“ZXIT IS WITHIN.”
~~~We are within ZXIT.”
Like the wardrobe that opens on a garden, & Alice’s looking glass rabbit hole, a library can open on (&/or drop us into) countless worlds, dimensions, adventures out of (& within) ourselves & circumstances, an ephemeral liberation from ordinary limits of time, life & self….
However delivered, stories don’t just carry us to other places & times, but INTO OTHER LIVES: people, animals, figures of the imagination–monsters or superheroes; talking toys, trains, transformers; teller of tall tales &/or subject of same; sleuth of mysteries, seeker of know-how & understanding; dreamer, lover, fellow explorer of inner world & outer worlds…. Be bard. Be singer. Be boy. Be girl. Be creature of the wild, seer, cosmic traveler, fool….
Moments of active happiness, even glee, find pleasure in the shared motion of music, verse & dance (“& we all fall down”), but the book & library need no outward physical activity to trigger singing & dancing in heart & mind, in resonance with others, transported to feel a translation of experience from their points of view (yet safely “once removed,” i.e., in realms of the imagination).
A library opens doors into lives, worlds & stories, each “piece” at once entrance & EXIT. Bod Library had collected EXIT signs from before it was a library, when its main building already had more doors than anyone has ever succeeded in counting. Not all lead to actual EXITS, maybe a baker’s dozen; the rest pass to rooms, wings, halls, entries, closets, cupboards, basements & attics (both plural), sand-&-rock garden, veranda, internal aviary, walled yard of bird-feeders with its own internal & external gateways…. (And that’s not counting our other buildings, studios & the Inspiration branch in the mountains with boundless wild country.)
Now add the countless doors opened in imagination passing through a library’s contents, now including those clicked to open as pinhead-digital files & websites with virtual rooms, with contents of almost any length & size–with & a network of websites like ours–if there were ever any quite like this, with a seemingly bottomless self-reference section….
No bottom yet, but a variety of passageways & doors, some painted, some paintings (more or less as in the Trompe-l’oeil exhibit at Mapa Center). Hard to tell how many are labelled with ZXIT signs, but some. One without such a sign looks like a laundry chute or escape hatch. If it really were an escape hatch…, we’d ask, what do we escape from &/or into? An attached note reads “Chute first, ask questions later.” Not at the moment, thanks. (Besides, a note reads nothing; it’s we who read the note.)
“The reading of nothing will begin at exactly 00:00. Please be on time.”
“Dr. Marion Miriam Malarkey will speak on Nothing: A Void Not Prohibited by Law, a previously deleted excerpt from her newest book The Arts & Science of Escape, in which she claims one of the best methods of ESCAPE remains one of the earliest, namely not showing up.” –Dewy Decimal Digest
“The dewier the decimal, the screwier the digest,
the gooier the digestion.” —Offal Wall’s Treat Urinal
In an attempt to demonstrate Glass-Half-Full Disclosure, Bod Library’s flunky-in-charge of sausage generation, Yours Crudely, admits to having been a patient of Dr. Malarkey briefly, & not entirely on a voluntary basis, pending release….
Dr. Malarkey’s report to the court stated, “Unequivocally & without reservation, you can call Yours Crudely completely nuts; you can call Yours Crudely mister putz; you can call Yours Crudely lord of shmutz or a colossal pain in the butty-but-butts. But you can’t lock him up in a cage that shuts for long, for he’s a master of escape, with absence for mistress, soon gone from any landscape, seascape in some he-scape or she-scape, a man without a constant face, at one with empty space.
You may think you know just where he’s gone, & then you find he weren’t there long–meaning you don’t find him at all, daddyo, for long long gone, might as well be nowhere–a bottomless hole mostly covered in hair–open mouth & glassy stare, .whirlwind swirling the county fair–catch a whiff of dairy air…holy cow-pies by–“
Now that was uncalled for, and quite unprofessional,
like a gossiping priest, fresh from confessional,
Oy vey, we’re on our way–exactly where, we can’t yet say–
We can’t tell where we’re going.
We can hardly tell where we’ve been.
The self escapes our knowing
{~~~doing empty zafu zen}
~~~~~~the mind its pen–
The point (if there were one) might just be that we enter our own conception (as we might any imaginary library), as visitors in search of some ever-fluctuating combination of enlightenment, education & escape–. No longer the same self as before, we take on the character of our roles. Yours Crudely the copywriter might become Alice the inn-keeper with a cider press, who helps with the filing. (Oh, and such an exquisite delight to imagine that ecstatic re-becoming!)
Or perhaps it’s the post-doc in a cubicle in the corner where detective fiction & psychopathology meet & cross their eyes, dot their T’s, pinch their cheeks & shoot the breeze. Or the Associate Fellow Filing Flunky in the Dept. of Misplaced Records…the sensuously dictioned visitor checking the shelves for bodice rippers & bosom bobs (who shall remain nameless & anonymous as usual)…everyone has a story–or used to, before so much migrated to the cloud.
Who comes to the library now, but this half-fictional library historian specializing in the Bod? Who actually lived as a boy in his grandmother’s house, which housed (besides the coming & going of extended family) both a 2nd hand dress-shop & a lending library (likely discussed at some length elsewhere). With library in his psyche, if not still in his blood, breathed in while daydreaming where the winter sun streamed in.
As for this library, presumably the idea of being an actively functional filing-cabinet was the start, the library a convenient metaphor for organizing (foirst rooms, then whole sites). At some point, close to the beginning, it took on some life of its own, encouraging new text (as here right now), holding text for re-drafting, explorations for re-imagining….
At some point, it struck me that the library was becoming the title character of its own novel–a novel novel, in the form of a library–on-line (LOL), for which little old I simply served as often as possible. I thought of other writers I associated with libraries, like Borges (of whom I’ve written elsewhere), and also of novelists who’d played with their forms & varied their contents to reflect the forms of their time, place & culture. Many came to mind, from Leopold Bloom to Don Coyote de la Mancha, but John dos Passos especially, vaguely recalling snatches of jazz, commercials, newspapers & magazine, his media atmosphere.
Not that his novels necessarily held together. In fact, I can’t recall a single character–perhaps part of why the books have slipped further into obscurity, compared to the characters that stand out so boldly in Joyce, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck & others. It’s as if the sense of character gives the reader eyes & ears, heart & mind to engage with. What does a library have, by contrast?