FICTION
PETER BOYLE
THE APOCRYPHA OF WILLIAM O’SHAUNESSY
Author’s Introduction:
The Apocrypha of William O’Shaunessyis an assemblage of translated fragments by fictive authors who wrote in Greek, Latin and other ancient languages. At times social critique, at times parody orsatire, but most of all exploration of imagined human states and worlds, the whole is bound by a few recurrent narratives – the story of the sad kingdom of Eusebius and its quest to maximise inequality, the poetic land of Ebtesum, the holy city of Kitezh, as well as the lives and works of such poets as Erychthemios of Alexandria, Omeros Eliseo and Irene Philologos. Part of my enjoyment and purpose in writing these fragments has been to extend lyric or inward poetry by setting it against wider political and philosophic contexts, some sense of the earth in all its layers. Under the supervision of the heteronymous classicist William O’Shaunessy, the Apocrypha now contains five books of fragments, running to some 300 pages. For me the Apocrypha has been a way to unleash the imaginary, the unexpected. Beyond formal considerations of what is lyric poetry, prose poetry or straight prose, this new work arises from a vision ofpoetry as intimate and intuitive thought experiment.
Book IV, section II
...and from the depths of the water rises the fragrance of music. It is the Kingdom of Siripech – alone of all lands it accepted its vanishing. Massive as inverted pyramids reaching towards the earth’s centre, chambers of imaginative space soar downward into the blue chasm of the waters. Vanished from earth, its music resonates everywhere. How often Pharaohs have come to this shore, have gazed into the stillness and wept. Its people never sought eternity. No one hungered that his name should last forever. The Kingdom of Siripech never cared for architecture with its straight lines and blocks of stone. All it built were thatch huts, simple shelters against rain, and truly its people were happiest living outdoors and sleeping wherever weariness or love’s tenderness overtook them. Music was their passion, whether produced solely by the voice or by various plucked or blown instruments devised from shells, crafted wood or the tensed strings of certain vines. Only after they had vanished was it understood that their music was mankind’s one hope for survival. Without their realising it, the music they created could control the oceans and winds, restore order to the seasons and, in rare moments, set limits to the evil in men’s hearts. Rival tribes, extraordinary poverty, Eusebius, the Pharaohs themselves destroyed their Kingdom and its people, all but wiping their name from the annals of history. Sensing that the final hour had arrived, their leaders retreated below the sea, taking their knowledge with them. Siripech is the name given to the music that drifts some mornings almost audible above the waves, and Siripech is the name of a high-browed woman with sharp jet-black eyes, a face beneath the sea visible from certain cliffs where the Pharaohs gazed, understanding too late how what is overlooked and despised alone blesses and saves.
(Fragment in Greek inscribed on a clay jar containing perfume, found in the ruins of El-Bakri on the Red Sea coast, dated as around 720 BCE)
Siripech, in the name of the wind you come to us, tenderly we hold you, with tears we cover you, in a poor hut where music is about to be invented, teach us to love.
(Song from The Royal Songbook of Amanate, Year 12 of King Men)
When the Nile did not rise in the customary way for three successive years and famine threatened to destroy all the towns and settlements, an expedition was organised to find the sacred kingdom of Siripech which was held to lie somewhere within the sea dividing Egypt from Arabia. Flowers were strewn on the waters in the hope that they would reach Siripech. I have seen the flowers, I have heard the weeping of the people. The old have said to me, ‘If there is hope there is hope in Siripech.’
(Herodotus, Book XXIII, the Ecbatana edition)
Book I, section II
Among the Cistercii let no one be accused of opening their veins with undue haste. For them every action is so weighted with consideration that over many lifetimes each of them acts as if conversing and discussing with all others though he acts alone and in silence. When the first signs of final weakness manifest themselves, the Cistercii, preferring to enter the cauldron of oblivion with all their being intact, lift the razor with such reluctance and such precision that, it might be said, each movement is both infinitely slow and lasts no more and no less than an eaglet’s birth-cry. In the language of the Cistercii the terms ‘alone’, ‘loneliness’, ‘in solitude’ do not exist, nor words to say ‘by oneself’ o r‘with others’ since every breath is both a moment’s idleness and the profound enactment of a community’s decision to pass on their presence in the sun.
(Nicolas of Tyrrhene, 4015)
Book I, section VI
The citizens of Eusebius were renowned for their addiction to every form of ownership and wealth. Not content with owning houses, lands, islands, factories and latifundia of all kinds, metals and fruits named and unnamed, they began the practice of claiming everything from magic spells to words and phrases. A small group of the Eusebioli, forming themselves into a corporation for the purpose, asserted their right to the invention of the words ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’. A rival consortium took out ownership of the present tense. So fierce was the vindictiveness of the Eusebian courts, whose jurisdiction extended beyond Earth to galaxies visible and invisible, so absolute the force of their arms, that for decades no one could speak anymore in the present without suffering confiscation of all their goods and the enslavement of their children for several generations. Likewise when a spell was developed to enable the sun to rise in the morning, it became the property of a corporation threatening the Earth with darkness if they did not part with a third of their wealth. It was only in the eighteenth year of the fifth cycle of the Dravidians, about the time that the corn ripens, that a revolt of the bondsmen forced the collapse of the Eusebioli’s ownership of spells and words. Suddenly it was found that language had died all around them, that the world had gone on growing and changing with no need for spells or phrases – adept beyond abjection, a new grammar had been writing its way into new emotions, new relationships and time-frames. It was in this era that scholars first remembered that a speech beyond words had always been the true birthplace of humans.
(The Book of Origins, authorship unknown, Library of the Exiles in Alexandria, Fragment Index No CD451)
First they took the words, then they took the children.
The children returned. The words did not return.
Seeking for the words, the elders understood how speech must be lost completely before it can be truly used.(Lucius of Ocampo, 283)
Learn then from the Eusebioli how little their mania for possession had to do with wealth – how much with the overwhelming instinct constantly to narrow that portion of reality available to others. Closing evermore tightly the door that opened on language, they discovered in the silence of others, confirmations of that same narrowing that fascinated and obsessed them.
(Aristobulus the Areopagite, Proposal for Certain Reforms to Investment Laws, Sicyon, 8898)
In the time of the Eusebioli’s monopoly of spells, words and knowledge structures, the practice developed of giving children entire spells and lengthy poems and grammar treatises as names in the vain hope that the right of a person to their own name would be respected. Birthday and name day ceremonies at times lasted several days while the name was recited and in this way, it was hoped, language might continue. The initial confusion this created with the court system is generally held to be the chief explanation for those fragments that connect us to the ancients.
(Nicola of Samothrace, date unknown)
Book I, section XI
On his fiftieth birthday Demagorgas the sage was woken by his children who came to tell him messengers had just arrived with the news that Rome had been destroyed.
‘Go back and ask them, has it sunk below the waves?’ he replied.
The children returned to the messengers and then reported back to him that it was a barbarian invasion, that Rome had been sacked and all its buildings torched.
‘Oh, is that all?’ he replied and went back to sleep.Coda: Demagorgas’s query whether Rome had sunk below the waves concerns the well known magic practice of reversing the universe. It was feared that various black magicians had mastered these skills and that, once the practice of putting cities under the sea began in earnest, all the world would be destroyed.
But others claim that this story concerns Alexandria not Rome, and that it was indeed suddenly and mysteriously plunged below the waves, that Demagorgas and his children had long been wandering there without realising it, that the great cities in truth had long returned to the seas that were their true homes, and that all of us dwell in the great silence that awaits us.(Polydoros the Heresiarch, fourth century AD.)
Book I, section XXIII
Ten days journey southwest of Royal Memphis lies the Kingdom of Ebtesum. The Nile was in flood when I set off along with guides and emissaries of the Nubian Order to make my way to this famous centre of learning. Ebtesum is sometimes called the invisible kingdom – its boundaries wander over the years, its location is always subject to dispute. Ebtesum is preeminent among all kingdoms for its beauty – the beauty of its women, its poetry, its dance and song. Nothing in Ebtesum survives. Its inhabitants have little understanding of the desire to endure. Time flounders in the rich air of this kingdom. Since nothing is repeated, nothing is written down.
The people in Ebtesum have no knowledge of zither, plectrum or other stringed instrument, all their music consisting of drum and flute, apart from the extraordinary and subtle vocalisations in which they are unsurpassed. Improvised poetry is the high achievement of this kingdom. To write down a poem, they say, is like clinging to love and the man who copies down his own poems is like a man imprisoning a woman to keep love always at the moment of its first ecstasy. Everything must be let go – only in this way does the beautiful flood into our hands. On days of forced absence in Ebtesum love letters dissolve even as they are written.
Only those whom fate compels to leave attempt to write down the poems they heard in Ebtesum. Such is the origin of those famous collections whose copies have long changed hands and turned up in libraries throughout the earth and across all times: The Red Book of Ebtesum, The Black Book of Ebtesum, The Green Book of Ebtesum, and so on. For everything that is in the rainbow and everything that is not in the rainbow belongs to Ebtesum.
It is now many years since I have been in Ebtesum but too much of its spirit remains in me to attempt the transcribing of the poems I heard. Many evenings, more and more evenings now the darkness approaches, I sit recalling the poetry and music of Ebtesum. I recall the day I sat in the caravanserai expecting to leave the next morning, summoned to join my brothers at the deathbed of my father. An exquisite music of wild teeming rapture came from a small cubicle nearby – the blended sounds of many drums and several voices, loud almost to the point of cacophony yet exquisite and subtle at the same time, creating out of their confusion an endless array of dialogues and choruses. I opened the door very cautiously, fearing to disturb those inside, yet the cubicle was empty apart from a small child, no more than eight years of age. All the voices came from his mastery of improvisation – the drumming was the clicks of his tongue, the patter of his hands on the stone wall. He was performing for himself in the darkness yet all around him the moths circled, diving and humming.(Herodotus, The Complete Histories, Book XXX, as preserved in the Etruscan translation of the Trevii.)
It has been stated by some authorities that this same Ebtesum was also Eusebius, the kingdom renowned for its ferocious greed and the savage destruction it dealt to others. It appears that the two kingdoms alternate according to certain formulae known only to the higher adepts of the Mathemasis. Eusebius itself is held to be a permanently recurring state of possibility – that it has already manifested itself three times – once in Ebtesum, once in Bactria and once in a location too small to be named.
Perhaps, despite their many apparent differences, Ebtesum and Eusebius are connected by their peculiar impermanence. Of all the great and terrible Empires of earth Eusebius is the shortest lived. Whereas other Empires have lasted three hundred or a thousand years, Eusebius is held to have shrunk to the dimension of fifty years – possibly even six weeks. With its monopolising of language, its ruthless possession of the present tense, it sped up the process of its own destruction.
Possibly Ebtesum and Eusebius alternate, the one dwindling and then vanishing as the other appears. Possibly both coexist, layered alternately across each other as two types of reality.
According to some scholars, during the times of its vanishing the elders of Eusebius shrink to the dimension of small finches trapped in a dusty cage at the back of a warehouse. They are, of course, immortal. Alternately, when Ebtesum disappears, its people live on as the myriad grains of sand that line a fishtank. The resonance they create penetrates the furthest stars.
Others hold that the two kingdoms have always coexisted.
It is prophesied that the fourth manifestation of Eusebius will be on one of the Atlantean Islands. The Mani texts state that of the five islands of Atlantis all are large – roughly the same dimensions as Asia, Europe and Africa. One sentence in the text suggests that the fourth manifestation of Eusebius will herald the end of the earth but it is likely that this is a late interpolation.(Macrobius, A Brief Compendium of the Ancients)
Book II, section II
The Chermetzoi recognise twenty-seven different degrees of relationship between people, each creating its own separate variation of their language, with different tenses and alternate words. Among the Aretai to their north there are more than fifty-five distinct levels of intimacy, each generating a separate language. Often in the morning after a night of troubled dreams a couple will awake inside a new language, slowly recognising its shape and contours.
The Sarmenians, on the other hand, have over three hundred words for different emotions, disdaining the perilous imprecision of such words as ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘fear’, ‘like’ and ‘dislike’. To them the vocabulary of languages outside their own fatally distorts even the most everyday levels of inner experience. They insist, indeed, on the tentative approximation of their own language, claiming the greatest element of human emotions and feelings remains yet to be discovered.(Euphrastes, Treatise on Grammar, 410)
By night the blue dream walks on water. I stand in a room of bones, following in the notes as they fade the disembodied journey of ecstasy.
Here I go again, stepping out into one of the innumerable languages with its seventy-five terms to state the layered intensities of love. At each level having to speak in new tones and cadences with strange middle preterite tenses. And language modifies itself upwards and downwards over the years, shuffling inflections and sounds so that, all around one, new words are always beginning – and the elderly say, ‘I stumble with joy. I do not know this world.’(from Hieronymus of Chios, ‘Among the Illuminated’)
Peter Boyle was a guest at the 2005 Watermark Literary Muster
PETER BOYLE is a Sydney-based poet and translator. His most recent publications are Museum of Space (UQP, 2004) and What The Painter Saw In Our Faces (FIP, 2001) and, as a translator, The Trees: Selected Poems of Eugenio Montejo (Salt, 2004).
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