by Blake Carpenter
–
You wake with a drought of
Knowledge
Of where you are – of where
You’ve been, and where you’re
Headed.
Butt-ends pepper the street
And ‘twixt the toes of
Feathered feet.[1]
You[2] are Observer[3] – you are Machine, yet you are Flesh – and now, you rise from a bench. It is a bad bench, and why you rose – the metal frame, with all its waves and protrusions, makes an awful nap.[4] As you massage new aches, you scan the street: to brick, cobble, and rubble. Not that you mind the view, it’s fathomly familiar with the complementary smog and back-lane shifts.
You meander the street passing structures well abandoned – or you hope that be – as the middling sun’s phosphoric rays (it is, was, and will be noon) guide you. A marble rail, if marble was merely a mixture of matte and glossy whites, constructed before you – maybe blinded you – and on the rail, a streetcar, equally white and vintage (apart from its golden decals) that bannered: “NEXT STOP – BABEL OF WESTERN GREATS.”[5]
You are Machine, so naturally, you embark. The streetcar’s interior is much to be desired – weathered leather, frayed staples, and no seat for the driver. About the driver, about them: they lack a mouth, have nubs where ears should be, and eyes, a gaze, that with their cowhide complexion, eyes that slot horizons, fail to blink, and stare blankly at Observer; at you, at the skin you bear (2mm thin), at the thoughts you calculate, and… the ticket suddenly escaping from your pocket. They stretch their arm to expose the calloused base and decayed cuticles that gesture a ticket, your ticket. They punch a holey icon and give the ticket back. From what you can make, the image seems to resemble a sort of clock missing the hour hand while the minute strikes ten (in arrow shape).[6]
You take your seat – you are Flesh over leather. But you are just as much Observer, so you do your very job, and peer out to blurring brick, brick…brick. Time doesn’t pass, but still acknowledges the journey between space. You have arrived, is what you would have heard if you were home, but you are working, observing, and filled the silence nonetheless.
You exit the car to an assemblage of winding tracks; a tower of alabaster – a library, Babel of Western Greats.[7] The tower’s fifty-four amorphic stories form an indescribable, and even contradictory structure with its apex piercing the immobile sun. Its arching doors dawn the same target paraphernalia as on your ticket. The doors open, as if prompted by your arrival, to a hexagonal lobby, blank parchment scattered about, and a beam of light – say a meter radius – thrusted through the core foundation.
“This is how you’ll travel, Observer,” says a voice from beyond the beam. “And welcome,” it continued, “you came just in the nick of space!”
You respond – or try to – but what you have to say isn’t important.
“It’s what you write, that is,” the voice enlightens.[8]
You have questions, but may not ask them, for this a library. And maybe, because you’re very observant and do good work, you notice no reverberations from the disembodied voice; maybe, it’s in your head. But you know what you are and listen all the same.
It, the voice, explains your purpose, your job. You are to write, but not contribute; you are to observe “the imagination of man”[9] and document Gateway.[10]It reiterates the importance of thirteen and a half words. You find this arbitrary, maybe stupid, and you are not that – you went to college. “This is to preserve the Canon. You must understand.”
You don’t.
“As you ascend, you neglect the descended. You will forget. Time is not; time cannot. And so, Babel’s volumes, once perceived, are frozen to the transient work of Greatness.”[11]
You feel a confounding heat – like a roaring pyre sheathed in ice – there, and not there. Then, in the same moment of space, a cold silence. The voice is gone.
You scavenge the lobby, Volume I, for papers and pen. You have a job to do, and so you write…
The Tale of Your: “The Makings of Gateway”[12]
Vol. 1: Mute conversation, write to refine, dare to write much. Determine what co-[13]
Vol. 2: Numbers count; punctuation must not. Half words round down. Angels to Lo-[14]
Vol. 3: Could be Logic (maybe Love). Indexing from Man to World, no wo-[15]
Vol. 4: Men hiding from cyclops, I smell rotten food, and feel men’s fe-[16]
Vol. 10: Shame, migraine, lungless, cold, very cold, need leave. Street youths: piled cor-[17]
Vol. 21: Endless space around inverted plates – nine realms. They sink while I ri-[18]
Vol. 27: King offers estate to daughters who love for love’s sake. They do-[19]
Vol. 48: NOTES RUINED!!! Static sea – mid storm – huge whale – frightful sight – lost over-[20]
Vol. 49: Beauty in every hue. Islands untouched – free kingdom of animalia, expressive spe-[21]
Vol. 50: I feel no need to write, simply that I want to wr-[22]
Vol. 51: Gunpowder, tattered blues under blood-soaked browns – trotting, groaning, dropping along white pla-[23]
Vol. 52: Man assaulting man for the lust of one. Like father, like s-[24]
Vol. 53: A stream of words helix the transfer beam telling me to le-[25]
You make it, in relative piece, to Volume LIV. You phase from the light to a lecture hall filled with empty chairs – good chairs – blue chairs, all but one. A lone seat of muted peach and unfastened leather hunkers in front of where you rifted. You take a seat – unbothered[26] – and swivel your view to a man – a greying man with owl glasses – writing the phrase “On Narci-” along a blackboard.[27] You look up, maybe in awe, to a pointed roof – sealed in iridescence. You are Observer, and consider the light source, for one would assume the sun, as the tower did seem to syphon its energy (in earlier space), but now, you aren’t quite sure. You decide this perplexity could be a novel addition to the surviving records. You peer down to grab your pen and notice metallic lining between the striations of dyed wood – you have more questions but are slow to write them. As you scribe a “?” you feel the glacial flame return from where it left you.
You are Flesh, you are Machine, and the varying odors of surging circuits.[28]
You wake with a drought of
Knowledge
Of where you’ve been, but where
You are, Boston, is coiled in
Concrete.
Sirens billow alleys
To sully a “thug” splaying
Queer ability.
[1] An intro poem in similar style to T.S. Eliot’s Preludes, establishing the transported You and urban/industrial setting.
[2] Inspired by Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, the majority of Babel of Western Greats is written in the second person, deconstructing the “You” and contextualizing [your] milieu – [your] world.
[3] Jasbir K. Puar’s “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” theory on Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage reimagines intersectionality in relation to identity and, the retroactively coined, “assemblage”. They conceptualize the enticing pros and complex (appropriating) cons of assembling one’s differing notions of identity. When in a dream (possibly like the one “You” are in now) you are just as much mechanical and subservient as you are thoughtful and defiant – to identify with, or against, your “role” and a driving theme throughout this piece.
[4] Reference to hostile (anti-homeless) architecture and Plato’s theory of “Forms” – where the “perfect” schematic of anything exists disparately from time & space while the collective we intrinsically know it. And this bench is not that.
[5] The contrast of opulent whites (and accented golds) among the brick and rubble.
[6] A rather uninspired icon that vaguely resembles the symbol for “male”.
[7] More blinding whites, and a reference to Borges’ The Library of Babel. “Babel of Western Greats” is also a library of convolution, but comprised only with the 54 volumes of Great Books of the Western World, 1st ed.
[8] Barbara Johnson’s essay Writing expresses the prominence of Western male literature and the subsequent “silence, denigration, or idealization” of the other – the not white man. What “is” and “isn’t” is wholly dictated by writing, and used to dilute actuality when literature is majority male and comically, depressingly, white.
[9] One of the tenants of The Great Conversation.
[10] Gateway to the Great Books, published in 1963 by Adler et al, aimed to be a supplementary (10 volumes) version of Great Books of the Western World. (Mayer)
[11] Phasing up to a new floor (volume) has You forget the events of the previous floors. When on a floor, time is frozen to a single scene from the given volume You are currently observing.
[12] A reference to Dan Simmons Hyperion, specifically “The Poet’s Tale” and Silenus’ challenge of limitation.
[13] “The Great Conversation” – the first volume in Great Books of the Western World, and what aims to reason for the selected texts that proceed it.
[14] Part 1 of 2 volumes of Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas decoding topics A-L (Angels to Love). You contextualize the 13 ½ word limitation (operates like Microsoft Word “word count”). The arbitrary flesh-like rule with the machine-like review system.
[15] Part 2 of 2 volumes of Syntopicon: An Index to The Great Ideas decoding topics M-W (Man to World; with no mention of “Woman” as a Great Idea).
[16] Homer’s The Odyssey; Odysseus and crew (all men) hiding in terror from the cyclops, and the first inkling that You are experiencing the emotions and sensations of the scene.
[17] Hippocrates’ (putative) On the Sacred Disease. Believed to be one of the first attempts to explain epilepsy as a human disorder – excess “phlegm” coursing through the brain – rather than a divine one. (Farrington)
[18] Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno’s 9 circles of hell and the juxtaposition of You “rising” through Babel while Dante “falls.”
[19] Shakespeare’s King Lear, when the title king, thinking to retire the crown, offers ladyship (land dictation) to his 3 daughters, only if they claim to “love” him. Goneril and Regan lie to loving the king, while the youngest, Cordelia, just flat out says that she does not love him. (“They do-n’t”)
[20] Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. You leave the beam on to a boat during a storm – all locked in time. You are face-to-face with Moby and, by such sudden imagery, propel your held notes to still sea (which spoils paper all the same).
[21] Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and the seclusion of the Galápagos Islands. Species with distinct identities and intersectionality all their own.
[22] Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and the means of production when analyzing capitalism – when work is in the wants and dictation of the people.
[23] Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and the French invasion of Russia. A battlefield over a snowy white landscape.
[24] Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; the eldest of three boys assaults his neglectful father for pursuing the woman his eldest loves.
[25] William James’ The Principles of Psychology; [Your] stream of consciousness is trying to tell you something.
[26] You know what [You] are by now, Machine.
[27] Sigmund Freud, being the last volume of works, is preparing a lecture On Narcissism, the relationship between ego and the external world, and why You are slow to see the danger of the “chair.”
[28] Reference to Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal, where a young woman struggles conforming to the 1920’s capital/patriarchal “machine” and is sentenced to death via electric chair (a less than “ideal” chair). Though Machinal is not a 1st ed. “Great Work,” it’s symbolic for the fate of work written by women (or others) in the time of congregating “Great Work.”
Works Cited:
Adler, Mortimer J., et al. Great Books of the Western World. 1st ed., Chicago, IL, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.
Borges, Jorge Luis, et al. The Library of Babel. Boston, David R. Godine, 2000.
Farrington, Benjamin. Science and Politics in the Ancient World. Routledge, 25 Aug. 2016.
Jamaica Kincaid. A Small Place. 1988. New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000.
Mayer, Milton Sanford, et al. Robert Maynard Hutchins: A Memoir. Berkeley, University of California Press, Cop, 1993.
Plato. The Republic. 375AD. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2013.
Rivkin, Julie, and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 3rd ed., Chichester, West Sussex, UK, Wiley Blackwell, 2017.
Simmons, Dan. Hyperion. Spectra, 12 Jan. 2011.
Treadwell, Sophie. Machinal. Broadway Theatre, 1928.
Sprockets and Springes 