A young man, in whose dark hair a single strand of grey has recently appeared, decides to set out on a series of excursions suggested by the fall of the cards.
Complex rules will determine the direction of each journey. For instance, the suit being WANDS, he will only go North if the journey is take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up is a Knight.
Equally intricate rules, whose algebraic clauses and counter clauses he intuits with each new cast of the cards, cover the choice of South, West and East; even of the clothes he will wear: but he will always travel by train. This decision is based on the relationship he has identified between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet cold room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at railway stations. This similarity rests, he is willing to admit, on a metaphor: for while the fall of the cards is – or seems – random, the sequence of destinations is – or seems – controlled.
To represent himself in this affair, the young man – or ‘Ephebe’ – has chosen THE FOOL. This card, therefore, will never turn up. He has subtracted it from the deck and keeps it beside him; each afternoon, as the light goes out of the room, it seems to fluoresce up at him from the table or the arm of his chair, more an event than a picture, we move forward through time by the deeply undercutting action of Desire. As THE FOOL steps continually off his cliff and into space so the Ephebe is always a presence attempting to fill the absence that has brought him forth. He is a wave tumbling constantly forward into each new moment, and his journeys are thus in every sense a trip. By following the journeys as they fall out, he believes, he will open for himself a fifth direction; and to help identify it he will bring back from each journey an object. These objects or donnes will eventually comprise both a ‘compass’ and a set of instructions for its use.
All the Ephebe’s journeys begin from London.
-The Horse Of Iron And How We Can Know It. from Travel Arrangements by M. John Harrison
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-08-10 07:59 pm (UTC)A young man, in whose dark hair a single strand of grey has recently appeared, decides to set out on a series of excursions suggested by the fall of the cards.
Complex rules will determine the direction of each journey. For instance, the suit being WANDS, he will only go North if the journey is take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up is a Knight.
Equally intricate rules, whose algebraic clauses and counter clauses he intuits with each new cast of the cards, cover the choice of South, West and East; even of the clothes he will wear: but he will always travel by train. This decision is based on the relationship he has identified between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet cold room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at railway stations. This similarity rests, he is willing to admit, on a metaphor: for while the fall of the cards is – or seems – random, the sequence of destinations is – or seems – controlled.
To represent himself in this affair, the young man – or ‘Ephebe’ – has chosen THE FOOL. This card, therefore, will never turn up. He has subtracted it from the deck and keeps it beside him; each afternoon, as the light goes out of the room, it seems to fluoresce up at him from the table or the arm of his chair, more an event than a picture, we move forward through time by the deeply undercutting action of Desire. As THE FOOL steps continually off his cliff and into space so the Ephebe is always a presence attempting to fill the absence that has brought him forth. He is a wave tumbling constantly forward into each new moment, and his journeys are thus in every sense a trip. By following the journeys as they fall out, he believes, he will open for himself a fifth direction; and to help identify it he will bring back from each journey an object. These objects or donnes will eventually comprise both a ‘compass’ and a set of instructions for its use.
All the Ephebe’s journeys begin from London.
-The Horse Of Iron And How We Can Know It.
from Travel Arrangements
by M. John Harrison