#in a walled city
It has been a strange and difficult time. Many people I know processed this through art, storytelling, music, poetry, drama, comedy, and so many other forms of expression. And many people, like myself, fell into and out of the ability to do this creative work, into and out of dry spells, while trying to keep our heads above water and to live in a shut down world.
About a year ago, in the midst of chaos and as a way of responding to it, I began an experimental audio series called IN A WALLED CITY. After a hiatus, work on this project has resumed. Over the course of this past year and especially during the time of quarantine I was able to spend more time listening and watching. While this has been a traumatic period in many ways, it has also been a time of enormous artistic output for many people – many of whom are professionals, many of whom turned to creative work for the first time, and many in between.
I’m working with a group called Thicket to launch an artistic showcase called KALEIDOSCOPIC in which we aim to feature artwork of all kinds made during this time of immense change. We are looking for everything from songs to podcasts to films to monologues to essays to anything else you’ve made that you consider your artistic expression.
This showcase will take place online on July 17th. We are seeking submissions in the form of 2-5 minute videos that show your art in whatever form you feel is most appropriate.
This is a paid event. We will be selling tickets for $25 and we will split the proceeds: one third will be divided among all contributing artists, one third will be divided among the production staff, and one third will cover expenses.
If you’d like to submit to the showcase please visit https://www.thicket.agency/ where you can find the FAQ as well as more information about Thicket and upcoming workshops.
If you would like to get involved with production of this or future events, or if you’d like some guidance on your submission, or have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
If you aren’t planning to submit, please consider purchasing a ticket and spreading the word. I will debut new work from IN A WALLED CITY at this event and several close friends and collaborators will be showcasing great work as well!
In other news, I am working on an instrumental album called NINE COURTLY DANCES as well as rehearsing live sets with both Wing & Scale and RAQIA. Touring with Welcome to Night Vale will resume in the spring of 2022.
I am looking forward to seeing you, on the road or online!
Thanks for listening,
Jon / Disparition
Manifestation of the Will as deliberate Change in reality. Expression of the Self beyond the limits of Body, Mind, and Soul. Foundation of emotional resonance in the Other. Intersection of divided worlds.
What are these practices? What kind of box do I put them in? How do I take them apart so that you can piece them together into realness?
The thousands upon thousands of texts in my castillo with their millions of words, they offer so many possibilities. Anthropologies and fantasies, they brush against but do not quite touch. I draw this line with chalk of ancient shell, unbroken circle on smooth raw stone, covered over with carpet and warm room.
from THE HISTORIAN (to be continued)
I.
We follow every road, cross every field
our maps coated in finger oil
the stains of generations
We keep all names new and old,
on small wooden plaques
or old dominos
threaded on twine or twisted fishing line
carried on the belt
and around the neck
Among our people, the sound of these names -
they brush and click against one another
is our most Sacred sound.
We like it when you hear our approach
when you hear us on your road
You quicken, you liquidize
your memory hears us before your self
begins to boil
to foam and rise
We do not sell answers
this is forbidden to us
We freely give any name in our mind
ancient or weeks old –
the histories bestowed on us, our heavy burden
is also free
You offer, and we accept
the night of rest
warm nourishment
a few small wooden plaques
or old dominos
On our noisesome belts we carry
towns, cities, roads, mountains, rivers
objects strange and mundane
process and plans
plants and creatures
favorite dishes passed down through generations
The only names we do not carry are human
this too is forbidden
Your names, our names
temporal or permanent
these may be written
only on the inside of an onion skin
We are cherished and hunted
sought everywhere
Some bring us within their walls
celebrate us, bestow upon us
names newly made, or old stories newly learned
They make us heavier.
They give us more noise.
Others seek us to silence us
to cut names from our belts
to burn or bury
They have many good reasons
reasons we understand
But we do not comply
We go to great lengths
We protect ourselves
We were born the day the old net fell
dissipated in distrust
fragmented and cloistered
As the age of paper unfolded we quickly earned a natural trust
and right to cross gates
wander in and out of walls
and gathered friends to walk with us
to watch our backs against those who would lighten us
It did not take long for our numbers to grow
As new waters came into the valley
we walked along canals
balances on the little walls
met with carriers of salt
rode with Fivers the length of their Way
In the days when paper cracked and peeled
it is said one fourth of every other hold
came to walk with us
New cultures bubble and foam across the plain
Old paper blows and washes out to sea
fresh skin glistens in the sun
green and gold and pulsing
Our flow across fields
the lines we draw between
walled cities, far towers, open circles, wide farmsteads
we acquire weight and thickness
and shine into the glass eyes above
dead and living
bound to old nets
and new gardens
In this way we speak
The names we carry are tiny
The names we carve into the earth reach for hundreds of miles
Words that stretch across the land
these are the names of countries, cities, rivers, and mountains
in our own secret tongue
Forever unknown even to us
none of us has ever seen them
Glass eye above, you hold us.
Liquid eye on the other side,
we wait for you.
II.
It was March when she fell into the Vision
The first March of the liquid days
When the remnants of the fakery
Still wet in the streets
Waiting to be washed away
Or dried into dust and carried off by winds
In April came the days of Seperation
The waves of dreams from the east
The flow over and under the Sierra
Her Vision was a rock in the stream
Vortices shed behind her
By May the formalities had fallen apart
Concrete and sands shifting under the feet
A shift quicker than anyone had anticipated
The turning of some hidden mechanis
Or opening of a door
You looked behind you and it was already done
These were days of bright colors
Of opening
Unguided masses of the east
Pulled through and into the searing valley
This has happened again and again
But those who had crossed the sands
Or walked the ridges and ravines
Now floating just above every surface they crossed
Tongues bound, silenced by the strength of that first pull
She was the first to greet them
The current were strong in those days
She took position in the center of the valey
In the beginning it was only her senses
With expert use of Overlay
From the edge of her fields
Alone under the sky
Then she sent her people unto the land
To gather stones, the width of the circle
And with this built her tower
Rising from the middle of the San Joaquin
Those who came to her
Learned to breathe that sacred water
Soon word travelled on those currents
And seekers came from all direction
The wild marches of the north
The communes and bastides of the valley
Even the glistening shapes of the Bubble
And then word spread to the mirror cults of the Southland
In those months of heat and haze
She was visible only to those far wanderers
Selected by her watchers
Allies waiting at crossroads
Or within the webs of aid that sprang up in those days
Words and deeds sent to her
By crow and bee
With Autumn came visiblity
In other lands this is a time of darker skies
Rain and turning leaf and cold wind
Here it is the time of burning
A new and focused heat
But distance is distance
And light is light
So here too we have that clarity
That sharpness of season
And so she began to glow
Blue and violent spillig across fields
Winding through canyons
Crossing the horizon
Eyes awoke and turned to face her all at once
They came for her – at first small and local groups
The Bubblers to record and categorize
To steal and mock and recreate
The Christkeepers to silence and burn
To meld and reshape and funnel
And then the air changed, the Southlanders came
High ranking channelers of the miror cults
in shining capes and glittering tights
Envoys from the realms of Glendale, Cessna, Orange, Pasadean, Waterworld, and the Citadel, naked and direct, covered in shifting and confused signs
Wanderers of the desert communes and priestesses of Salton, come with flowers , vines, and warnings
Overwhelmed and ever weary, she took from this widening flow
And spun an elaborate filter
A circle five miles around her tower
Sinking into both sides of the river
Any who would approach her, the Source of San Joaquin
Must carry a living plant, one year of age or older
Not yet found within her Circle
Thus was born her famous garden
By December she had become fully real
The flow into her Circle narrow, slow, intense
The return into the world bright, jagged, searing
They came with palm, succulent, and vine
They left wrapped in currents and winds
Eyes glowing, tears streaming
In January came the days of new accord
When flowers turned to signs and letters
Were wound over the gates of cities
When Mia Marisol, in person, approached
Bearing citrus micrantha
And left with a map of ways to slip
Between every mirror of the Southland
It was February when the waters around the tower
Began to froth and rise as mist
Unsnapped from the grid
She divided and dissipated
The line of her circle wound back up around its spool
The tendrils of her garden, still bound to her
Reaching for the sea.
III.
Those who cover themselves in empty signs
And piecemeal tongues
Those who live in loudness
Wrapped in fragile image
Snared and stretched and caught in the gaps
Become as paint and pasetel
Smeared gradient and shining dust
This is your service and your bridge
Become rose, become ultramarine, become lime, become magenta, become iris, become azure, become sienna, become canary, become puce, become mustard, become sea foam, become umber. become crimson, become ochre, become gold, become vermilloin, become feldspar, become violet, become sage…
I.
ash falls on tile, on paper, on skin
ash enters our windways as a poison, and enters the earth as a nutrient
carved stone sculpture of an open hand, embers collecting in the palm
they spin and rise
walk among ashes as though in a sacred courtyard – unarmed, naked, empty of song or idea
walk among ashes as though barefoot into the wetlands, sinking and becoming
the ending and beginning of the worlds in their millions, ashes rise from the ground in a cloud, the cloud fades into the sky and pulls back into the distance
the shapes and forms that emerge into visibility
are shaking, secretly and inwardly
nervous, unsure how to approach
clouds that choke and clog our passageways with memory. once, from distances, this scent could pull us for miles towards the solace of warmth and comradery. In the age of paper the scent is mixed with fear and imbalance.
the clouds grow. we walk by day in ochre and fall to stillness as the veil disintegrates around us, asleep in beds of amber, washing up on their shores.
II.
He bought the little glass jar at a tourist trap in the Temple Pass, the tiny city they used to call Casa de Fruta and then the Nine Times City. Yes, the place where Faita’s Kite still lies in pieces up on the hillside. Yes, the same place where they still fly in the night. That place. The little glass jar was etched with the image of a poppy. Yes, that poppy.
He filled the little glass jar with soil from the shore of the ancient resevoir, a thin column dry and loose at the top, wet and dense at the bottom, he spread it out upon his tile and ran it through the sieves before funnelling it into the little glass jar with the etching of the poppy.
He was heading east against the flow, a direction that called attention, all the way across the valley he kept his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his robe, his head low, his thoughts a pure reflection of the landscape and vibration in the area immediately surrounding. A slow and silent mirror creeping along the overgrown upper paths of the Eightyway, he encountered few – and those he met, or rather saw, seemed as eager to avoid the mark as he. And so they passed each other with no acknowledgement, each giving wide berth and then erasing all shade and memory of encounter. Still, without quite realizing it, he had one set of fingers tightly clutched around the little jar full of earth with the etching of a poppy.
They stopped him soon after he entered the foothills. He had left the road by then but it didn’t matter. From atop a low ridge he had stopped to watch figures throwing logs across the way at Clipper Gap as travellers lined up outside of a tent by the side of the road. On the approach to Applegate they surrounded him in a clearing, a pickup and SUV in front of him and another pickup behind. They poured out of the vehicles. He took his phone out of his pocket – yes even at that late hour he still had a phone. A gloved hand grabbed it and threw it into the field while someone pinned his arms from behind and then kicked his legs out from under him. Then another hand forced his face into the ground and a voice was calm and close in his ear : “you can simply dissappear”. More hands pulling at his robes, tearing it from his body and then ripping the pockets open.
Someone picked him up so that he was kneeling but kept a hand on the back of his head, forcing his to the ground. They were going through everything and setting certain items aside on the hood of one of the pickups – even in this chaos he was attuned to the sound. The small leather tube containing the writ, the cutter, the digger, his canteen, the small glass full of soil from the ancient resevoir, the sieves, the tile.
One of them gave a stifled yelp. They had found his eggs. He expected them to smash the eggs in an act of mocking cruelty and was surprised to see shells fall silenty to the ground as the eggs were eaten quietly and hurriedly by whoever spotted them.
As he watched the shells fall he noticed their bootprints on the ground, the cross at the center of the pattern, and felt a cold dull pain rising at the base of his spine as his stomach began to churn. Wolves of Honor. He thought he had steered well north of their territory but things changed fast and information wasn’t what it used to be. All of the old maps were dead. Silent but nearly paralyzed with fear, they walked him over to the SUV and strapped him into a hard fiberglass seat in the back.
He didn’t know much about the Wolves of Honor, but he had seen comrades with that cross pressed into their face or back, seen the broken hands and missing fingers, he’d heard the rumours about what had they had done to Jesse, what they had done in Truckee. That was enough.
They were in motion almost immediately. The straps made it hard to turn his head, and a bare wooden board seperated him from the front of the cab. With pressure he could twist and see partially out of the window to his right, where the trees were getting thicker and the sky darker. Soon they were climbing steeper hills, winding back and forth into the Sierra, and he had to face forward to keep from getting sick. Eventually, he closed his eyes.
They stopped at a low, small building on the edge of a small and steep ravine. When they pulled him out they light was almost gone but he could feel the form of the land, run himself over the jagged stone hidden beneath soft layers of life and death.
They brought him into a small gray room partitioned by crude brickwork and thick, dull glass. In the tubelight he could see their piecemeal uniforms, the longrifles on their backs, their pins and patches, wolves and stormclouds, eagles and runes, the flag of the old empire with the five bars and the stars replaced by a cross.
Two stood behind him, hands on his shoulders. Three sat at an ancient folding table. Through layers of glass he saw several other figures crowded into a tiny room at the far end of the building, shrouded in white, their movements hindered by some binding he couldn’t see. The blur of the glass masked their faces but they looked like elders, and they were swaying gently back and forth.
The Wolves pushed him down into an old school chair that was bolted to the floor and bound him to it. Someone came in holding what was left of his robes and a duffel bag. With gloved hands they slowly removed his belongings and placed them on the table, the sieves, the tile, the cutter, the digger, his canteen, the small glass full of soil from the ancient resevoir, the small leather tube containing the writ.
One of the soldiers behind the desk produced a clipboard overstuffed with white, yellow, and pink papers and carbon sheets. Yes, the triplicates of legend. In hushed tones they debated intracacies of the paperwork among themselves. He could hear them but their jargon was impenetrable. One by one they picked up the items, gestured at the forms and eventually filled out various sections, their tone and faces muted with boredom. When they came to the leather tube, they stopped as if afraid to touch it. Then one of them slowly stood and ambled outside.
A heavy space lay on the room and all inside its partitions. The drone of the tubelight was the only sensation. Even the prisoners had stopped their swaying. The remaining Wolves stared ahead, eyes dulled. He scanned the walls, the ancient forms and notices still held up with tape, indecipherable graffiti in three languages, a crude drawing of Mia Marisol with her eyes crossed out and a snake coming out from her mouth. Could have been done by the Wolves or by any number of previous occupants; her name had been anathema in this part of the mountains long before their arrival.
The wind began to pick up outside. A sound of leaves and creaking branches filtered through the brick work. Then the door opened quickly and a group of soldiers came in. They wore the same patches as the other Wolves but their armor was more uniform, they were heavy with clinking gear, they smelled of woodsmoke.
One of them picked up the leather tube from the table and popped it open, then held the writ close up to their face, folded it in half, and stuffed it into a pocket. “Outside, and bring all his shit.”
Two of them got up from behind the table, languid, slow, one of them pausing to stretch. They unstrapped him, lifted him roughly from the chair, rebound his hands behind his back; three went outside and then the two behind pushed him, following.
Outside the dark was total and the wind strong. A floodlight above the door of the building shone on the gravel drive and reflected off of parked trucks. They all stopped just a few feet in front of the door. The soldier who had taken the writ was addressing the others: “He’s got a Writ of Gomez. Do you guys know what that is?” almost yelling to keep above the wind.
“You should know what that is because we signed this. In fact, every chapter of Knights on the coast has signed it. McCora signed it, I was there when he did, and that means us. Now, I want to show you guys something. I’m going to show you how these people work and how to turn their own snake language against them.”
The soldier turned to address him directly: “Gentle traveller, do you know the meaning of the term ‘to abide’?”
In the silence the wind grew stronger.
“You see in this writ it says that you are to ‘abide’. Specifically it says you are to abide by the structure of those realms you cross. Realms. Well, we aren’t a realm we are a republic, and in our republic we abide in Christ. Don’t worry, I already know you don’t. I already know that. But it says you are to abide by our strictures, and it turns out you don’t even abide by your own. How do you think we found you? Take a wild guess.” From the same pocket in which the writ was folded, his phone was produced. One of them must have gone into the field to find it.
“I don’t know a lot about how you people do things but I’m pretty sure you aren’t supposed to have this. You don’t look like a Bubbler to me. And you definitely aren’t supposed to have it here.” The phone went back into the pocket.
“And so we have you. Now, I know, we all know, what it is to trespass – because we are all sinners. The most we can do is ask forgiveness. To ask forgiveness, you have to accept Christ into your heart. Only then can you begin to abide – only then will it be in your nature to abide. Please kneel.”
Someone kicked him hard in the back of the legs, heavy hands on his shoulders forced him down. He whimpered as his knees were driven into the gravel, the first sound he made in their presence. With his hands behind his back he couldn’t balance on his own, the two behind him holding him semi upright.
The wind had grown stronger. Dry needles and small branches were blowing across the drive. One of the Wolves had gone back into the building and returned with the duffel bag, then one by one began tossing the items onto the ground. The sieves, the digger, the porceilein tile landed on a corner that chipped off. One of the sieves rattled as it rolled away down the slope.
“Here’s our solution, and you don’t know how lucky you are that we’re in the middle of something right now. So, it’s simple. You will open your heart and accept Christ, you will abide in Christ so long as you remain on our land, we will let you take your little witch toys and walk away because they don’t do shit here. The illegal spy device that you brought into our republic will be cleansed and destroyed by the proper method, the writ of Gomez we will keep until we have observed you leaving our territory – it will then be sent to your superiors, the old way, and with our seal attached. Now, to show our faith we will unbind you so that you may place your hand over your heart. Please do so.”
At that moment the little glass jar landed badly on a rock and shattered. Immediately the wind picked up the dust of the ancient resevoir, it circled in the air around the drive and fled into surrounding the darkness. It was then enough confidence returned and, triggering an aged memory, enough power entered him that words rose quitely in his throat and flew into the air: “may you sit for all of your days in the southwest corner of every room with a northwest wind blowing dust in your eyes.”
They had not yet unbound his hands and they never did. One of them punched him hard in the stomach and then again in the chest. He struggled to breathe. They forced him upright, marched him back into the building, opened the layers of doors to the tiny room with the elders shrouded and white, and threw him to the floor. His hands still bound behind his back, a boot pressed down on them, then kicked him in the lower back, then stopped. They were furious, but hurried – there was something odd about their speed. They closed and locked the door and then shut off lights in the outer rooms, then there was another clanking of bolts as they locked the last door from outside. Then the sound of engines and the crunch of wheels on gravel as they left. And then the wind outside, the breaking of branches, the hum of the one flickering tubelight they had left on in the tiny room.
As his breathing regained some normal rhythm and the pain began to subside, he managed to turn himself onto his other side. He had thought the room crowded with prisoners but it must have been some trick of the glass – there were only two. He recognized them immediately, the ancient teachers who had wandered the valley of Joachim and the Sierra in the chaos and the liquid days. One of them came from Fresno, the other Chico. As soon as they saw the recognition in his eyes, they looked at one another and, as though he were not present, began their Discourse. Outside, the emberse had already begun to fall.
“Was this wise, what our young traveller has done? Look where he finds himself – bound and defeated. If one is caught in a current, it is unwise to swim directly against it” said the Teacher of Fresno
“You must have failed to look into the eyes of our captors” remarked the Wise One of Chico, “our traveller has spread a fear into them. The fear will take them – maybe not this moment, or this day, but it will be their defeat.”
“It wil not be the defeat of all of them. These people, these Wolves, they are a hairs breadth from the witch burnings and pogroms of old. To use such a curse, is to incur a debt. Howsoever that fear is spread, it will return upon him and not just him, but on all of his people, on those who are bound to him by love and knowledge, and on those who depend on their kindness, and so on across the webs between us all. Not every seed takes root but the one that does will break all the soil and drink all the water of the field” responded the Sage of Fresno.
“And that of which you speak is that which must be done, the soil wil be broken and the water will be drunk, as we leave from the age of fields and enter into an age of the forest” opined the Aged One of Chico.
“Does this transition need to occur without wisdom or foresight?” asked the Learned One of Fresno “and with such dire consequence for those caught in the margins? Those with less power will suffer for what he has thrown into the wind. To move from one age to the next is unavoidable, but is it so much to ask that this be done with sensitivity, and with precision? As reality shatters can we not watch our step, that we are not cut by the flying shards?”
To which the Elder of Chico responded “Look down on the forests of tomorrow, which grow as did the forest of yesterday. Do you see it placed upon a grid?”
The teacher of Fresno was consumed in a pillar of light.
The teacher of Chico faded into the ether.
Outside, the windws carried ash and ember and the distant sounds of chainsaws and of logs being thrown across the roads.
III.
There will come a day when you look up to find the sky full of machines – heavy and strange, objects that don’t look like they should fly. Like pieces of them are breaking away and falling slowly, drifting down like steel feathers.
There will come a day when you condense all of your feelings into your fingertips until they glow and you will scrape them against the air leaving bright traces, and you will be unable to hide those traces before you are seen – was that the first time?
Think back over the dreams you have had throughout your life.
Focus on what you have seen again and again.
Not the people, not the events, not even the feeling – not exactly. Look around you. Circle around and above.
The room, the space, the architecture, the geography, the design, the living and unliving things and the balance between them.
Focus on where you have been again and again.
What are the settings you return to in dreams that you have never seen in the life you call “real”?
The intersections, the hallways, the parks, the transit systems, the view out of and into windows.
Focus on what you have seen again and again.
Do not let yourself be led astray by the temptations of literary symbolism – the roads and bridges that we see in dreams are not metaphors, they are infrastructure.
These are the marches, the borderlands, the high and distant domes of our temples are held aloft by pillars of smoke. That which happens here echoes and ripples. Currents wrap themselves around you.
Focus on where you have been again and again.
How is it possible that these memories have entered so deeply into you, the details of places you have never physically entered, this sense of routine and repetition
How is it possible the drone of machines and weight of their distance, their journey across the upper atmosphere has covered you in your sleep like a blanket all these years
Think back on the dreams you have had over and over in your life, and think on the dream you are in now
Invisible and floating in a photonegative world, awake and waiting the painted masks, the order of keys, the pulling line. Three blue diamonds buzz against glass in the light of dawn.
There will come a day when you glide just above the fields and the ground will drop from beneath you, the valley and its twisting currents far below, shrouded in mist.
bandcamp: https://disparition.bandcamp.com/album/5-five
apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/in-a-walled-city/id1526192366
spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/18ZkP5CrZBaS0CZ74bkyYZ?si=oeG3AhRLRaKxw9CKzrR7Hw
I.
they unfold before you
sea after tiny sea
partitioned by salt-crusted stone
wall after tiny wall
stairs and algae
miasma of shifting colors
they collect in the corner of the eye
they add up
eyes on the road
lines under the earth
blur of walls pooling in the corners
the sight takes hold
the hands grow numb
the brain bubbles
the sky descends
drift from lane to lane
an arcing dance
a line over the line
a circle around and above
valley of all valleys
born a sea of grass and wandering fire
wind, current, and thrum of hives
the floods your dreams and longings
an arc of bright feeling from root to fingertip
starlight across the surfaces of your rivers
pylon after pylon
eye after eye
seen and marked, near silent drifter
may your body be generic and featureless
may your wiring be gutted and pulled
may your quietness fill you
may their ear be clogged
tiny drifter, shining beetle on a ribbon
drawn forth out into the night
the winds wrapped around you
wanderer, there is no where you can go
the map will shift to contain you
the known written in under your wheels
your feelings writhe, reach, and wrap around
the branches we extend to meet you.
II.
The darkness came hours ago but sleep will not, and so you decide to go for a drive. In silence and grace you decent into the garden. Gently, you remove a section of the cellophane, the part over the window, cutting it with your thumbnail. You slide the window down into its well, pull the door open from the inside, careful to make no contact with the exterior. Inside, you run your hands over every inch of the dashboard, slide them deep into the radio cavity. Making sure, just making sure. You feel those above, opening the fate for you, and those below, melting out from the grass and high roses, gripglove hands just below the windows. You feel the soft motion, wheels just barely sunk into the rich soil. The open gate is at the bottom of a steep hill. In position, the hands let go. Flying just above the ground, low level owl, a quietness of creaking frame and grasses pushed aside. A gathering speed, in the bottom of the stomach and in the corners of the eyes. Hands on the wheel, in no time choice is upon you.
III.
lines cross just below the grapevine
glowing, burning lines who shout their visibility into space
built, burned, built again, shaken to rubble, built again
frail city of rope and web, half of you invisible
sacred city of collision
for so long we passed through you hurriedly, unlooking
covering every part of you with names and moving on
seen from above, so clear
south branch and san andreas
golden slope and stripe of char
IV.
You are entering the Sovereign Nation of the Way. Everyone still calls it the Five. All members of all houses are welcome on the Way with the sole condition of motion. Drift. There are five hundred and twenty three official gates into the kingdom of the Five, gates which anyone may cross but if you are not a citizen, you may not stop. And you are not a citizen. Crest on dash, their eyes read you as soon as you cross a threshold, they hold on to you for every moment until you leave. The old eyes, boxes mounted on tall metal frames, the new eyes, tiny and embedded in ever conceivable surface. They appeared in the cities, decades ago, now they are found in every yard of road in every one of the Thirteen Hundred Miles. The Way is a mile wide and immaculate, unbroken by storm, fire, or collision. The Fivers are ever present, working constantly, resurfacing, extinguishing, eternally decorating. On the outer lanes, hulking 32 wheel beasts roll perpetually at thirty miles per hour, spaced ten miles apart from each other. The alcalarodante, each is unique and elaborately designed. These are where the Fivers live and keep their workshops, dispatch their wheelers and small carriers, and watch the endless feeds coming in from the eyes in miles before and behind. In this and many other of their duties, they overlap. The Fivers are fond of redundancy, repetition, certainty.
You enter the realm through the Gates of Elysian, the natural flow pulls you quick and silent through the sleeping valley. In no time you’ve reach the southern edge of the old security complex, the Grapevine Wall. Really a series of fortifications starting just below the Castaic checkpoint, they now lie in ruins, empty since the days of Marisol’s exile. The only remaining inhabitants are in the Towers of Frazier, once built to house workers on the Wall as well as Marisol’s garrison, now they are an independent walled city in their own right – and still fiercely loyal to her memory. In this night you see the Towers glowing distantly, lighting the walls of their valley off to the left as you pass the darkened Gates of Tejon. The dramatic landscape around you nearly invisible, the sharp drops and burned strips still pull at you. Even the Way itself, cast into a glowstate, a bright ribbon seen from the stars, feels dimmer in this stretch. But now a flash fills your interior, and then another, a pulse from the alcalarodante ahead on your right – now approaching you feel your carrier slow, resistances wound slowly around outer tires, the pull from a Fiver watching inside.
V.
every part of you has been covered in fire
even in the time before us
every part of you gives a golden light
even in this smokechoke season
gatherers, gatherers
machine and hand
field after burning field
row after shaking row
they collect in the corners of the eye
they add up
a blanket of scars
all across the southern valley they stab and suck
tens and tens of swords
armies of drop carriers
benders of pipes
cover you with living carcasses
wrap around your trunks with iron hands
pull and shake until you drop what you hold
vibrations separate the root from the soil
only a tiny space
waiting for the flood
the patterns on top of you scream out
visible even at this holy distance
circle around and above
circle around and above
VI.
What spells weave they, these Fivers? Already your carrier has been netted and lashed by bonds invisible to the edge of the wide deck at the rear of the alcala. You have felt, you have seen throughout this procedure, the light of the Way dimming around you. But that cannot be so. Gripglove hand of a Fiver slides your window down, and then you see the figure step back and beckon. Out you crawl, even at this low speed the transition to the large open platform on is jarring. Wind and ash in your face. Immediately you feel it, the descent, the opening of the valley, the Gates of Wheeler. Drops of moisture collect on you, run in streams along the ornate balustrades of the alcalarodante. The figures around you remain motionless but seem to grow in number as the fog thickens. Just after you pass the Gates, the glow of approaching dawn becomes visible on the eastern horizon. Before you is the City of Wall, one of only four stationary settlements in the entire realm. and also the first. Fortified by Marisol in the last days of her gambit, this section of the old wall community became an independent collective called Interchange before linking up with the rest of what became the Sovereign Nation of the Way. The central keep, on the grounds of the old outlet mall, retains the same footprint and layout of the original structure at its core, but has been expanded in all directions, each outer layer more decorative and less functional than the last. It is here they are bringing you, but the alcala has to perfom some bizarre maneuvre to get you there. You’ve never seen one taken out of its lane. Half a mile inward, at the center of the Way, massive chains of heavy carriers hurtle past at over a hundred miles an hour – unlit, fenced off, their presence known through their churning wind. There is a sudden steep descent and a sharp turn, and then you are beneath the heavy carriers, crossing for half a mile under the southbound Way, emerging in a greygreen light on the far side opposite the keep on a wide, flattened surface - the long ago site of Marisol’s headquarters in the last days of the defense. From here you will cross a bridge, one of very few remaining in the realm, crystal clear and two miles long, double the width of the Five itself, leading from here directly into the keep itself. The alcalarodante never actually stops – Fivers escort you along the outer platform where a narrow staircase leads to a waiting wheeler drifting beside you – you step into it, it peels away, the alcala lumbering off to its route. Can they stop? Is this the source of their power, their endless motion? The wheeler climbs the glasslike slope of the bridge with its thickgrip wheel, the eastern light breaks through and across the valley floor, scattered across the surfaces of the thousand tiny seas the stretch out from the walls of the Five and onward into the flat northern distance.
VII.
wave after shining wave
reed after bending reed
wind and current carry your song
your fields sunken and untended
cormorants cap ancient pylons
leaning but still towering over the coursing Way
circle around and above
even from this sacred distance
salt shouts its edges into space
layer upon layer
a softening grid
until the waves return in strength
until they wash through the jagged teeth at the base of the bubble
until the rivers swell
until the waves find themselves again at the foot of Sierra
the ]In A Walled City[ stories are set in a range of futures, between now and two hundred years from now. While these stories take place during and after dramatic and large scale historical events have occurred, in no sense is this a depiction of a “post-apocalyptic” world. No more than the world you are currently in right now is “post-apocalyptic” - the past is full of collapsed nations, destroyed cultures, ideologies or experiments that manifested with good intentions and broken methods and fell apart before they worked, people picking up the pieces and starting again, new ideas, new combinations, new cultures, and on and on. Tumultuous, life changing events can be found across the entire spectrum of human history. Life continues around and between them. Worlds end, the universe does not.
new worlds come into being, continually. I am not interested in trying to depict a dystopian society (nor a utopian one). There are many individuals and groups with strong and detailed ideas about how society ought to be structured and run. The road between the idea and its execution is often a difficult one, and the end result may differ greatly from the original intent, with unseen results for those who live within the system, and with varying levels of agency. For many people our current society is dystopian. For many people, a range of societies in the past were dystopian. A matter of perspective, privilege, positioning with relation to the power structure. Other people, those at the top of power structures throughout history, have lived in utopias of their own design. Rarely if ever are these moments and ideas static. The notion “ideal society” can change radically even within the mind of one person as they age and experience.
Any of these thoughts and plans can be so easily disrupted, changed by unexpected and seemingly irrelevant forces, elements from outside of the box, outside of the system. An insect, a bird, a stone fruit, an earthquake, a whisper, a flicker of new awareness, an idea or fear that comes not from any rational thought but from a dream and which colors all of one’s actions for the rest of the day.
