Work Text:
It was June 7th when I set out to see its repair.
Today is the 13th.
Now, I finally have, in my hands and in my home, The Remembrance of the Zahir. In it, I hope to find the answer to my being. With the canvas restretched and framed, I saw in it the two figures I had always seen; one in repose, one with an agitated gait. Upon the seam of the painting there was now, revealed, a small convex mirror. The mirror was bronze and plain, and sat upon a counter to the furthest right of the image. In it, in perfect non-Euclidean distortion, was a reflection of the artist’s hand which appeared to be arduously at work as I gazed upon it. Who this self is, if this self is, now all this time after what happened in The Sleeping City. I am not the man I was then, but I am still able to recall, and perhaps recount, what happened. If it were to suit me. I could.
That hand alla prima and still painting. The two figures. Details which came to light in my efforts to come to a conclusion about myself- a candelabra all but one light extinguished, the hint of slippers beneath the bedside, a floral tessellation in the carpet beneath the subject. They said anyone who looks upon the painting is shaped forever to become one of two different people. These two people who have the same non-face.
I am at first arrested by my apprehension of the portrait-sitter is whose face I cannot see. Before the repair was completed, it seemed as if the sewing would bring together the eyes and lips of the profile, features which made a head a face. The line of your cheek beneath the eye, revealing the truth of a hidden expression. But once repaired, the silhouette was all I could manage. Perhaps Es knows the traditional style, or Marn could find an expert in repairs. A question for another time.
This tangential line of thought leads me then to the figure in the background. Left to right, with an incredible agitation. Their step hovering just above the grass, portrayed with such… efficacy? It’s difficult to find the word. Such intent. I thought I could hear the crunch of the yard beneath their shoes.
The research I had found those months ago implied that just seeing this portrait would be enough. I am lucky to have it, to hang it in this house. With It by my side, we sit in the living space and read and I glance above and try and make a decision. I reflect and it reflects back to me, the artist’s hand trapped in its labor of perception.
“The portrait will shape you to become your understanding of who that person is.” I suppose a little longer is necessary to make that understanding clear to me. Or, my understanding, is that understanding takes time.
I sat on the floor of my apartment and rubbed my hand through Its hair. I am still, albeit only partially or… with the painting above us, temporarily, Myer Leopold Duvall.
---
Today is the 10th of June,
"My purpose is merely astonishing," he wrote, "The final term of a theological or metaphysical proof—the world around us, or God, or chance, or universal Forms—is no more final, no more uncommon, than my revealed novel. The sole difference is that philosophers publish pleasant volumes containing the intermediate stages of their work, while I am resolved to suppress those stages of my own."
And yet, for Lye Lychen, there is not a single draft to bear witness to that years-long labor. I suppose his method made sense. He attempted at once to find all he could find, and understand so much that it could destroy him. Or us. I don’t know what I think of him anymore, yet he writes me still. I believe he would write me without response for eternity, and long after we- the creature and I- leave this place, its next tenants would find their doorstop periodically tapestried with the ravings of a mad scholar.
All these impossible ways and means he writes to me are somehow also the least interesting.
“What my eyes saw was simultaneous; what I shall write is successive,” he writes, “because language is successive. Something of it, though, I will capture.”
I find myself tucking his letters in the cover of this journal, as if I will someday revisit them with anything but bored disdain. I told It yesterday, while slicing an eggplant to be oil-fried, that Lyke’s state reminded me of a book I’d come across in the Sapodillian libraries, though the author I could not recall. How Lye Lichen will arrive before my own Quixote- his letters will remain in the coverfold as prologue to my journal. I will be introduced to my story through his eyes.
Why the Quixote?
In this repair, now so nearly complete, I find my hands are often injured and crave to be idle. I cannot keep fine work going without rest, the travel to Aldomina has taxed me deeply, and the fatigue is not simply of the flesh. It brings books to me, from somewhere, and I read them with a voice that no longer sounds my own.
Rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor. “Truth, whose mother is history,” and “History, whose mother is truth,” which is which these days? I find myself predisposed to the former, the idea staggering, that history is not a delve into reality but is, in fact, the font of reality itself.
Historical truth is not what happened; it is what we believed happened.
It finds the stories boring, and vows never to bring me anything else about the concerns of dragons.
---
Today is the 15th of June.
“The Remembrance of the Zahir,” is a painting, but the Zahir itself is something altogether different.
In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or letter opener has scratched the letter N T and the number 2; the date stamped on the face is 1929.
In Arabic, "zahir" means visible, manifest, evident; in that sense, it is one of the ninety-nine names of God; in Muslim countries, the masses use the word for "beings or things which have the terrible power to be unforgettable, and whose image eventually drives people mad.
Ali Azur relates that in a certain school in Shiraz there was a copper astrolabe "constructed in such a way that any man that looked upon it but once could think of nothing else, so that the king commanded that it be thrown into the deepest depths of the sea, in order that men might not forget the universe."
In 1832, on the outskirts of Bhuj, Meadow Taylor heard the following uncommon expression used to signify madness or saintliness: "Verily he has looked upon the tiger." He was told that the reference was to a magic tiger that was the perdition of all who saw it, even from a great distance, for never afterward could a person stop thinking about it. Someone mentioned that one of those stricken people had fled to Mysore, where he had painted the image of the tiger in a palace. Years later, Taylor visited the prisons of that district; in the jail at Nighur, the governor
showed him a cell whose floor, walls, and vaulted ceiling were covered by a drawing of an infinite tiger. It was a tiger composed of many tigers, in the most dizzying of ways; it was crisscrossed with tigers, striped with tigers, and contained seas and Himalayas and armies that resembled other tigers.
It has been said that there is no creature in the world that did not tend toward becoming a Zaheer,1 [lThis is Taylor's spelling of the word.] but that the All-Merciful does not allow two things to be a Zaheer at the same time, since a single one is capable of entrancing multitudes.
I look at the painting and I turn it over in my mind’s eye. First I could see the face of it, then the reverse; now I can see both sides at once. It is not as though the painting were made of glass, since one side is not superimposed upon the other— rather, it is as though the vision were itself
spherical, with the Zahir rampant in the center. Anything that is not the Zahir comes to me as though through a filter, and from a distance— A violent scene of my imagination, physical pain.
This painting is not the Zahir, but it does remember it. It sees at once a person before and after obsession. I begin to sort my feelings. I recall my desperation when I realized that no divine fortune could any longer save me; the inward relief of knowing that I was not to blame for my misfortune; the envy I felt for those whose Zahir was not their self but a coin, a slab of marble or a tiger.
How easy it is not to think of a tiger!
-----
I will write, someday, “On June 7th, I began the task of repairing the Remembrance of the Zahir.”
For now, what I write, is that today is June 7th, and on June 6th, Chine died.
I do not know if there will be a funeral. As I put pen to page, I am sure there will not be.
Their life was exemplary, and yet an inner desperation constantly gnawed at him. He passed through endless metamorphoses, as though fleeing from themself. The cut and color of his hair was famously unstable, as were their smile, their skin, their nose, and the slant of his eyes.
Shall I confess I was in love with him, and that their death actually brought tears to my eyes? Though in writing it, I find this so selfish to say. In another time, under other circumstances, maybe I...
Perhaps he suspected that. Perhaps he knew what I was asking when I asked if he remembered. I am suddenly relieved that there will be no funeral.
At wakes, the progress of corruption allows the dead person's body to recover its former faces. Chine had so many faces, I am glad to say I will not see his face in the distorted emotional arrogance of the highest quality embalming that money can afford. They could not carve his sneer, they could not capture his presence. No version of that face could disturb me but this one conjured by my own imagination; Chine lying stiff among the flowers, their thirst for the world growing more perfect in death.
It was that image that spurned me to leave. I wandered, and It did not follow me.
With increasingly weary and rapid steps, I sought not only to banish these feelings but to escape their orbit altogether. So I preferred to “lose” them. I went neither to the Basilica that morning nor to the cemetery. I took a passage to Constitución and from Constitución to San Juan and Boedo. On an impulse, I borrowed a bicycle at Urquiza, abandoned it, then walked toward the west and south; I turned left and right, with studied randomness, at several corners, and on a street that looked to me like all the others I went into the first tavern I came to.
I ordered whiskey and a honeyed tea, and drank them mixed together. I half closed my eyes, even behind the dark lenses of my spectacles, and managed not to see the numbers on the houses or the name of the street.
I exited and turned to my left to find the breath knocked out of me, as I braced myself against a convenient railing.
I had wandered in a circle. I was on the corner where I’d started.
Someday, I will write that the memory of today is about my resolve to restore a painting.
Today, I miss my friend.
--
Today is the 18th of June,
I have responded to one of Lychen’s letters.
He asked me twice, at first, to join him in the basement of an old friend’s childhood home. His words in the first letter were jumbled, unclear. The second was not much better. My lack of response was intended as a disinclination, I am utterly unwilling to allow myself to be locked underground by a madman. Lychen’s boasting clearly masks some deep-seated fear that I wouldn't see his "miracle"; in order to protect his delirium, in order to hide his madness from himself, he had to show it to me. He asked twice, at first, and the third time he wrote of his insistence to visit Aldomina.
I’m not sure if it was my resentment for the man or my general growing agoraphobia that brought out my response, but I wrote back only to tell him that it serves him right, having his mind boggled, after all the places he’s stuck his nose where he hasn’t been wanted.
--
I will not light a candle to check the calendar for the date. It is too early, or too late, or this memory persists too ubiquitously to imply it is tucked only into this moment- into the creases of this page and limited to one day, instead of inked, stained, and folded into the creases of me.
There are nights where I feel so certain I'll be able to forget that I will stubbornly, willfully remember. The truth is, I abuse those moments; starting to recall turned out to be much easier than stopping. Its voice does not help.
All these nights I do not sleep, for there is a combat in my heart. I wear myself down to nothing and rest until the moon is out. Many of the bugs prefer this, and I laughed out loud to It one day that maybe that’s why it’s called The Sleeping City.
I wish it were so easy to not think of a tiger.