"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.
