Daniel J. Guercio
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Is it true, or the illusion of truth?
Stories (4)
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Sociological Imagination
This place is odd. I am at a café in Allentown. I like the loft area. I am Phantom of the Opera here. Hiding in the shadows of a dead and vacant café. There are no people here; just as there were none on the street. The things around me that feel most alive are, ironically, the things that are most dead. To my left is some sort of wooden crank machine. To my right, an old, ornate full-size mirror. Up here, closer to the ceiling, one is better able to appreciate the ghosts of this building. Often the ceiling is the last thing to change through all the iterations of businesses and residences. These things feel more alive than the phone by my side, the clothes that are on me, the bag that I carry, but not the books that are within that bag. Marcel Duchamp coined the term the “infrathin” to give a word to the phenomenon of the residue left by humans on objects. It is the marks left behind, such as the warmth on a seat after someone has left, or the smell of tobacco in a room. These objects around me relate, but they are a more permanent version. They have taken in the marks of history and the dead. There is a possession to them. The phone, my clothes, my bag have touched no one but me. Save for the passing brush or the hug of family and partner. But this is not imprintation. Some of my books have not known the touch of another reader, but not most. I love used books. This possession of books is intensified by the marks of prior human contact. It is a connection with a separate mind that is thinking and interpreting the same words as you. In a way, this is a comradery. It cuts through the loneliness of thought. It adds life to thinking with the dead. Roland Barthes discusses in his essay “The Death of the Author” that the author should be one that disappears into the work. Ultimately, the reader becomes the author. It is the reader that is the end interpreter of the work, and it is the reader that gives meaning to the work. Without the reader, there is no author, and there is no author if they are not themselves a reader. Even without used books, there is an aliveness that comes from books that is ultimately unalive. It is this uncanny paradox that makes books the quintessential source of intelligence. Freud discussed this element in his essay on the uncanny by stating that the uncanny arose from “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate”. In this understanding, it can be argued that books generally hold this uncanny quality. They are both alive and dead and also neither. However, it should be accepted that the uncanny stems more from the doubt than the paradox. This aliveness is the continuation of life through ideas. Discussing, and somewhat opposing, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, Kate Zambreno, in her To Write as if Already Dead, speaks of the desire to write with the solitude and peace of someone dead, and yet to place oneself within the work in order to be seen, respected, acknowledged. Although the reader may give the ultimate meaning to the work, the words themselves are a certain continuation of the self. The words matter, but maybe so also the importance of its generality, which Hamlet may well have implied with his epizeuxis, Words, words, words. More than the café in which I now sit, with its wooden crank machine, ornate mirror, and historical ceiling, books contain the history and space in which one can think.
By Daniel J. Guercio7 months ago in Critique
The Unreal of Preservation
How can one think of preservation in terms of what is real? I think this while sitting in the main reading room of the Abbot Library at the University at Buffalo. I had been meaning to come to this library for some time after seeing a picture of it. Books are a passion of mine and thus so are the repositories of knowledge that we simply call libraries. Gone, it seems however, are the days of the beautiful library. Filled with grandeur and craftsmanship to be an edifice of thought itself imbued in structure. A space in which one can think, connected to the history of Mankind. A space that could anthropologically be called a place; that is, imbued with history, emotion, tradition. I could just as easily now be writing of the strangeness I experienced walking through the very modern, yet not all unpleasant, 39th Street Stavros Niarchos Public Library in New York City that felt the need to display photographs of the world’s most beautiful libraries on their walls. A strange display of the past in a space in which the past is abandoned, if only preserved within the books themselves, and yet, how real is the copy of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Joyce’s Ulysses that is printed in 1994, covered in its protective plastic laminate? In fact, the main 5th Avenue library that is imbued with history and beauty has lost its practical purpose and has become a museum that is its own relic.
By Daniel J. Guercioabout a year ago in Critique
