Fancy may be supplied; but Truth once lost in the annals of mankind leaves a chasm never to be filled.– Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature (1791) [1]
Perhaps the important thing to remember about the stories of Scheherazade - otherwise known as The Tales of the 1001 Nights - is that they haven't come down to us as they were told, but rather as they were written down long after the fact.
After King Shahryar deigned to pardon her, mainly because of the ‘three boy children, one walking, one crawling and one sucking’ she'd borne him during her long ordeal of storytelling, the Queen was forced to revisit the entire set of tales she'd told him during this three-year stint, in order to re-dictate them to the palace scribes:
In due time King Shahryar summoned chroniclers and copyists and bade them write all that had betided him with his wife, first and last; so they wrote this and named it ‘The Stories of the Thousand Nights and A Night.’ The book came to thirty volumes and these the King laid up in his treasury. [3]How precisely she managed this feat is not discussed. Perhaps she brought in an annotated selection from the ‘thousand books of histories relating to antique races and departed rulers’ she had collected while preparing her astonishing act of deliverance. As she described it to her father, the King's Wazir:
... either I shall live or I shall be a ransom for the virgin daughters of Moslems and the cause of their deliverance from his hands and thine. [4]There's no real way of knowing, then, just how closely these thirty volumes of stories actually resemble the ones whispered by the Queen to her husband (and sister) as they lay together in the dark. Certainly Scheherazade can't have had her reference library to hand at that point, so her incomparable memory was really all that stood between her and immediate death.
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When I first laid eyes on the handwritten book of minutes kept by the Titirangi Branch of the (so-called) ‘Society of Spiritual Cartographers,’ I have to say that I was not unduly impressed. Precisely who found it – and when – has been difficult to ascertain. All I know is the story I was first told: that it was discovered in a box full of oddments discarded from the old Treasure House which forms part of the modern Lopdell Complex.
The Treasure House itself was built in 1926 as a home for the extensive collection of Kauri gum and other native artefacts owned by Frank Oscar Peat. When the Titirangi Hotel opened a few years later, in 1930, the Treasure House was listed as one of the ‘surrounding attractions in the area’. [5]The Kauri gum collection was dispersed later in the 1930s, but the Treasure House continued to be used as a museum, storage space for the Art Gallery, and even a community centre – until, that is, the reconstruction of the entire area was undertaken in the early 2000s.
How and when the Society of Spiritual Cartographers began to use it as a venue for their meetings, I cannot say. My own involvement began when I was asked to advise on the value of this single odd volume of shorthand notes which had somehow escaped the fate of its (presumably) many companions.
Fortunately I took shorthand typing at school, and so was able to fathom the nature of its contents without too much difficulty. Not for me the fate of that nineteenth century scholar who transcribed the entire contents of Samuel Pepys's famous diary without ever realising that the key to the shorthand he used to record his thoughts was resting a few volumes over in Pepys’s own painstakingly catalogued library at Cambridge!
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Talking against death. How else can one characterise the storyteller's task? It's seldom quite so direct an equation as in Scheherazade's case, but perhaps the nature of her plight has struck such a chord down the centuries simply because it is only our stories – or, rather, the record of our stories – which is likely to survive us.
How does Baudelaire put it?
Les minutes, mortel folâtre, sont des ganguesCan the same be claimed for this fragmentary record of the meetings of a club for amateur storytellers? Why was it thought necessary to take it all down, in the first place? Surely the members must have read out their pieces rather than improvising them on the spot? Could not those prompt-sheets been pasted in here instead?
Qu’il ne faut pas lâcher sans en extraire l’or ! [6]
[‘Minute by minute we creep towards death
The treasure of each is more precious than breath’]
Certainly there are documents and snapshots included on some of the pages. In the absence of the earlier volumes, where presumably all such matters were dealt with and the by-laws and conventions of the society spelt out in detail, one can only make conjectures from the evidence before us.
Perhaps it was their rule that – as in Scheherazade's case – the stories each of them shared had to be spoken rather than read? Perhaps the Society's officers needed their own dedicated copy of the proceedings of each meeting to deal with follow-up queries? It seems unlikely that these scribbled pages were actually meant for circulation, but certainly some of the transcripts are far fuller than others. Perhaps some members were more conscious than others of their debt to posterity?
In any case, whatever the reasons for its existence, we are left with a series of fragmentary tales: some complete, some anything but. There are many reasons to associate this society (at however many degrees of separation) with the Spiritualist movement itself. One is its name; another is because the common subject of most of these stories is death – or, if not death proper, a variety of conjectures about the Afterlife.
Nor is it clear if the majority of them were meant as fictions or transcripts of experience. The fact that they all share first-person narration, and are presented as actual events, cannot really be regarded as evidence one way or the other.
One interesting point, revealed to me by an informant who used to work at the Lopdell House Art Gallery (now Te Uru Waitakere Contemporary Gallery), is that the Treasure House itself – while a heritage building, and therefore immune from tampering or demolition – is sited on top of an underground stream. The water flows just a few feet down under the floor.
This makes it unsuitable for anything but occasional use, as the atmosphere inside is too damp for occupation or permanent storage. This may explain why the ledger itself was thrown out in one of the periodic Spring cleans necessary to maintain the building's health.
It may, however, also explain why it was used as a venue for these meetings in the first place. It's well known that running water is regarded as a convenient conduit for spiritual activity. Haunted houses tend to be located in close proximity to aquifers, and the junction of underground streams is generally one of the first things looked for by psychic investigators.
In any case, be that as it may, the Treasure House remains an immensely atmospheric relic from the mysterious past of West Auckland – a time when artists, bohemians, and counter-culture enthusiasts gravitated to its bush-clad valleys because they were: (1) off the beaten track, and (2) comparatively cheap.
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My job as the editor of these materials has proved less straightforward than initially expected. To start with, I was faced with the dilemma of just how to present them. My first thought was a facsimile edition with transcripts printed beside each page of the original: a solution rejected (finally) mainly for reasons of cost.
As an alternative to that, I decided to make a painstaking record of the notes of each meeting more or less as they stood: including false starts, marginal comments, and other paratextual details. The unreadable nature of the result did not, however, seem to justify such an expense of time and effort.
In the end, I decided that the only practical way to proceed was to extract only those two narratives which could be regarded as reasonably complete for separate presentation. While unrepresentative of the character of the papers themselves, this approach does have the merit of being more convenient for readers.
Given the incomplete nature of some of the sections, I have nevertheless had to record, at times, certain details of their original appearance at the end. I've tried to confine my remarks to factual information, however, rather than providing any more editorial commentary than is absolutely necessary for comprehension.
Without more knowledge of each of the members of this society, identified, as they were, simply by initials, it's hard to guess the larger aims of their meetings. Was there an element of channelling here? Were some of the transcripts made directly from voices emanating from the Other Side?
It's hard to be sure. It may have been a more conventional writer's group than that, though the decision to take down the proceedings verbatim would seem unusual for such an informal, everyday gathering.
Another theory which has been gathering traction recently is that this volume was intended as the minutes of a Dream Laboratory, a record of the dreams (lucid or otherwise) of each of the participants.
I'm left in the unsatisfactory position of having to admit that your guess is as good as mine. If we had some of the other books of minutes which must once have existed no doubt we would know more. Were there other branches of the Society of Spiritual Cartographers? Was it an international or a purely home-grown organisation? As yet I've had no luck in resolving any of these queries.
I do feel, though, that some parts of the stories collected here are sufficiently intriguing to justify putting them on record – if only in the hopes that this may inspire someone to come forward with some other surviving relics of this strange, apparently secret society, based in the dank wooded hills of darkest West Auckland.
- Michael Shield, Matariki weekend, 24-26th June 2022
Notes:
[1] Isaac D’Israeli, ‘Some Notices of Lost Works’. Curiosities of Literature. 1791-3. Rev. ed. 1823 (London: George Routledge & Co., n.d.), 22.
[2] Ref 4-4084, Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Library. [Available at Lisa Truttman, ‘The Titirangi Treasure House’. Timespanner: A Journey through Avondale, Auckland and New Zealand History (July 28, 2013): https://timespanner.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-titirangi-treasure-house.html].
[3] Richard F. Burton, trans., The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments. 10 vols (London: The Kamashastra Society, 1886): 10: 61. [http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/Vol_10/vol10.htm].
[4] Burton, Arabian Nights: 1: 15.
[5] Truttman, ‘The Titirangi Treasure House’ (2013).
[6] Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘L'horloge.’ Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). [https://www.poetica.fr/poeme-684/charles-baudelaire-horloge/].
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