Note 0: Bartlebooth
So, Chris: Why are you doing this walk? you might ask; in response, I might say something like this…
My junior year of college I was an exchange student for a semester in West Germany. (The second semester, at Rostock in the GDR, didn’t happen as that would’ve been in early 1990 and the political situation was more than a little bit unstable at the time.)
I’d already been an exchange student in West Germany from 1985-86, junior year of high school, and had spent the summer of 1988 working in St. Gall, eastern Switzerland; at that point, I was more or less your typical proto-hipster West German university student, which meant smoking (ugh, haven’t smoked since 1990) as well as reading stuff like the taz and Titanic magazine. It also meant shopping at Zweitausendeins on a regular basis, which was my first contact with Oulipo - specifically Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, which is still on my bookshelf. That eventually led to Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi aka Life A User’s Manual once the battered demo copy was put on sale for half price. That edition is also still on my bookshelf.
There are three things about that book that always come to mind: one, an offhand description of a pornographic painting (?) of a cook (?) using a boy as his catamite while at sea (??); two, a story of a nanny who accidentally causes the death of a child in her care and her employer’s relentless search to find her after she disappears, and three, the story of Percival Bartlebooth, which I’ll paraphrase here. Please bear in mind that I don’t have a copy of the book to hand; this is from memory and is bound to be unfaithful to the original. I, sir, am no Pierre Menard.
Bartlebooth - the name is an obvious allusion to Bartleby, whom I perhaps quoted all to often to my last boss at work (“I’m sorry, you’d like to me to support our new cloud-hosted patient safety software suite? Honestly, I’d prefer not to”), Melville’s famous scrivener.
The tale of Bartlebooth is perhaps the one great through-line in Perec’s novel; if memory serves, his is one of the few stories that isn’t constrained to a single room or chapter. He’s older, appears to be fairly affluent, perhaps even rich, and in answer to the eternal question What is to be done with a life? he decides to embark on a project that will consume an entire lifetime. He learns how to paint watercolors; he commissions research into special papers that can be reassembled perfectly after having been cut. He embarks on a quest to find the best jigsaw-cutter in France. He books a passage around the world; he visits one hundred harbors around the world for two weeks, paints a watercolor while he’s there, and then sends it back to Paris, where Gaspard Winckler, the jigsaw cutter, mounts it to a thin wooden board using a dissolvable glue. Winckler then creates a jigsaw puzzle, puts it in a bespoke box, and seals it with wax.
Once Bartlebooth returns home, he starts in on reassembling the puzzles; once he completes one, the special paper he’s designed is treated to reattach its fibers to each other so that it may be unglued from its backing without causing damage to the painting. The painting is then washed in a solution that removes all of the paint, leaving nothing behind but the paper, all trace of the human effort, time, and expense involved having disappeared.
Over time, of course, Bartlebooth grows older, his eyesight worsens, and much to his dismay, Winckler’s mastery of jigsaw cutting has reached previously unthinkable heights, leading him to all kinds of difficulties reassembling the puzzles. Again, if memory serves, Bartlebooth is unable to finish his life’s work and dies with a puzzle-piece in his hand; there appears to be only one piece missing in the puzzle laid out before him, but the piece in his hand is the wrong shape.
That is to me a sort of kōan - it’s a story I’ve thought about often in my life. What is to be done? To a certain extent, I’m walking this path because it’s circular; there is a beginning that’s also the end, there is no particular purpose to it, and when I’m done I’m at the beginning. Nach dem Spiel ist vor dem Spiel, after all. Most of our lives leave no trace; I fully expect mine to leave almost no trace, just like those watercolors. If I’m lucky, I left good memories behind - as well as some stuff I did for work, but that will quickly fade from memory - but that’s all there is.
Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha - my life’s work is its own undoing; its absence will be an enlightenment.