3.2.1 Unsubstantiated assertion (status: in dispute)
Whatever the Intended Purpose may be, this much is clear: the book is a system, method, and space for a comprehensive categorization of all objects, categories of objects, categories of categories of objects, etc.
4 What there is not
5 Mode of propagation
5.1 How the book changes hands
On the left-facing inside cover of The Framing Book, we find the word “DEDICATED,” and underneath, two lines labeled
“From: ________________ ”
and
“To: __________________ ”.
5.2 Each possessor of the book
attempts to impose his numbered ordering of the world by adding categories.
5.3 At some point whether out of frustration or a sense of completion, or a desire to impose such system on others,
a possessor will pass the book on to another user, by excising his or her name from the To line, placing the name in the From line, and then writing in the name of the next possessor of the book in the To line. The excision should be performed with the same instrument used to cut new pages.
6 As you may have realized
6.1 What this means is
The Book of Categories contains what is, in essence, its own chain of title. It is a system of world-ordering, which has, encoded into itself, a history of its own revision and is, in that sense, the opposite of a palimpsest. Nothing is ever overwritten in The Book of Categories, only interspersed, interlineated, or, to be more precise, inter-paginated.
7 Why
7.1 Why
would someone ever give this book away?
8 A man
8.1Looking for what was there
8.1.1Trying to name it
8.1.1.1 Naming being one way
to locate something not quite lost, and not quite found
8.1.1.1.1 A name also seeming
to be a necessary AND sufficient condition to possession of an idea, a name being a kind of idea-cage.
9 Something else you need to realize about the book
9.1 Is that
The sheer number of pages in the book is such that ordinary human fingers cannot turn the pages in a reliably repeatable fashion. Simply breathing in the same room as the book will cause the book’s pages to flail about wildly. Even the Brownian motion of particles has been known to move several hundred pages at a time.
9.2 In fact, if you ever lose your place in the book,
it is unlikely that you will ever be able to return to the same page again in your lifetime
[INSERTED]
6.1.1 One reason
why someone would give this book away: at some point, whether out of frustration or a sense of completion, or a desire to impose such sys- tem on others, a possessor will pass the book on to another user, by
excising his or her name from the To line on the
[INSERTED]
5.2.1 Each possessor of the book [4]
The various possessors of the book can be traced, from which4
10 A man named Chang Hsueh-liang
has possessed the book seventy-three times. No other individual has owned it more than six times.
10.1 Little is known about Chang, a general in the Chinese army,
except that he is believed to have lost a child, a newborn daughter, in a freak accident while on a brief holiday with his family.
10.1.1 The incident
Onlookers who witnessed the incident say there were no words in their language to describe what occurred, only that “the water took her” and that although “nothing impossible happened,” it was, statistically speaking, a “once in a universe event.”
10.1.1.1 His daughter
was five weeks old when she died. For reasons unknown, she had yet to be named.
10.2 It is unclear whether Chang
was repeatedly seeking out the book, or it kept finding its way back to him.
10.3 A medal of some sort, and two insects
are believed to have been placed inside the book by Chang.
10.3.1 The general problem of categorization
Although it is worth noting that the location of these objects is unstable, due to a phenomenon particular to The Book of Categories known as “wobbling,” which can result from stored conceptual potential energy escaping through the frame of The Inner Book and resonating with The Outer Book.
10.5 It is clear from certain sites in the book
that Chang remained obsessed with naming what had happened to his child.
10.5.1 Chang’s last entry
is a clump of (A)CTE paper consisting of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of blank pages, known as The Chang Region. On each page of The Chang Region of the book is written what appears to be an ancient form of a Chinese character. Scholars disagree as to the identity of the character.
11 Eventually, a possessor of the book comes to realize
how hard it is to find any given page, lost among the pages. Trying to find that slice, to cut through it on either side, before the page has been lost.
[INSERTED]
8.1.1.1.1.1 A name actually being
a memorial to the site where an idea once
rested, momentarily, before moving on.
8.1.1.1.1.1.1 If you listen carefully,
you can hear it in there, but when you look inside, the idea-cage is always empty, and in its place, the concrete, the particular, something formerly alive, now dead and smashed.
[1] Which itself is listed in The Book of Books of Categories, vol. III, p. 21573, row K, column FF.
[2] And counting.
[3] The Intended Purpose is unknown, so this is basically just a wild-assed guess.
[4] Lambshead himself has been the caretaker of the book on two separate occasions, each time receiving it from Bertrand Russell, and each time passing it to Alfred North Whitehead.
Objects Discovered in a Novel Under Construction
Documented by Alan Moore
The following items have been retrieved from the construction site of an uncompleted novel, Jerusalem, where completion of the structure’s uppermost level has been delayed by unanticipated setbacks that are unrelated to the project.
The site itself is gigantic in its dimensions, with more than half a million words already in place and the three-tier edifice as yet only a little more than two-thirds of the way into its lengthy building process. The intimidating silence that pervades the vast and temporarily abandoned landscape is exacerbated by the absence of the novel’s characters and by the lack of any background noise resulting from the engineering and the excavation usually associated with such ventures.
Making a considerable contribution to the already unsettling ambience is the anomalous (and even dangerous) approach to architecture that is evident in the unfinished work: the lowest floor, responsible for bearing the immense load of the weightier passages and chambers overhead, seems to be built entirely of distressed red brick and grey slate roofing tiles with much of it already derelict or in a state of imminent collapse. Resting on this, the massive second tier would seem to be constructed mostly out of wood and has been brightly decorated with painted motifs that would appear to be more suited to a nursery or school environment, contrasted with the bleak and even brutal social realism that’s suggested by the weathered brickwork and decrepit terraces immediately below.