Works of Sublimity and Mystery: Incidents in the Night by David B.

David B. - Incidents in the Night

Uncivilized Books (Published originally in French as Les Incidents de la Nuit by L’Association)

Ah, to hold within your hands at last a rare and long sought after book. There are books and periodicals that have been all but forgotten, having attained almost to the status of myth. Is not a myth more exalted than the real thing in some cases? After all, myths endure, while paper decays with time. How many people in our day and age have held within their hands one of the few remaining copies of Giodano Bruno's 'Sapphiro Regia Stellantis', or Lautremant's 'La Paon Infernal'? It is often lamented among collectors of rare books that the internet has destroyed much of the joys of collecting, that any book may now be had by anybody willing to put up the money. Yet this is not entirely true. There still exist certain rare volumes which are spoken of only in hints and rumors, nearly (if not completely) unknown online, not to be found on Ebay at any time. 

Incidents in the Night by David B. is a book-lovers dream in graphic novel form. It is the first of what looks to be two volumes. The fictitious periodical which is its subject and from which it takes its name is an invention worthy of Borges. Perfectly plausible, yet (so far as I can ascertain) entirely mythical. The contents of the first volume of the magazine are described in just enough detail within the narrative to give the phantom a hint of substance, to make us feel as though it might be nearly possible to obtain a copy of one of these elusive treasures for ourselves. 

There is yet another book described within this one. Its text consists simply of the letter ‘N’ repeated over and over across the blinding glare of the otherwise empty page. I am reminded of the story ‘N’ by Arthur Machen, which would seem to partake of a theme related to the context in which this book appears. This single letter, taken alone as a signifier, is of interest in itself. In English, it might be taken to refer to the compass point, affiliating it with the magnetic currents of the earth and allowing it to indicate a clear direction of travel. North has always been the direction of mystery, if not for any other practical reason than the fact that, in times past, the climate of the far north made it largely inaccessible. At the extreme north, far beyond the reach of our corporeal nature, lies the pole star around which the heavens revolve. The mystics of Islam, in their cartography of the soul, associated the north with the darkness at the approach to the pole, the sun at midnight in who's invisible light the aspiring mystic is annihilated in the consciousness of the Divine One. The Hebrew letter N signifies the fish, that which is able to survive within the depths of the sea. The sea may be taken to represent the unmapped regions of the unconscious, void of structure, wherein the rational mind cannot abide. This is the place of pure intuition or knowledge of the soul. The human part of us is drowned in this place; only that part of us which is signified by the glyph of the fish may survive in this environment. Interestingly, this book within a book consisting only of the letter ‘N’ is titled ‘The Desert’, which, as with the depths of the sea and the polar regions, acts as a sort of terra inaccessible to that which is most human in us. There is here an association with the forbidden and the impossible, with death and the transcendence of death.

N is also a negation, a nonentity, a cancellation. It represents the signification of a thing by its absence. This mythical book would seem to stand opposed to the Rosicrucian Book M or Liber Mundi, often taken to represent the whole of manifestation as cosmic book. Liber Mundi bears much in relation to the creation myth presented to us in the Sepher Yetzirah, in which the universe is formed by the engraving of 22 primordial letters on the void, and their subsequent permutation. Perhaps this Liber N, then, takes the form of the shadow of the book of the Rosicrucians: it is the void itself, a book containing no words, pages or letters, no light, no truth, nothing whatsoever.

The appearance of the book 'N' in the present work seems to bear the weight of all of these associations. It is enigmatic, consisting of more than the sum of its parts, and at the same time elusive and omnipresent - perhaps it is better if it is never adequately explained.  

The story presented in this book blends admirably the heights of myth with the depths of pulp fiction and noir. It hints at hidden symmetries and the primacy of the unwritten (and, in this case, the unseen). I eagerly look forward to volume 2.