There's a message on a board saying the queen will fall one day. And the men are running wild. A castle won't hold them all. A castle with no queen and no crown. The men will cry. The men will die. Perdition manifestos will replace their bibles. Death will tattoo their necks. And the fear is such that the men grab the troves and the treaties and run away. The North is lost. The compass went mad. Let's ditch our lands and live on the shores of Terameer.
A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative…. That is why constant learning softens your brain…. Stopping the creation of your own thoughts to give room for the thoughts from other books reminds me of Shakespeare’s remark about his contemporaries who sold their land in order to see other countries.
Arthur Schopenhauer, January 9
Movement lost them in the first place. Motion destroyed their hearts and ate their core. And all they had left were their wandering feet. Lost in the sand. Most gave up their minds to the vile winds of the valleys. But for those who waited, their walk led them to Sougeysez. The land with no kingdoms and no kings. Where people share their food, where property and reign have no language equivalents. Mine and yours are one and the same. And the Sougeysi dialect makes it clear. Sougeysez's medicine man sees them from afar. And as his father and grand-father did, he spreads his arms and says "Let them in".
Let them in. In order for it to work, the door must remain unlocked. People might enter without knocking, they might crash your party and drink your wine. Let them in, and let them drink – because you might meet somebody interesting.
Amanda Palmer
The youngest men in the tribe sat around the wanderers. 9 were left. The Sougeysi give power to the youth. They are the ones who lead the hunts and pierce the game. They are the ones who dance first during ceremonies. And because they've never been to a ceremony before, the opening dance is always different. The Sougeysi tradition is one of constant change. The 9 men show them their broken compasses, their maps and their treaties. They explain with signs and drawings. And the youngsters laugh and smile.
Scientists can be too rational. They're like a rich man drowned by ambition and to whom you need to smile and remind he might not be on the right track.
Kauffa, The only travelling Sougeysi
Kauffa takes his pen and grabs one of the men's maps. He writes a poem in the margin. He draws a deer and a wild boar. He describes the 9 men in Sougeysi. The men look at one another. These maps are their only guides to Terameer. Should they stop Kauffa ? Should they take the maps and the treaties and run ? But the eldest wanderer isn't looking at them. He is looking at Kauffa. He is reminded of a time where he used to populate the margins of his own booklets with nonsense and off-topic thoughts.
Marginalia
The name the elder used to give to those fragments of thought and seeds of insight he scribbled in the margins of a book
The men who sold their land look at each other. They've lost their lord and their North. They've lost their compass and their core. They landed in a village where everything belongs to everyone. Where doors open to strangers.
The queen's men sold their lands but got paid in souls. They breathe a new air and their empty lungs take it in. While aiming for Terameer, they forgot the margins of their journey. And slowly their mind, drowned by the smoke of the Sougeysi hookahs, leapt into a world where margins are the journey. Where logic takes a stroll in the fields of idleness and absurdity. And they smiled, and they stopped and they breathed.