Ah, books, books, books
For you humans, one could ask where can we live but days? But for we library-ghosts, aka the spirits of dead libraries, where can we live but books?
It is too soon for me to tell you how this particular library died or how libraries die in general, although, like democracy, we too die in darkness. (Oh Texas, what fresh hell is this?)
Instead I want to share a story from my life as a library.
It was late Summer 2015 and the human who housed me in his university campus office had just returned from a year away. I can’t say I missed him. In the previous three years before he left he’d been acting increasingly strangely and, while now I know why and where his actions were leading, back then I recall feeling a palpable suspicion and sense of dread as he unlocked the door and walked in amid my shelves that August afternoon.
He was clutching a small, dirty yellow notebook, stuffed with various papers and leaflets. As he was wrestling with his keys to close the door behind him (with no word of greeting emitted in my direction), out of this notebook fell two slender white pamphlets, landing at my base.
Both were written in Spanish, a language I vaguely understood thanks not only to the fact that he would sometimes bring two people to see me – a glamorous woman and a talkative boy – who spoke to each other in this language, but also because books of Latin grammar and by numerous ancient Roman authors swelled deep within my shelf life.
One of the booklets was just words:
While the other included a strange image of a pair of dice within a music staff or stave, depending on whether you are using US or British English – I was fluent in both.
As he gathered up these stray bookish newcomers, with a furtive glance in my direction, I had a sense that something had transformed him during his year away; something that would in turn change me.
He then proceeded to rummage through his backpack and with some visible effort retrieved a heft tome with a giant number 12, streaking in a reddish-blue across its cover, and to abruptly push aside a group of my faithful occupants to make room for it on my stunned shelves.
Then nothing.
Over the months that passed, he seemed to return to normal and this uninvited guest was left there within me, unopened. It is only now, since my death three years ago, that I realize that it wasn’t so much this book that had transformed him (and me), but the experience that generated it and the idea that it represented. Slowly but surely this experience and idea generated new arrivals on my shelves – strange shaped books, from small publishers, each brimming with images as well as words. That was the least of it – soon there started to appear a group of well-known friends, monstrously changed by some savage artists – effaced, burned, tied up and even hanged from a rope by the window.
They reminded me of a terrifying image I had once seen on his laptop of one of the so-called artworks by the Cuban artist Glenda León – whose name I recall from the cover of one of those white booklets – as part of a series called Lectura Fragmentada.
One work from this series, far as I could make out was shown, as part of the exhibition in a bookshop, which was the project announced in the other white booklet, specifically a section of that exhibition called (horribile dictu!) Libros sin dominio (Books without mastery).
But I am getting ahead of myself. There is so much to tell you that I need to pace myself. At least now you know a little more about him and his curious ways. As I said before, now I better understand what he was going through back then, but at the time, it was disturbing. It was almost as if he was slowly turning into someone else and, worse of all, was hell bent on taking me with him!