Relegated

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Sibylla Klein’s contributions to the subject of distance have left her the target of intense scrutiny. The fluctuations in her stances over time and geography have made it difficult to imagine how the scholar herself might be labelled, both woman and theory. Some studies suggest that her influence on the work of later scholars Daniel Tevahine and Efua Jonas – who occupy vastly different niches of thought – circumscribe any typification of the scholar and thus epitomize what may be considered ‘Kleinesque’, as much as that can be achieved given her resistance to categorization.¹

The biological proximity of this paper’s author to the late Sibylla Klein should be addressed. It is believed that Klein is, in fact, the author’s mother, and this is the largest bone of contention in Klein’s not uncontroversial career: in her lifetime, Klein claimed to be the mother of more than 370 children (90 of whom are known to be still alive, not including further descendants and scores of children born after the date at which she declared this figure) and for Klein herself to have reached the age of 562. It is thus in the personal as well as professional interests of the author (currently serving as Provost at Bermuda College, Bermuda) to attempt to uncover Klein’s extraordinary life, which has until now been left an undesirable addendum to her academic theories.

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¹ Antoinette, L. (1990) recognizes iterations of Klein’s work in multiple, unconnected studies, where Klein’s own name has not been credited.

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Many students of the Kleinesque are keen to dismiss the academic’s contentious histories of herself, believing these a blip in her otherwise strong scholarship. But the author of this paper contends that Klein’s open association with her own past, present and future puts her at ease with her more curious and perhaps even original perspective(s) on distance and history.

A private archive of Sibylla Klein exists in Krakow, Poland, a place to which Klein never travelled yet expressed affinity towards, and it is safeguarded by one of her attested children, who wishes to be named on these pages by his stage name, Jeremy Barr.² Accessing the archive is tricky, for it requires proof of familial association with Klein. The registration form is cumbersome, the waiting list extensive. Neither is there a specific location of the archive nor an address pointing to it, and the author has been requested to leave all geographic precision out of this paper. Discovery of this archive happened only by chance, while the author holidayed with her partner in the city of Krakow in the summer of 2026.^{3 4} The Klein archive, also unusually, does not allow visitors to make either scans or photographs while inside the building, nor are any materials allowed outside its grounds, and so this study must acknowledge the possibility of mistakes that entered into the accompanying transcriptions during the author’s thirty-day sojourn there.

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² At the time of writing, the archive has been closed until further notice.^‍

³ For Klein’s concern with the limits of chance and how such limits bleed into destiny appears across her work, see among others Anon. (1586) La Mort de la Chance (attributed to Sibylla Klein); Klein, Symon. (1847) Spectres of the Hereafter; Klein, S. H. (1928) No Coincidence; and Klein, S. (1999) “Waiting and its Aftermath” in Time and Tempo.^‍

⁴ The archive is actually an inconsequential extension of Jeremy Barr’s home. Despite his severe restrictions on the researchers who travel there, Barr gives his family, including his five-year-old grandchild, free reign of the materials contained therein. Due to secrecy and lack of funding, the author found the archive in a sorry condition, manuscripts dog-eared and coffee-stained, some sections pulled out entirely, others with shopping lists and personal resolutions scribbled on the back. Barr has compiled an index of the archive, though his indiscriminate handling of the materialsand his lack of training in librarianship have assisted little but the archive’s appalling state.

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A conference was organized on the twelfth evening of this author’s visit, when independent scholars were invited to present their own papers simultaneously and (again, unusually) at different corners of the archives, facing in, with the ambition to add weight to Klein’s ideas of scholarship and space.⁵ Each of the scholars’ papers had been heavily edited by the archivist before the day of the conference. Due to the nature of admittance to the archives, this was in effect less an academic conference than a fittingly uncomfortable family reunion, and so many of these “scholars” were in actuality descendants of a thinker whom some venerated and others sought to undermine.⁶ What these scholar-children may have lacked in formal intellectualism they made up for in vigor, and the evening glittered with imaginative excursions by Chausiku Feye, a Kenyan folklorist who recited from heart her paper “Sibylla and the First Nine Daughters of Gikuyu and Mumbi”, Thai statistician Lamai Sukpraserit with the mind-blowing “Quantum Separation Between the Matrilineal Lines of Sibylla Klein”, and Raghav Patil with his sociological treatise “Nothing Is as It Will Be: Tracing Kleinesque Behavior in the Inner City”. On any given day, visitors are usually restricted to a total of seven in the central section of the archives, three in the northwest corner where there are two desks and three chairs,⁷ and one visitor only in the glass room at the top of the winding staircase towards the back of the central room. On this evening occasion to celebrate Sibylla Klein’s work, the archivist known as Jeremy Barr made an exception and allowed in more than the allotted number of people, as long as they could prove some genealogical line to the scholar.

The archives contain documents that span five centuries, and Klein is assumed to have written them all.⁸ Unfortunately, the author of this paper is unable to accurately read handwriting pre-dating the seventeenth century, and so a swathe of early manuscripts had to be discounted in her investigations, leaving the question of Klein’s origins open. Of the notes that remain, roughly 70 per cent are written in English, or a form thereof, though Klein’s handwriting – even in later centuries – can prove a trial for even the most painstaking scholar. The burden falls on the author to affirm that the documents in this archive do appear to be the work of a single person.
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⁵ With permission, the author has made character sketches of these scholars, so that what must be left off the pages in terms of the architecture of the building itself can be notionally disclosed in the composition of each familial attendee.

⁶ As for many children, and children’s children, and so on, the impressions left by the mother are the hardest felt.

⁷ In the event that two scholars prefer not to share space, the corner’s boarded-over windowsill can also be used as adesk.

⁸ The appearance of the manuscript papers and ink look authentic to their periods, though considering the number of bogus creations of Kleinesque work in recent years, a professional conservator should be employed to affirm theirauthenticity. Preferential treatment should be given to conservators without bias against or toward the quinque-centenarian, if it is possible to find such an individual among Sibylla Klein’s multitudinous progeny.

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Considering her centuries-spanning works, Klein’s consistent focus on distance in her writing is nothing short of astounding. Her individual concerns and theories, however, bear little relation to each other. There, Klein is inconsistent, perhaps consistently so. Her academic work on this subject can be divided into five distinct periods: Limitations in mapmaking (1640—1703), dichotomies between belief and reason (1704—1798), scandalous proximities (1799—1870), familial misunderstandings (1871—1950), and artificially prolonged existence (1951—2019).

Despite her implausible age,⁸ Klein sought a method of existence that depended on the popular media of each period, confounding the boundaries between scholar and reader andminimizing the distance between them through idiosyncrasies of format. Klein attempted this in the nineteenth century through poetry and later, in the twentieth century, through photography and film.⁹‍
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⁸ The generally accepted year of her death is 2020, though many consider this year as itself premonitory and steeped in cabbalistic prophecy. A small but growing number of believers in Kleintheorie (the largest component of which is based in Franconia) eagerly await her return in the flesh.

⁹ The author should mention that Klein’s diligence in this matter was significantly impeded by the slow progression of technology^.10

¹⁰ When you reach the age of 562, you’ll understand.

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If it were possible, and this author has no reason to believe such could ever be the case, Klein’s obsession with distance and its relation to existence is based in the fact that she had time to consider how to prolong her life beyond her already extraordinary years. It must be acknowledged that this article has been written precisely in the wish to close the distance between author and subject, and in the process of writing this author became greatly concerned with the prospect of achieving the opposite of Klein’s success—in foreshortening life through closing figurative distance.¹⁰‍

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¹⁰ That is, between the daughter and her mother.

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Where might lie the clues for this being a possibility? As the author left the Klein archives on the twelfth day, after the international family gathering, Barr granted access to a milk-white bottle containing rolled sheets of ‘stories’, explaining they were Klein’s ‘finger exercises’ composed at various points in her life but bound together in death. After some pause, Barr then confessed that he knew at least one of these stories to be untrue.¹¹ The author questioned why it should ever be necessary to examine truth in stories, which are rarely parsed for their veracity but for their impact on the reader. She recommended that, if there are truths and untruths, Barr consider exchanging the label of ‘story’ for ‘account’,¹² to which he acceded.

Concerning the contents of this bottle, Klein believed in both repetition and inconsistency. At times these notions were divinely inspired, at others they were due to gravitational pull, then later they were conceived through other means of matter (both dark and grey). To prove her theories, Klein travelled widely, from the earliest date on record (the Kingdom of Navarre in 1564) to the latest (Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2016). In each location, Klein discovered and discarded a bottle that she described as ‘milky of hue and misshapen with a thin, brittle neck and uneven opening, with the maker’s mark of a bleating goat’, keeping only the story within.¹⁶‍

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¹¹ The author has narrowed her search for this/these untruthful story/stories¹² to ‘The Unclaimed Story’,¹³ ‘The Story of Uncertainty’¹⁴ and ‘The Story of No Gospels’.¹⁵

¹² Or accounts. See above.^‍

¹³ “He spoke and yet his mouth never moved from its malignant grin, his many eyes both rolled and remained fixed. In his cap he stuck a single black feather, plucked from his armpit, and began to write. I had purposely troubled him with my dark arts, inquired him to imbue his might within me—and now, he had come.”^‍

¹⁴ “In that white-scrubbed room a whisper reached them: What they waited for wasn’t another round of quarantine, as everyone expected, but a test. A single question would be asked of them: ‘Are you a good person?’”

¹⁵ “I wish to inform you, Sir, of an untapped water supply in my home country. All you, Sir, are required to do is give me your details and I will ship the water to you. Our governments, Sir, won’t suspect a thing.”

¹⁶ Krakow, The Sibylla Klein Archives, MS 3013, fols. 40v–41r.

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Repetition, Klein believed, closed distance. Repetition forged friends from strangers. Inconsistency exposed the snags in time and allowed travelers to recreate distance based on the strengths of their imagination. Klein believed that, by breaking down the composition of a subject, she would see patterns of existence.¹⁷‍

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¹⁷ I wanted to see angels dance on the head of a pin. I wanted the atom shown to me through the lens of a microscope. I wanted to split distance into their smallest possible units. Repetition, bearing the milk-white bottle with its caprine seal to her.¹⁸‍

¹⁸ I wanted to watch angels dance on the head of a pin. I wanted the atom shown to me through the lens of a microscope. I wanted to split distance into their smallest possible units.

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This paper’s author was unable to secure the funding for a project that would allow her to visit the above-mentioned locations. Thus, the documentation made by her mother¹⁹ had to suffice in lieu of visiting these places herself. Without the use of a scanner, this work proved insurmountable, and the author discovered that the only path she could find through the material and towards Sibylla Klein lay in copying down her work herself. In the action of writing, she surmised that her pen could stretch and contract the time and intellectual distance between author and transcriber, just as her use of the third person in this paper stretches and contracts the narrative of the author’s own existence.

Unfortunately, after another sixteen days of work, the author’s time in Krakow came to an end, and the archive is no longer open to her, nor indeed to any other scholar hoping to gain a deeper understanding of Klein’s theories due to Barr’s misanthropic behavior (just like his mother). Nevertheless, the author believes that a work that cannot be replicated is precisely where Klein’s narrative continues to thrive. The beginnings of a work that can only hint at a complete picture of the now-closed archive to an academic’s extraordinary life would thus allow Klein not merely to retain her voice but for her to live in it, springing from the work at a time of her choosing.

Nevertheless, without the comforting structure and veracity of the archive, many erroneous accounts will aim to close the gap between Klein scholarship and the mystery of Klein the woman. In conclusion, this author can only believe that she has chosen to be²⁰‍

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¹⁹ It has recently been speculated that, while Klein passed through the ages, she also changed her sex, opening yet another vein of literature from the eighteenth century and earlier, where living as a man would have afforded her more visibility in the worlds of art and culture.^‍

²⁰ in a spot underground, a saint’s ghastly bones, or a troll under a bridge, or a dragon in its cave – stolen away but listening to the people who pass overhead, unbelieving.

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relegated²¹‍

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²¹ after all that time, 562 years and too many children to count but enough to make a reasonable guesstimate.

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to²²‍

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²² a macabre daughter, who likes to pick at scabs.

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a^23
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²³ footnote.

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