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god and a decade ending with the brief and delirious ruling of acid freaks, post feminists and de-constructors of language

When I thought about the idea of god waking me (or not) I became afraid. There was a German lullaby by Brahms that my then ancient great-grandmother used to sing to me when I was really very little which ended with the words: “Tomorrow morning, if God wants so,
you will wake once again.…”  Our family life was altogether politically non-theistic, except for the great-grandmother who passed away when I was about four, but the idea of god deciding about my waking in the morning was still disconcerting. What if he did not want to? On a whim? Would I just sleep forever? Would I die? What if he plain forgot about me?

When I had asked my mother about the song she had explained to me that the lyrics dated to a time when it was understood that everything – everything – happened only with god’s consent and that these lines, by their content, did not deal primarily with the idea of god remembering to wake people or not.

I don’t know whether that explanation did much to put my anxiety to rest, I think probably not. But it certainly was with relief that one day I realized that I actively did not believe in god. That was an easy attitude to acquire in my family, by the way, and an easy attitude in that decade following the sixties, a decade ending with the brief and delirious ruling of acid freaks, post feminists and de-constructors of language which left a lasting impression on western societies and which was my intellectual parents’ undeniable contribution to a new cultural value system, a system that allowed for people like them to unfold their wings and discover entirely new horizons and ideas.  I don’t remember that we had ever attended any church service. Even wedding ceremonies in my parents’ circle of friends and family were civil ceremonies. No baptisms. Still, God remained a quaint distant relation who, after a history of misfortunes, had found asylum in old nursery rhymes and lyrics. All but forgotten and without charitable visitors, but hanging on.

My parents’ were avidly confessing atheists for many years until older age and the dawning sense of their own mortality softened their rhetoric. And yet, my childish sense of superstition, during the phase of their most decided and articulated stand on the topic, detected an ominous quality to the concept “god” and it took some years and my awakening intellect to overcome the threatening taste the fear of that forgotten but lingering god left in my mind. Maybe god explained and explored would have been easier to understand but I was pretty much left to my own devices to figure out what the idea of god stood for.  I vaguely feared god until I shed that fear pretty much like I had shed the fear of the nightly intruder eventually. Only much later did it occur to me that the elimination of god did not erase the randomness and with it the terror of the unpredictable nature of death.

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page 176 – still in the library

I took out my small compact powder out of my jacket pocket. I clipped it open and looked into the little mirror in the lid. My face glowed sickly pale under the fluorescent lights. Winter pale.  I clipped the lid down, got up from my chair and stepped into U – Z. As I had expected, there was no one there. Velasquez, Varese and The Venetian School, gigantic volumes, with soft, yellow pages lingered pompously yet with a limp attitude between smaller books, waiting to be released from the boredom of their shelf lives. This is what immortality means, I thought, sitting on a shelf as an afterthought to your own life. Maybe to be lifted down every few years to be perused briefly for some kids’ art assignment.  I touched the laminated, slightly deformed backs with my fingers. Books do not endure lamination well, a laminated book resembles a plastic covered sofa. One cannot enjoy it. I apologized to the volumes that were sighing with age and discontent …

I have been working on this novel for a while now. There are passages that I really love, snippets, impressions that convey the atmosphere I want to create. There is also, almost surprisingly, some real plot (unusual for me) and a couple of protagonists I can vividly picture like I can picture friends. The novel could be read as science fiction – or it could be an account of a delusion. I don’t quite know which one it is, but so far it could coherently be read as either and it will depend on the conclusion to point in one direction or the other. Any kind of science fiction could of course be an account of the protagonist’s delusions if one chose to read it like that. This is one reason I chose the genre for this particular coming-of-age story in the first place. Another one is that I have been craving for a playing field for my interest in ephemeral science and have been having a ball researching and reading up on all kinds of science projects with marginal news interest from marine bioluminescence to quantum physics to astronomy.

 

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Library, U – Z / another excerpt

I stared at the girl. She stared back, then, inexplicably, she smiled regretfully, rose out of her chair and smoothly walked over to the bookshelves, turned the corner and was immediately out of sight. Before I could follow her into art books U – Z and ask her to wait, I heard voices. Two elderly women were approaching us through the middle aisle. One of them held a library catalogue card and they both scanned the shelves. “Agnes, Denes, D, don’t think we will find anything here, Marie. Might just as well look for Leon Levinstein, L. Won’t find anything on him either, I bet. It’s all van Gogh and Monet and Renoir, coffeetable stuff. We will have to go to the New York Public Library for Agnes Denes, I tell you.”  Marie grunted. “Now, “ she admonished her friend “we will not know until we look, will we? These libraries sometimes are better than their reputation. Librarians are strange people, and they are in charge. “ The ladies turned corners at “D – H”. Their voices were swallowed by the books. It was too late to try and follow the girl into U – Z.

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the dragon lair

I did not stop at the reception desk but walked straight towards the staircase leading up to the first floor. I felt confident, no adrenalin rush this time.

A demanding voice stopped me: “And where do you think you are going, Miss?” I stopped dead in my track. This was not supposed to happen. I turned around slowly and walked over to the reception desk. A no-nonsense woman, maybe in her mid-fifties, observed my progress critically. When I had reached the desk, I put on my nicest smile and stated: “ I have an appointment with Prof. H. I can just walk straight up, thank you.” “Prof. H.?” the woman inquired. The buttons of her starched and ironed shirt strained against her quivering bust. “Yes,” I answered, leaning over the polished desk a bit, lowering my voice, “I have been working on an assignment she gave me.” That did not seem to impress her much. I waited. “Feeling a bit funny, aren’t we” she answered without any expression. I changed my tactic: “Please, M’am, why don’t you just call and ask her,” I suggested. “Her office is on the first floor.” We stared at each other. She slowly turned red. “Where do you think you are,” she finally hissed, “a fancy hotel? Wall Street?” She exhaled deeply, then inhaled again, as if she was practicing her yoga breath. The shirt buttons were getting a good work-out which I noticed as a detail despite my growing annoyance. Why wouldn’t she just let me find my way as was custom in the building or at least call up? I was certain that Prof. H. wanted to see me just about as urgently as I wanted to see her. But the reception desk lady behaved like a dragon in front of a lair. I thought I could even smell her foul breath. “Listen, missy,” she snarled “I don’t know what you intend by walking straight into a men’s homeless shelter and I am sure I don’t want to know. I do not care whether you are looking for your daddy or grandpa, you have to wait until they come out. What I want, right now, is for you to leave this building through the front door and not bother me any further.” I took a step back. Men’s homeless shelter? I looked around. This was unmistakably the same lobby I had crossed through the last time. “Now. Missy,” commanded the voice of the dragon lady  “… or I will call the police to see you out.”

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space, void of people

I woke up when a hand was gently nudging my shoulder. My neck was stiff. I was still sitting in the library chair. Dr. Hausner was gone. “Miss, I am afraid we are closing.” A woman’s voice. I looked up. Ms. Clarice stood right next to my chair, smiling. All other visitors were gone. I got up drowsily and carefully checked the window reflections, too. All visitors were gone. “Are you alright?” Ms. Clarice inquired. I looked at her closely. Her small golden earrings reflected the fluorescent library lights, transforming the miniature reflections of the library on the convex mirror of the gleaming curves  into a warmer, more elegant version of the actual space. An alternate space more suitable for someone like Dr. Hausner than the mundane space of Summerville library.

“When did Dr. Hausner leave?” I asked. Ms. Clarice narrowed her eyes. She ignored my question.  “You must be very tired,” she replied, “go home and sleep.” “Did you see him?”, I insisted. “Go home and sleep, Miss, I have to switch off the lights now.” I wanted to protest but she anticipated my notion and gently shoved me along. “Come back tomorrow,” she repeated, not unfriendly. We walked down the staircase together.

There was nobody downstairs either. From the winding staircase I could see  the lower floor breathing calmly. The tessellation of the carpet tiles looked like the exposed skin of an ancient creature. An empty library is a marvelous space. Really any space empty of people holds some kind of promise that seems to disappear once it gets populated. When I slowed down to linger on the staircase, I felt Ms. Clarice’s warm hand on my shoulders again, encouraging me to continue down the last few steps. I sighed. “It’s beautiful, the library, “ I said apologetically, “at night, I mean. When all the visitors have left.” We reached the ground floor. I took care not to step on the lines of the irregular tile pattern. I have never been quite able to just move without paying attention to the rhythm of any kind of tile, responding to it in some way, and today was not the day to start with it. Ms. Clarice remained silent while I gingerly crossed the open space. I wondered if I ever would get used to people not answering. Strictly speaking, I had not asked a question though. Ms. Clarice looked the kind of woman who did not have an appreciation for idle conversation.

She waited patiently while I balanced over to the cubbies to pick up my bag. I pulled out my jacket first. A small piece of paper trundled to the floor like a feeble bird. Folded from yellow legal paper. I bent over and picked it up. Ms. Clarice was still waiting for me at the door, so I simply slid it into my pocket, shouldered my bag and walked over. She still smiled, never once complaining about the delay. “Good night now,” she said simply. I nodded. She locked the door right behind me. It was cold outside. When I turned around, the lights in the library had already been switched off. The building looked deserted. I started walking into the evening.

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organic sources of light

“Recordings of what?” I inquired. His smile faded. Again it seemed like he was listening to my voice retreating in the library. “She said you were smart,” he remarked, more to himself. I was not sure that was supposed to be a compliment or a reminder to himself. “Who said?” I cut in. I had the uncomfortable feeling of him looking at me again and I felt reprimanded without him saying a word. “Sir, please, who said that?” I rephrased my words.

“Never leave a question before it has been answered,” he advised me, not answering either one of my questions. He fell silent.  I stared at him, then lowered my glance, then looked up at him again. He could sit perfectly still, looking very much like the archetypical image of a blind man. It seemed to me, again, that I noticed more visual detail than one should notice. More than I could process. The crease of his pant legs, the way the fine wool fabric folded itself, the nuanced shadows in those folds. His white, chiseled hands, holding on to the walking cane even as he was sitting. And yet, despite or maybe because of the rich details  I had an increasingly hard time focusing on him. It was like reading a book when you are very tired already and you can’t focus on the words. You are still reading them mechanically but you do not get their meaning. He faded or rather he diminished in size. He diminished in size but gained in clarity. I wanted to protest. I had a million questions. He looked like an illustration, I thought, feeling very tired, like one of my mother’s illustrations, done in a myriad of very fine, sharp lines. And each of these lines was emanating a fine, very precise, white light.

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coloring idaho

My mother was busy preparing dinner and answering questions my sister had while sitting at the big wooden table and doing her homework. This evening she was coloring and cutting out the states and gluing them in the right place on a map of the US. Both my sister and I hated coloring in worksheets and my mother had brought out her expensive Sennelier pastels to persuade my sister to employ some effort on the task. The map as far as it was completed looked like a beautiful velvet patchwork quilt. You can’t achieve that with your Crayolas. I wondered whether her teacher would be able to appreciate the difference.

Montana was already pasted in its proper place. It was colored in layers of gorgeous deep Indigo and now, with a vengeance, Phoebe was wasting pale Vermillion Orange on Idaho. I sat down at the table and watched her. There is something nice about a little kid coloring in even if she detests it. My mother walked past me and ruffled my hair in a distracted way. It was just as much part of her dinner routine as cleaning dishes right after using them. For a moment I was back in a comprehensible, friendly world. No opportunistic cannibalism, no aliens. Phoebe pasted Idaho on to her map and contemplated color choices for Washington State. “Why do they have to be different colors?” she complained but her heart wasn’t in it, you could see that she did enjoy choosing a new pastel stick. According to my mother you can never work with materials that are too good and you should always strive for beauty but I still felt a bit doubtful whether you actually needed art pastels to complete this kind of homework.

Phoebe still had the whole west coast and Alaska to color and paste and she grunted disapprovingly as she studied the worksheet after cutting out Washington State. Washington was going to be Cinnabar Green. I liked the way she held her tongue between her lips when she had to cut something out or color something in. She looked a lot like Plinius, our cat, after his dinner when he sits down on the table and probably contemplates dessert choices waiting outside in the dark beyond the kitchen door. Phoebe looked like that whenever she was focusing on something. Right now she smeared Cinnabar Green all over Washington. The pastel stick made a fat, smacking sound on the paper. At the kitchen bar behind us my mother cracked an egg. The splintering  was very clear and pleasing to me. I thought that recently I had been much more perceptive to small sounds. Only this morning on my way to school I had stopped to listen to the sparrows hopping over the path to the front door of our school, their tiny claws scratching the bricks. How much does a sparrow weigh? 35 g?

Phoebe looked up. “Mommy?” she asked. My mother looked up from her mixing bowl. “Which language do they speak in California?”

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raving madness

I had seen a lot of strange things recently, but nothing quite matched the moment when I first realized that the girl I had been looking for only existed in the reflection of the mirror. And yet I felt her standing right next to me. I wasn’t terrified. Thinking about that I still wonder about my comparative cool. My heart was beating like crazy and my stomach was churning. I was speed thinking, but in circles. I didn’t think “it’s impossible”, not once since I had ventured out to find Penelope Hofmann had I entertained that thought. But I was coming close to it this moment. All other inconsistencies with reality that I had noticed before had still born small elements of ambivalence that left open the possibility of an explanation to reestablish everyday logic. But there were only two explanations for the incredible appearance in the window: either there were more phenomena possible than had been scientifically accounted for so far – I wasn’t ready to think into the direction of supernatural beings – or I was raving mad. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem directly threatening. I was still sitting here, the girl was still standing right next to me in the reflection of my world in the window, and there was nothing I could do at this moment to change that. Maybe with the exception of an immediate termination of my belief that this was possible. Somehow. I realized at that moment that I would prefer to be raving mad to inhabiting of a world without surprises. I managed a weak smile in direction of the girl. She responded with a grin.

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Leonardo and mirror script

I sat down on my chair and opened my notebook. A yellow, folded over sheet of legal paper slid out and in one smooth gliding motion fell onto the floor. The old lady. I had completely forgotten about her note. I picked it up and unfolded it. The creases were precise like origami folds and still remembered the birdlike fingers folding them with sharp determination. The lettering elegant and even, very pretty, did not at all resemble the kind of handwriting to jot down a passing thought on a small piece of legal paper. I could read it and couldn’t at the same time. I got the rhythm and it seemed strangely familiar. It wasn’t all that difficult to decipher and yet it took a moment to realize how the writing had been transformed without becoming a stranger to itself. Most everyone who is capable of reading will eventually grasp the concept of script as reflected in a mirror. The old lady had been writing in mirror script. Once I recognized that she had used mirror writing I could read it as you would, too. My mother had once told me that Leonoardo da Vinci had used mirror writing in his journals. He only ever used his right hand writing from the left to the right side of the page when he was addressing someone else through his writing. For all other purposes he chose to write right to left side of the page, reversing his letters as he spelled each word. Historians have discussed ever since what could have motivated him to do so. Some have said that he wanted to make it harder for others to steal his ideas. I don’t think that could have been the reason. Anyone can read mirror script fluently just with the tiniest bit of practice. A genius like Leonardo could have done much better encoding, thereby disguising his secrets. I think he just chose to write from left to right because he was – as is known – left handed. A man who loved to draw in the most precise, specific way, would he not have hated to smear his own writing? But anyhow, reading reverse script is not all that difficult. But I wanted to make sure I got it right. So I lifted it up against the window. There it was, the writing clear and beautiful. I had recognized it even in mirror image, even before I had recognized it as such, I had listened to the words so often and had read them many times, they were like a familiar face. “The Road goes ever on and on. Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can.” She had painted the letters JRT underneath. And I must follow if I can. As if I didn’t know. I stared at the lettering in the mirror of the window glass against the darkening sky. I stared at myself holding the sheet against the pane. I stared at myself n the window glass. Who was I? Where was I? The other me looked back, a pale, shimmering reflection.

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anticipation and tesselation

The floor in the library greeted me with the reliable intricate tessellation I had marveled at since I had moved to Summerville. Knowing that it would have seemed strange if I had stood still and just stared at the carpet tiles I walked slowly towards the lockers trying to mirror the rhythm of the tiles with my feet. I stuffed my backpack into a cubby hole and tried to work out – not for the first time – the plan for quasi-periodic tiling of the plane with only 2 figures each with a five fold symmetry. It had a peculiar energy to it. Also not for the first time I asked myself who in the world had come up with this specific mathematical tessellation for a library floor carpet. Following the outlines of the tiles with my gaze I felt my heartbeat slow down and my fear subside.
Stepping to the side still following the edges of the tiles I had a sudden feeling that I would run into someone. For a split-second I felt an intense anticipation of a physical obstacle, a person I would run into whose body I already felt like you feel a chair in a dark room the moment before you hurt your shin. I had an apology on my lips as, looking up, I still waited for the run-in. But nothing happened. There was no one near me, in fact, the lobby was empty, even the front desk was temporarily unoccupied as a metal sign indicated. I felt confused. Have you ever mistaken a shadow on the pavement for a shallow hole in a road and stepped down too hard or, being preoccupied while walking up the stairs, have misjudged the number of steps and taken one more step than necessary to climb the staircase? I had exactly that kind of empty anticipation, a strange stomach upsetting emptiness as if I had taken one step too far, out into nowhere.
For a moment I waited. The hum of voices on the first floor of the library reassured me. I had missed a heartbeat just now, but after a moment of reconnecting with reality I finally crossed the lobby and walked up the stairs. And yet I felt like every step I took was echoed by a second, like I was walking with a friend at my side. I checked twice whether someone walked up the winding staircase right behind me, in my blind spot, so to speak, but there was no one.
Tuesday afternoon at the library. I like vacation as much as the next person, but there is something special about a school afternoon at the library. I like the idea that the library is a space solely dedicated to the transfer of knowledge from the pages of a book into a brain. I like the hushed atmosphere, people writing excerpts from gaping volumes, an old lady in woolen stockings inexplicably spending her days copying Anna Karenina in a beautiful script on fine stationary with the initials LNT, kids hanging out mostly with some kind of school assignment, procrastinating and talking in low voices with occasional shrieks.
Towards the back shelves of the first floor there was a little niche with a chair I favored. It was right at the window behind a safe wall of three aisles of age old art books. Art was clearly not a favorite topic in Summerville and the volumes were mainly collecting dust, emitting this strange smell only library books acquire over time (and that makes you want not to read whatever it is that is hiding inside because the smell indicates that the contents of the book have expired since, are deceased and encased in their last dwelling, like a body in a sarcophagus.)