Notes (XIV)

Marsh’s kitchen was minimally stocked. There was some milk, and some bread, and some peanut butter. Probably other things, but those are the ones I remember. We subsisted on these things for a very long time, eventually depleting them entirely. The peanut butter I remember as an adversary—it was the chunky kind, and the chunks would get stuck behind my teeth, and for the most part they distributed themselves in incorrect ways, and when it was someone else’s turn to read I spent a great deal of tongue-work attempting, with incomplete success, to correct their arrangement. I remember wishing there were some more well-behaved foodstuff available, but obtaining more food would necessitate leaving the house, and this seemed steadily more and more ill-advised. The outside seemed like treacherous territory, infested with abominable beasts and swarming mites, ornate with poisonous vines, the edge of some medieval map. Stepping across the threshold of Marsh’s front door would be tantamount to stepping off a cliff.

The conversation with Jenny recounted in the previous post constituted the last break before a long period with no breaks at all. It is difficult to fashion any sort of narrative out of this period. On the sublunary echelon, it consisted of our Spelunking party handing around a stack of paper and reading out loud from it. Occasionally one of us who was not actively reading would walk to the kitchen and bring back some peanut-buttered toast, water, and/or milk. Occasionally someone would ask for coffee; unsurprisingly we found that a little bit of coffee went a long way, and there was never a need to brew a new pot.

This is not much of a story, and what was flowing through our minds was not much of a story, either. Some of you might have hoped that our dedicated exploration would reveal a heretofore unnoticed narrative thread in the so-called “Non-Lucid Section,” but nothing of the sort occurred. I found the content of these many hundreds of pages quite fascinating, but not in the manner of a novel. The closest analogy I can devise—which is not very close—is that it resembled a painting: it seemed to be a coherent depiction of something essentially static. I felt as though I recognized what I was being shown, much as one “recognizes” the forms in a painting which after all are really just so many brushstrokes. The individual sentences and pages of the “Non-Lucid Section” were indeed “non-lucid,” in the same way that an individual brushstroke does not constitute a picture of anything. Built up into a larger mass, they evoked something definite.

Salby wrote that TNC was his attempt to portray “the obverse face of Mundum.” In his earliest attempt to articulate the nature of this “obverse face,” he referred to it, dramatically and yet obscurely, as “THE WHOLE BLEAK ENDLESS WORLD.” Much less dramatic accounts can be found in the peculiar pseudo-academic treatises written by William Chen, the majority of which can be found in the Salby archives. (I considered it a higher priority to make digital copies of Salby’s journals, but having done so, I have now begun scanning Chen’s work, and I should have a digital copy of The Salbian Personality ready within the week.)

Chen’s work, although verbose, is ultimately not much more illuminating than Salby’s “THE WHOLE BLEAK ENDLESS WORLD.” It is very dry and abstract, almost compulsively so; there is the sense that Chen wanted to thoroughly separate the conceptual essence of Salby’s views from the poetic, pyrotechnic, and aphoristic style in which Salby typically chose to express them. So, for instance (in Formalizing Anti-Formalism), Salby’s emotionally forceful term “definite wrongness” is subjected to many pages of dry exegesis, culminating in a somewhat ludicrous tour de force in which Chen describes an apparently unremarkable and innocuous glass of water sitting on his desk and explains at length why, in fact, the glass of water is “definitely wrong” in an essential, immutable way. Salby’s own response to this kind of thing, as evidenced by the journals, was ambivalent—he clearly admired Chen’s (indeed quite astonishing) erudition and industry, and considered Chen a dear friend and kindred spirit, but disagreed quite vehemently with some of his attitudes toward “Mundum” and its nature.

My purpose in making this digression is to clarify that none of the voluminous Salby/Chen material really gives one any clear sense of just what it is that TNC is trying to “depict.” Perhaps this is because it was simply easier to write TNC than to set out in plain language what TNC was going for. (On the evidence of TNC itself, plain language was very much not up to the task.) And yet, I feel that TNC does in fact “paint a picture” of some definite thing, and that this thing lines up more or less with the (highly incomplete) characterizations of the “obverse face of Mundum” given by Salby and Chen.

Of course, if Salby and Chen couldn’t relate it in plain language, then of course I can’t either. But it has something to do with the separation, something to do with the disarrangement of material, something to do with the sense that the world outside of Marsh’s house was a minefield, or a malign Wonderland waiting to chop off my head. The picture is in some way a picture of “the real world” as we see it every day, but exposed as drastically distorted, “incorrect,” unsatisfying, in a recursive way so that each subset is as incorrect as the whole, and each attempt to redress the great wrong comprises a continuous part of the great wrong itself.

According to my calculations, we spent somewhere between 30 and 40 hours in this continuous receptive state, reading and reading. This must sound ludicrous. But at the time it seemed quite natural. I can’t be sure how any of the others felt about it, but I watched them, and I think we all had the sense that the longer we had kept reading, the more dangerous (!) it would be to stop reading. We had found a calm, tranquil waterway when there were storms all around. We did not dare stray from the course.

This phase ended sometime in the mid-afternoon of Monday, June 28. We had read continuously through Saturday night, Sunday, Sunday night, and Monday morning. We had closed the blinds and relied on electric lighting, so that the passage from day to night and night to day was barely perceptible. (The sudden starts and stops of the air conditioner’s drone were, however, quite startling.) The end was initiated by Marsh, who had begun to read the section, beginning on p. 1554, which we had previously agreed to call “Tale 1”:

“TOM: We really ought to do something about it.

“SALLY: It?

“TOM: That crack in the wall. The spackle I used isn’t doing the job. Look at it. You can see the crack again.

“SALLY: That I can.

“TOM: So you see what I mean.

“SALLY: I see that there’s a crack in our living room wall, to the right of the big mirror.

“TOM: I’m thinking maybe I’ll call John and ask him to take a look at it. John’s always done a good professional job.

“SALLY: Mm-hmm.

“TOM: What?

“SALLY: Nothing.

“TOM: I just think we ought to get that crack fixed. It’s unsightly.

“SALLY: Well, whatever you want.

“TOM: Do you want there to be a crack in our wall?

“SALLY: Oh, no. Heavens, no! Nothing but that!

“TOM: Look, what are you so peeved about?

“SALLY: Well, there’s a crack in our wall, for one thing.

“TOM: I know that’s not it.

“SALLY: You do? You seem quite peeved by that crack yourself.”

After reading this line, Marsh just . . . stopped. He looked around the circle. His eyes were a bit bloodshot and his face was shadowed with stubble. He sighed, paused, and began to speak.

“Look, I have something to say.”

None of us moved. It took a number of seconds for me to realize that this was unlikely to be a line from the text.

“Guys—Aaron, Paul, Jenny, Kelsey, dad. I have something to say.”

“That’s not what it says, is it?” I said.

“No. I’m talking. To you.”

A wave of nausea swept over me. Everything had been upended. Our boat had capsized. There was no telling what could happen now.

“Can we talk? To each other? Is that a thing we’re allowed to do?”

He seemed to be addressing me, for some reason. After a moment, conflict-averse as a result of shock, I replied:

“Go ahead, Marsh.”

“Okay. Uh.” He took a deep breath. “Look. I don’t know what’s been going on here. I don’t know what the fuck was in Kelsey’s pills, because I have been tweaking out. Do you guys realize how long we’ve been here? I think it’s Monday. I think it’s Monday.”

After a pause, Kelsey said quickly and with shame:

“Oh, shit. I forgot to call my parents.”

Marsh rubbed an exasperated hand across his sweat-slick forehead. “I don’t know what is going on here, but this is my house, and I want us all to just stop and take a moment and talk about what we’re doing here.”

No one said anything.

“Like, are you guys fucking crazy? We get here, Aaron’s having some sort of freak-out, and you”—he glared at me—“decide the solution to that is to take drugs, stay up for two nights in a row, and read gibberish until our brains leak out our ears.”

“It’s not gibberish,” Aaron said.

“Oh, really? I’m sure you think I’m just too dumb to get it, right, ‘Err’?”

“I don’t think you’re dumb,” Aaron said limply. “I just don’t think it’s gibberish.”

“Look,” Marsh said, standing up now. “I know you guys think I’m kinda dumb. Because I don’t come up with ‘Hypotheses,’ or write fics, or anything. I’m just some stoner dickwad who thought he was good enough for your fancy little coterie. And yeah, maybe I know words like ‘coterie,’ but I’m still some stoner dickwad in the end, right?”

“Marsh, personally—” Jenny began, but he cut her off.

“But you know what? There are things I can see that you guys can’t. I can see that this”—he waved the current TNC stack with his right hand—“is crap. You have your theories, and your Hypotheses, and all of this bullshit, and I’ve been so fucking patient with it, but deep down I think you know that this is just not a good book.”

“Could you, maybe, tell us what you don’t like about it?” Kelsey offered.

Marsh threw his hands up in the air. “What I don’t like about it? What is there to like about it? It’s not well-written. There aren’t really characters or a story. There are all these weird words and misspellings in there, but you can tell they’re not in there for any good reason. He’s just putting them there to fuck with you and make you obsess over finding a pattern where there isn’t one. It’s meant to make nerds waste time. That’s it.

“Think of all the shit we could be doing right now. The fun we could be having. Hell, the books we could be reading, actual, good books, instead of this shit”—and here he flung the stack of paper against the wall. It splayed out into a number of overlapping piles on the floor. We all gasped.

“Marsh, I respect your opinion,” Jenny said, “even if I don’t personally agree. Can we maybe just all sit down and talk about this a bit? I mean, it’s interesting stuff, right? It’d be like a Cafe thread, but here in person.” She smiled. I envied her resilient, sunny spirit.

Marsh looked like he was torn between several possible gestures. He reached forward, as if to grasp something from the assorted stack of paper on the coffee table, but then suddenly lurched backward and returned to his lowest-energy configuration, seated in his La-Z-Boy (facing the couch, across the table) and 80% of the way to full recline.

“I guess, personally,” Jenny began after a moment, “I think there’s a lot of interesting character stuff going on in Caves. More than I had realized before tonight—uh, I mean, before Spelunk 04! It’s not written in a conventional style, no, but as a writer I feel like there’s a lot to admire and learn from there, about how to portray characters from multiple perspectives, and . . .” She trailed off.

“Really?” Marsh said. His La-Z-Boyed form and slight smirk were reassuring, a recognizable image of the Marsh we knew and, in one sense or another, loved. “Which characters do you think are so great? Tom? Sally? Cleanth?”

“Well,” said Jenny, and here began a set of agreeable, sublunary exchanges. I was pleased that Marsh had calmed down, but I still felt a deep unease: after this much immersion in TNC, we were still talking about it on this level? Where was Mundum? Where was the separation? I wanted to speak, but feared to expose myself. Thankfully, Aaron (Mundum bless Aaron) did my work for me.

“I think,” he said, “I’m getting something very different out of this than you guys are. I don’t really see it as a story with characters. I see it as . . . telling us about a certain way of seeing things.”

He gets it, I thought, and was filled with sudden affection.

“I think I was going about this all wrong, on the Cafe,” Aaron said. “And for a while, that hurt me. I was looking for a way out of how dark the whole thing was. Some way to turn the deaths into reincarnations. To tame the whole thing. But I don’t think I need to do that anymore. I think it’s saying something, and it’s saying something dark, but I think it’s something I agree with.”

I beamed. Everyone else looked as though they were trying to pretend he hadn’t opened his mouth. I looked over at Ken, who had not spoken at all since we had stopped reading. He looked lost, empty.

Marsh glared at Aaron. “So what is it saying? Probably something too sophisticated for the plebs like me, huh?”

“No, no,” Aaron pleaded, “it’s not . . . I don’t know how to say it, but I think you can get it, Marsh. I think we all can. It has to do with death, and with . . . things being in the wrong place . . .”

He gets it! I almost cried out.

“It’s really weird how I don’t feel tired,” Kelsey said. “Like I don’t feel tired at all. I am kinda hungry, though.”

Everyone seemed to relish this distraction from Aaron’s morbid rambling.

“We’re all out of peanut butter,” I said.

“Thank god,” Kelsey said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to eat peanut butter again.”

“I could go for, like, a burger and fries right now,” Jenny said.

“You’re in luck,” said Marsh. “There’s a diner right up the street. Dad and I go there all the time. It’s, like, the paradise of grease.”

Jenny’s face lit up. She looked like a doubting kid who’d just heard irrefutable proof of Santa Claus’ existence.

“Let’s fucking do this!” Marsh bellowed. He was in his element again. Going to show us around the town. Have some good earthy (sublunary) fun. Out of the caves. No more bullshit.

I have to take a break, here, to prepare myself. The sun is setting. I will finish before midnight, Cafe. Let’s fucking do this.