from The Crimson Hexagon

"The Crimson Hexagon"

included in Pearl and Other Poems

They were spurred on by the delirium of storming the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.

                                                      ‘The Library of Babel,’ Jorge Luis Borges

                                                       Trans. Anthony Kerrigan

For a period after graduate school, he worked as an unemployed academic. He found this vocation to be similar to other kinds of unemployment, but somehow more important. It involved a lot of sitting at the computer, typing things, refreshing things, arranging things, and clicking things. He enjoyed this work, but found it to be too taxing, and soon withdrew into a less directed, and proportionately more anxiety-producing, life-path.

At times, lying in bed and thinking, history seemed to him to telescope out into a thin and tube-like object. In his mind, a vast space filled with stars surrounded this brass tube. Moving closer, he could see, as through a cross-section of its material, the layered construction of the tube’s circumference, even as this circumference remained transparent, no obstruction at all to the sight of what lay inside. Closer still, the tube grew immensely long and narrow, and he perceived, with a kind of piercing visual intensity, in which all things were reduced to their most minimal, yet crispest, geometric outlines, a vast chain of people and events, shuttering before him with increasing speed, each a burst of comprehensible light.

At these times, wonder crippled him. Awe struck him; it punched him in the skull with its fist.

That he could have despaired, that he could have doubted when, as he now saw, history unfolded with such linear simplicity; benign and wholesome; there for him; his. He need only insert himself into the linear tube of history, as all these others had done, with whom he now felt a certain kinship—he, too, having seen them, felt reduced to his most minimal, yet crispest, geometric outline.

“I, too, am a burst of comprehensible light,” he reasoned.

Such times were times of great beginnings, in projects.

At other times, however, he was confounded by curved space. His life consisted in a menagerie of unfinished projects, each of which, in its moment, consumed him, overwhelming any periphery.

Perhaps the most fascinating of these unfinished works, both objectively and by the standard of his own compulsive investment, was a work called The Crimson Hexagon, which involved pseudonymous identities, each of which he imagined to have his or her own corpus of distinguished (and completely finished) writings. 

Each of these imagined identities was more than a mere “pen name.” What he was after was nothing less than the creation of human life, ex nihilo.

According to Wikipedia, the association of transmutation—the proverbial lead to gold—with alchemy’s highest goal was misguided. Alchemy’s motivating chimera, its true Holy Grail, he read on Wikipedia, was artificial life, the homunculus, the tiny man:

That the sperm of a man be putrefied in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb… After this time, [the homunculus] will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.

So he read in the “Paracelsus” article.

“Why would it be smaller?” he wondered, and felt a certain pleasure at returning to the word “putrefaction,” which he repeated to himself, silently: “Putrefaction. Putrefiction. Putredaction. Putrediction.” He tried to imagine a relationship between the perfectly formed—but tiny—body of the artificial person and the aural qualities of the word “putrefaction.”

“I am unable,” he thought, “to maintain the fundamental grossness of the thing referred to, putrefaction, with the referring word, ‘putrefaction.’”

“Putrefaction,” he thought, and after a brief pause, “lactation,” and felt vaguely troubled by his own line of reasoning, even doomed, in a way that reminded him of Kafka.

“Horse womb,” he later reasoned. “Cucurbit,” he thought, and felt better.

~

Like life, he knew his creations were contingent, vulnerable; that they could pass at any moment from life to death, or death to life; that there was nothing necessary about their historical birth.

“All lives are bubbles. Poppable, like me,” he reasoned.

Like most human beings, his humans dreamed. Like most, the odds were stacked against them. Indeed, every waking moment, the accumulating lessons of experience and age and work and marriage—etc.—seemed designed to remind them, to drill into their brains and even bodies, into every cell, if possible, the likelihood of failure.

Many of his tiny humans sensed this, without words, intuiting a kind of despair, and then banality, and then despair again, and finally banality, where they settled. Some understood it more explicitly, as the consequence of wide reading; or through a well of self-honesty that, untrained, offered similar truths.

Some few were dreamers, committed to their ignorance, happily oblivious to the disproportion between dream and experience. These few doomed themselves by denying even the molecular chance the others maintained by embracing despair.

He had less hope for these ones.

Like his humans, he knew that the reality he imagined was unlikely. It hinged, he knew, upon a certain degree of circularly referential saturation, a kind of diagonal hyperlink that could lead from Wiki article to external source to YouTube video to newspaper piece to history book to flesh and blood and back again, to Wikipedia.

However unlikely this arrangement of referential elements into a self-perpetuating system, the quantum leap from text to history, he clung to its possibility as the anchor of his life. “All lives are real,” he reasoned. “Some, just potentially so.”

Both his despair and his hopefulness were habits. Sometimes, he felt that sadness was crushing him into a very tiny, tear-wet ball of a person, who cringed inside his chest, unknown to the world outside, while his bigger, visible-to-the-world self carried on, a ghoulish automaton, indifferent to the suffering its continued participation in life caused to this smaller, less robust, person.

This ball person’s characteristic “smallness” never met, in his mind, with the conceptual smallness of the homunculus.

~

More important than inventing the detailed biographies—which, he thought, was little more than any author of fiction might accomplish—the grand anthologies in which he played every part, the reviews of books and book blurbs, the vast tissue-work of correspondence, postal and electronic; more important than any of these, were the Wiki articles.

It was not the sneaky game of passing off false personae as historical fact. It was not the cat-and-mouse thrill to have bypassed, again, the petty Wikipedian enforcers of reliability, notability, and what he insultingly thought of, to himself, as “actual existence.”

These Wikipedians were too small-minded, too prepossessed of their own zealous place in the hierarchy of the real, he knew.

He imagined each of these faceless volunteers as a wizened, recently retired middle school teacher, who, nearing the end of her life and possessed of a new wealth of time for personal reflection, came to regret, above all else, her squandered opportunities for constraining and diminishing the possibilities of meaningful, human existence.

She had wiled the days away. Where had they gone?

They were gone, well gone. But still, she could police the reliability of Wikipedia, perhaps assuage her conscience—and leave this life with hands less bloody—by watching against any datum of an expansive, imaginative, or hopeful provenance.

Or so he imagined.

He knew that his mind was faster, and his fabrications more avid for truth, than history or the internet. He knew that his mind mirrored the principle of fictive reality embodied in the internet; that his archives were as real as Wikipedia’s—and that Wikipedia’s archives were very real, indeed; they formed a secret alliance with him. No, this mere game was not the terrible force that shook his finger as it clicked ‘submit.’

One day, one of his human poets, Jack Feist, wrote the following:

Here is the song of my homunculus,

who is all the I that I am.

I conceived him first as a mandrake root:

he grew in the shade of my dangling feet

while I dribbled strangled syllables to the dirt

& hung from a tree.

“Homunculus, homunculi,” he thought. “Ho-mun-cu-wheeeeee,” he thought, and imagined the swinging motion of the poet’s feet…


(c) 2014 lee sharks, property of planet mars

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl