She was delivered to the kitchens as a child, and she does not remember anything before this. She grew up avoiding people and trying not to be too visible. Then it was discovered that she could read and write, and she was apprenticed to one of the lord's illuminators, to be instructed in that trade. She was not a good student, but she was dedicated to improving, and she did, over time. She found it very difficult to concentrate on anything. Sometimes the stone walls around her appeared to become perfectly transparent, as though they were made from glass, and she could see everything that happened in every part of the manor. She remembers that this was when she first become aware of the tall man, squatting in his tower far above the rest of the huge stone complex, reading, or being screamed at by invisible beings. He first noticed her when he was informed at dinner, in an off-hand way, by one of the petty nobility, that she could read, and that she had apparently been able to do this as a very young child, since of course no one in the kitchens had taught her. She remembers his eyes, which she thought were actually a lot like hers: sparkling, crystalline, transparent, liable to see through things. Or not see through things, she thought, but bring other things into correspondence with their own transparency. To engineer a synthesis of these essential qualities, on their own terms, a synthesis that was described and delineated in language. The language could be precise and synthetic, or it could be maddeningly recursive and allusive, and the loose descriptions were the ones that she thought were dangerous. She did not know when or where she had learned to read and write, and she told the tall man this when she was asked, trying to make sure that he could not see into her eyes. There was a secret technique for hooding the gaze. It worked like this: she would imagine herself retreating backwards into her own head, behind a sturdy gate, and barring it shut. The gate was made of iron bars that she could see back through, across the newly created distance inside her skull, and out into the world. When she was behind the gate her eyes could not be easily identified. If she had a greater need for secrecy or discretion she would simply retreat behind a second gate, and close that, and then a third or a fourth, as necessary. The first time she did this, with the tall man looking into her face, she retreated behind gate after gate, maybe twenty or thirty of them, for what seemed like hours, but was actually only seconds. She thought that she deceived him, but he had seen what she was doing and marked it with intense interest, and from then on had her followed and her movements reported on by his agents. It took her many days to recover and come back to herself in the aftermath of this first meeting, but she did not suspect that she was in any danger.
She would think often about language games while she worked on manuscripts with the illuminator. She could not illustrate; had proved utterly incapable of this despite repeated and sustained effort, and so she was restricted to working on the letterforms, which she enjoyed embellishing and building out so that they were sometimes almost impossible to identify as letters at all. The illuminator found this frustrating at first, but over time begin to enjoy the game of puzzling out the script from the spidery, abstracted, geometric designs. They made an agreement: she would play her abstraction game only on the titles of the manuscripts, and would render the rest of the scripts in precise and legible characters, and in return he would inform the lord that these nearly incomprehensible titles were in fashion somewhere far away, and maintain this fiction, so that she could continue with her game. Eventually the titles of the works would cover nearly the whole of the cover or title page, leaving no room at all for illustrations of any kind, and she explained earnestly to the endlessly patient illuminator that it was because she was trying to enter the script into correspondence with the labour of illustration.
Her life at court became easier. She would continue this practice as she grew older: bringing incompatible affects and concepts into communication, to see how they would mutually infect one another and begin to make new and unexpected demands, of her and of the world around them. She made many fun and surprising discoveries this way, and most of these went unreported to anyone. Her joy was private and transient, which did not dim her enthusiasm at all. Every now and then she would sense that some specific formulation might be dangerous to her. In particular she found that using herself in the game, placing herself in relation with things that were unlike her, could have unintended and violent effects in her mind. She like the sun, like faeces, like intimacy, like a gift, like a wound. Each of these formulations took her days to recover from. So after a while she decided to avoid this, which made her sad (because she enjoyed the naive thought that she could implicate any two things into her system without damage, without changing), but which she felt (beneath the sadness) allowed her a degree of self-understanding. Armed with this self-knowledge she instead worked on making her thought processes breezy and slippy when she herself was their subject. One thing that she knew without needing to think about it was that she must never open this relative association between herself and another person. For a long time she was happy.
No comments:
Post a Comment