1. There is no need to describe the aim of magic; sure, I could just enumerate some common uses, but this would be a self-serving endeavor — its purpose would not be to understand magic. Therefore, we would lose focus in the Arts themselves, by losing ourselves into a vague description, and perhaps even trick ourselves into thinking this leisurely activity can help us know them (the Arts) without putting in the required labor.
Such were the thoughts of a young man one evening, as he was ordering his notes and the skies churn and roared from beyond his window. His thesis consisted of his own original re-systematization of modern magic; it would develop many years later into a proper book, of which purpose seems to have been the baffling of scholars for many hundreds of years thereafter.
2. “If I could effectively explain my aims into an abstract, as I’m told I must do by my professors” he muttered to himself, “I would not write the thesis in the first place; for it would suffice to leave this introductory note.” If he must write an introduction, he might as well use it to complain. Cognition must start somewhere, after all; might as well initiate it by laying down the problems, be them soaked in a certain amount of frustration.
3. “In the name of God, Mave, what are you on about?” said another youngster from behind him. The room was only lit by a lantern of the boy working on his thesis, the other side remaining almost completely dark. “I’m trying to fall asleep; besides the thunderstorm outside I must deal with your nonsense too?” he continued, calm despite the reprisal.
”Shut up Henry”, was all the wizard Mave could manage in response.
”No, you shut up. I’ve had enough of this. Everyone writes abstracts all the time, why are you making such a big deal?”
“Because,” he started with a certain amount of excitement, “and you should know this, it may well pass as a concern with the real issue when it fact it is...”
”Merely a device to avoid the thing itself. Yes, you are sure to repeat this every day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now shut up.”
A wise man would recognize that at times he must take a loss with dignity instead of embarrassing himself further by desperately trying to fix what cannot be fixed. However, young men are not very wise, and Mave was by all accounts a young man:
”Stating an aim is a generalization, or abstraction, devoid of power! And a simple result is nothing but a corpse! It’s simple to just draw boundaries between thinkers. Instead of dealing with the real issues, you just say, well the Theorem of Living Forces stops where Theorem of Unliving Forces begins, but do not see how they relate to each other in a process! It’s easy to just describe this as such and such, comprehension is much harder.”
Despite Mave’s efforts, there was no reply. If the rain wasn’t so loud, one would be able to hear regular breathing in the darker side of the room, where Henry must have cast some sort of spell on himself. This, of course, did not bother a young man, who kept indenting ink on paper.
4. An appropriate number of hours of sleep later, for Henry if not for Mave, that specific quality of light and smell from after a storm enveloped campus. At Laude, everyone would gather in a small chapel to pray and meditate in silence. Then, they would listen to a passage read aloud by the current Primo Frate, current take-carer of the chapel, from one of the old tomes. These did not have the purpose of helping the students understand any of the materials of their study; it had instead the purpose of letting them get acquainted with a general view of them. It was the purpose of introductory classes to give them to tools to classify the knowledge and form arguments that would allow them to accept or negate statements on this body of knowledge, and reading the materials was the primary source of the knowledge itself. And eventually, students would be able to pass serious judgements on these tomes, fully living besides, in syntony or against, magic, by virtue of their comprehension, having penetrated its depth through speculative effort.
So went the theory; but in practice it seems that people were feeling wise enough by virtue of having the ability to quote the old tomes, or at best dogmatically reapply the spell-structures used therein. It was this social phenomenon that bothered our hero. And perhaps not just him.
5. Having finished chanting the verses — for ancient tomes were written as poetry, as it was thought in those times that magic must be recited with much care for rhythm, tone, and cadence — the Primo Frate, a bony man in his mid-thirties, of medium height and dark complexion, performed the usual rituals that signed the end of the meditation: sprinkling a special concoction into a vase of water, that assistants — a handful of older men and women, usually peasants that had suffered some sort of contorted fate and were as a result obliged to flee their homes — would distribute to each of the students in small purple-blue cups with no ears. The Frate had his own, except his was decorated with a golden pattern around the rim. Then, following the Frate they would dip two fingers in the liquid, and draw two lines that went from the forehead to the chin, across both eyes. He would then say: “The shapes of truth are many, and we grasp them through love of knowing.” Then the public echoed in unison: “Through love we grasp them.” At this point, people left in an orderly manner, mediated by the assistants. The Frate waited for the chapel to empty.
”At long last you can return to your study”, an old woman said, as the last youngster left, and the heavy doors were shut again. The cool dampness had been somewhat alleviated by the fresh air but would soon return to its former glory. She rested her hand on his shoulder.
”That seems to be the case” He remained still for a few seconds. Just before she exited through the back, into the assistant’s dormitories, he called to the woman. “Elsa? Will you converse with me for a bit?”
She smiled. “Of course. Is this about your rebellion again?”
“You are correct. Please hear me out. I’m thinking of submitting my request to the Rector today. Then perhaps he would allow me to take pilgrimage to Caracorum, where I could meet up with the Saints...”
”Dear Elias, who would take care of our chapel? Would you leave us at the mercy of the local wizards?”
“I must, Elsa. Or would you rather accompany me?”
She burst out laughing, but her smile was sweet. “I am happy you suggest it, but as you can see, I am an old woman. I cannot take such a journey. Forgive me young Elias, it’s not for fear of death; I fear to slow you down.”
”If so, then you shouldn’t fear my absence.” he reproached.
”I fear for the structure, not for myself. I am outside the structure, for I await my end, but the others rely on it. And there aren’t many high officials as kind to the structure as you.”
“You are wise, and for this I seek your counsel.” This was the cue for her to take leave. As she opened the door to the assistant’s corridor behind Elias, he added: “The day will come when mere love turns into concrete science — when hardened speculative effort prevails upon the pretense of intuition of the Essence. You will see.”
She waited for him to finish before closing the door behind her.
6. Mave was running back to his dorm, which he had left at Laude in a complete mess. This was a common phenomenon, and one could see, if they were standing on the hill where the chapel was located, various groups of students wearing brown robes and sandals, heading in a common direction.
“Silliness” he scorned, “as if any other shape besides systematic formality can give us understanding of magic. Love my arse!”
The group he was part of consisted of two other boys and a girl. One of them was grinning, and about to make a joke (probably about how loving is for women) when the girl, Clara, interrupted him. Her figure was shorter than everyone else’s.
”Without love you cannot possibly understand Essence”, she argued mightily.
”You don’t even know what that means” Mave returned.
”Calm down idiots, none of you know what anything means” said the other one of the boys. He was hovering tall over the group, despite standing with a slouch. His tone was lazy and somehow agreeable, which allowed for harsher words to be taken relatively well by others. “Consider when you cast a spell; it’s not the formulas and complex theorems you think of. It’s just the feeling, and yet it works! It works!”
”You sound like an engineer, Barth” said Clara. “But I agree.”
“It’s true, go work with the second regiment’s machinery, I heard they also work.” added the boy whose joke never made the light of day. Or early morning.
“Silliness, making fun of things working is making fun of the corpus of knowledge that predicted its construction would be worth the price and labor, it’s making fun of the labor of arriving at the knowledge itself!” Mave scolded. “You have all been brainwashed. And you too Barth! You too.”
He stopped abruptly, held up his arm and softly expired; a gust of wind and light circled around his palm. The others stopped few moments after, instinctively, and turned to look at him, confused and most likely a bit insulted.
”What are you doing?” Clara asked.
”Wait and see” Barth said, his voice somewhat excited, “this is something we’ve been working on the past two months. It’s quite something.”
Low clouds formed above Mave, and the whirling wind in his hand made itself longer and longer, reaching for the sky. He then kneeled and put his other hand on the ground, slowly, lowering the other hand as well as a consequence. He posed the wind in his hand on that spot of earth he had embedded with magic, fixing this thin tornado on that spot.
”We’ve pinned it down! I’ll show you the formula later today...” Barth continued. “Even so Mave, this is petty, it doesn’t prove your point. You’ve now produced this through feeling, no? Also, people are staring.” Barth slashed with his arm over the column of whirling wind, which wavered, then stumped upon the spot on the earth, nullifying Mave’s magic. “We’ll present this formally next week. I don’t want people talking nonsense.”
“They’ve seen us plenty performing on the laboratory’s fields. Stop being annoying.”
“Stop being petty.”
“The point is,” Mave exhaled, “we couldn’t have made this if we didn’t work out the principles that led to what we called the Pin Theorem. The feeling of magic is just a trivial consequence of being a wizard. It’s just the necessary mediator between our cognition of Substance and Substance in itself, through us. We are a vessel, but we need a motor. That motor, if you will, is feeling.”
”OK, and? You can never really comprehend that feeling. C’mon, let’s go.” He made to continue their way to the dorm. “It’s not like we have all morning. Listen, intuition is how you truly comprehend the Essence. A peasant might study for a few years, as the assistants of the chapel master often do, and understand the basic principles of magic, but they lack that feeling, what we call divine love — without being blessed, what can they do with cognition?” finished Barth triumphantly, if a bit out of breath. “Nothing!”
″Sorry to interrupt, but I’m off” said the other boy, killing Barth’s sense of prowess. The group had arrived at the dorm area. They waved their hand at him as he hurried his way to a building to the right. Clara excused herself as well and directed herself on an alley further ahead. Shortly after, the remaining two arrived, and Barth opened the door to the eleventh block section A, made a sign for Mave to enter first, and then followed in silence.
notes, 1-6
What follows is a parody of an old text.
epilogue
1. There is no need to describe the aim of magic; sure, I could just enumerate some common uses, but this would be a self-serving endeavor — its purpose would not be to understand magic. Therefore, we would lose focus in the Arts themselves, by losing ourselves into a vague description, and perhaps even trick ourselves into thinking this leisurely activity can help us know them (the Arts) without putting in the required labor.
Such were the thoughts of a young man one evening, as he was ordering his notes and the skies churn and roared from beyond his window. His thesis consisted of his own original re-systematization of modern magic; it would develop many years later into a proper book, of which purpose seems to have been the baffling of scholars for many hundreds of years thereafter.
2. “If I could effectively explain my aims into an abstract, as I’m told I must do by my professors” he muttered to himself, “I would not write the thesis in the first place; for it would suffice to leave this introductory note.” If he must write an introduction, he might as well use it to complain. Cognition must start somewhere, after all; might as well initiate it by laying down the problems, be them soaked in a certain amount of frustration.
3. “In the name of God, Mave, what are you on about?” said another youngster from behind him. The room was only lit by a lantern of the boy working on his thesis, the other side remaining almost completely dark. “I’m trying to fall asleep; besides the thunderstorm outside I must deal with your nonsense too?” he continued, calm despite the reprisal.
”Shut up Henry”, was all the wizard Mave could manage in response.
”No, you shut up. I’ve had enough of this. Everyone writes abstracts all the time, why are you making such a big deal?”
“Because,” he started with a certain amount of excitement, “and you should know this, it may well pass as a concern with the real issue when it fact it is...”
”Merely a device to avoid the thing itself. Yes, you are sure to repeat this every day at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Now shut up.”
A wise man would recognize that at times he must take a loss with dignity instead of embarrassing himself further by desperately trying to fix what cannot be fixed. However, young men are not very wise, and Mave was by all accounts a young man:
”Stating an aim is a generalization, or abstraction, devoid of power! And a simple result is nothing but a corpse! It’s simple to just draw boundaries between thinkers. Instead of dealing with the real issues, you just say, well the Theorem of Living Forces stops where Theorem of Unliving Forces begins, but do not see how they relate to each other in a process! It’s easy to just describe this as such and such, comprehension is much harder.”
Despite Mave’s efforts, there was no reply. If the rain wasn’t so loud, one would be able to hear regular breathing in the darker side of the room, where Henry must have cast some sort of spell on himself. This, of course, did not bother a young man, who kept indenting ink on paper.
4. An appropriate number of hours of sleep later, for Henry if not for Mave, that specific quality of light and smell from after a storm enveloped campus. At Laude, everyone would gather in a small chapel to pray and meditate in silence. Then, they would listen to a passage read aloud by the current Primo Frate, current take-carer of the chapel, from one of the old tomes. These did not have the purpose of helping the students understand any of the materials of their study; it had instead the purpose of letting them get acquainted with a general view of them. It was the purpose of introductory classes to give them to tools to classify the knowledge and form arguments that would allow them to accept or negate statements on this body of knowledge, and reading the materials was the primary source of the knowledge itself. And eventually, students would be able to pass serious judgements on these tomes, fully living besides, in syntony or against, magic, by virtue of their comprehension, having penetrated its depth through speculative effort.
So went the theory; but in practice it seems that people were feeling wise enough by virtue of having the ability to quote the old tomes, or at best dogmatically reapply the spell-structures used therein. It was this social phenomenon that bothered our hero. And perhaps not just him.
5. Having finished chanting the verses — for ancient tomes were written as poetry, as it was thought in those times that magic must be recited with much care for rhythm, tone, and cadence — the Primo Frate, a bony man in his mid-thirties, of medium height and dark complexion, performed the usual rituals that signed the end of the meditation: sprinkling a special concoction into a vase of water, that assistants — a handful of older men and women, usually peasants that had suffered some sort of contorted fate and were as a result obliged to flee their homes — would distribute to each of the students in small purple-blue cups with no ears. The Frate had his own, except his was decorated with a golden pattern around the rim. Then, following the Frate they would dip two fingers in the liquid, and draw two lines that went from the forehead to the chin, across both eyes. He would then say: “The shapes of truth are many, and we grasp them through love of knowing.” Then the public echoed in unison: “Through love we grasp them.” At this point, people left in an orderly manner, mediated by the assistants. The Frate waited for the chapel to empty.
”At long last you can return to your study”, an old woman said, as the last youngster left, and the heavy doors were shut again. The cool dampness had been somewhat alleviated by the fresh air but would soon return to its former glory. She rested her hand on his shoulder.
”That seems to be the case” He remained still for a few seconds. Just before she exited through the back, into the assistant’s dormitories, he called to the woman. “Elsa? Will you converse with me for a bit?”
She smiled. “Of course. Is this about your rebellion again?”
“You are correct. Please hear me out. I’m thinking of submitting my request to the Rector today. Then perhaps he would allow me to take pilgrimage to Caracorum, where I could meet up with the Saints...”
”Dear Elias, who would take care of our chapel? Would you leave us at the mercy of the local wizards?”
“I must, Elsa. Or would you rather accompany me?”
She burst out laughing, but her smile was sweet. “I am happy you suggest it, but as you can see, I am an old woman. I cannot take such a journey. Forgive me young Elias, it’s not for fear of death; I fear to slow you down.”
”If so, then you shouldn’t fear my absence.” he reproached.
”I fear for the structure, not for myself. I am outside the structure, for I await my end, but the others rely on it. And there aren’t many high officials as kind to the structure as you.”
“You are wise, and for this I seek your counsel.” This was the cue for her to take leave. As she opened the door to the assistant’s corridor behind Elias, he added: “The day will come when mere love turns into concrete science — when hardened speculative effort prevails upon the pretense of intuition of the Essence. You will see.”
She waited for him to finish before closing the door behind her.
6. Mave was running back to his dorm, which he had left at Laude in a complete mess. This was a common phenomenon, and one could see, if they were standing on the hill where the chapel was located, various groups of students wearing brown robes and sandals, heading in a common direction.
“Silliness” he scorned, “as if any other shape besides systematic formality can give us understanding of magic. Love my arse!”
The group he was part of consisted of two other boys and a girl. One of them was grinning, and about to make a joke (probably about how loving is for women) when the girl, Clara, interrupted him. Her figure was shorter than everyone else’s.
”Without love you cannot possibly understand Essence”, she argued mightily.
”You don’t even know what that means” Mave returned.
”Calm down idiots, none of you know what anything means” said the other one of the boys. He was hovering tall over the group, despite standing with a slouch. His tone was lazy and somehow agreeable, which allowed for harsher words to be taken relatively well by others. “Consider when you cast a spell; it’s not the formulas and complex theorems you think of. It’s just the feeling, and yet it works! It works!”
”You sound like an engineer, Barth” said Clara. “But I agree.”
“It’s true, go work with the second regiment’s machinery, I heard they also work.” added the boy whose joke never made the light of day. Or early morning.
“Silliness, making fun of things working is making fun of the corpus of knowledge that predicted its construction would be worth the price and labor, it’s making fun of the labor of arriving at the knowledge itself!” Mave scolded. “You have all been brainwashed. And you too Barth! You too.”
He stopped abruptly, held up his arm and softly expired; a gust of wind and light circled around his palm. The others stopped few moments after, instinctively, and turned to look at him, confused and most likely a bit insulted.
”What are you doing?” Clara asked.
”Wait and see” Barth said, his voice somewhat excited, “this is something we’ve been working on the past two months. It’s quite something.”
Low clouds formed above Mave, and the whirling wind in his hand made itself longer and longer, reaching for the sky. He then kneeled and put his other hand on the ground, slowly, lowering the other hand as well as a consequence. He posed the wind in his hand on that spot of earth he had embedded with magic, fixing this thin tornado on that spot.
Clara’s almond-shaped chestnut eyes widened. “It’s completely pinned?”
”We’ve pinned it down! I’ll show you the formula later today...” Barth continued. “Even so Mave, this is petty, it doesn’t prove your point. You’ve now produced this through feeling, no? Also, people are staring.” Barth slashed with his arm over the column of whirling wind, which wavered, then stumped upon the spot on the earth, nullifying Mave’s magic. “We’ll present this formally next week. I don’t want people talking nonsense.”
“They’ve seen us plenty performing on the laboratory’s fields. Stop being annoying.”
“Stop being petty.”
“The point is,” Mave exhaled, “we couldn’t have made this if we didn’t work out the principles that led to what we called the Pin Theorem. The feeling of magic is just a trivial consequence of being a wizard. It’s just the necessary mediator between our cognition of Substance and Substance in itself, through us. We are a vessel, but we need a motor. That motor, if you will, is feeling.”
”OK, and? You can never really comprehend that feeling. C’mon, let’s go.” He made to continue their way to the dorm. “It’s not like we have all morning. Listen, intuition is how you truly comprehend the Essence. A peasant might study for a few years, as the assistants of the chapel master often do, and understand the basic principles of magic, but they lack that feeling, what we call divine love — without being blessed, what can they do with cognition?” finished Barth triumphantly, if a bit out of breath. “Nothing!”
″Sorry to interrupt, but I’m off” said the other boy, killing Barth’s sense of prowess. The group had arrived at the dorm area. They waved their hand at him as he hurried his way to a building to the right. Clara excused herself as well and directed herself on an alley further ahead. Shortly after, the remaining two arrived, and Barth opened the door to the eleventh block section A, made a sign for Mave to enter first, and then followed in silence.
[cont.]