cabrillo

I meet the fellow on the way from here to then. I know it is best that he fails to recognize me, however it hurts a little when this occurs. The greatest shock is when a conversation starts between us two strangers. I don’t know who speaks first, but my haunted look probably initiates the pleasantries. Our uncanny kinship brings us both into deeper conversational waters than we can tread.

I play to his ignorance, dancing in the fear of discovery. But soon my questions become a herd directed through the gates of time. Memory coalesces into answers he can’t give. He assembles words that frustrate him in their impotence. And I know this boy who pretends to be a man. 

With a tremble he shares a broken tale. Expectation seizes him as he awaits my reply. And I break his heart when I give false praise. But for me it is a dead thing that haunts me in resurrection.

This child fears the wrong things in his beauty. I want to warn him of the real monsters. But he has to break in the proper hands. It is his hopes that crush me. The songs in his step are a pied piper. They prance him along cliffs and briar. He has stumbled often already but I can see his future abrasions. 

I lose the words of his voice as my mind wanders the years. My eyes watch the scarless hands weave a word. They cut the air in expression. And I forecast their toil. I find them incapacitated tomorrow. 

Then my mind wends selfish, and I wonder what he sees. Perhaps a prescience keeps him from inquiry. Does he know? I know this is not what he wants. I know it in my bones. But would he be proud to follow the phantom’s steps?

The question I can never ask breaks my mask: I excuse myself before my emotion unwraps itself before my stranger. I take hurried limping steps without looking back. I add a cut to him in the confusion of his fellowship. But I must flee.

I find myself wandering in stilted steps. I am far afield. I fight the battle of this question. I pretend to know the lad but his answer scares me. I feel a promised shame in the mystery. 

But I remember the hope in his eyes. Battered and bruised, a smile slants his starboard. I hear his laugh in tears. I remember the dead stories reborn into new. I know the love crafted into him by the wind. Deserts ache with beauty that some struggle to see. 

And I realize his answer is mine.

window

The darkness of the here is warmed by the eternal distance. Boats of adventure and freedom are behind the closed portal. Enclosed above and before by green life, dark in its shadow. Friedrich longs for what is before. Sadness and hope entertwine. Beauty amidst shadow. Removal and distance, with a longing gentle air.

The decay of day ushers our mind to eternity. Repose without peace. Man’s craft before God’s. Cycles unending. And the plight of a soul. Upon the border. Stuck in the portal. Limited expanse. Concealed glory. 

Our gates to home. Ascending light as the artist wonders. Hide our wonder. In stone and mystery. Where do we tread? What is withheld? Do we bind the dead or are we bound from the height? Can the living understand the gateway? Walls shroud our sight.

Fear and wonder at play. A thrust down and a cast upward. The porthole to a golden dissolution. Our theater exhibited by three. Disdain, despair, and disport. Alien lands confound but concentrate our view. 

Limits. Verdant but confined. We are given a promise with no result. Unless we fall in and find a barque of dreams. What are you looking for? What is through the door? Does she call her beloved, son or lover? Does her slant give motion? Contrapposto to the vessel. Escape? Does she travel the seas with her mind, trapped in a gown of allure. 

The world without limits. Door ajar. Gates asplinter. Void. Black bands of fear. No ship transports our monk. Deathly rock, mystery before, God ascendant. The Expanse stretches Its arms. It smiles death. But He said, “Come.”

All paintings by Caspar David Friedrich

volant

 Severian

“”Through the window and door I could look out unseen on all the bright life of tree and shrub and grass outside. The linnets and rabbits that fled when I approached could neither hear nor scent me there. I watched the storm crow build her nest and rear her young two cubits from my face. I saw the fox trot by with upraised brush; and once that giant fox, taller than all but the tallest hounds, that men call the maned wolf, loped by at dusk on some unguessable errand from the ruined quarters of the south. The caracara coursed vipers for me, and the hawk lifted his wings to the wind from the top of a pine. 

“A moment suffices to describe these things, for which I watched so long. The decades of a saros would not be long enough for me to write all they meant to the ragged apprentice boy I was. Two thoughts (that were nearly dreams) obsessed me and made them infinitely precious. The first was that at some not-distant time, time itself would stop . . . the colored days that had so long been drawn forth like a chain of conjuror’s scarves come to an end, the sullen sun wink out at last. The second was that there existed somewhere a miraculous light—which I sometimes conceived of as a candle, sometimes as a flambeau—that engendered life in whatever objects it fell upon, so that a leaf plucked from a bush grew slender legs and waving feelers, and a rough brown brush opened black eyes and scurried up a tree.”

—The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

Once more we see life from the tomb. Even birth. From the home of ship, rose, and fount. If symbols live, our apprentice is declaring allegiance once more. The escutcheon of a procured nobility heralds the promise of his days. 

But cast in the light and darkness of his visions. The End and Beginning. The expected demise with a rebirth to greater life. Our humble narrator of the neverforget is framing the quest with nary a wizard at hearth (nor sepulcher). Casting visions from the tomb, our lost boy, sees the conclusion but the hope.

New better life we know the Conciliator gifts through talons. Splinters. Promise. Dead raised. 

“Darkness closed over me, but out of the darkness came the face of a woman, as immense as the green face of the moon. It was not she who wept—I could hear the sobs still, and this face was untroubled, and indeed filled with that kind of beauty that hardly admits of expression. Her hands reached toward me, and I at once became a fledgling I had taken from its nest the year before in the hope of taming it to perch on my finger, for her hands were each as long as the coffins in which I sometimes rested in my secret mausoleum. They grasped me, pulled me up, then flung me down, away from her face and from the sound of sobbing, down into the blackness until at last I struck what I took to be the bottom mud and burst through it into a world of light rimmed with black.”

 —The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

Fenrir accounts the baptism an ejection from the underworld. Its Mother casting out the refuse. In death he hears the dead. Who keens? His lost matron? The coming one? Has time folded? 

Nenuphar crown the burial, and decorate the deceased. Life amongst the mire. In contrast to our torturers bloom. Yet both discourage and repel. 

To what is our Jack Ketch reborn? To follow our Locksley? It seems this sunders his home. No longer at rest. He descends to burst forth. He fell through the underworld. There was no work of climbing nor willful aspiration. Our severian is swept along by bandits, symbols, stygian mothers. Visions promises his path. The coin his duty. The coat of arms his call. 

Guiltless? Worthless? But it is his tongue . . . carved by the wily wolf. 

isengrim

  Resurrection and Death

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”

The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

We wait on the baptism of death and invert the process of life’s end, but the cunning Wolf decides this is the Moment. We are promised the water but we get the grave. Symbols transforming beyond knowledge. Our little apprentice is now a thing greater than himself. In his revivified corpse, he spies a corpse fly. 

New life purchased by a purpose dimly held. 

Why? I suppose the cunning one elicits this. This or surrender. Mastery or tomfoolery? 

But is our knowledge mystic? Are we seeking madness? Where do the words pivot? Idea to thing. Where’s the step? Or it is no idea lest it enact? We can discount the nonactive symbol as nothing at all? Is this Isengrim’s claim? 

And then there is the divide of the lupine and the severe. Which is whom? Which is more unreliable? 

“Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. I understood the principal intuitively that night as I heard the last volunteer swing the gate closed behind us.”

The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

What, in the gates closing, sparks the sensation? Locked to a grave, by darkness held: reality becomes the pockets of diffused light. Upon narrow bones he runs to night. Was it all fusing before his fear? And so our Locksley a beacon in the entwining morass? And fresh from rebirth phenomenon questioned. 

These connect and invite but is the culprit caught? A parlor room accusation? Isengrim grins from his grave. 

Here we start. Where do we end? The throne of course. But of what substance?

erebus

The bedlam of the street gave me peace. I could not hold onto the voice for the crash of voices scurrying around me. Cascade of color a running tide ushered between market stalls as the breaking rocks. I let the current draw me, releasing my will to the throng. 

After losing myself in the running stream of countless turns and eddies, I found the river drawn to a pool in an open court. The public space collected its particles of people around a stage that lifted a stone above the ground. The gravity was a pantomime of two boys with the down of manhood. They cantered and tumbled to music I could not find. I cast about to hear the timbrel but even the din of mob was stilled save for a voice. 

As I began to listen, I found the troupe performed to the faceless words. This was their music and rhythm. The unseen speaker spoke as a gentle bird, in transcending simplicity. How his story could reach my ears seemed a miracle of wind, but bodiless it entranced us each. A love was proffered, in veil and faith. Words upon words, bricks upon mortar. 

The disembodied voice told of court and castle, and hunt with danger. Familiar and common, I fought the fog of my malaise to understand the street's tale. The nameless knight of the stage began to coalesce as his misfortune mounted. Soon fear came to unbalance my confusion as the hapless hero sustained more descript wrongs. And before the narrator unveiled the knights colors, before the knight's actor impressed his wound, I knew the man.

"The Sanguine Knight." My heart clutched at the secret pronounced. The speaker continued to wend a mindless path through the mass while stacking the tragedies upon the hurts. An actor died in the arms of the red chevalier. Betrayal and flight, saw a leap from the stage. Hurried chase circled the audience, enclosing them in the intrigue. 

My body felt the press of human water as they tightened around the story. A little boy clutched at me thinking me his father. In horror I trembled for fear of the child and broke from him. I fought the waves but they were an enraptured wall. 

The tale never faltered. Soon the chivalry of our knight was questioned. His faith might be hollow. Perhaps his curse merited. His near drowning met with some exultant cheers. His madness leaving the believers doubting. 

I surrendered my retreat. The tragic saga had me bound. Instead the whirl of the crowd began to pull. I clutched the pommel, hiding my sin. And my feet again took me in currents not my own. 

As the story reached the forest keep, our Sanguine Knight, bereft of his name, crawled to the dais. And I nearly fell into the open. The moving hole of the narrator had found me. 

"And sylvan king laughed a laugh

While rest upon his hippograff"

I fell upon my side in duress. The blade clattered upon the stone. 

" 'Urchin, villein, and dastard son

You step upon feyéd doom' "

The speaker, with his ageless eyes, never broke his telling. But he stooped to offer aid.

" 'With naught but dirt to crown you

The final question, is she true?' "

Troilus and Criseyde Frontispiece

cornstarch

The years had decomposed him. For a breathing thing it was strange to find him so transparent. I thought it curious but my attention so quickly passed through his gaps. It was like his molecules were lazy in their attraction and they spun a little uncertain. This new relation of matter would have shook the scientific world if anyone cared. 

It is hard to recall our meeting. It might have been at university. Or a work function. He is a vapor in my thoughts. He is like a ghost that haunts the sparse memories of my dreams, and waking scatters his details. It is such a curious experience: a hole in the mind that sucks up any pursuit. I lose it all the more I quest for it. 

But your question reassembled a few of his fragments. Why do you ask? Did you actually use his name? What was it? That... I've never heard that name before. But his specter haunts the edges of my mind. Perhaps, you could tell me why you are looking for him. What was his name? No. Perhaps.

arda

Some bear the residuals of a child's arbitrary love, some are a speck that invited an epic in my mind, some are the tragedy, some the intrigue. A list of oddities, for certain. Many loves were lost to the limits of a number.

30. Balin

29. Tulkas

28. Theoden

27. Yavanna

26. Maedhros

25. Gil-galad

24. Elrohir

23. Elladan

22. Denethor

21. Elendil

20. Maeglin

19. Oromë

18. Nienna

17. Huan

16. Túrin Turambar

15. Aulë

14. Aragorn

13. Peregrin

12. Melian

11. Beleg

10. Bard

"'Arrow!' said the bowman. 'Black arrow! I have saved you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain go now and speed well!'"

9. Eomer

"Stern now was Éomer's mood, and his mind clear again. He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come thither; for he thought to make a great shield-wall at the last, and stand, and fight there on foot till all fell, and do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor, though no man should be left in the West to remember the last King of the Mark. So he rode to a green hillock and there set his banner, and the White Horse ran rippling in the wind."

8. Morwen

“They sat beside the stone, and did not speak again; and when the sun went down Morwen sighed and clasped his hand, and was still; and Hurin knew that she died.He looked down at her in the twilight and it seemed to him that the lines of grief and cruel hardship were smoothed away.”

7. Frodo

“There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?”

6. Finrod Felagund

"Lo! sudden there was rending sound
of chains that parted and unwound,
of meshes broken. Forth there leaped
upon the wolvish thing that crept
in shadow faithful Felagund,
careless of fang or mortal wound.” 

5. Beregond

"I am no captain. Neither office nor rank nor lordship have I, being but a plain man of arms of the Third Company of the Citadel."

4. Gimli

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”

3. Luthien

"Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world"

2. Húrin

"... and each time that he slew Hurin cried: ‘Aure entuluva! Day shall come again!’ Seventy times he uttered that cry; but they took him at last alive...”

1. Faramir

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

All Art by Jian Guo