Tag Archives: Vide

What Will Be Saved?

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I don’t have to live forever, and neither does my work. I don’t necessarily want most of my work to outlive me. Someone might save it, anyway.

I think, when I started writing with the intent to be published, some part of it was because I wanted to be known, remembered, maybe immortalized. When I first started writing as a kid, I don’t think I put much thought into whether my stories would survive the test of time. I did want to be famous, though. I wanted to be known by strangers. I wanted to change someone’s life. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to be remembered, but I wasn’t really thinking about what would happen after my death. I wanted to feel it all while I was still alive.

At some point, though, I started writing for the future. It stopped mattering whether I become well-known in this life. I began to write for future archivists, scholars, students, and writers (sometimes addressing them directly). I write so that my words can speak for me when I’m gone.

That vague maybe-future wasn’t my only reason for writing, though. I write for the people around me. I write for my friends and family who want to read my writing. I write for my fellow writers in the creative writing MFA. I write for my classmates, professors, and mentors. I write for the living writers whose work I adore. I write so that people might respond to my work, and I might get to read those responses.

Mostly, though, I have to write for me. I have to write to get these ideas out of my head and onto the page, because I’m the only one who can. That’s why I write hypertext and other e-lit. Hypertext is how my brain works. I use Twine/HTML because it allows me to make the whole book, not just the text inside it. Digital Humanities last semester gave me confidence that my hypertext could be considered literature. Now, BOOKS!! has given me the confidence that I am writing books when I write hypertext. Not just writing books, I’m following in a long line of bookmakers who use whatever technology is available to them in order to show their ideas to the world. I know much more about that history after taking this class.

In this class, we saw hundreds of books and other book-ish objects in the archives. We saw a whole collection of zines, which were made to be read immediately, by people in the zinester’s immediate vicinity, not necessarily to be saved for the future. My midterm project was on Typo Bilder Buch, a book with no intended purpose, printed on paper towels, a work of ephemerality, saved by the archive. One work from the additional class readings, Agrippa (A Book of the Dead), used computer code to convert an electronic poem into genetic code as it’s read. Over time, it would lose all meaning. However, archivists have preserved the work and its meaning for future readers. This is the power of archivists. Archivists can and will and do save these works, and other works like them.

We can all be archivists. We can all, in the spirit of Benjamin, cultivate a collection of these memory-storing objects we call books. My archive includes my favorite books from childhood, my favorite textbooks from undergrad, my favorite novels and collections of poetry and short stories and essays. It includes programs from readings that I’ve attended and where I have read my own work. It includes about a dozen notebooks which I’ve filled with story ideas, poetry, journals, drawings, and absolute nonsense. I saved it all for myself, not because I expect that someone else will want it someday. However, someone might try to save it. Same with hypertext. Maybe it will become obsolete, but someone might try to emulate or recreate it.

This is what this class has taught me. Once the book is published, neither the author nor the publisher gets to decide what happens to it. It may be loved, criticized, remembered, forgotten, uncovered, taken out of context, stolen, pirated, plagiarized, or archived. What I want saved will likely be lost, and what I want burned after my death will likely be the things people most want to save. A terrifying idea to some, but to me, it’s half the fun.

The Hypercento: a New E-Poetic Form

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Thesis statement: The hypercento is a form of hypertextual poetry which I have invented, based upon the cento, a form of found poetry. The hypercento allows the poet to hyperlink, annotate, and rework and original text beyond what is possible in a traditional cento.

Project Description: The hypercento is made up of several different layers of text, which all combine to create one interactive hypertext. The first layer is a cento, a poem made entirely of lines taken from other texts. The second layer consists of longer excerpts of quoted text. Each line selected for the cento gets its own lexia, which gives the reader deeper insight into the original text and credits the original author. The third layer, accessed through hyperlinks in the second-layer excerpts, allows the poet to annotate the text, expand upon an argument or a poetic image, or subvert the original author’s message.

The hypercento will also contain a bibliography, which will include a list of lines grouped by author and ordered alphabetically. This bibliography will serve as a second poetic arrangement of the selected lines. The poet must allow the style requirements of the form to dictate how this part of the poem is arranged. This will represent the role of the archive in collecting and storing meaning for the future.

My first hypercento will be made of lines from the readings from this class, plus others which helped inspire the form. It will touch on themes such as the archive as a cemetery or a place of worship, religious worship and erotic worship, books as objects of fetishistic importance, and the sacred and profane acts of desecration required to make books and bookwork.

Medium: Twine, Harlowe: Free, easy to learn, easy linking system, customization tools, hypertextual, “twine”: thread connecting separate texts (textiles), link to “cento,” from the Latin for “patchwork garment”.

Annotated Bibliography:

1. Benjamin, Walter. “Unpacking My Library.” Illuminations, Schocken Books, 1931, pp. 59-67.

  • I want to dive into Benjamin’s framing of book collecting. He claims that people collect books because of the meaning they hold for the collector, not because of the text within them. The cento is a similar kind of collection. It allows the poet to create a collection of lines which hold a meaning that only the poet can really understand. The hypercento allow the poet to share this meaning in greater depth.
  • Line choice: “These books arouse”: leaning into the erotic nature of books, as my classmates in Form & Theory of Poetry suggested.

2. Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Library of Babel.” 1941, https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Borges-The-Library-of-Babel.pdf and https://fall2025-ecl596.jessicapressman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/the-library-of-babel-by-jorge-luis-borges.pdf.

  • I’m using both of the translations on the class site. Mostly to pilfer lines. Also going to bring religion into this, obviously. Something about worship in a religious sense and worship in an erotic sense.
  • Line choice (first link): “pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations,”
  • Line choice (second link): “kiss their pages in a barbarous manner”

3. Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.

  • The cornerstone of the class. My poem will be about what makes a book and why we make books. Obviously, The Book must be in it. I will be focusing on passages related to electronic literature and bookwork.
  • Line choices: “trace our finger along text’s rim and make it sing,” and “refuse the book’s function while interrogating its form.”

4. Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature. Columbia University Press, 2019.

  • The main excerpt I’m citing claims that “a single collection can potentially refashion an entire field’s underlying architecture.” I don’t know if the hypercento can actually do all that, since it’s not that revolutionary of an idea for hypertext, but I think it can change how I write poetry.
  • Line choice: “Whitmanesque multitudes”

5. Drucker, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. Granary Books, 1995.

  • Citing mostly for Drucker’s commentary on “the book as an electronic form” (14). There are also a few lines I want to pull from the footnotes.
  • Line choices: “an infinite and continually mutating archive of collective memory and space,” “the continuity of the sheet across the gutter,” and, “I would have to
  • include every poet”

6. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.” Postmodern Culture,

  • The hypercento is short for hypertext-cento, and so hypertext-specific analysis will be necessary in describing its place in hypertext poetry. In this article, Hayles gives a list of characteristics specific to hypertexts. This will also allow me to go on about Patchwork Girl, and I Will Go On About Patchwork Girl.
  • Line choices: “digital texts cannot escape fragmentation,” “spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines,” and, “complicate that sense through flickering connectivities, re-working it into something rich and strange.”

7. Marino, Mark. Marginalia in the Library of Babel, 2007, https://markcmarino.com/diigo/i_blog.htm.

  • It was vital to include this work, as it’s a hypertext based on annotating existing text. It is clearly one of my major inspirations for the hypercento. I particularly want to reference a few of Marino’s notes on the Babel Fish translation of Borges’ story.
  • Line choices: “Babel’s Fish does not know the meaning of hope,” and “those grains unto which we might all pass.”

8. Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” Refiguring the Archive, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

  • I wrote a blog post on Mbembe’s comparison of the archive to temples and cemeteries, places where magical rituals are happening. I’ll be using these motifs throughout the poem and my commentary.
  • Line choices: “the nature of a temple and a cemetery,” or “rituals that we shall see below are of a quasi-magical nature”

9. Pressman, Jessica. Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age. Columbia University Press, 2020.

  • Focusing on the framing of the book as an object which holds meaning outside of the text it contains. Particularly want to use the motif of book as fetish object. This adds more connective tissue to the religious worship/erotic worship theme.
  • Line choices: “a poignant artifact and fetish object,” “an act of rebellion, self-construction, and hope,” and “a physical thing of beauty, complexity, and fascination.”

10. Stewart, Garrett. Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept to Art. The University of Chicago Press, 2011.

  • The original title of this poem was Bookwork, and it was mostly about bookwork and book objects. The poem, as it is now taking shape, is more generally about our class, but it still refers quite a lot to bookwork. And if I’m referring to bookwork, Stewart must have at least one line in the poem.
  • Line choices: “denied, violated, or evacuated in content,” “But the loop isn’t a facile short-circuit,” and “making the traversed space of their own content metaphoric.”

Week 12: The Archival Function of a Novel

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In last week’s post, I went on a tangent about an essay that was cited by Jean-Christophe Cloutier in Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature. I’m glad to get to write a second post about this text, so that I can actually write about this text.

What struck me this week was Cloutier’s emphasis on the “archival function” of novels (24). Every novel is a collection of direct quotes from, indirect references to, and vague recollections of all the literature that the author has ever read. A novel archives the spirit of the time and place in which it was written. Both the archivist and the novelist must curate only what is essential from the entire available zeitgeist. Although they may serve different functions, both the archive and the novel are valuable research tools.

Cloutier recounts discourse on whether fiction can fill gaps left by the archive, an argument which relies on the premise that novels are less valuable than archives for scholarly research. My personal experience in the academy (and my life in general) has given me the view that there’s no single objective measure of a medium’s value in academic research. Different disciplines, and different niches within them, will all have their own standards for determining the value of different forms of media used in research. The question of whether fiction can be used in research doesn’t feel like much of a question anymore. Of course it can. Fiction doesn’t just fill gaps. It’s a vital part of history.

Fiction and other forms of creative writing like poetry and creative nonfiction offer individuals the chance to distill their personal histories and libraries into portable, sharable mini-archives. This is valuable work. As Cloutier says, “If a human being’s life can contain Whitmanesque multitudes, then a single literary collection can potentially refashion an entire field’s underlying architecture” (23). One powerful book can force institutional change.

One of Cloutier’s central arguments in Shadow Archives is that there are limits to the powers of the archive as a research tool. Archives are run by people who have biases. Even archives which do their best to limit bias will have physical and financial limitations. However, they have more power and access to resources than individuals. The archival function of an archive is to offer a broad view and a more distant reading of a cultural moment. The archival function of a novel is to offer a unique perspective and a close reading of a cultural moment.

Week 11: Archives as Places of Power

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A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about bookwork and Carrion’s characterization of the archive as a cemetery for books. This idea is revisited in this week’s reading of Shadow Archives: the Lifecycles of African American Literature by Jean-Christophe Cloutier. In the introduction, Cloutier cites Achille Mbembe’s essay, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” for Mbembe’s analogy of the archive as a tool for resuscitation and resurrection of texts. After this reading, we can expand upon the metaphor. An archive isn’t just a cemetery. Archives and cemeteries, rather, are two spaces which serve similar functions in society. They are both places of power, created to heighten the experience and abilities of those within them.

When I went back to get the link for my blog post, I saw that Sierra left a comment I missed when it was posted, which expanded upon the analogy of archive as cemetery. Part of this comment is a refutation:

“Why cemeteries and not memorials, or something else? The idea of cemeteries are to host the dead, but why are books dead? In our interaction with them, do we not make them alive? They are not really dead, because when one person looks at the book they are seeing it through their own lens (societal, religious, political, etc) and it is different for each person.”

Mbembe has some answers for these questions. Memorials are objects of commemoration. Mbembe says that commemoration is, “part of the ritual of forgetting” (24). Memorials serve to help us let go. Cemeteries do hold memorials, such as gravestones, but they also hold the dead themselves. They are haunted. They are places to remember, relive, and revisit as much as they are places to let go and forget.

Archives are comparable to cemeteries because, “fragments of lives and pieces of time are interred there” (Mbembe, 19). Archives conserve work produced by those who are now dead. They hold onto work by living authors, saving them for future generations. Books carry information about creatures that have gone extinct. Many physical books in archives are made from the fibers and skins of dead plants and animals. Their existence may be overlooked by many readers, but the archive is still their final resting place. Books are objects of the dead.

The content of the books, however, is in many ways immortal. I think this was Sierra’s main point in the above quote. The codices and the printed text in an archive are alive in that they continue to exist and degrade when not in use. The ideas come to life when they are revisited by the reader. That visitation becomes an impression in the reader’s memory, forever changing both the reader and the idea. A powerful enough memory will not die. Even as it fades from conscious to subconscious, it will continue to influence the reader.

The physical space of the archive is designed to heighten its ability to create a strong memory. They are not just places to access the remnants of the dead, but places to access immortal, perhaps divine, ideas. Mbembe does not just compare archives to cemeteries, but also to places of worship:

“… the physical space of the site of the building, its motifs and columns, the arrangement of the rooms, the organisation of the ‘files’, the labyrinth of corridors, and that degree of discipline, half-light and austerity that gives the place something of the nature of a temple and a cemetery: a religious space because a set of rituals is constantly taking place there” (Mbembe, 19).

Cloutier explains that these comparisons are based in the conventions of “genre fiction” (Cloutier, 19), but I don’t think that means we can’t also take it seriously.

When I visited the reading room, I felt a genuine sense of religiosity. I had to perform the requisite rituals of filling out forms and checking out books. The priest and acolyte (a trainer and trainee) quietly discussed the esoteric knowledge of proper handling as they set the books up at the tables. The library is generally pretty quiet, but it was extra quiet in the reading room. There was a feeling of being watched, not just by the acolyte at the front desk, but by some higher power that would ensure the safety of the books (or maybe CCTV). I entered through the dome, which always feels a bit like the entrance to a sacred space (even when it’s raining and they have to set up buckets to catch all the drips)(maybe especially then). Although I was looking at a book made of paper towels and cardboard and typos, a book not meant to take itself too seriously, the space elevated the experience. The book had a greater impression on me because of the architecture and aesthetics of the room and the rituals I had to perform to look at them.

Typo Bilder Buch

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Part I.

            Typo Bilder Buch (Typo Picture Book) (2012), by Romano Hänni, is an artist’s book made of cardboard and paper towels. Hänni letterpress printed 65 copies of the book. He used the colors red, yellow, blue, and black. There is some readable text, printed in German, but most of the book is made up of illustrations made out of typography. Hänni uses both serif and sans-serif typeface, along with some of his own printing forms, to create some obscure shapes and some recognizable images. These typographic scenes were printed onto sheets of paper towel, which were then stitched together and bound in a cardboard cover with a paper dust jacket. It comes with a four-page English translation of the German text.

Hänni’s Website also offers the following description of the work:

The page layout was deliberately not prepared. The design and sequence of the pages were intended to develop during the work process. The first printing forms were blue lines and linear frameworks at the bottom of the pages. New ideas developed during the unrolling and tearing off of double pages of paper towel as well as during composition, setup, printing and removing of the type.

The printing workshop represents the available raw materials: Lead characters, synthetics and wood, brass lines and signs, typographic signs and lead symbols. The typo pictures were composed from individual parts and printed on the hand proofing press; some of them were superimposed in several printing cycles. They are intended to mutually influence and merge into each other and to display an inner connection.

The page format was determined by the paper: Paper towels, maxi roll; composition: 100% oxygen-bleached pulp (54 g/m2± 5%), wet strength additives, agents; roll length: 62,1 m ± 2%, sheet size: 23×26 cm, ± 2%, paper from responsible sources.

Part II under the cut:

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E-Lit: Making a Text Sing

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In the final chapter of The Book, Borsuk gives examples of, “contemporary approaches to digital reading that, rather than offering up a crystal goblet, invite us to trace our finger along text’s rim and make it sing” (203). This quote encapsulates how I feel about electronic literature. All books are a collaboration between creators and readers, but not all creators and readers are necessarily conscious of this when they’re creating and/or reading books. Electronic literature is necessarily an interactive experience, which makes the collaborative nature of the book impossible to avoid.

One example that Borsuk mentions is Pry, by Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro. Borsuk says that, “Pry explicitly requires the reader’s interaction to make meaning” (247). The text remains flat, literally and figuratively, if it is read like a normal e-book. The text must be pried apart for the reader to literally see what would otherwise be subtext. The reader gains a greater understanding of the text not just by close reading, but by active participation.

This is not our first encounter with E-Lit in this class. We read Marginalia in the Library of Babel by Marino at the beginning of the semester. To find meaning in Marino’s annotations, we had to interact with hyperlinks, follow rabbit holes, and make connections. While we all might have interpreted Borges’ Library of Babel differently, may have read with different levels of attention or awareness of context, may have skimmed it at different paces, but we probably interacted with the text similarly, based on how we’ve been trained to read these kind of text in school. Marino’s text, however, is not something most of us are trained to read. Many of us would have tried to read it in a linear form, chronologically or in table-of-contents order, but some probably tried to read it like they might explore Wikipedia, clicking on whatever seems most interesting at the time. Some probably skipped most of the hyperlinks and missed all of the story. Each of us truly read a separate text.

This is why I love E-Lit. It encourages close reading, exploration, and collaboration. It doesn’t just enable readers to make the text their own, it forces them to do so. The authors/designers/coders who create electronic literature must also understand our medium. We need to be able to, as Borsuk puts it, “[draw] attention to the interface to explore and exploit the affordances of the digital” (203). We must know what a reader expects to see and the different ways a reader might interact with the form so that we might subvert those expectations. We must be okay with the idea that most people won’t read every bit of text. The average reader won’t even find every page. However, the culture of electronic literature practically demands that someone will, if you leave it out there long enough to float around in cyberspace.

Week 7: Carrión’s Bookworks

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In a section titled, “The New Art of Making Books,” in this week’s chapter of The Book, Borsuk discusses Ulises Carrión’s concept of the bookwork. Borsuk gives a few definitions of such a work. Bookworks “refuse the book’s function while interrogating its form” (145), while encouraging authors and readers to pay more attention to both, and pay more consideration to the whole object. This definition was not entirely clear to me until I began digging in the Notes.

Borsuk mentions a video of Carrión speaking at The Evergreen State College in 1986. In the quoted section of the video, Carrión calls libraries, museums, and archives “perfect cemetaries for books” (145). This idea intrigued me, so I went looking for the rest of the video. While the link in the notes no longer works, I was able to find the video on YouTube.

This isn’t just a video of Carrión lecturing at a college class, though. According to Carrión’s own title cards, it is also, “A selection, both limited in scope and quite arbitrary, but nevertheless of great significance, of bookworks from Ulises Carrión’s Other Books and So Archive.” In the video, between brief clips of Carrión speaking, we get to watch him flip through bookworks from his personal archive.

In the video, Carrión describes his selection process for works entering the Other Books and So Archive. He says, “In order to present only bookworks, we have been forced to exclude a lot of artist books which don’t embody a statement on books in general” (31:33-31:51). This gave me a clearer understanding of bookworks. They’re not just artist books or non-traditional books or some ephemeral message of mindfulness. A bookwork is an object which specifically embodies a statement on books.

Borsuk, paraphrasing Carrión, says that, “Bookworks take on greater importance when the codex itself seems to be imperiled.” (145) The codex certainly seems to be imperiled today. If you look at BookTok, it seems like people would rather speed through stories than spend a lot of time deeply reading one book. If you look at Amazon, it seems like people would rather buy cheap, AI-generated “slop” than books written by humans. It’s a rough landscape to be looking towards as an aspiring book maker, but the challenges of this zeitgeist are also opportunities. In this era of AI slop, over-consumption, and the growing feeling that books are worthless, book artists are tasked with creating new bookworks which can embody a meaningful statement on these “worthless” objects.

Week 4: The Point of Contradictory Definitions

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Last Tuesday in Special Collections, I made a remark to my table about the instability of definitions. It was something like, “The longer I’m in school, and the more I learn how we define things, the more I realize how differently we all define everything. It’s a miracle that we can communicate with each other at all.”

The first chapter of The Book by Amaranth Borsuk reminded me of that, particularly the black pages. Each page offers a different definition of the word “book.” We don’t need to believe all of these different definitions at once to be scholars of books. We need to see them, though, to cultivate our own definitions. One of the main reasons to read and consider all of these disparate definitions is to try to understand that how we define common terms, even ones which feel foundational and universal, might be different than how the people we speak to on a daily basis define those same terms.

If we look only at the definitions on the black pages in this chapter, we learn that a book is specifically a physical, portable language storage tool (2, 8), and a book is as big and fixed in space as an inscription on a monument or a mountain (15, 35), and a book is a highly inclusive and flexible category that can include many different media (15, 22), and a book is a physical support for text, not merely the text itself (29), and a book is not just an object, it’s a technology that evolves with the needs of its users (42), and a book is, “an experience. […] A book starts with an idea. And ends with a reader.” (57). These definitions contradict each other, so the point is not to hold one definition up as the ultimate definition. Readers get to see several options, make up their own minds, and understand that other intelligent people can think something different.

More past the break…

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Week 3: Already Thinking About My Final Project

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While reading this week’s texts, particularly “Old Media/ New Media” by Dr. Pressman, I started getting ideas for my final project. (Or maybe just a personal project.)

The project would be made up of two texts written by me, one physical and one digital. It would also incorporate text and images from whichever special collections text I choose. The physical text would use asterisks, numbered citations, or maybe emoji to “link” to the digital text. The digital text would be an index of hyperlinks, quotes, and other footnotes for the reader to understand the physical text better.

Themes that might be explored in this format:

  • Old vs. New media: The project would question the distinction between “old” and “new,” referencing Dr. Pressman’s writing on Bolter, Grusin, and Hayles. Regarding “Remediation” and “intermediation,” I could show how the physical text and the digital index influence each other and how they’re influenced by other media, both “new” and “old.” Both texts would be influenced by the special collections text, and that text may also be influenced by my project. My interpretation of the text through “new” media might influence how that text is seen by new readers. Readers who already know that text, however, might approach my project differently.
  • Detached Footnotes: Going back to our conversations about Marino’s Marginalia, this project could be about what happens when the marginalia is separated from the text. Eventually the medium I use to create the digital index will become defunct. The one copy of the physical text might be destroyed or kept somewhere inaccessible to most readers. How could someone read one without the other?
  • Subconscious influences: This morning, I texted Raine some of these ideas. It turns out that he started a very similar project last year. I’m not sure if he’s told me about that project before, or if we happened to grab our ideas off the same shelf in the Library of Babel, but the idea of uncertainty as to where ideas come from is one I want to play with in the project. A lot of the digital index will be references to my influences. But what about the ones I’ve forgotten?

This isn’t a project proposal, obviously. It’s a vague creative daydream. Not to be taken too seriously, yet. I don’t even know what genre it should be. Will this be a fictional story? A collection of poetry? Non-fiction prose? All of the above? I probably won’t know until we’ve visited Special Collections. Now that I have an idea of what I want my final project to look like, though, I might be able to quickly home in on a book that could play in this space. Looking forward to this week’s classes even more, now!

Mystics in the Library

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“The methodical task of writing distracts me from the present state of men. The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species — the unique species — is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.”

This paragraph comes just before the end of “The Library of Babel” by Borges. Throughout the story, this narrator presents his experience of the Library straightforward and factually. He acknowledges the existence of other views (the mystics, the “impious”), but he dismisses them.

“The mystics claim that their ecstasy reveals to them a circular chamber containing a great circular book, whose spine is continuous and which follows the complete circle of the walls; but their testimony is suspect; their words, obscure. This cyclical book is God” (2).

“The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the `feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity'” (6-7).

I, however, am a firm believer in the constantly-changing nonsensical library and the circular chamber (I, myself, have seen the god-book. It was torus-shaped.). Clearly, I’m a mystic. I could say I’ve been a mystic my whole life. Ironically though, I only felt comfortable calling myself a mystic since reading William James’ lectures on mystical experience. James was one of the first scholars of religion as a social phenomenon. He qualified “real” mystical experiences. After reading his qualifications, I realized I’d had real mystical experiences before.

But who was William James to decide what makes a mystical experience real or not? And who is this “man of the library” to decide what parts of the library are real or not? He’s not the “Man of the Book” (6). He’s just another wanderer. And what good has his wandering done? “In adventures such as these,” he says, “I have squandered and wasted my years” (6). Going back to that penultimate paragraph, the narrator looks back at the living world. He laments those who worship books but can’t read them. What about those who can read but cannot fully understand?

Isn’t that all of us? What human can read something and fully understand all the nuances and connections to other texts, events, people, memories? I can’t even remember all of the individual influences that come together to help me create a new piece of writing. But that’s sort of a creative dream of mine: a hypertext that manages to connect everything. Like Marino’s Marginalia, but nothing not highlighted. Highlights on highlights. Infinite footnotes. “It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe” (6). I agree that it could exist. I wish I could create it.

But what would be the point? All of the connections that I could make are not all of the connections that could be made. It would need to be something that EVERYONE took part in creating. And at that point, I’m just creating The Universe. The book that this peregrine is looking for is the entirety of the library.

“I pray to the unknown gods that a man — just one, even though it were thousands of years ago! — may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified” (6).

From one wandering mystic to another… You are that One. You’re examining and reading the book right now. And you’re also writing it. This is the book. “Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry,” are the book. “suicides, more and more frequent with the years,” are the book. The humans, about to be extinguished (in 1941. Plenty of reason to think that in 1941.) are the book. It’s the whole thing.