October The First Is Too Late
• Comptes Perdus « Revue des Choses Presque Vues » Vol. XII, Nº 3, Automne 199 October the First is Too Late, par Lucien Trente. Londres : Faber and Forger, 198 Préface • V. Rosier • Institut du 30-Sept. • Études de cas • Schismes • Numérisation • Conservation • Triomphe • Croix Rosier • Fin • Appendix: English Translation En nous offrant son précieux éclairage sur l’un de ces organismes de recherche restés jusqu’ici méconnus, M. Trente a rendu à la communauté savante un service insigne, mettant en lumière une institution digne—rien de moins—d’un Bloch ou d’un Ginzburg. Car loin du regard profane, mus par la seule reconnaissance espérée de la postérité, des érudits œuvrent sans relâche en leurs citadelles du savoir. Ainsi, la Labyrinth Sodality, l’Iberian Sundial Society, le Rekord-Club Gründerzeit, le futur Museum of Tri-Jurassic Technology, le musée Pith Brooks, et surtout l’Anti-Gravity Research Foundation ont-ils tous, en leur temps, reçu les honneurs qui leur revenaient. Justice est aujourd’hui rendue à un autre de ces hauts lieux. … [Un incident d’impression ayant entraîné la perte de la majeure partie de cette recension, nous en livrons ci-après un précis anglais tardif. —N.d.É.] … Fin. —G. et B. [N.d.É.] Texte intégral ci-dessus ; précis anglais ci-après. M. Trente has furnished a signal service to the scholarly world with his éclairage of one of our unsung research bodies, worthy of Block Ginsberg. Far from the common eye, for the thanks of posterity, scholars labor in citadels of knowledge— the Labyrinth Sodality and Iberian Sundial Society, the Rekord-Club Gründerzeit, the forthcoming Museum of Tri-Jurassic Technology, the Pith Brooks Museum, and especially the Anti-Gravity Research Foundation, have all at some point received their due; and now another has come due. One fears it will grace more catalogues than shelves, reviewed more than read, yet any reader of even modest cultivation will at once perceive that Trente’s inquiry eclipses those earlier curiosities in both scope and intellectual élan, and would prove an inestimable ornament to any library. For Trente’s Chestertonian thesis is a micro-historical vindication of the English verity that no things are uninteresting—only people. …M. Trente conducts us to a quaint quarter of New Orleans, past the park where the seagulls cry and 19 steps down a dilapidated lane—past a sleeping rusty-black c The Institute of September the Thirtieth
(Founded 196
Dedicated exclusively to the exhaustive study and preservation
of all phenomena, documents, and recollections pertaining to
September 30, 193 (all translations mine) The Institute is one of the least known legacies of the late Vincent Rosier ( 192 …Trente feigns no hypotheses for the reason of these phenomena, for it is enough that they move as he describes, but he explains the occult title thus: during the old lion’s final inspection of the Institute, our author marshaled the courage to ask, “Why the Thirtieth? Why not, say, the day after?”—only for him to rear back: “October The First is too late!” This recalls those early 20th-century titans who dreamt of universal photographic catalogues, of vast Palais Mondiaux in Geneva meant to house the entirety of human inscription, but in Rosier, those ambitions are involuted to a breathtaking degree. For the Institute tasks itself with gathering the disjecta membra of September the Thirtieth and shoring them against ruin, a repairing of the world guided by a genius loci almost Blakean—“To see a world in a grain of sand / However paradoxical its foundational premise might appear to the uninitiated, like a L’Entrecôte of history, the sheer encyclopedic ambition of the Institute’s collections testifies to an endeavor wherein (per the playwright), nihil humanum is deemed alien; the Institute attempts a radical recentering of the human condition upon this pataphysical temporal locus, an eternal September. Everything is coming to be, or has become, through the 30th of September, 193 Its agents diligently peruse library catalogues for items to Xerox™, and rare book dealers sedulously send circulars of items appearing at auction to feed its esurience for every book published that week, or which might have been on sale. The Institute has the largest newspaper collection in the world—not in depth, but in breadth, as they aim to collect every newspaper that day (and before, and after), in both morning and evening edition. As its seemingly-limitless endowment is not so unlimited as its task (for ars longa, dies brevisque), the Institute often preserves only the most relevant issues, while the rest are dispersed; and so there is a steady stream of visitors who are there to examine, as the case may be, the sole known surviving issue of a South American newspaper (on gauchos), or searching later issues in the hopes of pirated articles or rebuttals. Likewise, the sum of the meteorological and stellar records kept at the Institute (off-site) can only be described as ‘astronomical’, and every so often, an astronomer from Cambridge or Mount Wilson may inquire after a plate. Increasingly, scientific time-series are calibrated against the Institute’s comprehensive cross-section, as a temporal prime meridian, a fixed point around which a world turns. …In its early days, the Institute prioritized ephemera: diaries, real or dream (often a single page from anonymous donors), receipts, hotel registers, passenger manifests, restaurant and dining-car menus, playing cards, collectibles like Dixie cups, amateur recordings of radio stations, or any photo an archivist could argue might have been taken on the 30th. (…The “Rosier Apple”, bred in Michigan and introduced commercially with a trademark granted on September 30th, is now known exclusively from an archival watercolor sketch.) This reviewer notes approvingly the Institute’s initial reverent focus on juvenilia— children’s marbled papers, bubble gum wrappers (focused on baseball cards), and schematics for homemade go-karts from the Chicagoland area—prescient, as they could never have been preserved later, and represent some of the few meaningful sociology archives of childhood (a field which, beyond charming anecdotes, still awaits its Bachelard or Bourdieu). These often have unexpected uses in deducing the ley-lines of the past. Gourmands consult the menus to understand the evolution of fine cuisine, like where certain sourdough breads came from. The grocery store receipts, seemingly so picayune, have proven priceless to nutritional historians; the U.S. National Institutes of Health have digitized the collection to understand public nutrition on the eve of war and the health effects of rationing. And linguists discovered a previously unknown temporal dual to hapax legomenon, termed hapax ephemeron: words used by multiple people but zeitgebunden to a single day, which are invisible to less comprehensive archives, and which seem to function as a unique langue of that day (eg. “autumnese” or “umbrellous”, “Blitzfrieden”, “droop-tail”, “farewellfare”, “khaki-gaze”, “spell-gaping”, “Thirtio”). The past is a foreign country which poses its own translation challenges to would-be exegetes, which are still being thrashed out in the annual Ephemerata linguist symposia. Parallel analyses indicate that other domains experience hapax ephemeron, of advertisements put up only to be pasted over the next morning, daily-special dishes never seen again; each day may be regarded as a man who is born with the dawn, matures in the afternoon, retires in the evening, and dies with the sunset. (That other melancholy Dane was indeed correct, that the 30th had to be lived forward, though it is understood only backward; and this understanding—like the owl of Athena or a review—is doomed to arrive too late.)
With a veritable paradise of archives in one building, visiting novelists and historians will often reconstruct “a day in the life” of a major figure and find out if the President had fake turtle soup at the White House before taking in a contemporary movie like Dark Victory, and if he took a train with an itinerary, then the list of known passengers he might have talked to, and what he would have seen along the way like advertisements, local newspapers and weather. (A curse of reading this is that readers will start noticing “late September 193 One can sit in the media room, and play what the archivists call the “alephabetical tracks”: a 24-hour long track splicing together random seconds from every unique audio source with a known broadcast time for various geographical divisions like “Chicago” or “Continental USA”—this is a useful corrective to histories which suffer the mass tyranny of greatest hits like Glenn Miller’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, and necessarily ignore all the local one-off broadcasts, like the many chorus groups. These archives have been mined for art projects such as Martin Claychrist’s haunting day-long film, The Thirtieth Looks Back: the artist isolated tens of thousands of faces from photos and footage, and then the film continually superimposes faces as a collage—each new face covering up the previous ones. Not all efforts prove suited for academic study. One post-graduate visitor attempted an ambitious “olfactory art” project to synthesize the dominant ambient smells of various global locations: vials of synthesized Parisian café exhaust, rural Irish peat smoke, and the metallic tang of Chicagoan industrial zones, based on chemical analyses of soil samples and contemporary descriptions in literature; while some visitors found it useful, there were persistent questions about whether the 30th really smelled that bad, and what the value to the Institute was. And the charming, if scientifically dubious, effort to catalogue the collective unconsciousness of humanity foundered when the initial statistical dream diary results, showing anomalous ‘ψ’ predictions of October 1st, disappeared in followup data collection, and unspecified related projects were shelved due to “administrative irregularities” (and with them, dreams of retrocognition). Of late, Trente informs us, they have begun experimenting with the newest audio-visual technology on NeXT workstations to record ‘living histories’ in an advanced prototype hypertext system, recruiting ‘citizen-researchers’ to interview anyone over the age of 50. These may be of particular value in the future with the development of the “Inter-Net” (an Americanized Minitel), or perhaps another fad. The Institute, it must be said, grapples with the inherent problématique of matching its conceptual focus (or Anglo-Saxon absence thereof) to its resources, and avoiding professional deformation. The first challenge appeared early on, in its “Warring States” period: to what extent should the Institute seek to ingest all legal and government documents, which are generated in such timestamped volume? The Legalists argued for a strict one-size-fits-all policy of taking anything dated the 30th, to create La Bibliothèque totale or Total Bookcase (“If every record is preserved, there will be neither errors nor doubts”); if other research on “decorative disciplines” had to be defunded, so be it. The Antinomians emphasized the sheer archival volume of such a simplistic policy would inevitably lead to the downfall of the Institute, either in the rebellion of researchers, or in its budget shortfalls. The resolution, it is not without a certain irony, came when the Legalists’ warehouse expansion could be funded only by an act-of-faith of researchers, including the fiercest Legalist advocate, Dr Shang. (“—nor archivists”, Institute legend reports the Antinomian retort.) Trente highlights as the second major (archi)tectonic fault the “military historian” vs “pacifist” divide: the most salient events of the 30th are, of course, the developments in WWII—setbacks in the Phony War, the infamy of Poland and creation of a government-in-exile, which mark its true start. The military historians argue that Rosier’s intent was clearly to study WWII and preventing that disaster, with an emphasis on Polish issues (likely due to a personal connection, given the Polish immigrants and refugees in South Chicago at that time), and that the Institute had unbalanced priorities. The reader too will wonder at the resources expended by the Melbourne sub-archive on reconstructing the recipe for the half-time meat pies served at the 193 The ‘pacifists’ argued that Rosier’s intent was even more clearly to not study WWII: had he intended that, evidently, it goes without saying, he would have said so, no? (Trente’s sympathies are clear in his critique, not without an almost Gallic verve: “It’s the Institute Of September The Thirtieth, not Of The Second World War! Does the world need another? Much less a shrine of Polish effigies built around the inkwell & pen used by Raczkiewicz⸮”) The dispute approached a second war in the world of the Institute, as, each convinced only they understood the still-silent Rosier’s reason to be, even the most remote affiliates were forced to choose sides, culminating in a poker-waving incident (after which the conflict chilled). Trente characterizes the pacifists as winning less by dialectic than by decay, as the military historians died off and it became ever harder to say something new, while the pacifists (like the boxer Melankomas) kept their arms up, discovering ever new fields to mine: jazz performances, hydraulic and electromechanical computers, the much-ballyhooed Polish cryptography program’s reception, the lost first TV broadcast of an American football game (the holy grail of the athletics division), auspicious births (Trente describes a recent chemistry Nobelist as a “5-alarm fire” as the Institute labored to fix an unexplained lacuna—indicative of a certain Gallophobia?), and every 10 years, a frenzy of guest researchers who descend upon the quiet quarter to await the uncensored release of the next US Census. While Trente diplomatically describes the Institute as running like clockwork, the reader will detect a delicate sous-entendu. How will the Institute handle digitization? Can the 30th archives be adequately computerized, and avoid pieces decaying? Is a Xerox™ a substitute for the original (a debate ended, but not resolved, by a budget crisis within its first decade)? What might be lost if the physical archives are discarded and future scientific methods cannot be applied to the original artifacts? (A micro-CT of items like Rosier’s baseball glove runs to gigabytes, yet captures neither isotope ratios, environmental DNA, nor dried-sweat proteins for future proteomics.) Can the aura of the artifact, its very “thereness” so crucial to our phenomenological encounter with the past, truly survive its dematerialization? Even Saint Jerome—whose feast, the Institute oft notes, falls on the 30th, surely not a coincidence, because nothing is a coincidence—would struggle with Institute norms, such as dating all internal documents by the ‘Adjusted Eon (Æ)’. It is with a certain drollery, Trente informs us, that the Institute has recently inaugurated a year-long futurology project, “The Way The Future Was”, collecting every speculative article, magazine feature, or radio commentary predicting “what the world of tomorrow would be”, short term or long term, triggered by the 193 The skeptical reader will eventually be forced to agree with Trente that “the future of the past has never been brighter”—
O Thirtieth! O victorious Vincent’s ever-rosier day! For once dead, now livest: thy catalogues raisonné, monographs, theses, anthologies, all continually mirror thy radiance; thy brilliant cohort of mortals, now deathless, possess the land in perpetual re-issue (authorized or pirated); thy breakthroughs and éclaircissements mesmerize the mind; and thy novels and recipes and words (hapax no longer) sporulate and bud around the world.
O Time, O Death, where is thy sting? For the archivists already speak of the challenge of artifacts of the 30th multiplying on their own, like mankind: memoirs ghostwritten by the silver screen, homages, forgeries, Ossianic fragments, stamps canceled by post offices closed that day, coins and medals which should have been struck for that date (sometimes discrediting supposed originals), and sold to unsuspecting (or suspecting) numismatists. Trente closes by reprinting a circular announcing the formation of an international society, the Rosier Cross, to memorialize the death. Its chapters expand worldwide, for one generation cannot suffice to the task of creating a world. Already, we are told, this conspiracy against the Future counts among its members not just linguists but eminent clerics and engineers. Here, at the end of history, mankind has been disillusioned of ideology and symmetry, and unable to look forward, looks back. How could men not fall under the sway of the 30th, to the coalescence of its minutely detailed reality (in 1,440 equitable parts)? It would be futile to reply that today, as every day, is as detailed and real as the 30th—for where is the Institute of Today, and who its Maecenas⸮ It is no-one and no-where and no-when; and men cannot live in a Xanadu or utopia. The 30th may be a maze, but it was one lived by men, and destined to be solved by men. Its dialectical rigor enthralls the mind, though it is the dusty rigor of the chronologist. Already September 1 If Trente’s exponential bibliometric projections are correct, by “152 Æ”, no publication on the 20th century will fail to mention the 30th. We shall be remembered solely by scholars (of the 30th) for this autumnese review. The mere langue & parole of 52 Æ will perish from the earth. The world of the Twentieth will be the Thirtieth.
It makes little difference to us, as we go on revising, in our quiet countryside retirement, an cyclopedia of Casares we shall never publish. …A strength of M. Trente’s work is that it does not confine itself to the dry gazetteers or almanacs or statistical digests the Institute has heaped up in the thousands, but evangelizes its holdings by synopsizing all artifacts: from artwork to carefully clipped magazine and newspaper articles, indexed by topic, location, and name. For Thirtio appears everywhere now, whether implicitly in an extended conference, a politician’s vacation, or just anecdotes in passing many years later. This review itself becomes part of the Institute’s labyrinth, as the attentive reader will indeed find no shortage of references to decipher in this work (for in the making of an axe handle with an axe, the model is near at hand). We go to look up yet another one—but see the dusk has fallen, and it is half-past-nine already, we end too late. (And outside the softest creak of something on the wing… oh, do not look back, we beg you in God’s name, do not keep looking back!) Ainsi, we close with an affecting example of boyhood, harvested from an anonymous […] Saturday, end of September, and the end of summer baseball season ’39. The Pirates stare down the Pistons, spitting chaw in the dust. It’s a beautiful day for a parade or game: cold, crisp, and fair, a touch of the looming winter to make a boy forget laying in a fug for weeks before. […] Whiston is glaring daggers at me: I will suffer eternally for letting the gang down. The other lads look away at the stands, the fences, the dugout, the sun over the roofline half past five… We can still win, it’s five four bottom ninth, it ain’t too late, all we need is one last out and their runners are not worth a plugged nickel. But they have given up like a kicked droop-tail, and the Pirates are euphoric as they snigger at us and chant: “blast it past it! onta Waveland! hey batter hey batter hey batter—swing!” The bat cracks. “High!” A slow lazy arc, every eye silently following it spell-gaped, past the sun, back down, on its predetermined path toward no one but me, exiled to the outfield, as I casually hold up my glove for the white sphere emerging from the dark like a revelation, pitched to me by the Good Lord Himself, landing with just the slightest thwack… As cheers erupt on both sides… End. [turn reader-mode off Trente’s first footnote (reproduced here) informs ailurophiles that Rosier’s c
Université T. U. O. T. (retraité à Chavignolles),
En raison d’éventuelles erreurs ou omissions de traduction, la version française fait seule autorité.
