“Down in the Grass” also records the first mention
in the Middle Venue literature
of the First Day – that now mythical period,
of which just the oldest among us who'd remained
on the Floor had any recollection,
that had inaugurated the Early Venue
between the shadowy time that Scrawl had come forth
and the Ascendancy of the LA.
It was on this First Day that the Greater Men were
believed to have spoken to the men and women
of the Venue in their dreams, imparting
to them tools for the naming of things – things that were
irrecoverably lost in the Dispersion.
The Songs of the Greater Men was believed
to be a mundane, inadequate transcription
of the Book of Life that the Greater Men had kept
open on the First Day for perusal
by the men and women of the Venue and that
in fact was that very same notebook into which
Scrawl, acting on their behalf, had entered
the minutes and hours of that primeval Accord.
What preoccupied us now was the mystery
as to how these mysterious texts had
been generated. We made an experiment
of choosing volunteers who’d agree to remain
isolated for long stretches of time
so as to test whether thorough isolation
from news of the Outside would effect the content
of the Transcriptions. To our amazement,
we found that the texts that resulted kept full pace
and included allusions and even direct
references to events going on
elsewhere. Yet sooner or later an admission
would compromise our experiment, and it would
be discovered that our strict procedure
in fact had not been maintained, that the performer
had communicated with an Outsider or
glanced at a broadsheet that a visitor
had left on the Floor or elsewhere, etc.
There were two schools of thought as to how the texts had
been produced. There were those who believed that
the original songs on which the manuscripts
were based (the Book of Life, as the Outside termed it)
had contained information concerning
how life after the Breach would unfold and, further,
that virtually every single event that
would transpire in the world after the Breach
had been encoded therein. The soberer ones
however (myself included) held that, although
it could be true that the original
songs were communicating to us in some way,
this communication probably went on at
the level of mere affect, and that through
our mumbling we were just mournfully attempting
to make sense of what we mourned – of what we had lost
in the Breach and of the sorely missed youths
whom we had once been fortunate to call our own,
the same youths who had abandoned us to the Floor.
Those who came to visit from the Outside
took our Transcriptions and the interpretations
that we made of them back to the Stations, into
a world that for seeming eons would take
very little interest in the Old Venue,
in the Floor on which the Lesser Accord was spawned,
or in the greater accord that spawned them.
Strange enough, it was from the outermost Stations
that the majority of our visitors came.
Eons later, the highest interest
in the Early Venue, in its literature
and its faith, and in the shadows of the Greater
Men that, legend had it, still made their home
on the Floor, would be born in those areas that
were furthest from the Old Venue - perhaps because
those Stations furthest from us were also
those places furthest from the struggle for the goods
and for the gadgets that took place at the Stations
that were centrally located along
the immediate Periphery, barely more
than a short stone's throw away from the forgotten
Old Venue, now covered over with weeds and woods,
eventually to be obscured completely
by bridges, traffic clovers, and noodle parlors.
It is to life after the Dispersion –
life in the outer Beyond – that we now must turn.
F I N I S
[Next: The Coda Chapters. The Lines Are Not the Same]