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.