Perle was that cousin of mine who went bonkers in Brooklyn and took to the streets to provide such entertainment for the shopkeepers. Especially that deli owner with the menu in Yiddish who supplied her with paper bags for her stuff.
There were many stories about her but they were mostly embarrassing, not the tales of the wise jester one would pine for. And since she was not the only person on the tree to go ape - I had that uncle who died of radio - I began to wonder if this oytser, this heirloom I was searching for, might not turn out to be a dented neuron that led to madness.
Then I heard about The Grand Quiddition.
This was a book Perle was said to have been working on for her whole life starting out when she was a student reading in comparative religion and continuing onto the street begging for food and attention.
The Grand Quiddition was her attempt to work out the rules of logic and circumstance that would, on the most complete level – at what we would now call the supersubatomic level – explain what Aristotle referred to as the to ti esti. The “what it is.”
In other words, the meaning of life.
Meaning of life. Only a nut would even think there was one and Perle was as shelled and salted as they came.
Just another family myth no doubt, but it did explain this odd page I found in the album. It was from an old paper bag from that local deli – I could see the logo at the bottom – scribbled on in a tiny, tight hand. The hand of a lunatic, if you must know, intense and engraved into the paper with rage. I had to use a magnifier to read the words and a dictionary to transcribe them…part Yinglish, part Perleish.
It told the tale of a group of men who lived together in the early 19th century somewhere in Poland. These were scholars who had cast aside their traditional roles in the community and the faith and all that, in search of something more important, more elemental.
The time they lived in was simpler than ours but even so it was far too complex for their tastes. The world had splintered into a riot of different religions and sects and movements each with its own symbol, truth, rules, practices. Not to mention a crank suspicion of all the others.
This dispirited them deeply.
Was this the only hope for humanity? Was God nothing more than a cosmic mirror shattered into endless sharp reflections? Was there no truth but the whole truth and was that simply a flash in the pan of opinion?
The thought was unacceptable – no, painful – to them. The yearning that had called them to their studies in the first place still echoed and so they decided to embark on a grand project…to simplify what had become an impossible cacophony of voices. In other words, to find the basic truth of the human spirit.
You can see why their story appealed to cousin Perle.
They were not rabbis and certainly not monks, although the confusion is understandable; they were wellwishers, deep seekers, rooters after truths. And they were clever and had studied science and the natural arts and knew things about the world. So they devised a machine, a grand mechanism like a mashup between a difference engine and a brewery, made of rivets and counterweights and sluices and heating coils. This was before computers mind you, back in the age of stunning clockworks and clever automata. Relying on their tools of steam and alchemy and brass and mechanics, they built this magnificent contraption – if only we still had the plans! – that would render the fat and reduce the fluids of overstuffed sentences and florid phrasing.
It was a machine of essences and simplicity that would, in the end, give us something we crave, or at least something they did on our behalf…a certain certainty about life itself.
They worked for decades, these dreamful engineers, taking all the sacred texts of the world and compiling them and feeding them one by one into the engine.
All of them.
From the Torah and the Gospels to the Qu’ran and the Tao To Ching. The Five Classics of Confucianism, the Havamal of Asatru, the Kitab-i-Aqdas of the Baha’I. Nothing was missed. All the Nikayas and the Sutras and the Gitas and Eddas and the Golden Tablets of Moroni, each one was carefully processed. The Book of Shadows just before the Book of the Dead. Even the Holy Piby – and who knows which translation – did not escape them. The more the better, gathered from every corner of the globe, all delicately served into the whirling, roiling engine and all pulverized into their quintessences.
This engine was not just a word mixer, mind you. Nor was it any kind of semantic chewer. It was more basic than that. It was a meme distiller, a nub engine, an upshot shooter. It took the complex ideas represented in all those texts in all those languages from all those realms and ages, and rendered them into their basic component, into the central idea that made each book resonate.
When the task was done, the output – and I know what you want to ask but sadly I cannot answer it because no one alive knows what form that output took – was gathered up and itself fed back into the machine.
You see what the plan was?
To reduce all those sacred texts and then reduce the reduction. To come up with one single, singular, singing singularity. One concept. A cosmic crux. The nitty-gritty quiddity.
A God thought, if you will.
You might imagine that when it was done, the world would end and a new one, the one we now inhabit so fitfully, would form. Or that the machine, on completing its task, would destroy itself rather than reveal what we cannot and should not know.
But according to Perle and her Grand Quiddition, they did in fact succeed. Leave it to a madwoman – who are all romantics after all – to believe that this could be done. The final sentence on that brown bag spelled out just what the engine produced after all that time: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. But we would not listen. And so, in the ending the word was…”
Her sentence ended there in iron-clad irony.
But then I turned the page over and found one final word printed in Hebrew letters on the other side. I had to look it up and it turned out to be the Yiddish word “dreck.”
Dreck. Garbage, excrement, nastywaste.
Coincidence, I presumed. Perle had trailed off with that ellipsis; this symbol was just something printed on the bag to show its use at the deli. For trash as opposed to cookies or bread, in other words.
Coincidence. That was all.
Yes.
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