(4) “What Is the Truth—How Shall We Approach It and Its Importance to Our Understanding of the Gray Caps”—speech by Sarah Potent
(5) “Channeling the Dead—Its Impact on Our Understanding of the Gray Caps”—speech by Roger Seabold
(6) “I Am the True Descendant of Samuel Tonsure”—speech by James “Tonsure” Williams
(7) “Evidence for the Existence of a City-Sized Fungus”—speech by Frederick Madnok [as read by Harry Flack in Mr. Madnok’s absence]
I think the agenda alone should give some insight into the kinds of buffoons with which Duncan had aligned himself. He had gone from writing legitimate books to writing legitimate articles to teaching at a legitimate school to scandal and heartbreak, and now lived a sad existence at the very fringe of his chosen field.
(Again, unfair. I appreciate your protectiveness, but the truth is often so strange that one cannot, at the outset, discard even the most ridiculous of theories, the silliest of suppositions. Remember how I let my students do my research for me? This was a similar situation—I was always searching for the sliver of truth in the outlandishness presented at those meetings. Even the most absurd theory might have in its core details, its foundation, some hint of information about the gray caps, something to be salvaged or redirected. I attended those meetings for that reason, not because I believed everything I heard, or even wanted to be associated with all of them. But who else, Janice, would publish my “crackpot theories”? No one after the war except, ultimately, Sirin. And even he didn’t do it properly, as you—my benign, self-chosen executioner—well know.)
Certainly, I was used to dealing with strange people—I’ve never met an artist who wasn’t at some level a deeply strange or estranged person. But this was different. These were people on the edge of the edge of sanity. Oddities. Carpenters who, in their spare time, developed paranoid theories about House Hoegbotton that grew to full fruition in the dark, glistening spaces of their imaginations. Stay-at-home wives who, bored, had bought into the more lurid broadsheet headlines. Self-hating bank clerks making a pittance who had curdled inside and defended the gray caps because they would have cheered if the gray caps had risen up and taken over the city. People who believed they were the reincarnation of historical figures like Tonsure. And, on the fringes of those fringes, homeless people who used the meetings to take shelter. The mentally challenged who had been discharged from the now-destroyed Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital. I even thought I spied a gray shape that resembled my former fellow inmate Edward at one point, although when I looked again, he was gone.
And those were just the audience members.
How the spittle flew during the meeting I observed! The sour taste of vitriol! The sad, lonely, pathetic, nervous, neurotic, psychotic, exposed underbelly of the city.
“In my opinion, Tonsure was a gray cap disguised as a priest.”
“The grace with which the fungus leapt from tree to tree astounded me.”
“I didn’t realize I had the gift to channel ghosts until I was twelve.”
“In the vast, empty spaces beneath the city, this huge fungus has taken over and means to envelop us in its clammy grasp.”
“Being a woman, I am more attuned to the feelings of inanimate objects.”
And Duncan wanted to become their leader: the Lord of the Disinclined. Disinclined to work. Disinclined to hold a job. The Disenchanted who had never been enchanting, except, perhaps, as children. No wonder Mary hated that group. I hated that group. We could have taken an oath of solidarity on that much, at least. (And yet, they, and I, are much closer to the truth than those who scoffed at our organization, regardless of the sometimes illegitimate evidence provided at those meetings. I sense a certain amount of snobbery in your remarks, Janice, as if the only people worth a damn are artists or writers or playwrights—but look back on your own description of the New Art and the New Artists. Were they really any different, except that the results of their obsessions and imagination were more forcefully inflicted upon the world? Sometimes a theory or idea is as strangely beautiful as that expressed by any painting, even when it’s articulated by those who are not articulate.
(Let me tell you what I saw that day, at that meeting. I saw a woman trying to come to terms with the death of her sister by inexplicable means. She did so by taking what facts she knew about Samuel Tonsure and bending them to a theory that attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable. In that forced assimilation of fact and fancy, Janice, there might have been a fragment of truth, even if only a psychological truth. Perhaps by seeing Tonsure in a different light than I, she advanced my understanding of him one tiny increment.
(Sarah Potent’s diatribe about the truth, taking as her basis Stretcher Jones’s rebellion against the Kalif and expanding it to include many of the unanswered questions about Ambergris’s past—wasn’t she, in disguised form, asking the same questions we all have asked from time to time? Does she deserve vilification for trying to think her way through all of this?
(Could you have missed the beauty of Frederick Madnok’s theory that Ambergris is “shadowed” from below by a giant fungus, wide as the city and deep as the city is tall, through which catacomb the tunnels of the gray caps? Could you not see the utter precision and craftsmanship of his many diagrams? The humor of the labeling—a sense of humor that tells the reader that Madnok knows how outlandish his theory may sound.
(There is an art, Janice, to being an outsider, a skill to being a good crackpot. Some people decide to become writers of fiction and this is considered a legitimate endeavor. Others decide to make their expressions of the imagination more personal. I, for one, gained more from that meeting than from any novel I have ever read!)
But the fact is, Duncan didn’t see them as they really were, only as he wanted them to be: a society of visionaries, of dreamers, of revolutionaries. Apparently so enthralled by them that he lost his wits for a time, Duncan became antisocial and avoided me. (Who could blame me, considering your attitude then? So similar to your attitude toward Mary. Oh, the irony, considering her attitude toward AFTOIS.) As these crackpots began to take up more and more of his time, he began to forget to bathe. He didn’t change his clothes for weeks on end. He babbled to himself. (I missed Mary terribly. I missed her so much, Janice. I don’t know if you can conceive of how much I missed her.)
Worst of all, Duncan assumed more and more responsibility for the AFTOIS newsletter, as Lacond became sicker, meaning that Duncan wrote less as his increased editorial duties ate up his time.
Like Lacond, Duncan did not censor theories in conflict with his own. Duncan believed, given the inability of most “experts” to absorb the truth about the gray caps, that all outlandish theories should be given an airing, regardless of their validity. He thought that this would make minds receptive to the unusual and improbable, “softening resistance,” as he used to mutter, “to reality. A kind of general insurrection against the complacent surface of things.” (For all the good it did me.)
To this end, the journal, which he edited more and more “in the name of” the still-living Lacond—even writing essays under Lacond’s name—became even more eccentric, and thus ever more dismissed, unread by a populace living in denial. (But some of these theories were beautiful and elegant, no matter how wrong-headed. For example, “morelmancy”—divination of the future from mushrooms … or, as you called it, much to my amusement, “a flowering of spores, long dormant, a colorful array—of insanity.” Not everything beautiful has to be true to have value, you know.)