Labyrinths | Robert Rawdon Wilson

Labyrinths

R. Rawdon Wilson

“Wilson's essay is equally idiosyncratic, though it apparently emerges from his ongoing study of the cultural significance of the emotion of disgust. His conclusion that the prospects of cyborgization disturb us because the process threatens the mythic integrity of our bodies is finally more conventional than his detailed speculation, along the way, about the potential benefits of penile implants and augmentations: "my penis will have been lengthened (by cutting the suspensory ligaments that join it to the pubic bone) and thickened (by the liposuction of fat from my buttocks or abdomen) and I will seem, to my own mind at least, irresistibly bionic" (240). Wilson is a Shakespeare scholar who can cite Dr. Who and Star Trek -- The Next Generation chapter and verse; altogether a very peculiar person. “ Robert Latham, Science Fiction Studies 24: 2 (July 1997).

“A man of edges; perhaps even an edgy guy. He seems most at home along boundaries. One moment you are standing in the well-understood turf of literary theory, but then you find yourself wandering along a beach in Chile or swimming after sea turtles on the Barrier Reef. Reading Wilson is like following a thread that will take you through a labyrinth, or perhaps, when you look back, map one out. There are so many disciplines, so many strategies and tactical moves, so many boundaries after all, that the mind either grows or staggers.” (Wilm Robertson)

“Always ingeniously argued and engagingly written, often oblique or even playfully wayward–rather than gamefully structured?–in its theorizing moves, cheerfully and, it must be admitted, sometimes exasperatingly willing to uphold both sides of some important arguments, this is perhaps not a book [In Palamedes’ Shadow] for younger players at the game of theorizing. It most certainly is a book to approach with a ‘lusory attitude’ of one’s own, a bit warily maybe and conscious that moves are being made in a game whose rules do not preclude feints and the occasional bedazzlement of the reader-adversary, but one which ‘illudes’ as it sometimes eludes and in which the fellow-player that is the reader can quickly becomes absorbed. Its manifest topic (games and play) is a bamboozling one, that has baffled some of the best brains in the business; and its ultimate subject (something like the nature of culture?) Is that of our bamboozlement as cultural subjects. Such a book would surely be a bit implausible, then, if it were not at least somewhat bamboozling in its own right? One is invited here to match wits with a master player, a Palamedes with more than a touch of Odysseus about him; and such an experience is necessarily instructive as well as profoundly pleasurable.” (Ross Chambers, “Rules and Moves,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 19: 1-2 (March/June 1992): 95-100.

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Bertrand Russell once urged students of logic to bear a number of puzzles about with them. It would be a way to reinforce the mind’s alertness, to make it wary in the face of conclusiveness. Perhaps the logician might never determine whether (say) the set of all sets that are not members of themselves is, or is not, a member of itself, but there would be cognitive rewards for puzzling it about: an awareness that knowledge is never, or seldom, as certain as the knowledgeable claim. For the study of literature nothing seems to correspond to Russell’s playfield of puzzles and paradoxes. The paradoxes that literary critics discover seem more straightforward. They do not test the mind in the same manner. Literary paradoxes are vehicles for irony, ways to describe contradiction, contrariety, and complexity. They are resolutions of doubleness, not irreconcilable propositions that appear to fly apart from each other, and, like the difference between bread and cheese, they are easily held together. The testing and reinforcement that Russell had in mind does not seem readily available to students of literature in the form of paradoxes. It may be that the study of literature does not require cognitive testing and reinforcement to the degree that logic does. I shall not attempt to solve that puzzle, but I do think that intellectual reinforcement of some kind should be desirable. What could it be? What would promote the intellectual versatility that might help a literary student in analyzing texts and dealing with the vast swarm of textual facts that make up the study of literature? In this essay, I shall argue that an awareness of literary theory, even if one is not truly interested in theoretical questions as such, fosters an alertness about texts (dragging forward difficulties that might hide unobserved) and a ready openness in dealing with textual phenomena.

Literary theory is an edgy business. It calls attention to edges: of words, of genres, of texts, even of the profession of literary studies. The metaphor of edges appeals to those who have an interest in theory: they see themselves somewhere beyond normal professional occupations, a cutting edge perhaps, certainly as having an edge on their colleagues. Those who dislike literary theory (finding it trivial, obnubilating, barbaric, destructive) may also feel themselves on the edge. Their teeth set on edge at the at least, they may also sense that they have become preterite, passed over, excluded from (important journals will not publish them), forced to the edge of rear-guard actions. All the animosities about theory as well as all the enthusiasms respond to the metaphor of edges. Theory could easily drive someone over the edge towards either horror or bliss. What, other than honing one’s knife even more ferociously sharp, should be done about theory? (“Literary Theory’s edginess: Texts, Problems, and The Array of Questions, ”English Studies in Canada XVIII: 1 (March 1992): 19-42.

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In a Condor’s Eye

As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A bubble blown translucent, its "white" would show up when in the socket as a half-lit sea green. A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its surface. Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key which Fraülein Meroving wore on a slender chain round her neck. Darker green and flecks of gold had been fused into twelve vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of the bubble to represent the iris and also the face of the watch.

Thomas Pynchon, V.

In Chile, I looked into a condor’s eye, watching it stare back into mine. Its eye displayed the indifference, the contempt perhaps, of a policeman studying one of life’s losers.

Eyes tell stories. Humans take for granted that their eyes are not only expressive, but narrative. They elicit suspense, deliver surprises, reveal secrets, display mood, feeling and intent. Above all, they seem charged, filled, even overflowing, with meaning. Human eyes glisten, shimmer, flash, flare and glower. They brood, grow somber, reflective, contemplative or else playful, blissful and loving. They shoot daggers (hot), warnings (stern), invitations (lubricious or commanding) and summons (imperative or pleading). If looks could actually kill, then the population of the world, over the many years of our collective history, would have been much less. Since they can also speak, or whisper come-hithers, the world’s population has continued to blossom and flower. Eyes are everywhere in human mythology. They are windows to the soul, it is said, but they also block access like sluices across a channel. The eyes’ opacity or their emptiness is a recurring motif in horror. If you could list all the purposes that poets and mythographers have claimed for eyes, write an encyclopedia of human eyes perhaps, you would still fall short of what the totality of this vision has been. A fine network of metaphoric fractures covers the surface of every human eye.

In this essay, I want to explore only one aspect of the eyes’s complex significance: consciousness. Human beings typically believe that they possess consciousness, whatever it may be and however it may have arisen, and that animals do not, or not to the same degree or with the same scope. The idea of alien beings, particularly but not exclusively cyborgs and androids, is disturbing precisely because there is no reason to believe that they would possess a consciousness similar to ours, nor yet one that would reciprocate ours. One human looking into another’s eyes will see, even if misinterpreting, an expression. In moments of great mutual intensity, animosity, rancor, thoughtful probing or desire, it may even seen as if the eyes are wound together and intimately bound up in an experience that severs, and then walls, off the world. In such moments, nothing else exists, neither the universe nor the world itself can make any claim upon your consciousness. In The Ecstasy, John Donne captures the exclusivity and intensity of such moments.

Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon one double string

Consciousness enthralls consciousness. Donne’s word for this process, later in the same poem, is “interinanaimates.” It is a happy term: two souls, two breaths of life, breathe life, or soul, into each other. Each brings the other to life. The myriad constellations of human expression are all, we seem often to believe, open to doubling, to being re-formed along a “double string.” Your consciousness will acknowledge another, whether in repugnance, hate or love, and similarly find itself acknowledged in the same moment. The blank stare, the unacknowledging gaze, plays such an important role in horror because it signals both an absence and (more importantly) a rejection of consciousness. Executioners, torturers, concentration camp guards, murderers, “hooded thugs” and lesser bullies, even bureaucrats, meet looks, pleading, begging or simply inquiring, with blank indifference. Their consciousness, if they have one, will not recognize your own. Indeed, it will brutally exclude yours. If someday an alien being looks into your eyes, it will surely be with just such unblinking indifference. You may then look into an eye vaguely familiar from its anticipations in science fiction, cold and electronic, masking (or not) its interior digital display, like the Terminator’s eyes in James Cameron’s two films. Those eyes will take everything “in,” but will neither note nor reciprocate your consciousness.

We often make-believe this cold stare since it is inherently disturbing and intimidating. It lies at the heart of such ceremonial exchanges of glaring as the “stare-down” in sports. Boxing matches typically begin with this ritual: a cold fixing stare that reveals only implacable hostility and utter indifference to the other’s well-being. Whatever effect the stare-down may have on either boxer, it excites the audience, helping them to anticipate an impending scene of primitive, inhuman (“animal-like”) violence. Beneath the human stare-down, there are memories of animal eyes blocked to understanding, incapable of symbolic communication, but peering deeply for signs of aggression or weakness. There may also be fears of alien eyes, cyborgian instruments for analysis lacking both feeling and response. You will look into an animal’s eyes, Berger remarks, across an “abyss of non-comprehension. ^[1] This is the look that the executioner adopts and the boxer imitates. It is what we imagine that an alien’s look will resemble. When I looked into the condor’s eye and observed it staring back, I was aware of that abyss. No symbolic gesture could have crossed it.

North from Santiago, the landscape turns quickly into desert. At first you encounter a semi-arid region that might remind you of parts of west Texas or New South Wales beyond the Blue Mountains. After a time it becomes a full desert, black and grey dust darkening the mountains. Little, often nothing at all, seems to grow there. This is the Atacama, one of the driest deserts in the world. Stretching from Perú through northern Chile along the narrow band between the Andes and the Pacific ocean, it is region of black jagged mountains, bare as ancient skulls. Rocky escarpments and Bosch-like headlands characterize the coast. Occasionally, there are beaches, mostly shingle and coarse yellow sand. Pelicans and gulls are everywhere. The road doesn’t follow the coast consistently so that driving “along” it often means turning inland to catch the Pan-American Highway.

In August 1998, I followed this broken coastal road in a rented car, heading north from Viña del Mar to Arica on the Peruvian border. At one point between the bleak industrial ports of Caldera and Chañaral, we came upon a sea-lion sanctuary. Lobos del Mar in Chile look pretty much like their cousins in California or British Columbia, but they are still interesting to see, much as sleeping cats are. We left the road and entered a confusing maze of small sandy tails that wound between huge round boulders. Later we found a metal plaque planted at the edge of a cliff which indicated that the “orbicular” granite boulders were unique in the world, huge rocks worn smooth and round like pebbles but each the size of a house or a small bus. It was a intensely surrealistic landscape: the crazy labyrinth of trails, the orbicular boulders, the rocky headlands, the near-to-shore islands and the mournful honking of the sea lions.

After we had taken a number of photos of the sea-lions, my companion returned to the car to seek out a telescopic lens she had left behind. I stood alone on the headland enjoying the vast reach of the Chilean coast and the white-flecked blueness of the Pacific beyond which, only four or five degrees farther south, lay Sydney. Then out of the corner of one eye, I saw a strange figure. It was a bird standing erect on a rock across a narrow channel of water and just a few metres beyond the most landwards of the sea-lion islands. I remember thinking that it looked something like an old man, a figure from the days of Bartelby and Uriah Heep, dressed in a black frock-coat and a white starched collar. It was standing quietly in a rocky niche. When I looked at this bird more closely through my binoculars, I could see that it was unlike any bird that I had ever seen before. For one thing it was very large, nearly as tall as a man standing. Its feathers were jet black except for a few white feathers around its neck and head. In striking contrast, its thick, wedge-like beak was a rich, bloody red.. Its talons were long and finger-like.

As I studied this strange bird, it turned its head sideways and began, one eye fixed coldly upon me, to look back. I experienced a sudden shiver when I noticed that it was staring, apparently right up the binoculars that I was holding, into my eyes, picking me out and probing across the distance between us. In the total stillness of the moment, the bird “funnelled me into his eye.” ^[2] I let my binoculars fall upon my chest as I reached for my camera. This was a bird that I wanted to remember. However, before I was able to take the camera out of its case, the bird, still holding me in its unyielding stare, began to unfold its wings. This was a deliberate, almost processional, two-stage operation. First, it stretched its wings out to the joint so that it momentarily possessed a hunched, brooding appearance, the wings still half-folded but the joints pointed upwards. Next it opened its wings to their full extent and then launched into the space between us. I had a quick flash of insight when I took in the bird’s wingspan. Any bird as big as this one, with wings that stretched ten or twelve feet from tip to tip, must be a condor.

The condor flew towards me, its long neck stretched out like a length of tawny, corrugated plastic pipe. The featherless neck underscored the bird’s similarity to other vultures. I remembered the vultures with four-foot wingspans that I had seen in Texas years before. At the time they had seemed like huge birds, frightening even though I knew well enough that vultures did not attack live prey. As the condor flew towards me, I could make out a disproportion between its head and body. The head now seemed rather small, dominated by the wedge-shaped red beak, both of its eyes rolled ahead on me. Its body, in contrast, seemed attached to the other end of the pipe-like neck more or less like something distinct, a truck or an engine, say, but very large and black, unbroken by white feathers or red beak. The long, stretching neck made the bird appear to be craning ahead in an effort to peer forward and to keep me in focus. Its feet, with their long talons, were tucked up under its body, increasing the sense of a disproportionate structure. The huge body seemed to be sailing ahead with its comparatively small head extended on the end of its long neck like a periscope, or a separate command module.

I was never able to take the photo I had wanted. As the condor flew towards me, my initial frisson of surprise and wonder changed to fear. In the past, I had been dive-bombed by gulls. Small though they are, gulls are quite terrifying when they dive and swoop. Once, running with my ten-year old daughter on a beach on Philip Island, two or three gulls, perhaps defending a nest or else a choice area of beach for feeding, had attacked us. I grabbed a length of kelp-stalk to swing above our heads, attempting to drive them off, but the gulls had not been intimidated. Squawking and honking, they continued to dive until we ran farther down the beach. If I had been unable to defend myself against gulls, what could I do against a condor? I wondered quickly if it would dive-bomb me, its massive beak striking at my skull, or if it would come down talons first to grasp, and no doubt pierce, my shoulders. In that surreal landscape of orbicular granite and sand, there were no kelp-stalks and no sticks. I wrapped the strap of my camera tightly around my wrist and waited to defend myself as best, however ineffectually, I might. With gathering horror, I guessed that the condor would light upon my shoulders, talons stabbing through, and peck savagely through my skull.

The condor circled me at about twenty feet. One eye continued to fix upon me and stare. Then it spiraled up to about fifty feet and made a final, much wider circle, still peering down at me. And then it decided to leave me alone. It flew off to the south following the coast, looking for all the world like a small truck with a rider, something like a mahout, sticking out in front and steering. It had concluded that I was still alive, and not a dead sea-lion. I have wondered since what would have happened if I had followed the usual advice given to backpackers in North America who confront bears: play dead. The condor would probably have had my liver out before I would have been able to realize that the instructions had been wrong. I still have nightmarish visions of myself lying huddled on the sandy ground, face down and my head cradled in my arms just as I might have done had I been attacked by a grizzly, while the condor perched on my back and tore out my viscera with its thick pyramidal beak.

What happens when you encounter a wild animal big enough to kill you? What kind of transaction is it? Assume that you have no major weapon, no gun or bow. What should you do? The condor in Chile was not the first dangerous animal that I had met. Many years ago I stared, for twenty or so interminable seconds, into the eyes of a grizzly. Three years ago I exchanged stares with an enraged bison. In each of these cases what I recall most clearly, what (it seems) now sticks in my memory most vividly, are the animal’s eyes: the angry, puzzled stare of the grizzly as I shone a bright torch into its eyes; the fierce, territorial glare of the bison before it charged and afterwards as one eye had rotated back to fix me in a pensive stare. Those eyes possessed an intensity, brooding, fierce, in all ways hostile, and above all implacable. The animals’ eyes revealed a view, narrow and extremely limited perhaps, but still a worldview of sorts, in which I was only a nuisance, and obstacle to be cleared, possibly a danger or else a meal.

I encountered the grizzly one dark night many years ago when I was camping with my children in the Johnson Canyon camp ground near Banff in Canada. It was early September, late in the camping season, and we were the only campers in the ground that night. After we had eaten, I heard a noise, a rustling, crunching sound that indicated an animal, probably a bear. I took a powerful torch and began shining it into the bush at the edge of the camp, expecting to see a inquisitive black bear. Instead, I found myself exchanging a steady look with a grizzly. As I peered into its pig-like face, and made out the huge hump of muscle behind its head, I saw immediately that, unmistakably, it was a grizzly, ursus horribilis horribilis. The word “fear” scarcely indicates the feelings I experienced as I whispered harshly to my children to get into the car and lock the doors. The grizzly seemed to study me for twenty seconds or a bit more, its eyes, like dark, impenetrable pools of steady reflected light, fastened fiercely upon the torch, both riveted and angered by its unfamiliar brightness. What I found most amazing at the time was the unequivocal impression that I had from the animal’s eyes of a distinct personality, at once baffled and enraged.

Finally, the grizzly shambled off into the bush. It didn’t come back, but I spent the night dreading its return. My children slept in the car while I spent the night inside our tent, holding my powerful torch at the ready for further use. In the morning I told a park warden that we had seen a grizzly the night before. He laughed at me and said that grizzlies never came down below the snow-line (a dangerous bit of false information) and kept away from humans. I explained that I knew the difference between grizzlies and black bears, pointing out the shape of its head and the muscular hump. He only laughed. But it was September and bears roam widely at that time looking for the last good meals before winter sets in. Two days later I read in an Edmonton newspaper that a grizzly had entered a tent in the Johnson Canyon camp ground and dragged out a ten-year old girl. The bear had bitten through the girl’s back killing her. When I read that sad account, wondering if things might have been different had the warden believed me and posted a warning, I remembered, as I have many times since, the grizzly’s fierce, angry eyes. There was absolutely nothing in them except implacable rage.

Looking into an animal’s eyes, you can see a number of things. A dog may reveal love or else shame (the “hangdog” look is very real). Pets seem to show several emotions along a narrow spectrum, depending upon how they have been trained and the degree to which they accept you as a pack-leader. A pet dog can show happiness in its eyes, but it is the same emotion whether it is a response to being petted and made much of, to being given the chance to play or to be taken on a walk. Tamed animals learn many, if not all, of their emotions. Dogs are so specifically bred that they often seem more like cultural artifacts than animals. (I know a bichon, an animal bred to mimic some of the traits that a male mind might imagine an ideal mistress to possess, who shows acute dismay when you leave the room, grabbing your legs with its forepaws, as if they were arms, and whimpering tragically.) An animal so artifactual in its character might be expected to reflect human affects rather than to express its own. Even if you take a dog’s emotions to be wholly its own, “natural” in some sense, they are still situated along a limited range. You probably would find it difficult to distinguish bliss or glee from simple happiness in your dog’s eyes. Ecstasy would not figure. A wild animal has a colder look. Both the condor and the grizzly had only the intense stare of an animal dealing with a threat or finding food. Thus when Jung says that you can see nature looking back at you through an animal’s eyes, he may have meant only the indifference, the sheer implacability, that I think I have seen. He may also have meant (as Berger seems to have understood him) that, by a wild animal’s eyes, you can estimate your own infinitesimal standing within nature’s vastness.

My third encounter with an animal’s eyes occurred three years before I met the condor in Chile. I had been walking with two friends, one a visitor from Australia, in Elk Island, Canada’s smallest national park. The park has elk and moose, but also herds, both Plains and Woods, of bison. Strolling along a path through a patch of muskeg, far from where we presumed that the park’s bisons were, we were startled to see a male bison’s head and shoulders rise above some bushes about fifty feet in front. The bison then moved quickly sideways onto the path. It snuffled and pawed the ground with its head down, its short horns pointed forwards. Despite its comical horns it was acting very much like a bull in a corrida just before it charges. My Australian friend, who had grown up in small rural towns in Victoria, made soothing, clucking noises just as he might have for a strayed cow or a sheep. Then the bison charged. Both my friends jumped into the swamp beside the path, but I was on the offside, farthest from refuge in the reeds. I made a quick step to my left and jumped. In the time that it had taken me to make that single step, the bison had reached me. As I dove into the swamp, I twisted and turned my headbackwards, catching a split-second glimpse of the bison, head still down, exactly where I had been only the instant before. (Later a Park warden explained that a bison can run faster than a horse in the short distance. A fact that causes considerable danger, and grief, for riders on mountain bikes who expect to be able to outrun the animal.) A minute or so later, I heard my friends rise up from the reeds. I raised my head, cut from the unexpectedly dry ground I had hit, and saw that the bison had turned around to face back up the trail. Its protuberant left eye swivelled backwards and stared at me. I thought that I saw anger, but also a flicker of triumph. Well, perhaps not. Triumph is too human an affect. A dog might show it, but not a bison. Nor could I say truthfully that its eyes were baleful, malevolent or any other moral quality. It might have been so, but I am wary of my own temptations towards anthropomorphism. What I am certain that I saw was rage and a sense of command. It had driven away dangers to its turf. Now it had only to brood upon us and consider whether we continued to pose a threat, continued to challenge its control. In its eyes, I saw my personal insignificance registered.

In each of these encounters, I had looked into a consciousness that did not respond to mine. Every human metaphor, each splinter of mythology, concerning eyes, what they reveal and what kinds of “double string” may link them to other eyes, became wildly inexact and unhelpful. I want to choose my word carefully, avoiding anthropomorphism and figurative excess, but I am left with “implacable.” Those eyes did not acknowledge me as (or as having) a consciousness. They simply excluded me while considering what to do next. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that I might have done to placate them. Their own eyes did reveal a consciousness, but of the kind that human beings do not like to meet, or even to consider outside of horror and true-crime fiction. It was the consciousness of an agent who moves forward without giving any thought to what another creature may feel or experience. Even the fantastic prosthetic eye that Pynchon imagines in V., a description of which I have quoted as an epigraph to this essay, has more moral content, more potential for double-stringing, than did the actual animal eyes I encountered. Myth-inscribed, provocatively zodiacal, that eye embodies what human beings think that they have seen and what they think makes sight valuable: not territory as such, but meaning.

Inevitably, one day we will encounter alien beings. They may not look like us. Indeed, before we have actually seen them, they may be utterly unimaginable. Suppose that will be the case: the aliens will resemble the humanoid characters on Star Trek more or less as eel sushi resembles a tuna fish sandwich with tomato and sprouts. Their bodies, whatever these may be, will have evolved (or otherwise shaped themselves) to solve many of the same problems that ours have done. The physical constants of the universe, time, space, gravity, energy and so forth, will be recorded in those bodies. Somewhere, they will have an organ that is sensitive to light and to information carried on the optical end of the spectrum. These may resemble eyes, of course, or something nearly as familiar, such as antennae, but they may also appear to us as pads or warts, or even as multiple open sores. We will recognize them by their function and call them “eyes.” And it is likely that we will see neither our own consciousness reflected in them nor any sign therein that we have status above insignificant thinghood. We will look into an implacable stare and understand that, somewhere, we have seen it before. (HEAT 13 (1999): 125-36).www.ozemail.com.au/~indyk/heat13.html

PARABLES and METABLES

The Queensland Mundungus

The Mundungus was first remarked upon by Captain James Cook’s shipboard naturalist, Joseph Banks. Banks described it a large green bird, common to northern Australia’s monsoonal coast lands and some of the islands of the barrier reef, characterized by its distinctive stench. The early explorers and settlers in the Capricornia region of Queensland claimed that the Mundungus was flightless and inhabited the dense eucalyptus forests of the coast. Many explorers reported seeing its bright green feathers flashing through the bush. Although they often tried to track it, following its sharp, feculent pong, the Mundungus always evaded capture. It proved to be a clever, elusive creature that allowed no one closer than its gut-churning effluvium.

In the 1820s, members of the Royal Society in London successfully identified the Mundungus with the Munchausen Giant Green Crane. It was held that it normally flew too high to be seen. The many reports of having glimpsed it flee through the bush were ascribed to imperfect sightings of the Cassowary. Nonetheless, settlers in the ever more populated northern regions of Queensland continued to report having caught flashes of the Mundungus, scuttling swiftly through the bush leaving behind only the nose-piercing stink of corpse-rot and fresh faeces. Since the Mundungus was never actually seen, but only smelt, many accounts of its appearance burgeoned and spread. It was held to be long and slimy, but also squat and putrescent. Later reports claimed that it was dark and lustreless. Those same accounts also suggested that it might be mottled as if spattered with undigested chyme. It was said to host repulsive vermin that crawled through its feathers and swam in its eyes. Grubs, maggots and pinkly blood-swollen worms slithered in and out of its anus and beak. Many settlers argued that it must be too small to be seen, and that it produced its abundant and nauseous stench in order to drive away predators. In the late nineteenth-century one explorer captured a Mundungus, but, it is said, he became so nauseated that, vomiting the entire contents of his stomach through his nose, he let it escape. Since then no one has actually seen a Mundungus, but the inhabitants of Queensland speak of it with horrified affection. (From Boundaries, and other fictions)

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Prophets

Several hundred years ago, a heresiarch of QueAng-QueAng spoke of the future. Soon he began to acquire many followers, all of whom were persuaded by his doctrine that there would be time to come. The future, he preached, must be different from the present otherwise it would be, as the orthodox doctrine of QueAng-QueAng has always held, merely the past’s dreary reiteration. Present time, he argued, is not only the reiteration of the past, but also the very condition of the future for which, ineluctably, it will become the past. Many of his followers journeyed out into the countryside of QueAng-QueAng, even into the most remote deserts and mountains, to preach the heresiarch's message that there would be a future and that it would be unlike the present. Often, they carried small kaleidoscopes as symbols of the ceaseless unfolding of time. Usually, these were made from brass, incised with symbols of change, such as the stars, the moon or waves. Occasionally they were made from wood, lovingly carved with figures from the Babylonian zodiac. Peasants would peer into the kaleidoscope, turning the end as the prophets had instructed them to do, and would see the shifting patterns of bright glass as the image of future moments. See, see, the prophets would urge, time, too, can change. The future will come.

QueAng-QueAng was, and has remained, a theocracy dedicated to the principle that there is no future, only a past endlessly relived in a succession of illusory presents. Nothing new is possible. There are no new ways, neither discoveries nor inventions exist. The ruling thearchs of QueAng-QueAng hated the prophets of the future with the intensity with which they loathed time itself. They devised hideous punishments for the prophets and, as if to show that only the past counted, the most awful were those that were recorded in the most ancient chronicles or which had survived in the garish tales of QueAng-QueAng's forlorn peasantry. The First Prophet was killed by having his skin flayed in tiny slender strips beginning with his toes and inching upwards to his scalp. As each strip was cut from him, it was placed in a pile near his head so that he could watch it grow. From time to time, the executioner asked him gloatingly how many small strips of flesh would be needed to make a future. His followers were mostly executed in the time-honoured fashion reserved for blasphemers. Small groups of citizens crouched around them as they lay staked out upon the ground and sucked their blood with metal straws. The dried husks of their bodies were wind-blown into the empty horizons, into oblivion.

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QueAng-QueAng’s Cuisine

In QueAng-QueAng, the basic diet is quite simple. The people eat beans and onions, usually fried in fish-skins, and a number of coarse grains. The grains are either eaten as a porridge or else soaked and then fried in fish-skins. The people of QueAng-QueAng resist spices and condiments. They have an old saying, “There is enough flavour in one fish-skin for two meals.” When travellers bring red or black pepper in the country, the people of QueAng-QueAng are invariably horrified. They say that a meal made with pepper is like a little death. The mouth grows numb and the flesh about the skull seems to dissolve. For that reason, and for many others, they regard travellers, and all outsiders, as dangerous emissaries from the lands of the dead.

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Fiction

In Paradise everything is known. The created world can keep no secrets from the eye of its Creator. Numerous angels–legions of celestial servants–keep thorough records of all that happens. There are records of all natural substances, processes, events and catastrophes.One angel records starquakes, another the movements of atomic particles. For Earth, there are records of all natural such matters as waves, puffs of air and shifting grains of sand. Since what human beings do with their imaginations is also a question of events within nature, one angel has been commanded to maintain an archive of all human fictions. Azazaath, the angel in charge of this archive, is often mocked by the other angels.His work, they laugh, does not record what happens, only what can be supposed or invented. Everyone in the entire universe, they jeer, knows that there are only a very finite number of fictional possibilities. There are only a mere thirty-seven possible plots, a dreary fact which even human beings recognize, and all fiction is constricted within that narrow range. Yet one day Azazaath discovers something new, the unknown but often hypothesized thirty-eighth plot. In all the universe, whatever happens, subject to the regular laws of nature, can be predicted. A previously unimagined plot defies all the strictures placed upon the imagination, whether by angels or men, to burst on the mind with more power than billion starquakes. Then the other angels have to admit that imagination is more unpredictable than reason; fiction, than nature. They stand about the celestial porticoes abashed.

* * * * *

Erudition

The man sits in a bright green kayak resting on the beach. It is an expensive piece of equipment, unmistakably. The last ripples of breaking waves swirl gently about the kayak. A hint of a fading cross current slides them weakly along the beach. The man holds a paddle in the ready position, poised to spring forward once a large wave catches the kayak and bears it out into the surf. He is doing what he has been told to do or else what he has read in a handbook. Instructions are bound to have come with a new kayak. However, the tide is ebbing now. There will be no surf this far up the sand for several hours. He leans slightly forward, obviously tensed, his neck stretched turtle-like beneath his white Tilly hat, hoping to catch the next big wave. Occasionally, he prods the sand with the paddle eager to reach the receding surf. Mostly he sits patiently, waiting as only a man can do who has learned his lessons well.

* * * * *

The Syntax of Worldhood

Imagine an amorous couple. Call them Jennifer and Jason. Their bodies fit together, she says, so well. They are, he says, an item, a perfect couple, even to the edge of doom. But there is something wrong. They have begun to disagree. Occasionally, they quarrel. Jennifer wishes a lot. She says things like, “I wish you hadn’t” (forgotten to call, sneezed at the restaurant, come too quickly). He says crazy things like, “Lets go there” (to Spain, to Istanbul, to the future). What has gone wrong?

Their bodies may fit, nature so cleverly having designed the bio-mechanisms of coupling, but their imaginations do not, nurture having neglected the necessary condition of being a couple. Jennifer thinks in the optative, especially the optative past. (“I do wish you hadn’t done that.”) Jason, much as his ancient namesake, likes to fantasize the future. (“I want to climb Olympias Mons! Or plunge beneath the ice on Europa.”) Jason inhabits the future subjunctive.

People possess characteristic grammatical moods. Perhaps whole cultures do; certainly, fictional worlds do. Think of Hamlet. Everyone in that world, but especially its suspicious hero, asks questions. It is a world, punctuated by hundreds of questions, almost entirely in the interrogative mood. Individuals also exist largely in the interrogative mood. Jennifer and Jason would not like them much. Neither the optative nor the future subjunctive gets along well in the teeth of questions. How can people manage together when their construction of reality may be as different as alien worlds? Jennifer could never understand why her relationship with Jason fell apart when their bodies had been so apt for each other. She overlooked their very different imaginations. They imagine, and hence experience, the world differently. Jason’s future subjunctive is a land of glorious possibilities and it is delightful to be there even if you never can be. Jennifer’s optative is a more reactive, and a far more constrictive, mood. It gives her mind the narrow, punitive perspective of a parole officer. (“I do wish that you hadn’t wasted your time yesterday imagining life on Mars.”) But Jason’s mind wanders loosely, almost as if it had no discipline at all, on the brilliant, but impractical, horizon of possibilities. How could they ever have got along?

Some people shape their experience in the pluperfect subjunctive. That is not at all like Jason’s imagination. These people look backwards and try to imagine what might have been. If they had only turned right, not left, on that fateful day. If only Hitler had not invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, or if only Caesar had not crossed the Rubicon, what wonderful alternatives might have blossomed into existence? Try the pluperfect subjunctive mood as the basis of a long-term relationship! Other people, usually canny and plotting, imagine in the conditional mood. If I do this, then she must do that, and so on. It is hard to live long in the cold embrace of calculation. Yet there are also many who prefer to imagine the world’s experience in the future conditional mood. If, having done such and such, I were then to do X, what Y might follow? Because future conditionalists are less tied to the dust and grime of today, and certainly not to the dreary rethinking of what might be if only you hadn’t done what you did yesterday, they are more fun to live with. Jason might even have a long-term relationship with a woman whose characteristic grammatical mood was the future conditional.

Neither Jennifer nor Jason can spend much time with the most common grammatical mood, the indicative. Of course, there are past, present and future indicatives, but (lending a cast to a human imagination) they are all narrowly focussed, earth-grubbing like a pig snuffling for truffles. The indicative cannot abide the future subjunctive. What horizons are those, it asks, that cannot be seen? It has nearly as much difficulty with the optative. What is the good of wishing? What is the point in crying for a saltless sea? Or for one in which sharks or killer whales have not evolved? An imagination shaped by the indicative weighs facts and gets on with things, usually with expectations of profit or other advantage.

Jennifer and Jason ought to have seen a counsellor, not one who might understand the woes of marriage but one who could have looked deeply into grammatical difference. They should have (could have, might have, would have, and will have) spent less time examining each other’s genitalia and much more probing their respective imaginations. But for now they have slipped into that familiar human ocean of wandering islands and unforeseen monsters. Without understanding their imaginations, they (do, can, must) only drift farther apart in the swishing tides of vanishing foreshores.

* * * * *

An Ancient Tale

An old story reports that once Menippus Kynicus was aboard a vessel coasting the islands of the Cyclades. As the ship came in close to a small island near Delos, Menippus saw a crowd on the beach moving as if they were involved in a brawl. As the ship came in closer, it was possible to see that the crowd was actually a number of young men apparently beating a larger number of old women. Menippus wondered about this and asked the captain to bring his ship into the surf so that what was happening on the beach could be seen more clearly. Once they were in the surf, Menippus could see that the young men were attempting to force objects down the throats of the old women. He leapt from the ship and plunged ahead through the surf to find out what was taking place on the beach. When he came up close, he saw that each young man had one or two old women by the arms and was doing his best to thrust an egg down her throat. Menippus was amazed and as he tried to figure out the significance of what he was seeing, he noticed a peasant at the end of the beach who was also watching the scene. Menippus went up to the peasant and asked him the meaning of the young men’s abuse of the old women. “Oh,” the peasant replied, “it isn’t much, a common sight on this island. It is only the philosophers trying to teach their grandmothers to suck eggs.”

* * * * *

Summer Pain

The summer that I turned sixteen was always warm and pleasant. That is how I remember it. No storms. No fights. My friends and I rode our motorcycles to small towns where we would hang out for an hour or two. Occasionally we rode to parks and swam in the lakes. We went on dates with girlfriends and enjoyed furtive sex in the back-seats of our fathers’ cars or on blankets in the bushes near where we had parked our bikes. When writers look back on summers like that they use words such as “hazy,” “lazy” or “slow.” They would be as accurate as other words that I might choose. I don’t actually remember much about that time. I read very little and gave absolutely no thought to school or to my “future.”. I must have seemed surly, self-absorbed and insolent to my parents. Like most adolescents I was probably only lost in the lazy fug of existence, hoping or pretending that nothing would ever change. That I would not have to grow up.

Late in the summer, probably towards the end of July, I learned that a girl in my class had disappeared. People whispered that she had been kidnaped. I had known her rather vaguely since seventh grade. We had never gone out together, but we had talked a number of times. Once I had offered her a ride on the pillion of my bike, but she had declined. She had been good at English and in eighth grade she had read poems she had written to the class. I had pretended to laugh, or snigger, with the other boys, but actually I had liked them. She had a lot of curly brown hair and an engaging smile. I liked her without actively liking her. When I heard that she had disappeared, I was shocked and worried about her a bit. But not much. Someone said that she had run off with a boy from another town to get married. No much was said about her, but what was said was always different. Everyone had his or her own take.

The girl I was going out with at that moment and with whom, always against obstacles, I had occasional sex, told me that missing girl had been kidnaped by “white slavers” and was being kept in a whorehouse in New Orleans where she was made to give blow-jobs all day long. She had heard this from her aunt who “knew.” I had no definite views of my own, though I did lean towards the opinion that she had run off to get married. Girls did that lot in our small town, or at least it seemed that they did. I felt a few small twinges of envy thinking that this “nice” girl, rather pretty and quite smart, would have wanted someone (not me) so much that she would have left school and run off with him. But, on the whole, no one talked much about her disappearance. It was probably in the newspapers and on the radio, but adolescents do not follow the news except in the mode of gossip. Then we heard that she had been found. She had been kidnaped after all.

The older brother of a friend, a boy about nineteen had wrestled her into his car and taken her to a fishing cabin on a near-by lake. He had kept her there for five or six days subjecting her (as we say now) to sexual abuse. He had definitely raped her and made her do other things about which no one was ever clear. Of course, when we discussed the case, we would always say only that he had fucked her, not having a clear enough model of sex to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary, loving and unloving, sex. (It would take us all a couple of more years to learn that.) His younger brother, my friend, fell from sight. We avoided him when we saw him, or greeted him with falsely cheerful, Hi Theres and How’s it goings. We treated him pretty much as we would have someone whose parents had died or were dying. We lacked the grace to confront grief and offer solace. The girl didn’t come back to school in the Fall and I heard that she had moved away to live with her older sister and finish school there. I never saw her again, but I did think about her quite often.

When the trial was held several months later, we heard that the boy had had a crush on her for the whole year. He had tried to ask her out, but she hadn’t wanted to go out with a boy so much older (three or four years) than herself. The story that we heard, passed down and inevitably distorted, from the courthouse, was that he had kidnaped her to make her love him. He thought by making her have sex with him that she would have to fall in love. His plan was that once she had fallen in love with him, they would drive off together and marry. I suppose that he imagined them living happily ever after, never talking about how he had courted her, and never feeling regrets for the families they would have left behind. How could anyone have thought so simplistically about such a crushingly important event? Many years later, his brother told me that the intention had been simple, even straight-forward. He had wanted the girl to fall in love with him and then he hoped to drive away, never to return, to find a home in Arizona. He had imagined them working together happily on a ranch.

I had come back from the university to see my mostly-ignored hometown and met my old friend on the street. Never having gone to university, he was working as a shipping clerk. After we had exchanged some perfunctory information about ourselves, he glanced quickly sideways and mentioned, his voice dropping a decibel or two, that his brother had “come home.” I must have looked startled, but I remember gabbling That’s great and How is he, and perhaps one two other stupidities. The brother was taking it easy, but he hoped to go to work soon, maybe at a service station out on the highway. We talked a bit about his brother’s prospects, and then he told me that his brother had never wanted to hurt the girl he had kidnaped. He was just “in love” and wanted to run off with her to live on a ranch. I tried to imagine that ranch, but I failed. Images of Roy Rogers and Dale kept getting in the way. What had this unlikely rapist ever known about ranch life, I wondered, that he hadn’t learned through watching movies?

After that encounter, I never returned to my hometown. My parents had moved away and I didn’t know anyone there that I would have enjoyed meeting. I very seldom thought about my friend’s brother or wondered what had happened to him. Two or three years later, I told a girlfriend about him, looking for the whimsical side of things, but that had been a mistake. She had been horrified that I had known a rapist, even tangentially. It seemed as if my indirect knowledge of this person might have polluted me. She definitely was uninterested in whimsy. After that difficult contretemps, I seldom mentioned my friend’s brother to anyone and mostly forgot him. I even forgot the summer when the kidnaping occurred. It would have been hard to evoke the sheer laziness of the days or the way my Triumph motorcycle had come to fit me like a centaur’s body. My girlfriend of that summer, whom I had desired and loved with monotonous passion, had lost her face and most of her features except for her long black hair. I would not have been able to recall a single characteristic word or phrase, though I did remember her occasional sexual responses.

One evening many years after that time, in still another city, I abruptly remembered the young man who had kidnaped and raped my likeable classmate. I had been sitting at a bar with a woman I had only just met running through the usual gamut of specious topics for men and women who want to draw close. Suddenly, in response to nothing I had said, she asserted that “at least eighty percent of North American women” have been abused or raped before they are twenty. I wondered where she had found that stat, and she assured me it was from recent research in sociology. Therapists deal with the victims of sexual abuse in such numbers that it had to be counted as a plague, like AIDS or the Black Death. I remembered my friend’s brother at that point. An image of an awkward, gangling young man whom I remembered best as a second-stringer on the high school basketball team when I had been in junior high. Had he been an agent of a plague? Had he only been a misguided lover?

My new acquaintance told me that the motive for rape was power. Men desired, demanded in fact, that they be able to exercise power over women. I reflected, knowing enough not to argue the case, that this must be so in some instances, not in others. Had the boy in my hometown been seeking power? I had never thought so. I had actually believed that he had been driven into a mindless action by desire. He could not have known what he was doing, confusing as all we boys did that summer, physical sex with love. Even the girls seemed to believe that. My girlfriend, who had ridden quite a few times into the countryside with me looking for bushes or thickets of trees where we could lay my blanket, had once told me, speaking of another girl with odd tastes for repulsive boys, that there were some girls who “as soon as they let a guy fuck them, fall in love.” We all believed something like that.

Sitting at the bar, I tried to tell my acquaintance about the kidnaping and rape that had taken place the summer I was sixteen. She eyed me coldly, watching, I knew, for signs that I sympathized with the rapist. Ice-shards flecked menacingly in her eyes. I could see that our relationship was not going to happen. My mind was crowded with images of that summer and I felt that I was talking to her like a second person, another man whose mouth worked independently of my own mind. And then I imagined my friend’s brother like a fluttering bird. He scurried and flapped weakly across the floor of the fishing cabin, looking for safety. The bleak winds of existence blew over him and ruffled his runty feathers. What power had he exercised?

No power. I couldn’t imagine him other than as weak, confused and uncertain. He must have had motivations. At his trial, the prosecutor would have “shown” his motivation, his legally-defined intention. He would have had the clear intention to kidnap and rape. But why? Not surely, I reflected, looking into my companion’s angry face, merely to exercise power. Though clearly, he had exercised physical power in making her enter his car and then in keeping her a prisoner in the cabin. Probably he used physical power, though I didn’t like to imagine it, in forcing the girl to have sex with him. Had the exercise of power been a motivation? I believed his brother’s account that he had wanted to marry her and go off to Arizona to live on a ranch. That is, I believed that his motivation must have been vague, ill-considered and, in the form of movies, literary. I also knew that, had I been his lawyer, I could never have shown his weakness and confusion to have been an intention. Could I have shown anything? Nothing, I thought, that would have had standing in the court. I might l have shown that existence had frightened him. But then whom does it not terrify? I would have tried to show that he had been terrified of growing older, of having to make choices, of having to know what to do next. I would have stood in the courtroom, facing the jury like Perry Mason or all the other great TV lawyers, and shown that my client had feared never being loved. When he had actually grabbed the girl and forced her into his car, he had first only wanted to talk. He had offered her a ride (it may have been raining slightly, a fine drizzle at most, that afternoon) and, when she had refused, stepped out of the car only to talk. So he had grabbed her on an impulse, though behind that had lurked, never the desire for power, the terror of existence. And then everything had happened swiftly. Quick decisions and confused strategies.

In the cabin, the runty-feathered bird had fluttered about, looking for a way to Arizona that would have been, really, the way to self-confidence. It dodged about and ran in erratic circles as if a giant hand were reaching out, fingers flexing and stabbing, in a closing grasp. The hand, cold as death, exuding its chill stench, nearly caught the bird, but always, miraculously it seemed, its grasp failed. Vaguely, the frightened bird saw a place it could not reach and a life it could not have. It saw a path and took it, a quick thoughtless scurry along a false way. A terrible error, but the closing hand only raked it, deeply though not fatally, and tore its wings apart. Home, I said inconsequentially to the woman I had just met, is always the place you yearn for even if you have never seen it. Even if I had never been to Arizona, it could be my home if only I yearned for it enough. When she got up to leave, abruptly and without any signs of affection, she must have thought that I was mad. Or evil.

* * * * *

Gestures

In Lisbon once a man sat down opposite me in a small restaurant and pulled his lower right eyelid down, exposing a small expanse of pink flesh. Why did he do this? Think about gestures made with the hands in general. There are many such moves and they vary, though seldom entirely, from culture to culture. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, Pistol gives the “fig of Spain” to Fluellen, a rude gesture made by sticking the thumb up between the first and second fingers. Giving someone the “fig” (the figo or the “Spanish fig”) in Shakespeare’s England would be an insult, rather like give someone the “finger” today, unless it were done “in play” or ignorance. (President George Herbert Walker Bush, sitting in an open car moving in a motorcade up Pitt Street in Sydney, Australia, thought that he was making a Churchillian victory signal to the crowds along the way. He held up two fingers in a V sign, but, alas, forgot, or never knew, that when Churchill did this he always reversed his hand so that his palm was out. Instead, what President Bush did was to give the Australian people the finger which, in that country, is a two fingered jab, not a signal digit gesture. The Australian crowd was stunned and amazed.) In play, or ignorance, it seems clear enough, all may be forgiven.

Still, there is a problem about all gestures. Would they have any meaning if they were not already determined by a cultural rule? Suppose that a gesture is made with deadly serious intent–to insult, to hurt, to solicit a fight or a duel–and without the least suspicion of fun, chivvying, carnivalesque mockery. It could not have meaning unless some rule, or rules, hidden in the social fabric of the culture made it possible, gave it significance and, most importantly, indicated who could, and who could not, be insulted in this fashion. (Yoxu would not give the “fig" to the Queen nor the “finger” to your children.) Moves are determined by rules; rules are not easily, or perhaps fully, knowable. You can speak in your native language, no doubt lucidly and well, but how fully have you grasped its discourse? Your command of its parole may be superb, but what, really, do you understand of its langue?

Now imagine further the little scene in Lisbon. I was sitting in a small restaurant on a back street in Lisbon (oh, many years ago), trying to read a local newspaper while I ate. Abruptly I noticed a very large man, sitting at a table cater-corner to my own, who was looking directly at me while pulling down his lower right eyelid with his thumb. A great deal of pink flesh beneath his eyeball was revealed, though to what end I could hardly even guess. He repeated the gesture several times, and each time I grew more apprehensive (wondering what kind of overture, or move, he was attempting to make). Eventually, seeing that I didn’t understand him, he pointed at the waitress, a lovely young woman. I inferred that his gesture was intended to call my attention to the waitress and, somewhat later in Coimbra, querying Portuguese friends, I learned that it was a common gesture. It was a means, in no way simple, by which men noted the presence of a pretty woman. Pulling the eye open conveyed the suggestion that the other person should pay attention, “cast his eye” perhaps; the exposed pink flesh beneath the eyeball metaphorized the pinkness of the female genital slit. Thus the gesture, made by one man for another, indicated that the second man should look for a pretty woman. I had no idea of the rules that made this cultural gesture meaningful and when I learned (of) them, I found them quite opaque. Months later when I returned home, I had an occasion to use this Portuguese gesture “in play”. No one understood it. When I explained it, everyone agreed that it was thoroughly disgusting. Yet it had not been disgusting in Lisbon and not a single person in Portugal with whom I discussed the gesture had thought that it was.

* * * * *

Magical Storytelling

Once upon a time, not so long ago, nor so far away, in a village on the pampas, on the prairies, along interminable Pacific beaches, there lived two brothers. They were like commonplace real life brothers who got up each day and did what they were used to doing: eating normally, walking in more or less straight lines, feeling the winds of air and heat that blew, seeing within the variable translucencies of light, and living in the linear unfolding of time. Then one day they grew tired on this ordinary existence. It came to seem dun-coloured, dreary, and ever so scruffy. It was dismally predictable. And so they began to invent fresh existences. The first brother began by asking whether it was truly necessary to walk in straight lines from one point to another. Perhaps, he reasoned, it might make more sense to walk in curved lines, since they might prove to be more interesting, or even (in the long run) quicker. After all, he reflected, the universe sometimes appears to be composed of chunks of curved space, so curved lines might make more sense than straight ones. He went on to think about other things that he had been taught to accept, all very ordinary matters, but which might be only assumptions that could be changed: the notion that one line, and only one, might pass through a given point; that distances between points are constant; that planes have surfaces; that time passes linearly. All these workaday assumptions about human existence could be inverted and strange, but profoundly exciting, innovations would follow. New Worlds would emerge, open to exploration yet blankly closed to the commonplace vision of the rejected assumptions.

Meanwhile, the second brother began to weary of the undeviating predictability of life. He grew tired of the heaviness of gravity, of the solidity of substance, of the tedious on-goingness of cause and effect, and of the sensation of heated air that seemed to be the blowing of the wind. He began to imagine worlds in which things floated at will, in which substance dissolved and then flowed together again like quicksilver, in which events called out meaningfully to, but did not accuse, one another. He began to suppose that all human experience could be counterfactual. Suppose (he mused) that the wind were made of light. Suppose that the sky could be made of flowers and the clouds were bundles of soft petals, then rain might be the perfume of roses or of poppies. Let us suppose that the winds blow (or illumine) the embryos of desire.

In this way the two brothers began to reinvent the world. But it is important to remark that they did so in very different manners without paying much attention to others, precursors perhaps, who had tried to create similar reinventions in the past. The first brother began by assuming as single proposition that was contrary to reason and to the likelihoods of experience. The propositions that he invented were often antirational, but he was able to draw from them fascinating consequences. Once, he had made them, it seemed, extraordinary worlds became possible, and narratives about these worlds, before unimaginable, now flowed in his voice. All the it-goes-without-sayings that he had grown up believing began to fade (either into insignificance or into the vast volume of literary conventions). Thus he was able to assume that a library could be infinite, that a man might lose his ability to forget detail (and hence to make abstractions), that God might suspend time for one man but not for others, that a coin could have only one side, that a book might have as many pages as there are grains of sand, not one of which could ever be found again, or that might be a world (call it Tlön) in which existence arose from perception. Once he had invented these propositions, they began to function in his fresh accounts like axioms in fantastic geometries. When one accepted them, one could not avoid where they led.

Now the second brother shared the desire to begin freshly and to discard what had become dustily familiar. But he followed a different method of re-invention. He began by imagining spaces in which common and uncommon things existed side by side: folks died, grew old, had children, were born, yet flowers rained from the skies, human persons metamorphosed into animals or exotic plants, ghosts and chimeras abounded, and the mind lent the structure of obsessions to things so that the world became, in its re-invention, a labyrinth of emblems. In the second brother's narratives there were no single axioms from which everything descended, or from which the world hung, but there were instead two codes that were interwound, twisted in a grip closer than blood and mind, in a tight choreography of antitheses. The one code put things into place quite normally (naturally and explicably) so that people were shot dead, had ambitions, were deserted, became lonely and sought sublimations such as, say, making fish from gold. The second code organized events so that any number of strange things might occur: butterflies might follow a man everywhere, another might swim to the bottom of the sea and find lost villages where life continued or where ancient turtles snoozed by the thousands waiting, still another might build a lighthouse out of ice. In the imagined space of the second brother's narratives, the possibilities of two worlds were always co-present (their codes tightly interwound) and clung to each other fiercely.

Both brothers learned to tell stories about their reinvented worlds with a straight face, without shrugs, secret winks, or other hints that it was, after all, just a tale (the world had not been reinvented, only temporarily disguised). Some people thought that their talent as storytellers was simply this knack of telling about their newly imagined worlds without drawing attention to them as out of the ordinary, of giving their worlds narrators who could never raise the question of how it could all be the way it is, who never raised problems or suggested that anyone should look for explanations. There never were any explanations because none were ever required. Their worlds easily generated their own illusive conviction.

No doubt there are always people (more than policemen, politicians and pedagogues care to admit) who would like to reinvent the scruffy earth. If they cannot do it for themselves, except in sleep or when the fog is thickest, then they beg others to do it for them. And so the two brothers quickly gathered disciples, followers like scattered knights, who swore to reinvent their own worlds according to the rules the brothers had created. As their followings grew, the number of disciples increased, many uncertainties stuck to the brothers' fame. They became associated with strangers, their origins lost, and (worst of all) they became confused with one another. There were some adventurers among the new worlds who claimed that the brothers were actually just one person who possessed a single magic spell; others, that they lived in this place or that, making gazetteers of all the real world's invisible cities; still others that they were imposters, panvestites, masters of bunco and Buncombe. As often happens, a myth, or a network of little myths, sprang up about the brothers and they became at once more and less than their true disciples knew them to be. They were everywhere and everyone spoke much of them and of their power and influence. But who were they? really, everyone asked, who really are they? really, who? (From In Palamedes’ Shadow; rpt. in Boundaries, and other fictions)

Further references

[Robert] Rawdon Wilson, “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Eds.Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. 209-33. http://www.dukeupress.edu/