LUDIC LOG

No one wants to tell the story. Always there are reasons: the historians say it is not a story, and will only tell it under the guise of truth -- their truth, of course, which is the only garment in which they think a story may dress. The magicians, soldiers, kings and financiers do not like it because they didn't pay for it; subsequently its telling brings them no store-bought honor. The poets and bards and lettered men are of two minds about the story ­ well, of one mind; they aren't going to tell it either ­ but there are among them tedious arguments over whether it should not be told because it is too base and vulgar and common, or whether it should not be told because it is not base and vulgar and common enough. The churchmen dislike it because it is to the greater glory of none of their favored gods, and in it they sniff out the sulfuric odor of rebellion. There is no moral uplift in it, and if it can be said to prove anything (prove! words can prove nothing) it is that the best stories don't teach us anything.

So the story lies about, heavying the air, untold except in the form of dead history. In this way it cannot be touched or even thought about: once the truth-telling class gets hold of something, the first thing they do is turn it into history, and then they say "you can't change history", lest you get any ideas that once heard, a story belongs to you and you may do with it whatever you like. Tyrant history claims everything for itself, and allows on stage only those actors who play off each other and dare not say a word to the audience. The role of Swallowtail in the stories history tells is to be quiet and do what he is said to have done. For the reader who has heard of him only in school he is a name without a presence, and whether he is gone or dead and gone matters not at all. He is history, which is to say a dish on the long banquet table of the past, a dish that is there only to be eaten by the monstrous present. The past is a truth, not a story ­ but a truth that exists only to feed the engine of today, which pushes us endlessly forward into tomorrow. The past is history and can be looked at but not lived in.

As for the people in the story, most of them don't live anywhere at all. They are dead or vanished or gone to another world, or they never existed to begin with. Anyone in such a state is no welcome guest in the house of truth. The few who lived through it and can still be seen and heard are old, sick, senile: their words are not to be trusted. They are murderers and criminals and failures. Or they are notorious liars, or they are queens and guilders and men of power and other such self-serving types. Or they are devils and spirits, and nothing good can come of listening to them. Those few who have bothered to ask questions report being given answers either conflicting and contradictory, conditions incompatible with the real and true. What use are these, then, in telling a story? It is neither their passion nor their profession. And living through something no more makes you qualified to tell about it than eating a loaf of bread makes you an expert on farming. Their parts of the story, anyway, are incomplete, and their telling of it would last only as long as they were in it. Such a story would be a village, a city, a province, and this story is the whole world.

An untold story is an abomination, especially one as big as this. Every story wants to be told, in as many ways as possible, as many times as it can be said, and to as many people as there are to hear it. A story as big as the world will not countenance being cut into pieces and parceled out among entertainers, dotards, flatterers and historians. It sits, weighty and bold, covering the whole earth like a pregnant cloud. How dare we deny it for so long? The story does not care for truth or death. It does not concern itself with distance or disinterest. It knows no east or west, no good or bad. It wants only to seed the minds of everyone with ears to listen and eyes to see. It wants only to be heard a million times and be told a billion more. A story is unpredictable, that is truth: told the same way to five hundred people, it is soon five hundred stories. But untold it is malignant and dangerous, a thing that should not be.

The story, then, will be told, even if no one wants to tell it, and it will be heard, even if no one wants to hear it. It is a beast, and will take everything it can see inside itself; once told, it will enter and corrupt all that hear it. With a thousand mothers it will spawn ten thousand children. But untold, it will grow and grow unformed, and will make a void into which all of us will fall. So I will tell it. Not for free will I do this; I will have my fun. I will dress it up in robes and force it into rags, I will glorify it and praise it and flatter it and I will lie to it and deceive it and rob it blind. I will do what it wants, but I will also do murder and rape upon it. I am the only one there is to tell it, and so I claim that privilege. I will give it what it wants the most, and for that favor it will greatly indulge me: for I am a liar. And all stories are lies ­ this one more so than most. It needs me to tell it; and I need it to tell. The story knew it would find me, and in the end it will win: it feeds on the telling. I am its meat, and you as well; this world is its slaughterhouse. For this reason we live: to tell stories, to hear them told.