Distrust That Particular Flavor (11 page)

I FIRST READ
Jorge Luis Borges's
Labyrinths
in an armchair upholstered with a smooth lettuce-green brocade, patterned with leaves that were themselves not unlike lettuce, though they were also rather like clouds, or perhaps rabbits. I regarded that chair as an environment in and of itself, having known it since earlier childhood. It was the only relatively safe place in a room I regarded as ominously formal and adult, a room dominated by large pieces of dark furniture belonging to my mother's family. One of these was an unnaturally tall desk, topped with a bookcase closed with two long and solid doors, reputed, though dimly, to have once belonged to the Revolutionary hero Francis Marion. Its lower drawers smelled terrifyingly and chemically of Time, and within them, furled, lay elaborately printed scrolls listing the county's dead in the Great War.

I now know that I believed, without quite wanting to admit it to myself, that that desk was haunted.

I initially discovered Borges in one of the more liberal-minded anthologies of science fiction, which had included his story "The Circular Ruins." That sufficiently intrigued me that I sought out
Labyrinths
, which I imagine would have been fairly difficult for me to find, though I no longer recall those difficulties.

I do, however, remember the sensation, both complex and eerily simple, induced by my first reading of "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," while seated in that green chair.

Had the concept of software been available to me, I imagine I would have felt as though I were installing something that exponentially increased what one day would be called bandwidth, though bandwidth of what, exactly, I remain unable to say. This sublime and cosmically comic fable of utterly pure information (i.e., the utterly fictive) gradually and relentlessly infiltrating and ultimately consuming the quotidian, opened something within me which has never yet closed.

Or without me, possibly, I hungrily and delightedly saw, as Borges's hallmark corridors of mirrors opened out around me in every direction. Decades later, now, I understand the word "meme," to the extent that I understand it at all, in terms of Tlon's viral message, its initial vector a few mysteriously extra pages in an otherwise seemingly ordinary volume of a less than stellar encyclopedia.

Works we all our lives recall reading for the first time are among the truest milestones, but
Labyrinths
was a profoundly singular one, for me, and I believe I knew that, then, in my early adolescence. It was demonstrated to me, that afternoon. Proven. For, by the time I had finished with "Tlon" (though one never finishes with "Tlon," nor indeed with any story by Borges) and had traversed "The Garden of Forking Paths" and wondered, literally bug-eyed, at "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," I discovered that I had ceased to be afraid of any influence that might dwell within Francis Marion's towering desk.

Borges, this elegant and mysterious voice, whom I had instantly accepted as the most welcome of uncles, this inhabitant of a clearly mythical place called Buenos Aires, had somehow dissolved a great deal of childhood superstition. He had stretched basic paradigms as effortlessly, it seemed, as another gentleman might tip his hat and wink, and I had felt a certain crudeness, a certain foolishness, fall away.

I sat, changed, in the green chair, and regarded a different world, one whose underpinnings had been revealed to be at once infinitely more mysterious and far more interesting than I could previously have imagined.

When I left that room, I took Borges with me, and my life has been better for it, much better.

If you haven't yet made the gentleman's acquaintance, I can only urge you to do so. In all humility, I can serve no other function, here at the front of this now-venerable collection of his incomparable fictions, than to act, mercifully briefly, as a sort of butler. I am not a Borges scholar, nor indeed any sort of scholar, but I am honored (though indeed embarrassed, believing myself unworthy) to invite you in.

Please.

Many afternoons, decades, after my own introduction to Borges, I found myself in Barcelona, in late December, attending a festival celebrating his life and work. The events of the festival were staged in some vast repurposed fortress or castle, a structure I imagined had lain dusty and silent during the seeming centuries of Francisco Franco's ghastly rule, but which now, through the briskly confident resurgence of Catalan culture and vast
amounts of European Union capital, hummed and gleamed like a vacuum tube within a thirteenth-century reliquary.

One afternoon, alone, I sought out a rumored display of manuscripts and other Borgesiana, in a hall on an upper floor. Finding this, I discovered that these objects were displayed beneath glass, but a glass treated in such a way as to approximate the effect of the onset of his glaucoma. They were visible, these relics, only narrowly, and in a way that imposed a painful and awkward dance of the head if they were to be studied closely. I remember the peculiarly childlike slope, from left to right, of a handwritten manuscript page, and the delicacy of a red-lacquered miniature Chinese birdcage, the gift of a poet friend.

I went out walking, then, after having been invited to meet later with Alberto Manguel in a bar on La Rambla, the only person I'd ever met to have actually known Borges. Manguel, when I had first met him, a decade before, had told me that he himself had met a man who had known Franz Kafka. And what had this person had to say about Kafka, I'd asked? That Kafka, Manguel had told me, had known everything there was to know about coffee. But now I could no longer remember if Manguel had had any information of that sort to impart about Borges, and I reminded myself to ask him, when we met.

Walking through Placa Catalunya, I discovered a recent monument to some martyred Catalan figure in the civil war. It was grim, this monument, and terribly striking, a monolithic flight of granite stairs, tilted unnaturally, impossibly forward upon themselves, into the horizontal. A negation of what stairs are, and of flight, and of a life, aspiration. I stood beside it, shivering, trying to puzzle out the
inscription. Failing to do so, I walked on, into La Rambla. And eventually met Manguel and his friends. And in the course of discussing his new place in the country, in France, forgot to bring up Borges.

A few days later, at home in Vancouver, I sat at my computer, watching live feed from a video camera positioned somewhere high on the side of a building, overlooking Placa Catalunya. And on my screen was that terrible monument, the granite stairs, impossibly rotated, mute symbol of negation.

And beside it a man, wearing a brown coat, not unlike the one I had worn, standing. Attempting to puzzle out an inscription.

I was abetted, in that moment, by technologies Borges, our heresiarch uncle, with his doctrines of circular time, his invisible tigers, his paradoxes, his knife-fighters and mirrors and dawns, had no need of. And in that moment, as you will soon know if you are fortunate enough to ignore the awkwardness of our meeting here, and to enter that which awaits you, I knew myself, once again, to be within the labyrinth.

LITERARY FORMS ARE TOOLS,
and genuinely new ones are few and far between.

I believe that Peter Ackroyd has invented a genuinely new one with
London: The Biography
, although I would hesitate to give him sole credit for the perfected form.

There has been a vast, multiauthored, peculiarly specific "London Project" rather cryptically under way for the past decade or so, in London, and Ackroyd of course has been central to that, with works like
Hawksmoor
,
The House of Doctor Dee
, and
Dan Leno and the Limehouse
Golem
.

But these books arise from a substrate of more singular and less popularly visible literature: from Iain Sinclair's poetry (
Lud Heat
,
Suicide Bridge
), novels (
Downriver
,
Radon Daughters
) and superbly hallucinatory London-based nonfiction (
Lights Out for the Territory
), and from the obsessively detailed graphic-novel Ripperology of Alan Moore's
From Hell
. (Somewhere deep at the heart of all of this accumulated New Wave Londonology dwell the tygers and angels of William Blake, himself an artificer of what we would call graphic novels, were they to be produced today.) These are all works which attempt to re-Braille the Borgesian labyrinth that is London and its history, while regarding that
retouching, that induction of the "return of the reforgotten," as a heroic and somehow utterly crucial project in and of itself.

I have been a keen visitant to this London Project almost from its start, as the enigma of this mysteriously "unknowable" city has been with me since I first went there in my early twenties. The paradox of this vast human settlement, this text laid out in the one human language I have immediate and effortless access to, yet which remains somehow resolutely "closed," has troubled me quietly and constantly, and I have returned there more repeatedly, and more determinedly, than to any other world city. Looking, always, for some key, some Rosetta stone.

I began to find that key, it seemed, in the Nineties, in Iain Sinclair's work, with its weird cod-occult forays into urban ley lines and secret centers of ancient and nameless power. Sinclair's almost autistic vision cut down into the very magma of the thing, providing handles for what had previously seemed unimaginable, unmanageable.

But Sinclair's faux Lovecraftian subtexts, like Moore's blood-drenched conspiracies in
From Hell
, finally lose traction in the way that all conspiracy theories do: The description of an underlying, literally occulted order is invariably less complex than the surface reality it supposedly informs. Conspiracy theories and the occult comfort us because they present models of the world that more easily make sense than the world itself, and, regardless of how dark or threatening, are inherently less frightening.