he did, but the thing of his story required him to be eating that soup, but the recipe was found in a strange way, and that must be another story that takes us on a small—I promise you, children!—and brief search for the recipe. Now, you see it was quite fortunate that the lock mechanism was activated when it was, right in the middle of the story I was telling you through the recording you just happened upon, which was in my place. Finding that leads us to forage around the house for the ingredients, and, finding them, leads us to the soup. And—only through the soup can we truly understand this strange little hermit I spoke to you about recently. “Ok but J—n, he’s got to get home soon, and S—m, he’s feeling tired. Actually we’re all kind of tired.” Well then, I shall play out some music for you to nap by!

He was still consoled by the fact that he had managed to place some more distance between himself and the children seeking him out—for that was the appearance of the game he had gotten them involved in presently. He worked and thought and wrote and dreamed best only when pursued, or in pursuit. But the moment the chase was broken was the moment his torpor returned and his desk seemed a shallow grave, empty just enough for his corpse. He could only be revivified by the thought that he would soon enough return to his work, after he pursued the interest of this other thing, or sought refuge from the pursuit of someone or other. Later was time enough for the work. Thus, in this moment, awaiting the arrival of the children through a series of necessary complications, which he contrived to fabricate into the further intricacies of the story of this singularity, the hermit, he set to working out some fibers for the tapestry. But first, the lullaby. Ah! But would the cello sonatas of Bach be too much? Perhaps the flatulent relaxation of the agitated nineteenth century in Fauré?—music that dissipated a whole fury of artistic genius in a few short years. The whirl of his A minor Barcarolle wafted out of reclusive speakers. It was low enough for their ears that it managed to capture their drowsiness and configure it to its own. With the children soon preoccupied by subtly shaped dreams (whose trajectory followed the dissipations of that fateful and tragic age), he soon fell into his own dreamy reverie. And he found himself thinking of his own failings.

Was he ‘noble’? The word, archaic and underused, besides being now unknown, was like a dance of corporeal vitality to his wraith of a life. In a great castle of a work penned during that time, one phrase, like a single but crucial stone, he managed to cement as the foundation of his own hut: “in him was the highest pitch of greatness; here was present the rarest harmony: nobility of talent matched with nobility of soul.” He knew this could never be said of himself. And with this he sunk into a deep melancholy. He cried. Softly. The Barcarolle became a Ballade. But nobility is not for this age, he tried comforting himself. It was a hollow sentiment. Still, he had no true conception of ‘nobility’, except the vague sense of a self-certain stoicism combined with something that might be called ‘fortitude’. He searched after himself and set upon the notion of grace—wasn’t it ‘grace’ that determines the depth of or even the extent of one’s nobility? He thought, continuing, that there could be no nobility without some grace, and that he had, at least, a certain kind of elegance in his ways that could be called grace. And this grace was the charm he cast wide, like a net, but which was wasted always in the vain search for love—vain because of his need to be loved. The most inauthentic love. Thus wasted grace was no grace at all. Therefore he came to the conclusion that he could not become what he was not. If you are neither noble nor graceful, you cannot become such. Becoming what one was not was the highest inauthenticity. The becoming only covers the blemish with want. And there is no becoming without wanting, or desire. Here was the secret—to be or not! It was simple. Bivalent. A simple choice. Either/Or. Exclusive. Authentic choices are always absolute in this way.

He could not get past that one sentence in the book that had once preoccupied him: “… he knew how to love his friends….”, for he knew he didn’t know how. That fell into him like a white-hot slug of ore, melting its way to the core. It cooled and lodged deep inside; his sadness now had a clear and obvious pathway out. And it flowed. Overflowed. He could not be noble who did not know how to love, for if grace is nobility’s form, its substance is the knowledge of how to love. There was nobility without love, surely, he thought—but not without the knowledge of how to love. His own failing was precisely that: love itself escaped his knowledge of how to; but he consumed everything else he could lay his mind upon, and absorbed a knowledge of how. But in this liberality and eclecticism the singularity of love itself went missing. Surely one could love many, perhaps many at once; but it must be, if authentic, a knowledge of how to love one only. Each time a whole cosmos must be founded around the one, so that if there is a second, the love works there because of the one it is. In the many, there is always the one, the true, the singular, the indivisible, the a-tom. He populated his life with the many. But never did he find, he thought, the one in them.

He lived the horror of the philosophers of the nineteenth century—estrangement, the crowds of humanity, the fire of Prometheus finally seen for its true essence in the struggle to wrest soul from god. His novels, wraiths that haunted every mundane task, had only one idea, and it was his life’s purpose, he thought: to rebuild a fortress of self, to find the one again, the one who was worthy of the mantle of love. To glorify, finally, the self, to render it immune to the depredations of that century, reeling from its sudden loss of god. The false starts under the Age of Reason became the tragedy of revolutions, and the vainglorious ineptitude of the fearful reactions to them. No! Only at the century’s end would it have a vague sense, a glimpse, of a real possibility of self—it was covered in ash from the failures of that Old World and purified in the fire of the New, exposed, fragile, strange, ridiculous even. But it met with its true teacher from far beyond the Mediterranean. Yet they could not render it coherent. It was stilted, sentimental, stinking of idealisms and burdened by hope (Furies that pursued it all the way home). All of their authors in the North were clattering away in empty castles, worshiping at vacant thrones, building castles inside servant’s quarters and surrounding the castle by motes of servitude. He saw the possibility. The individual—one who could and would not be divided. But it fell stillborn onto his pages, each one a trial by absent jury that ended in the death penalty over and over again.

And so he fell into a long reverie while the children slept and kept vigil by his figurines and looking-glasses, books, notebooks, windows shaded and bare, doors opened, half-opened, closed, hidden. The light of the afternoon was half absorbed by the cloud bank that had moved in to mark a sharp edge of grey from illuminated sky. He moved to find in this room a notebook heavy with the thoughts that now returned to him from days as a no-longer youth still not having come into his own—in other words, from his early thirties, a time when the first presentiments of time, of death, of a long night ahead, are felt, and one enters into a new skin slightly bitter for being both new and a sign of age, two figures that taunt each other as the moon and the sun play their eternal games. He would contain a century in a page or two of prose so dense with refulgent depictions, aphoristic microcosms thick with essence—overflowing with Promethean intent, covering philosophies, political, metaphysical, ethical; with composers and their struggles; with the new breed of psychologist and their internal battles for mind or body … an age he could enwrap with one gesture of Spirit. From the century’s first days to its close with the death of souls and empires great and obscure. It was the terrible fruit of many generations before. Terrible. Hellish. Bloody. Baffling.