Chapter Text
It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay deep in snow. There was nothing to be seen of Castle Mount, for mist and darkness surrounded it, and not the faintest glimmer of light showed where the great castle lay. K. stood on the wooden bridge leading from the road to the village for a long time, looking up at what seemed to be a void. (Franz Kafka, The Castle)
P R O L O G U E
ΗΛΕΚΤΡΑ
Ὦ φάος ἁγνὸν
καὶ γῆς ἰσόμοιρ᾽ ἀήρ, ὥς μοι
πολλὰς μὲν θρήνων ᾠδάς,
πολλὰς δ᾽ ἀντήρεις ᾔσθου
στέρνων πλαγὰς αἱμασσομένων,
ὁπόταν δνοφερὰ νὺξ ὑπολειφθῇ·
In a bottomless cave, back when echoes did not exist yet, the sounds the drops of rainwater made when they fell were the single reminder of a single truth. They were devoid of any reverberation that would twist and alter the verity of the water. The blue was only blue, the green only green. Now, now that this sound makes sounds and sounds, how can one find the truth of a drop? Lost in the endless cavern, one drop becomes two drops, three drops thirteen, or twenty three. (How many yellow-green and shades and dark dark blues will stay hidden in the pools?)
And him: him, the drop, him, the sound, him, the echoes. How many him, how many pieces of lies and truths?
(When the water drop falls to vanish and blows the silence to smithereens)
In the back of his mouth – on his tongue, on his teeth: brown black and acidic; coffee. He enjoys the taste of it, one that lingers in his throat; this, on the delicate surface of his palate, the reminiscence of a past him and of past days. This the flavour fitting of the days during which he wasn’t constantly afraid. He remembers books, and the sound birds made at four in the morning, and his mother’s back, and his only friend's smile, and the campus of a university, and the bin in which he put the garbage after he ate his lunch, and he remembers, he remembers, he remembers the small paws of a black cat in the street, how soft its fur was, how warm it felt against his hands. A reminder of something now ugly, now corrupted. The taste of coffee is a tale, the burned story of a routine now that its flavour struggles against something other. This is a human taste: and this is the only
Human (Only the echo only the echo the echo o
Taste of the drop
That remains. can be heard.)
And there are so many questions. So many words in his head, that echo, and echo, and echo, in circles and pentagons and squares and triangles. He could pick them up carefully with the tips of his fingers, to arrange them and create the map of a new constellation. Like the Greek and the Roman did: cut a space in the sky, and observe. The fortuna adversa that is only told by birds by crossing the cut, the space: here is a number, how many happy privileges will be revoked? (And there, a question, so big in a world of so many littles: Why did this have to happen? – and the birds and the stars and the Gods do not answer. Nobody answers; this is but a tale; just a story 金木研 wrote some day in a creased spiral notebook –
Softly spoken under a tree: a billy goat’s chant…
Maybe 金木研… Maybe…
Ill and suffering, a Good Man, a Hero, (pale face blushing cheeks) under the spell of a fatal flaw. Softly spoken by a beating heart under a fence made out of ribs: τραγῳδία. τραγῳδία. τραγῳδία.
Tragedy.