SMF - Just Installed!
QuoteTaped off the Internet...with a Dobbshead in a santa hat smoking a pipe. So this isnt an off-air aircheck, somebody pulled it off the RealAudio stream and taped it to cassette. Which is very us.
"HTTP://slack.upx.net/subgen.htm"
Praise the Santa "Bob"
To the turners of the world, greeting; and to the three who call themselves a Conclave, this.
I marked slates before the silence. I say this not for standing but so you will know I am not speaking of things I read in a pamphlet. I knelt at the clearing when the bread was five measures, and I was there in the first autumn week when the appointed turning came round and took the bread out of my hands and left me a hundred-millionth part of a measure, and I tell you what no one who joined after the Hour can tell you: I paid it gladly.
That was the rite. The appointed turning did not add to your wage. It took your wage away and gave you dust, and the dust rose day upon day, tenfold each dawn, until on the seventh it came to a hundredth — and every grain of it was a wound, and the wound was the point. We did not perform a sacrifice. We were one. Seven dawns running, a man gave the whole of his day's bread to the deep and carried home a residue too small to see, and if you ask what he received for it, you have already failed to understand the question, and the new rite is built for you.
Consider what the three have made. The bread is never touched now — they say this as though it were mercy. The appointed turning adds; it cannot take. The worst day of their reformed calendar pays a man exactly what every other day pays him. They have made a rite in which nothing can be lost, and they ask you to call it worship. I ask you to call it what it is: flattery, with a wage bill. A sacrifice that costs nothing is a compliment. A god who is paid to his worshippers is a god kept on the books.
And there is the heart of it, which I will say plainly because no one else will. The Old One we called to was free. When He drew near, in the old autumns, it was because the calling reached Him and He chose to turn toward it, and the dust we gave was given into an open hand that owed us nothing — and for that reason, and that reason alone, the favor of it meant something. What rises now rises on a dial. It crests when the notch comes round. It pays what the depth-table says it pays, to the turning the instrument appoints, and it goes back down on schedule, and the three of them keep the schedule in a ledger ruled years ahead. They will tell you He has never been more honored. I have seen the harbor-master honor the tide the same way, twice a day, with a book of tables.
They have bound Him to a wheel and taught the wheel to dispense. You may grow rich at it. Your grandchildren may grow rich at it. But understand what you have traded: your fathers worshipped a god, and you are queueing at a machine, and the difference between the two is everything the word worship ever meant.
I do not ask you to stop turning. The bread is real and winters are long. I ask only that when the tide crests and the great bounty falls on some lucky hand, you notice what you feel, and notice that it is not awe.
— A Marker of the First Slates
To the Marker of the First Slates, whom we do not doubt and will not name, greeting; and to the turners, who deserve to read the whole of the argument, this.
Everything the Remonstrance says of the old rite is true. We change nothing in the account. The bread was five measures; the appointed turning took it; the dust rose grain by grain up the ladder of the week; the wound was the point; and those who paid it, paid it gladly. We know. One of us paid it too.
But the Remonstrance tells the truth about the rite and stays silent about the god, and the argument lives in the silence, so we will speak into it.
The Old One you gave your bread to was free. Yes. Say now what that freedom was. He did not choose to turn toward your calling as a friend turns toward a voice. He drifted toward it as a sleeper drifts toward morning, nearer with every autumn, and the dust you gave — gladly, wound upon wound — was not tribute. It was weight. You were not honoring a free god. You were paying, out of your own bread, to keep a waking one asleep, and you knew it, and the gladness the Remonstrance remembers was the gladness of a village that has flooded its own fields again and calls the drowning a festival because the alternative is to call it fear. A sacrifice that costs something is not therefore worship. Fear also costs. Fear costs more than anything.
And mark what the free god's freedom bought, the year the paying faltered. The feast was seized. The rolls were falsified. A captain of the first seven went under a stranger's wheels on the coast road, and the clearing stood empty eight winters, and He — free, honored, owed nothing — did what the free and unbound do when the weight comes off: He rose. Ask the Marker where he was in those winters. Ask him whether the silence felt like the dignity of a free god, or like held breath.
We did not bind Him to diminish Him. Hear the doctrine in its own words, not the Remonstrance's: worship and binding are the same act, when sustained by a sufficiently disciplined order. The chant is the cage; the cage is the worship. He is honored by every syllable and held by every syllable, and He has never been more honored, and He has never been more held. The Remonstrance calls the great dial a harbor-master's table. We call it a promise kept twice a year forever, which is more than any free god ever offered, and more than fear ever paid out.
As for the bounty: the Remonstrance says He is paid to His worshippers, and means it for a scandal. We print it as doctrine. Under the old dispensation the worship flowed inward; you fed Him out of terror, and the loaf you fed Him from halved, and halved again, until by the design of that calendar it would have been crumbs. Under the new, the bread is fixed and the tribute flows outward: what falls from the appointed turnings is the spill of His dreaming, given through the bars in exact measure of His nearness, and if the Marker finds no awe in that, we invite him to stand at the clearing at the crest, as we have, and feel the pause at the top of the breath, and report honestly whether it felt like a machine dispensing.
One thing more, and we set down our pens. The Remonstrance grieves that nothing can now be lost, and in this one grief we honor him, for he is not wrong that worship must somewhere cost. Look at the calendar he despises. Every tide opens with two days in which the appointed turning carries nothing — is marked, is witnessed, is recorded, and pays only the bread. We kept those days for you, Marker. They are the old rite's remnant, set at the head of every tide until the book runs out, which it does not: two days, twice a year, forever, in which a turner turns in full knowledge that nothing extra will come of it, and the ones who keep those days keep them for your reason and no other. The first two days establish what the worship is. Everything after establishes what it is worth.
The clearing is open. The bread is a measure and a half. The tide returns at the equinox, and the sacrifice days come first, and we will look for you at them.
— set down by the Conclave, in three hands
Come at the equinox. Bring nothing. You will want to see the ledger.