Call Me Zebra(87)

TEXT: It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour of it, and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very little speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is, that it is a world wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes unhealthy for want of air.





QUOTE #2





TITLE: “On Exactitude in Science”





AUTHOR: Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes (Travels of Prudent Men), Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lérida, 1658





ORIGINAL TRANSCRIBER: Jorge Luis Borges





TEXT: . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciples of Geography.





“Reactions?” I asked, leaning into my cane. “Thoughts?”

Through her hand, Mercè said, “I don’t feel a connection to the second quote. For example, what is an unconscionable map?”

Fernando leaned in. “A false map,” he said with acuity, “is an incomplete map.”

I should have known that he, a man with the strictest of consciences who had predicted Taüt’s return, would have caught on immediately.

“But all maps are incomplete,” Gheorghe protested ineffectually. “I had to buy so many on my way from Romania, and not even putting them all together—”

“Bricolage!” Agatha interrupted whimsically.

“Indeed,” I said. “Gheorghe, your thoughts on the Dickens?”

“Ah,” he said with unexpected clarity and confidence. “That went straight to my heart. I felt the void in the depths of my heart, and when I feel that void, I don’t want to drink.” He looked at his carton and suddenly disposed of it.

Agatha looked at him. She was beaming with delight.

“A genius,” she said to Ludo. “A genius!” She was referring to me.

Ludo rocked back on his heels and let out a charming little laugh. Who knew what was going on with him!

Remedios came forward. She said, “I prefer to live with a view to the afterlife. Why focus on the darkness of the present when one can pray—”

“All the way to the grave?” I interrupted. Then, more sternly, I said, “Someday you will understand that darkness is your greatest asset, the void your most powerful strength.”

She didn’t look convinced, but she said nothing more after that.

I turned back to Ludo. He was drunk. He had squeezed every drop out of his carton. His cheeks were flushed and his lips stained purple. He looked delightfully effeminate. Then he opened his mouth, and recited: “I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this condition of the world.”

A quote from Benjamin via Arendt. Ludo had been reading my notebook again! Or had he secretly been reading what I had been reading in order to gain access to the inner workings of my consciousness? I had no idea. Soon enough, I thought, I will get to the bottom of things with this mysterious Bembo.

By then, it was time to go. We arranged to meet again at the parking lot in exactly one week’s time. “The first literary pilgrimage,” I said, “involves a trip to the terroirs of Josep Pla’s birth and eventual death, Catalonia’s infamous Memory Man.But before we depart, dear pilgrims, I’d like you to repeat the following sentences after me: We are aware,” I said.

“We are aware,” they repeated.

“That each literary pilgrimage we undertake will unleash a chain of events that, like any event . . .”

“Will unleash a chain of events that, like any event,” they chimed in.

“Once set into motion, will enter in contact with other events and give rise to sublime and banal phenomena.” I let them catch up, then said: “We understand that while every event occurs in the present it also casts a shadow forward and backward in time and space and that there is no way of knowing if that shadow will serve to protect us or if it will keep us in darkness, submerged in a sea of opacity. But we, Pilgrims of the Void, are willing to sacrifice ourselves.” They followed along swimmingly. I didn’t give them a chance to pause and reflect on what was being said. “Our findings will be as inconclusive as life and we will defend them for that very reason, for their total disordering of so-called reality. Now let’s bring our hands together.”

We came together.

“In the words of beloved Shakespeare . . . ,” I said.