The Seated Scribe

The old man sits in an obdurate leather armchair. His skin is grey, his beard is grey, the hair atop his unblemished head is white. Very patiently and very deliberately he writes through the pages of a book, crossing and correcting until the nib of his pen becomes vulgar and dull, ephemerally satisfied. High and behind him, an inaccessible casement window casts its attenuated glare upon his desktop, and soon lamplight replaces dusk. Somewhere in the steep hours of the night, the old man trains his limpid eyes on a passage in the text: and there came, during that irascible misadventure, no cause for recoil. He produces a fresh nib from the drawer and impresses the same line, retracing it over and again in varied and impassioned script, until nothing of meaning or consequence can be lifted from the ink. Somewhere in the small hours of the morning, the old man slips briefly into a dark and troubled sleep, only to awaken with the lingering twilight; the pen, already in his hand.
The book in which he writes has no formal name. That is to say, the text is not conscribed by any one title or term. Some have called the book Longing, others have known it as L’ Appetito, still others, Forbearance. The old man believes in part to have once referred to the text fondly as Home, and later more keenly and bitterly as Aerugo; though, he cannot be certain of either, because many conceivable, cureless names preceded their delivery, and many more persisted, and still persist, after their realization. He can only be certain that the text has had a name, and that by some brevitous discovery it will have one again. There are X pages in the book. The number of pages keeps with the number of years in the old man’s mind, of which he has never taken count. Were he to tally them all, the summation of his efforts would be a number irreducible by division, both continuous and naught; for each page turns into the next, and when one page rescinds yet another page unfolds, and with it the records of him continue. Paradoxically, he is both conscious of and eluded by the unenduring devices at work in the book. He has charmed them into being. He has forgotten their spell. By his hand alone, the letters and lines have been lifted from the soil, carved and regarded with devout ambition, then buried once more beneath fathoms of similarly designed passages. Like fragments from a heatless fire, the lines of the text have been fortuitously recovered and recommitted by the old man, his attention never failing to impress upon them something foreign, something of the present. Thus at any moment, in any furrow of the text, even the smallest word may bear no semblance to its antecedent self. At one time, the old man believed there to be a linearity to the progression of the book, but as the text has been transcribed and rewritten, lapsed and remembered, performed, its meaning and direction have changed, its point of revolution, reversed. The aggregate of the pages is now a dim and porous cage of the old man’s construction, for which there is no sliding latch to open, nor an interstice wide enough to permit his reentry or even his rediscovery of what has been bound up inside.
Through diligence, the old man has come to witness a great many realities live and die within the pages of the book. With his pen, he has been the rector of silent victories and sentient awakenings. He has stood amid the ribbed vaults of a rayonnant cathedral, hung upside down over green waters from the branches of a kapok tree, floated in the eyes of a lover. He has swept dust from checkered floors and felt the breeze of winter breath suddenly in July. He has heard singing in the night, reached out and held only the darkness. He has fallen infinitely through the vestibules of time and space, dragging his heels in the air and whistling. He has smelled weeds and the deracinated roots of hyacinths, dined in the company of strangers. On his back, he has conquered the highest plateaus of the sky, sustained himself on rainwater, and known himself to be a god. He has forgotten days to dreaming. He has applied himself to the study of the natural sciences and realized the impetus of creation. He has fired a rifle into the air and pulled the defeated slug from a hole in the ground. He has known the tenor of the long arc of friendship and the brief, perfidious arc of passion. He has swallowed loss, gazed upon ruined, frescoed walls, and known the infinitesimal consequence of his misfortune, the value of his suffering. He has consumed corners of the world to which he has never been, climbed apogeal heights he has never seen, and held fast to a myriad of memories and self-truths that have never existed. The old man has known all of these things. He has known them to be the fantastic shadows of his irrecoverable past. They are the vestiges of his home, the rust of copper, and he has directed each one of them into being.
The realities of the book, like those of the old man, are axiomatic; their practice, based in a universal truth. Namely that the myth and the word are indivisible: neither can exist alone, and each creates the other. The old man’s history has given rise to the book, and in turn the book has initiated his history. It is by this truth that the old man has been able to permit the evolution of the text, and with it the dissemination of his past. Over time, the innumerable symbols of his memory have transubstantiated and evanesced below the stoke of his pen. They have suffered the muted crimes of the mind. Through his sustained reimaginings, he has come to lose, little by little, the features of an unalloyed past. People and places, moments, have spread out across the limitless enclaves of the book. They have lost touch with themselves, evolved in seclusion. Every attempt the old man has made to recapture some recess of the text has served only to reshape it, the mien of one event replacing the cast of another, wholly different yet no less true than the first. Unwittingly, he has altered the material and spiritual realities of his life beyond repair. He has suffered an infinite loss.
However, the old man has not been unaware of this fact. Through precipitated realizations, he has come to know something of his great failing. He has come to witness the realities of the corporeal world and the realities of the text as stark and incongruous. He has been unable to align the two. The old man has forgotten the walls of his room and the names of the birds in his window. He has lost sight of the moon, the ever-present smell of juniper, the cool sensation of his knees against the plain of his desk. He has become ignorant of the grey dust growing thick around the base of his lamp. He has forgotten the anatomy and function of his own tongue, the expulsion of breath from his deflated chest. He has become alien to the dull, rolling pains of hunger. He is unable to recall the impression of being awake. He cannot remember the word for pen, nor the word for change or time. He cannot name his want, the anger that he feels against what has been taken from him. He cannot define his privation of self. Though it is not that the old man fails to perceive these things. Quite the opposite. In his soul, he is able to sense the void of a life lost. He is able to roll the pen in his hand, recognize the desk at his elbows and the walls crowded in around him, experience the movement of his heart. He knows that he is aging, but he cannot articulate this concept. He cannot pronounce the world around him because all of these perceptions, and countless others, are not represented within the pages of the book. They have been locked away. Fleetingly, the old man has searched the text for some outline to his immediate experience, some codification of his reality. But all he has arrived at is a cyclical configuration of episodic impressions, wholly dissimilar and removed from those that he believes to be real. He has come to doubt the truth of the book. He has come to question the validity of its many corrugated and fantastic realities. He has come into the habit of removing page after page of his theoretical past, crossing and countermanding that which he does not remember, that which he does not believe. Gradually, he has come to lose both his true history and the speculative history expounded upon within the text. He has come to a pristine reduction. He has come to the first line of the book: I was born. He has come to doubt even that.