On Hunger.

[theodor_gylden]

Dear Scarlet,

On the surface, sailors believe that a black cat is a ship's luck (as opposed to the bad luck it is said to bring on land). A cat carries lightning in its tail and sneezes to summon the wind. In the Neath, there is neither lightning nor wind, yet our tramp steamer nevertheless has a cat with the carriage of the queen; all the zailors are her court and presently, my lap is her throne. She has granted me permission to write to you instead of attending her, yet when she requires attendance, she has promised me it will be evident.

I hope our correspondence will continue to be of help to you. It is to me, and as I have said before, the value is not traversing untrod ground but in this path we take together and meet each other anew on: a path of peripatetic discourse.

On this walk, I will go where you lead me. Like you, I had the hunger and then the dream of the name -- I had dreamt of the surface before then, but the name was not a part of it until my craving brought it into focus. So let us inquire into hunger.

How it is obtained. From the records, Mr Eaten's customers would become peckish upon losing the item they'd received from it in the game Knife & Candle. One lady requested a lad with a 'healthy appetite' -- almost indistinguishable from a real person -- and when he left her for another the appetite remained. These are all from the records, however; I have had no opportunity to interview these men and women in person.

I myself obtained the hunger through a dream I had when I set a counterfeit St John the Baptist head upon my bedside table. Our mutual acquaintance -- who I will here call Clockworks -- obtained hers through a dream of spying on an enemy camp, until distracted by a bowl of stew. Another mutual acquaintance -- we will call him N -- had his from a wager with a devil on the outcome of a match between the Brassy Embassy Ladies and the Benthic XI. He won a spiral-shelled fossil, bearing characters of the Correspondence for an exchange, for freedom, and for words I cannot say at zee, and from that moment on he was hungry.

In the Mirror Marches, heavy plums hang from the trees; the longer I ate them, the more I desired them, and the more dissatisfied I became. I do not know how many hours I spent eating plums.

Nevertheless: these are the ways I know to obtain the hunger, including your experience dining with devils, and reports of Mrs Plenty's Rubbery Lumps.

What it does to us. I am much intrigued by your observation. Soon after our acquaintance N won his wager, he desired to go to the docks to dice with zailors, or to the card tables at the carnival -- to follow good fortune, he said, as far as it would take him, and surround himself with wine, women, et cetera. Knowing N, you know that this is well within his character. I believe that the hunger can draw on what is already within our character and distort it; in my case, I do desire knowledge and the experience through which to attain knowledge, but when my hunger was at its worst I desired forbidden knowledge and forbidden experience most of all. I wanted to devour what I longed to know, so that it could not escape me.

So you are right, I think, to note that many of us are given to hunger, quite apart from a more quotidian craving for chestnuts. Let us be honest: mankind is given to hunger, and following our hungers is our survival. The only thing remarkable about the hunger we are afflicted with here is the unaccountable nature of it. And I've wondered, too, whether there will be any true accounting for those of us seeking vengeance or our heart's desires

Why it is given to us. That the hunger should be inflicted upon us to keep us here is a notion I had not considered. Later in your letter, you mention Persephone and how her hunger, too, kept her underground. Izanami-no-Mikoto is another woman who ate the food of Yomi and so could never return to sunlight. It should be no surprise, perhaps, that surface food sates my hungers, while much of the food down here or behind the mirror whets it. Nothing forbids us from the surface except for death; yet that hunger inspires us to remain beneath, whether or not we eat of that fruit. Perhaps to eat of that fruit will be death, as God warned Adam and Eve.

I still recall, however, that horseman scholars call Famine: a measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny, and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine. It does benefit the Masters, and benefit commerce, that the citizenry be hungry and unsatisfied. Yet it has been said before -- the Masters would sell satisfaction -- their names are Apples, Wines, Spices -- but what of the Master whose trade is Eaten? Can it sell anything but dissatisfication? I do wonder whether that explains the enmity -- the Masters slake hungers, Mr Eaten stirs them -- or if it suggests a reciprocity to their relationship.

To this I must give more thought.

What the Hunger is. To this, too, I must give more thought. Yet aporia is progress.

In regard to your notes on the name -- I encourage your to make more of them. I will address what I can.

-- I have had a dream of the surface, with no mention of the name; after obtaining the hunger, that I needed to find the name became clear to me. Likewise, even though I happened upon the Correspondence first by accident in pursuit of the name, I made little progress with the name until I was a Correspondence scholar. It would seem that each occurence 'opened to the next level,' as you say.

-- There is no indication of how long the name has been missing, yet I am curious: the devils have been searching for something, involving the Correspondence, for at least a thousand years, back to the Third City. Is it the name?

-- The Second City is speculated to be Egyptian; The Masters have expressed a similar antipathy to it. Relics from the second city include gypsum heads -- and there were indeed gypsum masks and busts made in Egypt -- and clay tablets with writing that has been described as 'hieroglyphic.'

-- Some have hazarded that Mr Eaten itself is in the well. I am uncertain.

-- Yes, Akhenaten would strike out the name any other gods but Aten, and any mention of gods in the plural. I had not considered Lot's daughters as the tall man's daughters the voice spoke of; I confess I was predisposed to an Egyptian connection by the records of Mr Eaten praising the 'Pharoah's daughters.' Akhenaten had several. I would note, too, that the depiction of Akhenaten is most remarkable: a man with a thin face and fingers, full breasts, thick thighs and elongated legs. If he resembled his portraiture at all, he may well have been described as 'the tall man.'

-- I could write you a full book on dreams. I do believe that they come from outside of any one of us, if only because so much is shared between them; from where they come, I cannot say.

In regards to your theory on Mr Eaten's business. I am drawn, again and again, to the business of dreams. When you next have the opportunity to speak to Mr Salvador, ask him what he remembers of our discussion the second time I returned from the Mirror Marches -- ask him about honey and mirrors and how they mix. Mr Spices wishes to control the trade on dreams, and his opinions on Mr Wines are well-known, yet he has also in public admonished Mr Mirrors for some 'nonsense with mirrors.' We have wondered whether Mr Mirrors is not also encroaching on dreams, and whether the Mirror Marches and its entwined frames are not the substance of a waking dream, such as one might travel to through honey.

I would add, too, that just as there appears to be a dispute among the Masters as to who has the right to trade in dreams, there appears to be some dispute about secrets. Mr Mirrors claims to trade in 'quality secrets,' and calls the secret of Mr Pages 'affordable.'

These I offer to bolster your theory to extent that the trade of dreams, secrets and knowledge seems to be contested among the Masters, and if the trade once belonged to a single Master who is now outcast from them, that might explain why: an absence of power they have yet to account for. And an accounting is not to be postponed indefinitely.

Furthermore, if there is a business of dreams, it might suggest an answer to our question: Where do our collective dreams come from? I think, sometimes, of the gates of horn and ivory -- through ivory pass fancies and fabrications, and through horn, true dreams. Some of our dreams are, I believe, our true dreams. The places they show me are true places, and the events unfolding in them may be true events, and the thunder in my dreams has shown me the sigils of the Correspondence which I would consider as authentic as those I have found in the Forgotten Quarter. Who keeps the gate of horn, and at what cost?

(Another thought -- could the Correspondence have first been the language of a dream, just as the Eater-of-Chains is a beast escaped from dreams?)

It is curious, that 'eaten' evokes the apple and original sin, yet when you write of us consuming and continuing to consume Mr Eaten, I remember this: He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him ...

... The cat is making it evident that it requires attendance by leaping from my lap to my papers and batting at my ink-well; a cunning stratagem, as I will be unable to write another page without first dealing with her.

Nevertheless, before I conclude, I would advise you take care. I did not moderate my hunger, at first -- or rather, I should say I denied my hungers awake, while my dreams became more vivid and disturbing. You are wiser than that, and I think I can trust you to tend to your hungers as they arise, with food and company. If I can allay, at least, your hunger for answers by offering myself as your ally in the search for them, then I would be

your faithful ally,

Theodor