From, Wullker, poor servant of thresholds
To, the Venerable Stullker, sainted of another country
we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well
Those, who having crossed into the forbidding country which withdraws from the approach of all conventional traffic; those, who having survived their unmappable journey along the country’s ever shifting pathways; these are the they that may then go on, and so encounter, at the country’s sufferance, and at a random centre of their journey, an interior space they call cyrican. Shaped as a great ear, and made of corridors and chambers, the cyrican seizes upon words spoken by the pilgrims as in a whispering gallery, and steals them into silence. The cyrican is an ancient trap set by the country for to catch out pilgrims, and it’s the width of a room, and where all life gives in, which it disguises as a holy space, their undespaired for destination.
The cyrican utilises the pilgrims' presence as a trigger for the mechanism of a confrontation with what they most desire. Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte, Käm ich in Verlegenheit, Was ich mir denn wünschen sollte, Eine schlimme oder gute Zeit. It supplies the asked-for object at the cost of looping the pilgrim back to the constraints of their own being (and she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist) - consequently, as in snakes and ladders, they will find themselves at the point of expulsion from the country.
And yet I have heard word of another place, tell me if you know of it? It said that if a pilgrim negotiates the cyrican trap successfully, and perhaps by some accidental non-completion of the pilgrim’s purpose, then another, but exterior, and wondrously garden-like clearing, may also be rarely come upon. This subsequent locus amoenus, 'the quietist place in the world', is an open garden, a single rock that is not hard and strong but new, soft and weak and at the beginning of its time. The single garden made of a single rock, is a point of allowances and permissions sited in the other heart of the forbidding country, and is approached only through a failure of engagement with the cyrican. Where the cyrican is the forbidden country’s trap for pilgrims, so the pilgrims become the trap set by the country to capture and thus enclose the garden (called, byrgan). Tell me, have you ever approached byrgan?
It was said to me,- that if they should survive the trap of the interior space, cyrican, in order that they might see and know themselves chagrined, then the pilgrims must thereby refuse resolutely to enter byrgan, in order that they may neither see nor know it. It is said they are conjured immediately from cyrican to byrgan at the will of the country, for the very reason that they might not know it. What is the open place, beyond the wall, that you would not wish to defile with your own presence, and of which you would forbid yourself even to have any knowledge? What is this defenceless and innocent place, friend, weary pilgrim, which you desire above all to belong to, where your yearning ends, which gladly allows your approach, but which you would also corrupt with your belonging even as it gathers you in unto itself? What is the place of which you have already destroyed the map?
That you are drawn there, I do not refute. And I know that against your will, you are destined to appear at its gate. It is the will of the country that you should see and know it for it is the place necessary to your being. And you may go on, and you may arise and go there. It is the logos of the forbidden country that you shall take it and make it your home there - for where you are, as the country wills it, it is gone. But it is there in byrgan that you shall find your peace. Byrgan is both your welcoming host and your comfortable home. From it, is derived your sensibility of what is lost from the habitable, and what is foresworn of the hospitable.
Most keenly, the man of the underground asks of us, which do you prefer: simple pleasures that you have easily won, or the hard fought-for ecstasies of your own suffering? In answer, you become aware that you must deny yourself entry to byrgan for the very reason that you may freely go there, for the reason that it is at your mercy. You are the corrupting spore that shall release infectious germs (amoebulae) into byrgan as your parasitic infection upon it gains a foothold, and thence multiplies you many fold from out of its ruin and decomposition. For its sake, you must forbear, and not go on. At the gate, in the moment of its in-gathering, you must give up on, and suspend, your arrival before the palm fronds of its welcome, for you are the fruit of its celebration. You are the trap of its desire.
As one approached the garden, he met another returning from it. The first: Es scheint alles verloren zu sein. The second: Etwas unerwartetes passiert. The first: Geister nehmen im kopf gestalt. The second: an wie kann man sich davon lösen? The first: Dieses phantom mit einer stimme und einem körper. The second: Dieser teil des eigenen Selbst.*
*What is it like, this place before which your blasted, clifftop being, your cramped, deformed habit, your creeping, afflicted comportment so arrives and eo ipso desires above all to enter? What is it like, this peaceful garden beyond the door, beyond the wall, to which you have dragged the coffin of your being? What is it like, the place, the moment, the where and the when of exodus-end, its threshold to which you are driven, contemplating even as you come near to it, even as you rend and tear at your raiment, the necessity of your immediate retreat back again into the country, retreating like a yellow and sloping hangdog. Consider it now, the suspended, the self-denied, maddeningly nearby place: byrgan, the garden festival of your shrinking approach - a serious place of serious earth, where so many dead lie around. Is it not where you cannot not belong but at the entrance to which you are impelled, being the very and celebrated fruit of its in-gathering, so as to defend its integrity, to thereby also refuse your own entry there? If cyrican is the cause of our not knowing byrgan, then it is also the cause of our knowing of it. My venerable Stullker, see now the large letters I am writing to you with my own hand! I am mere,
Wullker!
