by
Peter Cowlam
Elena Motrich
Not new to these cloisters was one impatient student, who had come to consider Occidental principles – should he or shouldn’t he cheat? Nicola, the most recent of Schmutzburg’s guests, gazed from her dizzy summit, flanked by those primordial monarchs. Incredibly – for her own had been whirled away in the bitter night winds – another set of prints, another procession of black hollows, meandered from the vapours, like coals in pristine snow. The contest she had entered had a name – it was Frame Solutions. Her opponent had decided on his next move while her back was turned. She ignored him, musing on that solitary speck of a man (meaning Michael, a fortuitous presence, surely). If he turned, and looked up the mountain, at the sun and sky, and the clouds, it was only a matter of time before Schmutzburg, or its one last bastion, also entered his view. She didn’t wait, but with a toss of her hair swung away from the ledge and faced her opponent, but did not return to their game. Even if Michael, she thought, understood the inscription over the outer door, and entered, he wouldn’t last here long. For how could he remain? A cold stone floor and naked walls, a rudimentary bed, a low table, icy winds that howled in at the uncovered windows – no one was given more.
So she reasoned, while a mess of guilty thoughts in her opponent threatened to stay his hand, an impulse he suppressed once it had formed as a possibility. Words he spoke were a veil on his clumsy machinations—
‘You had begun a list of books.’
Nicola studied the board and the new, illegal position of some of its pieces, and thought about how to answer. A few summarising sentences were impossible. What would a mere student of Schmutzburg understand of her own student life, with its autumn afternoons? Could it mean as much to him, those sudden gusts, the flutter and flurry and shower of leaves?
She heard the bell – they both heard the bell – and was certain of what to say, was equally positive that the broad, extended lawns in the grounds of her orthodox life, cut and rolled into alternating bands of green – that these as phenomena were another dissimulation. Yet you cannot consign everything to the world’s history, from a surviving reality measured as private experience. The details were important.
One day she looked outward from a bench in the convent garden, and conjectured at the surrounding symbolism. Urns or sanctified vessels that hadn’t stood the test of time, smeared as they were in lichens, moss and mould. Neither were the holy statuettes of unassailable stuff, when limbs were fractured and noses broken off. No. She, Nicola, had nothing to say, nothing at all of the books she’d read, and anyway a chilly wind was rising. (By now Michael was puzzling over that relief.) Squatting down at the board, she accused her opponent of cheating. Honourably, he conceded a fourth consecutive game.
❦
Here in the House, a benign old mystic in a creaking chair had trained his mind to ignore the woody friction when he leaned forward to dip his pen, or back to gaze into the shadows and contemplate. He had never stopped wondering at the seasonal rites of peoples beyond the perimeters of Schmutzburg. These musings reinforced themselves whenever he beheld the careworn faces of Westerners who sometimes sojourned here, his life at a remove from theirs, invested with other meanings. They arrived with their signs and symbols and burdens of prejudice, for the wise elders of the House to examine, in the fullest flower of every human folly.
He’d dipped his pen for the last time that morning. He put it aside and glanced through his open arch. In the conical blueness, a solitary cloud had been busily disintegrating, and in that other perspective, in the oblong whiteness when he stood, a new set of prints curled up the mountainside.
The bell tolled and he left his desk. He took down a heavy book from a shelf and blew away the dust. When he opened it and turned to the page he wanted, too many hands had been here before, and he was obliged to smooth away the creases, to flatten out its script, before placing in a marker. A spiral of steps led him into the lower chambers, and here he met Nicola in one of the passages. Dusty shafts of sunshine filtered in at intervals through slits in the wall. He apologised, but handed her the book – not too late, he hoped. Well, this had been a long time coming, but anyway, Frame Solutions wasn’t a game one learned overnight. The old man chuckled.
‘I hear you’re beating all our best students,’ he said, adding, ‘I shall have to see if I can’t upset that winning streak,’ though it was years since he’d played.
Down, down again, and at the very foot of those stairs a young English head turned with a start. The old man had begun to interpret for his benefit a plaster relief over the mantel, whose three divisions – one upper, two beneath – represented what? One in the pair depicted an unhappy village husband left holding a new-born baby, with an empty jug of ale. His suspicious wife knew his evil ways, and where you saw her creeping round from behind, she clutched at a wooden shoe and wound back her arm in preparation for a blow to the head. A cowardly neighbour, keeping his own head down but determined to miss nothing, reported what he saw. What we see is a luckless husband condemned by the village fathers. On the right of the pair, local worthies come together and are unanimous – the drunkard they hold aloft rides the skimmington.
Michael looked at the old man, and at the relief, and at the old man again. ‘And that, the upper?’ he asked.
‘Ah, that is the just god in his heaven, who sees that his law is carried out.’
❦
Here on another winter morning, the sun in its ice-cool heaven rose above Schmutzburg, a forgotten country, and forgotten its House of Folly. A hole appeared, or the tiniest chink, where a glimmer of light briefly penetrated a diffuse wash of moisture over Europe. A wrinkled old rustic in his mountain shack looked up for a moment and fancied he’d seen something, but heard only cars and a tourist coach.
Michael was in the gallery, where the students had gathered, all of them determined to ignore him. Neither did Nicola speak, coming in moments after and finding herself a seat. Michael nodded. She opened a book. She’d got it for its commentaries, its author an expert on the game of games. Grading was able to mark her progress page to page. Then without warning she tossed her hair back across her shoulder, in a pause from the book, taking in what changes took place in the courtroom below.
The affable old mystic sat at a bench with two others, while the man accused took his oath from a cleric standing by. That official withdrew, leaving in view a Westerner in early middle age. His dark hair had thinned to greying wisps at the temples, and had receded to the crown, and that made it all the more unclear to Nicola that a poet was about to be tried, his eyes bulging behind the lenses of his spectacles. Two deep furrows demarcating flabby jowls accentuated the flare of his nostrils. His thin lips formed an intelligent, whimsical smile. He stood waiting – a poet of the English municipality – in a shabby blue suit, a white shirt stiff at the collar, and a two-tone broadly knotted tie.
The case against was roughly this, while the three old men were loose with their metaphors. Our poet took his afflatus not from any potent commingling afloat in the atmosphere, but from something much less elemental, bound up with the naked mastery of form. This was not to deny the necessity of rules – that was understood. The objection was one of emphasis, for what was the character or ingenuity of prosodic architectonics other than plain, arithmetic workings out, and the trivialisation of lived experience?
The defence was less vague. Historical problems couldn’t be ignored, and the poet confessed to a growing sense of intimidation in the presence of his technological colleagues. For example, he, the poet, was capable of this: he could conceive a regular figure, a tetrahedron, in his mind’s eye, and could tilt it, rotate it, examine its lines and surfaces. But the crudest schoolboy, with his home computer, could do as much and more. Or on a grander scale, think of this inscrutable planet Earth, and make of that a vision – a blue ocean sphere suspended brightly in an enveloping darkness. Can any lyric prefigure again so stunning a photograph? Even Armageddon, that most vital conceptualisation in his repertoire, has been subsumed into mere technics and delivered up as a political possibility.
The accused was a man of conscience, whose observations had something of a Janus nature, being both involuntary and the source of ceaseless irritation. If all our medieval visions were now the acquired, bastardised property of governments and technocrats, then the only freedom left was in wallowing – an art that was bourgeois, puerile – or in the frustrations of social protest. And anyway, they seemed to want to consider his case in a theological light, with accusations answerable only in the realms of the unknowable. The four looked up. The sentence seemed a mere formality – condemnation to the world again – but Nicola had allowed that open book to slide from her knees and fall with a thud to the floor. This first session was adjourned.
❦
Late evening. Michael sat in the gathering dusk on the edge of his bed – hands and forearms dangling, elbows on parted knees. He approximated cardinal points of the compass. North was cold and damp – the wall opposite. East was a window on a country in darkness. West, an open door on creaky hinges, allowing in the last warm rays of a world in decay. There as he guessed was the poet’s dying emblem, a dull red segment as the sun underwent its final descent.
In the early morning the position was much the same, though now he heard voices and not the whirr of his thoughts. Above, the trial had repeated itself in all its developments, however much he disciplined his mind. He looked out of his eastern window and saw a distant country, its clouds of dust, its plumes and billows of brown smoke rising through an early frost, a dew. Nearer – below him on the courtyard – the poet had just snapped shut his tarnished cigarette case and returned it to a hip pocket in his jacket, which was crumpled where he’d slept uncomfortably. He lit up – a tarry, unfiltered cigarette – and drawing deeply looked east himself, though from his elevation couldn’t see over the bright icy slopes into the valleys. Six, seven students just out of earshot had formed a circle and discussed concluding details, until at last an elected spokesman, whose warm breath Michael saw exhaled excitably into the cold air, detached himself and strode up to the smoking poet.
Later, a much older man was looking on, from the highest window in Schmutzburg’s southernmost tower. What he hadn’t seen – Nicola and Michael together again – was immaterial. His opinions concerning the two had already formed. Michael, immobile at the foot of the stairs, was pointing up uncertainly to the apex of the relief.
‘The just god in his heaven,’ he said.
Nicola, shrugging, said only, ‘Just god, no. It’s a landowner, that peasant’s feudal overlord.’ Meaning is always material – in this case a loss of revenue and the moral collapse of the workforce. We so like our parables of ownership and neglect.
Six or seven students set up a small table, while Nicola stepped outdoors with a playing board and a canvas sack for the pieces. The unbidden young Englishman followed, bewildered, while his older compatriot must accept he was guilty as accused. The poet as he loses his voice reveals his remoteness in what he says for those who have lost their faith.
❦
Dreary grey scholars, who for generations had sneezed and drawn their secret signs in accumulating dust, consulted their archives, and were able to make one assertion: in its breadth of possibilities and relationships, that historic discipline Frame Solutions, first appearing in the fourth millennium BCE, had helped its adherents achieve superhuman powers of assimilation. If that was its extent, what of the rules? Well, exquisitely simple. The players began with twenty-four identical pieces, the opposing sets being differentiated by colour, and to each individual certain powers and scope of movement were ascribed, though not declared until its first move or capture. Thus an almost limitless range. Half a dozen students now formed a semicircle together with the silent Englishmen, while a seventh, large-framed and pale, could feel the colour rising in his cheeks. He would have to retract his confident offer to commentate on every move, or explain the rules, when almost certain to result was a first, embarrassing defeat.
Nicola considered her options but wouldn’t make the decisive move. This was as much as Michael understood. The bell tolled again and the poet tossed down his cigarette butt onto the cold stone, crushing its smoky ember under a polished toe, a city shoe. A biting gust rolled in round the frozen peaks of that far eastern country, still twitching in its slumbers, under a long, feudal shadow. When the old man from the southern tower came out to the courtyard – robed, in open sandals, supporting his tottering frame on a staff – the sun in the east behind him settled on his grey hair bright as a halo. Nobody stirred.
So far this wasn’t the game he’d come to see. He shuffled forward to the two seated at the board and crossed his arms, waiting. It was a hopeless position. He smiled. The student foundered. Like so many before him, he conceded – he retired, scratching his head. Then the old man put the tip of his staff to his lips (he cautioned the gasps, the hubbub, the euphoria), and next it was Michael, with a wrinkled hand pressed to the small of his back, as that pushed him to the newly vacated place. ‘Play,’ he was told, and unaware that the passing of only a few more days would see the commencement of his own trial, he squatted down nervously and took his place against that all-conquering female. A slight flicker of amusement crossed her features, but she restrained a smile and set out the pieces again. Michael, reluctant in his challenge, made a first tentative move. She snorted when he named his opening piece – a choice revealing a naivety unsuspected even in him. In the shadow of that tyrant god her failing religion had sought to vanquish, her compulsion to teach a lesson, and punitively, re-emerged.
The old man chuckled, but didn’t remain, and when the poet took his place, assured that his own system could never be so vulnerable, no one foresaw his defeat, until late afternoon, when in the lengthening shadows, and a rising wind, only one spectator remained. But even he – pallid, large-limbed – shied away before the final outcome, consoled by the sure knowledge that both must turn to that distant, inscrutable country, to those shadows over the mountains, for any hope of salvation.
So she reasoned, while a mess of guilty thoughts in her opponent threatened to stay his hand, an impulse he suppressed once it had formed as a possibility. Words he spoke were a veil on his clumsy machinations—
‘You had begun a list of books.’
Nicola studied the board and the new, illegal position of some of its pieces, and thought about how to answer. A few summarising sentences were impossible. What would a mere student of Schmutzburg understand of her own student life, with its autumn afternoons? Could it mean as much to him, those sudden gusts, the flutter and flurry and shower of leaves?
She heard the bell – they both heard the bell – and was certain of what to say, was equally positive that the broad, extended lawns in the grounds of her orthodox life, cut and rolled into alternating bands of green – that these as phenomena were another dissimulation. Yet you cannot consign everything to the world’s history, from a surviving reality measured as private experience. The details were important.
One day she looked outward from a bench in the convent garden, and conjectured at the surrounding symbolism. Urns or sanctified vessels that hadn’t stood the test of time, smeared as they were in lichens, moss and mould. Neither were the holy statuettes of unassailable stuff, when limbs were fractured and noses broken off. No. She, Nicola, had nothing to say, nothing at all of the books she’d read, and anyway a chilly wind was rising. (By now Michael was puzzling over that relief.) Squatting down at the board, she accused her opponent of cheating. Honourably, he conceded a fourth consecutive game.
❦
Here in the House, a benign old mystic in a creaking chair had trained his mind to ignore the woody friction when he leaned forward to dip his pen, or back to gaze into the shadows and contemplate. He had never stopped wondering at the seasonal rites of peoples beyond the perimeters of Schmutzburg. These musings reinforced themselves whenever he beheld the careworn faces of Westerners who sometimes sojourned here, his life at a remove from theirs, invested with other meanings. They arrived with their signs and symbols and burdens of prejudice, for the wise elders of the House to examine, in the fullest flower of every human folly.
He’d dipped his pen for the last time that morning. He put it aside and glanced through his open arch. In the conical blueness, a solitary cloud had been busily disintegrating, and in that other perspective, in the oblong whiteness when he stood, a new set of prints curled up the mountainside.
The bell tolled and he left his desk. He took down a heavy book from a shelf and blew away the dust. When he opened it and turned to the page he wanted, too many hands had been here before, and he was obliged to smooth away the creases, to flatten out its script, before placing in a marker. A spiral of steps led him into the lower chambers, and here he met Nicola in one of the passages. Dusty shafts of sunshine filtered in at intervals through slits in the wall. He apologised, but handed her the book – not too late, he hoped. Well, this had been a long time coming, but anyway, Frame Solutions wasn’t a game one learned overnight. The old man chuckled.
‘I hear you’re beating all our best students,’ he said, adding, ‘I shall have to see if I can’t upset that winning streak,’ though it was years since he’d played.
Down, down again, and at the very foot of those stairs a young English head turned with a start. The old man had begun to interpret for his benefit a plaster relief over the mantel, whose three divisions – one upper, two beneath – represented what? One in the pair depicted an unhappy village husband left holding a new-born baby, with an empty jug of ale. His suspicious wife knew his evil ways, and where you saw her creeping round from behind, she clutched at a wooden shoe and wound back her arm in preparation for a blow to the head. A cowardly neighbour, keeping his own head down but determined to miss nothing, reported what he saw. What we see is a luckless husband condemned by the village fathers. On the right of the pair, local worthies come together and are unanimous – the drunkard they hold aloft rides the skimmington.
Michael looked at the old man, and at the relief, and at the old man again. ‘And that, the upper?’ he asked.
‘Ah, that is the just god in his heaven, who sees that his law is carried out.’
❦
Here on another winter morning, the sun in its ice-cool heaven rose above Schmutzburg, a forgotten country, and forgotten its House of Folly. A hole appeared, or the tiniest chink, where a glimmer of light briefly penetrated a diffuse wash of moisture over Europe. A wrinkled old rustic in his mountain shack looked up for a moment and fancied he’d seen something, but heard only cars and a tourist coach.
Michael was in the gallery, where the students had gathered, all of them determined to ignore him. Neither did Nicola speak, coming in moments after and finding herself a seat. Michael nodded. She opened a book. She’d got it for its commentaries, its author an expert on the game of games. Grading was able to mark her progress page to page. Then without warning she tossed her hair back across her shoulder, in a pause from the book, taking in what changes took place in the courtroom below.
The affable old mystic sat at a bench with two others, while the man accused took his oath from a cleric standing by. That official withdrew, leaving in view a Westerner in early middle age. His dark hair had thinned to greying wisps at the temples, and had receded to the crown, and that made it all the more unclear to Nicola that a poet was about to be tried, his eyes bulging behind the lenses of his spectacles. Two deep furrows demarcating flabby jowls accentuated the flare of his nostrils. His thin lips formed an intelligent, whimsical smile. He stood waiting – a poet of the English municipality – in a shabby blue suit, a white shirt stiff at the collar, and a two-tone broadly knotted tie.
The case against was roughly this, while the three old men were loose with their metaphors. Our poet took his afflatus not from any potent commingling afloat in the atmosphere, but from something much less elemental, bound up with the naked mastery of form. This was not to deny the necessity of rules – that was understood. The objection was one of emphasis, for what was the character or ingenuity of prosodic architectonics other than plain, arithmetic workings out, and the trivialisation of lived experience?
The defence was less vague. Historical problems couldn’t be ignored, and the poet confessed to a growing sense of intimidation in the presence of his technological colleagues. For example, he, the poet, was capable of this: he could conceive a regular figure, a tetrahedron, in his mind’s eye, and could tilt it, rotate it, examine its lines and surfaces. But the crudest schoolboy, with his home computer, could do as much and more. Or on a grander scale, think of this inscrutable planet Earth, and make of that a vision – a blue ocean sphere suspended brightly in an enveloping darkness. Can any lyric prefigure again so stunning a photograph? Even Armageddon, that most vital conceptualisation in his repertoire, has been subsumed into mere technics and delivered up as a political possibility.
The accused was a man of conscience, whose observations had something of a Janus nature, being both involuntary and the source of ceaseless irritation. If all our medieval visions were now the acquired, bastardised property of governments and technocrats, then the only freedom left was in wallowing – an art that was bourgeois, puerile – or in the frustrations of social protest. And anyway, they seemed to want to consider his case in a theological light, with accusations answerable only in the realms of the unknowable. The four looked up. The sentence seemed a mere formality – condemnation to the world again – but Nicola had allowed that open book to slide from her knees and fall with a thud to the floor. This first session was adjourned.
❦
Late evening. Michael sat in the gathering dusk on the edge of his bed – hands and forearms dangling, elbows on parted knees. He approximated cardinal points of the compass. North was cold and damp – the wall opposite. East was a window on a country in darkness. West, an open door on creaky hinges, allowing in the last warm rays of a world in decay. There as he guessed was the poet’s dying emblem, a dull red segment as the sun underwent its final descent.
In the early morning the position was much the same, though now he heard voices and not the whirr of his thoughts. Above, the trial had repeated itself in all its developments, however much he disciplined his mind. He looked out of his eastern window and saw a distant country, its clouds of dust, its plumes and billows of brown smoke rising through an early frost, a dew. Nearer – below him on the courtyard – the poet had just snapped shut his tarnished cigarette case and returned it to a hip pocket in his jacket, which was crumpled where he’d slept uncomfortably. He lit up – a tarry, unfiltered cigarette – and drawing deeply looked east himself, though from his elevation couldn’t see over the bright icy slopes into the valleys. Six, seven students just out of earshot had formed a circle and discussed concluding details, until at last an elected spokesman, whose warm breath Michael saw exhaled excitably into the cold air, detached himself and strode up to the smoking poet.
Later, a much older man was looking on, from the highest window in Schmutzburg’s southernmost tower. What he hadn’t seen – Nicola and Michael together again – was immaterial. His opinions concerning the two had already formed. Michael, immobile at the foot of the stairs, was pointing up uncertainly to the apex of the relief.
‘The just god in his heaven,’ he said.
Nicola, shrugging, said only, ‘Just god, no. It’s a landowner, that peasant’s feudal overlord.’ Meaning is always material – in this case a loss of revenue and the moral collapse of the workforce. We so like our parables of ownership and neglect.
Six or seven students set up a small table, while Nicola stepped outdoors with a playing board and a canvas sack for the pieces. The unbidden young Englishman followed, bewildered, while his older compatriot must accept he was guilty as accused. The poet as he loses his voice reveals his remoteness in what he says for those who have lost their faith.
❦
Dreary grey scholars, who for generations had sneezed and drawn their secret signs in accumulating dust, consulted their archives, and were able to make one assertion: in its breadth of possibilities and relationships, that historic discipline Frame Solutions, first appearing in the fourth millennium BCE, had helped its adherents achieve superhuman powers of assimilation. If that was its extent, what of the rules? Well, exquisitely simple. The players began with twenty-four identical pieces, the opposing sets being differentiated by colour, and to each individual certain powers and scope of movement were ascribed, though not declared until its first move or capture. Thus an almost limitless range. Half a dozen students now formed a semicircle together with the silent Englishmen, while a seventh, large-framed and pale, could feel the colour rising in his cheeks. He would have to retract his confident offer to commentate on every move, or explain the rules, when almost certain to result was a first, embarrassing defeat.
Nicola considered her options but wouldn’t make the decisive move. This was as much as Michael understood. The bell tolled again and the poet tossed down his cigarette butt onto the cold stone, crushing its smoky ember under a polished toe, a city shoe. A biting gust rolled in round the frozen peaks of that far eastern country, still twitching in its slumbers, under a long, feudal shadow. When the old man from the southern tower came out to the courtyard – robed, in open sandals, supporting his tottering frame on a staff – the sun in the east behind him settled on his grey hair bright as a halo. Nobody stirred.
So far this wasn’t the game he’d come to see. He shuffled forward to the two seated at the board and crossed his arms, waiting. It was a hopeless position. He smiled. The student foundered. Like so many before him, he conceded – he retired, scratching his head. Then the old man put the tip of his staff to his lips (he cautioned the gasps, the hubbub, the euphoria), and next it was Michael, with a wrinkled hand pressed to the small of his back, as that pushed him to the newly vacated place. ‘Play,’ he was told, and unaware that the passing of only a few more days would see the commencement of his own trial, he squatted down nervously and took his place against that all-conquering female. A slight flicker of amusement crossed her features, but she restrained a smile and set out the pieces again. Michael, reluctant in his challenge, made a first tentative move. She snorted when he named his opening piece – a choice revealing a naivety unsuspected even in him. In the shadow of that tyrant god her failing religion had sought to vanquish, her compulsion to teach a lesson, and punitively, re-emerged.
The old man chuckled, but didn’t remain, and when the poet took his place, assured that his own system could never be so vulnerable, no one foresaw his defeat, until late afternoon, when in the lengthening shadows, and a rising wind, only one spectator remained. But even he – pallid, large-limbed – shied away before the final outcome, consoled by the sure knowledge that both must turn to that distant, inscrutable country, to those shadows over the mountains, for any hope of salvation.
‘The House of Folly’ belongs to Peter Cowlam’s short-story collection Penumbra. Penumbra itself appears in Peter Cowlam’s recently published compendium edition Early Novels and Short Fiction, available at Amazon and other online retailers, as both hardback and ebook.
