by Aldwyn » Thu Feb 08, 2024 8:43 pm
**More from the clan forums. This is posts and from the perspective of Xoco*
A singing in the night woke me from my dream. Out in the tiny distance the flicker of a chain gang of torches twined its way along the horizon, and I could almost feel their naked helplessness crawling inside me. I had read of these convoys, travelling only by cover of night, men dragging themselves in file, women stacked into wagons like dominoes, bound for an underground dormitory where they would be visited by the wealthy in private. Only after a long minute did I see abreast atop the hill with me the great beasts, pale matted fur dressed by blood, ochre and earth in their eyes. They addressed me with a regal silence, watching me, as a pair. When they turned slowly and departed I was left only with the sensation of their invisible embrace across the whole extent of my body. The dry plains around that solitary hill upon which I had set myself stretched on forever in moonlit silhouette. The train of torches blinked slowly out of sight, and dawn uncovered the mass that I had escaped in my sleep, withered and gray at my side. I felt my horse's hooves and checked her limbs and by afternoon we were into the Braem.
My memory has degraded to the point that I can no longer clearly remember what I did even at the start of the day, earlier in the day. Or it is that my days have become so routine I cannot tell one moment (one day, this day, this moment) from the next. This evening I will eat the same thing I ate yesterday evening, every evening for the past, week, month, year.... I have been reduced to my basest instincts, perceptions.... which are, however, altogether dulled. Between writing the previous sentence and this sentence I have closed the windows and drawn the curtains, because it began raining heavily, because I cannot stomach the sight of rain today, and I have put on a sweater, to ward off the chill, although it will of course not ward off the chill.
A single life can easily be ruined by chance, an entire species can be obliterated by chance without any effort whatsoever, with slightly more difficulty an empire can be ruined by chance, and the difficulty gradually becomes greater and greater, but never impossible, gradually more and more irrelevant without ever becoming totally irrelevant, until the point is reached at which chance ceases being chance, kills itself off, and becomes purpose. Past that threshold chance suffocates, meaninglessness is suffocated by choice. Resolution, however, never actually occurs, except in individual instances; it exists perpetually in the future, not yet having arrived; clarification remains beyond our reach, and the amended situation, amended by time, remains petrified in the dead centre of the womb. But one life can, with the utmost ease, be extinguished. Everyone is constantly forming opinions about you so that it is increasingly difficult to be another person the more people you come into contact with, opinions that are always mistakes. The person who you believe yourself to be, who you are convinced is the person that you are that is really existing, is almost never the person who you are seen to be by the people with whom you come into contact, and thus the person who you actually are. Every woman I have painted believed me to the be the woman she believed to be painting her, but the woman that I am has never been, in even a single case, the woman that she has believed to be painting her. The people I paint are always other people entirely, I have never painted a person who was actually that person who I painted, the woman on the canvas is always a different woman, a third woman, different also to the second woman I see or the first woman she really is to herself as she knows herself to be. The eye is actually a defective organ, the most defective organ, whereas the ear is the most correctly tuned organ, the most truthful organ of the body. What I see has never, I have not noticed (or remembered) even once when this was not the case, corresponded to what has really been in front of me, in whatever direction I have been looking. It becomes painfully obvious when others speak to me or of me in front of other people, when I hear them speaking of me, that what they are speaking of, who they are speaking to, is not me but something else entirely, really only their (always ridiculous) image of me, which is utterly false, and I am constantly ruined by these false observations, to a greater and greater extent I am ruined. To know someone for a long period of time, to be in constant contact with one person for a long, the longest, period of time, for decades or for a lifetime, is to be ruined further and further, their image of you becoming more and more corrupt, more and more false, eventually a total deception, a total incompatibility, an unbearable weight, the woman that I am no longer recognisable as the woman that exists entirely within her own mind, she who I have been in constant contact with for uncountable years. Such a situation, such a relationship, if allowed to progress so far to so much ruin, must be escaped without hesitation, before extinction occurs. The only person with whom we have a perfectly sublime link is our own person, and therefore our own person is the only person with whom we are able to communicate without serious, without fatal error. Everything else is repetitions of repetitions of miscommunication after miscommunication, unto unintelligibility. But even our intrinsic communication, the only reliable, stable form of communication available to us, can easily be ruined by chance, by the exteriorisations of other people of their versions of us, versions riddled with corruptions that then suddenly infiltrate us and corrupt our own mechanisms of communication with ourselves, leading rapidly to either insanity or complete stupefaction, a disease the majority of the human race now suffers from. The opposite, inverse position is anxiety, usually a totally disruptive and devastating anxiety, disruptive to the miscommunication towards which we are constantly compelled by exteriorisations but never disruptive to our truest communications, communications of the deadliest accuracy. But we have been taught to be terrified of accuracy, taught to worship the most inaccurate of ideas, the most inaccurate actions and communications.
I placed the letter back into my pocket. The ink had begun to grow faded from continual exposure. How many times had I read that paragraph? The letter only twice from start to finish, it was too huge to digest all at once, the longest she had sent me in our years of communication, and the last. To read it was to be completely conquered by her, as was the case with all her letters, all our interactions had been a complete conquering of me by her, all our communications had been a total surrender by me to her strength of character. I had declared my love to her on more than one occasion, and I believed that, although not explicitly expressed as such, her letters, always stretching on for pages, pages and pages of unhurried yet messy writing, writing of a totally individual intellect, were in some sense a declaration of love. Caemlyn, according to my first impression, was an empty city, a bland expanse of idleness and childish vigour. I rested my horse for two days out of necessity, scarcely leaving my room to the mud of the streets, before continuing west, towards the Mountains of Mist. A week later I found myself in Baerlon, surrounded by merchants. I immediately began writing a letter to S, although she could no longer read letters.
Dear S,
I have passed nearly through Andor and am staying the night in Baerlon before going south. I have decided not to continue through the mountains. I cannot stand the sight of those mountains, I know it would be totally fatal to me to attempt to enter them, totally fatal to my personality, to cross into those mountains, although of course the passage is totally secure, physically speaking. There is the most frightening thing in those mountains, which I can identify as total stupidity. S, I want to tell you of a dream I have been having, every night since passing through the Braem. It begins and ends in that forest, the Braem, in the structure (which does not in fact exist) in the centre of that forest, although it is not that forest but my own, a pseudoBraem, usurped, deformed, taking on the appearance of being not my own, originating from a location given birth to by another, behaving in such a way as to be entirely unusual to my own being, at least by appearances, by physical appearances, which of course dominate every possible view, a location dangerously pregnant, even possessed, from which my forest was extracted, or: expelled. In the dream, the workers, with materials from an alien, unknown location, having built the structure to perfection, having completed the project which they set out to complete, were hired to set out to complete, and ended by becoming attached to, as if it belonged to them, as if it were part of their individual being, the structure at the centre of the forest, said to themselves, before departing, as their vocation demanded they depart, always depart, “Here is the structure at the centre of the forest”, and later, some of the forest having since been cut down, still referred to the structure as “the structure at the centre” of the Braem, even after such a portion of the forest had been removed from existence that the nonforest nearly encroached upon the structure, skirted the boundary of the structure, the forest edge becoming more and more perceptible from the vantage of the structure, still then called it “the structure at the centre of the forest”. I read a strange passage in one of my books today, a book on the design and construction of the buildings of the Ogier, it has made me wonder whether this is the same seamless impregnability of which you wrote once in regards to the untoward concourse of childhood amorosity. How many years was I imprisoned in my dungeon in order to prepare me for marriage according to the cruel and insane whims of my mother? Simply because I showed the expression from the youngest age, like my mother, of an invert's sensibility? The in fact (contrary to her inept estimates) ultimately submissive inclination to don the garb of boys and to roll through mud? When I was sixteen she uncovered my volumes of poetry and short prose which had until then been safely hidden by me for over two years, and did not simply forbid me from penning any further “perversions” but removed every scrap of parchment and every writing utensil from my rooms. The only way I was able to maintain correspondence with the outside world was by the compassion and sacrifice of my liveried watchers, who provided me with just enough parchment and ink each time to compose my short responses, who smuggled the letters to and fro. Where now is the impregnability, the supposedly impregnable dungeon within which I was contained, the supposedly impregnable devotion, the impregnability which (as you say) is elementary? I can't bear to go outside. Everything I hear myself speak comes out only as guttural nonsense, and all about me people are singing praises and infatuating themselves with their own saliva, their own genitals, their own excrement. And I am always hounded by that same excrement!
Yours, Xoco
I passed through Ghealdan as I had passed through Andor, the mountains always at my side. In Cosamelle I talked with a bar girl who told me her life story, then I sought solitude from the gleemen in the woods skirting the town. Just before arriving at Amador my horse stepped on a scorpion and before four days had passed waiting for the hoof to heal I was issued a summons by an Inquisitor. Apparently my reclusive visit had unsettled certain suspicions. A guard tried to apprehend me as I made to leave the city with a new horse, insisting I wait for “clearance”, and I was forced to leave him bruised at his post crying “witch”. Just inside the border of Altara I began staining for the first time in four months. I met an old woman living in a squalid hut with four malnourished cats and stayed with her for two days. We made love through the morning of the second day and ate boiled potatoes with our hands. There were no goodbyes. A representative of the Records and Classification Section who had personally inscribed an inventory of the buried dead in question gave me the location of the common grave outside the city border where S had been interred along with nineteen other criminals and enemies of the state of Illian. I burned all the letters that I had written to her since she had died at the site along with all the letters she had written me. My staining had not stopped even after twenty days, as I stood in the spray at a declivity before the Bay of Remara.
There are two ways, yes, only two: you either become bored by a thing, or it pulls you into itself, an addiction, or an obsession, in either case uncontrollable. After reading the works of deep and serious thinkers, returning to tales, entertainment, becomes absurd, each phrasing engorged with improbability. How many copper, for instance, must one count? Everyone knows that a starving person suddenly finding food eats too quickly, eats too much, and immediately dies. There is not even the opportunity to expel it: their stomachs are shrivelled, their throats are parched, there is no reflex whatsoever. Sometimes (you know this) when I lived in Ebou Dar, I would go days without eating. I would forget that I had not eaten. I wandered those convoluted streets, looking upon one architectural artifice after another, sometimes stopping for a little kaf. Back then, everything was dusty, up to the sky. Actually, the dust seemed always to come from above. In Cairhien, the act of looking upwards is an impossibility; no one speaks except in curses, behind flagging veils, in whispers in taverns. In Cairhien, everything is architecture. But in some places, the dust rises up from the ground and scarcely touches upon the air: it fuses instantly with something heavier than itself. Elsewhere, dust appears from nowhere, suddenly attached to you, or it sweeps across you, always on your blind side. In places where the latter is the case, conversation consists only of interruptions punctuating interruptions.
**More from the clan forums. This is posts and from the perspective of Xoco*
A singing in the night woke me from my dream. Out in the tiny distance the flicker of a chain gang of torches twined its way along the horizon, and I could almost feel their naked helplessness crawling inside me. I had read of these convoys, travelling only by cover of night, men dragging themselves in file, women stacked into wagons like dominoes, bound for an underground dormitory where they would be visited by the wealthy in private. Only after a long minute did I see abreast atop the hill with me the great beasts, pale matted fur dressed by blood, ochre and earth in their eyes. They addressed me with a regal silence, watching me, as a pair. When they turned slowly and departed I was left only with the sensation of their invisible embrace across the whole extent of my body. The dry plains around that solitary hill upon which I had set myself stretched on forever in moonlit silhouette. The train of torches blinked slowly out of sight, and dawn uncovered the mass that I had escaped in my sleep, withered and gray at my side. I felt my horse's hooves and checked her limbs and by afternoon we were into the Braem.
My memory has degraded to the point that I can no longer clearly remember what I did even at the start of the day, earlier in the day. Or it is that my days have become so routine I cannot tell one moment (one day, this day, this moment) from the next. This evening I will eat the same thing I ate yesterday evening, every evening for the past, week, month, year.... I have been reduced to my basest instincts, perceptions.... which are, however, altogether dulled. Between writing the previous sentence and this sentence I have closed the windows and drawn the curtains, because it began raining heavily, because I cannot stomach the sight of rain today, and I have put on a sweater, to ward off the chill, although it will of course not ward off the chill.
A single life can easily be ruined by chance, an entire species can be obliterated by chance without any effort whatsoever, with slightly more difficulty an empire can be ruined by chance, and the difficulty gradually becomes greater and greater, but never impossible, gradually more and more irrelevant without ever becoming totally irrelevant, until the point is reached at which chance ceases being chance, kills itself off, and becomes purpose. Past that threshold chance suffocates, meaninglessness is suffocated by choice. Resolution, however, never actually occurs, except in individual instances; it exists perpetually in the future, not yet having arrived; clarification remains beyond our reach, and the amended situation, amended by time, remains petrified in the dead centre of the womb. But one life can, with the utmost ease, be extinguished. Everyone is constantly forming opinions about you so that it is increasingly difficult to be another person the more people you come into contact with, opinions that are always mistakes. The person who you believe yourself to be, who you are convinced is the person that you are that is really existing, is almost never the person who you are seen to be by the people with whom you come into contact, and thus the person who you actually are. Every woman I have painted believed me to the be the woman she believed to be painting her, but the woman that I am has never been, in even a single case, the woman that she has believed to be painting her. The people I paint are always other people entirely, I have never painted a person who was actually that person who I painted, the woman on the canvas is always a different woman, a third woman, different also to the second woman I see or the first woman she really is to herself as she knows herself to be. The eye is actually a defective organ, the most defective organ, whereas the ear is the most correctly tuned organ, the most truthful organ of the body. What I see has never, I have not noticed (or remembered) even once when this was not the case, corresponded to what has really been in front of me, in whatever direction I have been looking. It becomes painfully obvious when others speak to me or of me in front of other people, when I hear them speaking of me, that what they are speaking of, who they are speaking to, is not me but something else entirely, really only their (always ridiculous) image of me, which is utterly false, and I am constantly ruined by these false observations, to a greater and greater extent I am ruined. To know someone for a long period of time, to be in constant contact with one person for a long, the longest, period of time, for decades or for a lifetime, is to be ruined further and further, their image of you becoming more and more corrupt, more and more false, eventually a total deception, a total incompatibility, an unbearable weight, the woman that I am no longer recognisable as the woman that exists entirely within her own mind, she who I have been in constant contact with for uncountable years. Such a situation, such a relationship, if allowed to progress so far to so much ruin, must be escaped without hesitation, before extinction occurs. The only person with whom we have a perfectly sublime link is our own person, and therefore our own person is the only person with whom we are able to communicate without serious, without fatal error. Everything else is repetitions of repetitions of miscommunication after miscommunication, unto unintelligibility. But even our intrinsic communication, the only reliable, stable form of communication available to us, can easily be ruined by chance, by the exteriorisations of other people of their versions of us, versions riddled with corruptions that then suddenly infiltrate us and corrupt our own mechanisms of communication with ourselves, leading rapidly to either insanity or complete stupefaction, a disease the majority of the human race now suffers from. The opposite, inverse position is anxiety, usually a totally disruptive and devastating anxiety, disruptive to the miscommunication towards which we are constantly compelled by exteriorisations but never disruptive to our truest communications, communications of the deadliest accuracy. But we have been taught to be terrified of accuracy, taught to worship the most inaccurate of ideas, the most inaccurate actions and communications.
I placed the letter back into my pocket. The ink had begun to grow faded from continual exposure. How many times had I read that paragraph? The letter only twice from start to finish, it was too huge to digest all at once, the longest she had sent me in our years of communication, and the last. To read it was to be completely conquered by her, as was the case with all her letters, all our interactions had been a complete conquering of me by her, all our communications had been a total surrender by me to her strength of character. I had declared my love to her on more than one occasion, and I believed that, although not explicitly expressed as such, her letters, always stretching on for pages, pages and pages of unhurried yet messy writing, writing of a totally individual intellect, were in some sense a declaration of love. Caemlyn, according to my first impression, was an empty city, a bland expanse of idleness and childish vigour. I rested my horse for two days out of necessity, scarcely leaving my room to the mud of the streets, before continuing west, towards the Mountains of Mist. A week later I found myself in Baerlon, surrounded by merchants. I immediately began writing a letter to S, although she could no longer read letters.
Dear S,
I have passed nearly through Andor and am staying the night in Baerlon before going south. I have decided not to continue through the mountains. I cannot stand the sight of those mountains, I know it would be totally fatal to me to attempt to enter them, totally fatal to my personality, to cross into those mountains, although of course the passage is totally secure, physically speaking. There is the most frightening thing in those mountains, which I can identify as total stupidity. S, I want to tell you of a dream I have been having, every night since passing through the Braem. It begins and ends in that forest, the Braem, in the structure (which does not in fact exist) in the centre of that forest, although it is not that forest but my own, a pseudoBraem, usurped, deformed, taking on the appearance of being not my own, originating from a location given birth to by another, behaving in such a way as to be entirely unusual to my own being, at least by appearances, by physical appearances, which of course dominate every possible view, a location dangerously pregnant, even possessed, from which my forest was extracted, or: expelled. In the dream, the workers, with materials from an alien, unknown location, having built the structure to perfection, having completed the project which they set out to complete, were hired to set out to complete, and ended by becoming attached to, as if it belonged to them, as if it were part of their individual being, the structure at the centre of the forest, said to themselves, before departing, as their vocation demanded they depart, always depart, “Here is the structure at the centre of the forest”, and later, some of the forest having since been cut down, still referred to the structure as “the structure at the centre” of the Braem, even after such a portion of the forest had been removed from existence that the nonforest nearly encroached upon the structure, skirted the boundary of the structure, the forest edge becoming more and more perceptible from the vantage of the structure, still then called it “the structure at the centre of the forest”. I read a strange passage in one of my books today, a book on the design and construction of the buildings of the Ogier, it has made me wonder whether this is the same seamless impregnability of which you wrote once in regards to the untoward concourse of childhood amorosity. How many years was I imprisoned in my dungeon in order to prepare me for marriage according to the cruel and insane whims of my mother? Simply because I showed the expression from the youngest age, like my mother, of an invert's sensibility? The in fact (contrary to her inept estimates) ultimately submissive inclination to don the garb of boys and to roll through mud? When I was sixteen she uncovered my volumes of poetry and short prose which had until then been safely hidden by me for over two years, and did not simply forbid me from penning any further “perversions” but removed every scrap of parchment and every writing utensil from my rooms. The only way I was able to maintain correspondence with the outside world was by the compassion and sacrifice of my liveried watchers, who provided me with just enough parchment and ink each time to compose my short responses, who smuggled the letters to and fro. Where now is the impregnability, the supposedly impregnable dungeon within which I was contained, the supposedly impregnable devotion, the impregnability which (as you say) is elementary? I can't bear to go outside. Everything I hear myself speak comes out only as guttural nonsense, and all about me people are singing praises and infatuating themselves with their own saliva, their own genitals, their own excrement. And I am always hounded by that same excrement!
Yours, Xoco
I passed through Ghealdan as I had passed through Andor, the mountains always at my side. In Cosamelle I talked with a bar girl who told me her life story, then I sought solitude from the gleemen in the woods skirting the town. Just before arriving at Amador my horse stepped on a scorpion and before four days had passed waiting for the hoof to heal I was issued a summons by an Inquisitor. Apparently my reclusive visit had unsettled certain suspicions. A guard tried to apprehend me as I made to leave the city with a new horse, insisting I wait for “clearance”, and I was forced to leave him bruised at his post crying “witch”. Just inside the border of Altara I began staining for the first time in four months. I met an old woman living in a squalid hut with four malnourished cats and stayed with her for two days. We made love through the morning of the second day and ate boiled potatoes with our hands. There were no goodbyes. A representative of the Records and Classification Section who had personally inscribed an inventory of the buried dead in question gave me the location of the common grave outside the city border where S had been interred along with nineteen other criminals and enemies of the state of Illian. I burned all the letters that I had written to her since she had died at the site along with all the letters she had written me. My staining had not stopped even after twenty days, as I stood in the spray at a declivity before the Bay of Remara.
There are two ways, yes, only two: you either become bored by a thing, or it pulls you into itself, an addiction, or an obsession, in either case uncontrollable. After reading the works of deep and serious thinkers, returning to tales, entertainment, becomes absurd, each phrasing engorged with improbability. How many copper, for instance, must one count? Everyone knows that a starving person suddenly finding food eats too quickly, eats too much, and immediately dies. There is not even the opportunity to expel it: their stomachs are shrivelled, their throats are parched, there is no reflex whatsoever. Sometimes (you know this) when I lived in Ebou Dar, I would go days without eating. I would forget that I had not eaten. I wandered those convoluted streets, looking upon one architectural artifice after another, sometimes stopping for a little kaf. Back then, everything was dusty, up to the sky. Actually, the dust seemed always to come from above. In Cairhien, the act of looking upwards is an impossibility; no one speaks except in curses, behind flagging veils, in whispers in taverns. In Cairhien, everything is architecture. But in some places, the dust rises up from the ground and scarcely touches upon the air: it fuses instantly with something heavier than itself. Elsewhere, dust appears from nowhere, suddenly attached to you, or it sweeps across you, always on your blind side. In places where the latter is the case, conversation consists only of interruptions punctuating interruptions.