City Story

This is another start to a story, like the one I posted a few weeks ago. Who knows, one day I may even carry on with it...

I have heard that there is an edge to the city, that if one travels far enough one will come to a fortified wall, greater than any known bastion, beyond which lies… what might be called empty space. Land without buildings. Bedrock the same as that through which the lower levels are burrowed, but covered with a layer of the same mold that is cultivated as a medium by olericulturists, which in its turn is populated by a vast crop of self-propagated plants. Such fantasies are surely wish-fulfillment, but who would not wish to see such a paradise, who could bear to deny its possibility once the idea had been presented to them? It is not dissimilar to that better known fantasy of the okeanopolis, inspired by the great marshaling basin of Salar, and perhaps has a similar origin, in a natural response to  great glasshouses like those at at Middlegate. The difference is that many believe that the okeanopolis is real, that there is a place where great wharves stand at the edge of a basin whose extent is too vast to encompass with the eye. I have even seen maps… 

In truth though, the city has an edge: it is where I live. All I must do to cast my eyes beyond it is to step through the window of my garrett onto the library roof, and look upwards. The boundary between roof and sky is too clearly delineated to deny, and one can easily suppose that there is also a lower boundary, although explorers have yet to fathom the deepest extent of the catacombs. It is in the lateral compass of the city that we must face the philosophical necessity of the infinite, and the axiomaticity of the proposition that the city in which we live is the universe, not a thing that is in it. Such a fallacy springs from the presence in our language of two words for essentially the same thing: but all the universe can be said to contain aside from the city, is the sky.

There are days when I could imagine that the library itself is the entirety of the cosmos. Although I am The Librarian, I have no assistants or apprentices. It was a wealthy and powerful family that collected the library, but although they still bear the title of Dynast, it is now little more than an honorific. It is as much as I can do to prevent the most important works from falling into decay, and my days spent conserving bindings, poisoning worm and cataloguing little used stacks are long enough that I often leave the library only during the hours of darkness. It is rare, and therefore welcome, for a visitor to the crumbling palace to require assistance in research: mostly they do not proceed beyond the well appointed reading room, which is kept presentable for the use of the family.

The Dynast Pel Horotin of Metateichan Parast is (or was) a moderately distant cousin of my employers, the Konefkin Dynasty, the owner of a small estate in the district of Parast that lies beyond the Peregrine Wall, separated from the refuse heaps and slums of the Scatapolis only by the River Óis. Like all metateichans he was prone to impetuous action, and ill founded, optimistic beliefs. He was however, a deeply intelligent, perceptive man, and a true scholar, notwithstanding that he was principally a man of action, and a feared duellist. In his company, and through collaboration with him, I have unlocked the meaning of much of the obscurest content of the Konefkin Library.

He first came to the library in a state of great agitation, bearing two ancient texts, small, hand copied codices that he had purchased from an archaeologist excavating deep catacombs to the far south. They were written in an admixture of ancient tongues, and promised to hold a clue to the proper reading of the Paleokiano language, which was known in many texts, but which had never been properly understood. Even its name was a description of its great age, and the fact that it was principally written in blue ink: no scholar had the first idea how it might be pronounced.

Dyn. Horotin, however (who to my great discomfort insisted I address him familiarly, as Pel) was no linguist, and, though interested, was not excited by the possibility of solving this ancient puzzle for its own sake.

The Paleokiano texts were the subject of much speculation by those who hoped to prove the reality of mythological sites: the okeanopolis mentioned above; the Citadel of Mikhtan, filled with its armoury of magical weapons; the great subterranean waterway of Kanna; and many others. His researches had led him to believe that our library’s Paleokiano texts might hold accounts of travels far beyond the regions that constitute the known world today, travels he himself wished to emulate. This was the source of his excitement: he believed he might find directions to ancient sites and treasures that would unlock the earliest history of the city’s peoples, and perhaps enable a scholarly account of the origins of the city itself. In short, he thought he had found a way to discover the identity of the putative First Builder.

This search was to prove the impetus to the transformation of the Konefkin library, to a great leap forward in the scholarship of ancient texts, and sadly, to the almost certain death of that brave, intelligent, foolhardy and misguided man.

A Great Crowd Assembled

A great crowd assembled, at the end of a road.

They gathered around the small, black, glossy, hard pellet of damage

that had extracted sticky filaments from each of them

and tangled them in a web of which it was the centre,

but to which it was not connected.

All of them stared at it,

that black hole spider,

accepting all their gazes, absorbing their attention

and reflecting nothing.

Some of them perhaps had never seen such a thing:

to most, it was unknowably familiar.

To many it was on the periphery of their vision,

just behind one shoulder, stalking them;

to many others it was invisible,

so that when they stared at it directly

they saw what they imagined was behind it:

but not on this day.

On this day it seated itself in dark splendour

unfurling its robes over the steps of its dais like a dowager empress.

On this day it held court

and all the people in that shuffling haggard crowd offered tribute.

I knew a man who went to Africa,

a man who had soul,

a man with two names, one in each of his native tongues.

He was a full man, rotund with humour,

corpulent with intelligence.

He was a music lover.

He is a minister in the court of that shadowed presence.

I knew a man who went to America

disguised as Fidel Castro,

who also had two names:

one for his family, and another for his thoughts,

which were songs about buildings, the coin of our speech.

He has been my shoe size.

He is a henchman of that glossy, matt horizon.

I knew a man who went to India

armed only with a flute.

He had a dog as tall as him,

and I ate powdered milk from beneath his sink,

consumed his bandes dessinées.

He set me in motion.

He sleeps at the feet of that oblivious master.

I knew a man who went to Spain

and dwelt in his father's house.

He stole images

from the quick and the lovely,

and dashed himself on the rocks

of his saline imaginings.

He is a tumbler before the chancellor of that absence.

I knew a woman who went to Norwich,

whence came the man who went to America,

who once lived in part of London

where the man who went to Spain

and the man who went to India came from;

and the man who went to India had a child,

who lived near the woman who went to Norwich.

This is how that jet puppeteer weaves its net.

And that great crowd began to drift away,

returning each to their business, or so they thought.

They are still gathered there,

at the end of that pleasant, wooded lane,

bound.

Bound not by oath or loyalty to that hated compulsion

which drew them together,

but by that tight net of tacky threads which it elicited

but which they alone created.

Bound, an arch of only keystones

at a certain unchanging distance

in orbit of that unreciprocating singularity.

We cannot see it or imagine it

and so we do not fully believe it

but it is all there is.

We are its cadets, and we will be its slaves.

Some of us will serve it as midwives, or couriers:

but every single one of us will be its mute parishioner.

We will be complicit in the sentences and decrees of its court.

We will polish its smooth surface,

and admire our reflections in its light sponging outer boundary.

We will eat its meal of ashes,

and drink its wine of dust,

and hating it, will submit to its excruciation,

until we love it.

Until we welcome our dessert, and sleep.

Suffolk, November 2010