The Infinite Library (35 page)

It would be tempting to believe that John of Lerida had at least one secretly sympathetic figure of high authority willing to sign off on a death order for thirty-six Leridans on paper while giving nineteen pardons in secret. The authority charged with executing the sentence would not have known the initial number, and would have recorded only those who appeared at the stake on the appointed day. It is tempting to believe this because I want to believe it; otherwise, I would have to admit that time has removed any trace of the Leridans and any hope of retrieving the truth.

Unlike other purges, the immolation of the Leridans was not made a matter of public record. The burnings were executed privately, and inquiries were silenced or lost in a maze of bureaucratic shuffling. Future popes had no knowledge of the Leridans – since the matter was of no memorable account – and so it is as though the history of the Leridans was written in invisible ink.

Of John of Lerida, there is scantly more information, but there is no explicit mention of magical mirrors or the sect he authored (if he in fact did so, and it was not created posthumously). The record merely itemizes unrevealing information: his ordainment, degree in the Franciscan Order, a few attributed works, suspected for novelty, and death. The four substantial scriptural commentaries he penned are listed, but are curiously absent from the Vatican's library holdings. In terms of his dealings with the anti-Pope Felix V, anti-Pope historians have found no mention of John of Lerida in any of Felix V's correspondence or personal notes. The same holds for Xinevius, which is odd given that a fierce opponent would have written something about and against John of Lerida. This is where the more solid connections of the history end, and a temporal gap emerges until the heyday of the Jesuit Order.

A one Xavier of Lerida took some interest in the history of his region and came across mention of John of Lerida. In 1571, Xavier of Lerida appointed the task to a group of mendicants to locate John of Lerida's written works. Lacking critical apparatus, a group of careless copyists (that pledged faith to the master in name more than deed) forged a hopeless confusion. Corrections were attempted by more schooled and conscientious minds, but this only made matters worse, compounding error with more error. Interpolations, elliptical phrasing, glaring lacunae, overwrought guesswork, and wild speculation transformed the Leridan doctrine (as it began to be called) from an elegant treatise to a veritable dog's breakfast.

Another aspect occulted in the deliberation of the Leridan Mirror was the tendency of overeager thinkers beguiled by optical sciences to insert their own findings in place of the Master's. Perhaps feeling well-intentioned to clarify any metaphysical or alchemical muddiness they erroneously perceived, they took gross liberties in editing our every nuance of the Master's preparatory design for the Mirror by merely imputing to him their own scientific prejudice and optical treatments. Namely, the simplicity of natural science in stating that mirrors in a particular configuration can cause rays of light to converge on a single point did ill-service to John of Lerida's rarefied exposition. If we were to take the Jesuit copyists' view as being a faithful reiteration, then John of Lerida's work would not have been suspected of any heretical danger. The problem with this selective rereading of the Leridan Mirror is the risk of leading subsequent scholarship to reduce John of Lerida as being merely another amateur observer of optical phenomena. If said interpretation held, John of Lerida and his invention would be of only minor and inconsequential anecdotal significance.

Despite the botched and brief-lived John of Lerida revival inaugurated by the Jesuits, which only seemed to bring the matter to a premature and uninteresting conclusion, I cannot in fairness dismiss the Leridan Mirror as settled or anything less than an enigma. To assume that he was some amateur observer or a trickster does not accord with much of the intrigue surrounding his name, nor several of the dangling ends of this mystery. Since I had come to an impasse, I approached my friend – the Peter of Maricourt scholar – with my findings to see if he could be of any assistance in directing my inquiry. This is the letter he sent me:

Dearest Friend Gimaldi -

I'm glad to hear that you are keeping mentally active with these research aerobics. I've always considered you a serious mind since I first met you, and serious minds in an age of academic celebrity are a sad rarity. I am afraid that you have made an appeal to one of my intellectual blind spots since I doubt that I can provide you with any other information than you have already quite astonishingly uncovered. Peter of Maricourt is a much more accessible topic, but you prove yourself the high pedigree of scholar that takes the hardest road in choosing a topic where nearly all the leads have gone cold. Although I most likely lack the finesse of mind you possess or the sources you have acquired your information from, could I be so bold as to make a speculative gesture by declaring that John of Lerida's Mirror is not actually so crudely an object as it is a metaphor for a more sophisticated metaphysical view? It was not uncommon for the time that learned men with dangerous ideas would conceal their ideas metaphorically, or in code, or by other means. This, of course, is just my humble suggestion, most likely incorrect, and something you have already considered (and since dismissed). I will make my inquiries here. For the time being, bon chance!

Although my colleague could not furnish me with any useful links, his suggestion that John of Lerida's Mirror was purely symbolic had considerable merit. I devoted my research time toward metaphorical uses of the mirror in matters of philosophy and theology. It was then that I came across a small work simply entitled Speculum Mundi by Theodotian of Patmos, 1493. In it, he claims that God is the culmination of all converging light. Against the view of a round earth that faces outward, he states that the sky is a pure illusion, and that we are all residing on the inside of a sphere. The sun (or God) is at the centre of this sphere and casts the light of creation upon the world. The world, in turn, reflects this light back unto God. A diagrammed model appears in this text where light emerging from a central source inside a sphere is reflected back toward the centre. Theodotian makes frequent mention of Heraclitus who said all was created by fire and would return to it. The strong Pagan and anti-Church doctrine nature of this text was obviously heretical. God becomes the fire-source of all created matters, and all created matters reflect themselves unto him, perpetuating God as a fiery entity. This co-dependence between God and matter reduced God's divinity as partially reliant on the empirical world. Theodotian cites Aristotle as his authority in only one instance, making a hasty deduction: Aristotle states that when we think of the past, we look down; when we think of the future, we look up. What would otherwise be an innocuous anthropological observation becomes something other in Theodotian when he makes the connection here that God's fiery creation has already happened (past) and our future in returning to God-as-fire is yet to be (future). Humans, according to him, have an innate understanding of this temporal relationship, the kind that plants also possess in growing toward the sun. Furthermore, Theodotian states, it would be possible to make “smaller gods” by somehow suspending a source of light inside a perfect sphere that had a mirrored interior. The danger, he warns, of making either the mirror or the light source imperfect would be a disastrous conflagration.

Circumstances began drawing me away from my initial eagerness in recovering the truth behind John of Lerida. As a way of putting the matter to bed just as the Jesuits had done, I wrote an article that was subsequently published with my musings intact. The loose threads that suggested that the Leridans were possibly still active after all these centuries, using the Mirror of Fire as some representation of the true divine essence, factored a bit too strongly in my article. I say this because someone may have taken issue with my conclusions which may have brought to light something that wanted to stay hidden. The event took place three months ago at home. My curtains were open and it was a very sunny day. I was sitting beside the window and reading what would be my last book to be read in the usual manner. I saw two men in their 40s across the street. One made a bizarre gesture I have yet to recognize, while the other held some kind of oval object delicately curved on its edges, no bigger than a wallet. This object was turned just so and aimed directly at my eyes. The doctors did not believe me that this was the cause of my blindness, but rather I must have burned them by being too close to a flame. Suffice it so say, my condition was inoperable.

To be blinded by a mirror – any mirror, and not just the sort that is forged in the secrets of alchemy – is said to happen to many. We rarely see ourselves objectively and most often blinded by what it is that we see. In this case, I was blinded by my own folly, staring into a mirror and having reflected back at me a truth that was too much to bear – or was not mine to know. That I desired to reflect back at the world knowledge I had gathered on John of Lerida and his sect was a mistake, for some images are not meant to be reflected back into the world, but absorbed into that hidden, secret darkness.

[This section ended with what I would consider almost a direct taunt:
Gimaldi, you little weaver of tales and fables, as blind as Milton and Borges with half of a half of their power! -
This could have easily been written by Castellemare given the tone. Symbols for my benefit, perhaps, were heaping up, and the mirror only doubled them. The mirror divided the Library infinitely].

15

Cui Prodest?

P
erhaps little more than the mere recollection of my face, as memory had presented it to me. The mirror was dirty, streaked, unclear, but my face was clearly unshaven. I gazed intently at the seemingly infinite eruptions of stubble that peppered my face, stubble that had taken on a new life as wiry spots on the pocked landscape. I steadied a slightly over-caffeinated hand gripping its implement to shear the sward of my neglect. Yet, I paused as if about to take stock in what I was, to repeat a mantra that was still fresh to me but felt prematurely stale: “My name is Gimaldi. I am 45 years old. I live in Toronto, Canada. My temples are grey. The bags under my eyes have developed their own baggage. I do not know if I am at the centre of a vast and incomprehensible mystery. I own no pets. I have no current love interests. I make my living with books. I am addicted to cigarettes, and perhaps addicted to my failure to quit them more so. I fancy myself as being of the rationalist mindset in making fair and meticulous deductions. I do not look good in the colour red or in profile.”

The mirror held every blast of projected image without itself being affected – a repository of endless recollections. And those fostered and provided by memory had their way of occulting the naked view. Perhaps I would see in the mirror a man twenty years his junior or senior, wasting my thoughts on what I would look like in the future or what I could have looked like had I adopted a healthier lifestyle. These thoughts would droop as the stems that were to transfer to them some kind of nutritive relevance were far too weak. Instead, I took to the repetitive act of scraping steel upon skin, leaving fallen black snow in the basin of the sink.

I stood and laboured – or, rather, fussed needlessly – with myself. I was a shut-in, feeling and being cosmopolitan but not actually
being
cosmopolitan except by the geography of the self upon which the distance between idea and its action is connected only by one road under heavy construction. I read books, or sold them, and was as leeched of life as they were. Just the
idea
of life, how it might look or feel or taste. I made pointless mental calculations I never broadcast to others... warming over swathes of memory alloyed with inherited social myths... what one ought to be or do by ages 30, 40, 50... I added to and subtracted from my own age comparing how many years past or until the next expected benchmark or age-ascribed standard. “Married by...” “Career by...” - just blanks and unsigned cheques. Physically older, no further, but too depressing to vocalize, a luxury of self-absorbed pity that timeless swaddling of the middle-aged man that summons as much feeble strength to combat it. Paralyzed by these self-directed sermons, rendered useless by a self-targeting grudge: I was at war with myself, against myself, through very slow and exacting punishment for I know not what. For being born? For crumpling rather than charging at opportunity?

Finding myself ambushed by my own self-created wringing, overwrought riddles within riddles, I pounced and gabbled at them, believing my squawks and barks of excuse or false courage would be flared and blared. But, bulldozed flat by mean, hard, little concerns... I could clutch at the very essence of myself, withdraw my hand with the root of it, and find it so small, so shrunken. And then I just let that part of me rest. My contribution to the story, overdue, underwhelming, but I was entitled to just a little self-reflection when I had been busy getting tangled in multiple mysteries.

The two weeks had past and I was expecting a research report from Jakob Sigurdsson sometime in the late afternoon. I had my doubts that he uncovered much, mostly believing that he most likely did not put as much effort into the task as he would let on. For me, the mystery was not deepening, but rather widening, increasing its dimensions topographically. Cynical as I could be, I had long since abandoned any hope in resolving it... and yet I held to the same fool practices of collecting the detritus of clues, recording all the tracks in shifting sand, trying to catch the scent of the answer as it reticently kept its distance like the horizon. That, and the reckless and coquettish tossing in my direction the handkerchiefs by figures like Castellemare who did so just to ensure that I would follow.