The Infinite Library (44 page)

Much ado on colour, for the colour of the foretold man was grey as it was black, black as it was red. A world that had passively surrendered the vibrancy of its own colour for cheap and tacky dreams had fallen under the maudlin spell of washed-out hues, pale derivations of what was once a variegated brilliance. Black, red, white, grey: the most psychologically effective colour scheme for its starkness, as evidenced in the regimes of history. It deserved a replay. A keener and more crisp adaptation.

What cruel coldness there was in the air, and the foretold man brought the machine under his hands, gently caressing the cool metal chassis with the pulsating colour of his body in a discordant concert of sensation. He came to realize his necessity in a world that called upon him in its collective dreams, a world that committed vicious acts against itself without so much purpose beyond a bit of greed here and a touch of misdirected anger there. How the world of fragile reasonable order thrummed like a weak heart with its own fear of its obsolescence.

The faint sound of a train hung in the air. He began to walk. Endless rows of houses stood shoulder to shoulder like stout soldiers with blunt chimneys in a whirling ballet of smoke that dissipated into a pure and empty sky now bereft of colour. Off in the distance, office towers speaking coolly with reflective sans-feature faces, their rectilinear bodies filled with smaller and equally hollow bodies, circuit lines, corpuscular cuts and flows vibrating from floor to floor, and run-on carpets like the tedious sentences of a despairing and drunken poet failing to grasp the emotional impact of a love long gone. Bodies of tall glass, reflective colossi, crested above it all in full plume, their heads kneeling beneath the smog ceiling of sky. The trees were the detached arms of titans, root fingers firmly gripping the earth, a geyser of billowing leaves waving hither and thither from a wound that refused to heal. Some kind of Order had been woven here. The foretold man detected the acrid stench of an era deceitful mostly to itself. This has happened before.

Foretold by whom? Whither the sibyls?

Escher landscapes, reflections of half moons in rounded glass, embossed machines raised on the tinder landscape, the staggering debt peopled owed the machines of their own making. Leather stretched on metal meat, kept in place by steel studs. Smooth flowing glass, or else crenellated and frosted. A pair of eyes opened and closed every few seconds, long enough to absorb the immediate sense of a visual moment, a texture, an object. The foretold man kept walking, cataloguing only that which he saw in those periodic moments of the opened eye, and reflecting in those serial episodic moments when the eyes fell shuttered. All he allowed himself to hear was the beating of his heart. Fish scale
silver flashes washed momentarily across the faces of passersby,
illuminating in a controlled instant the perpetual
risus sardonicus
hidden beneath the skin. The foretold man realized that the world was very sick, culture-sick, and that the tightened ball or mass of its neurosis would serve his plans well.

The sibyls, their faces engraved with sorrow, forecasted the man's arrival in tones that did not betray this sorrow. His name was Ensopht. He would pick one place of crisis at the exclusion of all others as the catalyst for the events he had been entrusted to bring to fruition. There,
he would place the abstract machine, and a radiating circle of reformation would pulse from its nest, causing the entire world to
shimmer in its and uncalculated desire – a desire and hunger for cruelty it hid from itself.
The fatigued denouement of peace and politeness was quickly giving way to more craven, more barbarous urges, and nations – as well as their contents – were once again thinking the unthinkable. He would name this ab
stract machine “Albrecht, or: The Will.” Although it had to go unnamed now, it would need a name in the future once all of its pieces had been collected, all the gears and fly-wheels of the correct concatenation of personae were fused. It would require the complex calculation of something like planetary dynamics.

Ensopht's eyes were two hanging
pendulums of corundum dabbed with two small daubs of obsidian. His face was a burnished taupe, and his forehead appeared slightly crested as if the bone refused to yield from making itself prominent in the overall concert of the skull's form. His lips were thin and pursed and his nose was slightly hooked as if dowsing. With his hands lightly folded into delicate fists resting upon his waist, his eyes peering at the mottled flecks of grey dotting the horizon blotted by buildings, it was nigh time for him – the harbinger and facilitator – to prepare all that was necessary to bring the players unto the stage.

Leopold Castor was busy tracing wobbly circles in the air with a numb finger. In his current state he found it hard to trace even such a simple shape. Yet he tried again and again until the fatigue of failure set in as it always did, incapable of overcoming the erratic trembling of his hands. A light piano could be heard emanating from the CD player's speakers, encrusted though they were with stickers from old and now defunct flash-in-the-pan bands that once captured Leopold's interest but fell into the rubbish bin where the odds and ends of disconnected memories go. He was unable to marshal his suffering and narcissistic self-destruction into motion, to convert the general character of his common malaise into work. There would be no further development, but rather a deeper entrenchment of his mood, sublimating his frame of mind to anything but an artistic work. The blank canvas was testament to his impotence and neglect. It stared menacingly at him, imploring and goading him to do his worst; for it was only the worst that he could possibly achieve. He was one man and that was one canvas, and though reciprocity demanded his active relationship with it he could not afford to purchase another. “If I had an infinite supply of canvas,” he said hoarsely, “I could summon the courage to experiment freely. A man and his canvas necessitates that there be more of the latter than the former. But financially confined. Infinite canvas: if I fuck up, take it down and replace with a fresh one, forever if necessary... or at least the masterpiece is created and then I can die.”

Of course, he could have painted over all his errata, but there was something in the purity of the untouched canvas that he sacralized, something that – when once effaced – could never be reproduced. The novelty of the virgin face, once touched, banished for all time. And as much as he fantasized that death would take him at the pinnacle of his finest and most triumphant achievement, both ego and curiousity would doubtless bade him to hang on, to see how the next chapter of the tale will unfold. But, since he had not achieved anything remotely masterful in quite some time, and not to his impossible and idealized vision of what that would be, the fantasy's fulfillment or dismissal was rather moot. His was the perpetual argument ad pabulum.

His over-anxious desire to found and ground a new “ism” in art, to become emblematic of a new era, to be its representative icon - all of this was not only presumptuous and egotistical, but a rank impossibility in an age that tired of the hasty series of people declaring “new” anything,
the chasing after phantoms, the making of supply with no corresponding demand
. Much that was mere cultural and historical recycling bore these bloated titles of largesse, of being new and novel, but hardly deserving of it. Would it be any doubt that even if Leopold had succeeded in making something truly new that it would be held under suspicion or dismissed by disinterested silence? Stagnation supreme, and he was as victim to it as anyone else. The more he thought of art's purpose, art as a whole, art's future, the further he distanced himself from creating – a self-fulfilling emasculation. The market had peaked without warning, and all that seemed left were old fragments that would be stitched together in different ways. He had no artistic prowess for repetition. The call had gone out: art is dead, so long live art. But even this was the repetition of resurrection, and what art needed was a touchstone with the real, and the real was a vicious place. What art needed was a a salient
her
to rally around, or maybe a charismatic villain.

Stumbling to his feet on unsteady legs, he resolved to make another attempt at something potentially meaningful. Squeezing the tube of chrome blue on his chipped and crusted palette, he bolstered himself before the canvas with the false sense of courage that he could overcome its mocking blankness and not merely slink away. As soon as he brought that tired and frayed brush to the canvas' face, he would soon regret it.

After this regret, what was left to him but that nocturnal bosom that freely accepts all failures without prejudice? Leopold made his way, as usual, to the pub.

Ensopht penetrated the inner city and its coagulated antisocial bubbles, pedestrian traffic whorls and hubs of panicked commerce... A dazzling array of dizzy scenesters and endless chatterers dotting the grey. Sitting quietly in a pub booth near a table surrounded by young men who fancied themselves rebellious, he cocked his ear to hear how people spoke these days, their lilting gerunds and burred muzzle-dialects that would froth and boil to no avail before submerging into the flatulent murmur of phonetic depths in the vernacular asshole. So many layers of sound: a slight wheezing strung along with a booming voice from a noble carriage, a shallow mumble here, a piercing inflection there, all voices in different tempos, in a predictable staccato stumbling toward the ideal legato of the fully-fleshed style of oratory.

Some posters of events on the walls. A gaming convention poster sported a virtual woman with enormous digitized breasts. This was not a minimalist era; more meant
more
. The scramble for some special and sacred identity in a hyperbolic yet homogeneous culture conveyed a different species of alienation – an alienation which had its yet to be developed yearning for some kind of extreme solution. To stab and thrust desperately beyond the thick and sturdy plastic of it all... Ensopht knew what desire lurked in every heart of hearts, what it secretly pined for even if it lacked a name. The people, as a whole, wanted the return of the hero, the tyrant, the cruel, the arcane, the treacherous, the brave. The people, at bottom, craved blood. They craved it to be shed, they craved it to be in an agitated pulsation to reanimate their lives, lives surrendered to a kind of paradoxical mobile inertia. And no non-stop war footage or slasher films were satisfying this need, a desire that demanded the visceral, not more screens.

Ensopht cast his curious peephole gaze at the full environment, this diorama of the failed repeated in so many places. A conspicuously overdressed man wandered drunkenly from table to table, telling any with ears that he was the man who lived with the ghosts of poets. An artist at a far table, agitated with manic activity, was frantically scrawling page upon page of human mutilation in his sketchbook - a sketchbook born from fever. People collected here, collected there, a fractured hall of mirrors where each participant may disperse infinitely in distorted self-reflection.

And then there was silence; all eyes turned to the artist at the far table, his eyes wide with the rising arc of frenzy brought upon by whatever delusions beguiled him, the substances he no doubt took to bolster his sudden stuttering resolve. His sweaty finger was on the trigger, the gun's nozzle was pressed against his head. The circuit of will, weapon, and execution of act were being brought into their balanced alignment. Suddenly, that alignment was punctuated by a shot and the arrangement fell apart as quickly as it come together. Everyone except Ensopht was caught in the freeze frame of horror, paralyzed. In their minds was the same looping image of those few instants before the silence had broken. Calmly, Ensopht was the first to move, walking purposefully to the table where the artist's body was slumped to one side, exposing the gruesome gaping poppy he now had in place of his head. Ensopht primly removed the lifeless hands from the vacated sketchbook and, with an approving grin, placed it under his arm, making a quiet and uneventful exit.

Once he had made a fair enough distance from the scene, he perched himself upon a park bench and straightened himself before the sketchbook as if about to delve into a rare and sacred text. The
sketchbook issued a creaking, leather complaint when it was opened, and it was full save for three blank pages at the end. The header page read, in bold, red italicized letters more hacked by a thick-felt tip than written: “
THERE IS NOTHING WORSE THAN BEING!
” These six words, in their peculiar conjunction, teased a hint of reminiscence upon Ensopht's face. The drawings were all done in shades of red, purple, gashes of blue and black, deeply set and smudged with mad thumbs. These were juxtaposed by the sharp and thin lines of a man who was quite evidently, as modern clinical parlance would have it, “troubled.” The drawings centered on the rather distasteful subject of genital mutilation, mixed with various scrawled portraits of subjects with no trace of emotion or expression upon their faces. At the bottom of each page there was a running footnote. Upon reading through it, two texts were alluded to:
Ars atrocitatis,
and
Ex jure solaris
. Ensopht was compelled unto curiousity to explore the reference with more scrutiny, for he found it odd that the first book would be so carelessly mentioned. The second book was of illicit significance, a hopeless mystical hash contrived by a writer beyond any healthy measure of obsession with Cranach, Durer, and Dante. The
Ex jure solaris
was also extensively quoted in the sketchbook, this particular example of note: