Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

by Samuel R. Delany

  The driver laughed.

  Pryn sat a long time staring at the sky.

  Now, old city of dragons and dreams, of doubts and terrors and all wondrous expectation, despite your rule by the absent fathers, it’s between us two!

  Montréal—New York

  July 1980—November 1981

  Appendix A: The Culhar’ Correspondence

  [The Neveryón tales, of which Neveryóna (‘The Tale of Signs and Cities’) is the sixth, are based on an ancient text of approximately 900 words known as the Culhar’ Fragment or, sometimes, the Missolonghi Codex, which has been found translated into numerous ancient languages. Because of the Culhar’s incomplete nature as well as its geographical dissemination among so many cultures, it has been difficult to assign an even reasonably indisputable origin to it, either as to date, land, or language of composition. In 1974, however, a comparative retranslation of the text from the various languages in which various versions have been found was presented by a young, black, American scholar, K. Leslie Steiner, along with an extensive commentary. Steiner’s work is notable not only for its linguistic interest but also because of its mathematical side. The first collection of tales (Tales of Nevèrÿon, Samuel R. Delany, Bantam Books; New York, 1979) was clearly in dialogue with Steiner’s findings. That volume concluded with an Appendix, written by archeologist S. L Kermit, giving a general review of the Culhar’s history as well as the thrusts of both Steiner’s mathematical and interpretive work. Among the responses to both the tales and the appended monograph, one, addressed to Kermit, seems worth publishing (en appendice) along with the engendered correspondence, for the readers of the present (or indeed the absent) text.]

  New Haven

  February 1981

  To S. L. Kermit:

  I have just read your comments on the Culhar’, and Steiner’s translation of same, and I feel that some remarks are in order.

  I have checked the literature, and the Appendix to Delany’s work seems to be your first foray into archeology or text redaction (unless you are the S. Kermit who wrote the annotations to the most recent edition of Dee’s Necronomicon, in which case my congratulations; it was a solid piece of work). I would suggest that before you make another attempt you learn something about the topics you discuss. Or rather, learn something more; you’re obviously not ignorant, but your knowledge fails you at a number of points. Some examples follow (page numbers from the current edition of Tales of Nevèrÿon, London and Hanover, 1993).

  p. 247: ‘Proto-Latin.’ I haven’t any idea what you are referring to, unless it be archaic Latin. The prefix ‘proto’ is used to refer to reconstructions of early stages of languages, ‘early’ here being sometime before those languages were reduced to writing. Thus, you can’t have a text of a proto-language. If you do, it is an attested language, and no longer a construct. The proto-language which is the postulated ancestor of Latin is referred to either as proto-Italic or proto-Italo-Celtic, depending on your theoretical bias.

  p. 247: ‘…4,500 B.C., or even 5,000 B.C., which put it [the Culhar’ Fragment] practically inside the muzzy boundaries of the neolithic revolution.’ The two scholars I asked agreed that the neolithic period was roughly 6500 B.C.,–3000 B.C. Thus your dates are about as solidly neolithic as is possible.

  p. 248: You mention that Blegan found a Greek version [of the Culhar’] in the fourth level down at Hissarlik, i.e., at Troy VI. This is highly interesting, as it is the only evidence I know of that the Trojans spoke Greek. Given the location, an Anatolian language seems more likely. Nor is it possible that it was put there by the Greeks, since the numbering of the cities is done from the bottom up, and VI is older than VIIa, the historical Ilium. Any text in VI was in Troy before the Greeks got there.

  p. 248: ‘The only ancient people who did not, apparently, know of the Culhar’ fragment were, oddly, the Attic Greeks…’ This is indeed odd, since it implies that the Ionic and Doric Greeks did, and if this is so, it is about the only thing the groups didn’t share. Greek culture of that period was a nearly seamless whole; we differentiate among them by the recorded dialect differences.

  p. 251: ‘…the young engineer Michael Ventris…’ Ventris would probably be slightly wounded by this, as he was an architect.

  251: ‘The parchment itself…most probably dates from the third century A.D., but it is also most probably a copy made from a much older source…’ You’re damned right it is! Linear B ceased to be used around 1200 B.C., with the fall of Pylos! This makes it just about dead certain that whoever copied it didn’t know the meaning of the characters. And by the way, Linear B didn’t have ‘letters.’ Letters are those graphic symbols used in an alphabetic system only. You can no more refer to syllabic characters as ‘letters’ than you could hieroglyphs.

  251: ‘…written in the same ink…’ How can you tell?

  p. 251: ‘…transcriptions of block-letter Greek inscriptions, that sculptural language written on stone in upper-case letters…’ First, I have no idea what ‘block-letter’ is supposed to mean. Are you implying the Greeks also made cursive inscriptions on stone? And what is a ‘sculptural language’? I can give a good metaphorical reading for the phrase, but that doesn’t seem to be what you intend. Do you mean that it was the script used on stone? One presumes that the same script was used on parchment; however, no parchment texts have survived, Greece’s climate being wetter than Egypt’s. And ‘upper-case letters’? The Greeks had no lower case. No one did. Minuscule letters are a Byzantine development. The phrase ‘upper-case’ is thus empty of content.

  p. 251: ‘Indeed, it is the only fragment of Linear B ever to be found outside of Crete.’ Garbage. Linear B is found on Pylos, not to mention at several sites on the mainland.

  p. 251: Transpoté. Is this a direct transliteration of the Linear B text? Are you sure? Trans- is Latin! If the ancient Greeks (or whoever) were calling something trans-anything, then we are witness to a considerable revolution in archeology. A Greek name with the meaning you want would be Peripoté or Parapoté. And poté does not mean ‘never.’ Never. To do so, it must take a negative particle. And ‘across when’ is not a possible Homeric meaning. Homer simply doesn’t use it in that sense.

  p. 252: ‘…Linear B was in use only in the very early stages of the neolithic palaces at Cnossos, Phaistos, and Mallia.’ Hold it right there. The phrase ‘neolithic palace’ is oxymoronic. A culture which can build a palace isn’t neolithic. Further, Linear B is from the late period of the palaces.

  p. 259: Steiner retranslates ‘The merchant trades four-legged pots for three-legged pots’ as ‘The merchant (female) ceases to deal in three-legged pots and now deals in four-legged pots.’ Something tickled just over my brow line when I read that reinterpretation. I went and dug out the Culhar’ Fragment in Inscriptiones Graecae, where it is referred to as Kolharé. In the passage Steiner cites, the verb translated as ‘trade’ is αλλασσειν. This does indeed mean ‘trade.’ I can find, however, no evidence of its ever being used in Steiner’s sense. She might be thinking of μεταλλασσειν. While it would suit Steiner’s translation, however, it wouldn’t suit the earlier one. In short, there is no Greek verb which carries the ambiguity which trade does in English. I am wondering if Steiner was simply looking at an English version, without bothering to cross-check.

  But I have gone on long enough. Your effort is praiseworthy, and with some revision can become a useful commentary.

  sincerely,

  (signed:) Charles Hoequist, Jr

  New York

  4 August 1980

  Dear Charles Hoequist, Jr

  Back in February, when your letter arrived, I dutifully forwarded it to the address for S. L. Kermit that K. Leslie Steiner had left with me before going off to take a guest-teaching position at the University of Bologna.

  Last week, when I got back from my vacation trip across the Canadian Rockies, I found—finally!—Professor Kermit’s reply, sent in care of me. Professor Kermit’s description of the
state of your letter on its arrival in the desert (see below) does not even approach the state of his on its arrival here! Besides the indecipherable over-stampings, there was clearly a heel-print on it. At one point the letter had obviously been wetted, Lord knows with what. (Visions of incontinent camels are called up just by the smell!) As well, the whole had been ripped in half and the envelope badly taped together. The sheets inside were still in two pieces. Because of the wetting and the generally deteriorated state of the air-letter paper, I decided it might be best if I transcribed it for you. I just wouldn’t trust it to another trip through the mails. Also, Kermit does not exaggerate about his handwriting. With diligence one can make it out, though the transcription took me a full three days and about 25 consultations with various friends over this or that squiggle, masking a j, y, or g; over that or the other near-contourless line, ghosting an m, n, or u. (I recall Hyder Rollins’s labor over the hen-scratchings of the ‘Keats Circle’ and gain new respect!) I hope you don’t object. If you could see the state of the original, I’m sure you’d understand.

  My best wishes,

  (signed:) Samuel R. Delany

  [Transcription follows:]

  June

  My dear Hoequist,

  Your letter, dated February, reached me yesterday—and it is June! Though would you believe, not one of us here at the dig has been sure precisely what day of June it has been for two weeks now? Sometime when the next provision caravan passes through and I can start my answer to you off on its circuitous way back to New Haven (I just assume you are at Yale, in the shadow of that great, transparent library where writing is at once displayed, displaced, and entombed, like a gleaming metaphor of its own historical position), perhaps we here will be able to orient ourselves again. But since Professor Wellman, hauling that architrave from the cinder basin, smashed up his Seiko LED, we have truly dwelt in a land without time. My own watch has only its sturdy little Donald Duck hands, semaphoring about the day—and no date window.

  Really, we could be living in the middle ages, here at the site, rather than in the last quarter of the 20th Century. (It is the 20th Century, isn’t it?) Unless you are familiar with the absurdly primitive techniques expediency makes traditional for the archeology of this region, I doubt you would believe the arrival of your letter: in the haversack of a pack camel, the envelope crumpled, soiled, opened at least three times (as is all the mail that reaches us here—a fraction of that which is sent, I’m sure), and re-sealed and over-stamped with the blurred colophons of Iraqi Government Security (why all our mail must go by way of Iraq, which does not even border on this country, to reach us here, is beyond me—unless it’s because the wealthy Kuba family of that nation, still out of favor, has footed part of the expedition’s costs), in runny blue and screech orange. In this half-excavated oasis, two hundred miles from any place with a pronounceable name, much less a post office, I feel I am sequestered in some parallel world of the sort Leslie used to make me smile over when we had our separate rooms in that shabby student house just outside Ann Arbor. (Field work delayed my doctorate until 1968, when I turned thirty-one, the same year that the then-nineteen-year-old Ms Steiner took her first advanced degree in math.) How many hundreds of years ago is that now? Communicating with what I’ve nostalgically taken to thinking of as civilization could not feel more exotic here than if I were sending up smoke signals to be seen from Mars.

  Indeed, in terms of communication your letter brings me information that you apparently assume I have been apprised of long since, but which, alas, I simply had not known. For example, yours is the first indication that the ‘article’ I wrote at Leslie’s somewhat hysterical behest, two and a half years ago in a tent on the icy foothills of the Kapwani Mountains, has actually been published.

  How bizarre. How unexpected.

  There, as far away from anywhere as I am now, I drafted it in longhand at a single marathon sitting over the back of some foolscap sheets, on the other side of which was a mimeographed proposal for a UNICEF grant to study water-tables in the suburbs outside Leah-Sohl, that had somehow ended up among the paleontology journals I’d stuffed in the book-carrier on the side of my canvas suitcase. Leslie stood outside the while, puffing and pacing in the snow, waiting a good four hours for me to finish it—that is, when she was not spatting with Yavus, who’d come skulking up the blustery slope behind her, all the way from Ephesus, where she’d apparently picked him up again, a continent or so away. Research assistant indeed! The only pay Yavus ever received back at the museum was for unloading boxes from the rickety army trucks that occasionally carted in crates of artifacts, that summer we were all together in ‘Stamboul. That pay, incidentally, came directly out of my meagerly lined pocket! Oh, yes, he can be an entertaining, even an affectionate, companion from time to time, nor is he without a certain street-wise humor that, of an evening’s stroll together down Istiqlal, can be quite charming. But Leslie is a rather heavy young woman—whereas I am a thin, even gaunt, middle-aged man. And Yavus, our handsome black-marketeer, simply made his choices along the lines to be expected of his class and race. But really, I am just assuming you know our—how shall I say?—broad-beamed Hypatia? Is a better term ‘large-bottomed’? Perhaps ‘a generous-breasted, round, brown Venus of Willendorf’? How she gets to the places she does leaves me awestruck! Once she simply ‘dropped in’ to say hello at the bottom of an Afghani cave-complex I was excavating with old Pace and young Dr Kargowsky. The circles in which her work or mine—not to mention the overlap—is likely to attract attention are notoriously small. Though in print we feign an impersonal formality, really—everybody knows everybody! I wouldn’t be surprised if, at one time, I had actually met you, Hoequist, perhaps at some university conference or other (the arrival in blistering heat by commuter plane; Professor Rockeye’s archaic ‘52 MG taking us to our limply chenilled guest rooms) held in the Indian Artifact Museum: two adjoining classrooms in the upper corridors of Fopping-Twee Hall, converted into a display area by the over-enthusiastic anthropology elective of 1938, its wallhangings and glass cases dusted religiously, once a year, during Spring Intersession, ever since. What college would it have been…? There was the obligatory underripe Brie on the cheese board and sherry in plastic champagne glasses—with a stack of paper cups at the table corner, in case. If I recall rightly, Professor Widenose, in very dirty sneakers, kept apologizing for the failed air conditioning. Professor Parsnip yodeled out the conclusion of a story I’d heard her begin some years ago at another conference (with the same name, a different number, and the identical Brie and sherry) about her 1957 exploits among the Grungy-Grungy of the Lower Muddypigpuke. And sitting in the corner, working through her sixth champagne glass of Christian Brothers, bored out of her corn-rowed natural, was Leslie, the tedium relieved by (for her, and just a whit less for me as only about one out of three was launched—dazzlingly!—my way) the smiles of that shy, white-blond, six-foot-seven Adonis of Polish-Ukranian extraction, as at home on the gridiron as he was in the stone-quarries, where, since his fifteenth year, he had taken an annual summer job, but here, in this high and humid eyrie of abstraction, just the most engaging bit out of place. I found all this out by a gambit which began: ‘And what is your connection with our little group? Are you one of Leslie’s star students?’ Oh, no, he was just well, hell, thinking of giving Professor Steiner a hand, if she really did decide to go off and dig in that Peruvian pot-hole next September. Above that bronzed cheek, with its faint, ephebic scars from a boyish brush with acne, between those gray-gold lashes, his blue eyes were challenged by nothing else in that room save his own (size fourteen and a half! Later I had an opportunity to check) adidas.

  Leslie, at five-foot-one-and-one-quarter, has a mind like a steel trap and usually one to six stunning creatures in tow, from—should one put this more delicately?—the less intellectual strata of the societies she goes careening through. How she does it, with that bottom and those teeth, I’d give my own last wisdom tooth to know…which was, i
ncidentally, twinging again last night.

  This desert is not the place for a toothache.

  But we were talking of the Kapwanis, the snow. I remember Leslie said to me, ‘Kermi—’ She will call me after that ingratiating green absurdity that hops through those hopeless children’s puppet extravaganzas, while I, out of what in this day and age must be misguided chivalry, do not respond in kind—‘Kermi, just say that Yavus was the research assistant who brought the Codex to my attention.’

  ‘Leslie,’ I said, ‘we were all sweating together down in that basement storage room. Yavus was going to use the damned thing to roll one of his super-dooper Turkish knockout bombers, when you snatched it out of his hand!’

  ‘Oh, Kermi, please…!’

  Anyway, I finished writing; and they made preparations to spirit it off down the mountainside, after leaving me a full ounce and a quarter of very fine hash, which she begged me not to consider payment for toning down any of the more risqué elements in the tale of her discoveries that I just might have been tempted to throw in for ‘human interest.’ They left then, the fur around her parka hood blowing in the snow-flurry, Yavus’s hood thrown bravely and idiotically back from his hawk-profiled, darkmaned head (it was cold that evening!), the two of them chattering on about bus schedules in Ha’bini—as if those people had any better grasp of time than we do here at our desert site today.