Despite the wholesale confusion and excitement
thrown up by the Menahmen faith in its
feverish nascence, our still quite youthful Venue
offered quite a bit else to the perusal of
the disinterested eye apart from
the opportunity to condone or condemn
a people engaged in the difficult business
of religion-building. (I write this with
an ironic tone that I can hardly conceal
or escape, for what eye could one have located
among us that was disinterested?
Scrawl, to be sure, was quite the eye, though with respect
to his interest – well, a good number of us
exerted ourselves unsuccessfully
and with inordinate muster to determine
exactly in whose interests he was striving.)
While these artless plays about Menahmen
were coalescing into a veritable
genre, other groups on the Floor were transforming
into a dramatic literature –
as vital as it was (or would soon prove to be)
difficult to sustain – the old tales as well as
much that was now available to us
that was not ostensibly religious in scope
or in origin and thus could not easily
or with immediacy be harnessed
to the rapid gallop of the burgeoning faith.
The central difficulty with the older tales,
however, was that, as with just about
everything else, they had come down to us in bits
and pieces, and determining with some degree
of certainty which particular bit
belonged to which particular piece would require
scholastics and curricula taking ages
to develop past the zero-level
degree of sophistication at which we were
capable of working at this fragile outset.
For our present purposes, didactic
or theatrical, we would simply have to patch
them up and piece them together as best we could
(and of course the paucity of even
the most rudimentary sort of scholarship
was our great concern and not that of the LA,
who deigned to hear not a word of such things
as scholastics and curricula…we would have
to let them come to that on their own – anyway,
there was little that we could recollect
concerning anything of that sort, apart from
the bare idea that there once had been such things
and, moreover, that attainment to them
was absolutely necessary if you wished
to attain a proper understanding as to
the inner workings of our former world –
what had composed it and what had gone on in it.
There were two sources from which the youthful players
and dramatists took their material.
On the one hand, there were the ravished memories
of the greater accord, now known collectively
and certainly euphemistically
as the Reservoir, which appeared to have suffered
further deterioration as we were forced
to call upon them. On the other hand,
there were the many bits of the old manuscripts
that had been brought up (or pulled up, dragged up, hauled up…
however you thought proper to phrase it)
from out of the Breach. Sometimes there was concurrence
between the various sorts of material,
which was reassuring, though more often
radical divergence. This, of course, was the case
with the Menahmen legends, which, as said before,
derived entirely from the manuscripts –
although it became increasingly difficult
to separate out the unadulterated
tales as they had been delivered to us
from the material based on the Analects
of the Greater Men (which would eventually
serve as the name given to the codex
containing our impromptu fooleries that stemmed
from the questionings held at the didactic plays
and elsewhere) and from the commentary
to which the Analects in time were submitted
by the more erudite members of the LA.
And as for our jokes? In contrast to what
we possessed of the Menahmen legend, our jokes
of course had come entirely from the Reservoir
of the greater accord. Apparently
folks before the Breach had never busied themselves
with the preservation of jokes. Yet with the jokes
at least we had no problem retaining
a secure hold on what was what. That is to say,
in contrast to the confusion that was coming
to characterize almost everything
having to do with Menahmen, as far as jokes
were concerned we had unusually precise
knowledge concerning what had come from us
and what was later added by the LA. Why?
For the simple reason that it was the business
of jokes with which we’d been preoccupied
immediately after the time Scrawl came forth
and before the First Accord (as we came
to know that moment, now scarcely recalled
with much clarity but viewed with great nostalgia,
when we’d all been of one accord…or so we thought)
had split itself up into a greater
and a lesser – back when the ones with memories
still had the run of the show, before the chaos
that came with the LA’s ascendancy.
Our successful recovery of the Dozen
(the dozen original extant jokes, that is),
together with our subsequent efforts
at joke production, posed an unapproachable
standard, at least from the greater accord’s standpoint,
against which the Recovery in all
of its stages was and would continue to be
measured. We’d known a joke to be a joke during
our lost, prelapsarian First Accord
due to the fact that it elicited laughter
and did so with obvious unanimity.
In other words, we all had had a laugh –
and that’s how we’d known that we were of one accord.
But later, when it came time to retrieve the tales,
we didn’t have the useful, revealing
evidence of a shared physical reaction
on which to rely. We had been fully aware
of the dangers involved in forgetting
(or having forgotten) the criteria which
allowed for the distinction of fact from fiction
and had taken great pains to ensure that
the bewildering jumble of material
was met with skepticism and circumspection.
But there was next to nothing we could do
once the LA had taken hold of everything.
Thus, the improbable tales we saw springing up
now and again across the Floor, such as
the one that told about an ancient general
who commands a vast army comprised of hungry
individuals with mercurial
temperaments and haphazard allegiances
to the remotest limits and furthest reaches
of the world as it was known at that time,
that particular moment of antiquity,
only to encounter a giant vine thrown up
to the clouds from a bean the general
planted one evening for good luck, which he climbs and,
after slaying the ogre at the top of it,
receives in an image traced in the sky
a vision of the silken napkin Menahmen
used to wipe his weary brow on the night before
he met his unfortunate death, now said
to be in the possession of a seafarer –
an enterprising man who will one day become
famous for discovering a vast tract
of land across the western sea, but who will bring
to the inhabitants of that vastness disease
and pestilence and will plunder its wealth…
And so it is incumbent on this general
to lead his massive and famished army, henceforth
to receive their day-to-day nourishment
from a bread that will be tossed down from the heavens,
back in the direction from which they came, in search
of this mad seafarer and the relic
of Menahmen he unknowingly possesses,
to usurp a godless mission bent on plunder,
to bring to the otherworldly Savage
the True Faith and, with it, the many benefits
of higher civilization that are vouchsafed
to those who keep it, and to thus prevent
the curse that would otherwise and incurably
fall on men and women by an exotic race,
its intractable land and vengeful gods.
[Next: The Real and the True]