The Dimensions of a Cave by Greg Jackson

Author:Greg Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

V

THE NIGHT INTO which Quentin spoke was as fathomless and black as the night of the journey he described. The car started with a jolt, he said, and for several minutes we passed underground. We moved through dim tunnels where shades of graffiti tattooed the columns and girders like cryptic ruins of a lost civilization. The concrete caverns echoed dully with the clanging of the train. Then the tunnel rose to the surface and the ash-brown sky sealed us in its lambent skin.

Leaving the city on a bright day often has a hopeful air, but at that hour of night, crossing that circuitry of serpentine roads, raised roadbeds and bridges, tracing alongside buildings concealing their cagelike and unknowable purpose, you might have thought yourself transported to a mining colony on a distant planet, he went on. So peculiar was the color and quality of light, the city’s mechanism bristling electrically beneath the irradiated puddle of the heavens, that it seemed possible this wasn’t night at all but the regular condition of our cursed preterition. Brick facades streamed past, gas stations, flophouses, cut-rate hotels. Stoplights blinked above the rutted, scarred street. A broken flood lamp flickered over a desolate athletic field. The scope of the world stupefies. What a massive arrangement each building represented, not just its structure but the interlocking human agreements from which it was knit. And here were hundreds flowing past, thousands if one counted all the eye took in from the prospect of a gentle rise. The city extended in an endless glowing carpet, dwarfing the mind’s reach and offering, as consolation perhaps, a sense of liberated insignificance beside the massive improbability of human plans. And yet an atlas, I knew, would house this infinite and involute architecture in no more than a pinpoint … Yes, I was thinking of Bruce—of how insufficient he liked to remind you a map was to imagining a place, how much more complicated he always believed the world was than our abstractions allowed. I remember him in those last months before he left for the war, when his convictions began to spill over into rage. I recall him at the windows in the newsroom, gazing out at the city. How infuriated he became at the hubris in our fantasy of control. The impulse that looks at a map and concludes that what the mind can comprehend in schematic it can master in full. He saw the seduction everywhere, this fatal mistake. Any state of idle dreaming in which you believed the world would bow down to your simplicities and grand intentions. And was he wrong? The spatial world has three dimensions, the map has two; the three-dimensional body rises out of flat simplicity in all its manifolds—and how many shortcuts do we take to entrap this world beyond our heads, to make its vast plane amenable to comprehension? How many do we project back out, mistaking our software, our dreams for the world? And how many of us, in our search

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