The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [52]
This is how memory works, when you live forever. You lay a man on a stone, and you see the man and you see the stone but you also see the history of the stone, as you saw it when it was whole and polished, when it was cracked and poorly cared for, when most everyone knew it was going to go, when it stuttered, when it fell. You remember who built the stone pillar, the debate over the color of it, whether or not it was garish. You think of the books you know that deal in pillar-hood, perhaps Yuliana of Babel’s architectural poetry. Perhaps the sciopods’ ranting about the decline in quality construction. And because you have seen so many patterns shape and ravel and unspool, you also see, flickering just out of reach, the possibilities inherent in a stranger with such small ears, such a small nose, such a tiny jaw. You see, dancing at the edges of his shape, what he might become. What you might become.
On the night the pillar fell, I was busy at my stall, writing for coin. After Astolfo’s illness, he had found a kind of grudging love for the groves of parchment-trees and the long hoops for drying skin in the sun. Finally, he ignored me completely, dwelling among them always, happy and silent, in a kind of communion with them of which I had no part. I began to take our vellum and ink to the quarter-moon market, and it began to grow famous and desired, for it was always fine, and I have a good hand. A lovely script makes any paper shine.
Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes, I had copied out from one greenish sheet of pepper-leaf paper to another. It was a passage from the Anti-Aristotle of Chandrakant, which a widowed gryphon by the name of Fortunatus bade me make into a small book for him. The Anti-Aristotle, you see, was himself famously widowed in his youth, and suffered bitterly, as his wife had drowned, and no body remained to bury. All of the philosopher’s passion he poured into his master-work, the Physikai Akroaskeos, and when he had finished, he fell into such a grief that no one could come near him without being quite clawed and wet with tears.
The philosopher went to the mussel-shell, and the old men there, but could not tell them he wished to be healed. Words failed him. He walked into the west and did not return.
The night the pillar fell, with the market clamoring all around me, I wrote smoothly: Animals and their variegated parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies exist, and we say that these and the like exist by nature.
The pillar chipped its complex torus, and tottered on the onyx floor. I ignored the sound. Distraction is the enemy of perfection.
All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are constituted by art. Each of them has within itself a principle of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration).
The constellation of Taurus-in-Extremis, the Slaughtered Cow, could be seen winking through the broken wood. Ebony dust drifted down on a soft breeze off of the river.
Even motion can be called a kind of stationariness if it is compulsive and unending, as in the motion of the gryphon’s heart or the bamboo’s growth. On the other hand, a bed or a coat or anything else of that sort, insofar as it is a product of art, has innate impulses to change.
The stone column crashed down; rich black earth spurted up through the ruptured floor. The pillar’s belly shuddered in it, and cracked from side to side, loud and unignorable. But I dutifully finished my line, so as not to lose my place: