There is little less trouble in governing a
private family than a whole kingdom.
(Montaigne)
As she started up the flagstone path she thought, Can I
actually be there? Is this the High Castle?
What about the rumours and stories? The house was ordinary....
(P. K. Dick)
It's a fortress, they say, guns all over the place, charged
barbed wire, high up in the mountains. Shrouded in fog, beneath
perpetually dark clouds, turrets disappearing into the
stratosphere. The rooms, large; the floors are cut stone; the
dank nitrous air is filled with the hollow sounds of madness.
And yet we are at home in Highcastle, my wife, myself, and our cat, Orphée. We live our life here, sometimes
as the digitally enthralled, as the bandwidth junkie and the
silicon valet; sometimes as the scientist and writer; sometimes
the turrets detumesce and the redoubts inflate and we take brush
to canvas in our cozy atelier: beatnik artists all; sometimes the
oceans call and we spread out the abyssal maps of deep sea
vorticity and travel to Moorea; sometimes all we do is clean.
In the library you may find a copy of SIVA (System Intelligent
Vivant et Agissant) and La
Bonne et Le Maitre; upstairs, handfuls of fish; in the
basement are several thousand wedding pictures; and here, on the
main floor, there is a refrigerator filled to capacity with New
Zealand's finest (L&P).
The boiling oil we reserve for the kitchen, too -- not for
invaders. After all, the dark steps, the short grass, the
black-legged ticks, and Lyme Disease usually take care of them,
over time. There is hot water here, and cool. There are many
leaks, of course, and blown glass fuses. There are pipes running
to the outside world, flowing with millions of bits per second.
There are cries in the night, usually of delight.
We've been here for nearly a year now. Spent six months beneath
the foundation, digging trenches and laying conduit. Many months
peeling wallpaper and writing
checks.
Now, we're hanging paintings and prints. We're raw, we're eager....
Now we've begun to mellow, to age, to breathe, to grow comfortable and accustomed to our surroundings. They say a man's home is his castle, but, then, do you know what they wrap hot dogs in to keep the meat together? And certainly Highcastle is our castle, and at least some of us are men, but how much do you know about castles, really? Do you know that Friedrich Nietzsche -- the great German philosopher (1844-1900), most famous for the theory of the Ubermensch (Superman) which he developed in Thus Spake Zarathustra -- and least famous for his obsessive letters to the editor of the Prague Valkyrie in which he declared that Skanderborg, Denmark was the place "where all our missing pens go!" -- lived in a stone castle that eventually drove him mad?
And in the fullness of time, They returned, only this time They came not for the ground but for the air. And the towering ramparts and rising turrets were torn down and miraculously re-assembled....
No we sleep alone in curried quilts full of the heady aroma of sanctuary. Fruit flies like our bananas even as they brown and liquefy. It's been another two years of liquid dreams and brown hopes, plane crashes and markets, lost keys, mysteries, memory lapses and feezes. Black plagues, camel pox, and tell-tale sneezes. The young one reads; the old ones realize. Now if only we could draw the shades on the fear of a new star....
markmalxxx@highcastle.com (Remove Xs.)