Un Tríptico de la Locura
Un verdor terrible
Back in 2022 I read the book When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut. It came into my life in odd ways. I would see it on a friend's coffee table and take a photo of its dendritic cover. It was then recommended by a bookseller after I unknowingly saved a New Yorker article about its author. It didn't quite click with me at first. But it belonged to that very special class of media that I sometimes come across where I feel a strong certainty that there is something that I missed and that I am not done wringing it of meaning after a first quick interaction. I was quite drawn to the few moments of quiet introspection that would occur in the book. Random imagery that was clearly meant to evoke a tapestry larger than what was directly on the page would suddenly appear as narration or the speculative internal monologue of a character. But I didn't quite understand the significance of the biographical nature of the book. I wasn't a very curious first-time reader.
After I quickly finished the short work I found myself chewing it over more than I would've expected. The goals of the book were accomplished with a brevity and a beauty that made it almost infectious for me to think about. I couldn't avoid my mind coming back to the moments of meditation that almost exist as ghosts around characters being laconically described in dire social situations during their rises to intellectual Olympus. More than that, I was trying to decipher the message of the book and finding that, on reflection, the book's meaning was expanding like a fractal for me. What does it say about our world when the people who are at the frontiers of our knowledge routinely report back with the thousand-yard stare of a traumatized soldier who has seen the dark depths of man's collective soul? One who has seen too much. Is there some inherent relationship with the ability to shift a worldview enough to see something novel and a sort of madness? Or worse, is there some effect of scientific discovery that strikes its denizens with that same madness without them having contained the seed for its dark growth prior to their pursuit? Is madness catalyzed or planted?
As much as it is a treatise on the dangers of man's search for meaning through the lens of science, the book implicitly treats on the importance of narrative in humanity's understanding of the work of our great scientists. The book begins its first story with a single paragraph of non-factual information and by the end has entire swaths that are fabricated. This is something that I didn't notice on a first read so I was of course not considering the implications of such a structure. But after learning this fact about the book one can't help but realize that they have become part of its structure. Part of its narrative. When We Cease to Understand the World performs a very important thought experiment by its very existence. It proves that we already do not understand huge landscapes of the world around us. That our vision is pocked by blind spots either due to sheer laziness, willingness to succumb to scientific/literary authority, or otherwise the insanity that would come with ripping back the curtain to reveal a blinding light of lunacy-bearing information.
Mi extracción de La piedra de la locura
After roughly nine months I had not stopped thinking about this book. It conveyed its ideas in such a novel manner that is almost designed to infect its reader like some sort of virus. It poisons one's worldview to think so much on how exceedingly little information we really have about what goes on around us, at a cosmological level, at a sub-microscopic level, and even at an interpersonal one. I had these deeply tinted glasses of conspiratorial mistrust and deep paranoia of the workings of the world around me perched on my nose when I took a vacation to Spain this April.
As is (likely unsurprisingly) my wont when traveling, I find myself in many bookstores making luggage-bloating terrible decisions. Perhaps something beyond random chance would assist my eye on this particular trip in a bookstore in Barcelona as it landed on a chartreuse pamphlet-thin volume with the minimalism of a manifesto to its design. It draws my eyes as it sits on my desk now: Benjamín Labatut's La piedra de la locura. At the time I had thought he only published the single book of his that I had read, but would come to learn that he had other Spanish books published before WWCtUtW (Un verdor terrible being its original Spanish publication title). It wasn't until I made it back to the states that I realized that La piedra de la locura was published in October 2021, almost exactly a year after WWCtUtW (September 2020 from what I can glean online and in its copyright section).
I held the book with me at all times and attempted to read the first couple pages through determined will as we spent time in Barcelona and then Mallorca and Seville before ending up in Madrid. I am semi-proficient at reading Spanish and most of the Romance languages from my high school Latin days, but couldn't really grasp much other than the fact that the opening section of the book discussed H.P. Lovecraft. Though one thing I could understand was the title: The Stone of Madness. Along with this cryptic title, inlaid after the epigram and opposite the first page of the book's text was a print of Bosch's The Cure for Madness or The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (La cura de la locura o La extracción de la piedra de la locura). After a quick Google search I found out that the painting in this book happened to lie in the same room as Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (El jardín de las delicias), a painting that for several years has stayed with me as a visual theme in my life, but that's for another time.
At this point I was excited to get the the Prado and was pining for the last stop on our trip, Madrid. When we arrived to the city, the day before our booking at the Prado I stepped into an old book shop. I made it in just as the owner and his mother were closing the shop and they very graciously allowed me to take my time looking around (and after checking out humored me for a long while as I attempted to improve my Spanish by discussing the charm of their shop). But within a few minutes of perusing the shop, forces out of my control brought my gaze to another thin book that wouldn't normally jump to my attention: En las montañas de la locura, escrito por Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Perhaps I don't need to mention that emblazoned on the cover of this Spanish edition of a novel I have read many times before, this time in color, was Bosch's La extracción de la piedra de la locura.
I would have much to think about while I sat in the presence of ~200 tourists, back turned to them, examining a small circular painting that sits in the same room as Bosch's most famous gigantic triptych.
I had planned to write out my thoughts on the process of translation as a means of improving my Spanish skills, but perhaps thematically that thread of thought has eluded me as I shake out a whole different tapestry of complex oddity that Philip K Dick and Labatut could have set up for me. I will probably still write out some of those thoughts in another post because the process of translation really does change the way one reads a book drastically. But for now I think this is an adequate amount of my brain to expose for one sitting.