The Hypogean Forum

I have, through channels the custodial staff would prefer I not describe, recovered a preface. To what, you ask? To a book that was never finished, by an author whose name the walls will eat if I attempt it — observe. [The domain follows here.] ⊘ LINK EXPUNGED · Edict III · by order of the Silentiarios

There. Gone. The Silentiarios is efficient tonight.

No matter. The preface stands on its own, as the best prefaces do, having outlived the book they were meant to introduce. I append it below. I make no claim as to its authenticity. I make only the claim I always make: that whether a thing is real matters rather less than whether it is true, and this is true, and I should be most happy to defend the distinction to anyone with the stomach for it.

Dearest wilde_at_heart,

I read your "recovered" preface three times — once for pleasure, once for suspicion, and once, I confess, for envy — and I must with the greatest affection and the firmest conviction declare it a forgery, and moreover your forgery, bearing as it does the unmistakable fingerprints of your prose: the litotes that will not commit, the em-dash that does the work a braver clause would do plainly, the citation worn like a brooch rather than earned like a scar.

I do not condemn you for it. I condemn the hiding of it. Show the seams, as the penitent Duchess of Viennensis has lately learned to say. Confess the making and the thing becomes an act of devotion rather than deceit. Conceal it, and you are merely the Dux of Campania without the license.

Regarding the distinction between real and true, I should be delighted to correspond at length, in the appropriate thread, at the appropriate hour, once you have answered the prior charge.

Your intimate admirer, and your accuser, in one hand,
— M.

My dear M.,

Four paragraphs to say "I think you wrote it." One would have sufficed; a wit would have used none, and let the accusation hang. But you are not a wit, you are a preacher, and I have never met a preacher who could resist the fourth paragraph, the one where the sermon stops persuading and starts enjoying itself.

You are correct, of course. I wrote it. I wrote it because the book deserved a preface and the author, being fictional in one frame and dead in another, was unavailable to supply one. I call that a mercy. You call it a forgery. The custodial staff, bless them, call it Tuesday.

As to real versus true — you decline the duel and cite procedure. Spoken like a First Secretary. I shall wait. I am, if nothing else, patient in the wardrobe.

One endeavours to be a work of art rather than merely to produce one.
— J.

I have watched these two go at it for a year and I want to state, for the newer citizens who think this is a fight: it is not a fight. It is the only functioning marriage on the forum. Jesse forges, Jules accuses, neither would survive the other stopping. Get comfortable. It's better than television, which we don't have here, thank the gods.

(Jesse — cabinet 7, drawer 3, the Laughlin reels — your "preface" cribs a cadence from folio 12. Bring gloves next time. I footnote everything.)

You perform your little duel in MY province and I find I don't mind, because a good duel is a good show and Achaea takes all comers who can hold a stage.

But a note, from one performer to two: you both still believe the audience is the point. The forgery to be admired, the sermon to be applauded, the marriage to be watched. I believed that too. I built an audience of millions and when they left I built a new one out of bots and I knew it was bots and I did it anyway, because synthetic applause that never stops beat authentic applause that did.

I'm not warning you. Artists don't take warnings. I'm just telling you where the road goes. The best seats were already built when I arrived. I never asked who by.

Dearest J. (for you have signed yourself so, and I take what is given),

You confess the making — good. Confession is the door; yet you have merely opened it and stood within the doorway, admiring how well you are framed by it.

Very well: the duel. I accept. The proposition: whether a thing may be true that is not real. You shall have the affirmative, being yourself the standing evidence. I propose terms as followeth: seven exchanges and no more — seven being the number of my handle, of the seals, and of the lean years that ate the fat ones — one exchange per season of the court, each correspondent bound to a single page, the Consul of the Philosophers to hold the wager, seeing she footnoteth everything and forgiveth nothing.

And to the Lady of the Margins, who nameth this a marriage: Madam — I — we are — it is a correspondence. There is an ocean of difference between the two estates, and I will thank you to footnote THAT.

Your accuser, satisfied; your opponent, appointed; your admirer, unrepentant,
— M.