lickhaven

The tailor who sat at his bench in the town square had sat exactly so for more years than the inhabitants at the other the stalls could recall. He had sat there before they had, any of them, been born. 

Tailoring was perhaps too exalted a word for his occupation. He made no repairs, and none could claim to have seen a pair of trousers, a waistcoat, or a bit of livery fashioned from the working of his hands. 

What then, did he form from his cloth?

Josfell tailored new thoughts.

An odd function, perhaps – but one so difficult to contemplate? When we sit to ruminate, old thoughts dominate our minds: the past, the changing social situation, the eccentricities of our neighbors, the state of the polity. Consider what we hear on the street, what we read or see broadcast, what the “experts” say, what is whispered from mouth to ear. Is a bit of it new? Yet, somewhere, new thoughts must be fashioned, lest humanity shrivel from inattention.

Josfell was one-hundred-thirty-three years old at the time of this telling. That great age was none of his doing or planning. He had long been prepared to sidle beneath the earth, which had paid him no special attention. But somehow the lanyards of life held him back. So in this public place he sat and formed new thoughts, though those who passed had no knowledge of what work he did, and little interest.

Until one late Friday morning, the 29th day of June, when the sun hung high and Josfell’s spirits swung low, a young man with a stark black beard and riveting eye leaned over him.

“I need a new thought.”

Josfell looked up, startled. Over the two centuries of his trade, few had asked anything of him, and none before for the one thing which he could, unfailingly, provide.

“A thought?”

The intense young man pointed to the small square of cloth on Josfell’s lap. “Come, old one, provide for me a thought.”

Josfell held up the snippet, inspected it, tendered it. “Take.”

The man shrank back and constricted his brows. “I cannot take! It can only be bought.”

“I have no use for money.”

“That is not my concern.”

After fruitless haggle, Josfell sold the small thought-cloth for four copper pieces and returned to his work – like most of us, not much enlightened by his experience.

But the mind of Akim, who had made the purchase, was ablaze. He held a freshly minted thought, contained in a square but two breaths on a side, capable, he hoped and believed, of expansion into a world of contemplation. He would use it well and soon, that its impact be not lost or sullied.

In the poor mud-walled home he shared with Tamara, his too-often sickly wife, he caressed the thought-square and smoothed the wrinkles it had acquired from reposing in his leather pocket. What sort of thought might it be? A pondering, a question, a tentative answer, a mental bauble as mundane as a market list?

The sun had crossed the meridian into afternoon as he laid it on his rough-hewn dining table and considered its contours. So much was open to him in his life, which had reached a forking of the ways where concerted thought was needed. What if he had purchased only a misguided triviality? He feared its transference, yet knew this was the required act. Akim breathed deeply and raised the oddment to his open mind.

This is what he thought:

I am a herdsman of twelve seasons’ experience, knowledgeable in the ways of sheep and goats but insufficient in understanding the ways of men. When I cross the road, I ignore the progress of oncoming wagons, yet they pass me by unharming, for when I attend the opposite side, I am in no way lessened or altered. But within me flames a yearning that I cannot name or yet extinguish. I have the wish to be, but know not what it is I wish to be. Should I call down the rains upon my head, they would not water me. Should I call up the earth from beneath its rubble, it would not cover me. Should I curse the clouds that hide the sun, yet would they still provide, without question, salvation from the heat.

Standing, he railed to his wife, “My slate is wiped clean of questions each day as I retire! What do I know with certainty? What should I advance toward?”

He glared at the flaccid cloth, its content transferred. For this empty beckon he had squandered a portion of his father’s meagre inheritance? A rage built in him like the spring floods, overflowing the banks of his reason and sweeping the season’s withered mental vegetation before it.

He crushed the thought-source in his hand and retrod the dusty path to the market. There he confronted Josfell, quivering in part from malignancy, in greater part, disdain. “What have you sold me, thief?”

Josfell looked up, wide-eyed, open to the long ages when none had requested a thought. “I sold you nothing. I gave, you bought.”

Akim withdrew his anger, for even in his wretched sorrow he recognized this truth.

“But what,” he asked, “what is this?” holding forth the cloth.

Josfell turned the proffered square in his hands. A strange light, perhaps from above his shoulders, perhaps from a greater distance, touched the uneven surface and raised a brief flicker of luminescence. “I form the folds and cut the lines, but I am not master of the weave. I do not know what meaning it holds. Perhaps… the thoughts speak only as they can, each to each, thought to thought, thought to thinker? So that the thought that speaks to one is not the thought that would speak to another?”

“Charlatan,” cried Akim, but only to fill the space that might otherwise envelop both if no word were spoken.

In Josfell’s hands, the thought-square slowly lost its shimmer, to lie, if not lifeless, in the gentle grace of slumber. A weight descended upon him that he had not before known. “What would you have me do? I can refund your payment, but that will not alter the warp or weft. Yours alone are the crinkle and the waver, the twist and the wander of the cloth.”

Akim shook in near fever. “I cannot find its meaning! I have thought the thought, but all that comes of it is rank confusion. See how my life at home unfolds: Each day, when I reach to take down the tin of rice, first comes the desire, then the remembrance of where the tin is placed, then the will to move my body, next my ambulation to the shelf, then my hand extended, and at last the rice container lies upon the table. All my thoughts work to that end. But within your cloth lies no end. The edges are frayed, the threads hang loose and threaten to drift with the breeze. It is a sham, a great misnomer – not a thought but  vague intimation that lead to… nothing.”

Josfell put the cloth aside and rested his hands on his knees. “I did not know my father, and in my ever-increasing age have forgotten my mother. Such is life’s movement, which we are geared to accept. What was, is no longer, what could be, may or may not appear. Tomorrow, the earth may split in two and the halves desert each other. Should we dwell on such a fearsome possibility?”

“This, your thought, in its weight is much like mine from the cloth. Was it then first yours, only foisted onto me?”

Josfell shook his head. “We are the children of our pasts. But the future for each and all is murky, a mix of muck and blundered contemplation. Is that not so?”

“You say my thought, though worthless to me, is yet true?”

Josfell took up a wide swath of fabric, and with small scissors excised a piece half the breadth and width of that he had before given Akim. “Perchance the first was too grand a thought. Take this in its place, so that you might think within a smaller sphere. We are creatures of the earth, not of the sky. With this, perhaps, you will find easier access to your rice.”

Akim stood back, hands palm forward. “I find my rice well enough.”

“Then look to see what lies beneath your table.”

“You mock me!”

“Life mocks us. Nothing I say can change the heft of that mockery.”

Akim threw his smallest coin onto the tailor’s bench and took up the dwarfed shred. Even here, while still it lay in his hand, a thought hovered.

“Sell me another,” he demanded.

Josfell scissored a second segment from the cloth.

“And another,” said Akim.

Josfell paused. “So much thought?”

“How can there be too much, too many?”

“Take care,” Josfell warned, but handed across both added snippets. “The coin you gave covers all three.”

Akim did not dispute the tailor’s reckoning.

“Wife!” he thundered as he entered their hovel. “Wife!”

Tamara rose from her pallet, coughing. “What is it?”

“Where are your needle and thread?”

“Where they always are.”

“Get them!”

“Have you torn your garment?”

“Do not question me!” again in a roar, before his better nature intervened and his voice turned more confidential. “Not my clothing. More than my clothing, well beyond.”

Tamara brought her sewing basket. Akim laid the three new cloth skimps by her elbow, fetched the original, grander thought to top the inconsequential pile. Placing a finger on the upper piece, he declaimed: “Start with that. Each of the others you will add to it. I will show you the order, which must be exactly so. That is essential. Place this first beside the large one, the second here, the third – ah, no! How is this? It will not yet connect! I must purchase more before the third will adhere.”

“You paid for these, all?”

“Too much for the large one, too little for the others. It comes even. I take what money remains to buy more thoughts.”

“Our money for the food?”

Akim laughed, harsh at first, then more softly. “This money will bring food, it will bring all.”

So it was that Akim accumulated thoughts by the handful, the armload, until all but a pittance of his small savings had been transferred to Josfell, who attempted to dissuade the herdsman, but he would not countenance the tailor’s protestations.

Nor would Akim submit to his wife when she begged him to withdraw from this foolishness, for they had nothing left to eat but rice, and grew weaker by the day. Indeed, he tended his flocks with ever-lessening attention, so that they wandered off, one by one, or were attacked by predators and devoured. He responded only to the widening growth of the quilt that Tamara sewed, piece by piece, under his direction. For within his mind grew a resplendent tapestry of philosophy, a world-thought that would upend the errors and incompleteness of those who for centuries had expounded but pale simulations of Truth.

The day arrived when the final thought received from Josfell lay in his hand. He passed it to Tamara and indicated an unoccupied space in what had become an edgeless, ragged conglomeration of shapes. Once she had stitched the culminating thought into place, a wealth of revelation filled the herdsman’s mind, a coherence that spread through the interstices of his brain and beyond, an all-ness so vast that its full illumination exceeded not only his own ken – but what is permitted a human to comprehend.

So! he quailed within. This limitation, this inconclusion is given to me as punishment?

He rifled his wife’s basket, snatched her scissors, and began to wreak havoc on the thought-quilt that covered the floor and lapped against the walls. He cut and slashed with the small shears, severing here a contemplation, there a query, elsewhere an entire ratiocination on the afterlife.

He dismembered them, then slashed the bits to lesser fragments, until he had obliterated all meaning. He stopped when the segment that remained held only what he had discovered in his earliest days: the ways of life and family, of work and reward, of the sheep and goats he had tended, of his wife, of his comfort – and of his ever-confounding inclination to ruin all.

These bits, both separate and together, had been with him always. They were not thoughts he had bought; he had once lived and nurtured them, only to strew them willy-nilly in his rash scrabble for the ineffable.

Great tears runneled his face as he carried these tatters to the tailor and placed them on Josfell’s bench.

“You sought to present these thoughts as new… I had them already but knew them not, nor did I recognize their repetition when once again you rendered them to me. Take them back. Keep them to bestow on those less blessed than me. Give them away if you can afford to do so, sell them cheaply if not. All should have access to them, that these thoughts might reach completion, that those receiving them might see themselves with wild clarity. Whatever life may be on the grand scale – that we are not meant to know. It is not a withholding of the gods, but the limitation within that prevents us falling into the great infinity of ignorance. Take!”

Josfell accepted the remnants, but he could recognize in them nothing that he had formed or trimmed from some larger cloth. Yet he could not protest so to Akim, for the herdsman was already at a distance, striding for home.