Zeb the Memorious

For the 114th birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, Google made a doodle. Here’s a link to one of stories of his with such a bewitching central premise: a library that has every configuration, permutation and combination of letters.

The Library of Babel

From a nonfiction essay, here’s his list of what you would find in such a library:

“Everything would be in its blind volumes. Everything: the detailed history of the future, Aeyschylus’ The Egyptians, the exact number of times that the water of the Ganges have reflected the flight of a falcon, the secret and true name of Rome, the encyclopedia Novalis would have constructed, my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934, the proof of Pierre Fermat’s theorem, the unwritten chapters of Edwin Drood, those same chapters translated into the language spoken by the Garamantes, the paradoxes Berkely invented concerning Time but didn’t publish, Urizen’s books of iron, the premature epiphanies of Stephan Dedalus, which would be meaningless before a cycle of a thousand years, the Gnostic Gospels of Basilides, the song the sirens sang, the complete catalog of the Library, the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog. Everything: but for every sensible line or accurate fact there would be millions of meaningless cacophonies, verbal farragoes, and babblings. Everything: but all the generations of mankind could pass before the dizzying shelves – shelves that obliterate the day and on which chaos lies- ever reward them with a tolerable page.”

Personally, I want to read the rest of Coleridge’s Xanadu – to see the rest of that opium induced dream interrupted by a annoying neighbor.

Part 1

Part 2

But the best part, it’s all fake. The poems are the invention of a clever forger named Pierre Louÿs who fooled most of the experts with his “big find” in 1894. Once finally found out, the fraudulent origins did little to lessen the impact of the poems. In 1955 San Francisco, the first lesbian organization founded itself as the Daughters of Bilitis.

The tantalizing talents of the an art forger. Paul Auster laid them out in “Brooklyn Follies.” How do you find old paper to fool the X-rays & ultraviolet scans? Were the ingredients in your ink available at the time of writing? Do you know all of the tics of your writer? That Hawthorne always wrote sloppy and consistently spelled  “cieling” & “stedfast” incorrectly. The perfect work comes only from a mountain of research and preparation.

The great shame is that these masters of trickery have produced fakes, copies and missing originals so perfect that they currently sit in museums and private collections around the world. To be the master of your profession is to be completely unknown for it.

an image from one of the many illustrated editions of the “Songs of Bilitits”:

This is the last year of Kafka’s life and he is in love with Dora Diamant, a 20 year old woman who ran away from her religious Jewish family in Poland and is now in Berlin. She is half his age, but is the only one who gives him the courage to leave Prague, and she becomes the only woman with whom he lived. He arrives in Berlin in autumn 1923 and dies in the spring of the following year, but these last months are possibly the best of his entire life, despite his deteriorating health, and despite the difficult social conditions in Berlin at the time.

Every day Kafka goes for a walk in the city garden and sometimes Dora joins him. One day they run into a weeping girl. Replying to Kafka’s question she tells him that she lost her doll. He comes up with an explanation. ‘Your doll went on a trip,’ he says. ‘How do you know?’ The girl asks. ‘Because she wrote me a letter,’ says Kafka. The girl doesn’t look convinced. ‘Do you have the letter?’ She asks. ‘No, I’m afraid,’ he replies, ‘I left it at home, but I will bring it tomorrow.’ He sounds convincing so the girl does not know what to think. Is it possible that this mysterious man speaks the truth?

Kafka returns home to write the letter. He sits by his desk and Dora detects on his face the same tense and serious expression as when he writes his literature. If he manages to come up with a convincing lie, he will be able to offer the girl an alternative reality to the one that comprises her loss – possibly a false reality, but it is a true and reliable one according to the rules of fiction. The next day Kafka hurries to the garden with the letter in his hand. The girl is waiting for him, and since she doesn’t yet read or write, he reads the letter to her. The doll is very sorry, but she is tired of living with the same people all the time. She must tour the world and search for new friends. It’s not because she doesn’t love the girl anymore, only that she wants new adventures, and therefore must part for a while. And then the doll promises to write the girl every single day and tell her about her experiences.

This is when the story begins to break my heart (says the storyteller). The fact that Kafka made the effort to write the first letter was amazing in itself, but now he commits himself to a plan, according to which he will write a new letter each day – and all of this only to comfort a little girl, whom he met by accident in the park. What kind of person would do this? One of the most brilliant writers humanity has ever known dedicates his dwindling time to write imaginary letters from a lost doll.

Dora recalls that he wrote with a special attention to detail, that it was real Kafka prose: precise, funny and fascinating. And every single day, for three weeks, he went to the garden and read another letter to the girl. The doll is growing up, she goes to school and she meets new people. She keeps reminding the girl that she loves her, but implies that some complications in her life do not enable her to come back home. Slowly, Kafka prepares the girl for the moment when the doll will disappear from her life forever. He finds it difficult to find a satisfactory ending to the story and is worried that the magic will disappear. He considers a few possibilities and finally decides to get the doll married. He describes the young man with whom she falls in love, the country-style wedding and even the house where they live together. And then, in the final line, the doll says goodbye to her beloved friend.

if you use google reader, follow me at lex@lexltd.net. then i’ll see and start following you. shared items from smart friends are often the best posts that roll thru my google reader.

i pass magnificently carved doors bright with buddhist yellows and reds,  overhung by intricate tin awnings set in walls of pressed cow manure, the hand prints still visible. i stop at “the happy tibetan” restaurant and a young family man sits across from me grinning. i steel myself to hold my smile and eye contact for a length of time uncomfortable to an american but natural to a tibetan. i show him a ticket with the photo of the potala and we make admiring noises. he refuses the carrot i bought from the affable vegetable seller in the rows of the covered farmer’s market where there’s piles of vegetables, spices and pigs heads, somehow still smirking and bristly. the man’s daughter, six and brightly curious, accepts my chocolate cheerily. the patroness understands my hand gestures for food with none of the hemming and indecision of the young waitresses. she doesn’t try to decipher what i want or worries that i might not approve. she just nods and brings a bowl of tupa (noodles) sprinkled with yak meat.

after the meal, i sit and read the idiot as myshkin gets his first taste of high society with a biting commentary from dostoevsky. a wrinkled and still beautiful grandmother puts my chai cup into my right hand so i will drink and she can refill the cup again. her friend comes over and picks at my notebook with stubby fingers, small cracks in the skin filled with the permanent dirt from a lifetime of farming. i show her all the filled pages, proud and showing off but she only wants a blank piece.

i enjoy the tibetan’s smaller sense of personal space. my elbow tickled by new friends, a sign of friendship and laughing. old women touching their forehead to mine in a show of respect. also, the little regard for personal property. curious old men looking thru cameras left on tripods and books paged thru when i set them down to start my meal. perhaps the impermanence of this world allows greater freedom with the unimportant objects filling it.

in every direction and every corner pieces of art decorate the walls and floor. i’m especially taken by a scene of statues called collateral damage: a twisted boxy soldier covered in flags stands menacing over a mother clutching a child painted with camouflage, oddly reminiscent of the nativity scene. we meet the artist later at the Blues, Brews and BBQ festival just starting on the streets of urbana. a skinny self-effacing man who appreciates my compliments while shrugging them off as undeserved. a man who looked like he would be uncomfortable in any situation but the one he was in.

carly takes us on a tour, pointing out artist’s studios and maker spaces. she giggles at the costume closet/bathroom where people can borrow costumes, learn to sew or pinch a loaf. dresses with protest messages hang in the stairwell. carly tells us that “these girls were sick of going to protests and having their signs taken away so they painted them on their clothing. Take that away!”

she takes us into the bike project where volunteers make and repair bikes for people in the community, give them a workshop to work on their own or lead classes on bike repair. it’s in the old mail sorting room and a conveyor comes down from above with a green sticker at the bottom showing a sad little man with a crutch and the text “an accident happened here.” a heavy red fire door four feet up on the back wall serves as the portal for bikes and bike parts to shuttle to the parking lot where the most degraded lean against the brick wall in a haphazard pile of rusty parts and frames.

the odd music room focuses on instrument creation and playing with music theory. a small bookshelf holds essays on Beethoven, sheet music from broadway and a copy of ginsberg’s howl. the tonal plexus sits under the window, an electronic monster of a new take on a piano. an electronic keyboard with each key broken up into a row of small push buttons, further subdividing each piano key eighteen more times, with a rainbow of cables coming out of the soddered control center of the instrument. carly plays us a tune on the utterbot – a bottle with a rubber glove attached to the bottom filled with water. as you blow across the top of the bottle, you can change the tone by squeezing the rubber glove to raise the water level.

finally, carly gets to show us her passion: WRFU – radio free urbana, a 100 watt FM community station. LPFM was opened up by the FCC to empower community radio even though the application process is still long and torturous. it took them four years to get their license and another two to erect the sixty foot tower that reaches urbana and the majority of champaign. she’s a passionate supporter of community radio and is moving to cambridge soon to be a producer on car talk.  carly maintains the station automator that plays local music and syndicated podcasts, little league games, a program on native american issues, and ten hours a week of spanish programming.

leah tells us about a man who worked with her at a diner who had a degree in immigration law. he took a waiter job there just so he could get in touch with latino kitchen workers and help them change their immigration status. “he did it just to help and he still had to take shit off the management. there were a lot of good characters in that place. i read in the paper later that the ancient greek lady who ran it got arrested when she tried to hire someone to kill her husband.”

carly’s house sits in the middle of a park with the county fairgrounds just across the stream. a sweet small little place surrounded by trees and wildflowers. a compost toilet sits in the middle of a bamboo patch, a sedate place to pass your waste except for the mosquitoes. the house is spare and zen. a piano in the music room. bookshelves filling the living rooms and bedrooms. it houses the lectures, correspondence, and library of Herbert Brun, a pioneer of electronic and computer music.

we sit on my bedroll on her wood floor and look through a box of family trinkets carly just got from her grandmother. an immense array of small items that drive me crazy. there’s a story behind every chicago livery medallion and delicate porcelain rabbit and i want to know them all. she shows us a pewter arabian teapot that belonged to her grandmother’s great great grandma and a small golden apple that hides a tweezer inside for snuff? cocaine? we can only imagine.

leah and carly go the farmer’s market while i catch up on sleep in the dark basement on the raised concrete bed, a perfect slumber spot for me. at the market among the fruit stands, political activists and arts and crafts, she saw an old man doing a one man band with drums tied to his legs, shakers to his feet and a rake to scrape on the ground. he smiled around the words through his yellowed tobacco stained beard. a little girl with her first purse was entranced by him and kept removing one dollar bills from her purse to put in his cup. she would have given him all her money had her dad not said that’s enough honey.

we head through rural illinois with leah hating the unending flatness. we take a detour at st louis to take a scenic byway, the great river road that runs under the yellowed bluffs where the mississippi and missouri join forces. the textured bluffs resemble bricks and leah imagines them being built by an ancient civilization “still waiting and hiding in these hills” she declares with the characteristic passion and adorable grin of her crazy ideas.

low floods bring the water close to the road and finally cover it in the town of grafton, halting our progress. we get out to wade in the water over the road and watch the jetskis chug slowly between the houses with a foot of water in their basement. shirtless men drink beer and fish out of truck beds while logs looking alligators float down the big muddy.

we drive slowly through the town of elsah, one of the only communities to be placed en masse on the national register of historic places. a town of beautiful stone homes, removed one hundred years in history. we cross numerous one lane bridges and point out cute houses to each other excitedly or to a stone wall with a stove built into it. we stop at a garage sale that’s just ending and buy a nice sleeping bag for leah for five bucks. we conclude this detour finished and head back for the highway, driving late into the night to reach harrison arkansas and redneck activities with my buddy nat.