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October 24, 2005
Infinite Libraries & Stone Veils
John Hejduk writes with visual metaphors. His writing related to parts of my brain that normally deal with visual concepts rather than written language. Rather than trying to follow plot lines and character developments I became solely occupied with creating massive multi-dimensonal landscapes in my mind. With every paragraph the words seemed to paint large abstract emotionally charged vistas into my imagination; it seemed as if his words related more to subconscious thought patterns as experienced in a dream rather than anything at all literal. I agree with the idea that architecture and spatial constructions speak to each of us on a different personal level. In the part of the text where he describes the man going through the Hedge Maze, "He remembers the ruins of Delos and the cries of his beloved Angela... He leaves the maze with unease; she leaves it with a sense of comfort." This shows us how a space can trigger particular personal emotions based on our own worldview and life experiences. For him the Hedge Maze caused distress, for her it caused comfort. Experiences in such a place are subjective to the individuals' history.
The infinite library had a similar metaphorical style, but was written within a different context. This library represented a universe with its own set of rules which all its inhabitants were bound to. To me it revealed just how bound we all are to our own fabricated consciousness. Scientific and logical reasoning can only explain a small portion of the world around us, yet our minds make us believe that things must happen in believable and predictable patterns. Our laws of physics are completely relative to earth and our existence as humans. On a molecular level our laws of physics break down into mere guess work of probability. The same infinite chaos exists in the library as well as on earth.
I also liked the idea of using books in the library as the connective fiber within this created universe. It seems that all these texts formed a collective consciousness for all people. Together these books are all knowing of everything, they are God essentially. He mentions the search for ones 'Vindication', the idea of finding the meaning of all things, which is a similar quest of people in our world. This is the ultimate question which we all seek to answer in one form or another. In physics it's string theory, in religion it's God... I believe a universal connective force must exist on some type of metaphysical level.
Posted by Karl Channell at October 24, 2005 09:31 PM