Dear bibliopathologist,
for some time now I have been suffering from a little mania; perhaps it is just a tic, but with slippery implications on the already precarious order that reigns around me. I can’t close the books, but not in the sense that I can’t finish them: I just can’t close them physically and put them away in a bookcase, in the reassuring Cartesian and sequential order in which I would like to scroll through them one day. I find them around, after months or years of disappearance, on tables and coffee tables, on the floor, on stools and sofa armrests, on their stomachs, with spread wings, almost obscene, open and fluttering. I have observed them, and the sliding is the way they have to recur, in times that at times do not seem completely random to me. Sometimes I lift them up, reread them, and I wonder if I could have left them open on purpose, to leave them free to re-propose themselves, but without the participation of my will. What can I do?
–S.
Cara S.
let’s do a little exercise in active imagination. From the Memory Library of Plutosophy (1592) by Filippo Gesualdo at Robert Musil’s library-brain, we know that the shelves of book lovers are much more than a warehouse or an archive: they are a mirror of our mind, or if you prefer, of our psyche. And the psyche is very complicated. The “reassuring Cartesian and sequential order” in which you would like to gaze at yourself is roughly equivalent to what Jung calls a person: the public mask with which you present yourself to the world and with which you would like to coincide without residue. But behind the person lies the shadow, the receptacle of all the light and dark aspects that the mask strives to eclipse.
Well, I suspect that what you call mania or tic is nothing more than a little ploy to trip the Cartesian person in your library (therefore, by the magical laws of similarity, of your psyche) and force her to reveal the shadow. Chance, moreover, lends itself well to this kind of joke. The ancient divinatory art of bibliomancy consisted in opening a venerable book at random – Virgil in imperial Rome, the Bible in the early Christian centuries – and reading a verse or a verse as an oracular response, as an inspiration to solve a dilemma. What was invoked and consulted, however, was not chance as we moderns understand it, but a divine and providential intelligence that was presumed to be incorporated in those texts. In short, we let our little earthly reason be overthrown by a higher Reason.
A follower of the traditionalist René Guénon would probably tell you that since we pressed a Cartesian and rationalist cork to the top we are no longer able to offer ourselves as funnels to those celestial influences, and in order not to die of suffocation we have been forced to open some slits on the bottom. of the bottle, from where infernal flames filter, sometimes even a little sulphurous, which aim to blow up the Cartesian cork from below. Surrealism – with automatic writing, i exquisite corpsesthe random ink blots, the “objective case” ofcrazy Love and a thousand other similar findings – it was, between the 1920s and 1930s, the largest factory of this type of pressure corkscrew, and in many respects we are still immersed in its wake.
That credulous André Breton was fascinated by Mexican jump beans, and he was persuaded that they were moved by a mysterious or spirit force, only to discover that they were moved by small insects nestled in the internal cavity. But wasn’t it more beautiful to think they were animated? You do something similar with your books: you set them on purpose on unstable media, and with the pages fluttering; so that, when they fall, they give you the impression of having an independent life, and of having a bibliomantic message for you.
A nice trip to your Cartesian ego, no doubt about it! The bibliopathologist’s recipe: get a copy of the Process to surrealism by Jean Clair, and let it fall on a different page every day. I anticipate that they will all seem illuminating, and written especially for you.