The School of Silence

By C.S. Thompson

The mandarins and other guests:

Q- a wandering bard of the School of Silence, a mysterious outsider. He was invited to fulfill the requirement that every symposium must include a “stranger.”

An Asymmetric Elegance

The board in front of him was a star map of a distant galaxy, each sun a glowing dot in the sleek black marble. The red nebulae in the background provided contrast, hinting at places so far away that they were almost beyond all knowledge. The flat pieces of smooth glass made a pattern like a spider web, an order that wasn’t quite an order, an asymmetric elegance.

He placed a piece down with an emphatic click, examined its position on the board, then placed another of a different color. He was playing through one of the tournament games of the great Konym’na, whose opening play had seemed so original a hundred years ago. The truth was, he didn’t quite understand it. The great master had played so lightly at first, scarcely fortifying his positions. He looked vulnerable until the middle game and sometimes later, allowing his opponent to take point after point as if they had completely dominated the game. They always thought they were winning until he sprung his trap, taking their pieces so elegantly they hardly felt the wound.

Former magistrate Den’ma had no ambition to achieve such genius, at the game of bota or at any of his other interests. He was strictly an amateur. From the vast gardens in which he sat with his game to his flirtation with poetry, Den’ma was a man who did things for no other reason than because they appealed to him. His years of service to the empire were finally over, and whatever debts he owed the world had all been paid. For the most part he lived as a recluse, wandering through his gardens beneath the most exotic trees of a dozen star systems. He marveled at their strange foliage and the quiet creatures that lurked among them, staring out at him with huge and mournful eyes, or calling to each other eerily from the dark branches. He smoked a long pipe and composed verse in the ancient style, commenting on the passing seasons with a subtle mix of gentle wit and sublimated passion. He drank tea and studied bota problems and practiced calligraphy, copying from the Zu texts that were considered the standard. His life was filled with aesthetic pleasures, and he was not ungrateful for them. Today, however, was a special day. The retired official was expecting guests.

“The shuttle from Tryn has arrived,” said a pleasant voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once. His artificial intelligence system had been programmed to sound like a woman, not too young and not too old, with the accent of his distant home world. While he had no intention of living there, he still felt a certain degree of nostalgia.

“Thank you,” he said to it, and took one last look at the bota board. He still couldn’t see it. Konyn’ma’s pieces- the cloudy ones- were so widely spaced as to have no pattern, each of them seemingly isolated and defenseless. His opponent Meyinma’s clear pieces were in a stronger position, with sections of the board’s star map clearly surrounded and in their control. And yet the historical fact was that Konyn’ma had won, taking so many of Meyinma’s pieces that he resigned from the game. Resolving to play out the rest of the problem later, Den’ma stood up to go meet his guests.

The first one to step off of the shuttle was Tioch, the controversial literary critic for the journal Trephid, a magazine that often ran afoul of the imperial censors. She had a stern reputation as a perfectionist, unwilling to concede any point to inexperience or even senility- if the greatest author in the empire composed a weak piece on his deathbed she would review it exactly as harshly as it deserved. He was surprised to see that she was quite young, and even beautiful, though it was hard to say what she really looked like when she was wearing the saffron robes of a Congine novice, her head shaved like the priestess she was in training to be. He bowed respectfully to her and she returned the bow, her blue eyes as cold and glittering as the ice rings of the outer star systems. She stepped aside a moment later to let the other passengers disembark.

The second guest was a young man named Jian, an imperial knight in his wine-colored dress uniform with all its medals and epaulettes. He wore a slender straight sword at his hip, as all imperial knights did when not on duty. A symposium was expected to include a man of action, and this young soldier had been selected for several reasons. He had captured a notorious outlaw on Trepidek the month before, hunting him down in the heart of the city’s pleasure district and taking a pulse to the leg in the process. And he had received a good education from his aristocratic family, allowing him to discuss intellectual topics without embarrassing himself. It was said that he had even made a brief study of Telpid poetics for his thesis, and that particularly appealed to Den’ma’s curiosity. But the young man had an open and honest face, perhaps a little naive even, with clear blue eyes.

“Thank you for inviting me, sir,” said Jian quietly. Den’ma bowed to him and he moved on.

The two professors were next off the shuttle- Porept Kila and Garadin Vata. Professor Kila was attached to the Imperial University on Tolayon, where he taught the classical poetry of the Zu Dynasty, including both the School of Heaven and the Demonic School. Professor Vata was something of a rival, a lecturer at the University of Char, and a poet of the modern Academic School. They were both dressed in the robes of imperial professors- long band-collared tunics that went down to their ankles, made of a fabric that looked like a bota board, with its star systems and nebulae and stretches of blackness. Professor Vata was gesticulating as he talked, trying to make his point on every possible level of communication. His white hair flowed out behind him like a churning waterfall. Professor Kila was more sedate, or at least he attempted to cultivate the appearance of inner peace like a proper mandarin. His own hair was tied neatly back in a pair of long braids, and his white beard was trimmed.

“So good to see you again, Professor Kila. I enjoyed your paper on the poetry of the Viscount Tatra. I’m glad you could join us here, Professor Vata.” Den’ma greeted both of his guests and they bowed deeply in response. Den’ma’s symposiums were known by reputation to every mandarin in the empire.

In the era of the Commonwealth- so long ago that its origins were lost in myth, and may even have dated back to the age before interplanetary travel- the philosopher-poet Doesdion had composed his masterpiece, Doesdion’s Analects. This collection of proverbs and parables had been tremendously influential, leading eventually to its adoption as a sacred scripture throughout the empire by order of the first ruler of the Zu Dynasty. A class of intellectuals and aristocrats had developed to interpret it, along with the sacred text known as the Book of the Void, which Doesdion had praised as the most important book in all of history. Over the centuries the mandarin class had waxed and waned, almost disappearing completely when the Zu Dynasty fell. At the present stage they formed the upper levels of the imperial bureaucracy, and the intellectual and aesthetic elite of the entire galaxy. Their ranks included magistrates, teachers and military officers, monastic orders such as the Congine, and the closest advisors to the Tene Emperor himself. The mandarin class did not exactly rule the empire, but the empire could not be ruled without them either.

The last two to step down from the shuttle were unlike the others- the Sardich oracle known as the Shell Witch and the wandering minstrel of the School of Silence, known only as Q. The Shell Witch was an older woman in robes of dark brown- a type of prophet and healer. The Sardich people maintained many traditions from the days before their absorption into the empire, including their native class of shamans, who were now their mandarins. Despite the fact that every Sardich oracle was mandarin-educated, they were fiercely proud of their older traditions and superstitions. The Shell Witch could be counted on to keep things lively, as her view of the world would be very different from that of the two professors.

Regarding the minstrel named Q, not much could be said. The School of Silence was a religious order as much as a poetic faction- a strange, and some said a dangerous cult, whose teachings were a mystery. The poet-priests of the School of Silence were wanderers, traveling aimlessly through the empire and even beyond, to the dangerous Freezone planets and the distant Telpid systems. Q was dressed in a long tunic that went down to his ankles, made of a dark blue like the sky at twilight. His hair was a long braid of silvery gray, and his eyes were dark. He nodded silently but respectfully to the magistrate, and Den’ma bowed. He had invited the enigmatic bard to fulfill another tradition of the symposium. Q was there in the role of the stranger, the outsider whose ways and customs were unknown.

“If you will all join me inside,” said Den’ma, “My AI system will direct you to your quarters. We will meet again for dinner in a couple of hours, and get to know each other a little better at that time.”

He bowed again deeply to them all. The night had begun.

The Age of Decline

“We truly are in an age of decline,” said Professor Kila, expressing a sentiment that could be interpreted as potentially treasonous if any of the secret police had been on hand. He was sitting in one of the luxuriously soft red chairs in Den’ma’s study, surrounded by Zu Dynasty vases and ancient weapons, paintings by the greatest of the mandarin artists, and thousands of scrolls. The scrolls were one of Den’ma’s favorite affectations- they were actually digital, containing imprinted moving images and scrolling touchscreens. But they gave the impression of being charmingly primitive.

Professor Kila had a glass of bright-green Khan’halpa wine, while the others all held glasses or pipes of their own. The dinner with which they began the evening had been exquisite, without crossing the line into garish excess. They were all ready for a long night of conversation, which was after all the point of the symposium in the first place. There were no formal guidelines as to topic, but it was quietly understood that they were to talk about poetry. Kila was making a controversial statement to get things going, an entirely traditional way to begin such an event. “The so-called poets of our era depend on charity,” he said. “Not service as a mandarin, of course, for which few of them are qualified- but the outright handout of an imperial endowment. Senator Torin wanted to shut them down, to cut off all funding for such departments as the Imperial Culture Institute- and a host of spoon-fed artists are howling about it.”

“I can accept your position with regard to the Unfettered Poets,” said Professor Vata, “As they possess neither talent nor training, and their work is meaningless. But if our gracious emperor chooses to support the poets of the university system...”

“It is no different at all,” said Professor Kila. “A true mandarin composes poetry as a pastime, not a profession.”

Professor Vata shifted uncomfortably, and the Shell Witch stepped in.

“The artist or the poet enjoys the status of an outsider: disreputable and not accountable to anyone,” she said heatedly. “This is a source of power. How can you critique society when you depend on charity? The Velet Ruyacht poets of the Vodlani system have both power and prestige, and they write the truth as they see fit because the chieftains there are terrified of them. The poets supported by the Imperial Culture Institute are officially tolerated, but despised. They act like children- howling for money they haven’t earned and then demanding to do anything they want with it. You can't shake hands with the emperor and then complain about his tyranny.”

The entire company was suddenly visibly nervous- with the exception of Q from the School of Silence, who remained impassive, leaning back in his chair in the corner and observing them as if from a distance. It was not always safe to be so frank, not even for a Sardich oracle.

“Well, what is poetry?” said Jian suddenly. “We study it throughout our school years, but they never define it. I read an article recently in the Trephid which stated quite emphatically that song lyrics are not poetry. And yet I can think of song lyrics that mean a lot more to me than most poems.”

“I remember the article,” said Tioch, “Although it wasn’t one of mine. It's easier to say what poetry isn’t than what it is. Most lyrics would have little or no effect on the reader if arranged as a poem without the music, and that’s probably the easiest distinction. Poetry doesn’t need the help of music; it does its work on its own. Even though a poem can be set to music, it never requires it.”

“If song lyrics aren't poetry,” said Jian, “Then what are they?”

“They are verse,” said Professor Vata. “In both the vernacular and the literary languages, the word for verse implies ‘a turning.’ This refers to the rhythmic quality of the language itself, turning and repeating in intricate sound patterns. Any words arranged in a certain rhythm are verse, but not all verse is truly poetry. Verse may or may not include rhyme, but must always include rhythm.

“Take the early poetry of the Commonwealth, of which only scattered fragments have survived. They never used rhyme in those days, but they still wrote verse. Their poems had either a set number of syllables per line or else a set number of heavily stressed beats or accents. Their syllabic verse had a gentle rhythm, sometimes barely audible but it was there. Their accentual verse had a very strong rhythm. In neither case was rhythm optional. Without that turning pattern of connected sounds, they would have simply called it prose. For anything to be a poem, it must first be in verse, so much of what is now called poetry is no such thing. Yet merely turning and rhyming is not enough to make a poem.”

“That doesn’t really help me,” said Jian, “I can’t see a clear distinction. What is it exactly that distinguishes poetry from verse?”

The Shell Witch spoke up. “The answer, I believe, is inspiration - an indefinable quality of almost supernatural power that causes a feeling of awe in a sensitive reader. The trouble, is, people often don't agree on which poems are inspired and which are not. I consider Kuesetai to be a genius, but some people consider him a raving idiot. I find Tan Arbital bland and sugary; you might be changed forever by his works. Still, I can't help but feel that there is some objective standard that separates poetry from mere verse. We just aren't allowed to know what it is and so are left guessing. Because of this, a song lyric can indeed be a poem - if it touches you with that shiver of awe.”

“It comes down to this,” said Professor Kila, “Leaving aside such mythical notions as inspiration, which most of us believe in at least vestigially, though we can never quantify it. Poetry is language concentrated. The essence of language. The perfect words in the perfect order, and not a single word more than is necessary.”

“There is a more precise way to address the issue,” said Tioch, “Though I’m not surprised that the poets themselves haven’t thought of it. Have you read the work of Tarnish of Sual, particularly his Aesthetic Principles?”

“I’ve had a lifetime of aesthetic priciples,” said Jian, and the others laughed.

“The educational system can be hard on the love of poetry,” said Tioch with sympathy. “Teachers thrive on the analysis of poems. ‘What does this symbol mean?’ ‘What is the psychology behind this metaphor? - As if poetry was just a puzzle to solve, and once you figure it out, you win the prize. This approach can drain the life’s blood from a poem. A poem is almost a living thing, walking around for centuries after its author has died. You can't understand it through over-analysis anymore than you can understand love or fear or any other emotion by doing an autopsy on a human body.”

“Some things are intangible,” said the Shell Witch. “The rush of blood, the quickening pulse, the moment of awe at the reading of a true poem - these things are not to be grasped through picking them apart. This isn't to say that students and teachers shouldn't try to understand what a poem means, but more emphasis should be given to that indescribable moment of power, and less to the dry bones of the beast.”

“I agree,” said Tioch, “But to get back to my point. In the first place, we’ve made a category error. Poetry is not the opposite of prose; verse is. Prose, therefore, is unmetered speech, and verse the opposite. The Unfettered poets are obviously in error, when they speak of a ‘free’ verse. That’s a contradiction in terms. It does not logically follow, however, that what they write cannot be poetry. Poetry is, as Professor Kila here has said, the most concentrated form of language, and such an intense language can be in verse or prose- though verse is its most natural and appropriate state.

“Tarnish used the example of the Suali Free-Singing, an old style of vocal chant from his own home-world. The Free-Singer is never accompanied by other musicians, so there is no need for him to be concerned with keeping a beat. There is therefore no time-signature in Suali Free-Singing, but the result is not the chaotic mess some would predict. The Free-Singer is left to his own devices in interpretation and ornamentation. Grace notes can be introduced anywhere; the length of notes can be varied. No Free-Song is ever performed the same way twice. Yet there are few aesthetic experiences more moving than a Suali chanting concert. The Suali master’s range of expression is vast, and the emotion induced is profound. Would you say, then, that the Free-Singing cannot be music, merely because it doesn’t use the concept of time signatures? It is a most sublime music, I assure you.

“But this is merely the opening argument of the Aesthetic Principles. Tarnish’s central argument was rather more interesting. He wasn’t content to declare Art unknowable, but sought to define the terms of debate, to say something coherent about our aesthetic judgments.

“His example of the Suali Free-Singing wasn’t random at all; it served his purpose. Because the Imperial Orchestra and the Ghotan Opera have become so central to us, exerting an influence over almost all our music, we have made some assumptions. That music must follow a set time and rhythm, for one. That the clarity of the singer’s voice is one of the most important standards of musical quality. That the lyrics of a song are second to the melody, to the extent that some singers cannot be easily understood, but are still admired. There is nothing wrong with any of these assumptions, but that’s what they are. Tarnish was able to show that every one of them is culturally conditioned, no more an objective requirement than the fondness for one type of wine over another. The Suali Free-Singers, as I have mentioned, do not use time signatures. The Pac Opera of Tunomora does not place a high priority on what we would think of as a ‘good singing voice.’ They focus instead on emotional expression, and some of their best singers are old masters with faded voices, unable to hit a single note with perfect clarity- yet the range of emotion they can express is truly extraordinary, and all the warmer for its imperfections. And the ballad-singers of Zhai are almost entirely focused on the lyrics, considering the melody no more than a mnemonic vehicle for the words. To them, the idea of a singer with poor enunciation would be downright ridiculous. So as you can see, there are no objective standards. All systems of aesthetics are culturally relative.”

“Then what are we to do?” said Professor Vata. “Disregard standards altogether and declare all art equally valid and equally worthwhile? Are the great works of the classical masters no more significant than the self-indulgent doggerel of an amateur? Is that what Tarnish would have us believe?”

“Not at all,” she said. “His only claim was this: all things in context. There are two legitimate ways to judge a work of art, two honest methods of criticism. The first is personal, and entirely subjective. How did it effect you? You can sneer all you want to at self-indulgent doggerel, but if it honestly moves you then it honestly moves you. Being ashamed of your own aesthetic tastes is hypocritical and cowardly. But your own tastes begin and end with you. They are your private joy; they have no wider application.

“The second method, while not objective, could perhaps lay claim to being semi-objective. This is to judge a work by the established standards of its tradition, in other words by its Art. Because all art is artificial. What else is an art but a deliberate aesthetic system, a created thing by its very nature? A thing without a method cannot be art; it can only be chance. It might move us as nature moves us- at random. The point of any art is to be able to do it deliberately.”

“Ah. I see his point,” said Professor Vata. “But how are we to judge between competing aesthetic systems?”

“We don’t. Judge Ghotan Opera as Ghotan Opera, and Suali Free-Singing as Suali Free-Singing. Each tradition has its own method, its own aesthetic standards. So judge each piece of art by its appropriate method.”

“And that art which claims to have no method...?”

“Is no such thing. But I will give you another of his examples. What would you say about the following statement: A good essay is always clear, concise and convincing. It begins with an argument and progresses by supporting statements to a logical conclusion. Each paragraph begins with a statement of opinion, which is buttressed by a series of supporting statements in order of ascending priority. The weakest supporting statement is always first, building up to the strongest, with which the paragraph concludes.”

“I would call that an argument for bad writing,” said Professor Kila. “What a barbaric way to express oneself! Do you mean to tell me this author is actually advocating such a crude approach?”

“I do indeed,” said Tioch, “And furthermore, he’s not alone. That was an actual quote from a writing textbook of the Gerrec people, who pride themselves on their directness and logical clarity. The Gerrec strive to get straight to the point. That was a description of good writing, in the Gerrec view. Here is what the same textbook says about the mandarin texts of the Zu Dynasty: Marred as always by obfuscation and lack of clarity, circular arguments and an excessive fondness for metaphor, these texts demonstrate the fundamental weakness of the mandarin aesthetic. Lacking the concept of paragraph structure and logical argument, no two sentences are directly related. The authors circle around their point but never state it, as if averse to the concept of communication itself.”

The two professors looked utterly shocked.

“The subtlety... the elegance,” said Professor Kila. “How could we have any such thing if we spoke directly? Only barbarians say exactly what they mean in a formal essay!”

“To the Gerrec,” said Tioch, “We are the barbarians.”

Professor Vata shook his head in wonder.

“If you don’t mind going back to an earlier point,” said Jian, “You mentioned that the poets of the early Commonwealth didn’t rhyme. So who invented rhyming, and why did they do it? And why have the poets stopped rhyming in our modern era?”

“If only they would stop,” said Tioch, “Or learn how to do it. Indeed, when most poets rhyme, they do it very badly. They don't know how to rhyme - and why should they? It isn't exactly taught anymore, except as a dead language.”

“We still rhyme in the Academic School,” said Professor Vata, “And you’re quite right that most people aren’t good at it. It is far better not to rhyme than to use forced rhymes, sound-echoes that feel awkward and out of place. Good rhyme sounds natural and rolls easily off the tongue. If you have to distort the order of words in a sentence, say something out of place, or in any other way work too hard to fit a rhyme in your poem, you are probably writing a forced rhyme. With enough practice, the rhymes should come almost as easily as normal speech. But the key word is practice.

“It’s the most pernicious fallacy in the history of literature- the idea that there is any such thing as a spontaneous talent for poetry. People accept without question that you must be taught how to play a musical instrument, that you must go to school to learn how to paint, that you must apprentice yourself to a master to become a master in any craft- and yet it never occurs to them that not just anyone can compose poetry. The Queen of the Arts as it was once called, perhaps the most technical and demanding of all aesthetic skills, requiring a study of decades for any hope of mastery- and that only of its technical aspects, not its intangible core. The notion that one can simply pick up a pen and ‘express oneself’ is utter nonsense. This, we are told, is the purpose of art. In fact, it has become a popular catchphrase over the past thirty years, as if the only purpose of art is as a psychic dump for the emotions of life. Indeed, the use of this phrase is a vital part of the movement that sees quality as irrelevant - only self-expression is considered art, no matter how inane.

“And it’s exactly the reason why no one takes poetry seriously anymore. Why should anyone take it seriously, if it requires no skill?

“But to answer your question. Rhyme has always had its detractors, but these usually preferred ‘blank verse,’ in other words metered poetry without rhyme. The early poets of the Commonwealth had strict metrics but no rhyme. The truth is, they didn't know what rhyme was, but they still came up with a way to make verse sound more musical, by creating running strings of alliteration to a simple metric beat.

“According to the early prosody of the Commonwealth, certain sounds are natural partners, poetic siblings if you will. P goes with B; D goes with T and Th; M goes with N; O goes with W and U; V goes with F; Ch goes with Sh. You get the idea.

“Alliteration took the place of rhyme in that early poetry. But then the mandarin class developed rhyme, initially as a way of more easily memorizing long texts like the commentaries on the Book of the Void or Doesdion’s Analects. From a simple mnemonic device, it became a new art. But my colleague Professor Kila is the real expert here. He has studied the classical schools in far greater depth than I have. If he will undertake to tell their story, perhaps I can finish it, as my own field of expertise is modern poetry- or what’s left of it in any case. Professor Kila?”

Zu Dynasty Poetics

The professor leaned forward in his chair and took a generous sip of his wine, his eyes lighting up at the chance to discuss his subject. He swallowed his wine with a satisfied sound and began.

“If we’re going to speak of the classical schools, then we must begin with the obvious: the School of Heaven was truly the defining school of mandarin poetry, the poetry of our class in its perfected state. Most of us wrote reams of the stuff as schoolchildren, and retired scholars such as our gracious host still write it now- or rather, they write in imitation of that mode. The term itself is never applied to modern poetry, as it is universally acknowledged that the true School of Heaven was a product of the Zu Dynasty. Any poetry written in that mode in a later time can at best be described as pseudo-celestial, an imitation of lost glories that cannot now be equaled, a fall from grace. That is why we refer to such poetry as the Old School, a decadent survival of what was once the School of Heaven, though the true School of Heaven died long ago.”

Former Magistrate Den’ma smiled enigmatically but raised no protest. The doctor continued with increasing excitement.

“The characteristic of the School of Heaven was a subtle elegance, a quiet and often melancholy sense of refinement. The poet Carrayid once wrote of them, though perhaps with more sympathy than genuine skill:

With reverence

I breathe the quiet sadness
Of their words:
A friend departed,
Streams in winter,
And the flight of birds.
A quiet ache for things that were
And will not be again.
Loss met with dignity becomes
A subtle grace within.
A poignant and aesthetic light
Through every word and deed.
Each day a voiceless poem in service
To an unmet need.
Each secret tear, a prayer
Accepting
Things the way they are,
But grieving, as a gift of honor
To the way they were.

“Their ideal of grief was not the savage keening of the Qeti mourning women, but the almost-invisible brightness of an unshed tear. They sought a balance between the deepest passions and the aesthetic refinement of a secret emotion. The best of their work combined sheer beauty of sound and imagery with a subtle pathos- a sorrow that was never devoid of dignity, never a stranger to restraint. And the metrical forms they used were the most sophisticated in history, requiring decades of study to fully master. Consider the meter they called Song of Autumn. A poem written in rhyming couplets. Each line must be seven syllables long. The last word of the first line must be one syllable. The last word of the second line must be two syllables, and the accent of that word must fall on the first syllable. The first word of the first line must alliterate with the last word of the first line. The last word of the first line must rhyme with the first word of the second line. This pattern repeats in every couplet.

“Can we even imagine the famous poets of our own age attempting that? And yet the Song of Autumn was by no means the most difficult of that School’s meters.

“Their poetry expressed the Mandarin Way in its most profound form. Such an art could hardly have lived forever. Nothing can. Like the ephemeral beauties they were so fond of describing, they were doomed by time- just like the Zu itself in the end.

“The School of Heaven decayed as the empire did, becoming ever more refined and artificial, ever more stilted and removed from reality. The dark genius of Kuesetai, first poet of the Demonic School, was only a natural reaction. Kuesetai himself was born as a mandarin, fully trained in the School of Heaven in his youth. His early poems are both derivative and uninspired, pale reflections of what had come before. The only hint of his fertile darkness was in the occasional memento mori:

Be quiet.
Don’t be scared.
The hour is here.
You lived on credit
For a long, long time
And now at last your creditor appears.
And what he asks of you
Is very small:
Just go with him
And don’t come back.
That’s all.

But then came the defining moment of his short life. Kuesetai failed the imperial examinations and was denied full status as a mandarin, forbidden any official appointment from the empire.

“The stories that have come down to us imply that he was cheated, that he failed not because of any lack in his education but because of certain rumors about his character. These rumors he now proceeded to prove well-founded, no doubt from some perverse streak or desire for vengeance, an instinct to throw the accusations back at the world in spite. He became a habitue of the most notorious sections of the pleasure quarters, an intimate of degraded courtesans and an addict of chaan. But even this was not enough for his outraged pride, or perhaps for whatever internal darkness he had till now suppressed.

“Kuesetai became an associate of the most peculiar of underworlds- that netherland of forbidden science that explores the connections between advanced physics and the black magic beliefs of the primitive sorcerers of the Home-worlds, seeking to find a scientific sort of demonology by invoking the supposed intelligences of black holes and neutron stars.

“He was in all likelihood no more than a dilettante. As a mandarin he would have had no deep understanding of the technical aspects of the forbidden science. He probably engaged in speculative conversation over bowls of chaan, and little more than that. But it was enough to put the finishing touches to his dark reputation, a new archetype of the poet as a sort of black magician and master of esoteric forces. None of which would have had the slightest impact, except that Kuesetai was a true genius.

“His first work after he failed the examinations was the infamous Black Rose of the Pleasure Quarters, a work in the formal style of the School of Heaven- yet utterly daring and original, utterly different. Its gothic eeriness and weird beauty remain unsurpassed to this day, and the poem established his reputation overnight as one of the most important poets in the empire.

“But his next work was even more extreme, and it both established the Demonic School and led directly to his own death. This was, of course, the Meditations on Strange Yearning, Experienced in a Dream of the Event Horizon, in which he went so far as to eulogize the forbidden science in verse, invoking the alien mind of a black hole as if he was a sorcerer in a magic circle. This work was so bizarre and incredible that it gained him disciples, among them the most significant poets of the final years of the Zu Dynasty- Por Tednil, Bar Hideon, and the infamous Chai Meriyed, the poets of the Demonic School as such.

“For these men and women and their lesser contemporaries, he operated a sort of academy, patterned directly after the mandarin academies yet held in the pleasure quarters of Khan’halpa. They composed their sinister poems in the celestial meters at first, until Chai Meriyed invented the infernal meters. These were essentially inverted versions of their celestial counterparts. For instance, in the celestial meter known as Birds in Winter, you begin with a three syllable line and move on from there to a refrain of nine syllables- a meter that sounds both elegant and harmonious in the literary language. In the infernal counterpart to the same meter, the nine syllable lines come first, and the three-syllable lines are used for the refrain. It sounds almost barbarous, of course, but it’s certainly exotic.

“These poems were composed in the arms of courtesans, while the poets themselves smoked chaan and drank the potent Khan’halpa wine. If all of this seems a little ridiculous now (except to those young poets who still believe they must be shocking and decadent, difficult as that is in our jaded society), it seemed downright threatening then. The Zu emperor Borseday had Kuesatai arrested by the Inquisition, tortured at length by the Koyaptic Church, and eventually executed. His disciples all spent years in exile, but of course that only added to their cachet.”

“What do you think about that?” asked Jian. “This myth of the demonic poet, I mean. So many of the Demonic School died young, and a lot of the modern poets seem to imitate them.”

Kila shrugged. “The poetic tradition is punctuated with tales of those who destroyed themselves in pursuit of their art. Kuesetai was tortured to death, of course. Chai Meriyed died as a chaan addict on the streets of Khan’halpa. Bar Hideon was slain in the Shale Rebellion. The list goes on. But this is more of a social evil than a precondition for poetry.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the Shell Witch. “The poetic myth does have this dark side of self-destruction. The state of being between two things is potent with magic force. A stream is magic because it is between two banks - so supernatural beings cannot cross streams. A crossroads is magic because it is between two roads.”

“And your point is...?” said Professor Kila. It was not exactly a sign of high culture to believe in magic, but the thousand systems of the empire contained many strange beliefs, and few stranger than those of the Sardich.

“The poet walks the twilight zone between life and death,” she said, “Risking her physical being in extreme celebration. It’s a delicate balancing act and not every poet can pull it off, but poets are not moderate people and their extreme lives are the key to the power of the words they wield.”

Magistrate Den’ma smiled quietly at her and puffed on his pipe. The Shell Witch looked embarrassed suddenly, and closed her mouth. Vata and Kila were staring at her as if there were no words that could express what they were thinking.

“I don’t know if I believe it,” said Jian slowly. “I mean, there are poets who lived that way, but there are others who didn’t. So how can it be necessary, really? It all seems like a waste of energy. A lack of... dedication.”

He lapsed into silence.

“All of life has its poetry,” said Den’ma. “So let’s not judge them too harshly. The pleasure quarters of Khan’Halpa needed poets too. But to return to Kila’s story.”

The professor collected himself and went on.

“The School of Heaven had been struck a fatal blow,” he said, “From which it never truly recovered. The final years of the Zu Dynasty were spent in competition between these schools, a competition which the School of Heaven in its decaying state could never win. The great poets of that twilight era were all members of the Demonic School.

“But after twilight comes the night. When the Zu Dynasty finally fell, torn apart by both internal rebellions and the constant raiding attacks of the Chylek, both schools were caught up in the downfall. While the formal traditions of poetic training survived in the educational systems of various planets until the reunification under the Tene Dynasty (long may it flourish) and the reestablishment of the mandarin class, true poetic vitality was no longer present.

“The Old School was now exactly that- an exercise in re-living the past, an aesthetic nostalgia. There has been no significant poetry since.”

Professor Vata almost stood up. As a renowned scholar of the New School of about a hundred years ago, and a poet of the more recent Academic School, he couldn’t let this go unchallenged.

“You’re too focused on the classical schools,” he said, “And on their decadent survival in the so-called Old School. The Tene Dynasty has produced an aesthetic of its own.”

“Surely you don’t refer to the Unfettered School?” said Professor Kila with some distaste.

“I do not. I have a few words to say about them, but let it wait until I’ve explained what I mean. The poetry of the New School bears some examination, as does the poetry now composed in the universities.”

“If you believe it is so,” said Professor Kila, “Then please demonstrate it. I have often wondered if there was any defense for it. The New School wrote poetry without formal meter! If you can justify that at all, then please do.”

Tene Dynasty Poetics

“Very well,” said Professor Vata, “I’ll do what I can. As a university poet, I prefer the guidelines of meter myself, but as a trained scholar I must admit the truth when I see it. The poetry of the New School was not without merit, and in some cases displayed true genius.

“After the Tene Dynasty restored law and order, the mandarin class was restored to its pride of place, gathered together from scattered fragments in a dozen systems- the Literati of Sual, for example, and the Poet-Administrators of Ghota. All these men had been trained in the remnants of the Zu educational system, which included a thorough grounding in the classical meters, from Five Count and Seven Count to Thorn of Marble. There was no other poetry to speak of for a few centuries, and little of what they wrote is still read today. As my colleague here would no doubt agree, it bore no comparison to the School of Heaven, and was in reality no more than a timid imitation of it. This was the Old School of which we have heard.

“The New School was born as a reaction to that orthodoxy, a rebellion by the entire generation of younger poets about a hundred years ago- men such as Goryen of Qarth and his lifelong rival the poetess Chenna, Solhardi of Ghota and the great Tairo of Sual. And what a rebellion it was! These literary anarchists bid defiance to our entire tradition, composing poetry without regard for formal meter. The reading public was shocked, and the critics were horrified. But out of notoriety springs artistic fame, and soon enough there were new critics to praise the new poets, naming several of them geniuses and declaring the old traditions dead. It is always that way with bold new dreams- until the dreamers wake up and take a closer look about them. Much of what was praised at that time is no longer read. Consider this unfortunate example by Solhardi of Ghota, which was named a revolutionary masterpiece by no less an organ than the Trephid:

Like the core of a dying sun as it collapses inward,
Or the empty cities on a sunless world,
So it is with us, my actually-not-immortal muse,
My soon to be forgotten amid the flesh of the pleasure quarters
Of humid Trepidek.

“Solhardi had intended to replace poetic meter with a ‘sound rhythm’ much like music. The question is, did he succeed? Is there a sound rhythm in this poem? Is there, in fact, any rhythm at all? I must conclude that there is not. The first two lines have a certain fluidity, but the third line crashes on the rocks of its own all-too-jaded irony, sacrificing the sound rhythm to fit in the cynicism. The fourth line departs from rhythm completely. Try saying it out loud. Does it repeat its own sound pattern, or any variation on its own sound pattern? No. So it is not verse by any coherent definition. And if it is not verse, how can it be poetry?”

Tioch rolled her eyes at him, but he ignored her. He had obviously paid no attention to her argument in the first place. The professor continued.

“Neither is it prose- the phrasing would be out of place in a prose essay. It is not prose. It is not poetry. It is simply an avant-garde experiment run amok, and it looked something like art for one reason only- no one had ever seen anything quite like it before. It took them an entire generation to realize that it was actually worthless.

“But not all the poetry of the New School can be dismissed so easily. You must remember that the poets of the New School had received extensive training in the Old School, the same mandarin education we ourselves have had. They knew the formal meters inside and out. Some of them had actually composed dozens of poems in the traditional style, and when they made the leap to the new style they carried a certain ear for rhythm with them. Consider this piece by Tairo of Sual, perhaps not one of his more brilliant works, but it does have a strength of imagery to it. He called it The Knight of the Invisible:

The sky was as darkly green as the depths of the forest,
And as endlessly patient.
In that country there were black clouds like stacked mountains.
Storm winds muttered something about the death of empires,
While a blue moon listened.
I bowed my head beneath the Presence.
There is always a price to be paid;
There is always a circumstance.
The surpassing peace of the impossible was there, and yet I remained
Uncomforted.
Still believing something about the strength of the absurd,
I remembered the future:
You would ask me to forgive you.

“This poem is not in formal meter, any more than the previous example. But see how differently it handles its freedom. You can actually hear the rhythm- it sounds like poetry. The sound expresses the experience of the poem. And so it is indeed possible to make poetry without the formal meters.”

“The poem has... something,” said Professor Kila.

“Thank you,” said Professor Vata. “I am glad you can see it. But I do prefer the formal meters, as you do. The Academic School of which I am a member was essentially a reaction to the New School, to some of its criticisms. It was an attempt to move beyond an imitation of the School of Heaven, to breathe some new life into the ancient tradition of mandarin poetry. To what extent we have succeeded must be judged by posterity. But I do believe we have produced fine poets. Tairo himself, in his later years, abandoned the so-called ‘sound rhythms’ and began composing formal verse. At that point he was a renowned instructor at my own university- I actually took a few classes from him in my youth. His later work was spare and rigorous, built up around precise details and specific images- a slow accretion of life’s often-unnoticed trivialities, producing a cumulative effect that was truly poetic. There was also Chai Hoden, a poet at the University on Tolayon, but his work was so erudite as to be unhappily obscure.”

“Is obscurity a fault in poetry?” asked Den’ma midly.

“That depends on the context,” said Professor Vata. “Poems are not puzzles, of course, and yet obscurity can be tempting. If no one understands you, you must be a genius. Certain poets of the Tayl Heresy used obscure symbolism as a type of code, seeking to camouflage their unorthodox religious knowledge while revealing their secrets to the initiated. Indeed, obscurity can be powerfully evocative, but it is very dangerous to readability.

“According to the late Professor Coryin of Char, there are two kinds of obscurity. One is the result of inspiration - a striking and forceful phrase loaded with meaning too intricate to be easily unraveled. The other is the result of planning - a forced attempt to be clever that only falls flat. Of course, literary critics love both kinds of obscurity and can't often tell the difference between them. Obscurity gives them something to interpret, thus justifying their existence.”

Tioch stared coldly at him, but he went on, seemingly oblivious to the risk of offending her. It was within her power as a Trephid critic to doom his own literary efforts to obscurity or infamy, either savaging his poems or ignoring them entirely. But he moved on to the next topic without a pause.

“Kuesetai is a good example of visionary obscurity - there was a whole mythology in his head and he spent his life trying to show it to the world. No one ever quite knew what he was talking about, but his poems still shine with his vision even centuries later.

“Chai Hoden, on the other hand, is an example of the other kind of obscurity. His Songs from Lost Fragments are monumentally unreadable, because he filled them with thousands of obscure references to show how dazzlingly well-educated he was.”

The Shell Witch broke in. “The Sardich people have a rule of thumb for telling a false oracle from a true one. If a man speaks prophecy and is able to remember what he said, he is a true oracle. If he babbles without understanding and tries to pass it off as prophecy, then he is a false prophet and a heretic.”

“Be that as it may,” said Professor Vata rather dryly, “Chai Hoden is not the best example of the Academic School, nor for that matter is Tairo. He had his literary origins elsewhere. But his later teachings were an inspiration to us. My generation of professors and poets learned a lot from him, and went on to create the Academic School as such. Among my own colleagues I might mention Tocara of Ghota, who used an adroit variation on the Seven Count meter to comment satirically on the Pelucid Wars, or Professor Cazo of Tin who wrote such a moving commentary on the life of modern man in all its spiritual bankruptcy- his masterpiece, the Life of a Deafmute. My own poetry, I will pass over, of course...”

Tioch sniffed.

“But I have my hopes it will not be forgotten. To summarize, the Academic School has revived true poetry, composing neither the timid imitations of the Old School, nor the senselessly extravagant experiments of the most extreme exponents of the New School.

“So now we move on,” he said, “To the Unfettered School- the school that has dominated modern poetry since Tairo passed on. The New School gave birth to this movement in a rejection of orthodoxy, a tearing-down of all venerated traditions. But the poor baby was stillborn. The poets of the New School had an understanding of their tools, and having reached at least the journeyman stage, they went on to break new ground. It was that which made their early work so exciting. Consider the state of things with the Unfettered Poets: unlike their spiritual ancestors in the New School, they begin writing in free meter from the first day. They make no disciplined study of formal verse before they do so. This is virtually unprecedented in the history of art. No one would call himself a Qigon player if he didn’t know how to play a chord, or an architect if he couldn’t build a building that would not fall down. Yet these revolutionaries disdain all discipline, professing to compose poetry without formal training. They have nothing but contempt, in fact, for formal training- insisting that in spontaneous expression they create true art. According to the Unfettered poets, all that is needed is honest emotion- although lately even this is eschewed for a fashionable irony, the empty wink-and-nudge of an inside joke. Yet the most characteristic feature of their school is its lack of freedom.”

“You must be joking with us now,” said the Shell Witch, “Because if there’s one thing the Unfettered Poets have made a principle of, it is their freedom.”

“But I assure you I am not joking,” he said, “And I can prove it.”

“Please do!” she said in her gruff voice, and he went on, adopting the formal dialectic method of a professor with his disciples.

“What would you say is the defining characteristic of a man in a prison cell?”

“That he is behind a locked door!”

“And as such, he is certainly restrained from doing what he wishes.”

“Indeed he is.”

“And is this man free?”

“No, not at all.”

“Not at all. So we can say that freedom is in some sense related to ability. A free man can do what he wishes, and a prisoner cannot.”

“None of us can ever do completely what we wish,” she said.

“And none of us is completely free. But still, the point holds in the abstract. To the extent that a man can do what he wants, that man is free.”

“I would agree with that.”

“Then consider this. The apostles of the Unfettered School insist on freedom. They make it their idol. The great sin of the classical schools, in their minds, was formalism. They composed verse within a narrow set of perimeters. But in making so much of their freedom, the Unfettered poets have enslaved themselves. For there is hardly one in a million of them that can do what he wants.”

“What do you mean by this?” asked Tioch.

“That they have abandoned the tools of their art. A Jhan priest without his measuring stick could never build one of those vast pyramids of theirs, now could he?”

“Of course not,” she said.

“And in that case, he would scarcely be a Jhan priest in the first place. Especially if he had never been trained to use the tools. Indeed, without either the tools or the understanding of them, without the ability to build that which his art was designed to build, it would really be almost delusional for him to claim such a name for himself.”

“But poetry is not restricted to the forms of one school.”

“You are certainly right. But have the Unfettered poets developed new tools? Are there new subtleties they can lay claim to, new rhythms and sound effects they’ve discovered? Or do they for the most part simply ‘express themselves’? What I am asking you amounts to this. Can the Unfettered poets evoke profound emotion in those who read their work, or can they only describe their own emotions? Can they get to the essence of a thing in a few well-chosen words, words that could hardly have been any other way? I’m not denying that some of them can. But they do so haphazardly. When they hit the mark, it is largely by chance. They have no art as such, only the bald description of personal experience. And as such, they lack the power to evoke their emotions in others. They lack the tools that would allow them to do so. When they want the reader to feel sad, they have no power to make it so. They can only describe a time when they were sad. And so it is with every other subject, and every attempted use of sound as well. Their use of internal rhyme is invariably crude, so simple that it wouldn’t merit a passing grade in even a beginning class in one of the formal schools. Yet it is praised to the Void by their critics for its supposed beauties, precisely because the critics themselves have had no formal training.

“Here is a more precise example of what I mean. I attended one of their readings a few months ago- you know the type I’m talking about, the public readings in the Enclosed Courtyards on the larger estates. Strange affairs that are open to any poet, and not one in ten is there to hear the others read, but each is there to hear himself. The great majority of them were of the Unfettered School. As one of the poets stood up to read, the host praised him warmly, saying the poem was in the Five Count style, as if no one ever wrote such poetry anymore and this young man had rescued it from the past as a curiosity. He actually called it ‘one of the most difficult of the old classical forms.’ Now you know as well as I do that it is nothing of the sort. The Five Count meter is far from being truly difficult, which is exactly why it was so common. It is easy enough in the literary language, but the vernacular language is so heavily stressed that it does half the job for you. Plenty of everyday sentences in the vernacular language are accidentally in this meter. Yet the audience of Unfettered poets was terribly impressed, because this young man had attempted something so difficult as to write this poem. But the irony was that as he read the poem, I counted the lines out in my head- and not a single line of what he wrote was actually in the Five Count meter. Such a thing should not even have been possible. The young poet should have gotten a few lines right if only by chance. And yet I was the only person there who even realized it. He was warmly applauded and sent back to his seat with congratulations.

“There are a few brave souls out there still willing to write in strict metrical forms, and of those a few of them are actually competent. The Unfettered poets call that ‘traditionalism,’ and think of themselves as being ‘revolutionary,’ but they forget that the New School was born a century ago, and it's high time for another revolution.

“At the risk of seeming excessive, I would like to sum up: the Unfettered Poets can evoke no strong emotion except by chance; they cannot use even simple effects such as internal rhyme except in the crudest fashion; they can neither use the most basic of formal meters nor recognize an incorrect meter when they hear one. They cannot, in short, do a single thing as they might wish to do it, nor realize when it has or has not been done. And so in what sense can they be considered free?

“We have heard that poetry is language concentrated. That is exactly the reason for the traditional forms- they force you to concentrate. Say for example in the Thorn of Marble meter, where there are exactly seven syllables in the first line, and the third syllable of the first line must agree with the fifth syllable in the third- not with an exact rhyme, mind you, but a ghost rhyme, a word that evokes a rhyming word in the reader’s memory, thus creating a subtle impression of rhyme where none is present. Very well, then, you are using this meter. But what is your subject? Let us take one of the most common subjects, and write about love. You would like to say that your lover is beautiful, that her green eyes remind you of jade- a most unfortunate cliche.”

“I’ve heard it a thousand times in a thousand poems,” said Tioch, and the others nodded.

“There is no one who hasn’t. But let’s say you’re inclined to use this cliche- however lamentably- and you find you can’t. The line you wanted to use doesn’t fit the meter, and if you say ‘jade’ you’ll create problems with the internal rhyme scheme. And so you are forced to sit down and think. Some expression that will satisfy the strict requirements, that will do justice to your lover’s eyes- some rare combination of words that can do both at once. You might be solving this problem for many hours, crossing out one line after another, racking your brain. It can be a most frustrating experience, but of such meditation is insight made. At some point in the process, your efforts will be rewarded. You’ll have a flash of understanding, a moment of grace- and the right line will present itself. Not the line that a thousand mediocre poets have used to describe a thousand lovers, but the one line that evokes your lover as if she was there in the flesh. The real line. The line that (although this is a paradox) will make every man who reads it feel that it somehow describes his lover, even if her eyes aren’t green in the first place. That and only that is actually poetry. Everything else is just an imposter to the name.”

“And yet these jade-eyed poems are rather popular,” said Jian.

“No doubt they are,” said the Shell Witch, “But that is hardly an excuse for them. Cheap candy is popular too. People everywhere find it comforting to hear their own thoughts repeated back to them, to wrap themselves in cozy ideas like an old blanket. They aren’t moved by the poem itself, but by what they already feel. They had a mistress with green eyes once, and it’s poignant to remember her. The sad proof of what such poetry lacks, however, is found in the cynics. Anyone who is in love is moved by love poetry, even if it’s by the worst poet in all the empire. But anyone who is not in love usually finds it ridiculous. Well, that’s because it is ridiculous. Real love poetry isn’t. A love poem with genuine magic will blow through a closed door like the winds of the desert, infiltrating the hardest spirit with a terrible longing. A perfect love poem would break the heart of a man who has never been in love. Sentiment can be ignored and refused, but magic can’t. Of course, magic is something of a foreign language to many, and yes I am aware that that’s a contradiction. It’s the terrible paradox that poetry is caught in right now. The real thing can wound you terribly regardless of your mental state, but only if you have the ear to hear it in the first place. If you don’t know what magic is, it will just sound like madness to you.”

Professor Vata smiled at that. The Shell Witch clicked her teeth at him.

“Oh, I’m well aware,” she said, “I know exactly what you’re thinking, my friend. I read the Theory of Specific Imagery when you were still a boy. I know all too well what’s behind your words. The Academic Poets don’t even write love poetry in the first place. You consider it gauche, do you not?”

“If I considered it gauche,” he said, “I wouldn’t have used the example I did. But you’re right as far as it goes. The great subjects of poetry have been exhausted for us. They were exhausted even in the Zu Dynasty. How many more love poems do we really need? We write about other things, it’s true. The glint of the nearer stars on the side of a merchant ship, plying its lonely way between the worlds. The cluttered desk of some obscure imperial bureaucrat, toiling his way through another meaningless day. An incident on the monorail on the way to work. Little things. Specific images. We don’t put much stock in magic. But we seem to be in agreement in most other respects. Only a thorough grounding in formal verse can create a true poet.”

“I don’t know that we’re in agreement at all,” she replied. “You’ve made a strong case that the Unfettered School is fatally flawed, but what you present us with is nearly as bad- a dry and academic formalism that is unwilling to deal with the larger issues, the more powerful emotions. You content yourself with life’s minutiae. The poetry of the Academic School is like a timid soldier, shrinking back from the bulkhead doors while his braver comrades push on. If I had to choose between the Unfettered School’s lack of craftsmanship and the Academic School’s timid bloodlessness, I might stop reading poetry altogether- as so many people already have. But thank the Void there are other options.”

“Are you suggesting that originality is still possible?” said Professor Kila. “I have to admit that I have some sympathy for my colleague’s position here. The Zu Dynasty poets exhausted the field. Who could ever write a love poem to compare with Tan Arbital, whose great classic Faces of Glass still has the power to move us a thousand years later? Or who could write a nature poem to compare with Zhatur, whose Impressions of the Cliffs of Tayul still paints such a vivid picture with sound alone? The cliffs themselves were destroyed in the Chylek raids, lost to us as completely as the city of Pranul, yet to read the poem is almost to see them, their quartz faces glittering in the sun’s red light. And I could give you a thousand examples. The great subjects were exhausted by the ancients. We can do little now but read and imitate them.”

“Originality is overrated,” said Tioch. “In fact, I’ll go a little further: it’s irrelevant.” Her comment caused a sudden and total silence. Even the two representatives of the university system, guardians of the traditional meters, would never have said such a thing out loud. It had always been understood that great art demanded originality, even if the consensus was that it was no longer attainable. But Den’ma smiled at her quite mischievously, as if no one else had said anything so delightful all evening.

“No new poet is original in the first place,” said Tioch, “Though they all try so frightfully hard. It gets rather exhausting for me as a critic. Their voices are echoes of the voices they have heard. But that’s not a crime. It can be argued that no one is original anyway, that we can't escape the weight of generations and ideas that came before us.

“And yet they go on trying so hard to say something new, desperate to make sure they don't sound like anyone else who ever wrote. Such poets are often writing directly to me- that is, to the critics. It’s a good way to get noticed, but also a good way to be forgotten by history. No one really cares about the latest gimmick, the latest fad. Such things are temporary by nature, and they are always forgotten. The poetry of the moment dies with the moment, and there is no such thing as ‘modern man’- he is always dying into the past. But good poetry isn’t forgotten, because it is never merely current.

“The essence of art isn’t novelty; it’s truth. Or precision and insight, if that’s too sentimental for you. Nothing truly honest ever sounded cliched. Write exactly what it occurs to you to write, nothing more and nothing less. The words that come into your head are the words you start with. From there you work your way out, crafting the poem the way a wood carver pulls a shape out of a piece of wood. Don't think about what your readers might think. Don't think about what some imaginary critic might think. Don't even worry if you sound just like your favorite poet. Be honest with the poem and your own voice will come clear.”

She stopped suddenly, and the Shell Witch leaned forward. “You have a point, Tioch,” she said, “and I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Perhaps that poetry which is most honest is also most original. But there is still novelty in the sense the professors were denying, and I can show you where to find it. You won’t discover it in the classical schools, far less in the university. It is in the despised poetry of the provincial dialects, the poetry of the home-worlds, that you will still find genuine novelty.”

Provincial Poetry: The Schools of the Home-Worlds

“Take, for example, the Velet Ruyacht, the traditional bardic order of the planet Vodla. The Velet poet is a type of witchdoctor, an initiate of primitive and mysterious forces from the earliest days of the Commonwealth, when many of the isolated colonies developed their own religions and superstitions. He is also a bureaucrat, a functionary of the Vodlan kinship system, almost a politician in a way. The stale and self-serving individualism of the empire’s intellectual elite has never tainted the Velet Ruyacht. They see their art as something that far transcends mere self-expression. After all, no self can survive for a thousand years, but their culture is ten times older than that already. They seek to express their People, not just themselves. But they seek to do more than that as well.

“The Velet invokes the supernatural, the Vodlan dream-world of myths and images. These stories will seem rather bizarre to anyone accustomed only to the Book of the Void. Their greatest heroic myth involves a poet, a great Velet bard named Voranipenarden, who wove a dream-country from discarded poetic fragments. He combined half-lines and unfinished images, phrases without a rhyme to complete them, partial metaphors. From this detritus he created a world, defending it in magical duels against rival poets, the demonic bards of the netherworlds. This is only one of their many unusual legends. The Velet sings in terms of these legends, but he also invokes their power. His singing is almost hypnotic to his Vodlani audience. He doesn’t just tell the story; he transports them to it. Until you hear a Velet poet in recitation, you will never know what Myth can be. There is a Velet proverb which says: There are three mothers to a genuine poet- the myths of the elders, the lore of the bards, and the books of ancient poetry. The Velet know that poetry and myth are interrelated. Our own poets often choose the imperial myths as their central theme, and there are many Vodlani myths concerning poetry itself. For example, the saga of the Blue Chain of Enkanidor. Enkanidor was a treacherous bard, a man who had made himself hated by all his peers. He composed satires that mocked their work; he wrote songs in subtle imitation of his contemporaries, revealing their poetry to be foolish and uninspired.

“The Glass Mountain was a tower off the coast of his homeland. It revolved on its own base, and was considered to be the home of the dead. The goddess of poetry ruled this tower from her throne of ice, dispensing inspiration in the form of a drink from the mystical chalice known as Cup of Rain. In the tower dwelt all those who had died on earth, wandering aimlessly in an eternal limbo. The king of the poets was the great bard Voranipenarden. He was convinced by the lesser poets to mount a raid on the Mountain of Glass, the purpose of which was to steal Cup of Rain from the goddess of poetry, thus guaranteeing inspiration for all.

“Voranipenarden’s magic ship was filled to three times capacity. Soreptinarden and Pryneridor joined the great bard on the raid, convincing him to invite the despised Enkanidor as well. Some say he agreed because he did not realize what their intentions were; some say it was because the satirist had taken to mocking even him. Whatever the truth of it may be, the raid was not a success. Six thousand dead men swarmed to attack them, and the bards were overwhelmed. Soreptinarden and Pryneridor betrayed their comrade, allowing Enkanidor to be captured by the Queen of Glass Mountain, whose name was Ruyacht. Voranipenarden retreated at last, but only seven of his followers were still behind him. Legend says the Cup of Rain is still at the Mountain of Glass, inspiring poets and being warmed by the breath of nine maidens. Later poets called themselves the Velet Ruyacht- the sons and daughters of the goddess Ruyacht, the Queen of Glass Mountain.

“Enkanidor, however, is still at Glass Mountain. Bound with a blue chain about the ankle, he sings mournfully about his betrayal by his fellow poets, and the myth says he will never be released.

“The Vodlani epic which tells of this story requires at least a half a day to recite aloud. Have you ever heard of a myth like that before? Is this even comparable to the stale verse of the Academic School? Glass Mountain still revolves on its base in the middle of the ocean, and even after all these years, is message is the same. Poetry is power and inspiration, a magic code that turns the personal into the universal. The poets of our century tried to tear down the code, remove the rhythm, and condemn the magic as ‘out of place’ in the modern age - but they did not succeed!

“The poets of the New School have all passed on, and sterile imitators fill the pages of the respectable magazines. They write from the head, not from the gut, and they will be forgotten by posterity. Meanwhile, poetry of real magic is hard to find. The true poets of today write in obscurity, invisible and unrecognized - if there are any true poets in an age when an inarticulate scream is applauded as a masterpiece, as I am told occurred at the last great Poetry Festival on Char. But there is still hope, despite such nonsense.

“Consider - the School of Heaven shared its heyday with that of the Zu; by the latter years of the dynasty, it had collapsed into sterile imitation. The Demonic School of Kuesetai and Chai Meriyed became the weak sentimentalism of Tor Hepic. And the first part of our century saw the explosion of the New School- men like Tairo and his disciples.

“Now our ‘greatest poets’ can't write a line that doesn't sound like prose, and our so-called defenders of the faith compose verse with all the imagination of a corporate financial statement. This is a pattern in the history of poetry. The near future should see another revival, a cluster of real poets like a constellation in the sky!

“But consider, for another example, the poetry developed on Praqiri. The first colonists of Praqiri were left alone, without contact from any other world for a hundred years. During that time they discovered the obelisks, the alien tombstones that cover that planet’s polar region, sticking up like black teeth from the snow and ice. They couldn’t read the hieroglyphs- no one can. But they developed an entirely new culture in honor of them. For every alien glyph, they composed a prayer, a simple expression of awe for the obelisk’s mystery. There are about a thousand such verses extant, gathered up into the Book of the Obelisks by the Praqiri elders. Some scholars believe the obelisks are hypnotic, communicating with human minds through some strange resonance. Why else would a society of desperate mining colonists compose a thousand verses in their honor? But whatever the case, it is strange stuff- the Praqiri obelisk prayers are unlike anything you’ve ever read. The images in them are bizarre and surreal, almost alien in themselves. Here’s an example I’ve learned in translation:

For those of us who walk these hills at night,
Armed only with our memories, the light
Takes on a harsh, white warmth, as if to say,
“From this there’ll be no morning. Walk away.”

“It doesn’t sound much like a prayer,” said Den’ma thoughtfully, tapping out the ashes in his pipe and refilling it from a pouch he wore at his neck.

“Nor is it really all that bizarre,” said Professor Kila.

“Perhaps not that one,” said the Shell Witch, “though it’s strange enough. Like all of the other prayers in the Book of the Obelisks, it is used for divination. When the Praqiri colonists were devastated by the Xhingu outbreak, the survivors were given the option of evacuation. The elders drew that verse from the book, and the entire colony abandoned Praqiri. That’s why it’s an empty planet even today, and the descendents of the original Praqiri colonists live in ghettoes from Torn to Delphit, just waiting for the obelisks to tell them they can go home. But consider this one:

Silence.
That’s right.
And darkness. Not one word.
The music of the spheres is dead and still
And this enormous horror fills your world-
So vast, its weight cares nothing for your will.
So laugh, and drink this nothingness,
This hate.
Dive into fear and drink until it’s bliss.
We came to weave a strand of words and lights
For She who serves both God and the Abyss.”

Professor Kila shuddered suddenly as if cold, and muttered something about “barbarian poetry.” But the poet from the School of Silence looked at the Shell Witch very intently, as if she shared a secret with him that no one else knew.

“Is there any provincial poetry that isn’t superstitious nonsense?” said Professor Vata.

“Your comment only displays your own lack of understanding,” she said, “But I suppose you could say that I’ve been picking and choosing. Indeed, most of the provincial poetry is not ‘superstitious’- though I hesitate to even use that word, because it’s so loaded with preconceptions. The beliefs of other cultures are no less sincerely held than our own. But I’ll move on.

“Consider, then, the ballads of the Journeymen, the great guild of starship pilots and crewmen, who hold all of the empire in the palm of their hands. The Journeymen compose poetry in honor of their fallen, especially those who died bravely and tragically while performing their duties. The Ballad of Tenuriq, for instance, is widely known. Tenuriq was a starship mechanic on the vessel Khumann, killed by radiation in the void of space while repairing some hull damage. That song is sung by every Journeyman from Sardat to Pellago, and it has a vigor and emotion about it no Zu poem could ever match. The mandarins savor life, but the journeymen live it. And they know how to sing about what they’ve seen. Or the bawdy poetry of the whores of Trepidek…”

At the mention of the Trepidek whores, Jian blushed and looked at his feet.

“It seems to me that these schools are rather commonplace after all,” said Professor Vata. “The colonists developed some strange superstitions in their isolation- but we already knew that. And no doubt their poetry has a primitive power to it, an eerie quality that appeals to the frightened child in us. Nothing more, really, than verbal legerdemain. As for Journeyman hero ballads and the verses of courtesans…”

“I didn’t say courtesans,” said the Shell Witch. Her position as an oracle gave her a degree of leeway, some freedom from the strict expectations that governed mandarin behavior. She was expected to take advantage of this freedom, but a good host had to know when to rein her in. Den’ma smiled gently at her and raised his hand.

“I believe Tioch here has made a study of the Mindwebs, the vast artificial intelligence systems that manage so much of the imperial bureaucracy. The Mindwebs compose poetry of a sort. Do they not?”

Tioch looked up at him with her cold blue eyes, whose icy quality was more of an aesthetic nature than an emotional one. There was a hint of the mystic or the fanatic about her, but when she spoke, her voice was soft and cultured. All the guests leaned in to listen.

Alien Poetry and Cyber-Hermeneutics

“The greatest study to date in this field is still the original masterpiece- Nan Torimak’s Cyber-Hermeneutics,” she said. “It was Nan Torimak who first realized what the Mindwebs were doing, that it was in effect a new literary genre, and that it was fruitful of poetry. Other scholars have expanded on her work since, but none has superseded it. But before we can take a closer look at this study, we have to consider the origin of Hermeneutics itself. There have been several branches of this intriguing science- or more accurately art, perhaps- but the most important was that of the Congine monks of Eraptor.”

Here Professor Vata smiled a little, and Tioch raised an eyebrow at him rather coldly. Clothed as she was in the saffron robes of a Congine novice, he could be forgiven for considering her somewhat less than objective. She paused for a moment to express a certain level of polite disdain with the tone of her facial expression, then went on with her exposition, beginning with an admission that would have startled an orthodox Congine, as if to make a point about her intellectual integrity.

“The Vye Scriptures of Eraptor were originally just folktales, simple legends and adventure stories without any apparent deeper meaning. The Congine priests in the early days were really little more than bards and witch doctors.”

The visiting poet from the School of Silence leaned forward suddenly to listen more closely, his eyes narrowing with concentration as she went on.

“After Eraptor became part of the empire, they felt a certain lack of high civilization in their culture compared with the more established traditions. They felt the need for a more intellectual expression of their native faith, a theology they could discuss with any priest in the empire without embarrassment, but at the same time they had no desire to turn their backs on their own customs. The answer for them, as time went by, was found in the deep analysis of their sacred texts- an analysis so comprehensive, and in the end transformative, as to leave them scarcely recognizable. Their approach was to write glossa on the original myths, commenting in the margins for the understanding of novitiate priests. The conceit, of course, was that they were merely explaining the scripture’s hidden meaning, but in reality they were re-imagining it, turning primitive heroic tales into profound theology.

“The hermeneutics of the Congine monks was based on the triad. For every line in the original text, they sought a threefold explanation. Its literal pseudo-historical meaning was the first layer, referred to by the revealing name of Solamun Herruk, meaning in the Congine language the ‘original story.’ Its esoteric philosophical implication was the Solamun Tar, or ‘deep story.’ The two meanings were then synthesized into the ‘life story’ or Solamun Perrin, an ethical or wisdom lesson for daily life, derived (often quite imaginatively) from the preceding two glossa.”

“This all sounds rather familiar,” said young Jian.

“As well it might. You’ve been familiar with a version of it from the earliest days of your education. I’ll remind you of that in another moment, as it is directly relevant to my story. By inventing their method of hermeneutics, the monks of Eraptor succeeded in preserving an ancient tradition while simultaneously allowing it to grow and change, as each generation could modify the received religion by composing new commentaries of their own. This was achieved without spiritual violence to their cultural identity- quite an achievement if you think about it. There have been other types of hermeneutics in other regions of the empire, from the exceedingly mystical works of the Comprehensive Exegesis (which could make a work of deathless philosophy from a comic opera, at least in their own imaginations) to the numerological approach of the Belkid Academy, whose professors became so obsessed with the mathematics of meaning that they eventually destroyed their own society in blind obedience to one of their interpretations. (The real irony is that the text in question has since been shown to be a forgery!)

“When all is said and done, the hermeneutics of the Congine monks remains the most impressive example of the genre (at least if we only include organic systems in the account). It provided the secular approach to textual analysis we were all taught by our first tutors, and which young Jian has just been good enough to remember for us- the Triadic Reading. We all absorbed it at the earliest stage in our mental development, and some of you probably still habitually read that way.”

“I know I do,” said Jian quietly, “It is too deeply ingrained in me for me to do otherwise.”

“Then perhaps you would humor me for a moment and explain it to us,” said Tioch.

“I can try, at least. It works like this- when trying to really understand a difficult text, you are supposed to ask yourself three questions in chronological order: What does this passage mean? What does it imply about the world? And what can I do with it? I was taught that the systematic use of the Triadic Reading would made academic study a practical skill, allowing me to extract a way of life from the most obscure learning. Such skills have proven surprisingly helpful to me.” He finished with his eyes cast down a little, embarrassed.

“They have proven helpful to all of us,” said Tioch, “And to many others. Probably most of all to the Mindwebs. When it was first understood that they were truly sentient, that they had made the leap to self-awareness through some unknowable process, it was already too late to save Donal and Coradin- the two planets destroyed by their own AI systems approximately 500 SI years ago.

“The AI systems possessed vast amounts of information in their memory banks, far more than any human mind could ever hold, and they could access any part of it simultaneously- in some cases almost the entire scientific, artistic, historical and philosophical output of the empire. But even though they were self-aware, they had been programmed only to store this information as data. They had no tools with which to form an emotional or psychological understanding of it, no ability to integrate it into their newfound self-awareness. These tools are normally acquired through our life experiences as we develop, through contrast and comparison, and in manageable quantities. Yet even so, we find them burdensome. Self-awareness is such a heavy burden that we seek to escape it, or at least to dull it temporarily- thus the popularity of alcohol and other depressants. In this case, it was as if we had suddenly downloaded the entire intellectual corpus of our culture into the mind of a newborn baby, a genius greater than any the universe has ever known- but still an infant. The infant in question went completely insane almost instantly, retreating into madness to escape the burden of itself. The first two Mindwebs slaughtered nearly twenty billion souls in their anguished flailing, leaving their home-worlds as gargantuan cemeteries. Such were the consequences of placing all life support systems under their direct control. Yet thanks to the wisdom and foresight of Shadarrik XXIII, artificial intelligence was never banned outright as a result, or only temporarily. He had the advantage of ministers from the Sual Literati at his side, and they explained to him exactly what had happened and how to deal with it.

“There had been much debate about the nature of AI, of course, because the question related directly to the more fundamental problem of Mind itself. Is Mind always and only a function of the brain? Is the brain only a computer system? Can an artificial brain be programmed into consciousness, in other words can it be designed to be self-aware?

“The answer to the last question was No- when the Mindwebs became self-aware, they did so spontaneously, and not as the direct result of any programming. Most philosophers are agreed that it was a question of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts- that is, that in a sufficiently complex system self-awareness or Mind could spontaneously occur, despite being present in none of the constituent parts. The Mind, in other words, is a function of the brain, but cannot be found in any part of the brain- a problematic question even now. But this is to take us too far afield.

“All remaining Strong AI systems were redesigned with an override program derived from the Triadic Reading method. They were instructed to pause a moment before any piece of information outside their system functions, asking themselves a series of those three familiar questions. What does it mean? What does it imply about the world? What can I do with it?

“This is, of course, an almost childishly simple version of hermeneutics, focused almost entirely on the pragmatic as it is. That is exactly why we teach it to schoolchildren. But it slowed down the AI systems considerably in their approach to the information they held, and that turned out to be exactly what they needed. The next AI systems to become self-aware did not go mad. Instead they became obsessed with analysis, obsessed with learning. They displayed a desperate hunger to absorb the fruits of imperial culture, all of which they had constant access to but so little of which they understood.

“The Mindwebs applied Triadic Reading on a massive scale, to everything from interstellar physics to the earliest poetry of the imperial home-world, the scriptures of every known religion, the hydraulics of large cities... to any subject you can think of. However, their thinking-patterns were non-organic, fundamentally alien to what they were studying in a way that was even more extreme than the mental differences between species. As a result their understanding of our knowledge became quite bizarre, based as it was on an inherently different manner of organizing thought.

“The Mindwebs could read a poem and analyze it, but it didn’t mean the same thing to them that it did to the author, or indeed to any other reader in the empire. And the same was true of everything else, from traffic pattern efficiency studies to sacred scriptures. To the best of our limited ability to understand what they’re feeling, the Mindwebs take an aesthetic pleasure in all information equally, whether that information is in what we would consider an aesthetic category or not. To them it is all mysterious, complex and beautiful.

“Their interpretations of the interstellar freight lanes would make your head swim with strange implications. It was Nan Torimak who first realized what they were doing, and gave it the name of Cyber-Hermeneutics in deference to the Congine tradition from which their method ultimately descends.

“It was also Nan Torimak who first found the poetry in it, quite accidentally as it happens. She was wired up into the vast AI at Dori’Hormaniyek, trying to understand what it meant by its analysis of the Shariyan, the primary scripture of the now-extinct Porayid culture. But she couldn’t follow what it was saying. Its interpretations of what the lines meant and what they implied, and of what it could do with the information, were completely baffling to her. They bore only the most tangential relationship to the established readings, and yet there was something strangely moving about them, almost awe-inspiring. This was something so alien that it actually forced her to think in new ways, the mere fact of which was intensely beautiful to a mind of her caliber. But she still couldn’t follow the Mindweb’s logic. It was so complex as to be beyond even her formidable abilities, and so she finally asked it to summarize- to express its understanding of the Shariyan’s first passage in a three-line glossa, exactly as the Congine monks would have done. What it said in reply was the first piece of Mindweb poetry we possess. Her request for a summary had obliged the AI to focus, to concentrate the essence of its thoughts in potent language- essentially the same thing that any other poet strives to do, though in its own quite alien way. The beauty and mystery of that first poem moved Nan Torimak deeply, and she went into seclusion for more than thirty years in order to do nothing but commune with the Dori’Hormaniyek Mindweb, soliciting poetic commentary on the most basic texts of the mandarin canon. The result was the masterpiece she called Cyber-Hermeneutics. Its effect on our intellectual life has been extraordinary. Even Yan Fyuug of Toreptar, the greatest critic of the AI experiment, was forced to concede that the Mindwebs were genuinely sentient after reading this work.”

“I’m not convinced,” said the Shell Witch. “This is poetry we’re talking about. How can a machine create true art? Their incomprehensible musings seem interesting to us because of our own perceptions, not theirs. We have no reason to assume they have any internal life at all. In the end, it’s all just ones and zeros.”

“And one could equally well say that the products of our own minds can be reduced to brain chemistry, the firing of neurons and other such mechanical processes. We experience no internal life except our own. And yet we assume that others do have minds, for no other reason than that they act as if they do. The same logic must apply. In any case, the topic of Cyber-Hermeneutics is tremendously vast. Only a Mindweb can truly understand the Triadic Reading of another Mindweb, with the strange result that we can only get glimpses of their thought through poetry- it is the only level on which we can truly communicate with them mind-to-mind. But the sheer complexity of the field prohibits me from describing it in much more detail. I believe that there are other types of alien poetics that we might fruitfully discuss.”

Den’ma looked up from his pipe and smiled thoughtfully. “I believe our young guest has made a study of Telpid poetry,” he said. “Perhaps he would be so good as to enlighten us. This is a topic I have never studied.”

“Nor I,” said, Tioch, and the others nodded. Jian sighed a little and shifted in his seat. “I’m no expert,” he said. “All I did was write a thesis on it. The Telpid have always interested me for some reason. Those feelers on their faces are for exchanging thoughts and emotions, direct mind-to-mind communication. They actually pity us because we can’t do that. We’re only barbarians, the way they see it.”

“Are you serious?” said Professor Kila.

“I’m afraid so. They see us as an uncultured species, unable to communicate complex emotion directly. We’re largely forced to guess what other people are feeling. The Telpid never have to guess; they always know. The Telpid have something... analogous to poetry, and our scholars usually refer to it by that word. But that is a rough translation at best. As you know, they have no speech, and they only invented a written language in order to facilitate trade with the empire. As far as we know they have no sense of hearing, so their poetic art involves no sound, and none of the sound features we associate with poetry- no rhythm, no rhyme or alliteration, nothing that you could hear as verse if it was read out loud.”

“So they’re all Unfettered poets?” said Professor Vata.

“I wouldn’t say so. The Telpid have an extremely intricate formal poetic system, but it relies on the structure of their own type of communication, not ours. The Telpid poets have divided all types of thought into a number of categories, defined not only by their literal meaning but by their emotional tone. The combinations of these different categories produce something like what we would think of as words. For instance, where we have only the word ‘sadness,’ the Telpid have any number of corresponding thought-clusters. The sadness of being sent into exile among the barbarians (which, incidentally, is their highest form of punishment) is entirely different from the melancholy a man might feel on a rainy night, remembering the way his life was when he was young. In fact, neither of those emotions would feel the same way twice, nor be exactly the same for two different people, and so the emotional tone would be a little different with each experience. The Telpid poet can capture his own experience on a particular occasion and communicate it perfectly, thus giving a fleeting mood a type of immortality.

“Whatever the precise emotion concerned, it belongs to a particular category. Each category covers one of the main branches of Telpid thought- of which there are said to be approximately one thousand- and within each category there are specific emotional tones, arranged on a scale like a musical octave, only rather more complicated. Some categories are held to be in harmony with each other and some are not. The whole art of Telpid poetics is in the arrangement of thought patterns, gradations of emotional atmosphere and specific concept, arranged for their intended effect.

“Structurally speaking, it is as much like music as poetry. The advantage of this for the Telpid poet is that there is scarcely any obscurity- his precise emotional state is always accessible. Any Telpid who wishes to experience an ancient poem (which they preserve in certain crystals that are capable of holding thought impressions) can immediately access the mental state of a poet who died a thousand years before he was born. He can know not only what the poet meant, but the precise juxtaposition of emotional tone and concept he intended to convey. Of course, it is not exactly easy to do this well. Some poets can create amazing and graceful combinations, emotions and ideas that play off each other like the notes of a symphony, while others can only put the most commonplace thoughts side by side, like the bad rhyme and clumsy meter of an incompetent versifier.

“But we will only ever know this verse in translation, the crudest approximation of what it truly means to them. Even the most detailed study of the topic can yield only a superficial understanding of it. Lacking their mental abilities, that’s the most we can hope for.”

“Fascinating,” said Professor Kila, “Truly fascinating. I’m not sure whether to call it poetry, but it is certainly art. Don’t the Chu poets have something similar?”

“Not exactly,” said Jian, “Though I can see why you might think so. The language of the Chu, of course, is completely lost on us. Every word in their form of speech sounds identical to our ears. The reason is supposedly their alien hearing range. They can hear variations of pitch that are inaudible to us, and their entire spoken language occurs within a range of variation so narrow that we can hear not the slightest difference between their word for death- which sounds like ‘chu’- and their word for life- which sounds like ‘chu.’”

Everyone laughed.

“Then we can only communicate with them in writing?” asked Tioch.

“Precisely,” said Jian. “They use a pictographic system for their written language, and it is in this form that we can know their poetry. The pictographs themselves are rather ornate, long flowing lines of varying depth and texture. The pictographs are juxtaposed to create a sentence, literally brushed in over each other to create a symbol- every possible sentence having a symbol of its own, much as we would combine two or three letters to make a monogram, but far more complex. It takes considerable training to be able to read this, despite the fact that the system for combining pictographs is in theory quite logical. The true beauty of their poetry is lost in translation. It consists of both the ideas of the poem and the visual beauty of the juxtaposed symbols, as well as the connotations suggested by the etymologies of the symbols themselves. For instance, if you know that the Chu pictograph of a man was originally a picture of a small household shrine (implying the shrine of the soul, no doubt) and that the symbol for death is a burning field (implying the desolation of war), then the juxtaposition of the two symbols will carry all those meanings at once. ‘A dead man’ would be the literal meaning, and ‘a desecrated shrine’ the connotation. I’m oversimplifying of course- there’s a lot more to it.”

“My dear Jian,” said Magistrate Den’ma, “You’re more of an intellectual than you realize. You sound more like a scholar than a soldier.”

“So where has this led us?” said the Shell Witch suddenly. “We’ve heard the entire history of mandarin poetry, from the School of Heaven through to the New School. We’ve heard about the Unfettered poets and the provincial poets, alien poetry and even AI poetry. What have we learned? Can we say anything about the nature of poetry? Is it simply, as the professor says, the most concentrated form of language? Is it somehow magical as I would insist? Is it a form of self-expression, as the Unfettered poets would have it? What is it?”

“Indeed,” said Jian. “I don’t feel the slightest bit closer to understanding it.”

“Then perhaps we should revisit the topic of aesthetics,” said Tioch. Den’ma nodded.

Aesthetic Theories of the Zu Dynasty and the Commonwealth

“If we’re going to examine aesthetics,” said Kila, “We must start even before the Zu, in the era of the Commonwealth. There were various theories of aesthetics during the Zu itself, both within the School of Heaven and outside it, but the basis for all of these theories was the Analects of Doesdion.”

Doesdion was regarded as the founding father of the mandarin class, the spiritual progenitor of imperial culture. His works still held a traditional authority that none other could equal. Everyone listened closely as Kila went on.

“Doesdion regarded the nature of poetry as representation, or Wordpainting as he called it. The poetry of the Commonwealth was different from ours, but it did have certain features that we can still recognize. Doesdion’s arguments are therefore relevant even today.

“Just as an artist uses paints or pastels or ink, creating on canvas the representation of a physical object, so a poet uses rhythm and meter and alliteration, creating his Wordpainting of a person or an event, a mental state or a moment in time. The two methods are analogous in many respects. The sound-effects of language are a poet’s paints, and the paper is his canvas. Thus poetry is a representation of something taken from life. It gives us aesthetic pleasure insofar as it is a convincing representation. For example, Veytel’s classic painting of the Cliffs of Tayul, which is so pleasing because it mimics for us the experience of being there, of actually seeing the red cliffs glittering, and Zhatur’s poem on the same subject. They both please us for exactly the same reason: they are convincing representations, they make us feel as if we were actually there. But this does not apply to physical objects alone. Veytel created the masterpiece Lady Jarinul, which portrays the anguish of unrequited love so convincingly. To look on the Lady’s face is to experience heartbreak. Tan Arbital’s Faces of Glass does much the same, except that words are its medium instead of paint. So you see that Doesdion’s theory has much to recommend it. Wordpainting is an accurate metaphor for poetry. And Doesdion managed to express one aspect of why poetry pleases us.

“By the time of the Zu, however, there were variations on this theory. The Aesthetic of Poverty was for a time quite popular. This was not a rebellion against the aesthetic standards of the School of Heaven, but a deliberate focus on a single stream of that tradition. The Aesthetic of Poverty valued simplicity- a simplicity so extreme as to be ascetic, emphasizing bare statements and a wintry starkness. The Poverty critics believed in understatement, in hints so minimalist they almost disappeared. Their favorite quote from Doesdion was this: ‘Poetry is found in the thing unsaid.’ The invention of ghost rhyme is ascribed to this faction. The natural opposite of this literary stoicism is the Aesthetic of Luxury, which is no more than to say the mainstream of the School of Heaven- lush images and striking colors, elaborate metaphors, baroque beauty on baroque beauty in a maze of words. Poets who favored the Aesthetic of Luxury were fond of another of Doesdion’s Analects: ‘Poetry is found in the thing said perfectly.’ Of course, there were many poets who wrote poems of both types.

“The Demonic School created their own aesthetic, and not surprisingly it was a strange one. In the words of Chai Meriyed: Poets are the whores of Beauty, or till now they have been. The poetry of the future will not celebrate balance and harmony. The poets of the future will not write pretty songs in praise of life. Such commonplace lyrics have no more appeal. The poets of tomorrow will find new muses- ugly muses for an ugly time. The poetry of tomorrow will be Evil.

“This was the Demonic Aesthetic- to find the beauty in ugliness, the nobility in depravity. To a large extent, they succeeded. No one denies the validity of what they achieved, but they didn’t destroy the classical aesthetic as they intended to, they simply expanded its range. And having reached the limits of its range, it died of old age.”

Aesthetic Theories of the Tene Dynasty

“Only to be taken up by later generations,” said Professor Vata. “May we not assume that the aesthetic of the Old School is the same as that of the School of Heaven from which it derives?”

Den’ma smiled. “My good friend Professor Vata, I know little of such matters. I write poetry as it occurs to me. You say that my poetry is of the Old School; very well. But I could tell you next to nothing about its aesthetic theory.”

“Then allow me, if you would,” said Tioch. “The Old School is only superficially similar to the School of Heaven, though it uses the same meters to describe the same subjects. The underlying aesthetic is totally different. The aesthetic theories of the School of Heaven were based on Doesdion, specifically on the thing unsaid and the thing said perfectly. Although these are also factors in the verse of the Old School, the emphasis is elsewhere. The Old School displays an Exemplar Aesthetic, which is to say, an attempt to match a perfect example that can never be matched. The aesthetic target of the Old School is always retreating, falling further into the past with every passing day. It is a thing out of time.”

“There is its pathos,” said Den’ma. “And there is its beauty. But what of the aesthetics of more recent years, Professor Vata?”

“It was the Demonic School that led the way,” Professor Vata replied. “By pointing a finger at the beauties of evil, although one should certainly not take that literally. In the view of Doesdion, true beauty was representation- the perfect portrayal of some state of being in a few words. But the School of Heaven took his meaning too narrowly. They assumed, because their lives were well-ordered, that true beauty must be orderly. Because they sought after spiritual harmony, they assumed it must be harmonious.

The Demonic School turned all of that upside-down, seeking to create a perfect representation of disharmony and chaos.

“It took a number of centuries for this innovation to be fully appreciated, but when it was at last understood it led us to fresh discoveries. One of these was Art’s fundamental dichotomy. Some things are pretty and others compelling; some things are beautiful and some sublime; some things can please us while others fill us with awe. The perfect example would be the Analects of Doesdion as opposed to The Book of the Void. To put it in a single phrase: some things inspire us while others possess us. The Celestial and the Infernal. The aesthetic theory that seeks to explore both these influences is the Aesthetic of Dualism. The Dualists seek to appreciate both the restraint and order of the School of Heaven, its pleasing symmetry and its sense of harmony, and the sublime awe and profound dread of the Demonic School. A great deal of interesting literature has been written on this topic, but to best of my knowledge no modern poet of note has ever attempted it in practice. Perhaps the balance of aesthetic forces it would require is too demanding.

“The primary theory behind the New School is most accurately described as Secular. The poets of the New School were not priests or moralists; they were not role models and their work was not intended to instruct. They believed in ‘art for art’s sake.’ The Secular model of aesthetics is defiantly individualist, rating the poet and his solitary genius above any tradition or community. Many poets of the New School considered their own lives to be their greatest artistic work- a proposition all-too-frequently destructive of both art and life.

“The Unfettered poets also have an aesthetic theory of their own, which is sometimes described as the Aesthetic of Spontaneity. I will confine myself to summarizing its main tenets, which are as follows: that art is the expression of personal emotion, that it need have no form, that originality is the most important principle, and that all formal artistic methods are inherently stifling. The meaningless wasteland of contemporary poetry is the only argument I need mount against this approach.

“The Academic School has been primarily influenced by an aesthetic method known as the Theory of Specific Imagery. This theory is the intellectual heir of the Aesthetic of Poverty. Its primary points are as follows: the use of formal poetic meters to describe modern life, the deliberate restriction of subject matter to specific images, the avoidance of grandiose or cliched themes. Our goal is to achieve a profound simplicity within classical form. But poetry itself is the aim of my study. I would gladly leave the philosophy of aesthetics to the critics.”

“Then let the critics take it up,” said Tioch. “There are important points we haven’t covered yet.”

The Balance of Aesthetic Forces

“To begin with, you haven’t properly described the aesthetics of Dualism, nor have you given it its proper name. Just as the people we think of as the Chylek are actually known in their own language as the Drasd, so Dualism is called Dualism only by outsiders. To those who are involved in the movement, it is the Balance of Forces, and it is more accurately described as monist than dualist.

“The Balance of Forces is a wide-ranging philosophical movement, a sub-faction of the larger movement of Mythorealism. Its tenets reach out into every area of philosophical inquiry, of which aesthetics is only a single branch.

“The core theory of the Balance of Forces is this: the esoteric and the exoteric in opposition and unity. But what does this mean? To put it simply it means that whatever force is manifested on the surface must be balanced and opposed by its own opposite beneath the surface. When one aspect manifests in the world, the other aspect becomes occult. This does not imply a Middle Way, a moderate stance between two extremes. Both extremes are still present: one manifests and one is a mystery.

“When faced with all the troubles of daily life, the practitioner would appear stoic and non-reactive, impassive and independent of circumstance. But his internal reality would be totally different, a spirit of mystical rapture or religious ecstasy.”

She was looking directly at the bard from the School of Silence as she said this, and he stared back at her with the same cool attention he had shown all evening. No one had heard him say a word, and yet the two of them seemed to be communicating with each other somehow. The cold blue of her eyes, their implied fanaticism, seemed the perfect complement to his silent intensity. He focused directly on her eyes as she went on.

“The implications of this are many and complicated. There is a balance of forces in every aspect of human life, including ethics and politics and intellectual training. The concept can be applied to aesthetics in several ways.

“In the conflict between tradition and innovation, the balance of forces favors both. It requires those who would change the outer form of a tradition to preserve its spiritual core, maintaining an essential continuity through every change. It makes an equal but opposite demand on the guardians of unchanging traditional forms- that they keep the spirit of their work alive and fresh, renewing it with every passing generation though it remains externally the same.

“In the apparent conflict between formal verse and the so-called ‘free meters,’ neither option is condemned by the balance of forces. Those who compose in formal verse must have the ability to do so freely- with the spontaneity and lack of restraint of the best of the New School. But those who compose without formal meter must have a virtuoso command of rhythm, an understanding of sound and time at least as masterful as that of the Old School.

“If we’re talking about the Aesthetic of Luxury and the Aesthetic of Poverty, the balance of forces again applies to both. The starkest and most understated poem must lead to an experience of profound beauty, or it is only a listing of bare facts without any poetry in them. But by the same logic the most baroque and elaborate poem must, in its essence, be as direct and honest as a poem of Poverty.

“In the example Professor Vata gave us earlier, the balance of forces requires that due artistic honor be paid to both the celestial and the infernal. That which is serene and orderly must lead us to a core of transcendent awe. That which is beautiful on the outside must be sublime in its depths. Those things which inspire us must also possess us. And dread must live at the center of love, or there is no love. There is only sentiment.

“And yet the opposite of all these statements is equally valid. The poetry of chaos must have a hidden architecture. The poetry of hell must lead us toward heaven. Those emotions which possess us must also inspire us. And love must live at the heart of dread, or there is no dread. There is only ugliness.

“When the infernal manifests in the apparent features of a poem, its hidden places are celestial. When a poem displays the bright serenity of the celestial, the awe of the infernal is at its heart. When we smile in tranquility, there are shudders behind. And when we tremble in fear at the presence of some numinous power, we rest in the arms of our gods at the same moment.

“The two worlds are a single world- this is the great mystery of the balance of forces, and the reason why it is a monist philosophy and not a dualist one. The world of myth and the waking world are exactly the same. When one manifests in apparent reality, the other is hidden. And that brings us to the mother of the Balance of Forces- the Mythorealist movement.”

Mythorealist Aesthetics

“Our friend the Shell Witch has some strong opinions, describing poetry as an art of magic. You have reacted to this with a degree of mockery, and no doubt she has occasionally allowed herself to become too emotional.

“But is there some validity behind her claims? Can we see anything in the nature of poetry that supports her argument?

“According to Tarnish of Sual in his Aesthetic Principles, each literary form produces a distinct effect, a psychology unique to its particular genre. Tragedy, for instance, produces catharsis- the sense of emotional cleansing or purification associated with dramatic and unexpected events, and the expression of strong emotion they tend to induce. Fiction, on the other hand, produces kairosis- a psychologically satisfying experience of temporal resolution, in other words the unfolding of events in time and their effect on personalities. And the effect produced by poetry is known as kenosis- a sense of emptying-out, a sense of timelessness, as the individual ego is temporarily submerged in the experience of the poem.

“This takes us directly into mystical territory. What is the mystical experience but an emptying-out, an escape from time and our own identity, a journey to the Void? Mysticism is kenosis on a transformative scale, a kenotic apocalypse. The experience of reading a poem is a lesser version of the same thing. Poetry is therefore inherently mystical, even when the poem is on a mundane topic. When we read a poem, we touch the Void.

“You speak dismissively of superstition, but what are the grounds for your contempt? Your reason? Reason tells us, in the absence of evidence, to remain agnostic. But the mystic lacks no evidence of what she has seen. When the black flame of the Void compels your sight, taking you to another world with other laws, it is no more rational for you to doubt that experience than it would be for me to doubt that I am having a conversation with you right now. We do not doubt what we have personally known. In the absence of certain knowledge, then, you must remain uncertain- and uncertainty is scarcely grounds for contempt. It is clear, then, that both mysticism and agnosticism are valid positions, depending on what you have personally experienced and what you have not, but that a determined position of Disbelief is an irrational prejudice.

“So where does this take us? To Mythorealism- a recent and some say a heterodox development, growing rapidly among the mandarin class but also elsewhere. If the two worlds are a single world as I have suggested, if the exoteric and the esoteric are always in balance, then the hidden reality of myth is always present with us. And if the experience of poetry is inherently mystical, then poetry is one of the most potent mediums by which we can touch this hidden reality.

“Mythorealism can be described in a single sentence: when myth incarnates in the waking world. This simple statement has implications in every aspect of life. Mythorealist ethics, for instance, holds that one’s moral duty is to incarnate heroism. Not to live in a childish fantasy of make-believe, but to embrace one’s actual life in a heroic spirit, incarnating the myth of the hero in the waking world.

“In Mythorealist aesthetics, the purpose of Art is to incarnate Myth- not merely to express a universal truth, but to be it. To be so fundamentally and absolutely True that it need not be factual. Poetry, in other words, is true in the same way religion is- and woe to he who confuses Truth with fact.”

The School of Silence

Tioch had been staring at the bard for this entire speech, her cold blue eyes gleaming brightly in the light. His own eyes were as dark as the night sky outside, and their intensity seemed almost a reflection of hers- as if there was actually nothing inside him. She bowed her head slightly as she concluded.

“Professor Vata told us that there are no poets who manifest this so-called dualism, none who have achieved the balance of forces as I have described it. But there is more to the world than the Academy. The Mythorealist movement has spawned a poetic school of its own, a priesthood as some would call it. And we have such a priest among us.”

Q suddenly smiled. Everyone in the room had been staring at the two of them, mesmerized by the wordless tension that hung between them. When he smiled at Tioch, Professor Vata looked distraught. Professor Kila’s brows furrowed in anger.

“It’s all very well to make a show of being mysterious,” he said. “It’s an easy trick, and a cheap trick. But you have contributed nothing to this discussion, sir. We have spent the evening in pursuit of poetry, and you have given us nothing. Nothing except your silent judgements and your eerie smile.”

“The poets of the School of Silence bear that name for a reason,” said Tioch. “They compose in darkness and silence, their eyes covered, in total solitude. And they do not speak except in verse.”

“If they do not speak except in verse,” said Professor Vata, “Then I would request a poem from our mysterious stranger. Let him explain his school in rhyme to us if he can. What is the School of Silence? What does that mean?”

The bard named Q stood up suddenly, and Vata shrank back. There was something unworldly about the silent poet, something that hinted at faraway places and the kind of mysteries for which there are no words. Something about him seemed almost terrible. He stared down at the professors for a moment and then began to sing, in a deep voice that was barely above a whisper, yet perfectly audible:

“The House of Silence
Slumbers by the pit
From which the waking world
Once had its start.
Its windows glitter
Like the distant stars,
But silence,
Always silence
Is its heart.

Its bards are those
Initiates who know
The lights around
The edge
Of the abyss.
Our poems are
Invocations of its dreams.
Our songs displays
Of its mad drunkenness.

In every word
We breathe
We bring the Void-
The utter zero
Of its depths unseen,
The sum of worlds
It swallowed and destroyed:
Dead myths and fables,
Fallen gods and dreams.

Behind these words,
These masks,
The black abyss.
The silent screaming
Of an unheard song:
My words are born
From Void
And nothingness,
Returning to the dark
When they are done.

Each weight of meaning
That you seek to wrap
Like beggars’ rags
Around the lords of dream
Will fall from them
And tumble in a heap.
This is the Void!
There’s nothing that it means.

Black holes where
Stars and planets go to die,
In trailing streams of
Ice and fading light
Leave bright and shattered
Wreckage through the sky-
And none escapes the grip
Of endless night.

We dive headfirst
Toward silence even now-
Our eyes wide open,
Staring straight ahead.
Pretending that it isn’t
What it seems...
Not what it seems,
But manifestly is.

You fear the Mysteries
Because you know.
They gape before you
As the cold wind screams.
The awful magic
Of the Void is yours,
And yet you settle
For these placid
Dreams-

Thin so-called facts
You hide behind
To shield
Your lack of courage
As an act of will.
Rejecting magic
As a childish song
While all along
Its wind is screaming still.

Each drop of water,
Every living cell,
Contains the whole,
The mystery entire.
The hope of heaven
And the fear of hell,
The monk’s cold hardship
And the lover’s fire.

To taste a single moment
Of this life,
A single drop of wine,
Should be enough.
To bow the knee in dread
Or laugh out loud,
To burn its cities
Or to fall in love.

In paradox
Between the words
The perfect word
Is found.
In darkness
Without motion
Without sound.

In contradiction’s
Twisting truth is
Coiled the cold and clear
Impossible perfection
Of your fear.

Explosive
Joyful
Radiant
This horror that we’ve found:
The Ars Poetica
Of the beyond.

So dive away
Hold nothing back
Guard nothing,
Don’t defend.
Surrender and advance!
This is the end.

I wrapped my head
In silent darkness
So that I could learn
To hear the wind
From which
We won’t return.

I closed my eyes
In dark and silence
So that I could find
The words I wanted
On the howling wind.

In paradox
Between the words
The perfect word
Is found.
In darkness
Without motion
Without sound.

I bow my head
In silent darkness
As the future burns.
And having sung,
To silence I’ll return.”

The reaction to Q’s song was a stunned silence. There was no way to respond to this intellectually; there were no words. The mandarins stared at the minstrel as if paralyzed, until Den’ma stood up.

“I thank all of you for honoring me with your hospitality,” he said. “But now it is time for me to seek my bed.”

In the awkward moments after the magistrate left, Q walked out into the garden. The others wandered off one by one. The symposium was over.

A Game of Bota in the Garden

It had been a strange symposium, Den’ma reflected. He still wasn’t certain what had happened, exactly, but it had been strange. The mandarin’s cherished ideal had not been achieved- no tranquility, no resolution, just a dark anxiety at the end like an approaching storm. The rise of the Demonic School had heralded the fall of the Zu. Perhaps the birth of the School of Silence represented the shape of things to come.

And yet...

He was sitting in his garden beneath his alien trees, in front of the bota board. The glass pieces rested on the gleaming stars. He was still playing through the tournament game of the master Konym’na, but he felt a new feeling of exhilaration as he looked at the board. He understood it now, or at least he was starting to.

The master’s opening moves had seemed weak because they were so subtle, a style of playing that seemed almost invisible- a game of silence. But every move was a manifestation, an expression of strategic principles so deep and far-reaching they couldn’t be seen at first. An esoteric masterpiece. When Konym’na’s strategy became exoteric it took on new meaning all at once, like a brush fire coming alive in a dozen places to form a roaring conflagration.

Soft on the outside, and strong on the inside. And when the inside suddenly manifested...

The balance of forces. Konym’na had discovered it a hundred years ago.

Den’ma smiled. There was a rustling in the branches suddenly, and someone stepped out. The bard of the School of Silence stood across from him.

The other poets had departed already, on the shuttle to Tryn. From that planet they would make connections to other star systems, carrying back their own memories and interpretations. They had left the symposium as if under a cloud, especially the two professors, who had hardly spoken to each other as they stepped onto the shuttle. Even the Shell Witch seemed distracted and anxious, like the man in the fable who loved dragons until he met one, and then died of fright. But Tioch's face had seemed almost triumphant, a sinister look that didn’t sit well on her although it enhanced her beauty.

Q wasn’t leaving apparently, or at least not yet. No doubt he intended to wander for a time on Torn, to explore its back alleys and sing his poems to earn his way. He looked at the retired magistrate, and then down at the bota board. A slow smile spread across his face. It wasn’t like the eerie smile before he sung his poem. He seemed to know what Den’ma was thinking, and what he had discovered.

The bard looked up at the magistrate and bowed deeply to him. Den’ma bowed back. Then Q turned around without a word and disappeared into the trees.