Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ Walking down a street in Philadelphia, I was dealt a blow on the temple by a paper airplane that had spiraled down from some open window above me, accompanied by muffled laughter; it proved to be a page from a book about the spiritualist community Lily Dale on which the Vocational School was mentioned in passing. And in one of a number of bags of interesting old books and papers left on a New York curb, as by indiscriminate and probably illiterate housecleaners clearing an apartment whose former occupant had died, I found, tied up with twine, a sheaf of yellowing papers covered in the characters of an unfamiliar alphabet, each page numbered, dated, and labeled in a childish hand, “Betty Clamm, SJVSGSHMC”!

      The Internet contains, it sometimes seems, all stories that have been and will be told. It is like that mythical Interstitial Library whose stacks readers sometimes wander in dreams, and whose itinerant librarians sometimes leave on your pillow astronomical bills for library fines levied on overdue books that you have never heard of, bills written in the already faint and soon to disappear stains of those mysterious night sweats from which you awaken terrified and out of breath. So I was not too surprised to stumble upon a reference to the Vocational School in the moribund listserv of a group of scholars whose common interest and broader topic was the work of a French philosopher whose name I did not recognize and cannot now recall but who seemed to employ a great number of obscure but wonderfully poetic terms composed of unlikely combinations or odd usages of otherwise ordinary words. I was skimming the discussion, which got quite heated, enjoying the feeling that I didn’t know what was going on, when I caught a phrase in passing: “. . . like those turn-of-the-century concerns that lined their pockets through the spiritualist fad, e.g., the SJVS.” Naturally other scholars would have come upon references to the Vocational School somewhere in their reading, just as I had. What surprised me a little more was the reference I spotted a few days later in a customer review of a pair of waterproof loafers I was considering. Well, one does not expect to find reference to obscure cultural institutions of another century (“like something an SJVS student would wear”) in the context of protective footwear! Still, they were of a conservative style and it was not really difficult to imagine a middle-aged scholar—say, one of the members of the aforementioned listserv—pulling them on and trudging off through the winter slush to his library kiosk.

      That pedestrian image banished all frisson of the uncanny until a few days later, when I received a cease-and-desist letter from a party representing herself as the Headmistress of the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, and threatening legal action if I did not immediately cancel plans for an anthology of “pirated” documents produced by and about the early Vocational School, to all of which she claimed exclusive rights. Plans I had not yet confided to anyone. No—plans I had not yet made!

      I suspected a prank, though I was struck in passing by certain arcane phrases and archaic usages characteristic of early Vocational School writings, and, somehow, found that my breath quickened as I read on. But when my eyes, swiftly and still scornfully descending the page, came to rest on the signature at the bottom, I thrust back my chair (scoring four claw marks in the varnish—I would lament those later) and strode into the kitchen to stare into the sink with unseeing eyes, a mad conviction growing in me that not only did the Vocational School live on, but so did that exceptional, rather dreadful, and indubitably deceased woman whose acquaintance I had made through a pile of yellowing papers, dreams, and the whispers of drainpipes and dead leaves. That the letter writer’s claims were true. Oh, not her claims to copyright, those certainly had no legal merit, but her claims to be the fourth-generation reincarnation—in the special sense of a person channeling another’s ghost—of Sybil Joines.

      Of course, any halfway competent forger could reproduce the capsizing loops and botched cloverleafs of that unmistakeable signature. My conviction was not rational. Let us say that I was possessed by it.

      Below the signature was a URL; I typed it into my browser and found myself regarding a plausible academic website. Vintage photograph of the Vocational School on the masthead, stock images of alleged students with pencils poised, application instructions for would-be distance learners. You may ask why I did not turn up this website in my initial research, and indeed I asked myself the same question. Later I learned that it had only just been launched; I must have been one of its first visitors. Once again I had the uncanny feeling that the SJVS was created expressly for me, was summoned forth by my interest in it, towing its history behind it like a placenta.

      A couple of phone calls connected me to someone who, in a hoarse, imperious voice that crackled like an old Edison recording, identified herself as Sybil Joines. I addressed her with awed courtesy and agreed to everything she said. Placated, she eventually warmed to me. Not only did she consent to the publication of this anthology,¹ but she gave me access to a great deal of immensely valuable material in the Vocational School’s own archives—much more material, in fact, than I can include here. (I hold out hope for an omnibus edition.)

      A note to scholars: Any historian of the Vocational School is faced with peculiar difficulties. Its scribes and archivists alike were in agreement that a self is a mere back-formation of a voice that itself belongs to no one, or to the dead. Thus authorship would be a vexed question even if all Vocational School documents were signed, as many were not. The current headmistress of the Vocational School, for instance, derives her authority from the demonstration that she is the mouthpiece for the previous headmistress, who was the mouthpiece for the previous headmistress, and so on. In a sense, she is who she is precisely because she is not who she is, and to insist too stringently on biographical “fact” is to miss the point.

      It is a fault of our age to consider all that is eccentric—and by eccentric I mean merely and precisely what lies farther than usual from a certain, conventionally defined, probably illusory center—as representing only one of two things: the symptom of a malady whose cure would restore the patient to a place in the center; or a new center, toward which all must hasten. What is true, we nearly all agree on; what we nearly all agree on must, we think, be true. But I would suggest that there are minority truths, never destined to hold sway over the imagination of the entire human race, and furthermore, ideas—less defensible, but to me, even more precious—that are neither true nor false but (I have sat here this age trying to compose a marrowsky better than fue or tralse, but hang it:) crepuscular. One might even say, fictional. Entertaining them, we feel what angels and werewolves must feel, that between human and inhuman there is an open door, and a threshold as wide as a world.

      Because I am a—faintly regretful—member of the majority, and know my way back to the center, despite my excursions to its fringes, I can speak to something that interests true eccentrics not at all: the utility of the crepuscular. For no one has ever got to a new majority truth, a new center, without passing through these twilight zones and thus eccentrizing themselves.

      But for every colonist there are countless expeditionists who will wander forever through deliciously ineffable sargassos, and when they write home, communicate both less and more than their correspondents would wish. For in the crespuscular every word is a marrowsky, if it is not one of those stranger compounds, those werewords, for which there is no name (word-ferns, word-worms, word-mists and -algae). What we know as meaning is not the principle cargo of such words. The Headmistress speaks this language like a native, for while the Vocational School may have appeared on county maps in the vicinity of Cheesehill, Massachusetts, its real address was in the crepuscular zone.

      Because the eccentric troubles the center like a lingering dream, there has been a great deal of nonsense written in recent years about the Headmistress of the SJVS. Some have gone so far as to doubt her existence (“And quite right, too,” I can hear her say). But she did exist, was as sane as any person of original views passionately held, and whatever fugitive pains urged her on, her central motivation was and always would be the hunger for understanding. Though it is necessary to stress that for her the deepest understanding would feel like incomprehension, and would be communicable only in the way that a disease is.

      So although there are mysteries to interest both philosophers and policemen СКАЧАТЬ