The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season - Softcover

Conn, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1573661538 ISBN 13: 9781573661539

Verlag: F2C, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A fable-like tale of a small community afflicted by a mysterious plague

 

Juxtaposing barbarity and whimsy, Brian Conn’s The Fixed Stars is a novel that has the tenor of a contemporary fable with nearly the same dreamlike logic.

 

At the novel’s heart are the John’s Day celebration and the interactions of a small community dealing with a mystery disease. Routinely citizens are quarantined and then reintegrated into society in rituals marked by a haunting brutality. The infected and the healthy alike are quarantined. In a culture that has retreated from urbanism into a more pastoral society, the woman who nurtures spiders and the man who spins hemp exist alongside the mass acceptance of sexual promiscuity. Conn delivers a compelling portrait of a calamitous era, one tormented by pestilence, disease, violence, and post–late capitalism. An unflinching look at a world impossible to situate in time, The Fixed Stars is mythic and darkly magical.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brian Conn studies mathematics in southern Rhode Island. He is coeditor of the journal Birkensnake.

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THE FIXED STARS

Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous SeasonBy Brian Conn

FC2

Copyright © 2010 Brian Conn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57366-153-9

Contents

1 THE ROPEMAKER'S DAUGHTER.....................................................92 ABLUTION IN HELICAL STRUCTURE................................................533 THE GREEN DOOR...............................................................834 JOHN'S DAY...................................................................1375 THE SNOW PAGEANT.............................................................2036 MERCURY......................................................................265

Chapter One

THE ROPEMAKER'S DAUGHTER

1.1 The Speech of the Old Man

I am a humble servant of people. In this world we work together. You are a woman of fierce intelligence and I can see that you have been thoroughly educated; I need hardly explain to you why we people can survive only together and never apart. There can be no more devouring of one another in those prisons which I shall forbear to name-you know the prisons of which I speak.

The race of people does not have it easy. There is not much luck for us. The race of people finds trouble where we ought to find trouble, for trouble purifies us: the philosopher reminds us that person is the animal that is purified by striving. But you distrust me, Molly, and not without reason; for have you not stumbled upon me sleeping beside this crossroads, with neither partner nor visible handiwork, with hair on my head and a velvet girdle round my body, and with the mien of one untutored in the love of people? And therefore perhaps you think that, disdaining the labors which civilization requires, I occupy myself instead with concealing my scalp under hair and my form under velvet. But discard the notion, Molly, even as we discard certain other notions which I shall forbear to mention; for enigmas of every description surround us, as fog surrounds the sea: even a head covered in hair may contemplate essential labors; even on the hearts of the garishly clad may be graven the image of darkness.

We people were born to strive, and there are none who strive more than I. Even when people lived in those deranged collectivities the name of which offends decency-even then they hardly strove more than I now strive. Just as the chemist compounds elixirs, just as the beekeeper nurtures bees, just as you weave these ropes which I see here in your wagon, so too do I strive on behalf of our civilization, with this difference: that my striving surpasses that of all others. For the charge laid on me brings me each day into the greatest imaginable peril.

You scoff and harden your heart against me-and rightly, Molly, rightly. "This old man," you say, "thinking himself what he no doubt calls an intellectual, will end by presenting to me a dream of those towers and homes of depraved design which for so many centuries held people bewitched"-I mean those rectilinear labyrinths of steel and despair which none would care to hear me describe, the towers and homes of late capitalism.

But I ask your pardon, Molly, for matters lie with me not precisely as you think. The dream that I will present to you is a different dream.

A group of travelers came near this road not long ago, as no doubt the carers for the land have told you: wise travelers from distant coasts, clad like myself in velvet, not because they cherished textiles but because they had traveled through a difficult region. And it was they who laid my charge upon me, on a hillock in the shape of a kidney near a region where the people suffer defects in their genome. We walk together in this world, Molly, and the civilization that binds us binds us not one atop the other, as we were bound when the idle throve; but it binds us side by side. Nevertheless do some of us by chance or blessing possess a peace more puissant and a love more loving than the peace and love of others, and the strength to stand against the oldest enemy of people. It is to me that such puissant peacefulness falls, and to me my ghastly task, the accomplishment of which, as you will presently hear, offends decency.

Know, then, Molly, that although you and I cherish between ourselves the things that people cherish, and rejoice in the love among people, there yet dwells in the land a monster who cherishes not those things, and whom it is my calling to bring to peace. I refer, Molly, to the vampire, or wampyr: that monster who, clinging to loathsome solitude, nourishes himself by means having to do with the genomes of people and with dreams of despair-means which strike at the very heart of our communities.

It is in the struggle against this monster that I find my calling. I see now that you have not been educated so thoroughly as I had thought, and that weakness tempts you to turn away from me and to think me an old braggart and a teller of tales. But I shall make it my duty to deliver you to peace. When I have completed my speech, at a time not far removed from now, then the two of us will be joined in a certain love, which, though it be not the ordinary love which joins people, will nevertheless accomplish the ends of love. Then, owing to the nature of my love, you will become aware of certain animalcules of the dark, and witness their acts and hear their voices; and even as my peculiar love together with all the other kinds of love form together the great spectrum of loves, so too does the manifest speech of our civilization, which is both like and unlike my speech, sound in harmony with the songs of the animalcules of the dark, which also is both like and unlike my speech, and make with it one utterance, the utterance of utterances, which is woven of the speeches of people and also of the songs of the animalcules of the dark.

To put the vampire to peace is no small work: we achieve it only by a terrible means. For darkness and solitude are his native elements, and the hanging rope which slays us people who live in community is to him as the sea is to the octopus, as the veld to the lion; and the means of bringing the vampire to peace is also the engine of delusion. I speak of a certain element, Molly, yellow and orange in color and rich in scent: that element which is the spirit of discord among people, and which was the fuel and fetish of an epoch which saw people bound not in love but in strangled networks of toxins and cravings: that element which makes man into meat, water into mist. Do you know the element of which I speak? I hope you will forgive my bringing up matters on which no friend of people will care to dwell; but what is required is precisely that the heart of the vampire be cast into that prickly and beguiling phenomenon with which the peaceful have no commerce.

You recoil strongly from me now, for to cultivate this element is a perversion. But I myself do not cultivate it; I wait, rather, for a certain season, that season which comes after spring, that season which dries the trees and brings the lightning, and makes of the forest an abomination; then I search out the vampire, and, coming upon him, cut out his heart and hurl it into the objectionable phenomenon from afar. Still you recoil, and I see that you hope I will leave you soon. For you suppose that, my duties being bound to a certain season, that season which comes before fall, I idle away the remaining seasons in low schemes, in accumulating commodities, in erecting structures. You dare! Let me assure you, friend of people, that I am no idler. Though we find ourselves now...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: F2C
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1573661538
• ISBN 13: 9781573661539
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 311
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar