by Seva Khusid (’24)
For all my life I have been a fawn. Thusly I recall being taught this knowledge. In the Gilded City I was a serve-girl, bidden to transcribe scrolls, bills, and receipt-notes, and a man from the Tower noticed me. For the precision and beauty of my symbols I had been brought into the fourth of its rings. From my monkish cell I could yet see the mundane spires of the City reach upward, but the last ring was as infinitely far from my window as it was from the gawkers by the Tower’s inverted foundation. There, my work became to transcribe notes and lexicons. Twice I got to hold old and heavy tomes in my hands, thrice I wrote down the lectures explaining the mystery of the words I could not know. Nor did I need to know them: just like my paper, I would host the words as they travelled, guide the meaning into its new home, and merrily forget it to clear space for the new text. The long life of a scribe left ink stains on my palms and lips, likened my skin to a raisin, and bestowed my left eye with an impenetrable fog.
The Tower’s use for me came to an end, and my final scroll was brought before me. Instead of transcribing, I was to read it and learn an Utterance fitting for my fate. And so it was, and I left the Tower, by the stairs spiralling up around its circumference, for a home above the ground, just beyond the limits of the Gilded City. As for my Utterance, I could only understand its four-word form, which nourished a small garden, just enough for my husband and me. My day-to-day joys were in his presence and in the memory of the children who all grew up in my time in the Tower. He would tell me what shapes the Gloaming took up above, and where Lady Moon passed by today, and I would avert my gaze downward, fearful lest the fog might crawl into the other eye too. But one time a rumour reached our neighbours, a rumour that Those-Who-Are-Not made their stop nearby, and now I pushed my husband for both of us to go and take a look. Let it be a dreadful sight, let it even be sixfold forbidden, I yearned to see it, and was ready to risk the remaining eye for it.
Of Those-Who-Are-Not many a thing is spoken, and all those things are true. Even what seems a drunken raving, even when it catches on and all the gossipers add new details, each less plausible than the other, even when the original teller denies them; every story about Those-Who-Are-Not is true. I learned this fact in my working years: once, a short note was given to me, a text to transcribe from a collection of personal writings and direct accounts. I did not understand it back then, writing words without letting them linger in the head, but this paragraph did refuse to leave. Now it returned to me, resonated with the strange and wondrous details of the neighbours’ tale, and I barely held myself from rushing straight to their camp — lest a story spreads about them leaving. My husband lagged slightly, tarrying in the undergrowth — Those-Who-Are-Not prefer forests — so I saw them first.
I passed the funfair gates and entered a temple: tree-columns converged to a stained-glass dome through which shone strange lone stars, and beneath it tumbled the line-dancers. I looked up, but they were now on the ground, faster than my eyes could flit. Their song deafened me, a piercing, joyous, wedding-song: they passed me in a funeral train, and the hero of the occasion clapped to the rhythm. The smells I cannot now recall, but on the tables lay people and fruits, gemstones and hay, and fish so enormous that only the deepest pits of the Ocean could house them. In these stalls they sold sculptures of shifting, flowing moondust, and their tamed beasts inhaled it and changed, as iridescent as the Gloaming.
The prior of this temple turned his gaze at me, and her eyes smiled at my confusion. Her children — two daughters and a son, exactly like his father in appearance — took me by my hands and I let them lead me into a circle-dance. The old legs moved, first slowly, then danced with more boldness than I ever had even as a girl, and the three young men whispered to me. With my mother’s voice they asked me to stay, with the voice of my brother that I never had they begged to come back to them, and I danced, and the Gloaming and Lady Moon above my head took on shapes the rest of the world would not see.
At last, my husband made his way through the thicket and emerged at the center of our ring-dance. Embarrassed — how could I dance with girls while he crawled through the dirt and bushes? — I slowed down. The surrounding world, just about to merge into a continuous, indistinguishable tumult of colours flitting about and forms contradicting each other, suddenly unfolded and smoothened back out, though still flowing from truth to truth as soon as a part of it would leave the vision. My dear old husband embraced me and led us, slowly stepping backwards, out of the circle, all the while the cheerful hosts would fill our pockets with antique coins.
He would have taken me home there and then, but I pressed on: even looking straight down and away from the rapid motion, I wanted to bargain for the smallest memento of that day. Slowly we hobbled to a large oval table, more fit for a castle than a forest camp, and I looked up at the wares. One statuette looked like a cat transforming back into a cat from a pear. Its gaze of simultaneous confusion and triumph, characteristic of their noble kind, struck me deeply, and my husband asked for the price. The merchant with cloven hooves responded: he would give the statuette if I took with it one word and one memory. At first, I heard my husband arguing, expecting some trick. Second, myself saying, ‘Well then!’ Lastly, the merchant’s son came by my side, and I heard the entire camp utter in a single voice: “AjNUT”.
I was born a faun in the silver dew of the Kind Lady. The wind swayed the field and Her sphere moved, giving way to the early morning flashes in the Gloaming. My strong three-fingered legs, with fur like that of the goats in the Gray-folk’s mountains, carried me off from the fields into the woods where none shall see and none shall recognize me. As wings they concealed me in the tree-crowns, and through the hollow trunk of a weyd-tree I slipped into the roots, just like the moondew that baptised me. Tree-sap I poured out of a cut some gormless woodsman made with his axe, in two days’ trip north of my field. The ewe-I hugged the woodsman, forgave him for the death of the tree, and whispered to both a pair of words that promise life. The tree walked home, the woodsman remained a stump, immortal in roots, and I, the evening smoke, dashed further yet, into the thicket from which none return: for there are none in it.
There among my people I had my place; I shall not even try to describe the halls in the realm of a thousand simultaneous lives. If we were, we would have lifted the treetops to the very Gloaming and walked over it. If we were, we would have lived in the roots stretching far out into the sphere of the world, and by their passageways we would have reached the outer shell, past the infinite radius. We would have closed the eyes of the world, lest their determinateness would limit us, and we would have remained in the woods forever, satisfied with their boundlessness. I was the first of my kind, and the last, and every one born in-between: and our history, longer than the life of the world, would take up no more than a page. If only we were, we would have been all this and all other things; but the world tolerates no true contradictions, and if our existence begets a contradiction, then we are not.
I was the only one left in the forest clearing. Of course, my husband was there too, but his presence was hardly enough to mitigate the jarring discrepancy between the quiet, familiar forest and the memory awoken in me by the Word. I went away, rubbing the calves of my tired legs, helping my husband carry the cat statuette. Its expression was still that of surprise and pride, but now it seemed to me a start of transformation rather than its outcome. Since then, twice ten times the Gloaming made its dance, until the rooftop of my little house crumbled, mixing myself, the statuette, and my husband’s unworn clothes into a single indistinguishable form. All the while I kept dancing in that wood. Not one of Those-Who-Are-Not was gone, quite the opposite: only me and my husband disappeared as shadows disappear into darkness, but I kept on dancing in the wide ring-dance, peeling off the shards of the other life.
I would dance and emerge out of the old body: I have always been a faun, while I was a scribe in the Tower, and before then, and after. And I have always been a girl who started as an amateur scribe with a ledger and concluded as an old woman who had danced in the camp. I am the old woman in her little house as she reminisces of that strange day and looks at the statuette, and I am the faun born in the shadow of the Kind Lady, and I am the old woman who became a faun as the Word carried me off. Now I have come to know: among the texts this old woman transcribed was this one.
Author Commentary: In this narrative I explore the experience of a genuine logical contradiction: first, as a bystander is drawn into it; then, from the viewpoint of a person whose life is a consequence of that contradiction. In a way, it is an experienced paradox, in dialogue with Graham Priest’s Sylvan’s Box and Jorge Luis Borges’ Blue Tigers. Following the latter author, it is also a game for the reader: how would you make sense of it? how would you imagine the rest of this world to function? is its contradiction genuine, and can true contradictions even exist? And, of course, it agrees with the theme of States of Nature: the protagonist’s nature is malleable, but so too seems the actual category of nature. It takes an old woman a minor paradox and an epiphany to become who she had always been — but which of these natures is real, natural, prior? I like the contradiction — so I say ‘both’.
Seva Khusid (’24) is a one-year MAPH student at the University of Chicago. He is interested in the convergences of philosophy, art, and play, be it outright interactivity or a story-riddle.