A gift for them. Make for them a gift. Something to keep their pages from flying away, their books from collapsing, their entertainments from drifting off into life and death.
Ah, the youths. There were many of them, but there was only one Youth. How they loved each other, how he held her hand and how she held his, how they left that dull interior in search of blue and green and their many shades. How they found their own way. How they studied our songs and played their own, played them over and over until they sounded not unlike ours, not unlike the older hymns. Until they sounded much as they would have sounded to us on the First Day, had we remembered them properly.
Who would have known that youth, that youths would have thought to fill out the spaces between the ledger lines of the songs that were our gifts to them? Why did they imagine the margins and the corners to be theirs, rather than the songs themselves?
These youths, how they found their own way.
-- from The Songs of the Greater Men (#16 – “Down in the Grass”)
While what had once been known as the Lesser Accord
took to the hills, plains and valleys that ran
along the Periphery (which soon, to be sure,
no one would refer to as the Periphery),
divided themselves into the many
casts and clans that would people the Dozen Stations,
drafted a legend of their early achievements,
codified their laws, established their texts,
elaborated their faith, cooperated
with each other, made kings and slaves of each other,
imprisoned and freed each other, fell in
and out of love, perpetuated misery
and suffering in the form of drawn-out conflicts
over their tales and over their gadgets,
submitted to truces that led to long eras
of peace, to the reciprocal exchange as well
of these same tales and gadgets, had much fun
and got bored…while all this and more was happening,
the greater accord (or those who were left of it)
made their home on the now abandoned floor
of the Old Venue and dedicated themselves
to understanding everything that had happened
since Scrawl, who vanished in the Dispersion,
had come forth (although this was now but a distant
memory, and in truth no one had the slightest
recollection of that man’s Coming-Forth
or of what indeed had transpired in that fabled,
now mythic oblivion from which he’d emerged).
The reader may not recall the details…
I’ve quite an effort to keep track of them myself…
concerning our catastrophic efforts at song
recollection. When we performed the songs
from memory, we couldn’t get past a phrase here
or an arch of melody there. And what we sang
from memory never corresponded
with anything that we found in the manuscripts.
Yet when we played out the manuscripts as written,
what the auditor heard was rarely more
than a cacophonic jumble, while the players
were sent into a semi-conscious reverie
that would awaken in them a maelstrom
of joys and horrors from which they emerged only
with a sure amount of difficulty. In fact,
while we had but scanty knowledge of all
that had gone on in the external world throughout
these generally horrifying durations,
our auditors soberly informed us
that we’d succeeded in coaxing a mere few bars
of wild and unkempt music from our instruments,
and that the racket had abruptly ceased
after the first several moments. Following
the initial outpouring of sound, there would come
a prolonged period through which we stared
blankly into space in a profound lethargy
from which we had to be violently aroused.
After some time, the LA discovered
our lips in movement, engaged in the production
of utterances that resembled human speech
at an almost inaudible level.
But they merely made a note of such behavior
and didn’t attempt to wrestle any meaning
from our minimal vocalizations.
They took no further interest in our troubles.
For that matter, the only interest they had
in this episode was their assurance
that they now had ample excuse to move ahead
with the Ascendancy.
It was only after
the Dispersion had left us on our own
that we took up the matter of the vocal texts
once more; for, though it had exasperated us
that we could never laugh at our own jokes,
without the older airs we felt truly bereft.
So we proceeded in the following manner:
A certain number of us would sit down
to our instruments, while others would position
themselves next to us with equipment to record
as best we could whatever gibberish
would emerge upon the music’s falling silent.
We were greatly surprised by the discovery
that on more than just a few occasions
we were able to discern a legible text
running through the syllabic mumblings that emerged.
Although such editing and occasional
far-flung speculation was deemed necessary
to the task, a small number of us devoted
much time to this activity (and much
energy – those who were designated players
had to be given several days’ rest after
a single session and the procedure
in most cases led to sustained melancholy.
The texts that we managed to produce in this way
are known as The Songs of the Greater Men.
[Next: The Sole Remaining Tenants]