Work Text:
Keine Kamishirasawa was, in a set of few words, a girl in a stupid dress.
She'd considered this before. Possibly the dress was only superficially stupid. It was bold and poofy and helped only in the slightest way by the 'stern teacher' hat she wore with it, which looked a bit like a miniature pagoda. She was possibly color blind, she had considered at times. That would go on top of being blind to anything other than history.
History was not, as it turned out, a sequence of dates. Well, really, it was, but Keine couldn't do dates on command. It was any wonder how she got this fact past most inhabitants of Gensokyo, let alone the parents of the human children she taught in a very dry, traditional, rote manner, involving much memorizing of said dates and associating them with what had happened where at one time.
But really, none of that was history. It was more like... noise on a scratched record under the needle, or seafoam washing up on the coast and describing nothing but the shape of the shore. Let alone the vast subaquatic depths and benthic fish. Nevermind the goblin sharks.
No. History, as it turned out, was mostly names, and Keine could remember a lot of them.
Hers, for example. Keine Kamishirasawa. 'Wise sound of the upper white swamp'. In full it didn't exactly roll off the tongue. And that was only the formal translation, to say nothing of mutated cognates or centuries of dialect erosion. 'Chiming Bell Where the Will o' Wisps Gather and Rejoice' would have been much more correct. Keine hated this about names, especially hers.
You could, for example, walk up to a random denizen of Gensokyo, say the words 'Reimu Hakurei', or 'Maiden of the Hakurei Shrine' and get an almost instant reaction, usually either terror or proximate fascination. This was the power of toponyms: they snapped the person using them eternally to the instant at which that name was first conceived. Ostensibly there had been hundreds or thousands of whatever a Reimu Hakurei was, but only in this time in this era in this place could they elicit such visceral and immediate terror or admiration. That was names.
And that was history. It was all a matter of semantic complexity. And while Keine was fine going around wearing the labels 'therianthrope' or 'half-beast' or 'were-hakutaku', none of those really properly explained anything about her. Given that language was massaged into such a soft clay in Gensokyo it wouldn't be entirely out of order to start running into things like samurai gardeners made half out of ghost, or the literal sun rolled into a small bird... Hadn't both those things happened before already anyway?
A thing's name was its form: classic nama rupa. And a thing's form was its impression. And an impression was a shape or sound or a feeling. Then all of those were stacked on top of each other, higher and higher until even the tallest mountain looked meager and distant. And there was her, Keine, on top of it all, reaching out to try and name every individual cloud, every individual drop of rain which had not yet become precipitation.
Were-human... Were there any of those? A kami which was also a carnivorous toaster? A milkshake with hidden and arcane secrets of immortal sages?
Keine knew the answer to all of those was yes. Anything you could name had already been written down, and then it had been read, and then it had been forgotten. Eating was just a matter of choosing which bits stood out the most, like the pieces of fried beef that had been seared just a little extra until crispy.
So she cheated. A lot. She rembered the letter of the spit of the name of the place of the thing of the person of the name. And that was usually good enough. When it wasn't she ate the bits around and cheated even more. So and so, she would say, did such and such at such and such time with the aid of so and so else in the era of something or other and that was it forever the end. And then she ate the memory of her getting any of the details wrong. And then she got indigestion, usually.
Things would always eventually come to a head. She would be quizzed, usually by a particularly precocious prodigy of a student, and they would expect her to recite things, and she would recite them, and they would identify the teeniest least material difference between then and now imaginable, and they would chide her, and she would eat them. Metaphorically, of course. And that was why she kept forgetting things.
Even if you could shove everything into one pile--and you couldn't, no matter how hard you tried, it would be like cupping water in your hands and expecting it to turn into an oasis--it still wouldn't help. There were... Incongruous elements. So and so's name surfacing five thousand kalpa earlier in a completely opposite context and yet still being woven into the same textual fabric. 'Sachi-san' had cost her a week to unfurl last time, and she spent just as much time making sure people DIDN'T know about Sachi-san nowadays as she had at first spent convincing them Sachi-san existed. It was karmic contact points all the way down.
And when she hit pure consciousness, what was left?
There was, again, a girl in a stupid dress. Sometimes it occurred to her that everyone in Gensokyo fell into one of two primary categories, and those were girls wearing a stupid dress or girls wearing a stupid something else. Fashion could barely hope to hold on through the aeons in Gensokyo, meaning anyone's best sense of dress was at least half a century out of date and therefore inherently anachronistic and or iconoclastic. It occurred to Keine most things were of that nature.
So how did she factor in?
Well, today, for example, a seemingly stochastic passerby had asked her when the festival of spring coming was. A random person--not even a student! And she had recited it for them without blinking and every detail was right and she did it in a single breath and then breathed.
And then they asked 'Are you sure?'
And that was it. Whatever that was... She hated it.
So she ate the entire day... Metaphorically, of course.
And that left her both hungry and full, both complete and empty. Because it also occurred to Keine that no matter how tight she wound the scroll around the board or how delicately she threaded the twine or how sweet the wine of forgotten pasts was... It would all eventually turn to grey mush, like chewed up parchment, waiting to be spit from mouth to mouth and then let dry and crumble to dust in the midmorning sun. Avidya. Yuck.
So these days she talked less and taught fewer students and was down to only writing lists of names only four hours a day when somehow her whole system had collapsed. She'd looked at a poster detailing the five aggregates one morning and realized she didn't understand a single word of it. She looked at herself in the mirror and her reflection said 'this, again?'
Yes. This. Again. All of it again. Nothing ever ends, the old saying went. Right next to everything eventually ends, nothing is always everything, and everything is ultimately and absolutely nothing.
And what was left? Just a place to wait for the rest of history to find her. To isolate the record keepers... That was what always happened. Eventually a scribe in the hot sun cheated, just the way she had cheated, and scribbled in an extra line memo or footnote or just one letter in the spelling, and thus a new word would be born, and from that a name, and from that a shape, and from that the thought of all thought condensed into the square area of a space about the size of the breadbox.
Keine hated breadboxes. No one of any real intelligence kept their bread in a box anyway.
She had considered writing everything down. That would be both technically and materially impossible, but she had considered it anyway because there seemed to be no realistic alternative. Eventually SOMEONE had to write EVERYTHING down, or at least their best version. And then all she, Keine, had to do, would be to transcribe it repeatedly.
She got as far as page 81 before she gave up.
Now she was stuck on 12 again. Nidana, nidana, no kagome... She heard a little tune of this particular number in her head, dancing through a brief minor key refrain. That was no help, nor was the majority of song. Culture. Food. All names.
What, for example, was a dandan? What was a dango, a ringo, a hime or a kami? If you treated every word as a title there was only one sovereign: 'The'. Long lasting era altering all obstinate and absolute and genuine 'the'. Agenbite of inwit, she thought to herself frequently without remembering where the saying had come from.
There were many other forms; the kind you filled out to request a loan or let the person testing you know what your vocabulary and capabilities were. And she looked at forms like those all the time at school, and therefore ultimately the only thing that was real was data. Words. Sentences. Little bits of otherwise unusable brick stuck together with homemade glue.
She prayed often. It seemed an important thing to do in the absence of a larger purpose. She prayed in the mornings before she went to teach, and in the evenings when she sorted her papers, and on nights like this when the fireflies seemed scared to dance outside her window. When she would have given anything just to see a shadow flicker the other way in the candlelight.
Books weren't everything. They could help you remember a lot before your eyes went, which hers had begun to do long ago... And despite the sheer audacity of the irony she could find no complete record about a blind scribe, and so that blind scribe must eventually be her. And then what would she do with her wasted evenings and solitary task? Would even a single other being in Gensokyo understand the gravity of time, the greatest weight pushing down on her like a world upon a titan's shoulders? She shuddered to think of attempting to describe all of it.
No. In the end, this probably was better. It was probably better that history would die with her, or fizzle out in a place that couldn't remember every detail of her life even if it tried. She'd just yesterday tried to recount the number of times she'd bathed since being born and could recall no exact number. That was how everything went eventually... Into generalities and the soup of the nonspecific. Soup that made her tummy ache.
Tonight was another night. Keine drew careful lines in very small writing on a piece of clean paper. Here, here, here, and here... There. A square.
"A square has four sides," she said. Yes, that seemed right. Then here, here... And another. And that was two things that were true.
"But..." She drew a sad little triangle in the corner of the page. Where was three? That was always the question, wasn't it. Buddha, dharma, sangha. Always the last one was missing.
Keine sighed and put her pen down back into its inkwell. She considered drinking the ink, then decided better of it.
She heard a snatch of music outside her window, but when she opened it to check, there was only the night sky and a large waxing moon.
"Hmm," she said. She shut the window again.
Would this be enough... Just to remember that once, at some point, she really HAD remembered it all?
Yes... Yes, that was enough for tonight, which was really tomorrow night, which was really yesterday and the day before that. She could only keep track of things which had happened, after all. That left a great many things as text only. She considered this.
She closed her book. She put out the candles and got ready for bed. She washed her face and brushed her teeth and hair and got into bed where it was dark and soft and warm and all the things a proper paradise should be.
Whether or not remembered, she slept.