Читать книгу Wicked Weeds - Pedro Cabiya - Страница 7

Warning

The album or scrapbook belonging to Dr. Isadore Bellamy is comprised of countless clippings, illustrations, photos, specimens, and texts. The curation of the present edition has focused on the presentation of those texts and has dismissed everything else.

By general consensus there are four textual categories, two of which, according to the experts, are not of the doctor’s exclusive authorship. The manuscript has been classified and divided in accordance with these criteria of demarcation, but only in the table of contents. The main body of the volume respects and maintains the order in which they appear in the original. There are some who contend that such an order does not exist, that they are placed at God’s whim—that is, by chance. Yet who can affirm that chance is not also a word, or many words, that we could one day learn to pronounce and in so doing become equal to God?

And so we issue a warning to the diligent reader, the one who will read in rigorous compliance with the page numbers: Your meticulousness and zeal will get you nowhere, for even following that path you will wind up in chaos. And chaos is a dark well where I cannot guarantee you’ll find any comforting notions.

Others will conclude then, that the best approach is to use the compass provided by the table of contents and to read the book in the order established by the categories. And while, in practice, the chapters are scattered and intermingled, placed at unpredictable intervals (or in accordance with the brilliant but erratic doctor’s fancy), these readers should fear not, for the table of contents will always deliver them to a safe harbor, telling them what goes with what. They will read all the things of one color and shape first, and the things of a different color and shape next, and so on, obeying the rule of like for like. This convenience, however, could be lethal. Because even incautious readers, naturally carried along by their own indolence, will not wish to veer from the path laid out for them by the judicious specialists, and they will, therefore, not read the album in the way Doctor Bellamy intended.

With tragic consequences.

PEDRO CABIYA

Grand Goave, 2010