If it weren’t for the beasts, we’d all live like scholars.
-- First Station proverb
While it's true that the First Station’s men and women
embraced the hard decision to eliminate
all didactic elements from their arts
with enthusiasm and vigor, it’s not true,
however much posterity has attempted
to so claim, that the final decision
was achieved without a short but significant
struggle. For some time it was not by any means
sure that the Antididacts would prevail.
There were many who wavered, and the bitterness
grew as the contest of opinion drew closer.
Despite assurance to the contrary,
suspicions lurked that, when the outcome was at last
made clear, those who'd sided with the opposition
would suffer persecution in the form
of shame, public ridicule, banishment or worse,
or that a caste system based on opinions that
had been held prior to the decision
would take hold, even if just temporarily
and on a semi-official basis, setting
a bad precedent for the settlement
and leading to widespread and general ill-will
and to acrimony both public and private.
But the Antididacts proved themselves true
to their word and within a very short time-span
it was next to impossible to determine
from one’s gait, attire, or manner of speech
what specific view one had formerly espoused.
Indeed, the radicalization promoted
by the Antididacts was so thorough
that not only were distinctions of opinion
formerly held rendered meaningless and defunct,
but also those distinctions most basic
to the theater as it had been understood
on the Floor of the Old Venue – those distinctions,
namely, between player and spectator,
author and player, and, beyond mere distinctions
of person, between the site of the enactment
and the site from which one gazed upon it,
down to the fundamental distinction on which
all the others rested between the enacted
itself and the staged enactment to which
it was entrusted – between the spectacle seen
and the spectacle overseen. In summary,
the entire conceptual scaffolding
on which the structural differentiation
between life and its letters was predicated
was removed to such an extreme degree
that, as mentioned above, one could never tell if
one was entering a state of reality
or a state of fiction on a visit
to the First Station or, further, whether it made
sense to maintain this trustworthy old distinction
throughout one's stay there.
The above proverb
concerning the beasts and the scholars attests to
the pronounced anti-intellectualism
characteristic of the First Station,
at least in its earliest period – one that
ensured that, for years, nothing would be taught or learned.
Today one speculates on the sources
and probable causes of the severe strictures
placed in the First Station on intellectual
life by the triumphant Antididacts.
The prejudice was by no means universal
in the dozen station settlements, and even
where it did exist, it wasn't so strong
as at the First Station. One explanation that
has been offered repeatedly is that the men
and women of this station lamented
the greater accord, whom by now they acknowledged
they'd completely forsaken in the Dispersion
and feared that the elders, now much revered,
had been permanently alienated by
the didactic fervor of the Lesser Accord.
Perhaps if the LA had exercised
patience and restraint, the collective memories
of the elders just might have eventually
recuperated, and we would now have
a Reservoir teeming with fishes, so to speak
(or with precious shipwrecked treasures, if you prefer).
Yet this explanation is entirely
unsatisfactory as it ignores the fact
that no one thought or spoke much of life at the Old
Venue until much later – at a time
when, half due to the enforced illiteracy
that decreed systematic obfuscation of
the historical record, the greater
accord became confused with the legendary
Greater Men, who were said to have lived peaceably
with the men and women of the Venue
in advance of the event of the Dispersion
(which was now confused with the Breach).
A more likely
explanation is that the earliest
leaders of the First Station, as mentioned above,
were those who had participated in the plays
on the Old Floor most assiduously
and had afterwards pioneered the settlement
of the Periphery to those stations furthest
from the Old Venue. At such great remotes
it simply wasn’t practical to expect that
the more studious would venture back frequently
to consult the abandoned Manuscripts
(and whatever might be left of the Reservoir)
on textual issues so as to ensure that
traditions were kept, precedents followed,
and technical standards of production maintained.
And because the subsistence of the settlement
depended on a stable, non-mobile
citizenry, it made sense to forbid learning
altogether at the outset to discourage
extensive traveling on the part of
those hands and intellects with which the settlement
could least afford to dispense.
The proverb also
points to the obsession felt by many
of the pioneers for beasts. To be sure, life on
the Floor of the Old Venue had not been filled with
an overabundance of beasts, and men
and women had exhibited remarkable
curiosity towards them, as mention of them
appeared frequently throughout the Fragments.
It was never supposed that the beasts were merely
imagined or allegorical creations
of the anonymous men and women
who had authored the texts, and it was a common
First Station belief that men and women in fact
had once served as beasts and that life had been
far happier before the Lesser Men (those men,
that is, who had fallen out with the Greater Men
of Menahmen) had introduced those first
evil gadgets by virtue of which all other
gadgets were born – namely, the writing implements.
[Next: Rolling Our Way]