Wednesday 28 November 2007

THE SERVICE STATION

The picture above shows a detail of the Greater Cornea Housing Development Project. It was conceived in conjunction with the huge Gondwanaland Theme Park Project which, in turn, was funded by an International Syndicate with the full support of the former Grand Duke. Both projects were cancelled once the Grand Duke was deposed - but a lot of damage had been done to the landscape and to the economy of this once prosperous province.


As the reader discovers at the end of the (as yet unpublished) third volume of Chronicles of the Greater Dream, Miguel himself reached Lavena some time after the events he relates. He later joined us on a state visit to the Province of Cornea, whose tyrannical Grand Duke had just then been deposed. During this visit, he and the new Prime Minister of the province had an interesting conversation :

“We dined that evening with the young Grand Duke. The Prime Minister, as we learned, is an outstanding historian, and while his scholarly work had never been appreciated by the Grand Duke, his real troubles only began after he published a short story entitled The Service Station.
As summarized for our benefit by the author, the story relates the misadventures of a young man called Omee, who sets out to visit his girl friend in a neighboring town. He stops off at a service station on the freeway, but when he wants to leave again, he is told that the road has momentarily been closed, and that he will have to wait.
The wait goes on and on. Night comes, day returns, a week passes, then a month; more and more people keep turning into the service station and are unable to leave, and the service station itself, in which all these stranded people bed down like campers, keeps growing until it reaches the monstrous proportions of the Grand Duke’s palace.
Since these people can’t go anywhere, they must find ways of paying their keep. They are hired by the service station manager to clean up, serve food, watch and spy on one another, and even arrest, judge and incarcerate one another. They must also be fed, of course, and since the service station bar serves only junk food, that’s all they get. The men soon begin to crave company, and the accommodating manager brings in a busload of prostitutes, and even shows X-rated films once a week in his office.
The same bus occasionally drives the people to a neighboring fun fair, where they all have a virtual good time, and as days pass, they find their lives turning increasingly upon the contents of the sandwiches they will be served for lunch, the girls with whom they will be able to spend a few minutes in the evening or the roller-coaster ride they plan to take on Friday afternoon.”
“And how does it end?” I asked.
The Prime Minister made a rueful face.
“The end is simple, Mr. Errazu,” he said. “One day, the road is opened again, but none of them know where to go.”


This short narrative, recorded towards the end of Miguel's history, appears suggestive of the spirit in which he wrote the book: as though the whole thing were a metaphor and was meant to remind its readers of the place they had meant to reach when they first set out on their journey.

Sunday 11 November 2007

STATE OF THE FEDERATION OF GONDWANA - 2004-2007


This is what Eburnea looked like when we first passed through the town three years ago. Town and port together appeared to embody the state of the land as a whole.
The city (like the land itself) was derelict, and the port, as you can see from the picture, had dried up entirely in the half-century during which it had been cut off from the sea. Ocean-going cargos and liners that had not been able to leave on time had settled down gradually and turned into rotting hulks. We were all deeply distressed by the sight.
Meanwhile, further up the bay, the port city of Cornea, hub of commerce and historic purveyor of counterfeit goods world-wide, had developed like a thriving cancer. Or so we were told. We only later verified this ourselves.
This and much else, was the consequence of a number of deliberate and ill-informed decisions taken by the colonial authorities, firmly determined to destroy the fundamental qualities and strange individuality of the land, while filling their own pockets beyond all sense or reason.
As we traveled through the land on our way to Levana, we gradually realized the full extent of the damage that had been wrought - it was quite beyond anything we could have imagined.
Whatever government there had been had collapsed a few years before we came and various so-called "warlords" (meaning “psychopathic gangsters”) had, by force, taken over the lucrative mineral resources of the land. This was achieved with the help of a massive inflow of weapons provided by powerful occult interests and miserable children had been conscripted to fight their lucrative battles – losing life, limbs and innocence in the process.
The legendary valley of Umbra had, in the course of fifty years, been turned into a colossal pile of garbage and, since the four main rivers of the land no longer flowed (the consequence of a rash decision taken by the colonial corps of engineers in 1904-05), the entire land was suffering from a great drought. At the same time, the Mahashunya desert had begun to expand and was even threatening the capital, Levana, while the age-old culture of the desert, which had thrived thanks to its millennial trade in Dreamstones, had been utterly ruined, as a result of which its capital city, Sabea, abandoned by its population, had become a lost city.
What had caused this disaster? If we are to believe the views expressed by Ramanag in his memorable speech (reported in full by Miguel in the second episode of his Chronicles), those who then ruled the great colonial powers had, in recent years, made an intimate pact with “mere wealth and mere power.” They had taken to their hearts the indispensable tools of science and rationality and had made themselves their submissive slaves while neglecting the purpose that these admirable tools were expected to serve.
This submission, Ramanag suggests, is like a drug, which leads its victims to assume that wealth alone is proof of their existence, ans to they think themselves immeasurably superior to those who are free of that self-destructive vice. They themselves became the contented slaves of the sole law of profit, and this form of slavery, I am told, is still quite successfully imposed everywhere in the world today, wherever the monopoly of power and the accumulation of wealth by the great machines of commerce has become an inherent purpose to the detriment of the well-being of the communities they were formerly expected to serve.
Ramanag was convinced that the Third Hemisphere alone can provide the antidote to this poison – and this antidote, he declared, was the Greater Dream – in other words, the state of minde favored by an uninterrupted dialogue between the human community and the community of the Emblemata - the Living Statues found only in our country.
Miguel’s presentation of the Emblemata in "The Riddle of the Seal" remains the best approach to this singular feature of the land and the fullest information is provided in the third episode of the Chronicles, "The Garden of all the Dreams – which is still awaiting publication.
I myself can confirme that the restoration of the Greater Dream in Gondwana has been followed by a well-night miraculous recovery of the land: Today, three years after we discovered this scene of desolation, Eburnea is once more open to the sea and a thriving port, the four rivers are flowing, the Valley of Umbra is on its way to recovery and Sabea itself is revived. The most important part of my mission, as I travel around the world today, is to present this news in an acceptable form to all those I meet. This must be done with utmost tact because resistance can be considerable at times. For this reason, too, my hope is that Miguel’s book will be widely read and understood, since his presentation strikes most people asremarkably convincing.
[My thanks to Erik de Villoutreys for the splendid illustration that goes with this entry. Don't fail to click on the picture to get a full screen enlargement of it. You can then enlarge it further (to 150%, for instance), and move through it from side to side and also up and down].

Thursday 1 November 2007

GEOGRAPHY OF MODERN GONDWANA

I've been away in Gondwana for some time now, chiefly because we have been worried about Miguel Errazu who has given no news since he set out to explore the Hortus a few months ago. Readers will find out all about the Hortus (or Garden) in the Third Episode of the Chronicles, but I should explain that it's a vast territory that has never been systematically explored.

At the time I left the country, two days ago, there was still no news, but we all hope to have some in the coming weeks.

I did however see our dear professors (Herbert and Wilhelmina) in Levana, and they kindly gave me an excerpt from the article they will be devoting to the Geography of Gondwana in the Encyhclopaedia Gonduanensis. It contains the sort of information they had already promised to post a few weeks ago... Here it is.

The Geography of Gondwana

As we said earlier on this Blog, cosmographic speculation about Gondwana has been particularly difficult in the past. But all this has recently changed. Spectacular progress in the field of satellite photography now allows pictures to be taken from unprecedented altitudes by using MRI (Mental Resonance Imagery - see below). This innovative technique has produced the startling view of the entire continent of Gondwana shown above. Although its landmass is equal to that of Asia, very little is presently known about the country. Certainly the most striking images that have been sent back from space are those shown in animation of the home page of the Greater Dream Project Website (www.greaterdream.com).

The above picture, based on the first thorough sattelite survey of the land has been modified to bring out the coastline and simplify the task of geographers working on navigational maps. The Venture Islands appear in the Northwest corner of the map. The Far Furlew Islands lie at some distance to the North. Some have pointed out that the outline of the continent somewhat resembles a cross-cut of the human brain. We have no significant comment to make about that!

Based on the preceding document, this hypothetical view shows the continent as it presumably was about 1.5 million years ago, prior to the fusion of its two halves, which finally met after having drifted aimlessly across the earth’s mantle for several millions of years. This tremendous tectonic collision gradually raised the great Mahakalpa mountain range (on the eastern landmass) and turned the former Midland Sea into the fearful central desert known today as the Mahashunya, often called the Anvil of the Sun. Both topographical features have come to play a fundamental role in the philosophy of the land. And here's one last picture for today... It shows the area surrounding the bay of winds.


lThis sattelite photo shows part of North central Gondwana in the springtime. The Bay of Winds, with its many islands, appears top centre. Eburnea is at the southernmost end of the bay. Cornea and its great port, a little further up its eastern coast. It is reproduced here with kind permission of Jean-Paul Agosti, Chairman of the National Geographic Society, University of Levana, Gondwana.

And here, finally is something about MRI
The technique of Mental Resonance Imagery (MRI) has existed much longer than the universally familiar Magnetic Resonance Imagery now used to such excellent effect in medicine and other disciplines. Mental Resonance Imagery is comparable to the sonar used by bats and submarines, which maps out the environment by gauging the sound that bounces off an obstacle or a prey.
Mental Resonance Imagery (hereafter MRI) emits messages of every kind which bounce off the thoughts and emotions of others and allows the person emitting them to map the other person’s mind and personality with a fair degree of accuracy. In former times, this was known as conversation.
Appreciations based on MRI are inevitably as subjective as is the appreciation of the bat when it pursues a gnat. But the fact that the bat more often than not manages to swallow the gnat should encourage us to assume that the creature’s subjective perceptions somehow produce valid and reliable data. This appears to provide an interesting argument in favour of MRI in general, although its uses in mapping apply a somewhat different technique, which cannot be fully discussed here.








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