isengrim

  Resurrection and Death

“We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us; we are their creatures, shaped by their hard, defining edges. When soldiers take their oath they are given a coin, an asimi stamped with the profile of the Autarch. Their acceptance of that coin is their acceptance of the special duties and burdens of military life—they are soldiers from that moment, though they may know nothing of the management of arms. I did not know that then, but it is a profound mistake to believe that we must know of such things to be influenced by them, and in fact to believe so is to believe in the most debased and superstitious kind of magic. The would-be sorcerer alone has faith in the efficacy of pure knowledge; rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all.”

The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

We wait on the baptism of death and invert the process of life’s end, but the cunning Wolf decides this is the Moment. We are promised the water but we get the grave. Symbols transforming beyond knowledge. Our little apprentice is now a thing greater than himself. In his revivified corpse, he spies a corpse fly. 

New life purchased by a purpose dimly held. 

Why? I suppose the cunning one elicits this. This or surrender. Mastery or tomfoolery? 

But is our knowledge mystic? Are we seeking madness? Where do the words pivot? Idea to thing. Where’s the step? Or it is no idea lest it enact? We can discount the nonactive symbol as nothing at all? Is this Isengrim’s claim? 

And then there is the divide of the lupine and the severe. Which is whom? Which is more unreliable? 

“Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them. I understood the principal intuitively that night as I heard the last volunteer swing the gate closed behind us.”

The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe

What, in the gates closing, sparks the sensation? Locked to a grave, by darkness held: reality becomes the pockets of diffused light. Upon narrow bones he runs to night. Was it all fusing before his fear? And so our Locksley a beacon in the entwining morass? And fresh from rebirth phenomenon questioned. 

These connect and invite but is the culprit caught? A parlor room accusation? Isengrim grins from his grave. 

Here we start. Where do we end? The throne of course. But of what substance?