‘Those good folk are running with their baskets and bags toward that vendor wheeling his barrow up from the waterfront. A mountain dweller, you have probably never heard of the fare he vends, for until a month ago no one would have considered it fare — except perhaps some of the more primitive shore tribes along those bournes where civilization has not yet inserted its illusory separation of humans from the world which holds them. Till then, what this man now sells at exorbitant prices was part of the slough and garbage that tangled a fisherman’s net: lobster, crab, oyster, shrimp…About a month back, down where the waterfront gives way to the beach, some of our city’s more fashionable young folk were taking an evening stroll, when they saw a madman on the shore devouring the soft, inner flesh of these repulsive, armored sea beasts. Nearly all of the company were properly appalled; but one, however, thought she caught a glint of some mysterious and unnameable pleasure in that madman’s eye. Later, with a hammer and a wooden blade, she contrived to get hold of one of these creatures for herself and taste of its protected innards. Now it has been known for years among primitive fishers that a clam eaten at the wrong time of year can kill; or, indeed, that these beasts fall into noxious decay even faster than fish in general. Yet such is civilization’s appetitive passion that it cannot allow the madman lone access to his skewed, mystical, minuscule pleasure, rare enough in the circling contradictions of his unreason. I say this incident took place a month ago; but really — it has hardly been a full three weeks.
‘Look at them!
‘Have you seen a more animated and enthusiastic group about any vendor here? Already woodcarvers and metalworkers have begun to fashion special mallets, picks, pliers, and prongs to assist in extracting the delicate, sweet flesh. No doubt the jeweler will shortly cast the same implements in gold, set about with agates and tourmalines — for these new flavors will reach the imperial palate before the songs of our young musician reach the imperial ear, despite the baronine’s entreaty. News of these flavors, these pleasures will penetrate the walls of the palace; news of this fashion in food will work its way throughout the land. And I tell you this: if one could map the progress of this news — fascinating, outrageous, appalling, marvelous — moving north, south, east, west of us, one would have a guide to the most trustworthy communications network we possess, putting to shame the Empress’s highways and winded couriers, jogging along with messages from merchant, bandit, politician, and pleasure-seeking prattler alike in their hide sacks.
‘But I see you staring down that aisle there, at the end of which the people gather. Above them, the old woman in the young boy’s mask is helping to set up the platform for the performance. Those mummers cast another sort of reflection of our country; as you can see, it’s one that many are anxious to watch. The actor there in the mask of a girl, with bits of glass in his hair, supposed to be diamonds, and the white dress down to the ground, no doubt represents our beloved Child Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is personable and practical. It is an image our nation holds of her from her ascension — back, indeed, when I was about your age now. The other one there, in the mask of a man with a scar down his cheek and who wears a wooden version of the iron collar, would seem to be the Liberator, Gorgik, of whom you spoke. So, we are to have a political satire. The populace will see an amusing distortion of its own preconceptions of these figures; as the audience recognizes the skewly familiar, it will laugh. Had the Liberator or the Empress the patience, no doubt each might learn something of the way he or she is publicly perceived. But I certainly do not. And the Empress is not the sort to come wandering, veiled and obscured by time and inaccessibility, into the publicity of her realm. But from the props and painted pieces coming out of the wagon, I suspect the scene is to be Kolhari. The young actor there, dressed as an old woman vendor? The little girl playing a potato-selling boy? I wouldn’t be surprised if they had chosen to lay their fictional encounter here in the Old Market itself, just where we have been walking. Come away, girl. The truth is that both our Empress’s conservative supporters and our Liberator’s radical adherents will soon lose patience with the liberal distortions the mummers will impose upon the real that, finally, both agonists share. Which side, given its head, would shut them down the faster is as moot as the decision between cider and beer. Both parties I know would rather opt for a more realistic portrayal of, say, a simple encounter, in a market place such as this, between a real young girl who might, indeed, have really dreamed of being a queen and a real slave who might well have had some real thoughts on the desirability of freedom: what these two saw, what they said, their points of human contact, their inevitable moments of distrust and hostility — that, certainly, is the performance the radicals would applaud. Of course an equally realistic encounter, say, between an aging woman who must bear not only the idiotic title Child but also the real weight and responsibilities of state with, say, a real slave who, indeed, had really dreamed of becoming a political leader and a savior of his class, an encounter in which we might observe the real ignorances of such a slave and the queen’s real sympathy and wisdom about the very real political matters the slave would correct by overweening will and inefficient magic — that is the performance the conservatives would applaud. Either would be preferable to the shenanigans shortly to be abroad. But as we make our demands in the name of that meeting point between ethics and art, we overlook that both radical and conservative versions are no less concoctions than the concoction we would have them replace: one has a real queen and an unreal liberator, the other has a real slave and an unreal queen. And it is the notions of reality and unreality themselves which finally become suspect when either one is mirrored in art, much less when both are mirrored together. The liberal audience, claiming to be equally tolerant, or intolerant, of both sides (and one suspects, alas, they really comprehend neither), no doubt reads, as we have been reading, for the final sign of the mummers’ value: they may be equally offensive to both sides. And it is only some perception of that reading — and not the fact or referent of the performance which is read — that allows the agonists to suffer their antics. I can only Humph and walk off in silence, because I am the man I am…a slave to all the forces whose flow and form we have been trying here to mark. You are a free woman, which, from my position, means you are probably ignorant of what forces compel you.
‘I would not be one of them.
‘Stay here, if you like, chained by their lies and illusions no less magical than the coins and calipers on the counter behind. But, I see, you are following me…Is it inertia, fear, or merely politeness that makes you abandon their enthralling spectacle of variety and unity, singly expressed by the best-intentioned misdirection, for my monotone drone, picking at awkward distinctions?
‘Myself, I can find the toys for sale at this counter amusing, at least for a while. The clay dolls for young boys and girls; these rubber balls for older children; the gaming boards for young men and women — like material tools, each seems to proclaim its intelligible task: how to erase boredom, in some useful way, from the leisure civilization imposes. The answers these toys suggest at first seem innocent enough: “We shall initiate amusing rehearsals of future tasks without the goad of responsibility,” they declare. “We shall exercise the body, while it is free of the paralyzing knowledge of real dangers that hang on the outcome of necessary action. We shall stimulate the mind without the mind-numbing political constraints a truly meaningful decision imposes.” Considered not in terms of their ends but of their origins, however, they become more ominous.