The Fixed Stars: Thirty-Seven Emblems for the Perilous Season

2. Ablution in Helical Structure

THE FIXED STARS 53 2.1 Silence We required someone to guide the building of the bathhouse in silence. “Though perhaps this person might speak,” said the woman who grew nutritive moss, “if it be only in the way that other people speak.” The woman who brewed dyes grew disturbed. “I would like a person who does not speak in any way.” “It may be too much to ask.” “Yet perhaps there are those who devote themselves to the art of building structures in silence,” said the woman who brewed dyes, “and it makes no difference to them whether they speak or not.” This state of affairs came about because of the woman in the well. It was the curer of silks who found her, but the finding of her surprised none of us. Already, several days before , she had screamed terribly in the night. That was the second full moon after Yule. Those of us who often dreamt of inhuman places woke thinking we heard one of the ancient CHAPTER 2 ABluTIon In HElICAl STRuCTuRE 54 BRIAN CONN mechanical sirens calling us to despair; those who had no such dreams woke into an inarticulate state. Many joined the screaming. These screams rent the community. Nobody knew how they carried so far. Nobody dared go out into the night. Even the nearest neighbors screamed alone. Finally we tired of it, and one by one we fell asleep. When day broke we knew that some tragedy had occurred, but we did not know its form. It was shortly thereafter that the curer of silks found the woman in the well—the small well, even then seldom used, where during the season the bees swarm in quest of bee-bread. We knew her: she was the woman who had cared for the apricot orchard, a beautiful woman. Her hands were bound together with rope, not rope of spidersilk, as we use most often in our community, nor of synthetics, but lank brown rope of the fibers of the horsetail moss, which grows in solitary places. We found no marks on her except those that might have been caused by her falling into the well. She smelled of ozone. While the maker of sandals labored she continued to smell of ozone, and the site of the manufacture of her sandals smelled of ozone for several days afterwards. We trust each other well in our community; but somebody had bound the hands of this woman. After some discussion we concluded that it could not have been one of us. But who else was there? Perhaps there was some reason behind it; perhaps her story was in the end a loving story; the ways of people are not simple. Every day and every night we carried with us a vision of the well, of a tunnel of stone extending before us into darkness. The community had long been of a size to be improved by a bathhouse. Now it was thought that by building this structure together we might begin to knit the community THE FIXED STARS 55 more closely; and once completed it might knit us closer still, for we would bathe together within its walls. At the same time, since the screaming in the night, it had become necessary to observe a certain silence, or rather a stillness: as though we were bruised interiorly; or as though we stood on the edge of a precipice, and even a stray ray of light, striking our shoulder, might topple us. We could not tolerate the heaving of bales and stones, certainly not the sawing of logs. If we wished to use wood we must split it bacteriochemically into shingles that fit simply into our hands, and bear them simply to the creek as people bear simple things in their hands, and afterwards bind them, likewise bacteriochemically and in stillness, into the form of a bathhouse; we must forbear visible violence and rely on the innumerable microscopic violences of bacteria. If not wood then there were cyclates, clays, and pastes, materials of malleable consistency or that might be made malleable. All of this was after all no impediment to us, but a guide and a comfort in a time whose meaning we could not easily understand. With a structure subtly erected we would substantiate our community not grossly but subtly—not as a thing cobbled from boards but as a thing recast, without the...