11.5.583
Five days have passed since I described the delight I felt upon completing my apprenticeship. Today I feel no delight. Today I realise the difficulty of what lies before me, and I wonder if I have set myself an impossible task.
How would I know that it is impossible? I cannot say. Somehow, I would know. There are forces and powers that people may not know of. Shamanism is one such. I have always wondered if shamanism is contact with the unknowable. Yet I am not a shaman, nor will I ever be, and there were no shamans in my immediate family, unless they disguised their ability; and I am inclined to believe that such camouflage—because of the vitality, nay the glitter of the shamanic mind—is impossible.
But it seems to me that passing the citidenizen test is impossible. I have passed the first quarter, and it was easy, so easy, but I know now that I will fall at some subsequent hurdle. I know this because something of life in the citidenizenry has been revealed to me, something that I did not know before, and it makes me think I could not bear to live something so vile.
Perhaps vile is too strong a word. A bureaucracy is not vile. It is too massive to be vile. Yet I feel repelled.
The first part of the test was to recognise erasure in a discipline alien to our own. I was assigned to a dessicator group, who wander the Mavrosopolis looking for the flowing water that can cause erosion. I was fascinated to discover that the sewers of the conurbation in which we all live are blocked so that water may not flow. This is extreme! We thawers are not so eccentric, that is sure, though I suppose our arrays of heaters, hotwires, fans and elements would look absurd to a dessicator or to a baffler. I recognised that a collection of cisterns in a high region of the Mavrosopolis would burst under the influence of building work, and this fact I reported to the master of the group. He then told me that I had passed, and he proffered me a silver arc: one quarter of a ring.
I am pleased that this shiny fragment lies in my breast pocket. I keep it above my heart in the hope that my sincerity will somehow alter the circumstances of my test. It is a forlorn hope.
But I learned something awful today. The citidenizenry is a bureaucracy; of what type I do not know, but I sense, as if with the intimate and vibrating nerves of my body, that it is one. I am appalled. There can be no place for the artist in a bureaucracy, no place for the sculptor, for the musician, for the actor—even for the playwright!—and certainly no place for the poet. What can I do? I must ascend from the gutter, yet if I do I place myself in an unfeeling, mechanistic, hopeless, meaningless system that already, already, though I know it not, I hate.
Such a dilemma was unexpected and it makes me wonder if I should continue. This I discussed with my mother. She said I should go on. Probably I will. But I must bury too many bright and carefree thoughts in my mind, and that is not a good thing. Life surely is not about the bleak sheet of vellum upon which is written a list, it is about spontenaity, about creation, about love.
Nogoths say little of love since it is a luxury on the street. But I will have none of that. Love is good, it seems to me, indeed who is to say that it is not a vital part of a peaceful life? So I suspect. Yet the bureaucracy does not admit of love, just as it does not admit of poetry. Am I then to become a dried up old man, dead like a white rose that was perfumed and cool in a vase of water, only to shrivel and die for want of a little concern?
It seems absurd to me that the Mavrosopolis does not have room for concern, and yet this heartlessness would explain the fact that nogoths lie in their thousands upon the sooty streets. The Mavrosopolis, perhaps, is a heartless thing.