4/27/1999 G.g.Ashbrook (with help from Ms.Rost)
A long time ago, there was an army sent to attack a castle-like fortress and they were a long time at the task. It seemed a simple task at first, it seemed only a matter of breaking it down and hauling away the pieces. They found the best way to tare down the walls was to go at it, each person, with pick and hammer, and brush. The [attacking] people stood on eachother’s shoulders covering the wall, and breaking away at it inch by inch, from toe to top; and of course before long they’d built supports and plank-ways when the shoulders of the people on the ground grew too tired. Often they would find interesting artifacts, engravings, or items built in, or thrown into the mortar of the wall, which many found to be quite beautiful; and in time a school of study and cataloging developed, ‘underground’ of course, at first. But it was fashionable for most of the people to have a trinket or charm which originally came from the wall.
vThe task was so long in the doing, and so many generations of people, standing on eachother’s shoulders, had lived out their days, that this was all the people could remember. In fact no one knew if they had been given any instructions about what to do when they were done; nobody could recall. All their stories, all the formalities and intricacies of their lives, were built around their path of destroying the wall. It was even observed that without the wall in some form, they would have no culture. If one looked from afar it appeared that the great wall was still quite intact. That is if one were so far way, too far to be able see that the wall was really made of people, carrying on their persons the jeweled adornments which had once been set into the inflexible stone and fixing agent, that now the wall just danced like the reflection of a dawn sun does on the moving facets of a water surface.
And when the first diggers broke through there were many people that would just as soon forget about it; who well preferred to keep the highly refined systems of organization, which kept healthy and happy this tribe of people, in good order. But those who were at the ‘cutting edge’ of this effort, who could see what the wall had been keeping them from, were, more often than not, willing to give up completely everything they had attained to move inside, that is, beyond the wall. Even though some of the people who said this meant it more figuratively. And when word of this spread in to the rest of the people, who could not see for themselves, it sent cascades of fragmenting myths about; usually contradicting eachother.
People on the inner rim spent long nights debating on how they would get the people from the wall into the middle. There was much disagreement over this because it was quite a task; in many ways more challenging than getting through the solid wall. The support of the wall, which was now composed of the people who had dismantled the ‘old wall’ (as some referred to it), relied on everyone doing their part. If people were simply taken from the wall into the middle area, the wall would collapse, trapping the bulk of the population; thereby defeating the whole purpose. The simplest suggestion was to dismantle the wall from the top down, but this was quickly debated for two reasons. One: that it was principally unfair to regard the ‘people at the top’ as a higher priority; ‘why are they better?’ seemed an inevitable question they would need confront. And Secondly: there was a strategic risk of the ‘people at the top’ considering themselves to be important beyond their arbitrary physical position in a structure they could not comprehend, and that on the basis of this that they would try to ‘cleanse’ their world, attacking their own foundation which would jeopardize the well-being of the wall as much as anything (when protecting that foundation had been the whole point in giving the ‘top’ this easily misunderstandable status in the first place). There were, from time to time, rumors that one person or another had figured out a way to move the whole wall at once. More than anything this aroused a potpourri of laughters. And also there arose counter rumors of conspiracy, which told that the groups who were trying to decide how to transport the populations had grown so powerful, that they actually wanted to keep the people from ever moving, thereby securing their own power and the power of their heirs; lest they ‘put themselves out of a job,’ as really was their strange professional occupation. To this a phrase "the wall never fell" circulated through circles of the curious and attentive, first started by a writer of fiction. And indeed it seemed that for whatever layer of physical wall which was torn down, another substance of wall appeared in its place. Though even in that, it sometimes happened that a minute amount of progress was made, being disappointing if a great leap was foreseen. Some people thought the wall would always be there, and that it should always be there, feeding the middle. Though it was highly debated whether the middle in fact needed the wall, or if the wall just needed itself, or if there even was a middle.
There was a group called the Body-Softeners, or some such thing, who had been inside, who had been to the middle, but who dedicated their somehow ‘immortal existences’ (if one attends to such rubbish) to getting everyone from the wall, who was the wall, into the middle; even when it seemed beyond absurd since the wall was reproducing itself faster than it was being taken down. Other problems arose too, such as sections of the wall evolving into ‘wall-dom,’ whereby they became incapable of surviving outside of the wall. Living under those conditions they had lost, or nearly lost, their ability to integrate with what was in the middle, since it was quite a different environment. Deep into the wall most people didn’t believe that anything but the wall existed. And since it was considered their whole world they expended all available energy toward making the wall as hard to disassemble as possible. This was, while just as self defeating, the opposite extreme to the reaction of the people who were still in the wall, but who had heard that they would have to give it up, and who then stopped doing their share of the work, also hurting their own foundation.
And of course there was always the problem of a tension between the structure of the wall and the natural, yet circumstantially alien, ‘produce’ which was imported from outside (presumably the middle area), or produced inside illegally. Those who were comforted by the stolid, or seemingly so, quality of the wall, perceived this comparatively boisterous element as corrosive, corrupting, threatening, and ‘up to no good.’ Yet none the less they required it for their own survival, since it was, to varying degree, "who they really were." This cognitive dissonance caused many a hard ordeal.
It had been long in the process, and yet had moved so slowly that those who knew never thought to tell and so the deal was generally forgotten, that one of these conspicuous fellows, or ladies, or groups, or who knows who, had set into motion a gradual transformation which would turn all the wall, in one piece (if you will remember), into the self same substance as the middle. The objectionable part of this, or as many found it so, was that it entailed doing just what you would ordinarily be doing, as opposed to building and un-building at the same time. For those who were trying to dismantle the wall quickly, this plan was seen as an attempt to keep the wall up, which of course it was not. And those who wanted to keep the wall up, if they noticed, saw this plan as an attempt to tare down the wall, which it also was not. It was a risky crafty clever quiet scheme, for the wall to evolve gradually across a line which was, all agreed, impossible to cross. Many, to their own confusion in the end, compared this task in all its perversity to that of transforming lead into gold, and ironically a few people tried to do this literally, presumably mistaking the meaning of ‘gold’. The thing was, everything in the wall, even the ‘old wall’ itself of memory (just to note: it was fashionable, among those who could afford it, to have replicas of the old wall built for display. But that is irrelevant here.), was only ever an inch away from crossing that impossible line; so close that many said and believed the line, for all practical purposes, was already crossed and that the news had just to be spread and believed (though, while optimistic, as has been said this is merely changing the substance of the wall to another no more easily dealt with) in consequence conjuring in the mind trails of ubiquitous phantasmagorical conspiracy.
The substance of the wall had to be transformed according to this slow process without changing or losing a single piece (contradicting those who wanted to sacrifice and give up everything they knew, and just as much contradicting those who wanted everything to remain the same). What people are perceiving has to do two things in the process of this transformation: One: the things being perceived must become internalized by the person who is perceiving (like the old wall); and Two: This must lead, in continuos path, to something which is simultaneously already a ‘natural’ part of the person and their external world and which is completely and utterly ‘alien,’ and ‘other,’ (as in arriving at the middle). The trick part of this is how to get that paradox (that impossible ‘line crossing’) to be something other than a brick wall. Every step is one which could potentially move in either direction, forward, or back. When a person creates a world, what are they doing and how does it effect the world they are living in? There can exist in people’s stories, ‘things’ which transform the world as people perceive it. A story can extend how people connect with their world, changing the interface. There are many different things a story can have or use to shift the world. It may be caricatures, or improbable events, which are no less than distillations of normal events which bring one focused piece into a new light of visibility. Even such things as ‘crossovers’ between the worlds which people create, have a profound if subtle significance for the ‘actuality’ of two people, two worlds, sitting together in a room, trying to push bits of their world through a wall of a membrane over to the other person, or, into that other world. And so often it is forgotten that many stories are only distant, encumbered, hobbled renditions of the ‘worldish’ objects they come from and are trying to represent, as an emissary with a poor memory. How were the people within the wall to take seriously the assertion that there was this ‘middle,’ something which they had never seen? As in the odd value of the mistake of solipsism, a view of the whole picture is something no one experienced in the day to day.
And there was another facet, the wall was also something between the people. Just as everyone lived in a wall together, they lived in walls alone. The middle, which might not have existed for all they knew, was both trapped outside them and inside them. So taking down the wall also meant taking down the walls between each person. Discovering the middle was not only the middle of their world, but their own middles too. But many mistook these walls for the ones which people had put-up themselves, as in common expression (such as social squabbles among slaves in a chain gang). And it may well be legitimate to claim that these walls, separate or the same (in all their levels), were fundamentally responsible for there being anything ‘outside.’ But this is only petitioning for a respect for the wall in it’s role. If these walls had cultured something within, what would be the sense in never manifesting that? But this is all part of the tension, which at times escalated to the status of war, between the wall, in whatever form, and the paradoxically alien and natural something which is fought, denied, and hunted for it’s value, all in the same breath.
The motion is slow, and it occurs when you are distracted. It is a transformation which by all accounts does not exist. It is a war which denies itself that name because it refuses to call either side ‘enemy.’ It is process which moves (in an impossible direction, which does not exist) only when you are ignoring it completely, and minding your own business. It is in its smallest part a dream which connects all, and which connects all dreams. It is anything which is more than itself. It is the girl or boy who can climb on top of their own shoulders to peak over a high wall. It is a tea specialist, a master of nothing, who must be killed for no reason. It is they who can dissolve into and reemerge from their own shadows, even shadows which are not theirs; and who are sometimes better represented in a backhanded illustration via the surrounding negative space, the space of tracery. In open air it makes the sound of light non-sense. It is a mystery by all measures.
Afterward
Upon the completion of the task which this group has been charged with, and called forth to execute, they may begin to ask a few questions which may never be answered. Who were these amazing people, this race called forth from nowhere? What really was this task that they were charged to do, and yet were told no more about than a soldier in an invading army is told about the musical tastes of the noble family he is trying to annihilate? What was the relationship between the wall and the middle area? How does a real literary universe come into being? Chekhov would say: work. And that may or may not have been an answer to the question.