The Infinite Library (82 page)

The carvings are endless, even if their variations are finite.

The author of these carvings must either be plural, generational, or otherwise by an immortal hand.

None of these conclusions satisfies the philosophical mind, but these are the only conclusions I can conjure. An endless narrative with no meaning or purpose any can divine, rumbling downwards for an inestimable distance, expressions that are both alien and familiar simultaneously or otherwise gain in meaning only by the imposition of the viewer. To contemplate something infinite, with its finite variations, usually results in the weak habit of assuming some kind of order to make sense of utter meaninglessness (beyond it being simply
an
expression). Every carving contributes to the endless whole, but no individual artisan has any knowledge of this. It is a synergy of an infinite metanarrative, and all play their parts in it unwittingly.

Is it god? I think not. I now dismiss the very idea that this is perfection, perfection being an attribute assigned by the limited minds of humans. This simply
is
, free of any discernible purpose or right and wrong. The stairwell, the chasm, the carvings upon the walls - all of it merely”substances” itself. Without will or agency, it merely functions, a Spinozistic kind of deity that is in and of everything. I have attempted every form of analysis gifted unto me by human knowledge, and yet I have not come up with anything more definitive by way of adequate explanation. I have sampled the mystic state, trying to comprehend this temporal non-space, throwing myself into hallucinatory trances that only seem to reflect back to me the variegations of myself. The carvings haunt my dreams, and I have attempted to perform an analysis on them, partitioning what I think to be dominant themes and motifs that may yield some sort of clue - all for naught.

My memories continue to flee from me, being replaced only with my time here. I can dimly remember what it was like before I embarked on this descent, a place that I now know with more visible assurance was in actuality a prison. I can faintly recall the long hours spent in argument and dialogue with contemporaries on abstract matters of the universe we had no hope of solving, and my conclusions to them would inspire them to declare me a nihilist. But it is not that I do not believe that there is no meaning, but that it is unknowable, and no method will decipher the metanarrative be it through logic, historical documentation, art, or mysticism. Something unknowable does not mean that it does not exist, but that our capacities are limited.

I am beginning to lose my language. It becomes harder to think in words. The new language that has rooted itself in my thought, supplanting the very human tongue I once knew intimately, is made up almost entirely of images - the carvings on the wall that are so many voices of a kind, their petroglyphs occupying a roughly similar orbit in my mind as it does the winding descent of this eternal shaft. I am occasionally paralyzed by a sudden internal luminary flash, a grand cataract of white light that hobbles me and threatens to send me over into the chasm if I am not quick and careful enough to plant myself upon the steps. Also, there are moments of quite uncomfortable chill, a draft issuing from the wall that numbs me.

Postface:

With one last gesture before abandoning all the rudiments of spoken or written language, before a complete consummation by thinking in pure symbols, it should be said that the petroglyphs' meaning has finally disclosed itself fully. Whether my sanity has been confiscated in my immeasurable duration here, I cannot say and leave it to those inside the walls to discern. I see in cycles three, a “memnoir” of sorts. I see an infinite library from which is plucked a singular narrative bolt that cuts across the day leading into the crepuscular end. I see what is born of paper and ink, the black and white genesis of a world that disperses its contents freely and vastly without bounds into the vacuum. From this unthinkable library comes unnatural books, books that only the Library destines to be in the hands of some at particular times, despite the caretaker librarian's efforts to suppress the will of the Library itself. From paper and ink comes the synthesis of a man who will stand as the full incarnation of atrocity, horror, and liberation.

The second act is composed of fire and voice, painted in red and gold. The foretold man, the product of a very meticulous synthesis of an artist, a scientist, a madman, a prophet, a figure of pure anonymity, and a philosopher comes to ruthlessly dominate desire by its unfettered emancipation.

The last act, where the knife of history herself glints with its one steel finger, is smoke and ash. The grey and silver of this act brings the narrative to its circular closure, and I see the reprise of a new feudalism take root after a cataclysm not easy to put into description. A new series of gods supplant the old in that cyclical fashion where things always repeat, but repeat differently. I grant as many clues as what will come to pass, as it must and so will it be, as a language of symbols permits. Gimaldi and Castellemare, Albrecht and Sigurdsson, Calembour and Schulmann. These names do not register any alarm for those who come across them as of yet, and perhaps never. But those who encounter these names in whispers without mouths ought to take note of them.

To say that any of this has come to a conclusive end is folly. The acts I have spoken of signal the beginning, and even if this appears at the end of some tome, it is but the first signatory of a dramatic pact between fiction and its opposite where their differences are harmonized to the point of abolishing their distinction.

And so ends the report of my quest, but the beginning of an impossible thought, a seventh meditation. I tarry no further but to delve into that impossible thought as the stairwell narrows to such a point that it becomes infinitesimal in ratio to the wall, and all becomes an absorbent chasm where not even light escapes its totality and inconceivable mass. I trouble myself with a meditation that will chart different course for you and me. It is a meditation bequeathed to both of us, on a stairwell or in an illusory prison. Ponder still this one thought, this one maddening meditation that will incite such a chorus of perplexity and perhaps extreme vexation:
libraries infinite, stairwells without end, and mountains without their valleys.

How can we even think of Gimaldi without his Castellemare? I cannot read the signs well, but maybe you can.

44

Epilogue

Gimaldi, you have been primed for this, with due preparation with this book that you have read. Take what you have learned and disseminate to all those who would listen.

From the Dedication Page of the
Ars atrocitatis (1
^st
edition) by Alberto Gimaldi

I
am making an unconventional dedication by way of an open letter to a figure I may never encounter again. The Library is a vast thing, and I have no assurance that he will ever come across these words. But, I feel the only way that he has any possibility of hearing me is if I put these words down in a book.

Dear Castellemare,

Now that you have decidedly vanished, taking your powder at the most inopportune time as if to continue along with the torments of unresolved mysteries you have seeded within me, I know that the only hope I have in reaching you is by the commerce of what we both highly regard: books. And I also know that it is in that marketplace where such commerce happens, the vast and paradoxical Library itself, where my writing will hopefully find its way to you. To write a book may be, in the end, the only way to contact a librarian who has absented himself.

I now regard the path you led me along with all its dead-ends, forks, frustrating enigmas, and drying up leads to have been absolutely essential to the narrative you helped co-develop. In fact, I know that the narrative set aside for you and me was coeval with the Library itself, and I have learned that mysteries are not merely fossilized in the dense sediment of books, but rather that books are their own genesis of mystery. You have also taught me, in the rather circumspect and devious ways in which you operate, the vital lesson of the
Backstory
: namely, that it was up to me to write the narrative you and the Library wanted to see actualized. I had been a puppet manipulated by a series of events and episodes to be compelled to write the book the Library desperately needed to have in its collection. I still do not fully understand the connection between the Library and the world's fluctuating and variable narratives, but there are fully determined factors that are put into motion to keep history moving.

The other element I came to learn was the lesson of the synthesis. It was not Ensopht who was the true facilitator of it, but rather he was just another static object among the six. What was missing was the author, that external relation which brings the six toward unity, threaded together by the narrative I was obligated to construct. I now know that a great evil has been unleashed, and it was unleashed partially by accident. The greatest evils humanity has ever known always come about this way, by a banal concatenation of otherwise innocuous circumstances and events, and it was essential that I - the unwitting author - would not know how it would all turn out lest I impose a different narrative to sabotage what would come to pass. Authors are never the masters of their own work, but rather are handmaidens or conduits through which the narrative must pass. The author merely breathes expressive life into a lump of clay that has already been formed in advance. That section of the
7
^th
Meditation
was not lost on me where I am directly implored by the Third Man to breathe life into the golem, into the clay bird.

My guilt, my evil, far surpasses the product, for I have been its circumstantial progenitor. I will not commit the atrocities of Dr Edward Albrecht, but my part in this tragedy is in being his author. There is no special place of forgiveness, no salvation reserved for those who would repose upon the false innocence of merely reporting what will come. Prophets and writers alike will be culpable for their utterances, and no excuse of merely chronicling a series of events will redeem them. It does not matter that I had been, without knowing it, secretly penning the
Ars atrocitatis
all this time for history will always weight our actions more on the side of consequences rather than intentions.

At times, I doubt that any of you - Setzer, Angelo, Leopold, Jakob, the Devorants - were real and not just products of my pen. The Library teaches us that the division between imagination and reality is a false one, and that certain characters live as if real, and certain living beings live as if fictions. Truth is a tenuous and multiple thing, arrayed with perspectives that are so numerous as to render the entire project of locating the one truth that defines existence as possible and meaningful as counting grains of sand on a beach. It is this terrible cliche that springs to mind for I do not have any other way of expressing the magnitude of this confused and hydra-headed truth. I imagine to myself - for that is all that I can really do - that each of you were episodic elements in my narrative conscious. The Cartesians like to insist that a real world exists outside of us, guaranteed by certain laws we cannot self generate which is proof that we are not all merely bobbing along in some demon's dream. However, I believe that the undisputed laws of mathematics and physics are red herrings designed to cajole us into a kind of lie, to suspend our disbelief in the real world. I do not subscribe to the false alternative that Descartes puts forward, that there is an evil genius running the show; no, there is no mind that governs and dispenses existence, but rather a collective concert of minds, events, and things that construct these patterns of the real we take for truth.

I am not much for the bloodless sport of philosophy, I'm afraid. I will freely commit open-handed fallacies if only because narrative seems to me the higher law. The world is diegesis: it is the tumbling and pouring out of constant contents from the multiple sources of narrative structure. These things that pour out of the clocks, the books, the walls, the libraries inundate and overwhelm us. It is folly to think that any person or secret order can staunch or control this existential wound, redirect its flows, or trace them back to a single truth.

I am not particularly gifted in writing, but my task does not require any measure of poetic eloquence, the ornamentation and embroidery others need to weave their tales with. No, my inspiration and style is solely that thing called the prose of the world, and so requires nothing fanciful, rhetorical, or any of the devices so relied upon by those with more desire to write than substance upon which to draw.

Castellemare, I do not despise you for all that you have done, nor am I still irritated by the cryptic affectations you put on. I do not pity you, and I do not admire you. There is no envy or malice when I think about you. I know that you were, like me, following that prose of the world that forces us to play at some roles, or be guided by the demands of character. To blame you would make as much sense and result in the same effect as to blame the narrative for what it is.