...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.

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.

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