Letter to a Man Holding Two Books

(with appropriate excursions into pataphysics)

By Chris Saffran

Father,

For your birthday I wanted to get you a novel by David Downing—an espionage writer I think you’d like—but I was having a hard time finding his first book, and his work’s best read sequentially. You can certainly pick up any of his books and enjoy it as a stand-alone, but it would give away too much from the previous works to sustain the viability of ever going back and reading them, which you would be inclined to do in proportion to how much you liked the book. And so I did not get you a Downing book for fear you’d really enjoy it. This runs contrary to my usual gift-giving modus operandi, but the circumstances demanded creativity. So I thought I’d try my hand a buying you some nonfiction, and the results of my labors are the two accompanying volumes. To hedge against the possibility I’ve chosen badly, I have decided to document my methods of selection, and in so doing, give a kind of substance to the “thought” which, as in the case of all ill-chosen presents, is what “counts.” If my thought is not well formed, let it at least be well counted.

Permit me to preface this by saying I don’t necessarily expect you to read either book cover to cover. You’re perfectly welcome to read them in complete non-contiguity, non-sequentiality, even non-entirely if that pleases you. As a matter of fact, before purchasing them I checked to ensure both possessed indices so as to facilitate the practice of strategic episodical reading should you wish to approach them thus. Indeed, some pataphysicists might recommend you try reading them backward and covered in honey, though for my part, I don’t know that I could ever endorse these tactics with any real enthusiasm. Still, you obviously have options.

Speaking of pataphysics, the reason I first picked up Uncertainty in Games while searching for a book to get you was that it looked reasonably short and its spine was a sort of committed red, while the books for a yard on either side were draped in muted browns, creams, and grays. It therefore both met a vital criterion and was somewhat noticeable, so off the shelf it came. To be perfectly honest, Uncertainty in Games cannot, even by the most liberally accommodating definition, be declared a true (or even pseudo-) pataphysical text. But at the time, it never occurred to me to hold the lack of a relation to pataphysical dogma against it (and when it did some minutes later, I discounted the notion as arbitrarily extreme), so it was with a clear sense of purpose that I opened the thing and inspected its contents. It elicited from me a sort of involuntary shrug, as does much of the literature that interests you, and so I bought the book.

One of the first things I noticed about the other book was a slight feel…some subtle sense…a willowy, gossamery hint of pataphysicality about it. Like an aura, but nothing so concrete as an aura. Rather, like the negative imprint of where an aura used to be, and where one would normally expect to find an aura, but the environs are so quiet no one is willing to comment on its absence. Like when you’re on the bus and it’s very hot and crowded and you realize a brace of scarab beetles have somehow gotten into your underpants and you’re tempted to kind of cry out but at the same time you feel awkward about calling the attention of a group of strangers to the goings on inside your pants, and so you’re conflicted, but then the scarabs start moving toward your testicles because of their proximity to a Stanford marshmallow you’d pocketed earlier, and so you finally decide to bring the matter up with your fellow passengers by announcing, “The scarabs in my pants are after my candy, and my testicles are in peril!” but you realize that having already wasted much time in indecision a certain economy of language is called for, so you assemble the salient points into the more appropriately concise, “Help! Testicle scarabs!” but just as you hitch in a deep breath to give the plea your voice you stop yourself, having identified that the placement of the word help at the beginning of your appeal (intended to efficiently elucidate the motive behind your suddenly raising the subject of testicle scarabs and so expedite any forthcoming aid while preventing the impression you’re some kind of insect zealot from taking root) might, to some people’s ears, sound like you’re attempting to enlist help in support of the scarabs’ mission, which is quite literally the opposite of the point you’re trying to convey and liable to induce at best a confused, and at worst an entirely counterproductive response, so you consider moving help to the end of your message, but quickly see that “Testicle scarabs! Help!” without a sufficient post-scarabs! pause, the duration of which you aren’t presently convinced you have the patience to pull off, could be misinterpreted as a sort of slogan promoting the interests of such oft maligned fauna and so produce the undesirable effect of convincing your would-be rescuers that people in general ought to feel better about ball-besieging-beetles, and you recognize with admirable clarity that efforts to engage their help in extracting the invaders from your pants after such a pronouncement, uttered publicly and with passion, might come off as grossly hypocritical, so you decide to toss out help altogether, damning it as surprisingly ambiguous, then have the brilliant idea of simply pulling down your pants and saying “AAAAAAAAH!!” as clearly as possible and at volume so that everyone can see exactly what the situation is and be simultaneously alerted to how you feel about it, when someone else shouts “My fucking head is on fire!” with an air of conviction you find not a little irritating, and so you open neither your mouth nor your pants, but instead ring the indicator to get off at the next stop. Because there’s obviously little to be gained by pulling down one’s pants on a public bus and screaming while another passenger on the same bus is complaining about his head being on fire. First of all, people might, quite naturally though nevertheless as a product of flawed reasoning (Post hoc ergo proptor hoc, etc.), arrive at the conclusion that your action was in response to hearing that someone’s head was on fire. Thus mislead, they would almost certainly think you bizarre, wildly eccentric, even dangerous—and in any case not be in the right mindset to be useful to you. Second of all, magnified though your own crisis might be in your attentions, it isn’t entirely lost on you that you’d look a bit peevish complaining about pant bugs when there’s a man not fifteen feet away whose head is on fire. Even if it were to turn out that, for all his brazen confidence, the fellow’s head isn’t actually on fire, the chances of those around you rallying to your cause would still be zero: trapped between two shrieking lunatics—one going on about a nonexistent cranial conflagration, the other with his pants around his ankles—the bus’s inmates would be, if nothing else, vexed. And so I bought the book. 

Further examination of Pataphysics: A Useless Guide revealed it does indeed have something of a pataphysical bent, so my instinct in this regard was vindicated. On the off chance you are unacquainted with pataphysics, it was described by playwright, goatee aficionado, and Frenchman, Alfred Jarry, as "the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments,” sometime between the discipline’s origin and Jarry’s death. Members of the Collège de Pataphysique, founded in Paris (after Jarry’s death, but before I looked this up), describe themselves as a "society committed to learned and inutilious research.” The word inutilious, does not appear to be recognized by any language, at least not openly, and cannot be found in any dictionary printed in French or English—my investigation on this point was exhaustive. That said, the pataphysicists at the college insist inutilious is a common word analogous to “useless.” Or at least they did. If the society still exists today, it is as elusive as an inutilious-defining lexicon. Suffice it to say, however, that if the Collège de Pataphysique went the way of the Edsel, it must have done so between the time of its inception, and your reading the period¹ at the end of this sentence

Happy birthday. If these gifts engender approval, you may count me well satisfied. Elsewise, you may count the well-intentioned thoughts I have herein preserved.

Your adoring son,

Chris