deviant ART

no eulogies here. broke up the camp & hiked awayy.
but listen:




send me some season's greetings (no matter what the season),
pay me a visit.

CITIES & THE DEAD 5

Like Laudomia, every city has at its side another city whose
inhabitants are called by the same name: it is the Laudomia
of the dead, the cemetary. But Laudomia's special faculty is
that of being not only double, but triple; it comprehends, in
short, a third Laudomia, the city of the unborn.
The properties of the double city are well known. The more
the Laudomia of the living becomes crowded and expanded,
the more the expanse of tombs increases beyond the walls. The
streets of the Laudomia of the dead are just wide enough to
allow the gravedigger's cart to pass, and many windowless
buildings look out on them; but the pattern of the streets and the
arrangement of the dwellings repeat those of the living
Laudomia, and in both, families are more and more crowded
together, in compartments crammed one above the other. On
fine afternoons the living population pays a visit to the dead
and they decipher their own names on their stone slabs: like
the city of the living, this other city communicates a history
of toil, anger, illusions, emotions; only here all has become
necessary, divorced from chance, categorized, set in order.
And to feel sure of itself, the living Laudomia has to seek
in the Laudomia of the dead the explanation of itself, even
at the risk of finding more there, or less: explanations for
more than one Laudomia, for different cities that could have
been and were not, or reasons that are incomplete, contradictory,
disappointing.
Rightly, Laudomia assigns an equally vast residence to those
who are still to be born. Naturally the space is not in
proportion to their number, which is presumably infinite, but
since the area is empty, surrounded by an architecture all niches
and bays and grooves, and since the unborn can be imagined
of any size, big as mice or silkworms or ants or ants' eggs, there
is nothing against imagining them erect or crouching on every
object or bracket that juts from the walls, on every capital or
plinth, lined up or dispersed, intent on the concerns of their
future life, and so you can contemplate in a marble vein all
Laudomia of a hundred or a thousand years hence, crowded
with multitudes in clothing never seen before, all in
eggplant-coloured barracans, for example, or with turkey
feathers on their turbans, and you can recognize your own
descendants and those of other families, friendly or hostile,
of debtors and creditors, continuing their affairs, revenges,
marrying for love or for money. The living of Laudomia
frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them: footsteps
echo beneath the hollow domes; the questions are asked in
silence; and it is always about themselves that the living ask,
not about those who are to come. One man is concerned with
leaving behind him an illustrious reputation, another wants his
shame to be forgotten; all would like to follow the thread of
their own actions' consequences; but the more they sharpen
their eyes, the less they can discern in a continuous line; the future
inhabitants of Laudomia seem like dots, grains of dust, detached
from any before or after.
The Laudomia of the unborn does not transmit, like the
city of the dead, any sense of security to the inhabitants of the
living Laudomia: only alarm. In the end, the visitors' thoughts
find two paths open before them, and there is no telling which
harbours more anguish: either you must think that the number
of the unborn is far greater than the total of all the living and
all the dead, and then in every pore of the stone there are
invisible hordes, jammed on the funnel-sides as in the stands
of a stadium, and since with each generation Laudomia's
descendants are multiplied, every funnel contains hundreds
of other funnels with millions of persons who are to be
born, thrusting their necks out and opening their mouths to
escape suffocation. Or else you think that Laudomia, too, will
disappear, no telling when, and all its citizens with it; in other
words the generations will follow one another until they reach
a certain number and will then go no further. Then the Laudomia
of the dead and that of the unborn are like the two bulbs of an
hourglass which is not turned over; each passage between birth
and death is a grain of sand that passes the neck, and there will
be a last inhabitant of Laudomia born, a last grain to fall, which
is now at the top of the pile, waiting.

I.C.

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