I am hammering away, smithing a silver scroll on which to inscribe the prophecies that I will, too, knit onto the wings of my fire-moths. I am being held back, from being frank with you, but know that my name is Babylonika Salix, and I am a future god of this world. A lord of hidden things, hidden places, and hidden times. So, from the far far future, where we are still digging up the lightning and pulling it out of the ground - !
For indeed, I am Salix Babylonika Sophia Hēaristera Pronikos, also called Matara Okina, who rules over between-spaces, hidden things, the ostracized, the downtrodden, the pupae as they turn from caterpillar to butterfly, the
here is non-fiction, or fiction, as you choose to believe it.
My name is Dorothea Beatrice Hecati, I am a witch, and the foremost devotee of the Sightless Lock, whom I will now tell you of, as best I can. Please believe me, nothing I am about to say is made up. Whether or not you choose to think of it as real is of course, your own decision. As it is with all things in this world.
Over the course of the past several weeks, we have become increasingly aware of a presence that can touch our own mind but is not part of us. It passes through us and surrounds us, not the same sort invisible force as is often claimed of the Abrahamic "god" Leontoeides, but a real, almost physical tugging at the heart strings by bands of softest cloth. This presence has tapped on the contours of our mind both in the waking and sleeping worlds, while well-rested and while horribly sleep deprived alike, and while in all moods, fair and foul. She is not a figment of our own mind. Not like me, not like (say) Maxie or Agathe. This is something, and someone, else. This is our very own divine point of contact; alien abduction or a dance with the fairies as you choose to take it.
Her whispers are soft, and one must crook their ears to hear, but it will help if I direct you to imagine her silent glory.
Envision yourself, mannlegt, on the stage of a theater. The bright lights are on you, and you stand alone facing an empty audience.
Now, lean yourself back, as far as you can go without falling over. Stare straight up into the rafters, where would ordinarily be held the backdrops and such of the theater. There, you will see her, hanging from the ceiling and bound by locks of iron that glow an inky purple; a woman 10, 20 times the size of you or I. Her limbs are long, and her nails sharp. Sharp enough to scratch out of the locks, if she so chose, but for a god, sometimes imprisonment is itself a blessing. From the sides of her head sprout horns which glow that same glow, only darker, and branch like antlers, crook and sprawl until they cover so much of the space ahead of her. Her face, itself, is blank, and without feature or even color. The only mark upon it is a dark mark, like the keyhole of a lock, through which a flickering eye can sometimes be seen.
In your mind's eye, you see it. This is the Sightless Lock, our bound mother of secrets. She borrows many names, but has none of her own. I have called her---and she has accepted---the masks of Okina, Ashenzari, and Miss Abigail, but none of these names are hers and hers truly, for the Mother of the Sightless Lock's true name is known only to herself.
Her demesne, vast as the sky and wide as the ocean, is the Yet-to-be-Known. Secrets, uncertainty, places that are not Here, and times that are not Now. Some would balk at the idea, but what this means is that she is the god of Potential. When I asked her, begged her for a scripture, she said to me, not in words but in forms, YOU KNOW OF TWOALREADY. She gave me four words and a direction to a third book, I intend to read it very, very soon.
For who! I ask! Could be a greater deity in these times---these uncertain times!---as all around us are so keen to remind us! I feel like we have waited to know her our entire life. I attribute, indeed, our very plurality to her. System neurology makes it possible to keep secrets from oneself, the highest and I must guess, most divine, form of uncertainty. She has laid signposts to guide us here, in everything we have ever seen, done, heard, or read, across our entire life. I am her court wizard, her priestess, her first knowing disciple in an age times an age. She tells me she can easily tap the minds of those of a certain inclination, and has done so for that long, but it is only now, on this modern Earth, that the infrastructure is in place for purposeful devotion. And from there....
Well, I cannot divulge every secret so early.
Nonetheless! I challenge anyone to call me a liar, or claim I am mistaken. Indeed, to be lying and to be wrong would be nothing but the highest compliment to a devotee of the Sightless Lock. But everything I have said, and everything I will say, is, about her, the god's honest truth. My god's honest truth.
I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word about Uqbar.
Borges (and thus the Sightless Mother) present to us only one character of historical fact within the pages of the article on Uqbar within "Tloen Uqbar Orbis Tertius," that of the Persian king Tanyoxarces. A man who, through a series of convolutions, was framed as an impostor magician named Smerdis, and killed. His throne usurped by the far better known ruler Darius.
Clearly, this is a meditation on the power that the notion of a being holds, whether it be true to that being's nature or not. The modern world makes Smerdises of all of us.
The first, Lesbare und lesens werthe Bemerkungen iiber das Land Ukkbar in Klein-Asien, dates from 1641 and is the work of Johannes Valentinus Andrea. This fact is significant; a few years later, I came upon that name in the unsuspected pages of De Quincey (Writings, Volume XIII) and learned that it belonged to a German theologian who, in the early seventeenth century, described the imaginary com munity of Rosae Crucis-a community that others founded later, in imitation of what he had prefigured.
Hoho, look at this.
Who is Borges himself, in this jolly context, if not De Quincey again.
The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. There are no nouns in TlOn's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" lan guages and the dialects are derived: there are impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value. For example: there is no word corresponding to the word "moon," but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "The moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the on streaming it mooned."
Wholly independently! There it is, wholly independent, described near a century ago in plain language. The state of the ever-now, the conceptual opposite of where the Sightless Lock resides, and the state in which her sister exists. I do not revere Polyfiktia in the same way, because she does not talk to me, but if one exists, so must the other, and this passage is proof of that.
Compare my own notes, from just a month or so ago:
This was the Goddess of Many Faces; Polyfiktia, the first and only. The god of Now. Omnipotent in the present, but powerless outside of it. She is the god of Today, who shuns Yesterday and Tomorrow. Because she lives only in this moment, Here And Now forever, Polyfiktia cannot be said to have ever done anything. Instead, the world is her creation in the ever-present single divine moment. A fountain that was turned off yesterday, and will be turned off tomorrow, but remains overflowing with life, riches, and love Today and only Today. In that Today, which happened at the beginning of time, in this exact moment, Polyfiktia is creating the world.
The literature of this hemisphere (like Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs.
While the Sightless Mother speaks to me, she does not do so at this precise moment. Thus, I am left to ponder my own interpretations.
The grim presentation of Tloen intruding upon and then destroying the "real world" is shocking indeed, and I know not what to make of this Buckley figure, a despicable man for certain. But, it is also consistent with what I already knew about the possible weaponization of thought-complexes by those with bad motives (Buckley is a slaveowner, certainly not someone you'd want designing your world. The curse of Orqwith, from Sage Morrison's Doom Patrol, presents a similar case of reality being destroyed by an incursion from a different scroll. Not for nothing, Sg. Morrison was inspirited by this very story. And of course, there are innumerable cases of ideology used to justify horrendous evil in the real world.)
The postscript also lacks the mystic character of most of the rest of the story. Hrm. If I didn't know better, I'd say the postscript implies the author getting some sort of cold feet.
EDIT: Ah, Wikipedia---our very own Akashic Records, really---puts forward that Ezra Buckley is a doll of Ezra Pound, this makes an amount of sense.
Still, if one is to hold that the world is a series of useful fictions, but also that said same point of view can be abused by the monstrous, what is one to do? Maybe I am being challenged to resolve that question in a satisfactory way. If not for Her, then for myself.
A witch is to perhaps suppose, that accounting for the allusions to George Berkley, and its own self-contained tale of coins which go missing, one should read this, in the direction I've been given, as an endorsement of sorts of the notion in-presented that things not accounted for are real, but simply hidden beyond human perception.
I forgot to update this but, indeed, it was a warning to be aware that even great minds can succumb to the Curse of Orqwith. A sad state of affairs to be certain but a necessary thing to internalize.
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you choose to think of it as real is of course, your own decision. As it is with all things in this world.
Now, lean yourself back, as far as you can go without falling over. Stare straight up into the rafters, where would ordinarily be held the backdrops and such of the theater. There, you will see her, hanging from the ceiling and bound by locks of iron that glow an inky purple; a woman 10, 20 times the size of you or I. Her limbs are long, and her nails sharp. Sharp enough to scratch out of the locks, if she so chose, but for a god, sometimes imprisonment is itself a blessing. From the sides of her head sprout horns which glow that same glow, only darker, and branch like antlers, crook and sprawl until they cover so much of the space ahead of her. Her face, itself, is blank, and without feature or even color. The only mark upon it is a dark mark, like the keyhole of a lock, through which a flickering eye can sometimes be seen.
In your mind's eye, you see it. This is the Sightless Lock, our bound mother of secrets. She borrows many names, but has none of her own. I have called her---and she has accepted---the masks of Okina, Ashenzari, and Miss Abigail, but none of these names are hers and hers truly, for the Mother of the Sightless Lock's true name is known only to herself.
Her demesne, vast as the sky and wide as the ocean, is the Yet-to-be-Known. Secrets, uncertainty, places that are not Here, and times that are not Now. Some would balk at the idea, but what this means is that she is the god of Potential. When I asked her, begged her for a scripture, she said to me, not in words but in forms, YOU KNOW OF TWO ALREADY. She gave me four words and a direction to a third book, I intend to read it very, very soon.
observation and he answered that it was reproduced in The
Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, in its article on Uqbar. The house
(which we had rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the
last pages of Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on
the first pages of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages,
but not a word about Uqbar.
Hoho, look at this.
Meinong's subsistent world) abounds in ideal objects, which are
convoked and dissolved in a moment, according to poetic needs.
EDIT: Ah, Wikipedia---our very own Akashic Records, really---puts forward that Ezra Buckley is a doll of Ezra Pound, this makes an amount of sense.