The Alexandrian Library was built on the orders of Alexander the Great, to act as an archive for all the great texts of the world. Destroyed in around 415 AD, the library exists now only as legend, although its influence remains in all attempts to conserve and honour words. In Don Paterson’s poem ‘The Alexandrian Library’ he relocates it into a dream world located in the most unlikely of places, the Scottish town of Cowdenbeath.
‘An Alexandrian Library’ opens with a mind-boggling quote from Francoise Aussemain, a completely made-up literary figure whom Paterson invented to occasionally introduce his poems. Aussemain/Paterson mediate on how nothing can ever be lost, it simply becomes irretrievable. Finding it remains elusive though, as what is found instead is ‘the overgrown path, the secret staircase, the ancient sewer.’
An Epic Journey
‘An Alexandrian Library’ begins with an epic journey, or rather a train journey through the Scottish countryside raised to the level of an epic. The speaker uses the second person making it seem as if the protagonist is being led along by an unseen force. The journey reveals the history of the places he travels past;
‘you uncover the names of decanonized saints
and football clubs, now long-extinct.’
However the history of these places is not quite as glorious as the realm of Alexander.
‘These were the battlegrounds
abandoned in laughter, the borders no more
than feebly disputed; a land with no history,
there being no victors to write it.’
When he arrives in Cowdenbeath the train disappears behind him leaving him in a deserted station. This is a ghost town, the edge of the world, the place where hope dies, where ‘girls with disastrous make-up and ringworm/ stalk past with their heads down and arms folded.’
The Library Revealed
A local leads him to an allotment with sixteen blue doors and in one of them he tries to recollect his most treasured memory. Then his lost ticket magically transforms itself, like something out of an episode of Mr Benn, into a business card for a second-hand bookshop with directions showing the way written on the back. In contrast to the Alexandrian Library Harry Sturgis: Remaindered and Second-Hand Books is not quite so magnificent. It is ‘book-clogged, low ceilinged,’ and its contents have titles like Dogfighter Monthly, Diabetic Desserts All the Family will Love and You and your Auto-Harp. Harry is present; disinterested and perusing the spot-the-ball contest for a football match between Brechin and Raith Rovers.
The Lost Texts From the Alexandrian Library
Two scrolls reveal something long thought lost, the work of Phrynicus, the influential Greek tragedian of whom ‘almost nothing survives except reports of his greatness.’ Sadly his work does not stand up ‘with no flourish of trumpets/ but a strangled toot, forlorn and wanky.’ Other legendary works lose their mystique by being read;
‘reputations deflate, heroes dwindle till finally
with Helen revealed as a fifteen-stone Catamite,
the Epic of Gilgamesh edited down
to the original camping weekend.’
The Alexandrian Library Endures
So with one bound Jack was free. He awakens from his dream next to his lover having forgotten the book he brought back in his dream. It is still with him though.
There can be no forgetting; even after the fire
the archives are always somewhere intact –
in the world, or that part of the mind that the mind
cannot contemplate.
The Alexandrian Library may have been destroyed, but the ideals it represents endure though creativity. Writers are part of something greater than themselves, a continuing process of trying to make sense of the world.
tomorrow the words will draw your pen through them
until you have traced the whole terrible story
and think it your own.
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