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Prologue
When he had gathered all the books
When he had indexed, catalogued, cross-referred and annotated them
When the little princelings and mighty emperors of China
Were dancing on the pinhead of his own estimable head
And the bile of the world was swimming in the gutters
And the fists of the janitor were beating street girls black and blue
And the oleaginous salesman had lubricated the hinges of the caisson
For the delectation of the housekeeper
A tiny gale started blowing
Down the alleyways and through the portals
Through the flightless windows
Through the wainscoted corridors of the rathaus
And the Groszbeggars stirred and shook a leg
And the Dixwounded rattled their small change of limbs
And acrobats stood on their heads like stars
And there were murders
Murders and conspiracies
For the intellect to catalogue and classify
For the mind to annotate and the fingers to cross-refer
For a superior consciousness to make sense of
In the hallways and beer cellars
In the prisons and surgeries
In lavatories and libraries
Where the books were gathered.
Dust: In tall angular letters
Where books are gathered there gathers also the dust
That sieves through the pores of the skin and the head
The absolute dust of the language that falls apart
In your hands, that settles in your palm
Like a promise. Ideas are dust. Words dust,
A universe of dust between planet and planet,
Precious dust certainly, gold dust, a dusting
Of light filtered through eyelashes batting over
The damp-smelling page, the foxing, the marginals,
The improvised shopping list of the dead,
The dead themselves, the dust of the prisons,
The workhouses of dust, the dust bowl, the dustbin
Of history, the dust of the poor who have wasted away
Into particles, molecules, atoms, the dust of the birds
In their nests, the dust of the hotel where the dwarf
And the scholar fossick among motes
Among invisible books, the books of the imagination,
The trapped dust of the folded page, the folded umbrella,
The folds of the skin that are clogged with dust,
The dust of the ovens to come, the dust of the scouring pad,
The citizens of dust in the dusty streets
The dust of the city you shake off your sandals
The dust mites, the silverfish of the imagination,
The dust of the station where a speech is in progress,
The dust of the mountain pass with its butchered soldiers.
Librarian of the universal library, have you explored
The shelves in the stockroom where the snipers are sitting,
The repository of landmines in the parking bay
The suspicious white powder at the check-out desk
The mysterious rays bombarding you by the photocopier
The psychological disorder of the filing system
That governs the paranoid republic of print
In the wastes of the world?
Madhouse
The point about the madhouse is that it’s virile.
The point about the madhouse is that it sticks by its beliefs.
The point about the madhouse is that sanity is bourgeois.
The point about the madhouse is that no one is acting.
The point about the madhouse is that no one gets in by simply being nice.
The point about the madhouse is that it liberates the spirit.
The point about the madhouse is that you can think just what you like there.
The point about the madhouse is that anyone can enter.
There’s nothing special about the madhouse, people come and go all the time.
There’s nothing threatening about the madhouse, we are all of us dying.
There’s nothing terminal about the madhouse: you go along for the ride.
There’s nothing sad about the madhouse: weeping and gnashing of teeth, that’s nothing.
There’s nothing mad about the madhouse, it is sanity by default.
We are sane by default, we are mad by design, but the mad are more admirable.
Admirable is the ape, the bulbul, the mitochondria, the swelling of the larynx,
Admirable the orchid, the garlic, the fire inside the shut book,
Admirable the cry of the tortured, the lost voice of the nightingale, the laughter
in everything ostensibly sane but tending towards madness
such as sunlight, the slow rain, each pendulous drop, the wide road,
the brimming eye, shadows, picnics, public conveyances, thunder.
Nature is a madness with a method and all the madder for that.
Culture is a madness everyone inherits.
Science is a madness in love with numbers, the perfect amour fou.
Health is a madness that shifts from minute to minute, gesundheit!
Money is madness that fills your pockets and leaves a silver slugtrail in the garden.
The point about the madhouse is not to describe it.
The point about the madhouse is not to change it.
The point about the madhouse is to live there
to accustom yourself to its immaculate manners
to dwell in the house of the Lord for ever
with the prophet, the poet, the dwarf, the scholar, the fire.
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