Subterranean Routes

Sometimes I will enter the Great Hall through the parking garage. It is out of the way, but the other-ness of it makes for, if nothing else, an interesting walk. One cannot always walk in the sunlight, one must sometimes take subterranean routes. Rows of cars in the half-light, dull green that lays in lines on the polished exteriors. The side panels make odd, elongated reflections of me as I pass. I glance at my distorted form like a phantom in the bright black hood. If I always looked so distorted, like a ruined painting... or do I? How would I know? I have little time to think of what I am to others. I am almost nothing to myself. All of my energy is put into seeing what is about me, to the point that I lose all sense of having a body. Then I hover for a moment outside of myself, seeing myself as a perfect fixture in some allusive scene. And just as quickly I am back feeling my feet move across the concrete. Rivulets of oil have stained lovely patterns across the dirty floor of the parking garage, like filthy roots extending from the drain. Distant rumblings are always about my ears here, as if I were below ground during a great battle. The floor shakes now and then from another approaching machine, the tires push across the ground with the sound of a wave breaking, or wasps chewing at wood. Pipes are left bare, skeletal fingers jutting from the concrete one way, running back into it another. Sometimes, seemingly from all sides, a low groan is emitted, like a monster turning in its sleep. I pause mid-step and think of Jonah in the belly of the whale.

In these moments, when my solitude is manifested most acutely, into a temporal and physical presence, I feel deeply connected to other people. I think of decisions that we all face that lead us to inhabit certain places, however temporarily. The wheel of destiny rests directly up against our backs, it touches at all points. It moves in synchronicity with the planet's rotation, and at any moment we are free to leap and cling to it awhile. How long is up to us. My destiny is tied even to those people who I have left scattered behind me (o how I miss them!). It is tied to all the past versions of myself, that indeed are myself, that live in me as I live out lives of other people. The farther I let my thoughts drift, the more melancholy tempts me. It has dangerous depths, so easy to slip into. But once again, right alongside this are equal depths of joy, they are simply obscured at times. To know one you must withstand the other, but both hold strong to your will. Both wear masks, speak deception, and want to claim you.

If I could only see beyond my senses, perhaps everything would seem in order. But we are allowed only a small glimpse, what our eyes, ears, mouths, and fingers tell us. The sum of all of this can be considered the ambiance that we read into the world, the crafting of our perception. Perception is led, but it is also a leader. Am I approaching awareness in these moments, when I slip silently, almost unrecognizably, into the rhythm of the heart? I step into a flow of time, it washes over me with transient moments that disintegrate before the unmovable future. The future is an unmovable mountain. It is not unalterable, but it is unmovable. It is an obstruction between us and eternity, a wall between life and the unknown.

Time in the Great Hall.

I sit at my desk listening to the seconds strike out into eternity, and I think back. In the living room of my parent's house was an ornate grandfather clock, probably seven feet tall, gilded with a gold-colored metal. A set of pendulums and weights were exposed above its base through a glass window that was hinged so that one could access the inner-workings easily. The clock was wound with a special key that had a gear and teeth that locked into certain notches. Every week or so, the clock had to be wound and set. The key was fit into three distinctive places, carefully turned an exact number of times, and then the counterweights would reassume their slow descent, imperceptible to a casual observer. The intricate cogs and spokes, unseen, could be heard working just when the house fell silent, at unexpected idle times, an anonymous presence that really became indiscernible from other background sounds. Every quarter of an hour the gears would click into place and the clock would chime out a fragment of a song. At the first quarter, the first four bars, at the half-hour, eight bars, at three-quarters, twelve, and at the top of the hour the full song followed by a number of chimes corresponding to the hour. Each hour of each day played out in this ceremony. Even through the night, as everyone slept, the clock would enact this play to an empty darkened room. Sometimes I would lie awake at night, up for one reason or another staring blankly into the ceiling above my bed heavy with thoughts that would not allow me sleep, and through the wall I would hear it ring out, sad little chimes telling me again and again, "You are awake, time is moving, yet there you lie."

The clock was a complicated machine, and I most certainly appreciate the skill and labor involved in making it. There is much to be said for precision. But the concept always bothered me. Every fifteen minutes of every day, should you be in the house, you were reminded of the passing time with a fragment of a song. One song only. So throughout the day you were involuntary company to the constant repetition of a single song attempting to fulfill itself. It struggled through the hour to come to completion, and when finally the one hour ended and the song at last voiced its unbroken maxim, the chimes would follow it like a death knell. The hands of the clock passed the crest of their orbit, and again within the song the struggle to fulfill itself began anew. A little death every hour, and a little life.

I do not even wear a watch, I never have. I have purchased watches, once again, they are fascinating things, but they remain in drawers until the batteries die out. I have a natural aversion to the idea of obedience to time, which after all is only a concept, however much it is now entwined with our biology and ostensibly dictates our actions. I could never own a clock such as my parents do, that requires and actually commands so much attention that it becomes another entity in the house needing to be cared for. The watches remain in drawers. Time in the Great Hall can move as slowly as a glacier or as fast as lightning, just as it pleases, and sometimes these moments jut right into each other. There are ways for determining the time, should I need to, but mostly I just feel the day passing internally, in my dark wing where there are no windows with which to make such judgements. The emptiness or fullness of my stomach, the dryness of my lips, how far I go into my daydreams, the pattern of movement of the other people here, all are sure demarcations of time.

The Gardens

Whatever rises out of the dust eventually attracts insects. I take my lunch in the gardens, out in the sun where the song of insects can be heard and the wind in the trees and through the bowing flowers is a pleasure and a respite. The breeze touches with hidden fingers the surface of the pools in the fountains, they shimmer and ripple over the reflected face of the sky. The sun makes a heavenward path through chutes of clouds. The sound of water spilling its basin so casually, refilling and spilling, spilling and making the light dance, as I lean myself back into the lap of an old wooden bench on the highest terrace of the crisscrossed footpaths that wind the hill and sever the green field. It is absurd, the extremes of sensory experience offered by the Great Hall of Records. One can go from the darkest, most bewildering corridors to the most color-saturated landscapes within a matter of fifty steps. The giant offers, with open hands, the full spectrum of available light. Open hands? From my bench on the hillside the Great Hall looks only like a face with a great glass chin. What was going through the mind of this madman, the architect, when he conceived this monumental project? Was he employed by some maniacal Count of the Clouds?

There are statues. And one in particular draws me. It is tucked away near one of the walls, for these gardens are walled in from the city. You wander on past the babbling of the last fountain, around a low willow grove, and there is a small, I guess one would say, empty plaza, all of stone, a little circle with a Roman-style sculpture on a short pedestal. The trees here are placed in a semi-circle about the figure, and block all but a slight warm breeze that touches with a careful palm. Often, at noon, as improbable as that is, the moon, a tiny daytime moon, sits directly to the right of the head, in the sky, opposite the arch of the torch-bearing arm. And in the other arm, close to the body, a bouquet of flowers. The robes hang graciously about the body, and I never decided if it was a man or a woman. But it stares down at me, bearing a guiding light, much stronger than the light of the moon, the lonely man in the moon. But what is most lovely is how it shows its age. It is worn, streaked by rain, darkened by filth that rolls in from the city on the wind. To me, the youth of its body, the flow of its robes, the arm stubbornly jutting out its fire at the moon day and night, despite the obvious diminution brought on by time, makes this somewhat of a holy place.

But I am granted only an hour. Even more absurd because I obey this ghost command despite the fact my superiors do not even frequent the Great Hall. It has been weeks since I have had to account for myself in any way or have spoken to anyone here, but for the formal necessities. I feel as though I could disappear completely and it would be months before anyone noticed. I take my time and wander back past my bench, retrieving the book I never even opened during lunch. What would I want to read about, when I have a sunny day, a bench on which to rest my weariness, a field on a hill growing with manic colorful life, all vibrating silently in the breeze, all for me to comprehend? And there, on the other side of the Great Hall, the city stretching out like a vast petrified forest.

The Exterminating Angel

I can leave this room if I want to. I know it. I can will myself out of any situation. I can leave this room, if only in my thoughts. I can live other lives, see distant places, fall in love, bear children, die and be reborn. It is as simple as staring at the wall. But a sense of desperation overcomes me. Why would I want to live only in my thoughts? Why would I dream, when I could touch, taste, smell, and hear? There is a world outside the Great Hall. Its movements are perfected, even when they fall into disorder and tragedy. The cycles of destruction and rebirth, withdrawal and return, life for death and absence for material; more beautiful than the most fluid motions of a ballerina. More meaningful than the deepest prose. Why should I only be allowed to imagine, or worse, observe and never participate? I long to shake the answers to these questions out of every still body around me. The world is waiting for me to know it. But it is not waiting, it is passing. Passing me, passing all of these jellyfish that call themselves men who voluntarily sacrifice the best hours of each day to "earning their way".

People are growing fat with their contentment. Their minds are being dulled by work. But all of this is necessary, no? People must make things. Value must be determined, worth must be assigned, progress must be pushed on, even blindly, for what else are we put here for? Time. Time is the exterminating angel. With it comes the concept of limits. Moments are sacrificed to the God Future. Planning is valued more than enjoying. Inertia, above all, tramples thought into dust. And what has become of this angel, Thought, which certainly is no exterminator? Thought is also currency. God Currency and Angel Action hand in hand reeking their own special revelation in the hearts of us fools. Let them eat my own heart as a sacrifice, that they may never be satiated.

What wicked thoughts go through my mind. I am more alone than the man in the moon, who is only a pathetic human imagining. Sometimes, in the darkness of the Great Hall, I see myself crouched on the moon in utter isolation, eyeing the entire Earth in one glimpse. And what do I see? Wasted opportunity. Idiots competing for money, falling in love with sacrificial lambs, killing the things they love, devoting their lives to the endless construction of altars to Gods they neither created nor comprehend. But these thoughts are running away with me, they are becoming too disorganized. But did I not just say that disorder was beautiful?

Enough of this. Today I will work myself to the bone, to the point of sheer exhaustion. "God goes with thoughtless people" and that is from a genius. I will work until all of these horrible meaningless imaginings become lost to one goal: sleep. But first, lunch, and for that I will go to the gardens.

James Baldwin's Funeral

I found myself in a cathedral, crowds of people surrounded me, thick but quiet crowds. The blue and red light through the stained glass, bruise colored, and the rhythm of drums, a deep-rooted beat close to that of the human heart, pulsed and tinted everything. Everyone was dressed darkly, it was a funeral. I found a seat in a rear pew under a column of yellow light. Behind me the murmur of the crowd dissipated in one long silencing wave, and the sea began to split. A coffin was borne through the breach. I didn't know anyone here, I didn't know at first whose funeral it was. When the coffin was placed on a sort of altar, with flowers set about it, I could hear softly, in different parts of the room, women beginning to weep. A man approached the pulpit. He was dark and solemn, the blue light gave the physiognomy of his face a deep look of reticent royalty. This odd light bathed the coffin, the pulpit and the first few rows of mourners, until it gave way somewhere in the aisle to shafts of yellow. But beyond these, the cathedral darkened to a point of complete obscurity. In fact, at first I thought I was in the Great Hall, that I had entered a wing previously hidden from me. But this could not have been. People in the Great Hall do not gather together, and emotions that can only be consoled in a mass grievance are alien to them. With the light on my brow, I felt utterly at peace. The man on the pulpit stepped toward a microphone which extended like an olive branch in front of him. I think that it was an olive branch, or at least it possessed some sort of verdure. Then the orator cleared his throat, a contemplative and anticipatory silence followed. When he finally opened his mouth to talk, not words came flowing forth, but light, great bright light came flooding from his ever widening mouth. And a dove appeared in the center of the light, and silently it grew to an enormous size. But the dove was also made of this seraphic light, and the entire cathedral became aflame with it. The dove, its head barely contained beneath the dome, turned its eyes, which were like two deep wells, and set them directly on me.

I awoke. Something like waves or drums still beat in me. I must have dozed off at my desk. The Great Hall was typically quiet and tenebrous. I took a second to gather myself, and then found a sheet of paper on which to write down the dream. But instead I wrote down these lines: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read. It was books that taught me the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all of the people who were alive, with all of the people who have ever been alive." Oh Mr. Baldwin, why must everything be born out of so much pain? When will the splendor of the world renew itself?

A city's worth.

On my bus ride every morning I am audience to a nickelodeon show of alternately fascinating and troubling scenes. I read the city as a dialect, an offspring of the complex language of industrial progress. I see it as a completely natural outcropping of men's dreams, however, still being a bit provincial, I also see it as totally unnecessary. But it is, and it is a feast for sensitive eyes. Where else is there so much oddity, so much contrary, so many delusions and truths? Well I suppose the answer to that would be "everywhere, even where man has built nothing". But one notion always is striking to me: that each day a city's worth of people passes on, while at the same time a city's worth is being born. This process of loss and replenishment, an ongoing exchange of souls, in motion every second. The frail line we imagine to be so strong that divides life from death is danced across daily. The living are born and wear the clothes and live in the houses of the dead. All the monuments we build to them are paltry compared with what they really leave us: the inertia of their experiments and mistakes. In Rome, any time they dig a new subway tunnel, ruined cities are revealed. Aren't we all perched on ruined cities?

These are the thoughts that are occupying my mind as I pass St. Patrick's Cathedral, the sky an indifferent blue overhead. Strands of clouds lay themselves softly across bare morning light. My day has hardly begun and I am already weighed down by thoughts. When I am out in the world these imaginings can be fixed to objects, whatever may cross my field of sense. But ah! there is the Great Hall, growing ever larger as we approach, a promise of resignation. Sometimes I wonder if I am only a dream conjured by that sleeping giant. But I live when I am away, do I not? How it shines on a clear morning, with a cruel glow. It could have been carved from a single stone, polished to perfect brightness. The activity of the city rushes about it, a million souls are passing through it at all times, and it remains unmoved. I step from the bus into the square that I have walked across lost in dreams over and over again. The strange pink building with gothic spires will be golden when I pass it from the opposite direction this evening. The cavalry man on his horse is forever lunging forward with his sword. The sculptures of the sailors on bronze plaques are trying to free themselves yet again today.

A friend wrote the other day: "The past is the past. Just like a bad dream." She is right, we are constantly reawakening from the nightmare, each moment driven by unseen energy, and the past vanishes under layers of these moments. But in the Great Hall there is another saying: "The past is prologue". It leads to something. We are thousands of living and dead souls reflected in a single body. These are my thoughts as I cross the threshold. I resign myself to another day of darkness and silence.

A Contradiction

It may seem that I contradict myself when I make statements like "I am alone here", when in fact I am in a large, long room occupied by various people. It is debatable, whether or not I am alone, and exactly how large and long this room really is. This owes to the fact that a person standing at any given point in the room very well cannot discern the surrounding walls from the shadows that hide them, obscured as they are by the low light and basic limitations of human sight. I have walked from end to end, trying to count the footsteps it takes to travel the length of each wall. But I never reached the point where I measured my feet and multiplied that by the number of steps taken. No, I always become distracted by some thought or occurrence, lose count or pace before too long, or my mind jumps to some responsibility I had to attend to before I became interested in judging the volume of my container. Anyway, though I have walked from wall to wall in both directions, I still could not draw up a blueprint, even in abstract terms, that could adequately represent this room, which of course is just one wing of a vast complex. I have asked others how deep the foundation of the Great Hall descends underground, how far beyond sight its vaults extend, how many rooms it has, how many elevator shafts, restrooms, security checkpoints, warehouses, etc. I have been given just as many contradictory answers. I am not genuinely alone here, I am amongst those who do not know where they are, who cannot judge height nor distance, nor even remember the particulars of the place where they spend practically their entire lives.

If I am not alone here, then I am at least an apparition, especially when I leave my murky little wing and go on a brisk intellectual walk through the maddeningly bright library. It runs adjacent to my dark quarters, parallel at times. The wall, hundreds of feet high, is made entirely of glass. The light changes with the position of the sun by day, at noon blinding me and then in the evening a pervasive low golden hue, a washed out ochre, the same color as my exhaustion, touches every object. Or if it is raining, it is a pleasant grey with ripples of light cascading through the water coursing over the panes, and everything about you swims. The people swim and do not know it, the tables move about in the current. Books and boxes of documents lay about on the tables, the colors of the bindings and the geometry of the stacks are quite a pleasure after the flat, sea-colored darkness of my room. But out here the people are no different. They still linger above their work, rarely looking up at each other. They still seem deadened, silent, occupied by unfolding worries, completely unaware of the beautiful, kinetic, light-filled world that they have the pleasure every day of knowing. They seem held down by great flows of gravity, as I soar by them, above them, my body as light as a thought. My love makes me ghost-like, my curiosity and the surety of my love. I want to tell them to love their world, it is full of activity, warm light, and people. The people in my wing know only briefly interrupted darkness, and for this we appreciate that other world all the more. Or is it just me? I hardly see anyone else here soaring.

One of my superiors.

One of my superiors came to visit me today. They don't know what to make of me, my superiors. They think I have no ambition. Or that I am a little lost in my head. But my ambition reaches far and deep into the world. And what may seem to be an outward indifference to my surroundings is in fact a dedicated concentration. I can only thank them, thank them that they have given me this opportunity, the opportunity to fulfill myself under the most satisfying circumstances. I thank them for my silence, my dim little desk, and for all of the people that mill about here in their own desperate ways. I thank them for the glimpse of this peculiar arboretum, this aviary where everyone is such a distance from each other.

They don't plan to hire anyone else on, so it is me now alone for good in the filming room of the Great Hall of Records. The machines that move the air start to work, like an army approaching. I feel as though I have walked into a spider's web, the way they are complimenting me. After all their praises are sung, I'm still here in the dark, waiting for the next request. My superior has gone. I sit very still and think about the permanence of situations. Or I should say, the impermanence. It would be the easiest thing in the world to stand up and walk out of here, through the bright lobby full of mid-morning sun casting long shadows from the pillars, out beneath the giant seal, an eagle bearing a scroll in its talons, LITTERA SCRIPTA MANET. Yes, the spoken word dies. Quite impermanent. As all of these seconds falling away from me while I sit here, earning my way in the world. But I must keep in mind that I am not an exception, that men must work throughout their whole lives, and that this work, in all the various forms it presents itself, is a necessary and fathomless universe, a counter-balance to the manic flight of my dreams. One cannot live always above this world, one must dig very deeply into it. One must suffer the pressures of a prolonged descent, if one is to know what it is to be acclimated to your correct environment.

I stand up from my desk, the little area about me is illuminated by a golden desk lamp covered by a green plastic shade. A golden green encircles each occupied desk, and these are the only sources of light in this wing of the Great Hall. They are placed here and there, in a slight geometric splattering. I peer down the long corridor, thick with shadows and slight sounds of activity, rustling papers, a cupped hand over a whispering mouth, the incessant hum coming from the vents. Here and there the heads of other workers and researchers float above pools of dark shadows, encircled by the glow of their lanterns, the color of sea-water. As they stoop their heads to examine whatever odd documents lay in front of them, they bob like jellyfish in an opaque current. The length of the room stretches into a complete darkness. The small pockets of viridian light, scattershot snowflakes falling from a shrouded moonless sky. Or more exactly, incandescent fish, fish that know few common words, in an absent-minded or indifferent master's aquarium.

I am an employee

I am an employee of the Great Hall of Records, in the capital of our country. My mind wanders so throughout my day and I find myself writing down the impressions that come to me from extremes of sensory deprivation and the total abandonment of myself. In fact, having so little stimulus has provoked me into long examinations of the slightest objects, movements, or sounds. The significance of every shadow, each footstep, and the resounding force of every word spoken have taken on great life to me, since I have entered this dark place. I feel like a student, or a child. This is merely a beginning, I have found that while there are always infinite beginnings, there are hardly ever limits, or endings.