What is real is what is true; what true, real. And yet, they are not the same. From the Breach all things come. Into the Breach all things return. The Breach is reality. Yet I say that much that is unreal comes from the Breach as well. The Breach is truth; through it appears the real. The Breach is truth; through it escapes the unreal. Just the same, however, it is sometimes the unreal that appears and the real that escapes.
The greater men of Menahmen had much the same as ourselves: much the same sky, with its deep azures giving way to fiery crimsons; much the same sea, with its waves and its fishes; much the same beamy stars, with their beamy configurations. Yet they did not have the Breach. Nor did they have the jumble of unmade things of which it is the Mother. Woe to us of the Lesser Accord. Woe to us, Children of the Breach.
-- from the Commentaries of the Lesser Accord
I offer thus to the reader an example
of the sort of thing that appeared in the early
distributions of the commentaries
that the leading minds of the LA had begun
to make on the Analects – the sayings, that is,
of the Greater Men (in whose numbers I
was ranked apparently – although we were never
informed as to our inclusion and could only
infer it from perusing the broadsheet
distributions of what down the road would become
the Analects), that had been meticulously
and with such great attention to detail
transcribed during the spontaneous colloquies
and interruptions with which the performances
of the “learning plays” were punctuated.
I offer these particular sections because
they comment in fact on one of my own sayings.
Truth is a gap through which the real doth peer.
(Analects XXIII, 1) Bear in mind that these
in fact were not my own words. I wouldn't have been
capable of anything this cryptic,
terse or stylized in as perplexing a setting
as the didactic plays, with their generally
informal and sporadic questionings.
The true story behind this supposed saying
of mine that by now has elicited volumes
of commentary and indeed has led
to the bitterest struggles between competing
schools of thought in the academies as well as
the seminaries goes something like this:
It was late in the day, and the “play” was dragging
along into its fourth hour. Momentarily,
I'd become the center of attention
in a half-hearted attempt on my part to step
outside of this trivial joke we were having
at the expense of these troubled youths and,
utilizing an argument I imagined
was philosophical, was trying to explain
to those assembled that I'd heard said that,
far from it being the case that reality
belongs to whatever can be thought or dreamed up
by the mind, it is rather true that what
the mind finds about it to its left or its right…
that this, in fact, is the only reality.
The entire point of this amateurish
foray into philosophical problems I
had very likely never mastered in my youth
and in which I had probably taken
little interest and had merely heard tell of,
possibly in my early days as a student…
the whole point was to convince the youthful
players of their idiocy in ascribing
reality to a fabled hero of whom
they hadn't had experience beyond
the way in which they knew him through the manuscripts.
As said above, at the time of my utterance
it was already late in the session,
and my companions had wearied of the constant
questioning and of their ever-renewed attempts
to undermine and outdo each other
in the extravagance and the absurdity
of their makeshift improvisations. By this time,
interest in this little game we played
amongst ourselves to stay the boredom (and to make
the most of something that was hard to regard as
anything besides humiliation)
was on the wane, no one seemed to be listening
to me anymore, and even the performers
with their robes and dangly beards were starting
to look glassy-eyed. I attempted to work up
a parable that I thought would be accounted
clever (and quite funny, to those who knew
what I was up to). “My friends, you can imagine
reality as a hole into which and out
of which the rabbit of truth comes and goes.
Now, imagine Menahmen to be this rabbit.
If reality is the hole, then Menahmen
in his truth has never appeared to us.
Conversely, if truth is the hole, then Menahmen
never appears to us in his reality.”
I went on in this fashion at some length,
and the entire speech was nothing but an attempt
to wrap in obscurity and obfuscation –
as much indeed of both as possible –
the very simple idea that Menahmen
was simply a figment of their overheated
imaginations (an idea that
you dared not state directly if you didn't wish
to venture the certain risk of being toppled
from the starry heights of the Greater Men
and cast down ordure-ward into the noxious Breach
with the traitorous and detested Lesser Men –
a fate that, although metaphysical,
certainly had its deleterious effects
on one's freedom of movement in the flesh and blood
world of the Venue). Just as my discourse
seemed to be floundering, a bespectacled girl
young enough to still be in pigtails and freckles
called out to me, ponderously seeking
clarification, “Dear Elder, what you're saying…
is that…that truth…is a gap…which the real peers through!”
“If you like,” I answered. “Yes, that's very
nicely put. Truth is a gap which the real peers through.”
I was taken aback with delight to perceive
that someone had followed me far enough
to distill from my ridiculous monologue
a pretty albeit meaningless apothegm.
[Next: The Unmade]