Piranesi(26)

The Index

ENTRY FOR THE EIGHTH DAY OF THE EIGHTH MONTH IN THE YEAR THE ALBATROSS CAME TO THE SOUTH-WESTERN HALLS

It is my practice to index my Journal entries every other week or so. I find that this is more efficient than indexing them straight away. After some time has passed it is easier to separate the important from the ephemeral.

This morning I sat down cross-legged on the Pavement of the Second Northern Hall with my Journal and Index. A great deal has happened since I last performed this task.

I made an entry in the Index:

Prophet, appearance of: Journal no. 10, pages 148–152

I made another entry:

Prophecies concerning the coming of 16: Journal no. 10, pages 151–152

Then I read over what the Prophet had said concerning the identities of the Dead and made an entry:

Dead, the, some tentative names for: Journal no. 10, pages 149, 152

I began to make entries for the individual names. Under the letter ‘I’, I wrote:

Italian, dishy, young: Journal no. 10, page 149

I was halfway through writing Stan Ovenden’s name (under the letter O) when my eye was caught by an entry higher up.

Ovenden, Stanley, student of Laurence Arne-Sayles: Journal no. 21, page 154. See also The disappearance of Maurizio Giussani, Journal no. 21, pages 186–7

I was stunned. Here he was. Stanley Ovenden. Already in the Index. Yet his name, when the Prophet spoke it, had not been in the least familiar.

I read the index entry again.

I paused. I knew as I looked at it that there was something very strange here. But the strange thing was so strange, so entirely incomprehensible that I found it difficult to form coherent thoughts about it. I could see the strangeness with my eyes, but I could not think it with my mind.

Journal no. 21.

I had written Journal no. 21. Why in the World had I done that? It made no sense whatsoever. The Journal I am writing in now is (as I have already explained) Journal no. 10. There is no Journal no. 21. There never could have been a Journal no. 21. What did it mean?

I cast my eyes over the rest of the page. Most of the entries under O were about the Other. There were a great many of those, which is only to be expected seeing as he is the only other human being apart from Myself – and, of course, the Prophet and 16, but about them I know very little. I saw that there were earlier entries for other subjects. These were as strange as the entry for Stanley Ovenden. As I focussed on them, I experienced the same reluctance to register what my eyes saw. Nevertheless, I forced my eyes to see it; I forced my mind to think it.

Orkney, planning for summer 2002: Journal no. 3, pages 11–15, 20–28

Orkney, archaeological dig: Journal no. 3, pages 30–39, 47–51

Orkney, Ness of Brodgar: Journal no. 3, pages 40–47

Observational uncertainty: Journal no. 5, pages 134–35

O’Keeffe, Georgia, exhibition: Journal no. 11, pages 91–95

Outsider psychiatry, see R. D. Laing

Outsider philosophy: Journal no. 17, pages 19–32; see also J. W. Dunne (Serialism), Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner

Outsider ideas, how different systems of knowledge and belief treat them: Journal no. 18, pages 42–57

Outsider literature, see Fan fiction

Outsider, The, Colin Wilson: Journal no. 20, pages 46–51

Outsider mathematics: Journal no. 21, pages 40–44; see also Srinivasa Ramanujan

Outsider art: Journal no. 21, pages 79–86

Here were references to more Journals that did not exist! Journals 11, 17, 18 and 20. Journals 3 and 5 did exist of course, so those entries were sound. Except … except … The more I looked at them, the more I suspected that these entries did not refer to my Journals 3 and 5, but to different ones. The entries were written with a pen I did not recognise. The ink was thinner and more fluid and the nib of the pen was broader than any pen I possess. Added to this was the writing itself. It was my handwriting – no doubt about that – but it was subtly different from the writing I currently employ. It was slightly rounder and fatter – in a word, younger.

I went to the North-Eastern Corner and climbed up to the Statue of an Angel caught on a Rose Bush. I fetched out my brown leather messenger bag. I took all my Journals out of it. There were nine of them. Just nine. I did not find twenty others that I had inexplicably overlooked until this moment.

I examined the Journals carefully, paying particular attention to the covers and the numbers written on them. My Journals are black and I number each one with a white gel pen at the bottom of its spine. To my astonishment I discovered that the first three Journals had originally been numbered differently. They had been numbered 21, 22 and 23, but someone had scratched out the initial numeral ‘2’, transforming them into 1, 2 and 3. The scratching out had not been done perfectly (gel ink is difficult to remove) and I could still make out the ghostly form of the ‘2’.

I sat for a while, trying to comprehend this, but I could make nothing of it.

If Journal no. 1 (my Journal no. 1) had originally been Journal no. 21, then it ought to contain the two entries on Stanley Ovenden. I picked it up, opened it and turned to page 154. There he was. The entry was dated 22 January 2012. It was titled: Biography of Stanley Ovenden.

Stanley Ovenden. Born 1958, Nottingham, England. Father, Edward Francis Ovenden, owned a sweet shop. Mother’s name and occupation unknown. Studied mathematics at the University of Birmingham. Began postgraduate research in 1981. The same year he attended one of Laurence Arne-Sayles’s famous lectures: The Forgotten, the Liminal, the Transgressive and the Divine. Shortly afterwards Ovenden abandoned mathematics and began a PhD in anthropology at the University of Manchester under Arne-Sayles’s supervision.