Aurorarama
Page 35
He had so many cards in his game right now that he would have needed a Siamese twin to hold them all. More cards, even, than the Seven Sleepers had ever had, more than anyone would ever have again. But it was now that things were going to be difficult. Revolution is not only revolution. It is slowing it down. Living up to it. Learning the legerdemain that changes promises to compromises.
His mind drifted off toward blueprints for a new constitution. A Council of the Commonwealth, with members elected by all the inhabitants from each of the Seven Sectors. The Council would designate the Organizing Officers. Their charges would be held for one year only. (Even his own? Wouldn’t he need more time?)
He shrugged. Whatever it was that he put on that paper, he knew that once it was built, it would work as well as a square wheel, and that the Commonwealth would always threaten to turn into a Commonwaste. Because, as it was written in A Blast, “some were wise, some foolish, some subtle and cunning to deceive, others plain-hearted, some strong, some weak, some rash and angry, some mild and quiet-spirited.” Because it would be his dream or vision, but not their dream or their vision. They all would live together under the same flag, playing at being a nation, but the only flag that would truly represent them would have to be a Penelope’s shroud woven and unwoven for someone who would never return, someone who had never been there. A banner as moving, as ever-changing, as ephemeral as the images under one’s eyelids before one falls asleep.
Through the archway and stained windows, colourful lights of all hues began to play more brightly, more wildly on the icicles of the fountain. Gabriel mumbled something to himself that Brentford could not make out. He came closer.
“The aurora, the aurora,” Gabriel muttered.
Yes. There could be no better flag.
Later, a thick, steady snow began to fall. Somewhere along Barents Boulevard, on the half-collapsed stands, the forgotten wax effigies of the Seven Sleepers had remained seated, slightly tilted, on the armchairs that propped them up. The surrounding street lamps gave a pale yellowish hue to their faces and a deep black sheen to their clothes, until the flakes dotted them, then covered them in patches, getting stuck in their beards and their eyelids. Their glassy eyes, faintly glinting in the gaslight, seemed to be all turned in the same direction: that of two small huddled figures sharing the same duffle coat, who stood in the snow, watching them in silence.
“And if any should like the world I have made, and be willing to be my subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such—I mean in their minds, fancies or imaginations. But if they cannot endure to be subjects, they may create worlds of their own, and govern themselves as they please.”
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
The Description of a New World,
or The Blazing World, 1666