all that's disappeared

an apparition appears

As the pandemic began to clear and the air became a tad less heavy after a personal tussle with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, i found myself wandering the Memorial Library stacks daily, stoned and nic sick off of a dying mint posh, vaguely searching.

Past the canada goose jackets and foodcarts during the day, underneath the floodlights turned on in the frigid night and over the steaming manholes, through the revolving doors and past the front desk’s card reader backed by extraordinary 70s-era fake wood panelling, and nobody much existed in the stacks except for the occasional ghastly figure of a librarian, masked up, pushing a cart vaguely floating underneath florescent sometimes flickering lights. I had recently shaved my head, bleached the ends. I thought of myself as a punk. I felt strange in public spaces.

The building had the same grey feeling as a pocket inhaler except it was dusty like a bank vault. For two years it remained my safe space, my personal quiet catalog, an endless expanse amidst the claustrophobic humdrum of student life on campus, a place where mysteries lurked, most of them very knowable if somewhat baffling (i first came across Derrida in this library), surrounded by, in the periphery of the place, a spattering of languages varying by section whose doors remained locked to my understanding. I was left mostly alone to this Borgesian dreamscape.

Having reverted to a certain kind of animal energy within this stodgy wilderness,—and certainly the dab pen in my pocket had its part to play in this,—i took on a hunter/gatherer mindset so that whenever i found a leather tome of mysterious contents in english during my wanderings around the library’s nine stories, onto the pile it went; whenever i came across a book of sociology, theology, or esotericism long out of print, sometimes for over half a century, onto the pile it went. Occasionally i would grab a book whose name i recognized, but these were only ever to be used as a familiar fallback for if the unfamiliar harvest proved too untenable,—the goal was the unknown. I was immersed in it. I had become the mystery.

My attention span was far too fleeting, though, unfortunately, for serious study and more often than not i would flip through the pages of a book until a section or two caught my eye, held them in place for a moment or two of clarity. Sometimes i would find a style in a smaller book approachable enough to lose myself within it entirely from beginning to end. These were the best of these murky moments but oftentimes i had smoking too much to truly recall what i had read even earlier in the week,—everything, all the voices and tones and information felt like a gradient, a rainbow which connected to itself, surrounded by fleeting phantoms of voice, the words of long dead writers and theorists all merging together, faceless and nameless in retrospect,—so it sometimes felt like a wash.

I can remember distinctly discovering Crowley and Ram Dass, McLuhan and Lispector in that library, though; and i would not have found them had a copy of Borges’ Ficciones, borrowed from a friend, not obliterated my view of reality the year before during those first hazy couple months of the pandemic, and the confusion, and those first times with acid and shrooms.

The part i have the most trouble reckoning with to this day is that the strange sort of agonies i felt wandering the library stacks like a hungry ghost were not any sort of empty nihilism,—that would come later,—rather it felt like so much the opposite that it may as well have been an empty nihilism: it was not that nothing meant anything, but that everything meant everything. Either way there was no distinguishing. Everything was in a jumble of meaning just by its being in existence as a pointing, as a having-been-once-pointed. That, sometimes purely in itself, filled me with the most profound wonder. All that’s disappeared is not lost. Not entirely. Not ever. It’s simply been archived¹. Isn’t that interesting?

Once during my wanderings, in the library’s idle summer hours, i somehow chanced upon Borges himself,—it could be no other,—wandering the library like only himself would, searching for something more concrete yet tremendously more vague than myself. He floated between Homer and Ovid, and the translations of both into english. Having gone blind, his eyes looked both ways in two directions at once. He said nothing at all to me. His slouch spoke well to how he was doing. I watched him, holding onto the metal at the end of the shelves, as he floated vaguely from the white florescent distance. What a surprise. What a remarkable surprise to see him like this.

He looked at my bleached blond hair and floated past me to browse the translations of Hesiod into spanish. His eyes turning blindly, gazing well beyond the shelf, he removed a book from the shelf, gently pulled it down with one finger to a horizontal and removed it out, licked the spine with his tongue, and disappeared into the dust falling catching the white light, faded into the smell of old paper, faded into every library spread out across a hundred thousand painted nodes across a painted globe painted over. Just as Whitman exists in every wild growth of grass and Sappho’s where wave meets rock, so does Borges exist in every library as its resident spirit, constellation, contradiction.

Brushing this experience off of myself, swearing to never tell a soul, i walked back home through the hazy winter to my seven roommates and i played beer pong in the basement with a bass guitar strapped to my chest. Henry Ptacek played the drum set beneath the radiator. Vinny walked thumping down the stairs one by one with a collection of thrift CDs he bought for 2 dollars a box on eBay and he began to take them out from their cases one by one,—“huh, Dolly Parton,”—to throw them shattering against the concrete wall. I joined, understanding the motion, understanding the sentiment, opening the clamshells and throwing. And soon all of us down in the basement would be throwing the CDs at the concrete wall until the floor became crunchy underneath our shoes and we finally felt a need to sweep it all away.

1. And on this note, rest in peace Archive.org—i will miss archive.org like a long-term friend almost become a long-lost friend. They’ve just lost their appeal in the courts, soon to have their collections shuttered to the public forever.