Scholion

On impatience and the enemy

[Editorial note: the following technical discussions were provided by a former Curator with a special interest in the discourse of the Last One.]

On {impatience}:

Impatience blows the trumpet
for the Advent of the ghosts.

The earliest interpretation of this cryptic saying, that it is a fragment from a longer allegorical work — a pageant or historical enactment, perhaps set to music — is almost certainly wrong. No context for such a performance can be derived from any Writing in the Archives, not to mention the torsion required to credit this construal's absurd claim: that 'the ghosts' were some kind of lesser deities — even mortals raised to godly rank after death! — who served as messengers between the divine Ancients and the human world.

Such an imaginative explanation likely arose before any other Writings of the Last One were discovered or attributed. (Among the Authors in the Archives, the Last One is the earliest to mention 'the ghosts'.) However, the entities he calls 'the ghosts' in his extended discourse easily resist such simplistic analysis; in his philosophy of life, they stand in the first rank of importance. His manifold vituperations against the ghosts portray a formidable race of enchanters whom he blames entirely for the cataclysm that destroyed his world, the magnificent civilization of the Ancients.

There does exist (or did: the original has never been located) what may have been an early 'draft' of this saying, never officially incorporated into any previous structuring of the Archives, but ever lurking, as it were, among the miscellanea of unplaceable artifacts when they were transmitted. Here is a reconstruction of that text:

The yelp of impatience trumpets
the Advent of the ghosts.

[By all reports, strikethrough in original. — Ed.]

This variant of the saying, though similar in sense, bears different freight, to wit:

In either case, one must wonder: how can it be that impatience serves to reveal or, worse, musters the ghosts?

Let us pause for a moment to ponder the operant term «impatience», which serves as the title of this antique Writing: it will more than repay any interruption in the flow of thought thus far.

What is impatience, after all? The loss (or relinquishment) of equanimity, in reaction to an unanticipated development in the unfolding of time: one had expected (or wished) one thing was to occur, but something else happened instead.

Interrogating this circumstance, we must back away enough to perceive two elements that constitute the situation, an expectation and the event, and then ask, How did this expectation or wish come about? or, to hint at an answer by rephrasing the question, What was the origin of the unsound expectation in the first place?

How would the Last One reply? How else? — The ghosts, fool. What did you think?

 

On {enemy}:

Text is our enemy: the utterance of the ghosts.

This brief indictment was originally thought to be a paragraph taken from {What can we do here?}, itself a much-copied transcription that by custom was bundled with the so-called Sermons of Egderus, presumably delivered during his tenure as Superius Frater at Mountain House. A later curator extracted this specific passage from that Writing to its own document, certain that its first sentence (or two, depending on how it is parsed) represented an instance of migratory text, claiming that it was in fact a bona fide Saying of the Remnant (without specifying how that attribution was to be validated), and that the brief explicatory phrase (about immortal fame) which followed constituted a gloss that itself became separated from its original referent and was re-attached here.

The thesis that motivated this act of violence upon an ancient arrangement of the Archives has ramifications that can be treacherous, but are worth outlining here, as no one else seems to have perceived the need for this essential forensic work.

To begin with, the mention of the ghosts in the second clause at least implicates the Last One, whose Writings constitute an entire discourse on the entities (or, perhaps better expressed, collective symbol) he calls the ghosts: his assertion in those Writings is that their origin, medium of action, and dwelling place are all founded in — even wholly constituted by — text.

Although Egderus never mentions the ghosts anywhere else in his extant writings, he is all but universally believed to have passed along the works of the Last One when he gathered, preserved, and transmitted the Archives during the Goliadic Age. This being the case, it is hard to believe that Egderus was not familiar with the Last One's theories, and may well have become 'infected' with one or another of that elder Author's crabby ideas.

But this is mere background. It is when we try to analyze the transmission of this tart morsel of invective that the true dimensions of the matter begin to emerge.

Let us begin with the obvious, as contemporary investigators are ever advocating. This string of text (migratory or not) was found among the Writings of Egderus, and so may well be a writing by Egderus. If so, is it complete, in its present form, that is, by itself? Perhaps, but this seems unlikely: Egderus is frequently aphoristic, but almost always attributes his pithy sayings to the Remnant, and even then only to illustrate or support one point among many in a longer essay, sermon, or memoir — that is, Egderus never seems to have composed epigrams that stand on their own.

But Egderus is hardly unique in quoting the Remnant, nor in employing crisp locutions of his own invention. Let us allow, then, that this particular example is a fragment of some other Writing — whether by Egderus or not may be argued elsewhere.

The question is, what motivated its extraction from the document in which it was found?

[The text of this peculiar (and peculiarly long) consideration breaks off here — Ed.]