of interest?

[Mark David Tristan Brenchley]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2001, Poetry Provider wrote:

> THE FIRST INVENTION
> 
> Imagine the time of my grandfather's grandfather, when the darkness was 
> newly separated from the light. Society was only a shadowy image of what it 
> would soon become. This was Mandragora before    my invention and all that 
> it set in motion. People spoke to one another, but their habits of thought 
> were coarse. People lived in fear. Our forefathers farmed, but with great 
> difficulty; a man    used a sharp stick to dig a hole for each seed, and 
> furrowed his fields by dragging his fingernails through them and picking 
> out each small stone. Often a whole spring passed in preparing 
> the    ground, and families went hungry or died come winter. They had fire, 
> but they had no candles, nor did they have proper looms - when a woman made 
> cloth for her household, she wound the woof    through each strand of warp, 
> and tamped down each row of weaving with her fingers. It took so long to 
> make a bolt of cloth that growing children went about in tatters because 
> their mothers could    not keep pace. Men knew how to count and keep tally, 
> but they had no numbers bigger than twenty. Twenty acres was the size of 
> Mandragora's largest farm (my grandfather's, which I cultivate    still), 
> and twenty sheep the size of its largest flock; what need had they to 
> reckon the infinite? Men's faculties may have been as well developed as 
> ours, but they spent so much effort    scratching their existence from the 
> soil that they had no time for ideas or contemplation. What sufficed 
> sufficed; and however much men might have profited from introspection, 
> their days were    full of drudgery that kept it at bay.
> 
> Such darkness persisted nigh unto the present day, and might nearly have 
> persisted ever, had not a glimmering seed of an idea taken root in my mind 
> and beckoned me out of the night. I wish it had    been an idea of 
> philosophical profundity, one that could explain to men where God resides 
> or what happens to our essence after death, but it was only a workaday 
> idea, the kind a farmer such as    myself might have about his farming. Of 
> all the events to set the process of history in motion, mine was a 
> realization about my horse. Had I known then what terrors my invention 
> would bring us    along with its joys, perhaps I would have allowed the 
> idea to drift off like a thousand other daydreams. I could not have 
> envisioned myself, two winters later, spending these long nights 
> writing    in my barn, writing against what seems the inevitable outcome: 
> that I, and all that I have wrought, will be forgotten utterly as the 
> future gallops forth to devour us. At the time I knew nothing    but the 
> perfect beauty of what I imagined.
> 
> I have already gone ahead of myself, however, for you do not yet even know 
> what I accomplished. Perhaps you will best come to understand the deed's 
> magnitude by its first outward sign: because of    my invention, I was able 
> to name my horse. I called her Hammadi. My neighbor Ydlbert von Iggislau 
> named his horse Thea. These names had weight for us beyond their intrinsic 
> beauty, because these    two work weary horses were the first anyone had 
> ever named. No horse before Hammadi lived long enough to need a name. It 
> was enough that God had given us the beasts to serve us; we had 
> never    spent enough time with a single one to come to know its soul. We 
> named our other animals - sheep and billy goats, for example, performed no 
> labor and had fair chances of survival. My cow, who had    provided me milk 
> even before I married Adelada, had always been called Sophronia, and seemed 
> worthy of such a name. We loved our horses nonetheless, as we loved our 
> crops and loved the    gentle spring. In their infancy we patted their soft 
> ears and watched their first, faltering steps with the same fear and pride 
> we felt in watching our own growing babes. We had little to spare,    but 
> the horses performed important duties, and we thanked them when we could 
> with windfall apples or carrots that had gone early to rot. And in times of 
> trouble, we prayed for our horses, sure.
> 
> But we could not risk giving a horse a name. They were subject to all 
> manner of plagues, maladies of the tooth, hoof, and digestion, sometimes a 
> dread illness that turned a healthy horse to a    deranged beast, choking 
> on its own frothy spittle, spewing blood from every orifice. Because God is 
> merciful, such a horse rarely lived longer than a day. Horses died young, 
> as all creatures die    young - like hatchlings in the nest or children yet 
> unable to speak, foals were delicate, without sense, and held always in a 
> balance that desired to tip against them. Sometimes God spared a 
> foal    its childhood torments, and it grew to be a strong adult, suitable 
> for work. The seasons could not turn round upon a workhorse, however; they 
> often died in their first few months of service. Even    the smallest human 
> error could bring a horse to its knees. I hitched my third horse, a 
> beautiful chestnut mare whose white socks I brushed down of mud each night, 
> to a full cart of grain one    August morning - a cart only slightly more 
> full than that she had pulled the week before - and she strained too hard 
> under the load. Before I could loose the choking strap from her neck, 
> she    stood quite dead at the edge of my farthest field, her eyes popping 
> and her tongue aloll. Her pained and frozen visage struck terror into my 
> heart, and I let much of the shocked wheat go to rot    in the field 
> because I dreaded to approach the dead horse. After a few days I enlisted 
> the help of my closest companions - my brother, Mandrik le Chouchou, and my 
> neighbor Ydlbert von Iggislau -    to drag the stinking, stiffened carcass 
> away. "Fear not," Mandrik told me, bowing his head of fine brown curls 
> before the sight. "The multitudes depart our presence thus, but the few 
> escape    intact." Ydlbert set his hat on the ground, revealing his balding 
> pate to the hot sun, spat in his two strong hands, and set to hacking off 
> the edible sections and the horse's skin. I could    neither think long on 
> the commentary nor bear to watch the flaying, so I returned to our house, 
> where we wintered in poverty and want, except for copious lots of salted 
> horse meat.
> 
> I am not certain I have conveyed the direness of our situation. We could 
> not produce horses fast enough to make use of them - the chances of 
> bringing both a male and a female to healthy adulthood    were few, and 
> when they mated, the spirit often left the foal before it left its mother's 
> womb. Horses - like even the bravest of women, my first wife, Elynour, 
> among them, may she rest in peace    - often died in giving birth, and a 
> foal would languish on the diet of sugar and water it suckled in its 
> mother's absence. A foal that persevered to its adulthood was prone to the 
> aforementioned    afflictions of the body; those beasts we acquired from 
> Andras Drck, the dealer, were healthier, but often dearer than their short 
> lives made worthwhile. Watching a horse in my barn at night, I    sometimes 
> saw in its trusting downcast eyes a premonition of the death that the 
> weight of its suffering would surely and eventually bring. Our ancestors 
> dreamed up a thousand spells to save them,    but though a man might 
> studiously recite his
> 
> 
> 
> Day be bright,
> 
> Load be light,
> 
> Bring this horse safely
> 
> Back home tonight
> 
> it only worked when the spirits were willing. When the horses did not die 
> of their sundry natural maladies, they strangled pulling loads.
> 
> I and my countrymen desired the plight of the horses to be otherwise, but 
> we knew no way to bring about the change except through ardent prayer, in 
> which we engaged together each Sabbath, and in    which many of us engaged 
> alone in the dreary hours before sleep. It is by such meditation, as well 
> as by luck, that eventually I came upon the solution, a solution so simple 
> yet so unknown that    we did not have a name by which to call it. Though 
> human vanity convinced me that the invention was the product of my mind, I 
> soon came to realize that I had received both a vision and a    blessing; 
> only much later did I begin to see the terrors such a blessing can wreak. 
> That first night I gave the longest prayer of thanks I have ever found it 
> within me to offer, and thus, with a    heart full of devotion, did I learn 
> the thing's Heaven-given name: Harness.
> 
>  From The Testament of Yves Gundron
> http://www.canongate.net/list/glp.taf?_p=5882
> 
> A long one, I know, but really this is a fantastic book.  And Thom Pynchon 
> agrees with me.
> 
> ****
> 
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Regards,
Mark