The Infinite Library (34 page)

The book.

The mirror [John Lerida]

Phantom relation:

a) Elemental conjuration (the sacred orthographers)

b) Destruction as preservation (the sacred biblioclasts)

One single columnar spine that keeps these two covers together, but itself hollow – a winding staircase. In one version, it is literal: a traveler's descent. In another, an opposition: the “sanscript” of reading what cannot be seen, what is between what is written.

The book as mirror, a phantom relation between two “things” not here now, but deferred, sliding off the infinitesimal moment of the now, of the present—yet ever-present even if it is just connected by phantom cables. I hold a crayon in my hand and transcribe myself—a virtual compendium—across the surface of the mirror, a mirror that I will fold up into a book once it has come to pass and I no longer create the reflection. I let the reflection cast itself, like a net, over me. And others come to this mirror-book, too, and see for themselves different things, varying reflections that I have no access to.

The others come to this book and remark it, bring their own transcription implements to its surface. Their faces are chalk white, like mine, but the reflections indicate different gods than what I am. They are other. But I am also other—to myself, fully and refreshingly self-alienated…and yet self-revealed in that moment of the mirror where I speak words to it and all it can do is mime the movement of my mouth.

I am a compendium, a bestiary, an encyclopedia, and it matters not if all the bundled data is correct, True, Good, Pure, even indigent of another time… it does not matter if the compilation of entries do not follow some recognizable alphabetical order, or a numerical order; I know the logic of my own book intimately, even if it is reams of iniquity, of self-deceit, playful illusion, a ghastly mirage, a complete laceration of self into splinters. All of this will be reflected in my mirror book, as I am sure it will yours. You will always find yourself - not anyone else - in the book. You are alone and the book only reflects your own image back at you. Never think you sought anything in a book other than yourself; that would be folly, delusion.

A
nd the mirror book will be a surface of reflections, and these reflections will have no material volume—which is to say that they will have the absolute volume across an infinite(simal) space
. These reflections will bring the gift of my compendium back to me in a split moment, conveyed in its own furrowed brow, its own haggard eyes, its own strained lines of a weary face, its own minuscule text from left to right. And I cannot close this book, even though I suspect it has covers and a spine. I would like to address all these anatomical features, to trace their contours and know them in a tactile sense as I close my eyes. Yet I do not wish to eroticize these features, as if learning
her
body in the night under the consistent laying on of hands. You may come to this book and a passage I find innocuous, superfluous, of mere verbiage and filler, might arrest you, seize upon you like a marauder…or captivate your eye with a secret desire to break the serpent gaze, to look away. The book not only receives, but freely gives, but it is itself a translation into another language, a kind of transcendental image, a carnival of minds.

The spine, the covers, the numbers, the corners, the margins, the flaps, the fold down the middle that suggests both closure and opening. This is a book. This is the book in its barest, coldest, anatomical reality. If it does not actualize (or conceal, dissimulate, reveal, fulgurate) in any other manner than this empty ontological proposition wherein we enumerate its constituent properties, then the book may not be essentially differentiated from the chair, the caboose, the walls of a house, the hinges on a door. A book—as mirror—must both say and play; or rather that you say, it plays. You play, it plays more. It will always exceed your capacity for play by its nature of excess. Deceptive, it is always more than the sum of its parts. It is even more than its constituent whole, more than anything. It is still bifurcating, being transcribed upon, giving off another surface. Always another angle. The spine or its covers—that thick hide, that skin that encloses textual innards—does not inhibit its growth like it would a body. The pages, like Borges’ book of sand, are always multiplying, in a kind of cell division.
This being the definition of the infinite book nested within the infinite library.

[At this point, the manuscript breaks off once more and attempts to satisfy explanation for the first reference, the leitmotif of the mirror (”The mirror [John Lerida]”). Again, I am named, a story within a story, and the mirror splits or twins here given that the mirror I was being prompted to see was initially between “myself” and Castellemare. This may pass as sophomoric pop-psych thesis of saying Castellemare and me are one and the same. The style shift here with the John of Lerida story is, again, very abrupt.]

John of Lerida and the Mirror of Fire

But of sublimer powers is that device by which rays of light are led into any place that we wish and are brought together by refractions and reflections in such fashion that anything is burned which is placed there.

-Roger Bacon,
Epistola fratris Rogerii Baconis de secretis operibus artis et naturae et de nullitate magicae
(1252)

While entertaining a friend and colleague one evening from the University of Reggio Calabra, I was treated to a copy of his article that was currently in press on Peter of Maricourt, a 13th century French scholar who worked diligently on magnetism, including a text entitled
Epistola de Magnete
(1269). As I came to understand from my learned friend, Peter of Maricourt's interests extended beyond magnetism and he was attributed to having fashioned a mirror that produced combustion at a distance. Given my fascination with mirrors, this anecdotal point intrigued me, and that was when my friend dropped the name of John of Lerida. Of course, the specialist nature of my friend's research made study of this figure outside the scope of his pursuit, but I was currently aimless in my hungry desire to grant myself some kind of intriguing glass bead game to occupy my time. This story is more a capsule summary of my findings, a rather unskilled attempt at providing my readers with a few clues to disperse the mists that surround the name of this obscure thinker. As is the case with most of my researches, I seem to multiply rather than resolve mystery, but this is what I have learned:

John of Lerida's birthdate is not precisely known, but it is assume that he died in 1456, and was born on or around the leap year of 1404, when Pope Innocent VII came to papal reign. From the scant historical offerings, John of Lerida created a doctrine that was reprobated by the Church and eventually silenced altogether. He belonged to the Franciscan Order. The source of this doctrine has been lost to time, but some rumoured accounts as to its contents remain.

In the year 1444, the anti-Pope Felix V and his notorious desire for potable gold came to learn of John of Lerida, and asked him to write a text on how to transmute base metals into gold, expressed in Aristotelian terms. From a source of dubious authority, John of Lerida is said to have assented to this request. However, according to this same account, John of Lerida had a secret enemy in the Franciscan ranks, a bishop named only Xinevius (I have not found, in any of my research, any further mention as to validate this person's actual existence). John of Lerida spent two years compiling the text which he entrusted to his servant for delivery to Felix V. En route, the servant was detained and the text confiscated for review. Xinevius' agents had intercepted the servant and, on his order, hired a few copyists to alter the original document by the insertion of various heretical statements. The document was then rerouted to the current Pope, Nicholas V (a Dominican) who issued the order of reprobation. Given that the anti-Pope in Avignon did not receive the document he had requested of John of Lerida, the latter fell from favour. The text itself, originally entitled
Secretum de auro potabili
was changed to the more forceful
Testamentum
, filled with heretical invective not of John of Lerida's authorship. However, it is not as though John of Lerida had not already been suspect in his true opinions and writings, and so it was not so farfetched that he would be held in contempt.

John of Lerida cleaved to the unorthodox - if not heretical - view that God was composed of four substances, each corresponding to the four winds. This view he deduced from an obscure commentary (author unknown) of Al-Ghazali and a creative interpretation of the
Almagest
(the latter having already been listed in the Index for its profane novelties). His view of a four-winds deity had its oriental inflection, but this view was very meticulously couched with fidelity to the current doctrinal acceptance of Aristotle.

Due to a metaphysical storm that arose among the clergy at the time that John of Lerida distanced himself from, his being suspected heresy was seemingly forgotten until after his death when the case of John of Lerida was reopened by a zealous Cardinal who had the Pope's ear.

Like Amaury of Bena two centuries prior, he was disinterred from his consecrated resting place, and his followers sentenced to the stake, thus bringing an end to the Leridans.

Of the fifty or so Leridan followers (accounts vary), most were brought to ecclesiastical justice, and if any survived, history has been silent. The Leridan sect did not enjoy the obsessive historical attention the Cathars, Albigensians, or other heretical sects have since been subject to. Even a corresponding connection to a follower of Raimundi Lulli is based on conjecture unsupported by any reliable documentation. However, legend (which has the ability to flourish without the fetters of textual
proof) has it that John of Lerida had been inspired by Lulli's idea for devising the cipher wheel, and that the two men shared a close intellectual bond that went willingly unrecorded for reasons of secrecy and protection.

Like Peter of Maricourt, John of Lerida is attributed with having perfected upon the former's work for a mirror capable of creating fire. The value of such a potential weapon in the late medieval world is beyond dispute. The alchemical method required to bring this fantastic mirror to term would have made obfuscation from Church concern challenging.

If the Lerdians, or what remained of them, had survived the purge and took with them the works of their Master, it is most likely they remained in hiding and delved deeper into the secrets of the Mirror of Fire. If this is the case, it is yet again an instance of operation in the blind spot of recorded history.

There have been a few loose mentions in the modern day, although these may be a jape or a product of hasty and nostalgic connection. A self-proclaimed “Leridan” was declined a position at Lockheed Martin for a proposal involving a space-based mirror that could amplify the sun's rays and be directed at any target on earth via computer - effectively functioning as an enormous and devastating magnifying lens.

However, these airy speculations and scant clues cannot be adequately corroborated by any authoritative source, so we must well leave them for more patient hands. It is best to return to the inventor himself, and the mysterious properties of his mirror.

It is said that he applied a tain of his own alloy on the back of a mirror, a recipe he refused to divulge. Some say it was of specific parts mercury and obsidian, while others go as far as to say that John of Lerida discovered the substance that unites the terrestrial and celestial realms, harmonizing matter and form in ways far more conclusive and concrete than any of Aristotle's abstract syllogistic proofs. Others have declared (without due authority) that he was a student of optics, and this his use of light and reflection was a matter of clever trickery. However, none of these reports record ever having witnessed the product of John of Lerida's feverish pursuit, and there has been no physical evidence of any such mirror bequeathed to the ages.

In actual fact, John of Lerida was not in any serious danger of being placed under the Church's severe scrutiny given its preoccupation with more pressing political matters, and so it is unlikely that he would have felt any need to destroy a mirror of this nature in order to spare himself or his secrets. It is probably speculation (confessedly my own) that the mirror never advanced beyond the design phase, and so its manufacture would have been entrusted to his followers.

We come now to the dubious and contradictory information concerning his followers – the only trace clue that may bring us back to the man himself. One account lists them to be as many as fifty in all, whereas other accounts differ by a more modest twelve to thirty-six. Church records are equally as inconsistent since in two separate documents of relatively high authority, the number of Leridans burnt in 1459 were seventeen and thirty-six in the two respective records. A difference of nineteen followers is a considerable gap, especially given the refined and meticulous nature of Church record.