By virtue of good breeding, Henry was an extraordinarily compassionate and generous young man. He contained a bomb that would explode at any minute and kill everyone in a twenty foot radius.
His unique burden gave him a sense of perspective which others, to his dismay, found magnetic.
“Be careful around me,” he advised. “There is a bomb in me that could blow up and kill you at any minute.”
“Oh, you’re not that bad!” his friends would laugh. “You haven’t blown us up yet, have you?”
To assuage his own uneasiness he would strive to be exceptionally understanding to those around him, as if he could pay off in acts of kindness the price of the devastation he would inevitably unleash.
The strain made him spiteful. Eventually, he moved to a cabin in the mountains where he was visited only by the postman. Alone and at peace, he could be an honest man in his letters until his final pop.
The waiting was over. After forty years of dedicated service on Earth the mothership had finally returned to take him home again.
He did not remember it well. It was soft, damp, and warm. There was nothing to worry about there.
The ancient form of magic performed by telling stories, weaving oaths and such became more advanced as a generation of self-taught youths discovered the Plane of Astral Semantics.
Their bodies in the Primate Material Plane held in trances, these wizards battled and became enamored in the silver-lit ether of their parallel universe. In anger they would carefully compose monsters and storms, then blast them in a ball of light to the rim, where it would bounce before settling as if on a roulette wheel.
The real motivation for the majority of them, of course, was loneliness. They rang out their arcane pulses into the boundless mist always with the hope that they would swiftly be returned by someone would be neither bored nor enslaved by it, neither disdainful nor slain. Somebody, in short, who could respond.
Meanwhile, their corporeal bodies grew dusty and thin.
There has never been in outer space this phenomenon seen once or twice on Earth: two perfect bodies purified of irregularity circling each other, never increasing or decreasing in distance from each other.
for Ethan Jucovy
“As you know, when I was your age I was already out on the open sea fighting pirates and scoundrels.”
The cool night breezed through the candle-lit cabana. The captain of the mercenary ironclad People’s Hammer began to fill his pipe. He wore a silver medal on his civilian jacket. His hands we black with engine grease.
The heretic monastic who shared his table sipped at a piña colada. He was not much younger than his companion, but he had practiced naiveté in the cloisters. Silence bid the captain to continue.
“After the Navy of the Socialist International sold its soul to the Hype Regime,” he explained, “there was no place there for a man of principles and brilliance. Just a waste of fuel chasing radio meme hot spots. Can’t fight the Silent Revolution with your head up your ass. Might as well be a Demogarch lapdog.”
The heretic removed the cherry from his paper umbrella sagely in agreement.
“At least the merchants got two feet and walk loudly with them. Scoundrels ain’t bad blokes either, in comparison to the sellouts,” the captain coughed indignantly.
“How’s the ship?” The monk sucked the cherry and its juices from his fingers in a single motion.
“Some creaks and leaks but its mine.”
“Patches planned?”
“Better than planned. Merchants don’t care what happens to pirate boats as long as the route is clear. Towed two already to the Bay of Renegades. New guns, good lumber. Sold a chassis for enough bank to hire another shipmate.”
“Got someone?”
“Asking the veterans. And there’s some in the Navy that still got sense,” the captain muttered nostalgically.
The Brother nodded before standing. “I may know someone. I’ll ask around.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and melted into the night.
April 30, 2010 – 10:37 am
Marcel had had a fantasy based on concepts from three books he had been reading and an offhand remark that Phillipe didn’t remember.
“The language games of the Martians and the cave dwellers became life-forms that existed primarily in the quivering extra dimensions of the super-string loops. They battled for supremacy over the evolution of other life. Cut a thousand years into the future, and there I was: meeting with one of them (not sure which kind) and discussing network identities….”
Phillipe wished the conversation would move on. He did not understand everything that Marcel was saying, but he knew vaguely of it symbolism. A close reading of the fantasy would illuminate a grand logic to the world both fundamental and all-encompassing. It was the same logic Marcel had been developing since adolescence, and it was wrong.
Marcel planted himself firmly outside of the barbershop.
“I’ve never gone to the barber. I won’t know what to do.”
“Just go in and ask for a haircut,” advised Phillipe.
“But how will they know how to cut it? Will I have to wait for a seat to be open? how much will it cost? Will they cheat me? Will it be a bad haircut? Will it be different from what I’m used to? Will people think of me differently if my hair is different?”
“Bring a picture of yourself then. So they know how to cut it.”
“Aha! I don’t have a picture of myself on hand,” announced Marcel. “I will return when I have a picture.”
He didn’t.
Marcel, who hated himself utterly because (for example, the previous night) he had noticed that his lower teeth were growing crooked, told his friend Phillipe about it.
“And that means the bones holding them will weaken. And then they could fall out! And what then?”
Phillipe nodded sagely. Neutrality would end things quicker.
April 21, 2010 – 10:11 pm
Dear K,
My informants report that a supernatural con artist has scammed and embarrassed you. Pity.
You are not the first to be hooked and hauled on the bait of knowledge, of course. Every Eden has its revelatory snake. Scholarship into the corpus of such legends suggests that the quintessential mistake is not acquisition but haste. Plato famously implied that knowledge is nothing but true and justified belief. Alone, true belief is a lucky guess. But justification is laborious. So to attempt knowledge via the mere consumption of fruit, for example, is to invite paradox.
One wonders whether you could have resisted turning the final card. As you say, you had no path, but the Devil–a man of his word, by all accounts–had sworn to follow it. Had you stopped penultimately, you would have had him trapped. Or erased? Or perhaps he would have paved a way before you with his own hands as the only way to fulfill his obligation without winking from existence.
I wish you would visit my continent so that I could introduce you to José Arcadio Buendía, a remarkable man and friend. He is incidentally a man of logic so committed that he scorns the flying carpets of his neighborhoods’ gypsies because their magic does not withstand the scrutiny of his laboratory. But I recommend him to you primarily for his philosophy of competition, according to which one never agrees upon rules with an adversary. Such a principle would have spared you from your current predicament. (José Arcadio is dead now but is an ambulatory ghost and fine conversationalist if you are willing to translate his vulgar Latin.)
I urge you to challenge your captor to another game, and this time set fire to the cards, pick up the plow of thought and reap the fecundity of mystery. Leave the Gödelian knot untied.
Yours sincerely,
J.L.B.
P.S. I have heard a fascinating rumor of a heresy brewing in the low country. It aims to awaken sleeping gods by slipping into their dreams and populating them with the absurd. Given my proclivities I am fascinated but fearful of it. Have you heard anything along these lines in your travels? Tell me and I will add your notes to my files.
April 20, 2010 – 12:17 am
One of the best things on the internet right now is an interactively composed webcomic called, misleadingly, MS Paint Adventures.
Its artist and writer, Andrew Hussie, demonstrated his potential first with Problem Sleuth, a year-long masterpiece of magical realist detective noir. From simple, whimsical beginnings it mutated into a brilliant epic that proved that the webcomic genre has no horizon.
His next project, Homestuck, is more ambitious.
Hussie began Homestuck while drunk with his own creative powers, and consequently lost control of the project in its critical early stages. It is, to be fair, hard to get into. But it is well, well worth it. The writing sparkles. The imagery delights. The plot enriches and the themes uniquely address the complexities and neuroses of our time.
If there ever were a time to jump in to the middle, it would be now.
One year into the project, Hussie has written a recap of the preceding events. If you read that it will give you insight into just one dimension of the comic: the complexity of its narrative structure. What the summary fails to communicate is how that narrative is only the backdrop of nuanced psychodrama and dialog (most often in instant message format) that will simply kick your ass.
Be warned, the summary also contains a ton of spoilers. So if it looks good I would start from the beginning.
Or just read Problem Sleuth, which is amazing.
