Castles in the Air

Dear Magus,

Since discovering ley lines some years ago, I have been forced anew to consider what it means to be both in a place but not in a place, grounded and yet not grounded, traveling and yet stationary. Ley lines, though tightly woven into the fabric of historical and substantial places, are simultaneously opportunities for fantastic flight from them into... well, the whither of ley line travel (much less than the whence) is a mystery still. We are in the early days of this science.

In any event, such travel has piqued my curiosity, and it also funded my hermeneutical horizons  anew with perplexing exegetical considerations. As I have mentioned before, although in this world we only have broken pieces of our core text, in other realms it appears they have, and are able to duplicate, their scriptures whole. Given how much we celebrate the recurring shattering of scripture as it seeds the world, the discovery that other "places" receive their scriptures whole and undivided is a source of wonder.

So, one such gentleman working in trade on the Baltic, shared this consideration with me in a recent letter: "The Bible does not exclude everything else but unlocks and discloses everything else." Well, precisely so, but I would have thought it did so in its shattered and incompleteness, not assembled as codex.

However, I can see how I have perhaps constructed a purist fantasy (even a fetish) out of our "distributed" text which as just as dangerous as purities that celebrate the unity and diachronic durability of a codex.

Philosophers do not want to recognize their own activity. They want to be pure philosophers and not authors, least of all poets. This means they want to be independent of what no poet is independent of, the sensuous and accidental. They want the theory of the text, not the physical writing of the text.

So it is never the Scripture that is needed alone, but the text as key.

My friend continues: "And though the senses may ever so deceive and history be ever so simple: I prefer them to all the castles in the air--only no purified, disengaged, and empty words--which I avoid like deep water and slippery ice."

This last has especially intrigued me, since the effects of castles in the air on recent geo-political situations has been so incredibly negative, horrific even. Those who live and fight from there, launching their remote drones, are so much more to be feared than those soldiers and officers who mix with the people and embrace the sensuous and accidental.

Yours,

The Ecclesiast

p.s. Please forward this letter on to the Alpinist. I feel it may aid him in his various peregrinations.