#bilbebabbles

"Have I told you? Upon my first crossing into the woods, I took in a trifold malaise. An exchange. A thickening of blood for the life of thirty creeping things. That malady has passed, and their descendants are now either few enough to name, or too numerous to know. Riddles for the centipede, or centipedes riddling my future?

"Not that my alliances would shrivel under sun, but stone weathers. Where else comes soil?

I rest my eyes upon my work in silence. Outwardly, I am still. Within, I am trembling. A Door must open. Not from desire. Not forcefully. It will open to me, sure as time turns mountains to sand.

A breath, long enough to mourn a lover.

Two, to join them in the grave.

...

Six, all gone.

...

...

...

Thirty.

I am still here, weeping.

Please.

Alone in the silence, there is no hand to take. The paint holds tight. The sun may rise and set, and so do I. But I do not dream, any more. Those doors are closed to me.

A season passes, and a year dies. I pass, but I do not die. The seeds and I are silent together. No desire, and no need of satisfaction. I take a brush into my hand, but it breaks into fragments. A friend does not know my name; I remember them, but there is nothing to say.

I walk silently, now. Another winter passes me, a word unspoken. In the snow, I return to look upon my pale work. It is not there. I feel, however briefly, that downward pull. It cannot be death. I am not concluded, yet.

I eat very little. There is always more besides. Crows will not take what is left, but a single dove may land on my shoulder. I do not look. I fear not what I might see, so much as what may be gone. He will return. He must.

If I desired anything, it would be an ending. I cannot bring it upon myself. It is not for lack of understanding. I see the ends of those around me, near and distant. The words spoken, each a breath closer to silence. But I do not see mine. I do not speak. In each breath I am as I was before.

Winters pass as dawn becomes dusk. It is, in a way, always sunset. Never night. Is this the promise I was given? It cannot be. It is not for me to remember the names of the dead, but I would feel them within me, where they had been buried. I carry not the silence of words unspoken, but the silence of one with no voice. And another winter passes.

Six winters for those departed.

Thirty, for those who remain.

And in my sleep, down, down, down I go.

A song goes from catchy to commanding to a representation of the winds' longing for a past that never properly happened. A stange sense of deja vu coalesces into an understanding of earthquakes and the names that can call them. You use these things to help you read a book or climb a tower or brew a beverage or clean out that shitty basement. The basement contains a shrine to the powers of the Wood. This is great because you can now concentrate a part of your soul more firmly, and that'll let you make that chilly drink Mr. Kille has grown so fond of a little bit easier.

It's also great because it doesn't feel like you're just taking, using, and consuming resources. Being able to make the stuff you use, or even make something you couldn't find, and then share it with someone, feels much more like something a person would do. It's neat not to be a detached, obsessive adept seeking any advantage on the path to immortality.

It isn’t my prerogative to give opinions; usually mere facts, sometimes guidance. But this is no ink to be squandered meekly, so I will start decisive. There is no question to be had, and no two (or three) sides to the matter; the Horned-Axe is eldest. In the first place there is not even a whisper of origin, where those bloody gods of the Wood see their birth in a thousand hushed fables. Beyond that, stone easily predates flesh, if one will forgive a vulgar truism. And for a third proof, Moth flies perilously toward flame, and yet has not been consumed; the Grail burgeons thirstily in influence, and yet swallows only shallowly, thusfar. Quiet, certainty, and watchfulness are sure markers of age. But the obvious draws no interest.

So, naturally, I will proceed to officiously decide the question between the latter two. In this matter it is easy to err to convention. It is taken as natural, in some senses, for the Moth to subvert the Grail in appropriate context. This naively suggests a dominant posture—better placement in the hierarchy, if one exists (if it does, circuitously). However, we must dig a little deeper here; if change follows desire, it must be true that desire came first. I won’t submit so easily to that solution, convenient as it may be.

Perhaps a different framing. The natural course is for quickened matter to go on living until it is dead, and then remain so; else the living beget more life. If we look for an origin, though, we absolutely must concede that inert matter must come alive. I cannot imagine a change more fundamental. One must change, to be alive. And, for completeness, one must live to desire. I will admit personal bias in this conclusion. I would, first, live. Desire can come later.

Locksmithing is a misleading name for what I do; a more honest man might replace the verb “smith” with “break”, but then, that man would not have arrived in this profession. Ultimately there’s a lot of value in that thin shred of respectability. The modest placard over my humble shop (J. T. Putnam, Locksmith) serves much the same function as a courtesan’s dress. Not a real barrier to impropriety, but a demand that my clients display a strong mix of audacity and currency to strip it away.

As for the work itself, I ask as few questions as possible. I try to draw a hard line somewhere on the safe side of open burglary. Today’s visitor is far from that, but I’ve seen her face somewhere else, and I don’t trust that at all. Eventually I ask if we've met.

As if anticipating the question, she releases a little laugh.

"Not face to face, I imagine," she says, mysteriously.

I wait patiently. She pouts at my unwillingness to play along.

"I'm on at the theatre. Two evenings a week?"

I don't attend.

"They've put me on some of the posters."

Ah.

Her business is odd. She'd like me to open an old stone door. It's located in an ancient church, to which she claims to have purchased access (her phrasing, not mine). I've done worse for less. I'm less interested in truth about intent than details about architecture, but she insists I'll "know it when I see it". I pack a prybar.

The church is thoroughly disused, and literally underground. Radiating rows of pews surround a worn down altar (oddly, the inner pews are taller than the outer ones). There are a few small side rooms, some with walls of naked earth. Though I'm hardly pious, the damp walls and aged stone do not convincingly profess christianity. Recurring sun iconography catches my eye, distracting me from the inconvenient truth there is, in fact, no locked door in sight. I pace around the central altar.

Maybe I've been had. I don't usually stumble into fool's errands, but then, most of my clients aren't disarming young women. I seem to recall a certain shifty glint in her eye; that or I'm too prideful to admit gullibility. Once more round the altar. Check each alcove again.

It’s hard to stifle a slither of resentment. I half expect her to appear from the shadows to mock me. In a momentary flight of fancy, I peer around for her most likely hiding place—perhaps this shadowy nook? Nonsense, of course: closer inspection reveals it is as empty as the rest. I turn about to leave, when a sharp point of light enters my eye. Across the sanctuary, near the top of the wall, I see a tiny hole in the stone, visible only from within this alcove. The backs of the pews align, creating the illusion of a stairway.

In the book, the biologist often simply knows things for reasons that aren't related to personal expertise or observation. She has some alien thing attached to her (a "brightness") for most of it, and it doesn't play by sensible rules. This works and is only ambiguous in the sense that we don't know how reliable this brightness is; can it be trusted? Are the biologist's ordinary senses deceiving her? The truth is a bit hazy but the story's intentions are clear. By contrast, the movie does this thing where characters explain the inexplicable via "scientific knowledge". The shimmer is a prism! It's refracting DNA! But unlike the book, it doesn't actually feel like we're learning things about the world, so much as watching characters fumble for rationality in a strange situation. Or maybe we're meant to believe them. I genuinely don't know. (It's not important)