A phrase that puts us precisely on the right spermy track as to the potential energy, the very essence of Shandyism, which didn’t disappear even when Crowley — after leaving the Ateneo — opened the window of his Seville residence and, with a histrionic flourish, dissolved the secret society. It was an energy that didn’t disappear but rather, in its scattering, became more potent; the experience of literature is living proof of this scattering, proof of that which escapes unity for good reason. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that the scattering of the secret society — and with it, of portable literature — would mark the moment when it began to approximate itself and finally began to be genuinely portable.
A SHANDY DRAWS THE MAP OF HIS LIFE
“I travel to know the geography of myself.”
Together, all the Shandies make up the face of one imaginary Shandy. The incidents that configured their tragic face can be read in the lines of this portable portrait, the map of their imaginary life. In this face — in all the Shandy faces for that matter — there have been deep lines since youth, lines that will gradually widen until they become emptiness itself. This unique mask — the synthesis of all portable masks — will be found in the tenuous light of a visit to Seville that pays homage to the majesty of time. (Time has ravaged this singular, solitary face, the face of the last Shandy.)
In most of the portraits his eyes are downcast. His right hand is held near to the face. The oldest example I know shows him in 1924, not long after his nervous breakdown beside the enormous towering rock where the concept of eternal recurrence came to Nietzsche. He has dark, wavy hair and a high forehead. He looks young, almost handsome; his eyes downcast — with the gentle, dreamy gaze of the shortsighted — seemingly floating toward the picture’s lower left-hand corner.
In the photograph of him at the party in Vienna, his wavy hair has receded just a little, but no trace of his youth and beauty remain; the face has flattened out, and the upper torso seems not just puffed, but burly, enormous. The hand — clenched into a fist with the thumb between two figures — covers his mouth, the fleshy lower lip. The gaze is opaque, or simply more inward, and there are books behind his head.
In another photograph, taken at the bottom of the sea, he’s standing immersed in thought in the Bahnhof Zoo, looking very elderly in a white shirt, tie and trousers over which dangles the chain of his pocket watch; his disheveled figure gives the camera a truculent look.
Finally, in the clear light of a room in Seville, he is consulting the final pages of a volume held open on a table by his left hand; it’s as though he’s looking toward the lower left-hand corner of the photograph; he seems, surprisingly, much younger than three years before and gives the impression of having achieved his goal of becoming a proficient reader of maps, composed of imaginary streets along which one can happily drift; it’s as though his gaze were already wandering through the final pages of that volume where he might have found the map of his life, a labyrinth in which every connection with a Shandy conspirator may be figured as an entrance into the morass of the portables’ invisible city, a space where losing oneself takes practice. The art of wandering the streets of the imagination reveals the true nature of the history of the modern city and leads us to the doors of the singular building where the last Shandy lives.
This person is someone who approaches life like a space in which to draw a map, someone who in Port Actif — when the secret society was being founded — was already considered melancholic, cut out for no other human state than solitude. (That is, solitude in the great metropolis or spent as a wanderer, fully at leisure to daydream.) This person considers himself melancholic, since he came to earth when Saturn — the slowest turning planet, the planet of digression and dilation — was in the ascendant. And under the auspices of this sign, he gets lost — like any good wanderer — in the labyrinth of Odradeks, with the Moldova ice slowly breaking up.
Since being slow is a feature of a melancholy temperament, the Shandy spends all day in Trieste on deck chairs. His slowness comes out in the way he reads the world. The melancholic person knows how best to read the world precisely because he is obsessed by death. Albeit, on the submarine, his vision of death gives him the sense that it is his melancholy that the world gives in to.
Once he gets to Seville, he considers the way that the more lifeless things are, the more potent and ingenious the mind contemplating them becomes; inert in the face of approaching disaster, in his melancholy, he is galvanized by the passion that exceptional objects awaken. He begins collecting books as well as passions, he knows that the hunt for books, like sexual pursuit, enriches the geography of pleasure. This is another reason to drift in the world. As well as first editions and distinctively baroque books, he collects miniatures: postcards, pennants, toy soldiers. . The love of small things underlies his liking for brevity in literature; his library is full of short books evocative of the cities he has become familiar with: Port Actif, Paris, Palermo, New York, Vienna, Ajaccio, Prague, Trieste, Seville.
Prague, on the map. This is the city in which the Shandy learns to journey around inside his room while sitting at his desk, staring at a blank page, and receiving a visit from his Odradek. Hunched over his papers and wrestling with the work at hand, the Shandy notices that a darker and inferior being has settled on his shoulder, an Odradek that attacks his soul, squeezing, narrowing yet rejuvenating it, and, after a fashion, taking years off of it. At first, the Shandy evades this violation by pretending no one’s visited him, but soon he comes to understand that this spreading of a semi-dark inferiority over his person is the most pointed and most creative of all violations; so he gives in to his Odradek, knowing he’ll become lost with him in the chaos that will finally give birth to portable literature.
Palermo, on the map. This is the city in which the Shandy life is a drawing of death. The Shandy will never go to Palermo, he’ll send someone in his place: a suicidal emissary who will convert a Sicilian hotel into a forbidden place in his memory.
Paris, on the other hand, is the underwater light of the days of his portable training. Silver bridges over the Seine link the intricate paths of a journey leading him through the days of his Parisian apprenticeship, to a convoy of stars, and from there, back down to earth once more, to the opaque nothing of an insolent farewell in Seville.
Seville is not on the map. On this southern tip, the last Shandy — a Saturnine hero with his ruins, his miniatures, his defiant visions and his relentless penumbra — thinks his intensity, his exhaustive melancholic attention will set natural limits on how long he can continue to elucidate his ideas on literature and life; he decides to conclude the book he’s working on in order to finish just in time: before it self-destructs. This is the decision of a person who knows that history in its true countenance swiftly passes by, and that the past can only be retained as an image emitting — like the lightning bolt of insolence, in its visible moment — a radiance that will never be seen again.
Only because the past is dead are we able to read it. The last Shandy knows that only because it is fetishized in physical objects can history be understood. Only because it is a world can a book be entered. For the last Shandy — for whom his book is another space in which to wander — his real impulse when people look at him is to lower his gaze, bow his head toward his notebook, look off into a corner, or better yet, hide his head behind the portable wall of his book.