[{{Ministry of Obscure Knowledge}}]

The Ministry is honored to publish Mr. Johan B.’s excellent introduction to his will and testament, which his family has entrusted with one of our members for the exclusive purpose of bringing this manuscript into the light. As the editor of this site, it is truly a pleasure for me to reveal this man’s brilliant words which are sure to intrigue as well as mystify all who enter through one of the doors of Johan’s collection. As you read, realize that you are tapping into the very corridors of a person whom we consider the most complete man in existence. There is no death where he is kept, only the abundance of a will which will remain preserved in the purest mathematics. Please, reverentially enjoy the following excerpts from his introduction.

Thank you,

Bishop

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My name is Johan and I am a collector of Johan. Johan inhabits in jars up in shelves which I have labeled by month in a closet which I have only allowed to expand at a rate of approximately 5 feet per year. I have filled up a sum of 45 closets throughout the 64 years of my obsession. Please, inquire about the combination of the closet number 44, since I have reserved a special set therein, which I rather not expose until after my death, which I have calculated to be in exactly 10 months, 4 days, and 23 hours. For sake of comedy, I will also add that 10 seconds will pass before I will completely lose my life-consciousness and during those 10 seconds I intend on verbally expressing to whom my priceless collection will belong. Know this in type, I will divide the closets in tens. One tenth to my daughter; the other tenth to my servant, Geoffrey, who has served me faithfully and without grievance; another to my ex-wife (except for the closet numbered 44); one to my secret mistress, The Lady of the Worm (whom will reveal herself at the funeral by saying a special phrase); and finally, another to the Modern Natural Museum which will also be receiving my body.

Geoffrey, who is scribing this, something a tad less informal than my will and testament, is sworn to keep this document in secrecy until I gratefully pass away into the great darkness. I, who am of sane judgment so far, intend on relating the history and folklore of my collection for the first time. In this very room, aching by the burns of burgundy on wood, I have locked myself for the past year in hopes of analyzing the files of my collection in order to find an answer to my sickness. I, who am hung heavily by a fever, have been previously hesitant to look at my files, truly not because of a lack of interest, but because of laziness; laziness which has now become an impending noose around my neck as I am approaching the very last of my days.

A fever, I can hear you criticize; a fever is nothing but the agitation of cells, barely a sign of doom. Nonetheless, I am here to correct your notions of Johan, and I reassure you that I have never had a fever that I could remember. As a matter of fact, I have never had an illness which I can remember, unless you consider the nausea of a failed romance and jealousy anything close to a sickness. This may lure your appreciation of my desperation, since it is not everyday that a man with the immune system of Christ can be compelled by any old common virus to be still on the sheets of a death bed. But, this is what the doctors have confirmed, or rather, to be honest before Geoffrey, what he (Geoffrey) has confirmed to be the cause of my fever: a gentle and normally meek common cold. Beyond the normative cough suppressants, lemon water, and aspirin that I have consumed, this cold has lasted me nearly a year, a year of constant aching and resting, a year of constantly being blessed (bless you!) and to no avail.

To sum up the conditions: I, Johan, who am speaking to Geoffrey confess that he has not harmed me in any fashion, since it was my sole decision to avoid doctors (since they always seem to take more than they can give) and to continue in this year long sickness until the day I die, which has been calculated and mentioned previously.

***

So it is within this quietness that I have kept my secret obsession. Do not ask me whether it is out of fear or protection or what have you, since it has come as a second nature to me and so I am unable to truly think it in blatantly psychological terms. To me, it is as if being asked why you breathe. It is a constant desire, an impulse which, if stopped, would be as illogical as when it first started (not that breathing is illogical, but the impulse of it is not controlled by our conscious mind). My mother began it, I have continued it, and through this assembly, it is difficult to relate to death, although it is breathing on my neck so heavily. I shall explain my processes (which I might have been subconsciously avoiding thus far) and perhaps you shall understand.

Since I was a boy, I was consumed by a fascination of my body, not unlike that which comes with puberty, but without the shame. I began by memorizing the number of my teeth: 20. It became a mesmerizing habit of mine to tongue my teeth over and over again, lest one of them should disappear when I was off guard. 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. A security blanket whenever I felt afraid at night, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. Whenever my mother would scold me, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. So that the day I lost my first tooth around the age of 5, was traumatizing, not to mention the fact that something called a “tooth-fairy” was to come and steal it away at night when I was not aware. On the night of the fairy, I grasped the tooth tightly between my toes and wore heavy winter socks, blue. Although my feet sweat profusely that summer evening, the tooth thief failed to snatch it and left me a coin out of duty. I was rewarded by my cleverness and so, I began to hoard my teeth in a little tin can until all twenty of them were collected.

Teeth were not my only fixation, since little afterwards, I took to noticing my toe and finger nails, how they grew and snapped off and were cut and lost into nothing. This upset me greatly as well, and so, after my mother would clip away at them, I would rummage the small trash bucket and find all 10, if I could, and I got progressively better at it. In other tins, they went, and my puerile fantasy of self preservation began achieving monumental scales. When my mother died, I was barely 12 years old. My father, who was a business man and a drunk, would leave me at the care of many servants, which I was told, had their tongues cut off for the sake of their profession. The thought of removing such a large body part terrorized me, and so the servants became a sort of monstrous terror in my childhood fantasy; incomplete zombies that were maniacally attempting to steal my own tongue away. For this reason, I would never speak around or to them, lest they had a good look at my fresh tongue.

The tongue crisis intensified through nightmares of perilous circumstances in absence of a tongue, leaving me gasping to produce words, rendering me unable to articulate the extent of my pain. In other dreams, I would produce an incessant yell that was unable to be silenced, smoothed, or verbalized by the taming tongue. Moreover, the irrational fear of losing my teeth or being dispossessed from my finger and toe nails was attempted to be rationalized in my dream world. Oh, I would wake up drenched in sweat on such nights! Dreams of nails and teeth just falling out like dry leaves, leaving my body and spinning forth into a vast world. Every item lost would age me, every time, bringing me closer to my death, which was merely my awakening from sleep. This cycle left me at a constant correlation with my waking life and my afterlife, which was of no use in taming any of my childhood tremors.

***

I have collected many other obvious things. Most of my hair and bodily fluids were also preserved. There are a few that some might feel macabre to keep, but I assure you that if any unclean excretion from my body is kept, it is because it is of some importance. For instance, a dinner with a special lady, a perfect recipe, a gift of chocolate, these are the things which are cherished and therefore stored. Anything else is really just disposed of, since the processes of excretion are not truly products of innate properties, but of external things which we process within. I am not particularly attached to these and I am positive that the reader or listener of this is very glad to hear that.

But enough of these things which I am positive many will find the least bit pleasant. It is not only the content which I am attracted to (which will dissuade any who think that I have some sort of pathology involving morbid objects); it is the amount, the length, the width, the cheer magnitude of my collection. Every door opened is another age, another world with several closets inside which keep other tiny worlds filled with history, science, poetry, memory. Every little underestimated detail of ourselves which we so blatantly toss, every unknown curvature of a nail, every broken strand, every liquid form amounting to an organism far greater than the body itself. It is a separate entity of the same; an abstract form of the person; an extension of self. If not for these glass jars, a large dimension of me would be floating around in the universe, recycled, undistinguishable, unknowable. If out of some sort of piousness of self, of reverence to the I, I have separated myself from the rest of the world, this is not out of any sort of disgust towards my fellow man, since I assure you that although I have been apparently in solitude since the leave of my wife, I have had a sure companion…whose youth I have had the pleasure of stirring even with these wrinkled hands.

“Master Johan has now taken a brief moment of silence. He gradually retreated to his room of reflection, where I am not allowed to enter in for today. If I may add but an impertinent remark, Master Johan has been a man of truly amazing mannerisms. His behavior is not strange, but I think that I have somehow become very affectionate towards it. To be honest, I don’t think that I would know any other fascination in this life but the wonderful collection of Johan’s parts. I hope that this somehow serves at a document for the future, since I have personally seen the “closets” as they are assembled and I don’t think that the world will really be able to understand how large the collection is. I have never told another person, but sometimes it helps me to remember how great when I compare it to a beach, and each beach is a collection of millions of little grains. The doors to these closets are actually continents and inside there are collections of all the beaches that exist everywhere in the world. Only Master Johan’s collection feels far greater than that…”

I would definitely be underestimating her by the briefness of this document, but to exclude her is an offense…

***

The Lady of the Worm spun silk so precious. I should refrain, but I am thus incapable because my heart has begun to swell, and such a sensation is only tamed through the loosening of the tongue. After a period of coy courtship, I had already introduced her to the immensity of my collection. Like a child, she absorbed, giggled, questions, commented, astonished at my pointing finger. And as it goes, fading acquaintances transform into implications, interpretations that amount to slight caresses of the arm, an increase in heart beat rates, and profuse sweating. It is not polite for a man to divulge what happens with a woman behind closed doors…and I have shut that door closed, the door to room 44.

***

I began to collect her parts a little after a month. Her golden hair that wrapped on her brush, her nail clippings, and occasionally a sanitary napkin, I gathered. I did it without her knowing at first, since I was afraid to scare her young thoughts, but I am positive that she suspected from the very beginning that I had started a collection of her, neglecting, I will admit, yes, neglecting my previous collection of Johan. I understand the implications of such an act and I find it comedic. In that, the secret room, I began to place her in jars.

I am. I am. I am quite exposed at the moment. If. If. If I were to say what that means to me. Rather, if I were able to say what that means to me…well, if you, the reader or listener, are able to see her collection, notice how the lighting is placed. How her hair shimmers like gold in fragile jars. Unlike my darker rooms, hers shines in amber…as my rooms grow progressively whiter, frailer. When we began making love, I began to collect other more intimate parts. The stray blonde pubic hair, curled golden wires…our fluids when matched in a concoction of love. I am…these tears which are stirred are of holy sorts. Geoffrey, who is kind, has provided me with a small jar. I don’t normally save my tears, no. I think that their very purpose is to be eternally removed from the body. They are thoughts that the mind cannot gather, exiled emotions, sicknesses of the brain. But these, these tears are not meant to leave me because they are tiny bodies of my love for The Lady of the Worm, the woman of the most precious silk known in this world.

***

…I understand that a distance widened between us when I first walked her into room 44. I pointed to her locks, our concoctions, her life blood and she was disgusted at the very finger that pointed at them. I could see it in her face, a sort of dimming compared to the well illuminated jars. She was not obvious about it, bless her. I cannot bring myself to ask for forgiveness, since I do not understand the charges or the sentence. Ask me to stop breathing. I laugh. When I die, she can have her room back.

When I die. The mastery of my calculations are not yet known to you and it is my intention to vaguely describe my processes. The true analysis is in the possession of Geoffrey who will provide it to the Museum after I pass. It is ideal to keep calculations of the rate of your shedding and the amount of it thereof. If anyone were to follow in my place, gather all, label all, and number all. It is not worth to collect if numbers are not grouped as well, since it is the numbers that concern us more than any abstract representation of them. I have measured the amount and the length of my nails, secretions, and hair throughout the years and I have noticed significant fluctuations. Today, my hair length is significantly shorter and falling out faster. My nails are also becoming more brittle, easily chapped, not as abundant. Every fluid in my body is becoming scarcer, so that there is a sort of drought within me which cannot be replenished. I understand what the effects of aging are, but I have concluded through my calculations (see my annotations) that I, a man who has never been sick before and is now sick, has been losing far greater than what is normal…has been losing in the rate of a dying man. And so, if measured along side my normal processes (which are tied to yearly progressions), my body is behaving abnormally and at strange speeds, which is to say that in one year, I am aging that which I might age in 10 years. 10 months, 4 days, and 23 hours. Those sacred 10 seconds I dedicate to the world so that the loved ones which I have listed, might listen to me addressing them for one final time by name, by my parts. Dramatic of me? I am sure. But when one passes away there is only room for insanity or drama and I choose the latter.

I worry that something is missing of this, my final correspondence to the world. If there was something far more transcendental in my life, I am positive that it would come to mind, but you have received the whole of my story. This brief memoir does not compare to jars filled to the brim, which you will soon be seeing for the first time. I believe that if we were able to truly recollect every small detail of our lives, every walk to the park, rather, every step that our body makes, or every muscle that contracts in our system, wouldn’t this curt experience we call life seem far longer? If that dead man there, in the casket, his head laying upon a silk pillow, was able to represent the whole of my years on this earth, how scrawny and pathetic, how pithy this existence must seem. But I am not a man in the casket, I am not a container of organs and a short list of accounts, I am 45 closets in 5 rooms. I am, perhaps, the most complete man that ever existed.

With this final thought, I retreat to my fever. If for an instance I have forgotten my illness, then I regard this letter as a sort of divine amulet. Secrets become stones. Long live room 44. God bless you, my daughter. I give the Modern Natural Museum permission to publish this along with all my calculations and notes. The lovely Lady of the Worm will be informed of what to say in order to reveal herself. I shall make it known to her through an anonymous letter this evening. If no one says this term at my funeral, then the room 44 shall never be opened, since I have not revealed the code to anyone else and if there is no claimant, then I shall give it to Geoffrey, who has promised me to destroy it at a secret time. When you see her, it will be obvious that she is the one, but to prove to you that she is, she will say in the gentlest voice upon the mourner’s podium: “Above all things, reverence yourself”*

This is my informal will and testament, with a retelling of a brief history of my collection. Geoffrey, my trusted servant and true friend, will reveal it at an appropriate time with all those mentioned herein present. It is not my intention for it to cause dissension, although truth always seems to be the barer of strife. Blame not me, blame truth.

Sincerely,
Johan B.
Collector.