notebook of a night watchman, part I

This abandoned dairy, enormous and sprawling, was once the very same cubic, two-story museum in which I stood as a gallery security guard ever since I can remember; of this I’ve finally convinced myself. This museum, afflicted as it is with malignancy-- long transformed by a cancer of rooms and corridors which have multiplied haphazardly in all directions-- this once quaint and contained small-town museum in which I stood as a security guard from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, five days a week for my entire life-- its paintings long since removed from the walls, and even the paint and particle board from those walls now weary with the road-map cracks forging across its plastered cinder-block construction, its parquet floors and padded carpets long since ripped up and carted away from the vast, gray cement floors now covered with nothing but plaster dust and pigeon shit-- this monstrous and dilapidated brick building was never the dairy fabled to have been sucked dry some time before my birth; it was and is the museum, the once quaint and contained small-town museum in which I stood as a security guard from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, five days a week for my entire life.
***
The time is 02:35 hours. I have just returned from my third nightly round, returned as though for the sole purpose of writing these very words with the pen I’ve yet to let go since filling out the hourly guard report required of me by my profession. The pen is ordinary, ball point; its ink, black. Two spare pens just like it (but for the irreproducible chew marks on the butt of each) lie incidentally crossed on the desk beside the telephone which never rings, which shouldn’t ring, for its sole raison d’être is to send the guard call out on the remote possibility of an emergency. In order to have adequate elbow-room to write this I have slid to the left of the desk the log book which is properly open to the page headed in large gothic lettering: "Stalwart Security, Inc."; below which I have written on the bold, black line reserved for it, the location: "Jansen’s Dairy"; below this, my name and badge number: "Victor Vereneseneckockkrockoff, #751"; and below this, my successive log entries: "23:30-- All secure on premises," "00:30-- All secure on premises," and "01:30-- All secure on premises." The only other object on the desk is the turn-key clock, the Detex clock, which I carry slung over my shoulder when making my rounds, the workings of which I will describe in great detail for you who plundered and left infected this modest, two-story, small-town museum in which I stood as a security guard ever since I can remember . . . But this brings me back to my last entry, the revelation written in my own hand no more than an hour ago, which I have read and reread. How could my precious little museum’s architectural affliction have progressed so imperceptibly even for the devoted security guard it surrounds from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, five days a week for his entire life, until one day he finds it night, himself working nights, from 23:00 to 07:00, a security guard for Stalwart Security, Inc., and stationed in this abandoned dairy, the one in which I now sit, rereading yet again what I wrote no more than an hour ago-- But by now it’s been longer! The time is 03:00 hours; I must go another round with this . . . this . . . .
***
03:33 hours. Doodled nudes. . . . The paper I am using is ordinary ruled notebook paper, white, a small box of which is kept in the lower left drawer of the desk, in case additional pages are needed after covering the initial incident report form. But a briefly accountable incident has yet to occur here, much less one that requires several ages to relay. As it happened that I returned to the drawer for more paper, I noticed beneath the desk a page populated with small pencil sketches of beautiful nudes, faceless woman constructed of cylinders and spheres barely held together with a subtle but continuous contour line of skin. Doodled nudes in all their different stages of erasure and refinement. And come to think of it, I have noticed this page before, or pages similarly covered with such sketches. None are ever finished, that is, completely fleshed out. One of the other two guards has apparently taken art classes! Instruction perhaps cut short for lack of funds, for we security guards are a poverty stricken lot. The guard whom I relieve, or perhaps the one who relieves me. Perhaps both are involved; my relief creating them, fleshing them to perfection, and the one whom I relieve reducing them again to the old geometry. Or perhaps it is just one, the other with no interest in the paper at all (He’s the one I could have understood perfectly well before tonight), or perhaps he takes the pages with him after he has done with them, as I will these.
***
04:34 hours. No, I never took an interest in blank paper before tonight. Before tonight my absent-mindedness never duped me into giving attention to an empty page. You see, I have just noticed the absence of a stack of books on the desk; usually there is a stack of eight or nine books, to my left, on the desk, library books I’ve brought with me to read during the time allotted me between rounds, leisure time which has increased significantly since I began working here, because the rounds which originally took me forty-five minutes have become so familiar that I can do them now within the half hour, driven by an incentive to acquire the maximum time to devote to my greatest and perhaps only passion-- reading. And although I cannot boast a college education, I have been a voracious reader in many disciplines of study, from philosophy to literature to science to the arts, ever since I can remember, and so consider myself something of an autodidact. And why would such a learned man work for Stalwart Security, Inc.? I am satisfied with the security profession because it leaves me time for study-- by now a good half hour, forty minutes if I dash through my round-- leaves me relatively undisturbed in the ideal solitude of an abandoned building in the night. And as you might expect, when not on duty I am most frequently seated in one of the plush chairs on the ground floor of the public library, with an even larger assortment of books stacked at my feet, the public library, located in the center of the city, rising up around me like a gothic cathedral and providing the security of an impenetrable sanctuary.
***
06:35 hours. I’ve so long fed from these umbilici of words, suturing them end to end, in succession, in my mind, yet my mind is incapable of spinning such a thread of Ariadne. My only hope is to leave a litter of somniloquies-- bread-crumbs, if you will, as I go-- shedding threads bitten off with my own grinding teeth until I’m left irreparably threadbare. And it is here I realize that from years spent reading and guarding I have developed a serious daydreaming problem, and that my loss of memory is a consequence of this daydreaming, or vice versa. During the thirty leisure minutes allotted me between my hourly rounds I would always read; tonight I write. Why? Is it simply because of the absence of books to read, books I for some odd reason forgot to bring with me to work tonight; I’ve never forgotten them before, not a day since my first week working here. Their absence makes this all feel somehow predetermined. . . . Is it because I no longer need to see the orange markers, which mark the guard route through a small lighted portion of this labyrinthine building, because my body’s memory, after years of repetition, serves to get me through my rounds without needing to disturb my daydreaming mind; because I can quite literally do my job in my sleep? Because my current state of mind and my time allotted to use it accommodate each other so well, I believe that I would be unable to write more than these flashes, these fragments, for more than thirty minutes, even if given hours of uninterrupted time. You see, I’ve spent most of my life in the quiet vacuum of the museum and library-- the library being, after all, a museum of books-- with their similar institutional, air-tight climates. So my mind has become a similar institution: a library of moments, museum of fragments. . . .
***
23:35 hours. All secure on premises. Vereneseneckockkrockoff on duty.
***
00:37 hours. I first became aware of my daydreaming problem when still a gallery guard in the museum. It was mid-morning, Tuesday, the day of the week the museum was most likely to be barren of patrons-- I remember because for just that reason Tuesdays were my favorite-- the day I would begin each week-- for the museum was closed Mondays-- fresh with the freedom to stroll around the gallery in peace, looking at the artwork and listening only to the sound of my dark and heavy footfalls echoing across the highly polished parquet floor. So it was Tuesday and I was admiring a recent acquisition of the museum’s, a rather large painting of a Laundromat which was also void of customers, its door open wide, and seen as from across the wet street of a rainy day. The broad sign above the door was impeccably rendered to appear at least fifty percent peeled of paint, the remaining fragments of its bold lettering illegible. Above the sign were depicted two apartment windows, curtains drawn across the one on the right; the left, curtains parted, framing the dark and indistinguishable recesses of a private, individual life. Above the distinct roof-line of the building, a strip of sky as if risen like oil to rest above vinegar-- the whole scene waiting to be shaken.
***
01:32 hours. For the Philistines who looted this museum, and who no doubt have-- or have destroyed-- the painting of which I speak, who provoked its galleries into such dark and ungainly agglomerations, I will explain that to commune with a work of art one must first drop one’s cynical intellectual defenses like a plush, cozy robe and become as vulnerable as a model before the artist. This is the state I had painstakingly achieved before the grand painting of the Laundromat, and it was in this state I watched materialize from the right frame of the painting, and then dissolve into the left, a man in gray raincoat, umbrella folded under his arm, glancing me up and down in his passage as though I were an unclothed mannequin standing in a shop window! My painting, I confess, was in reality the view of the street from one of the museum’s large, ground floor windows.
***
02:34 hours. The night of the museum window misunderstanding was for me a night of insomnia. Restless on a mattress saturated with antique dreams and nightmares, I awaited an understanding sun. But the sun came slowly, and I noticed that everything becomes heavier with its rising. I was looking out of the kitchen window, sipping coffee. The world outside suddenly rushed me, pressing itself flat against the transparent plane of the window until it appeared a painting tasteless against my landlady’s beloved cornucopia wallpaper. I began having trouble breathing and opened my apartment door for air, the door I soon passed through, reckless, never to return.
***
The twin bed, vacant but for the rhomboids of sunlight cast through the bedroom window and the pillow with the hollow left by the head, the fitted white sheet a rippled desert seen from the body of a passing airplane, white bed sheet rippled by the body risen like a sudden gust of wind across an expanse of sand. . . . Please understand, when a man has set himself the task of sleeping on an unfamiliar bed, having relinquished the intimacies earned of the bed he has slept on for years, the struggle involves not only his body but also his soul, for the substance of an unfamiliar bed is a confusion of clouds and coils.-- 03:47 hours.
***
04:28 hours. Illusion and Reality as the doting parents of the spoiled child Philosophy. . . . Had it not been for the advent of illusory art, Plato may have never felt compelled to draw his distinctions between illusion and reality; nor conceived of what is today known as his cave, prison of the human condition in which we are buried from the truth in the illusion of mere appearances. And even before Plato, Socrates, for whom our experienced world was but a shadow cast by the real. . . . It comes to mind that I should like to loose Plato’s cave among the caves at Lascaux, where at our earliest we pressed the palms of our hands wet with paint to the inconceivably thick walls of rock-- the entire earth behind them-- surrounding us, protecting us, to leave thin sister-images of their own shadows. There we birthed our shadows by the fire we built in the center of the cave, and the flickering of the fire became our shadow’s heartbeat. We painted the bison on those walls, stalked them as if they were real, and threw the spears which barely pocked the inside of our "prison." But we were not trying to escape the cave by attempting to penetrate those walls; then, it was the necessity of the hunt, the summons of hunger, with which we eventually ventured outside.
***
06:43 hours. All secure on premises. Vereneseneckockkrockoff off duty.
***
19:07 hours. Evening stroll to temper myself after a day of sporadic sleep. Through the dusk, notice approximately three blocks ahead, the abrupt beginning of a street running parallel into the distance with the street on which I walk. I cross to the right side of my street so as to be able, when the time comes, to cross onto this second, contiguous street, where I see women wearing pink and blue parasols with which they guard themselves against the high noon heat. Yes, it appears to be a sunny day on the street which extends like a beam of light from the rubbled vacant lot, a sunny day on the wall from which this misleading mural flakes, already territorialized by cracks.
***
And later, nearing home, night draping itself over my being, as though my being were a white marble statue being prepared for an unveiling.
***
23:39 hours. Those mobile statues Daedalus created, silly as circular arguments. In his Euthyphro, if I recall, Plato suggests the existence of an ancestral blood tie between architecture and philosophy, between Daedalus’ creations and speculative thought. (Note: for the ancient Greeks, architecture an sculpture converged to the point of being indistinguishable.) As legend has it, binding these statues, these living images, with chain or rope, was the best way of making the divine life in them manifest; the rope and chains harnessed this excessive life in order to better disclose its presence. And here I see the emergence of, like two horns on the head of the Minotaur, the poles of movement and fixity, of experience and knowledge. I must remember that metaphysics was first grounded in architecture, and that architecture was essentially built metaphysics.
***
00:29 hours. And then there are the cows. Cows sleep standing upright, or they choke on their own ruminations. They sleep for only two to three hours a night, having to spend the rest of their time eating in order to escape starvation. And each species of animal has its own particular sleeping habits, which vary greatly in accordance with each species’ survival requirements. These varieties of sleeping habits have been used to support an evolutionary theory of sleep, for physiologists have found that nothing exceptional occurs physiologically when we sleep-- no protein rejuvenation, etc.-- than when we are awake. So humans were slowly conditioned to sleep through the night so as to keep out of trouble during their hours of nocturnal blindness. Is this why the night watchman follows faithfully on his rounds the artificial light which girdles such a limited portion of this labyrinth? Why he follows this light like a thread of Ariadne which has had its two ends maliciously tied together, to form a circle? Why he hears, as though it were nothing but a rat the Daedalian statue of futility’s scamper wane within the dark and endless recesses he, himself, has avoided? Why I dutifully walk my rounds and never stray, a thought thought by this diseased architecture, the thought it hourly mulls?
***
01:35 hours. My job is monotonous but for the daydreams, which happen to occur at night. The daydreams have let me know that my situation and all that surrounds me is somehow inherently poetic. The clock, for example, which I carry slung over my shoulder during my rounds of the building, the first of its kind was invented around 1870, and the one I carry may very well be one of those originally constructed. It is a thick, round clock-- about nine inches in diameter-- encased in a cracked and worn leather holster with shoulder strap. On one side is the clock-face, which is only the size of a silver dollar; below it is a keyhole. The keyhole is meant for the specially designed keys posted throughout my round. When one of these keys is inserted and turned, the time is recorded on a thin strip of paper coiled inside the body of the clock, which rotates in pace with the minute-hand. Each key is distinctively cut and the location of each known by the man who inspects and changes these coils of paper when necessary, so it follows that this man-- who must be the boss whom I only vaguely remember, having not seen him since the day he first trained me for this post-- will have a record of where and when I was when turning each key. All quite dull, as you barbarians would agree, and dull for me until turning each clock key began to feel like the key I turn twice daily in my own apartment door. That is, I began mistaking time for space, space for time. And turning the keys in the clock for me now is like unlocking and walking through successive doors partitioning an infinitely long corridor. . . .
***
02:38 hours. It is not without some resistance I accept the fact that my head is not a key clock similar to the one slung over my shoulder during my rounds, though it weighs about the same-- five pounds-- or at least that my brain doesn’t function in a similar manner, flawlessly recording occurrences and events chronologically, which may later be researched and recalled with ease. No, there is no imponderable length of paper ribbon coiled inside my cranium. These notebook entries are chronological only in the sense that I record them as they come to mind. They may later be perused by me in the hopes of my catching a flash of insight, a gleaming of the key, as it were, inserted and turned to mark my way.
***
03:33 hours. I begin my rounds by passing into the stairwell through the door on the right of the desk. Two flights down, I stop, although the stairwell continues down two flights more. An orange strip of nylon cloth is knotted to a narrow vertical water pipe which continues the length of the stairwell, top to bottom. (How long has it been since I required the aid of that particular strip of cloth tied to that particular water pipe?) I pass through the door frame-- the actual door long torn off-- turn left and follow the corridor, which is poorly lit, toward the brightly lighted room at its end. This room is spacious, with a high ceiling. Walking down three steps into this room which is sunken off the end of the corridor, I continue along the wall to my right. There is a crack in the wall which rises at a constant 45 degrees from the angle where the last of the three steps meets the floor, and then tapers into a faint fissure before disappearing into the smooth solid wall altogether. On an inch per mile scale, this crack could designate a road approximately 600 miles northwest to southeast, or vice versa. It is what I’ve come to know as a "road-map crack," a beckoning break, a road taken which resembles a stress fracture in a tired old wall. But I suppose any crack could be made to designate 600 or any amount of miles of road. . . . I walk four more steps and the crack gradually reappears, continuing for about two more feet along the same 45 degree angle, as though it submerged momentarily within the wall, before resurfacing as the initial fissure which slowly emboldens to a considerable crack, before abruptly being stopped at the right vertical side of a window frame.
***
04:28 hours. The window is broken, though a shard still sits in each of the two lower frame corners, the left shard larger that the right, forming an irregular V at the base. The window, tucked away in the angular convolutions of the building, opens onto no light-- no street, lamp-post, or exterior spotlight-- and tonight, not even moonlight. As I look out, the cool air revives me and the darkness soothes my bleary eyes. I stick my head out of the window, breath deeply. If I back away from the window slightly, as though leisurely peering outside, I can see reflected in the two triangles of window still secure in the two bottom corners the lapels of my guard uniform, though the blue of my shirt is a little washed out by the glare of the fluorescent lighting of the room. If I position myself correctly, there is no glass to reflect my neck or head, both of which are consequently sacrificed to the bottomless, topless, sideless darkness. The silver badge pinned just above my left shirt pocket reflects the stark white fluorescence with such intensity that it appears to be molten. Then, the window frame becomes a picture frame. And it is as though the night had slipped into my blue guard uniform to pose for this painted portrait.
***
05:40 hours. Sun up. All secure on premises.
***
06:45 hours. The oval badge I wear above the front left pocket of my blue shirt is not silver but tin, and three inches in length. At one time in our history it was perhaps a tall, broad shield wrought from a more noble mixture of metals; no longer. It has over the centuries diminished to a symbol. And dragons and dark nights, instead of our bodies, prey upon and challenge our thoughts.-- Vereneseneckockkrockoff off.
***

To Part II