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igh upon a mesa, surrounded by a canyon, and in seclusion from the outer world, stretched the eccentric home of the extravagantly more eccentric Kenneth Burkhardt. The house was an aggressively modern construction of innumerable windows, winding ramps and interconnected decks. Consisting of one sprawling level raised several feet from the earth, a single winding corridor traversed its rooms. None of the furnishings were movable, being all of a piece with the fabric of the house. Even the chair of his desk was fixed solidly to the floor and could not be dislodged without violence. And to this solitary, saturnine and ascetic retreat, Burkhardt retired with his fortune at the age of 45 to write a book of philosophy.
He did not call it philosophy—he regarded it as a synthetic overview of the modern world—its strengths, weaknesses, structure, function, past and future—an ultimate analysis of contemporary humanity. And while I have called it philosophy, he vehemently disdained the word as designating nothing more than the solipsistic ramblings of men too vague and weak-willed for science. And the title of this projected work was of as oblique a saturninity as its author—Interregnum—by which he referred to the present period between, as he thought, the childhood of the world with its irrational modes and superstitions, and the new age to dawn, when all activities would be governed immovably but sympathetically by reason. In anticipation of this new age, Burkhardt had made himself its herald and prophet, and for this reason had retired to his seclusion.
It was a mighty work to be done but no one can say it was not prudently planned. He knew in essence what he meant to write and precisely the range of topics he would cover. He made an outline, subdividing his major subjects until subdivisions were exhausted into particular points. This outline alone occupied three months of work, constant research and ultimately more than 100 pages of single-spaced manuscript.
The work progressed steadily. Sometimes he deemed it necessary to drive to the city for more books in order that technical points rest on specific and authoritative citations. And indeed, there was hardly a topic untouched. At the end of a year, he had completed little more than the first of ten parts, and his progress comprised 900 pages. The work was truly epic and would, he thought, perhaps have to be issued by subscription—or he might simply have to donate the work to libraries. But still, it would provide the foundation for the proselytizing to come. So he worked, and in the evenings, sat listening to Debussy on the veranda while he drank white tea and gazed upon the canyon's depths below. And if he heard a soughing, sometimes howling wind in the canyon below, it did not disturb him. It was only the sound of solitude and the accompaniment of his work.
It was in his second year that he began to have trouble. His tastes may not have suited everyone but they were nonetheless very definite. And his manner, however severe and abrupt it may have seemed to others, conformed always to an inner decorum. As such, he was disturbed to find creeping into his otherwise orderly prose certain unaccustomed similes and expressions. Then again, he was assailed not merely by unfamiliar words but strange images that were all out of keeping with either his intentions or surroundings. While sunlight streamed through a hundred windows to the room where he sat and the brisk aroma of coffee was in the air, he nonetheless imagined grotesque scenes—tableaus that could have no conceivable connection to either his present work or multifarious past. But it was their grotesqueness, their nightmarish remoteness that troubled him most.
While pausing over a section on economic globalization, there came to his mind the image of grass parting in a field although no discernible object moved among it. In a like manner, he saw also whole trees parting on a hill, crashing violently in opposite directions as if with the passage of an avalanche—but here again no moving object but the trees could be discerned.
Such passing images could be shaken off. They were mere dreams, he was sure, suppressed at night by the lingering wakefulness of his restless mind, now reasserting themselves in his waking hours. He had read of it—REM intrusion, sleep paralysis, hypnagogia and other such. And if he thought more of it, it was only that in future he must sleep more soundly.
But the derangement of his prose was a more serious problem and hampered the progress of his work. Appropriate metaphors and expressions seemed crowded out or jostled by others emanating from some alien source. where he might have written |
| The enlargement and elaboration of corporate structure leads commonly to decadence of unity and purpose. |
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| he instead wrote |
| . . . leads commonly to a crumbling of features, like the instantaneous dissolution of the human body. |
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—a comparison he regarded immediately afterward as both inaccurate and uncalled for. Yet with a will of its own the image extended and elaborated itself, like the relentless variation of a compositional exercise. He seemed really to see a man dissolving as he sat alone in his room, liquefying even as he struggled to speak to someone who stood just outside the door—and to see the room below where a woman (who, in the particularity of the image, was dressed as a servant of the house) looked up in horror at the ceiling where a black spot slowly grew and dripped to the floor below. Or it was another man, in bed and surrounded by onlookers, his eyes shut while his blackened tongue quivered, who shouted in unearthly tones to be released from sleep. He was rewarded, when his eyes were opened, by the shriveling, crumbling and liquid collapse of his body. And in the vision, this collapse happened so quickly that the last echo of the voice seemed to reverberate over the last of his distinguishable remains.
And yet if it had been only these—the images, the derangement of his discourse—he might have withstood it, might have freed his work of these signs by persistent revision and correction. But his whole outlook was changing and his preoccupations shifted palpably to obscure, almost incoherent, corners of existence.
Existence—he wondered, could there ever exist such things as he now imagined? Among the recurrent yet constantly varying images that invaded his thoughts, he read the signs of many times and nations—the altering clothes of the actors, the furniture and appliances of the rooms in which they appeared, the accents and vocabularies of their speech, always distinctly heard. And he was not less troubled by the variations of the images than he was by the fact, gradually dawning on him, that the variations were not arbitrary. Not all nations were represented—not all times—and not all manner of men—but a pertinacious consistency governed them. In these visions, men of education were everywhere in evidence. This much he inferred not from many particular shows of scholarship but from that variegated range of speech and attention that marks men of letters. And if there was no sign of scholarship in the strict sense, he nonetheless discovered them in various attitudes of investigation or research—although of what was not for some time clear.
As for the settings of these scenes, while highly variable, they were constrained to a certain proximity. Very many of them clearly took place in the United States or Canada; almost as numerous were those in Britain; fewer in continental Europe. There were almost none in South America or further abroad, and these were usually extenuated by the presence of American or British travelers.
In time, too, the scenes crowded themselves into the past century, were palpably fewer in the 19th and almost unknown at any earlier time. And this graduated continuity of times and places gave rise to strange suggestions that he labored vigorously to suppress. It was, he thought, no more than the natural localization and continuity of knowledge that his imagination should invent by proximate materials. As for other suspicions—they could be dismissed as the rambling of the primitive mind, vestigial in dreams as in the structure of the brain.
He tried to restore his equanimity by dividing each day between his work on Interregnum and a journal of the intruding visions. In keeping with the vividness of their details, he set them down with a ruthless exactitude and with the pugnacious conviction that they could be nothing more than beasts of thought which dissection would inevitably destroy. Not content merely to write them down, he also daily re-read what he had written—and did so in the full expectation that familiarity would reduce them to the powerless banality destined, he thought, for all familiar things. Indeed, he came to think that his familiarity with the world through his exhaustive analysis of it might have produced the images as a byproduct—the jaded mind groping instinctively for relief in novelty. For this reason, he abandoned Interregnum and gave himself entirely to the journal in the hope of curing his obsession.
But with the progress of days and weeks, the visions only increased, disconcertingly putting forth new branches of imagery with overlapping details. In one quarter of these dreams (he felt they must be waking dreams), images of mold or fungi predominated. Unidentifiable growths overspread the exterior walls of a house, crept into the crevices of crumbling mortar and so invaded the fabric of the structure as to seem inseparable from it. Elsewhere, fungi floated in massive bodies on the ocean as if accrued to the hulks of derelict ships, growing thick and spongelike, and seeming almost to breathe with primordial vitality. And in another, some fungus was welded to the joints of an animal or monster, a distortion of crustacean form, such that it was impossible to tell whether the fungus lived in symbiotic relation to the creature or had overtaken the dead remains and animated the mandibles and shells with its own alien life.
Then there were scenes that he would not have classed with the other visions at all, had it not been for the recurrence of a single unsettling detail that pervaded them. It was a fog or mist—or he sometimes thought it a violent and widespread exhalation of spores, so nearly did he seem to detect its granulation. It moved through the corridors and rooms of houses, climbed the steep banks of wooded valleys or revolved slowly in the depths of pits. But it did not fly as the leaf was blown, instead passing from place to place with its own secret motive and thinning gradually, as it went, into invisibility—although he felt that it yet moved unseen, since the sound of its passage did not cease. It was a strange soughing, sometimes howling sound, seeming at once to indistinctly pipe and groan as with long agony or madness.
Ever again, his imagination was goaded by these and such these. But so much strength of mind as had resisted the countless superstitions of the world would not be undone by simple hippogriffs—not by malaise. He suspected a physical cause and took himself to the doctor. He received a general physical examination and the consultation of specialists. Blood tests were normal as were brain scans. No sign of disease could be found.
When physical causes were eliminated from probability, he went to the city weekly to visit a psychiatrist. He frankly divulged all, including the journals which he still kept. He even expressed his doubts of psychotherapy, giving his reasons, while admitting that his condition had so far eluded every attempt at self-treatment. But four months of sessions convinced him that the psychiatrist's treatment would be equally ineffectual. If anything, the visions increased in the potency and scope of their effects.
He had no doubt that even visions have an end. He would exhaust them—would bleed them of every scene and detail, and so drain his mind of its own fantastic suppuration. The compass of his knowledge was not limitless. Was it therefore not reasonable to say that the invention of dreams was also bounded? What madness (by now, he called it madness) had to say to him, let it rail. He would not be vanquished by daydreams.
Thus he began his second book, untitled, while the manuscript of the first gathered dust on a shelf. It would be, he smiled to think, a species of secret history and one to be buried when the nethermost of dreams had disgorged itself. And that the work might go quickly, he gave himself over to whatever ideas suggested themselves, as to the working out of a thought-experiment—to gain the mastery of the elements that its resolution would imply.
Although he continued to record disordered outbursts of imagery in the journal, he strove in his nameless book for logical rigor. Each man who appeared in multiple visions was profiled with close scrutiny according to the accumulated facts. Likewise, each place and monstrosity was similarly profiled on separate sets of pages in their own categories. This orderly process was continually threatened by the intrusion of new information but he found that by interlineation and marginalia, as well as by periodic recopying, he was able to sustain the steady expansion. Besides, he also made use of tentative maps and timelines, inferred with greater specificity and confidence as the information at his disposal increased. Architectural sketches were of great assistance in this regard as distinctive buildings and skylines could usually be matched against historical photographs and engravings to the extent of determining not only the nation and city but also the neighborhood and street.
At length, he acquired the names of some of the men—and gazed at their photographs with stupefied horror and recognition. The mobile and transitory faces of the intruding visions here lay immobile and ageless, unequivocal and somehow mocking.
With names came biographies, at times remarkably extensive if not satisfying. They were, most of them, artists, novelists, poets and musicians. Some of them were philosophers and academics; and there was a smattering of other professions. Nearly all were those who might be expected by keenness of intellect or special native faculty to be more than usually sensitive to images and ideas—more than usually capable of imagining the monstrosities that Burkhardt had seen. And in a few cases he indeed found evidence of these imaginings in their written or painted works, although the depictions were never quite consistent with the visions so meticulously recorded in the journal. Then again, a search for direct connections between the men revealed nothing, no common society of any kind—and connections of the third or fourth degree were too common to be useful.
From these investigations proceeded a great change in him. It was not that he ceased entirely to reason but that in his inexorable pursuit of reason he had discovered a mystery that reason could not unravel. Undoubtedly something had gone to work on his mind—a thing with a species of law and organization. He was brought vaguely to think of the equivocation of substance that some physicists had lately dared to extend from matter and energy to simple information—insinuating that the universe was nothing more than a holographic projection, a vast computer or unbounded automaton with patterns, symmetries and anomalies having reference to no other cause than the nature of its permutations. This thought—that the universe was nothing more than a pattern and descendency of information—led him further abroad to still stranger thoughts of the heritage of thought itself—of ancestral memory and the secret ancestry of words. Who knew better than he that ideas, literature, even mere connotations and turns of phrase suffer competition, death and development together with the material world? Who knew better than he that every word and name concealed an abyss?
But with great effort, he banished these thoughts. He would not be discouraged. Whatever was necessary, he would do. The visions interrupted him at every hour but they would not come forever. And in any case his masterpiece awaited completion. Once and for all, he would strip these goads of their mystery and power together.
He wrote day and night, furiously scribbling, stopping neither to eat nor drink, working until exhaustion came with sleep to reveal in the morning the insensible accretion of yesterday's pages, written in a hand so hasty and illegible that they must have seemed to any casual glance the scribbling of a semi-literate or a lunatic.
With the length of days, the secret history deepened. The visions extended further in time and space, gradually altering the nature of their terrors and the character of their protagonists but ever expressing monstrosity. He saw ancient cities, stone labyrinths carved from the mountains, rude villages of straw and mud—all haunted by beasts, visible and invisible, coming to men in flesh and dreams, shadowing their fires in a deeper darkness, catching at their vessels with indescribable sloughs of oceanic phantasms, growing amid the very trees and stones, and going back and forth upon the earth with an everlasting stealth and vigilance that outwore the very mountains and passed without the coil of death. Nor could men themselves be regarded as more than nests in which to breed horror. How, if the hand would not sit still on the page, if the empty air were alive with animal motion, if the unmoving mold were alive with intelligent purpose—how then could any face be trusted where all might be abroil with unreasoning distortion? Now—for no audience but the pitiless walls—he set down the terms of what others must miscall madness. |
I am not afraid of those unknown names I know, that speak themselves from darkness to my inner ear. Ancient beasts, blinding catastrophic lights at night, and the silent, silent houses where what remains is mindless but alive—these are not the cause of fear. But the endless reworking—things that were once men, men that were once things, sightless things unseen but shifting, dreams not dreams but stars awakened and the universal host of existence unsolid, interchangeable and undefining—this is what troubles me. All tumbled, confused, inwardly collapsing and reforming dreams might be set aside forever but that they persist and I know their names.
And if I know not the origin of all these things, I understand now those early visions—those faces slipped away like mudslides, avalanches of flesh and bones—black pools sinking into floors, creeping through the interstices of brick—fungi that are not fungi, ever-creeping and insinuating themselves into men or inanimate objects and cast upon the air like spores—a haze, a fog, a mist—into a fineness that the eye no longer sees yet living—moving invisibly in the world—parting the grass, breaking the trees—gathering around whatever thoughts suspect it, gathering with the increase of thoughts and feeding with a frenzy that is the visions themselves.
I have heard it. I will admit it now. I have heard it moving in the canyon. It is a soughing, whistling sound, at once piping, burring, forming the syllables of its name. But I will not write it. It is bad enough I have consigned so much to writing that I risk by its exposure the infection of the whole world. We shall not all become a nightmare. |
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But even as he set about the destruction of the journals and the late manuscript, his right eye fell shut. He at first thought it a mote of dust that had caused his eyelid to close by reflex. He tried to blink it away but the lid would not move. He felt at the eyelid with his hand, tried to raise it, and screamed.
He sought the mirror—even while an almost imperceptible groan escaped him and an irregular patter accompanied his steps. But by the time he reached the mirror, his voice was lost within the ruin of his body. A confused rumbling, spattering noise of indistinguishable vocalization caught at his inner ear before voice, sight and sound vanished together, replaced only by sensations of the most alien kind.
His great work complete, Burkhardt was no more. |
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