...I saw a city steadily sinking... ceaselessly stumbling on

Another city I went to was perhaps the most depressing place I've ever been. I was sent there by a former alderman, who wanted me to help them rebuild. It had been steadily sinking since its founding. You see, the founders built it on a swamp. They knew it would keep sinking, but they built it there anyway out of defiance. They were clever though, and the ingenious architects built machines to hoist the buildings from the swamp before they sunk too far.

Later generations had forgotten these machines, and built stilted structure on stilted structure, hoping to stop the sinking. Often, buildings will sink unevenly, and the stilts (or the structure itself) will break, and the wood will be reused for new structures which meet the same end. The citizens live with the same defiant attitude as their founders, but they no longer take the measures taken by their founders. Instead, they say that the machines never existed, and were simply a metaphor, and that these broken structures are what the founders intended.
They don't realize that instead of becoming the captors of the swamp, they have become the captives of the swamp,


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The title is from "Nice and Blue Part 2" by Aaron Weiss of mewithoutYou.

Appeal to Higher Authorities

An anthropologist friend of mine informed me recently of a few remote groups of esoteric mystics. They seem to believe that all things come from an abstract ideal concerning groups of things, and transformations of these groups. My friend could not give me much more precise information that that, as he cannot decipher their thoughts. In part, this is due to the arcane nature of their sects. He informed me, however, that the primary problem in deciphering their beliefs is that their written language is full of non-sense symbols and punctuation, with almost no written words. To make matters worse, the few letters they use seem to be used interchangeably, and occasionally, other opaque substitutions are made.

As a scholar of languages, he asked me to take a look at the texts. So far, he has been unable to give any to me; however, he did remember (he thought) a short snippet of the unintelligible writing:

{a,b|x,y} & {c,d|z,w}
     .es.
{{a,b}&{c,d|z,w}, {c,d}&{a,b|x,y}|{a,b|x,y}&{z,w},{c,d|z,w}&{x,y}}

Clearly, I have my work cut out for me. However, these seems vaguely reminiscent of an ancient instruction book I once glanced at. There may be a link-- or even an unbroken tradition. Esoteric sects have a way of keeping themselves alive longer than should be expected.

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The astute (and overly educated) reader will find the above set theory familiar, and would be able to "translate" & and .es.
But it doesn't matter anyway.

Labyrinthine

I think the most interesting city I've ever been to is a lone industrious city in The Brink. I never caught the name of the place, and the inhabitants never put much emphasis on it. These inhabitants are very friendly and quite expansive. However, they seem to take almost no interest in anyone. Either they expect the same sort of enthusiastic self-descriptions, or they present a different face to outsiders. Their friendliness removes any thought of egotism, although they can be tiring.

The most interesting thing, which the inhabitants hardly recognize, is that the city itself is a labyrinth. More properly, it is a maze. The citizens seem not to notice that their city exhibits any unusual properties, and find their way around without any hesitation. Only once was I not helped when asking directions-- the reply I got was "I haven't been in that part of the city, sorry." It's as if their city exhibits some logic that cannot be deciphered by foreigners.

Stranger still (although only in retrospect) is a feeling of nostalgia or deja vu that seems to float like a fog in that place. Everything feels familiar, as if I had just recently forgotten what was around that next corner. It could be that the construction of this city resembled other cities I had been to, or it could be the vague notion that I wasn't actually lost-- that I had been to this part of the labyrinth before. Either way, the city was rather eery, yet very pleasant.

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Hurray, Albert!

On another note, I recently picked up Labyrinths (coincidence, I swear), a collection of translated stories by Borges. I was hoping it would have A Dialog About a Dialog, but it does have The Avatars of the Tortouse and The House of Asterion, so it isn't a complete Loss... Also, it has almost all of the stories in Ficciones, which by themselves make it work while.

I need to get back my copy of his complete fictions, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

On Scientific Rigour

I've already realized that a sort of theme has begun to develop... one which I didn't necessarily intend. There's an anti-scientific feel to the workings of the universe and the philosophers of the universe. This is strictly unintentional; however, it seems necessary.

The purpose of this project is to illuminate a surreal and mysterious universe. A world which follows a well-defined (that is, scientifically discoverable) set of rules cannot be both surreal and mysterious.

While I do have anti-rationalist tendencies, the expression of said leanings is not the purpose of this project.

Also, to completely confuse the whole universe, On Scientific Rigour by Borges should be considered a part of this universe. Consider it De Quincey's Writings, XXV:lxv (b). I daren't write part a, although you may see more of XXV

Writings, VII:xii

Collectively, mankind has spent countless hours attempting to discover the hidden meaning of the machinery of nature. There is a strange automation in the world around us; one which consensus suggests is beyond the scope of a priori understanding. However, empiricism has shown no greater progress in understanding. Nor have the empiricists succeeded in developing a parrot machine-- a replica which was produced according to the exact structure and specifications of the original, with no understanding of it's purpose or mechanism. No such machine has ever worked. Of course, you know this; what you might not know, is that hundreds of parrot machines have been built, all to no avail. This would seem to suggest that the order and mechanism apparent in the universe is lacking.

On the other hand, perhaps, it is we who are lacking. One would think that in a world so full of dumb mechanism, the one creature capable of metacognition and abstract analysis would be capable of building a dumb replica. It seems such mundane tasks are beyond us-- by taking the abstract, we have somehow lost touch with the concrete.

*-*-*-*-*
De Quincey's name is perhaps too obvious... Oh well.

Edited to sound less arrogant (although no less didactic)

Ozymandias, King of Kings

In a remote corner of some uninhabitable jungle, amidst the trees, vines, miasmas, insects and demons, there is a misshapen rock. It alone suggests that a civilized hand was once here. Carved into the side of the rock in an ancient and nearly forgotten tongue, were the following proverbs. I reproduce here what translation I could muster, from what little etching remained.

...
He who ... pestilent [or pestilence or death]
the [unknown] worm [or snake] forgives the plow [or oxen]
Lower the lover of water into the river.

A fool [or ape] doesn't see the tree [or mountain]; the wise man sees.
...
... he would [or wanted to] become wise

The rest is illegible, eroded, except for a few miraculously preserved lines:

The cistern contains [or holds]; the fountain overflows [or breaks].
...
Joys don't laugh! Sorrows don't weep!

I apologize once again for the poor translation, and the unfinished text. I spent a day which felt like an eternity in that sauna of jungle attempting to read and translate it.

The whole experience of that jungle was bizzare. One could actually watch ants constructing trees; vines being wound and dropped; and leaves actively growing off of these structures-- trying to break free from their prison.

Clockwork

I've been inside that machine-- the one they say revolves the heavens about the earth-- I've watched its gears turn, traced the outlines of their teeth with my fingers; I've even stood on some. I watched a gear crack and fall, a spring loosed to follow its own path.

I looked up through the labyrinth of clockwork-- the endless cacophony of ticking and grinding-- and I thought to myself "This is not the machine which revolves the universe."

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Everything under *-*-*-*-* is meta; always. "*****" will be "in character" as the saying goes.

Albert... I like Albert; there's a good chance you'll see a lot of him. :D

First Post!

This has been edited... Cleaned up a bit. Hopefully, some pretension has been dropped. Hopefully.

I've finally decided to actually begin publishing something I've been meaning to get around to for a while. I don't expect to write here often, but it's a place I can throw half-baked ideas in my quest for some mystery which undoubtedly is unattainable. "What unseen pen etched eternal things in the hearts of humankind, but never put them in our mind?"

Anyway, what is (are?) Landscapes:
This thing is (read: will be) a collection of short, surreal, imagistic stories. Each one is intended to be a stand-alone "image" (Pound says: "An intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time")-- an attempt to convey in words "a groan that cannot be expressed in words", or rather, the emotion which spawned that groan. All of the stories are to take place in the same surreal universe; as such, they are to be seen as related and building on each other. When I'm done, hopefully this will be a projection of a projection of a subset of some universe.

Most will be written from the first person, all narrators who are part of the universe will be named, if nowhere else, in the "labels" at the end of the post. The narrators have very pregnant(4,5) names. Also in the labels section will be a clue as to what part of the universe the image pertains to.

Also, the "meta" category contains only my own thoughts and comments on the series.

Cheers,
Cory