The First Scroll
Posted November 8th, 2007 by BJ
“This, then is the Curse of the Historian: never to be able to truly remember, and never to be able to completely forget.”
THIS IS the Place: the where is here;
THIS IS the Time: the when is now;
THIS IS the Person: the who is I;
THIS IS the Act: the what is do;
THIS IS the Way: the how is thus;
THIS IS the Reason: the why is….
The why is….
Ah. But to see the WHY, we must go back. Back to the Beginning, and before the beginning of the Beginning.
Because just as every Life is a story, and all lives interweave, to make the Great Story, so every story has a life of its own. And just as with a child, who at conception has a Mother and a Father and the Third, the Other, who is neither Mother nor Father, but who is the catalyst, and acts from afar, so the Story must have its three antecedents, and each of these in turn have three parent stories. And so, although we speak of the beginning of a story, what we really speak of is the story of its beginning.
Here, at the edges of the Settled Area, far from the Conurbation, we live “Twixt the Wild and the Sewn” and we have our own ways and our own tellings. Here, when we think of the story of the Beginning, we, of course, turn to the Histories, the Scrolls of the Pot. But it is as well to remember, that in other paces, they have other Ways. And other Tellings.
The First Scroll
There are those who say that first came the land, and that then the Peoples came and settled the land. And there are those who say that the land was unimportant before the coming of the Peoples, and that there is no story before the Peoples. These two groups dispute, and rather pointlessly, I think, for there can little doubt that it was not the Coming that created the land. Others argue that this was in fact the case; that in truth the land did not exist before the Peoples arrived, but I ask you, what sense is there in that? And as neither of these views answers the question of where the Land came from, they leave something to be desired.
The third thread begins with the Journey. But even this tale must lead us to ask: the journey to the Land, we know, but from whence? And thus, the thread of the Peoples is the Father of History, and the thread of the land is the Mother of History and the thread of the journey is the Other of History, because it acts from afar, and begins those things which will give birth to the story, in the fullness of time.
Whether or not the Peoples left the place where they were from fear, or famine, or fighting; whether they left for hope, or heartsickness or from hazard; whether they sought battle or beauty or bounty, none is now prepared to say. But there are references in the second chapter of the Scroll of Recipes of the songs that were sung on the journey, songs of lost lovers and wandering riders, and high-flying deeds of daring, by men and women of great fame. And yet none of these songs mention places in the land; none speak of names now known to us, and not one tells of the Sky Pirates and their ships. Which, by my way of thinking, indicates a culture so foreign to our own as to be either a myth, or from so long ago as to amount to the same thing. For who could conceive of a time when we had no ships? You might as well say that the Burbah had no legs then.
The Lay of the Wanderer. Part the Second
“It is always important to watch the beginning of each new day carefully. In the first flicker of light, as the sun crests the horizon, we see the birth of new possibilities. There is the fore-lighting, of course, the glow that will warn us and reassure us of the possibility of the new day, but it is the very moment of awakening that we must take part in. We, the Historians, we make the day. By our recording of it, moment by moment we bring it into being. And not to be present at the Beginning of Time, to loose the Birth of the Day is to let Chaos come again.”
So my Master taught me, as we waited in the eighth-light, in the quarter-light in the half-light, before the coming of the first day which, as Historian Acolyte, I was to see. Then, as ever we sat at the mouth of the Library, each in their allotted seat, turned toward the rising point, whose place was marked by the Circle of Stones, set out, they say, by the father Historians back when Time was ordained and the Beginning Events were Reset. We take all of this for granted, now, of course, but what exciting times those must have been. Even to touch the Holy Jars containing the Records of that time makes me tingle with excitement, to think of how those few brave Historians, under the tutelage of the Father remade Structure out of Chaos, restarted Time, and began the Flow anew. What must it have been like, to begin the Song of Songs that creates the World anew, each day, for the first time? I remember it as if it were but Yesterday, which in a sense it was. I trembled with excitement, and not a little anxiety; would I remember all the words, all the responses? Would the time begin falsely, if I forgot them?
I need not have concerned myself, of course. The Histories themselves guided me as they have guided each Historian and every Historian to the same place, time-out-of-mind. And then, as this morning and every morning since that time, I sang as we must to greet the day and to begin the day afresh:
Awake, for even as the night declines,
And Dreams still linger in the shadows of men’s minds
And here along the border lands between
The then and now, we weave the Cloth of Time
For here between the Wild and the Sewn
Where every man must tell his tale alone
And Dream and Fact and Memory combine
To form the Warp and Weft of what is Known
‘Tis we who gather up the night’s
Last shattered stars and soft reflected lights
And sift the sand from broken bits of Moon
And spin the “Will-be’s” from the tangled “Mights.”
There is only one thing.