/lit/ - Literature

>>10239589
>were/was
>who gives a shit right
>anyways just to schizopoeticize further

it is said that there are four ways to leave the City.

one is to admit that you do not live there; one is to be the Author; one is to know that for a time you left, and are now returning; and the last is to know that you never left, because the City follows you everywhere. this is, after all, how it grows; it is said that you can carry the streets away in your pocket, like a souvenir, or a curse. the City sends out no colonists; it spreads purely by memory and anecdote.

the City has no rulers, or laws, which is why people who have visited it say how mysteriously calm and orderly it all is. there are no end of translations of ancient Chinese manuscripts to be found in the bookstores here.

you can imagine the faces of those who have been to the City before: a tired aristocrat, the owner of a few bauxite mines and crumbling chateaux, heir to some mitteleuropan duchy the name of which escapes you; the owner of some rag-and-bone shop under a bridge; nameless and wandering street poets; there is a family resemblance shared between permanent exiles exiled from exile. they all looked for the heart of the City, and found it to be only as heartless as they were.

it is said that the City bears a kind of resemblance, perhaps, to the Republic of Plato, but turned inside out: a kind of sophist’s garden, but with a dire curse placed upon it: that the truth is that there is no truth for those who do not believe in truth, and this is what compels one to remain in that place forever. the City begins by welcoming in all wanderers, all exiles, all the rogues and heretics, but exiles them once again as if by an invisible and fateful anaxagorian power. whatever you think the City is, it is not that: the City punishes not with death but with continued life beyond its walls. its eleusinian mystery: once you know that you belong there, you have to leave.

those who are the worst sufferers in the City are the ones who speak the Truth, a sort of condition acquired from dwelling in the City too long. for them the City etches the patterns of its own streets and maps onto their skin, though they do it with their own nails and needles; they describe it endlessly, vexed by spirals; in these blessed ones the City truly finds a home.

then there are the passers-by, the flaneurs, who give it its more cosmopolitan and agreeable flavor: charming and witty, these dilettantes are more like emissaries and envoys. the City has no political rivals, or emissaries; it is a sort of Castalia, though a Castalia which has forgotten the difference between the glass beads and the windows. the City requires no protection: if anything, it is to be gently quarantined.

it has been said that the City is a plague and it would be better grind the last of its cobblestones to dust and scatter them; there is almost kind of a relief in thinking so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-N7CkQ2-398