What follows is an excerpt from a rare, long-gestating work of Basso’s, his novel-in-progress  Anonym. This is a large, sprawling work of fine craftsmanship and boundless imagination, leaping across time and space to explore a mysterious game so fathomless and strange, it takes generations to play. As of now, Anonym only exists in the form of eight chapbooks, which in turn were printed in limited editions of sixty copies each; the planned final four chapbooks, meanwhile, have yet to be written. However, Basso is currently at work returning to those final chapters, and we plan on serializing the original chapters of Anonym on WFR.com at regular intervals starting later this year. – The Editors

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The cadaver under watered silk, bone crumbling into sand, like a dying mistress in his arms.

For Magus VII it was more a matter of topological dislocation. Something, or someone, had changed the forests and the grasslands on his estate. There were fewer hills, trees where none grew before, valleys instead of plains. Meadows evolved into marshlands. Though the soil had been seeded, only weeds, spaded from the earth, made a pyramid for burning. A vast, funereal mound bristled in the shadow of the hedgerow under a leaden sky. Strange as it was, it was all too familiar. He ordered the pyre to be set ablaze, and waited, crouched by a dormer, behind the immense façade of his Tudor mansion, in a room set aside for the storage of useless valuables. Scarcely daring to breathe, he waited till the rain had washed away the ashes.

No one was about. When he came to, it might have been a birdless morning, dusk or break of noon, for all the difference it made to the louring clouds. He’d expected to find charred remnants of the pyre from the night before, and took his coffee black to set the mood, never turning his eyes toward the window where, through a gap in the muslin curtains, he could have viewed the location of the mound’s remains against the rise of a hill foxed with sprays of buttercup. He had figured on a heap of charcoal, and felt no need to verify his assumption by peering through the lattice to ponder. It would have covered a broad area, roughly the shape of an ellipse, and faced the manor house like black bones from some fallen star, threaded with acrid smoke. The coffee sloshed in a shallow pool at the bottom of his cup. The dregs at center formed the pupil of a lifeless eye. He crushed a half-eaten biscuit. Crumbs dropped on the unblinking “eye.” He stirred the mixture to a mush and drank it down. The servants, perhaps were still asleep, or in the cellar tending to the sacks of grain—more likely, nipping into the hogsheads that held their master’s private stock, stretched out beneath the taps with gaping mouths, eyes shut to the vault of cobwebbed laths and the beetles dangling above. This time he would not go down, candle in hand, to rouse the overseer and his corpulent spouse from their torpor. He would not take horse to seek them out in some dark corner of the estate, where they might likewise be, sprawled beneath the conifers by a bubbling gully stream. Today, after his crouching sleep, there were no servants, or none to be recognized as such, for all was still. Only the wild grass moved, shivering in pale waves.

Above the tall blades, where yesterday a dolmen stood behind the mound of burning weeds, a totem rose, wide enough for a man to enter at its base. He had come upon it suddenly. Wherever he left the manor house, he made it a special point, for his private amusement, never to look beyond the toes of his boots. He drew near enough to where he knew the rise of grass to be crowned by the dolmen. For weeks he had heaped uprooted weeds before this primeval gateway, whose slabs of speckled stone were overgrown with moss and ivy. The dolmen, disguised by the undergrowth, had become an impenetrable arbor. Its ancient powers of magnetism seemed irretrievably lost. Perhaps some weak spark would have remained, to be ignited when the right words were spoken of the proper gestures made. But now the dolmen and the wild thicket that surrounded it had unaccountably vanished. Magus VII looked up from his boots to see a towering monolith in its place.

The totem resembled nothing he had seen in his books and travels. It seemed, at first, to be a random, and completely senseless, combination of abstract, vegetable and mineral concretions wedged one into another so that the borders of each became a zone of metamorphosis, a limbo of transitional substance which bled its branching framework along the length of the monument in an endless variety of solidified eruptions. A ruff of honeycombed windows girdled the summit of this lighthouse far from the sea. Its panes bellied out a froth of convex bubbles, shrinking, as the eye followed them down, into dingy egg-yolk larvae from whose turgid veils emerged the contours of coiling foetuses, ragged snails and sea urchins. Beneath them, small covered porches jutted, screened by scalloped windows which threw the blinding glare of the sun back on his eyes. As he walked, his shadow stretched before him, undulating over the rise to the smoky ellipse where the weeds had been consumed. Held in place by facets of blue mica, leaning prows nodded their ornamental heads from the next level of the totem. Below them, nested within a crust of lichens, the dead ends of a few coffered galleries were thrown into dark relief, counterfeit recessions in depth, leading nowhere, cloistered by the limaces that slid across their inner walls. He mounted the hill toward toward the monolith’s base. Its fringe of skeleton wings gave him shade in which to scrape the mulch and ashes from his boot heels.

Then he turned, and rapped twice with his knuckles on the burl of the totem door. Waiting, he felt a breeze lift his tremoring collar, never daring to look back for fear that the charred remains of the weed mound had, like the dolmen, disappeared. Wind flattened the acres of grassland behind him. As he listened for a  footfall to sound from within, he studied the patterns in the grain of the wooden door, hoping to discover in its terraced “land-scapes” some key to the enigma of what he now understood to be the Second Tower Move. He ransacked his memory for all that pertained to the Mad Player and the tragedy of the Ruined Tower. Many of the same elements could be found here, but in reverse. The burning of the weeds had been his own idea—an offering to what or to whom, of whom or of which, we know nothing. He continued to stare at the door. Not even its immobile flight of severed heads, human and animal, or the moveless passage of androids toward an abyss of whirling seas could provide a clue. And no one had come to answer his knock, to open the knobless door.

He pushed at it with the toe of his boot. The door fell open, without a squeak. Though the canopy’s shade had accustomed his eyes to murk, the blackness within was so dense all light appeared to stop at the threshold. He hesitated, expecting at least a slight change. Impenetrable blackness persisted. Taking a deep breath, he gripped the lintel overhead, for some bottomless gulf might yawn a step away, and planted first one foot, then the other, inside the totem.

The floor seemed solid enough, but was so riddled with abrupt hollows and protuberances that, after letting go of the lintel, he had to step gingerly to avoid falling. For a while, he groped without aim or method. No outside light, however diffuse, could penetrate the interior of the totem. Now and again he looked back at the doorway, which had become a dwindling frame for muddy fields, and saw the crest of the distant hill, the sky and trees, set as in a lifeless porcelain miniature. He looked for a sign of movement there, and tiptoed back toward the open door. The landscape seemed to flatten more with each step forward. No new stretch of grass lay beyond the foreground. The laws of perspective had suddenly come to nothing.

He was afraid to leave, afraid that if he were to step outside the doorway without having solved the totem’s riddle he would be lost or become a faceless figure in the landscape He knew, somehow, that he needed to discover the hidden stair which led to the false galleries he had glimpsed on his approach, and proceed from there to the turret honeycombed with a thousand concave windows—the eye, or perhaps the brain, of the totem. He stood beneath a species of whisper whose warm breath echoed from the upper blackness, dying in oscillations of air and silence. Not a twitch of movement, and yet that brief death of the whisper, scarcely reaching a level of sound, touched a deep nerve in his ear and caused him to lurch into an obstable which, happily, prevented his fall.

A bannister. His fingers ran along the curve of varnished wood till they were stopped by a wall. A wall, mossed with velveteen or some fuzzy mould. As he groped around the newel post, his foot made contact with the bottom step. Slowly, he began to climb. Seven steps up, his palm grazed another mossy wall. His fingertips strayed to its corners. Tapping gently with his knuckle, he found this second wall to be hollow, and hoped to spring a catch that would make it open. This time he did not have to wait.

He heard a rustling on the other side, and felt a sudden yielding of the wall to a surge of violet light. It pitched him onto a willowy carpet. When the spots faded from his eyes, he saw a form standing in a furry nimbus. A silhouette against a curtain of purple flame.

The post Excerpt: Anonym appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

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There can no longer be any question that, with Proust and Joyce, Franz Kafka endures as one of the towering fig­ures of twentieth-century literature. Of the three, Kafka’s works have commanded the most varied influence, in part because they addressed themselves to fictive conditions which soon after became the realities of a German Europe whose “administrative” efficiency brought the Kafkaesque to life in a manner far exceeding its namesake’s wildest visions. Yet even Kafka has his predecessors; his work devel­ops narrative techniques initiated by Kleist and Flaubert, two writers with whom he holds much in common. One need only read the eight Novellen of Heinrich von Kleist —particularly “Michael Kohlhaas,” that arresting study in futility — to know the measure of Kafka’s debt. As to the influence of Flaubert, it is the search for le mot juste, the ruthless pruning of extraneous material, the care lavished upon minutiæ that lends the Kafka text its haunting sub­stantiality. This detracts not a whit from Kafka’s originality, for no matter how bizarre an author’s work may appear on the surface, if it is of any lasting consequence its roots lie deep. In this regard, the link with Flaubert, whom Kafka saw as the ideal of the dedicated artist, may shed light on the nature of what has sometimes been considered the chief obstacle to an appreciation of his fiction and is, at the same time, the cause of much bewildering and contradictory exegesis.

Today there are at least three distinct schools of Kafka criticism, with twice as many shades of gray between. The fiction, if not the parables and paradoxes, continues to at­tract controversy largely because misreadings of the texts themselves, principally the novels, has led to profound misconceptions of their “meaning,” as though a simple formula sufficed to place Amerika or The Trial within the sphere of religious allegory, Gnosticism, Marxism, Freud­ian psychology, Surrealism, Existentialism, le nouveau roman, etc. The case is further complicated by the fact that there is a grain of validity to all such assertions. We know that Kafka himself was fully aware of the Freudian aspect of his work vis-à-vis the father; his interest in Judaism (especially the mystic wisdom of the hasidim) was sincere, though he makes it plain in the famous “Letter to His Father” (November 1919) and in his other correspondence that he is not in any sense a true believer — it is only toward the end of his life that Kafka becomes an ardent Zionist, probably more from concern with social experiment than out of religious zeal, for in a letter of 1922 he still describes himself as “alienated from the Faith.” All this notwithstanding, there is a pecu­liarly religious tone to the statements Kafka makes about the act of writing. He sees in the creative effort — the process as opposed to the content of a work — a “diabolic element” sustaining the “dark power” that destroys his life and without which, paradoxically, he would be crushed by madness. His is a body of literature emerging from fear and insomnia, a demons’ bridge let down between the hellish tortures of the night and the deceptive calm of daylight where the machinations of a writer’s two familiar fiends, “vanity and sensuality,” can pass unnoticed; its process is the nocturnal quest for nothing less than salvation, which Kafka knows lies forever beyond his reach because, for him, to write is to enact the occasion of his death without dying, to purchase a brief reprieve of amnesia from the inevitable by his refusal to live. Kafka would describe his coming demise to the last intimate detail and, in doing so, achieve the condition of “self-forgetfulness” so indispensable to an author whose own voice must be silenced in order that full expression be given to the dark forces within. Thus, Kafka recedes behind his work, effacing himself until no Kafka is left to suffer the evidence of his imminent annihilation. According to Kafka, the process eats away at the writer’s ego, is proof that “the existence of a writer is an argument against the existence of the soul.” Here Kafka found himself on the horns of a grim personal dilemma: the creative effort had cost him the life he might have lived only at the price of madness; the writing itself, if it forestalled that madness, nevertheless cut him off from life without ever bringing him nearer to salvation — it was “the reward for serving the devil,” and considering his one alternative, he could not have done otherwise, for the gradual detachment of the soul from what he called the ego allowed him to abandon his ego willfully rather than live the anguish of waiting for it to be taken by death. All this Kafka confided to Max Brod in a letter written during the period in which he was feverishly at work on The Castle. It would appear difficult to reconcile these desperate pronouncements with the cool, almost passionless control Kafka exerts over the style of his writing; and, indeed, such has been the case with commentators who have mistakenly applied Kafka’s statements on process to the content of his novels (witness the remarkably nonsensical “Homage” of Thomas Mann to The Castle). This confusion is understandable; the Flauberstian ideal of detachment seems at odds with an unleashing of the inner demons until we recall that Kafka’s surrender to the darkness results in “self-forgetfulness.” Yet there is another, more profound reason for the disconcerting plentitude of “meanings” educed from a novel like The Castle. Consider the labyrinthine basis of its structure, its cause for being: the deliberate subversion of plot and character by a rich construct of ambiguities.

The Castle presents the reader with a problem of navigation, yet is written so that all attempts at navigation are calculated to founder. Like Flaubert, Kafka refuses to meddle in the action; when he does comment, it is only to further an ambiguity. Statements seemingly straightforward suddenly appear to have been tentative, their accuracy deflected, reduced to nil. Kafka repeatedly deletes passages, often whole scenes, in which his characters tend to reveal strong emotion; he refuses to let them upset the delicate balance he has established between the hypotheses and the realities of life in the village until, with the progress of attrition, reality becomes so dubious that only hypothesis remains. His characters are enigmas to one another, even, one thinks, to themselves. K., his shadowy protagonist, wishes to reach the Castle, to live and work in the Castle village, but why? Why do the Castle officials take such pains with a man whom they would prefer to dismiss? “Why” collapses under an elaborate scaffolding of contradictions, hence the accusation that Kafka is “vague.” This alleged vagueness is precisely what has fostered the divergence of critical opinion cited earlier, enabling Kafka’s flag to tower at half-mast above a number of literary ideologies. But Kafka’s ambiguity, far from being vague, is rigorously controlled by the precision with which it is evoked; there are no idle metaphors, and because everything said about the Castle and its relation to the village is suspect, nothing can be ignored. Every sentence, to the last word, must be taken into account. Since “why” yields only a tissue of qualifying explanations that cancel one another out, we must examine Kafka’s use of ambiguity, asking “how” rather than “why,” if we are to find at least the shade of an answer to his mysterious novel. The ambiguities in The Castle consist of two basic types: image and equivocation.

A man, designated by the lone initial K., arrives late one evening in a snowbound village; thus, The Castle begins. K. stands on a wooden bridge and sees nothing but mist and darkness; no sign of the Castle, only an “illusory emptiness” into which he stares for a long time. It is suggested that K. knows nothing of the Castle’s existence, or that he lies when, at the inn, after being told he will need a permit from the Castle in order to stay in the village, he replies, “What village is this I have wandered into? Is there a castle here?”[i] Immediately after this admission of ignorance K. reverses himself, countering the threats of a young man “with the face of an actor” by assuming his own rôle, claiming to be the Land-Surveyor whom Count Westwest, of the Castle, has been expecting, and whose assistants, unavoid­ably detained, will arrive in the village on the following day with his “apparatus.” When the hectoring young man telephones the Castle for verification, K.’s claim is denied. Just as K. is about to be hounded out of the inn, the Castle suddenly rings back to confirm his story. An odd chain of events, to say the least, made odder by the appearance of K.’s “assistants” on schedule; they are known by name to the villagers, and have come from the direction of the Castle. K. does not recognize the two young men until they identify themselves; then, enthusiastically, he asks if they are not “my old assistants, whom I told to follow me and whom I am expecting,” which fools no one. We learn much later that the assistants have been sent by the Castle to cheer K. up because he “takes everything too seriously.” Accord­ing to the official who dispatched them, K. “has just got to the village and starts off thinking that a great experience, whereas in reality it’s nothing at all,” nothing because, as the Mayor points out, all K.’s contacts with the authorities have been, like the emptiness that shrouds the Castle in the night, “illusory,” and only K.’s ignorance of the Castle bu­reaucracy has led him to believe they were real. The Castle’s strange acceptance of this “nothing” provides K., in turn, with an illusory apparatus.

In the opening pages of the novel, K. gives the impression of a faceless sleeper attempting to direct the action of a dream that threatens to become a nightmare. But he is not dreaming. He seeks to impose his wishes upon others, seen and unseen. In chapters one and two he succeeds to a remarkable degree as the active force in a kind of chess game, bolstered by the Castle’s acceptance of his “challenge.” K. views himself as the aggressor, and Kafka pointedly refers to “the greatness of his enemy and of his ambition.” The Castle officials immediately become K.’s unwitting accomplices, for their “indecision” gives him the early advantage; he has put them on the defensive, laid the burden of proof, so to speak, upon them. Unlike Kafka’s two previous novels in which the protagonist receded, much against his own intentions, an increasingly greater distance from the goal, The Castle presents an intruder, an agent provocateur who has “the hardihood to make the first advances.” K., as initiator, must affect a certain stance with characters who, like him, convey the self-consciousness of actors not so much unsure of what their rôles are as of how they are to be played. On the fragile basis of a look, a gesture, words which may of themselves be wholly innocuous, K. determines his moves in the contest; all explanations of his behavior, by himself and others, are smothered in the unrelenting ambiguity of the text. One might say with equal incertitude that K.’s reactions are those of a paranoiac, or at times schizoid, or that he is merely acting out of caution to mask his hand from villagers upon whose trust he can never allow himself to rely. His motives remain obscure. One senses a gradual erosion of purpose, due more to fatigue than to any faltering of determination, as contradiction piles upon contradiction. This loss of control is evident from the very beginning on the part of the Castle, whose surrounding emptiness never quite solidifies and becomes only less “illusory” after K has asserted himself, in truth or falsehood, as Land-Surveyor. At first glance the Castle simply appears to be another, more distant village; some days later, at dusk, as K. stares beyond the town at the Castle, its contours are “already beginning to dissolve.” As with the novel itself, “the longer he looked, the less he could make out and the deeper everything was lost in the twilight.” A similar ambiguity of image, with something of the dream about it, envelops the figures of Klamm, K.’s reticent superior, and Jeremiah, the second of the zany assistants. When Frieda, the taproom girl, allows K. to peer through the judas into Klamm’s office at the inn, he espies a corpulent gentleman seated at a desk, a somewhat jowly face lit by an incandescent lamp hung low, whose reflection in the lenses of his pince-nez obscures his eyes; when, moments after, Frieda tells K. that the man, though upright and clutching an uncut cigar between his fingers, is asleep and always sleeps thus, it comes as a surprise — K., taking little note of what might lie behind the reflections, has naturally assumed Klamm to be awake. Jeremiah’s case is rather more bizarre: in the interval of a few hours his physical appearance changes so radically that K. fails to recognize him; the obstreperous youth has metamorphosed into an older, wearier man, become a “puppet, which sometimes gave one the impression of not being properly alive.” Jeremiah’s image has been altered to render his character ambiguous; he is almost literally a shadow of his former self, consumed and near delirium with fever toward the close of the novel when he confronts the equally exhausted K. This question of identity-in-metamorphosis returns us to the elusive Klamm.

Klamm’s image, like that of the other Castle gentlemen, is kept alive by rumor but at the same time rendered hopelessly inconsistent because the knowledge we possess of his habits, his comings and goings, his idiosyncratic sexual escapades, and even his physiognomy, rests entirely upon a dislocating sequence of equivocations. Eyewitness accounts of Klamm are conflicting. Barnabas, who must work directly under him as K.’s liaison with the Castle, can never be sure “whether it’s really Klamm he speaks to or not,” for Klamm “is reported as having one appearance when he comes into the village and another on leaving it … he’s almost another person up in the Castle.” Almost, an important qualification when we acknowledge Barnabas and his counterparts as being so preoccupied by the cases they must put to Klamm that they have little time for distraction during their brief, infrequent audiences with him. Klamm may only seem to be a man of many faces; perhaps this confusion of identity has a perfectly natural explanation: none of the so-called eyewitnesses has ever had sufficient opportunity to fix an image of Klamm in his mind. But what of the landlady? Due to some shady former connection with Klamm, she appears to know much more about him than any of the other villagers. If Klamm is one person, if his image remains fixed in the landlady’s mind, her elliptical explanations nevertheless allot him a certain measure of anonymity. He speaks to no one, and not even the landlady professes to be “capable of seeing Klamm as he really is.” In a passage deleted by Kafka, Klamm’s secretary Momus informs K. that Klamm “cannot endure the sight of” him, implying that K.’s insistence on waiting beside Klamm’s sleigh in the Herrenhof courtyard has caused the Castle official to waste two working hours hiding from K. in the inn. Klamm will evidently go out of his way to avoid a confrontation; I say “evidently” because this Eighth Chapter, as it stands, has a more ambiguous ending: the horses are unhitched on Momus’ orders because K. has stubbornly refused to abandon his post, hence Klamm is unable to leave for the Castle. Eventually, all trace of K.’s footprints in the snow is obliterated by the coachman to spare Klamm’s feelings. But just as Klamm’s pathological reticence seems established, further equivocations ensue, first from the landlady, who puts Klamm’s alleged shyness down to the interference of anxious secretaries charged with his protection; of course he “will never speak to anybody whom he doesn’t want to speak to, no matter how much trouble this anybody might take, and no matter how insufferably forward he may be; but that fact alone, that Klamm will never speak to him, never allow him to come into his presence, is enough in itself: why after all should it follow that he isn’t able to endure seeing this anybody?” In a passage deleted from a later chapter, Erlanger confesses to K. that “Klamm, my chief, has been a little uneasy during the last few days, at least it seems so to us who live in his proximity .… that does not mean he is uneasy — how should uneasiness touch him? — but we are uneasy, we around him are uneasy and can hardly conceal it from him any more in our work.” ­

This uneasiness of the Castle gentlemen — the driving force behind Kafka’s novel — attains its fullest expression in the crucial Eighteenth Chapter found among the author’s papers and published, with what are now the closing chapters, fragments and variants, in the fourth German edition of The Castle. K., returning sleepless to the Herrenhof in the early hours of the morning for his audience with Erlanger, tries the nearest door and inadvertently awakens the wrong official, one Bürgel, from a fitful doze. An electric lamp burns on a night-table by the bed, suggesting that perhaps Bürgel has not been asleep after all but had only pulled the quilt up over his head upon hearing K.’s quiet knock. He seems afraid, and his form stirs “uneasily” beneath the bedclothes until K. identifies himself; then, apparently satis­fied, Bürgel flings back the quilt, sits up, and launches into an extraordinary discourse on the workings of the Castle bureaucracy. In this deliberately tedious monologue, this masterpiece of equivocation delivered on the pretext that it will have a soporific effect upon Bürgel’s tendency to insomnia, we catch the distinct scent of fear, the gradual erosion of purpose and organization which has begun to overtake the Castle. One learns now that if K. were in full command of his wits, and not half stupefied by the craving for sleep, he might turn the situation to his irreversible advantage. Though aware of the danger, Bürgel cannot refrain from laying bare the “nocturnal weakness of the secretaries” and even seems relieved to do so, in spite of the possible repercussions. He openly admits that because of the necessity for night interrogations “the allegations of the applicants take on more weight than is due to them, the judgment of the case becomes adulterated with quite irrelevant considerations of the rest of the applicants’ situation, their sufferings and anxieties; the necessary barrier between the applicants and the officials, even though externally it may be impeccably maintained, weakens, and where otherwise, as is proper, only questions and answers are exchanged, what sometimes seems to take place is an odd, wholly unsuitable changing of places between the persons.” The forced intimacy of the nocturnal interrogation weighs heavily upon the Castle gentlemen, sometimes leaving them so vulnerable that they grant what, under better conditions, would have been easily deduced as an unjustifiable request. Thus, Bürgel must give voice to the disquieting metamorphoses taking place in his room, by which K., through the indifference of exhaustion, becomes his silent auditor and allows his aporia to run wild. K’s unexpected passivity puts him on the verge of gaining the upper hand at last in a subtle, indefinable way, for Bürgel is clearly at a loss and from this point on, the barrier lowered, his explanation of procedure almost takes the tone of a soliloquy by one of Beckett’s half-demented wanderers. Bürgel and his elusive colleagues must live with the unsettling possibility that an applicant will surprise a secretary other than the one to whom he has been summoned, and that, should this secretary happen to possess a “certain degree of competence” in the case, he will be compelled to work on the applicant’s behalf, regardless of his own feelings. Now, fallen into a species of verbal delirium, Bürgel asks, without waiting or caring for an answer, “You think it cannot happen at all? You are right, it cannot happen at all. But some night — for who can vouch for everything? — it does happen .… what we are concerned with is a matter so rare, actually existing only by way of rumor … that there is, therefore, really no need to be afraid of it. Even if it were really to happen, one can — one would think — positively render it harmless by proving to it … that there is no room for it in this world. In any case it is morbid to be so afraid of it that one hides, say, under the quilt and does not dare to peep out,” precisely Bürgel’s action upon K.’s entrance into the room. He is terrified because the unthinkable has happened; his unspecified but “certain degree of competence,” however slight, compels him to make an offer of his services. He is prepared to follow up on the case. K. has only to ask his aid. At times Bürgel’s imagery becomes improbably romantic; he compares the hypothetical applicant to a “robber … in the forest,” who takes by force what the officials would not otherwise be able to grant him, leaving them to brood over their impotent misuse of power. He even goes so far as to speak of K. in the third person; though not wishing to compromise his position by a direct exchange that might lead K. to make the fatal request for assistance, Bürgel cannot let the matter drop, and, with “the loquacity of those who are happy must explain everything” to his hypothetical applicant, must show K. “how extraordinarily rare and how uniquely great the opportunity is … how the applicant, though he has stumbled into this opportunity in utter helplessness such as no other being is capable of than precisely an applicant, can, however, now, if he wants to … dominate everything and to that end has to do nothing but in some way or other put forward his plea, for which fulfillment is already waiting, which indeed it is already coming to meet, all this one must show; it is the official’s hour of travail,” and Bürgel must reveal all, must, if K. puts the dreaded question to him, accede to whatever he asks, “even if … it positively tears the official organization to shreds,” because to pass the matter over in silence would be a serious breach of his duties. To extend the famous parable from The Trial, Bürgel and his colleagues join K. and all of Kafka’s protagonists as men before the Law. The Law, inexorable even to those who serve the tottering administration that is both its scaffolding and the potential instrument of its demolishment.

When we recall “the greatness of [K.’s] enemy and of his ambition,” his combativeness in the face of bureaucratic evasions, and the administrative error that is reported to have led the Castle to recognize, at least provisionally, his unsubstantiated claim to be Land-Surveyor — an error which, once committed, cannot be undone, because the Law in such an instance provides for the applicant’s pro­tection — it is small wonder the officials have something to fear. K. need no longer prove his case. The obligatory concession to his request by a vulnerable secretary such as Bürgel, who under the regulations is powerless to refuse him, will almost surely bring the Castle edifice to its knees; therefore, when K. remains in the deserted passage after Erlanger’s departure, an uproar ensues: one of the officials, reluctant to leave his cubicle, begins to ring his electric bell, and the others chime in until the landlord and his wife come to remove K., who is then informed that he had no right to linger there after concluding his business, “for the delicacy of the gentlemen was limitless .… during the period of K.’s presence they were probably trembling with agitation and the morning, their favorite time, was being ruined for them. Instead of taking any steps against K., they preferred to suffer …” It has been said too often that K. wishes only to legitimize his claim and be accepted into the village society by those who sit in judgment upon him. But one cannot, after all, believe K. would rest content with anything less than possession of the Castle. “You see,” Kafka wrote to Max Brod a year before he began The Castle, “it is as if my life task had consisted in taking possession of a house.” Kafka refers to his fear of love and what he viewed as the awesome responsibilities of family life. For K., how­ever, the motive remains obscured; his attention wavers at precisely the moment when the goal lies within his reach. Bürgel’s logorrhea deadens K.’s already weary conscious­ness into insensibility. K. sleeps, hears nothing, and thus will be unable to put forth the fearful request, while Bürgel, with jesuitical hypocrisy, fulfills the duties of his office to the letter and manages, by the sheer luck of K.’s fatigue, to evade the dire consequences. There is no judge, no accuser, only a complicated series of veiled maneuvers by two parties equally in the dark. K. has had the advantage of being the aggressor and he will continue the assault, in a gradually more deliberate yet circuitous fashion, past his loss of consciousness in Bürgel’s room; the Castle gentlemen will continue to live in fear of him. ­­No allegory here, it is nightmarishly real; which is to say, no single satisfactory “meaning” can be culled from this immense welter of contradictions, half-truths and outright lies that has fed the mutual, ultimately futile deception of two enemies. The emptiness of the night obliterates all trace of the Castle and is illusory, hence the Castle is real even if its architectural properties appear to be inexplicably altered from time to time; K., though a man of solid flesh and bone, becomes the illusory Land-Surveyor, the specter of an administrative error committed years before, come back to haunt the Castle gentlemen. In the end, one is completely at a loss to say whether design or chance has triggered the chain of events recounted in The Castle. One is no longer concerned with meaning — the work is far too equivocal to be leveled, its foundation far too fluid — but with a process, with how that process comes to annihilate itself in ambiguity so as to occasion the failure of K., the failure of the Castle gentlemen who will never be rid of him, and the failure of all ­­critical interpretations of the novel itself.

One last equivocation. In January 1922, shortly before he began The Castle, Kafka suffered what he describes in his diary as a “breakdown.” His writing of The Castle was abruptly terminated by a second breakdown in August 1922. The novel, then, is delimited by two states of nervous collapse and remains, like its antecedents Amerika and The Trial, unfinished. There is every reason to believe that, had his health improved, Kafka would have completed The Cas­tle. This presents us with an unforeseen critical dilemma. Kafka’s minor lapses of attention, which would normally have been corrected, are left standing, though we cannot know what they may have been because even a minute inconsistency is rigorously consistent with the ambiguity of his text. This, in effect, is the second level on which the novel operates, an irony richly to be savored by the con­noisseur. It is indeed fitting that a writer whose work has engendered at least three contradictory schools of criticism should, by neglect, leave behind an unfinished novel of such intricately-woven depths of exclusion that it becomes impossible for even the most “textual” of critics to distin­guish an intended blind spot from an unintended one. No metaphysics can ever hope to circumscribe The Castle, just as no fully coherent explication suffices to lessen its fatal mystery. Kafka’s diary entry for May 8, 1922, written at a time when he must have been giving serious thought to Bürgel’s monologue, warns off all interpreters: “Would you call it a conversation if the other person is silent and, to keep up the appearance of a conversation, you try to sub­stitute for him, and so imitate him, and so parody him, and so parody yourself.” What could be more Kafkaesque?

*

According to Michel Carrouges, Kafka’s attempt to evoke an indestructible realm beyond the tangibility of mortal things foredoomed his novels to incompletion and drove him up against “the sheer wall of the unexplored and the inexpressible.” Just as Kafka seems within reach of his goal the disintegration takes place; the closer his words come to the sheer wall, the thinner they become, until the distance to be crossed is less than microscopic and at the same time untraversable: ambiguity, so essential to the approach, destroys the possibility of arrival. This critical impossibil­ity of the thing that obliterates the object it completes is at the source of Daumal’s anguish before the geometric spectacle of his annihilation and in the denudation of the senses described by Vankirk under hypnosis, in Nicholas of Cusa’s “coincidence of opposites” and Mallarmé’s collision with absence in a small Venetian mirror; as the dissected arm of a criminal in Rembrandt’s painting it becomes an almost tactile emblem of disequilibrium, neutralizing the traditional implications of the punitive anatomy in much the same way way that John Kovacs’ existence is neutral­ized when rain eradicates the sole surviving letter of his name on an old receipt. The words and the images shatter. Our modern art lies rooted in a tradition that begins with Sterne and Rabelais, passes from Flaubert, the Symbolists and Kafka to Joyce and Beckett, and continues on. The sense of imminent textual collapse, of words suspended over an abyss of time, matter and memory, is present to a high degree in such diverse masterpieces as Ulysses, Nightwood, To the Lighthouse and Under the Volcano. All return to stillness. The stillness of death.

And death is inconceivable. Aeons after our annihilation the cosmos will have dwindled to an aphotic mass or exploded into infinity.

The post Essay: “Annihilation,” Part Two appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

(From Accidental Monsters)

ceremonies are a dim memory you
can get the old ones to talk of
anything but that they’d rather
make something up than admit to
what no one chooses to remember
natural cataclysms in a distant
past when the ground yawned and
cities were swallowed up behind
mammoth dust-clouds such legends
are all too easy to come by but
if you ask about the ceremonies
they tell you to look out for a
certain pebble or to read what-
ever patterns the wind makes in
the sand they would rather tell
lies than confess to what real-
ly happened and no one wants to
break the conspiracy of silence

May 30, 1976

***

LXXII
(From The Catwalk Watch)

empty streets then shadows late in the afternoon
that rippled a footfall echoing across the pavement

after the search they returned to their homes
empty-handed-most of their wives gone to the grave
or white-haired crones rocking by the windows
with no memory of why or how their men had left them

the survivors met at a beer-stained table
under Japanese engravings that hung
in the dark of the tavern

their barman had died during
the long years of the search-
some wondered why
they had ever bothered to return

July 10, 1978

***

The Smoking Mirror
(From The Silent Mirror)

for Marie-José Fortis

the great conundrum — a tree falls
in a forest and no one’s there -
does it fall?  is there even a tree
a forest?  who poses the question?
answer: the woodsman leaves no tracks
the brown leaves crumble of themselves
someone has become no one

it happened so long ago
it almost slid beyond the grip
of memory — the poet saw his daughter
moving toward the door
and knew she had gone mad -
as she put her hand to the knob
he called her name and she turned
to face him: between that moment
and the next the poet had become
an old man on the verge of death
alone in a room with a phantom
“wait” he whispered loudly enough
for her to hear but already she was
staring back into an empty chamber
and when she turned away her skirts
only seemed to rustle as she walked
noiselessly into the outer hall
closing the door behind her

dilemma of what one can only ever see
in reverse — the old cities are full
of men that have stood at the snare
waiting for the last disguise to drop
and reveal the face of the prey -
they’ve watched their children die
seen their wives in a stranger’s bed
smelled the jackal’s breath at their back
but one dazed look seldom if ever strikes
full on the eye it was meant for:
the old cities’ houses have grown
thinner than a bloodless dream

I uncorked the apothecaries’ bottle
and let the devil out — he hobbled toward me
on a pair of brittle ivory crutches
doffed his jeweled turban and bowed
“I’ll make the town roofs vanish
and show you who lives where and how”
I put my hand to his silken sleeve
and we were off — the roof tiles turned to glass
then disappeared beneath our eyes: we looked
upon the living dead in their tombs
and each was standing before a mirror

and Asmodeus said  “this woman
is Claire Duchaste or Deborah Démeny
whose second name comes from a dream”
one side of the looking-glass no one sees
just what Claire sees and Deborah sees
neither Claire nor the room where Claire
stands naked on that threadbare Persian rug
yet Deborah too feels or thinks she feels
the breeze from an open window touch her body
and absentmindedly scratches her hip
at the same instant which finds Claire’s
fingers brushing a mosquito from her own
“if Claire exists and can be touched
flesh to flesh by anyone other than herself
then all is well with us” Asmodeus whispered
“but if Deborah Démeny is the real one
then we two are less than the mosquito
we are nothing” for both Claire and Deborah
lie one beyond the other’s reach -
neither can ever be of the other -
the mosquito crawls on the blind side only
and this is the place of strangers:
the blind side of an unkempt dream

“let me go or bring me to the place
where I can sit and watch the thing
that happens in the dark” it was
his voice I heard his voice or mine
among the shadows on the other side

of the latticework — you poke your fingers
through the holes you come up against
the frozen smoke — I can see you there
I cannot see you no that was the lie
but I sometimes hear you breathing
or feel your teardrops falling
on my toes as they strap me in:
they’ve left me just enough of myself
to know I might at some time
pull the match from my pocket
strike with my thumbnail and tell
my story in the language of another

concessions to one fact -
that the flame sparks white
settles to an unsteady glimmer
goes out in the damp of my palm -
all I have seen will still
be less real than this blindness:
no more than a groping-place

the stairs run two directions — one to the horizontal
one to the vertical — they cross through doorways
under the shadows never meeting
carrying their bitter embassy to evaporation
and cast a silver stain upon the wall:
a mirror robbed of all images

someone peers into it
rapping his knuckles on that warm ice
as one might knock for the echo
inside an empty skull — the murderer
and the artist are one dissection of
a single face from youth to death -
the mirror alone abides without a dent
to scar the underside of its mask:
from there the light is always out
the room deserted and the staring eye
a stone interred in an upright pool

March 1985

***

Villa of the Mysteries
(From Catafalques)

what I could feel on my eyes
blank spatulate tips of stone
cold against the heaviness of the lids
hands caked with coal slivers and dust
and no ointment to salve the horror
of the haunting ground below

I entered by way of the lowest gallery
was interred in the well of the underlings
stretched out on tufts the earth grows for hair
shading its worms with a bone garden
the darkness licking at my tongue
the ebb of the heart’s cage murmuring

blue mountains beyond the crumbling colonnade
calm sea and not a single sail to shatter
the monotony of the curtain in the web
my face behind a thousand fading mirrors
from the first to the last unrecognizable
open the books and the pages will fall away

the woman held a gram of stardust
in her palm the glitter of forgotten eyes
more moist and naked than her flesh
green against the hedge she was lying
on her belly arched her haunches and smiled
as though no one were there to see

none but she to peruse these antiquities
cenotaphs with turning heads the glances
of sepulchral monuments embedded in
the lawns the tiles the terraced flagstones
where lizards cooled themselves beneath willows
and dreamed the dream of the dragon’s doom

dream of the monster Blindness
that creeps through the pillared halls
stops for the echo of its breath off the walls
to tell the distance it has yet to cross
to find the bleeding core of the Villa
and wipe death’s glaze from its eyelids

Tiresias in rags sifting the volcanic ash
for buried centaurs found a hoof
tugged at the desiccated fetlock
till a flank emerged and the face
came up black its eyes the sightless rubies
he could touch but never see the blindness of

the rest of the unhealed prophets lay
four to a room with the unforgiven
the olympians and the dead messiahs
chained to their bedposts clothed
as the tree is in high summer
crowned like the goat-footed god

over cavernous noises their screams
carried far into the woods
unlocked the oblong doors to the trees
the upright tombs whose rusted hinges sighed
to find a voice through the red dust
a lying-place under the silence of the moon

this forest of women their bodies
half transformed like mermaids
made of flesh and tree bark
warms at the pale loins where
the brown moss merges with the trunk
and the sap flows into the roots

their life’s blood meanders below ground
beneath the silt and through the ocher weeds
to drench the Villa’s ancient voices in the night
and there the toothless mouth will yawn
at the blade’s edge of sleep the eyes
will roll before they open on the blackness

bard in the boreal night bearded and strange
a glass moon hangs above your stubbled head
flakes of brittle snow shuddered by wind
cry farewell to the land of the sun
that spirals over the eucalyptus tree
farewell to swamps and their slithering venoms

this is not mine but the dream of another
who has never seen my face or heard my voice
but whom the womb separated before birth
when I too was breathing water and mist
gilled for an eternity in the grotto where no sound
could reach him untranslated by these liquid depths

May 1988

***

 Ice Fields
(From Ghost Light)

the mule crawls under
its cart and lies there
for close to a hundred years

an old man lets half a room
to the woman he hopes will
see him into the grave

black smoke billows
from a shattered window
now there’s time to forget

if I could inch it forward
without choking on my own air
like all the others here

less left of me
to make these words
you will never read

October 4, 1993

***

Found Objects
(From Earthworks)

a border of black spitting snow
the last thing you see
before losing consciousness
a darkness that has no meaning
followed by disintegrating outlines
of leaves or a path beside
a crumbling house

something moves in what
a second later becomes the grass
the dream begins
but it is not your dream

a fat man in a three-piece suit
waddles in to give you the bad news
you are nothing more and a great deal
less than the faded wallpaper
whose designs you admired
in a past life

a hand emerges from the þoor
a diamond bracelet around the wrist
you’d like to hock it but can’t
summon up the nerve
to tear it away

people still walk the streets
even at the break of noon

that thump in the heat duct
is the last gasp of winter
it plunges into your veins
before you can pluck it out

you are lying there unable to move
something comes into the room
you feel its weight on your back
as the blade penetrates your rib

nothing but a small speck of sky
someone will look up to it
for an instant before
poisoning the well

April 1, 1996

The post Selected Poetry of Eric Basso appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

If a cup of water be placed on the chest, there will
be no movements of waves or ripples on the surface.
—  Spriggs, The Art and Science of Embalming

Over [seventy] years ago, a terse, cunningly-moving tale by the Hungarian novelist Lajos Zilahy appeared in Esquire magazine. Its English title, “But for This … ‚” was perhaps three words too long; the ellipsis would have sufficed for what remains to memory of a journeyman car­penter forty-nine years after his death, when the last of his “effects,” a receipt for services rendered, is left to fade in the rain, letter by letter, until the name John Kovacs, his name, obliterated, will never again be seen, spoken or imaged in the mind of another. With laconic eloquence, Zilahy traced the progress of an identity toward inevitable extinc­tion through a series of bleak anecdotes written in unen­cumbered prose. No more, no less. This brief but haunting inventory of loss, soon anthologized in The Bedside Esquire of 1940, has fared far better, to the modern eye, than some of its more “substantial” companion pieces — stories by Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and other luminaries of the time — yet it cannot be called a “modern” text, nor could it be claimed, with any merit, as an exemplar by one or more contemporary schools of literature. “But for This …” is simply a work that has managed to “get through” with something more, perhaps, than its author had put into it. After thirty-five years of nondescript living, John Kovacs’ solitary demise presents us not with the death of a man, but with the death of a fragment, followed by the eventual ten-letter dissolution of a name in ink, the fragment’s final remains. This ten-stage effacement begins with a burial and ends with an innocuous receipt. Disconnected vignettes replace the traditional plot to effect a calm dismantling of the text. The narrative is stark, linking fortuitous events which have common ground only in recollection of a van­ished man or in the relics he has left behind. All vestiges of plot and character are subsumed in a process of eradica­tion, an emptying of objects and images as prelude to the ultimate denial of human existence, for each paragraph will disintegrate into the closing ellipsis of the story, never to return. “But for This …” is powerfully disturbing because it restores all things to their essential vacuity by depriving them of human associations, correspondences which once raised them to the level of secular icons. Such is the toll of annihilation upon men and things. Such is its endless fascination.

The human head may be taken as an ideal model for the contradictions inherent in animastic annihilation. Consider the case of a corpse newly dead and in full habit; that is, of one who has died without suffering the ravages of starvation or disease. The flesh lends itself readily to a close, pore by pore examination; its finest details gain an incredible sharpness by virtue of their immobility. Nostril hairs, commissures of tooth and gum, shallows between half-open lips where the tongue curls in the dry cavern of the mouth, these are subtleties that go far beyond even the most skillfully crafted waxworks effigy, though the skin, through the slow gravitation of blood to a lower depth, assumes the pallor of dulled candlewax. Often, as in litera­ture, a physiognomy much troubled in life can ransom a few lost years from the brief repose preceding rigor mortis; fretlines may yield to a smooth, unaccustomed complexion as the eyes flatten under their lids, settling fast in the skull’s sockets. There are, as yet, no blatant signs of decomposi­tion. Somatic death — the death of the body — will occur only when the last of the cells has ceased to function, when the hair and the nails no longer continue to grow. But the mind’s annihilation is the true death of what the body represents. When the cadaver is that of a close relative or a long-standing friend, its subsistence after death seems all the more incomprehensible, for the intricacies of the hu­man organism are suddenly brought into vivid focus. To the living eye, this utterly useless aggregate of facial details becomes a plenitude of absence, a meaningless husk, soon to be shoveled under. Yet for many it remains the icon, the personification, however deceptive, of the perished brain; hence, the almost primeval necessity to fill the void with totem and ritual. The untreated corpse, subject like any vegetable to imminent decay, enters into mystery.

January 1632. Adriaan Adriaanszoon of Leiden, alias het Kint or Aris Kindt, hanged for the crime of assault and bat­tery, lies on the dissecting table of Dr. Nicolaas Pieterszoon Tulpius in the theatrum anatomicum of the St. Anthony Gate, a weighing-house in Amsterdam; a young painter, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, is present and records the event for posterity — it is his first major commission and marks a crucial stage in his development as an artist. This painting, generally known as the Anatomy of Dr. Nicolaas Tulp, is unsettling for many reasons, not the least of which is the personality of its cadaver, Aris Kindt. The dead crimi­nal reposes in the full vigor of oblivion as the renowned doctor and members of the Guild of Surgeon-Anatomists press solicitously around him. Kindt appears oddly in­flated; with him, so unlike the other figures in the canvas, there can be no question of an illusory sense of movement.

Rigidity has set in, thickening the taut muscles of the thorax; their unnatural distension conceals the broken neck from view. Kindt’s facial expression corresponds exactly to the given signs of death; few artists have captured this mask of absence so well — one thinks of the severed heads painted by Géricault, whose studio at the time was said to resemble a slaughterhouse. But the most extraordinary thing about Rembrandt’s depiction is that what it gains in realism by his portrayal of the face, it immediately loses by his clumsy rendering of the dissected arm, which seems to rest quite limp upon the corpse, its nerves pinched back by the bloodied forceps of Dr. Tulp. That distorted arm, peeled and flattened into the semblance of a rubber glove, lies in astonishing contrast to the body proper by virtue of its stylized simplicity; it remains the single most arresting detail of the composition. One’s gaze runs from the face of Aris Kindt to the dissected arm, and from there to the keen glance of Nicolaas Tulp; but the wandering eye always returns to that arm, that salmon-colored objet trouvé which inhabits the painting like some exotic coral dredged up from the deep. In short, the left arm of Aris Kindt is monstrous, for, though it is the main focus of attention, it nonetheless strikes a profound discord, a counter-texture as it were, bred of a foreign substance which simultaneously destroys the unity and coherence of the image it completes. Paradoxically, the Anatomy of Dr. Tulp is held together by this one inharmonious element. The flayed hand, in that calm yet tense setting of the theatrum anatomicum, is a fatal lure, a contradiction, a scandal, because Aris Kindt remains unmoved.

Young Rembrandt surely had access to anatomical at­lases in the possession of Tulp and his colleagues; one may conclude that the appalling unreality of the dissected arm arose either from technical deficiencies or for want of a model — it must not, then, have been wholly intentional. Dr. Nicolaas Pieterszoon Tulpius, by skillfully laying bare the internal mechanism of an arm and hand, somehow in­tensifies for us the disturbing impassivity of his victim, and thus reveals the most unsettling “lesson” of the punitive anatomy. Rembrandt, breaking a time-honored precedent of concealment, has crafted a thing with the face uncovered; we see it plain, and from the shock of unrecognition it elicits comes a sudden realization that the doctor and his “pupils” are in the presence of an utterly useless object, a compost of meat, gristle and bone upon a narrow table. Aris Kindt will be fully coöperative; he will not bat an eyelash; he will not speak. He will keep death’s counsel, indifferent even to dismemberment and to his own methodical evisceration.

This impassivity of the corpse before the surgeon’s knife, and the effect which it produces upon the witness, plays a compelling rôle in the theatre of the public anatomy.

It is midwinter. Imagine yourself chilled, leaning over the balustrade of a high, elliptical gallery – one of up to six that rise, steeply terraced, from the depths of a small, shadowy arena under a domed skylight. Should the demonstra­tion take place after dusk, you may be standing level with a massive ironwork chandelier, festively candled against the gloom. You peer down the deep well into which a sacrifi­cial victim has fallen prey to men in black within the circle of illumination — the cadaver of a man or a woman lies on the swivel table. Toward the circle’s edge, where light fades to an amber penumbra, skeletons wired upright at the joints clench banners inscribed with legends calling the spectator to witness the vanity of human existence, the inevitability of his decay into bones. In the anatomical theatre at Leiden, the skeletons of a man and woman stood beneath a tree, depicting Adam’s fall from grace.

The Miltonian exchange of heaven for an apple, one bite of which brought death and pain into the world, robbed man of his dignity before the angels, and made Lucifer the equal of God, enters into the ritual dissection as an archetypal reference, unspoken yet subconsciously under­stood by all who crowd the ascending galleries. This harsh mythological annihilation of man’s hope lends an air of solemnity to the vivid actualities of the anatomy lesson by imparting a sense of drama in its most elemental form: the allegory. Mors ultima linea rerum, all splendors are fleeting, life and the world pass quickly away as the scythe takes its recompense. The symptomatologies of death are scarce enough to cloak, in seemly metaphors, the naked facts dis­assembled under the very eyes of an audience which has assumed the part of Hamlet before Yorick’s skull.

That Rembrandt’s group portrait is an act against death, a narrow victory over the ravages of decay, cannot be doubted; but it is also, in its way, a celebration of death. As in the punitive anatomy itself, the corpse triumphs over life and pain by an act of stillness. The subject under dissec­tion is an abyss within matter filled by the witness, who is, of course, the true subject of both the punishment and the expiation.

*

It was Flaubert, I think, who once confessed that he could never look at the face of a beautiful woman without imagining her skull. Listen and you can almost hear the bones rattling beneath Emma Bovary’s petticoats as she glides across the dingy parquetry. Her boredom, in the Baudelairean sense of the word, is the mask of living death par excellence; her smile, when she smiles at all, betrays the scent of leisurely corruption. A portion of the skull pres­ent there, behind her lips, a discreet memento mori, recalls her face to its impending anonymity. One smile uncovers a death’s‑head grin, degree zero between the perception of an existence and the idea of Void.

Nihil, naught, nil, nullity, nonbeing — prevalence of the letter N in all matters pertaining to extinction. The philosophical dinosaur has labored hard, over the years, to situate, define and comprehend what remains, in essence, unnameable. Neither numbers nor obscure etymologies can ever hope to limn the concept which, in poverty of language, we name Nothing, for words, even of neutral connotation, subsist at one remove from the noumena: Void and Absence. An approach to silence fares no better, though it carries us somewhat closer to the reasons for this conceptual failure. Silence, put obliquely to the uses of simile and metaphor, is “understood” in terms of the rela­tion it bears to noise; but the absolute Silence continues to elude perception. John Cage, in expectation of the Silence, had himself shut into a clinically noise-proof chamber, yet still heard a faint blood-pulse and an ultrasonic whistling in his ear. Another sensation, not so much of the Silence itself as of a counterfeit sound within the mind, appears in quiet moments to make a prolonged meander through some inaudible current between the ear and the brain. Of­ten an abrupt noise can trigger the “negative” of its own fleeting echo; unlike a pebble tossed into calm waters, this negative proliferates not a sequence of geometrical configu­rations but an endless winnowing, a chain of labyrinthine variations which push their listening-hollows deep into the silence that at each instant swallows them back. It is as though whenever absolute Silence seems about to bridge the gulf between annihilation and existence, a bogus infin­ity, harbored in the most opaque crypts of the drowsing consciousness, rises like a warped mirror, masking in its depths the threatening actuality of Void. All this, by way of approximate imagery, and one comes only a little nearer in description, which is nothing.

Nothing. The locution has a varied and imprecise mean­ing, is no more than a tragically inept transliteration of an idea which lies beyond the pale of evidence, and which, for that reason, has become, to couch it in the worst of all pos­sible phrases, an article of faith. A modern cabalist might perhaps deduce more than one enigmatic cipher from the long series of letters that, up to this very sentence, and to these very words, make up a portion of the speculative es­say titled, “Annihilation.” The text itself, like many another, contains an abyss of unwritten texts whose characters will differ from reader to reader and, in the mind of its author, from night to night. Thus far, it has attempted an approach to Void by way of silence, and to the Silence by way of words. Only words remain.

Thoughts exist, save in a few purely poetical cases, an­terior to language. If, as Henri Poincaré suggests in “Le Raisonnement Mathématique,” a region of the brain func­tions preconsciously, by some obscure proto-mathematical operation, to eliminate all but a decimal’s worth of the constant flux of subliminal articulations that swarm like an ocean of larvæ below the threshold of our inmost senses, then this limbo, which accounts for the greater part of our mental lives, has been doomed since birth to perpetual oblivion; it resides, in chaos, hidden from a consciousness nurtured in language and tending always toward an idea of order. In nuce, the workings of the mind are pure mystery. When the chemical origin of a thought is finally isolated in the test tube, the thought itself will elude us. Phonesis, words and written characters come into it much later, the last of a discreet chain of metamorphoses in which every second link is unrelated. Little wonder that a true under­standing of Void lies beyond our grasp. The whole edifice of language collapses before it like a house of cards.

Constant emphasis has been laid, for want of any suit­able alternative, upon the relation of Nothing to existence, though the two (note the gulf about to open) hold noth­ing in common. What does the previous sentence suggest? Within the opening capital and the period, the word nothing, logically correct in its placement, takes on a ka­leidoscopic variegation of meanings; one can draw either a positive or a negative inference from it. The word, unlike the thing which it denotes, is a snare. Let us take the para­dox of Nothing one step further by way of this caution: Nothing — if, indeed, it exists … Here we see that nullity of abstract words dear to the philosophers, words which, as Paul Valéry was correct to point out, are essentially hollow. Void is not, in any way, shape, or form, at the mercy of dialectics. Void is not in any way, shape, or form, for it lies in contradistinction to the totality of human experience. Logic, our sole means of approach, itself a species of void, exists within its own vacuum of intricate methodology, sac­rosanct in that it cannot be acceptably refuted save by logi­cal argumentation; to do so, one would be forced to take up the very practice one condemns. The paradox lingers. We tend to think of Void as emptiness, vaguely intimating the possibility of an enclosed space — however vast, how­ever dwindled — to be filled by some nameless presence. According to Descartes, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Under the cir­cumstances, one would do better merely to say, ‘Ego?’ or to omit all but the inverted commas, which by now, too, have become superfluous.

Thus we have the conscious mind, always at one remove from its core of being, able to conceive an idea of — but unable to know — itself, and, by such ignorance, reducing all notions of personal identity (which implies consistency) to a nebulous comedy of ever-changing masks. The “quest for the self,” viewed in this light, becomes the most absurd and insidious of popular delusions, a modern dream of Narcissus lured to his death by the image in water.

No mirror, in itself, possesses an absolute worth this side of death; no word, taken alone, has a meaning wholly unto itself. A mirror exists, apart from surface glass and silvering, as a form of camouflage, a window into nonexistent space beyond the domain of all but one sense: sight. Whatever vision brings to a mirror is obliterated when the eye turns away from it, for there can be no reflections, no counterfeit depths, without an eye to register them. The blind man’s house has no need of mirrors. Rooms elsewhere, deprived of sight or human presence, may exist before the moment someone enters them — until that moment, their mirrors will be blind.

By October 1864, Stéphane Mallarmé had developed the habit of scrutinizing his face each night for long hours in a small Venetian mirror. The goal of this seemingly innocuous exercise was to attain such a degree of passive concentration that his image, after a wraithlike period of transition, would neutralize and become one with its background. This neutralization was no mere optical effect brought on by prolonged staring. Mallarmé appears to have confronted his reflection not so much as the outer hide of his being — the carapace, as it were, through which a lesser mind might sound the depths of a soul — but rather as one confronts an unknown who has become all the more strange for possessing one’s own features in reverse. The distance across which this reversal of identity into other­ness occurs, doubled by the mirror’s surface, is half mirage; there lies a vertical plane, midway between the seer and the seen, whereon the true annihilation of both Mallarmé and his demon fixity collide. And if one gazes long enough through the point of zero visibility, the place behind anni­hilation may, in its turn, give way to a haunting ideal — in Mallarmé’s words, un fantôme nu, a “naked ghost” latent in the mirror. One such phantom he named Hérodiade.

The “Scène,” part two of Mallarmé’s triptych fragment, Hérodiade, was the first of the three sections to be written, the fruit of his interminable nights before the Venetian glass. Hérodiade lives, attended by her aged nurse, alone in an Idumæan tower. Her mirror is likened to a smooth, ice-covered pond submerging dormant leaves, the with­held substances of her memories and of an ageless past of memories anterior to her existence, a tenebrous primeval history. Far from being the lust-tormented Salomé whose lips burn for the Baptist’s kiss — his head, nonetheless, will hurtle through the blinding ecstasy of space in the poem’s third tableau — Hérodiade pines to enter the kingdom just beyond reach, where her mirror-image is the idol. The enigmatic distance between Hérodiade and her reflection, untraversable because it stretches across a timeless dimension that mimics space, color and form, light and shadow, gives the poem its unique static force. All movement, life itself, seems frozen under a prolonged suspension of words in convoluted syntax. Mallarmé has discovered that the mirror is a hypnotic lie, that its falsehood, cradling the stuff of man’s primordial impressions, is preferable, is indeed the only possible alternative to “the Nothing that is truth.”

The same decade in which the Impressionist painters began to dismantle light with dabs of pure color saw the composition of Hérodiade plunge its poet into a densely intricate warp of obscure languagy and imagery. Intel­lectually, emotionally, Mallarmé had wagered and lost everything in creating Hérodiade. Like his high priestess of sterility, he arrived at a terrible impasse, the negative and irreversible culmination of all his earlier works. Hérodiade’s desire to be one with the naked phantom in the glass, her passage into the mirror, would be accomplished only by an act of suicide; Mallarmé committed just such an act in writing the poem — it brought him to the very edge of be­ing and left him nowhere. The poem begins with the key word, abolie, “abolished,” and is itself a work of demolition, the abolishment of an inaccessible ideal. A year of intense moral crisis followed upon the young poet’s abandonment of Hérodiade, the “frightful year” of 1866–67; then he was saved, paradoxically it would seem, by Hegel’s metaphysics. But there had already been a tacit acceptance of Void, the background against which some great future Work might come to be written, in Mallarmé’s blinding of the mirror. Thenceforth he would make his poems windows into non­existent space.

*

The annals of mysticism are rich in narratives of a very peculiar kind. Meister Eckhart, Blessed John Ruysbroeck, Jacob Boehme, St. John of the Cross all write of a privi­leged “moment,” remote from human notions of time and three-dimensional space, when all contradictions are re­solved by the perception of a vast, eternal harmony that goes beyond the adequacy of words to express. To Western mystics the experience often manifests itself as a sudden and overwhelming illumination. This transcendence al­most of mind and body is by no means confined to the as­cetic; abundant “secular” documentation exists to indicate hundreds of similar occurrences in the lives of ordinary men and women—one also finds the “moment” described in works by Blake, Dante, Shelley and Rilke, to name but a few. In Eastern religions transcendence can become a way of life, the reward for years of mental and physical austeri­ties; supposedly one may acquire the talent to conjure up the “moment” by an act of will, paths to which are mapped out in the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and other sacred texts. The mystical experience must, nevertheless, be sharply distinguished from “visions” seen by the starving, sleep-deprived anchorites of early Christianity and from the dreams of the Old Testament prophets. In hallucination, as in sleep, there seems to remain a constant link, however tenuous, with the intellectual modus operandi; hence, a dream or mirage, subject only to the common failures of memory, offers itself, after due process of transcription, to some fatidic interpretation. The sibyl may speak indirectly, but no matter how mysterious her words at first appear, they are what they are so that the adept can reinforce the veneration of an arcane tradition by their decipherment. Such visions, dreams and Delphic incantations fall well within the resources of language; their “signification,” tainted by the spiritual bias of the recipient, need not detain us. What is important is their profound difference from the so-called “awakening,” which has sometimes been described by the mystics themselves as the experience of annihilation.

Nicholas of Cusa, the renowned fifteenth-century Christian mystic, speaks of a “coincidence of opposites,” implying that there is some point at which reason and logi­cal comparisons will cease to have meaning; at such a point the visible and the invisible merge: matter and spirit are one in the Deity. The higher understanding of this oneness, however, lies beyond all power of communication. Much of the literature touching upon mysticism sets great em­phasis on this stumbling block and suffers, in consequence, from a profusion of vapid generalizations and maudlin, ethereal clichés. Yet it is precisely these often insipid grop­ings toward expression that render accounts of the mystical experience so convincing. For Nicholas of Cusa, Creation and Void, no longer sundered by a barrier of contradic­tion, reveal, as of one substance, the presence of a fixed yet all-encompassing point: God. The actual knowledge of this supreme order and harmony “which passeth understand­ing” comes, minus the intercession of language, like a color from outside the spectrum; more than pure thought, it is not so much a thing which the organism absorbs but rather the thing that absorbs and, by implication, annihilates the organism in a “moment” of timeless ecstasy. It should be remembered that nearly all written and oral accounts of the mystical experience, though they differ in some particulars, are one in the sentiment that with the intellect’s absorp­tion into the universal harmony all sense of contradiction between being and nothingness ceases — the abyss assumes its place in the cosmos. It is not, then, a question of polar­ity, of “higher” or “lower” degrees; all densities of matter, from the most rarefied to the most concrete, dovetail at a common point with all that is unformed and uncreated, as motion dovetails with stillness, sound with silence. Thus, when Nicholas of Cusa expresses this “coincidence of op­posites,” he means to tell us that word and symbol have become a site of ruins, unutterably drained of meaning in the face of one privileged “moment” akin to death.

Over a century ago it was thought that the act of death could somehow be isolated, arrested in the brief limbo of time between existence and extinction. Edgar Allan Poe’s terrifying “Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” though a fiction, was widely believed to have presented an authentic account of mesmeric suspension in articulo mortis when published in December 1845, and as such attained in­stant popularity here and abroad. The hapless Monsieur Valdemar’s seven-month vegetal ordeal of mind and voice drew its author into a flurry of heated correspondence with professional, crank and lay enthusiasts. In some instances Poe was hard put to debunk his hoax; the idea that one might commune with death itself seems to have been, over and above the more repugnant aspects of the tale, too com­pelling a wish-fulfillment for the morbid reader willingly to eschew. The groundwork had been laid a year before with “Mesmeric Revelation,” a less sensational but far more in­teresting “report” in that it is something of a dress rehearsal for Poe’s cosmological treatise, Eureka, which was to influ­ence two generations of French and European Symbolists. Eureka has often been dismissed as worthless by shortsight­ed critics, many of whom are doubtless unaware of Poe’s profound importance in the history of world literature, a status relating as much to his speculative writings as to Roderick Usher’s hyperesthesia or to the proto-Baudelairean black cat; such criticism fails to take account of either the philosophical or parapsychological ambiance informing the practice of mesmerism, a practice which, ostensibly for literary reasons, came later to be the wellspring of Poe’s speculations on the materiality of the cosmos. His, after all, was the epoch in which the Romantics, and Balzac, had appropriated Swedenborgian dialectics to their own uses; the sometimes hazardous craze for table turning reached epidemic proportions in the U. S. and Europe within five years of Poe’s demise, affording countless amateurs the delusion of séance with a world of woodpecking “spirits.” Chicanery went hand in hand with the tastes of a period rich in hoaxes, nostrums, real and bogus automatons, snake-oil cures, and the waning though still powerfully sinister presence of the secret society. Mesmerism was in the thick of it, and Poe, an avowed skeptic who often gleefully assumed the rôle of charlatan, combined the two most pronounced ­­and contradictory aspects of his work — the analytical dæmon and the hoaxer — in “Mesmeric Revelation,” whose protagonist maintains that trance closely approximates a state of death.

Vankirk, the subject under hypnosis, perceives existing things directly, without the intervention of those “idiosyn­cratic organs,” the five senses, for they are merely the excess baggage of his “rudimental life,” a life held in momentary suspension. The medium of this perception is, of course, indescribable. Unlike the mystics, Vankirk couches his images in pseudoscientific language; he approaches his tentative explication of universal order in terms reminis­cent of Lord Kelvin or Faraday. His theory of “unparticled matter” (a description of God) anticipates the ’pataphysical investigations of Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll. Under the influence of trance, his senses in abeyance, Vankirk succumbs to an inner denudation; he experiences bizarre simultaneities of thought: words and phrases, though still recognizable as such, become mere sounds devoid of meaning. The appar­ent contradiction arises not so much from an insufficiency in Vankirk’s, or Poe’s, rhetoric as from the dislocating effect of the fact for which experience provides no analogy, namely that words, while they may no longer “signify,” remain none the less identifiable for what they once represented, though all concepts of representation have vanished and, with the now-vestigial senses, been rendered obsolete by the mesmeric state.

Pending evidence to the contrary, one must assume that these hypnotic “revelations” are based on erudite hypothesis rather than firsthand knowledge. It is always tempting to view Poe as a maddened opium fiend, yet recent biographi­cal intelligence shows him to have been, certain tales of the arabesque aside, a more prosaic, if intermittent, drunkard capable of sustaining prolonged bouts of genteel sobriety. Like Dickens, Poe may have actually dabbled in hypnosis, but such experiments alone cannot fully explain the almost Einsteinian depth of his grasp of ontological relativity. The denudation of time, space and the senses described by Poe would seem, in mesmeric trance, to be much the same as in the mystical experience. Eureka (1848), which he consid­ered his magnum opus, expands the earlier hypnotics into an astonishing cosmological system; it is, in every sense, a true and fitting document of the life of a mind. Yet its sub­stance remains hypothetical. We must look to the career of René Daumal (1908 – 1944), French poet, ’pataphysician and Sanskrit scholar, for the most extraordinary evidence of perceptual dislocation.

Daumal offers the example of a man who, from his ear­liest years, was obsessed virtually to the brink of illness by the idea of annihilation, and who, quite young, resolved to confront that idea head-on by whatever means he could command. Daumal’s hope that, beyond the “anguish of nothingness,” an “imperishable” absolute might yet exist led him, at about the age of sixteen, to embark upon a se­ries of dangerous experiments. His findings were set down in two remarkable texts. “L’asphyxie et l’Évidence Absurde” and “Le souvenir déterminant” bear witness to some pre­cocious researches into the nature of sleep, consciousness and death. Following in the steps of Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, Daumal concerns himself with the phenomenon of attention — attention carried beyond the point at which a mind normally loses consciousness of its existence. First alone, later in the presence of friends, Daumal inhales fumes from a handkerchief doused with carbon tetrachlo­ride in order to place his body in a state approximating physiological death. He passes through the initial stages of asphyxia against a rising tide of sleep; waking life seems an “inconsistent illusion” to him, yet at no time does he completely lose contact with his surroundings, though they come to be veiled, distanced by an ironic certitude which he knows will soon be forgotten. Clinging tenaciously to some splintered remnant of consciousness, Daumal dooms himself to witness, perpetually, his own dissolution, end­less recapitulations of his loss beyond time and place in a vicious circle of “evidence” consisting, on the visual plane, of vivid red/black phosphenes — circles inscribed within triangles — metamorphosing one into another according to an “impossible” geometric movement that engulfs the space around him, a warped, non-Euclidean space curving, at all instants simultaneously, toward the “central idea of identity” which it annuls.

This ironic certitude, this évidence absurde in which Daumal experienced, at one remove from nothingness, the spectacle of his own annihilation, proved a source of unbearable anguish; held in thrall by a “sentiment of the irreparable,” he felt himself suspended at the perimeter of a maddening paradox. Given that the phenomenon of as­phyxia transcends language, Daumal, to his credit, manages to describe his sensations without succumbing to the vague spiritual formulas which tend to mar similar accounts written by the mystics; his choice of wording is precise and of an almost scientific objectivity, at least enough so that oth­ers who have known this dislocation of the moi will under­stand. The irremediable paradox of Daumal’s situation lies in its unmasking of the fact that contradictions exist only because to admit otherwise — as he now must, ironically, to save himself from annihilation — would be to disrupt all preconceived notions of the “truth” of the very process by which we reason. In testing the frontiers of consciousness and death, Daumal has had to withhold a small fraction of his moi to be the observer; this, then, becomes the focus of his anguish, arising from a realization that the nature of what he observes exists in blatant contradiction to his now fragmented sense of identity. The évidence absurde can, and does, resolve itself only in Daumal’s perpetual dissolution, for he is the flawed molecule in a universe of impossible harmony, the one remaining contradiction to be obliterated.

“L’asphyxie et l’Évidence Absurde” and “Le souvenir déterminant” are of capital importance to the study of an­nihilation; they comprise rare secular documentation of an experience all too frequently informed by mystical or pseudo-religious hysteria. The necessity to observe, to maintain, at whatever cost, some shred of attention as consciousness drifts toward the moment of syncope and death, places René Daumal on a plane apart from the mystic writers, and raises serious questions about the validity of any religious or “spiritual” convictions that might issue from such an experience. Now, some fifty-five years after Daumal’s initial experiment, with a formidable battery of hallucinogens at our disposal, after dubious accounts by the thousands of “oneness” with the cosmos, we might do well to remember the incomparable Illuminations of Rimbaud, and that that poet later renounced them as delusions.

Part two of this essay, which focuses on Kafka, among others, will be posted on Thursday.

The post Essay: “Annihilation,” Part One appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

***

Before the mask. I must at least go through the motions for as long as the antitoxin can keep me awake. An increase from 0.5ml. of a 2,000 million per ml. vaccine, given as the first dose. My eyelids are get­ting heavy. A little while, and yet a while longer, to follow the tick of the clock (corner-of-the-eye hallucinations: livid specks that seem to jump out of the walls before a glance decomposes them), and I will have begun to dream. A window impossible to distance. Somewhere beyond the grimy panes there was, there is, another room, high above Promontory Wall, where he used to spend his time.

1.0ml. Behind the tree, the window. Fog too thick, at first, to cast even a faint reflection in the clouded glass. There, above the porch roof. Slate tiles toward a rusty gutter with the creak of something that rocks in the lower branches, no guttering water, not a sign of rain, though the air was leaden and damp. He waited, stretched out in his bed with the light off, for her footfall on the stair. He must have been down there, the old man, the antiquarian, leaning back, his cane chair squeaking from across the green of the tabletop the night the landlady died. The canaries had gone to sleep. Then, by degrees, the mist swallows up the image with its shifting forms and hidden noises. It comes back to me.

No one dies of the plague. One simply never wakes. When they first began to nod off in the streets, I took them for dead. The fog had not yet settled like a pall over the city.

1.5ml. I could almost see him then, the Ancient Wanderer, walking out among the sleepers. He had thrown a veil over the dark pools of his eyes and went from one to another with lamp in hand, or as an undulating shadow on a wall of water. The narcolept. Their faces turned up to him. In the empty streets. From the stairs I heard him breathing white smoke under the lampposts, down to the docks where keelboats and schooners were no longer even silhouettes. He walked alone to the end of the jetty. Somewhere behind the last crab shanty there was a noise of splashing water as he threw himself into the bay. Once, he came at night to the theatre. No one had cause to recognize him. There, from the edge of the darkness beyond the footlights, he showed his sad face to the actors. He was sitting alone, marking time by sketching a maze of webs around their bodies the night the old man saw him.

The metabolic process remains more or less normal, or normalizes according to the needs of sleep. As long as in­travenous nourishment is provided, there is no reason at all why the patient cannot live out his allotted span of life in dreams. Glucose. Tubes to drain off the liquid excretions. Growth of hair and fingernails continues long after the last evacuation of feces. Always, whenever too many of them have been gathered in one place, the overpowering stench of sugared urine.

2.0ml. No effect. To keep myself from dozing off, I reset the alarm every five minutes and tried to picture the moon, which no one has seen for weeks. Before the mask, it was a lot easier to get around my office without knocking drug samples and specimen tubes off the cabinet tops. A full moon every night, large and yellow, under clouds swept by wind across the heavens. Something I’d read in a book. In cutting the eyeholes, I hadn’t followed the pattern closely enough. Whenever I ventured out, or if I was called away, I had to be careful of where I walked. A distinct fall-off of light toward the edges. The moon had all but disappeared behind the trees. The silvering that limned the rooftops passed, and I was alone in the streets. They must have come for me before morning. A half moon every night, blood-red, hovers near the horizon. Without stars or light, he waited for her footfall on the stair. He was in his room, stretched out on the mattress. The mattress leaned against the wall, by the window. He had stretched out on the bare springs to keep from turning over. A waning moon each night the map hung under a sheet of glass. Second window. What I can see of the mist from here. The old man is leaving, going down the wooden porch steps. He will not return. He has taken almost everything. By degrees, piece by piece, until nothing remains but the smile in a pool of lunar clouds.

Something more that runs counter to every precept of medicine. Just before the plague of sleep, another name­less disease had taken form. Those who were exposed to the contagion began to dematerialize. They were only half there, as though the accumulating mists had wanted to eat them alive. Since the brain was almost the last organ to deteriorate, the victim was forced to suffer in full con­sciousness not so much the fading away, but the agonizing process of starvation. At first, the skin became a mass of ef­fervescing dust behind which the internal organs gradually came to appear. Once the victim had reached this stage, a normal examination became impossible. The desire to eat remained; but, as the disease took its course, any solid or liquid nourishment placed in the mouth fell through the floor of the buccal cavity to the ground before it could be swallowed. The internal and external musculature remain in working order almost to the end. Temperature seems to play a crucial rôle in determining the degree of dematerial­ization of any given part of the body. The pathology, here, is elemental. The tip of the nose, the ears, the toes, and often the buttocks, being anywhere from a quarter to a full two degrees cooler than the normal bodily temperature, tend to retain their density over a longer period of time than those organs and tissue which are normally concealed by the epidermal layer. One way to retard the illness, then, would be to keep the patient constantly exposed to the cold which, however, would almost certainly result in pneumonia or some other complication. The process of dematerialization is such that, once the cutaneous envelope becomes affected, the glands, the musculature, the lymphatic and circulatory systems, being from one to four degrees warmer, will already be too far gone by the time the skin has begun to effervesce, removing all possibility of an early diagnosis. The ­­incubation period is unknown. One cannot be absolutely certain that the dematerialization is in any way connected to the endless sleep.

2.5ml. Another opening. Then the old man must have known something. Before the mask. Before the mist. To imitate the buzz of the flies. It deflates. Without light, the putrid blot spreads over it, driving them mad. From room to empty room. Old, tumbledown crates. Shreds of crumpled waxpaper. And if I dare to close my eyes. Another street. In a strange part of the city. I was with her, upstairs with the one who died. Before the fog. The flies. What passed for a bed, a night table by the curtained window, the faint ellipse of lamplight thrown up on the wall, bending out along the ceiling’s end. If this was the room. One without a clock. The ticks. It was much easier then, without the eyeholes or the goggles to fog my vision of a moonless night. Without stars. I could see her leaning in the doorway at the top of a long flight of stairs, where the light had begun to seep through. An opening, yes. I went on tiptoe. Late in the afternoon. In the morning. On a moonless night when the noise of the traffic was not so loud. If I closed my eyes, she would be there in the half-light of her room because my office was too far off, though I would have preferred to have her there, like all the others. Someone must have told him about it the night the landlady died. He must have been told. They would have come for me. Before morning. Upstairs, where so little remained of what we knew. All the rooms were empty, except one. The room with a second window on the mist. A bit more of the warbling. One of my patients sang like a nightingale. Other silhouettes. The flies. And all because the rats, as rats are wont to do, were making a bit of noise on their own, sniffing amid the wood shavings for a crumb of cheese the cat had carried away. In my eyes, the steps. One at a time. Like all the others. A soft tread on rubber mats nailed to the wood. On tiptoe in the night. The flies. The fleas. All that remained to be collected was lost to him. He had relinquished any rights he might have had to the landlady. Old jukebox colors tinged with a fading redness in the air. By way of recompense. Be careful, one of the steps has a loose mat. Squeak by squeak. The odor I could smell, always, on my hands. I have to go now. The police will handle everything, I have to go. Just after five. Scratches. Contusions. Where the lamplight glimmered through. We tried it on the bed. She lay in the shadows. The steps, once more. Not that I’m old. I return, step-shadows dwindling over the tips of my shoes. As I neared the top, she was standing with the light behind her, the one who died, and like the poor landlady after her, not even the unkept promises of the old man could bring her back. I told you to phone the police. Are you deaf? Or he has lost his own shadow beyond the last reaches of the mist. He searches the library alone each night for the words to come to him again. To come while I still have time to remember the ticks, not just a tick at a time. Between which, the notable absence of a clock at the bedside. Standing between the bed and the curtained window. Now, if she wanted to sleep. It would have to be the floor. Soon she would be too far gone. Nothing, at the brink of death, but this coarse-grained shroud of dust sinking through the floorboards, down through the stippled ceiling to the last staircase, and into the bowels of the earth. If they told him about it, he must also know the horror of that night. Her skin took color with the cold, but the bed wouldn’t hold her. She sank under my weight through the mattress. Echoes of the wind passing through old piano wire. I found her under the springs, stretched out beneath the hanging wads of dust, in a shadow.

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