Long Short Stories

CURATORIAL NOTE

The Dandy entered the Ancient Land carrying baggage from the Distant Land. He carried the tools of The Orientalist’s trade, but was not conscious of that word. To him, he was an Observer, a Naturalist. He studied flora and fauna, geography, the peoples he met along the way, with an artist’s eye, not a scientific mind. He knew magic. The magic he had learned in the Distant Land. True, he was always seen with his telescope or binoculars, his magnifying glass, and his camera, but for him these were the tools of observation and remembrance, benign in and of themselves. Yet he knew their delicacy and power, and wielded them carefully.  When he entered the forests of the Ancient City, in a secret and hidden valley he had travelled months across the Ancient Land to find, the Dandy knew his intrusion might be unwelcome. And so, it was. Fierce guards of the city surrounded him and challenged his very presence with sharpened swords drawn. One of the locals held his hand aloft and commanded the guards to desist. This was The Prince. The Dandy took an immediate liking to him. He was handsome and wielded great power with authority. Soon, The Prince became The Dandy’s friend, and demonstrated his own powers of magic. This was the Ancient Magic from the Ancient Land, now forgotten elsewhere, but known and practiced in the secluded Ancient City. As days passed, and sweet fragrant nights in Royal Chambers lit by candlelight slipped one by one into dreamy memory, The Prince asked his father, The King, to issue a decree: The Dandy was to be given the freedom and the Royal Protection for roaming the Ancient City and its Lands at will: observing all, learning the knowledge, and practicing the Distant Land’s arts of Observation. The Dandy was overjoyed, but nature’s dangers still lurked. Nature is still nature of course, and we are a part of nature (as the Dandy well knew), and nature is, by nature, competitive. Soon the Dandy and The Prince were challenging each other to duels of Magic. The Ancient City’s magic was stronger, yet onlookers became worried and jealous: they saw an uninvited guest practicing his strange ways in a Land that was not his own. Rumours began to circulate. Certain cliques of intellectuals and swordsmen began to devise plots. This Dandy and his strange ways need to be driven from the Kingdom. They beseeched The King to reign in his son, and by doing so expel the Dandy. On that fateful day The Prince and the Dandy fled the Ancient City together. They avoided what they presumed would be death, and if they were to be ostracized, they would exile themselves together. Their legend lives on, yet few, if any, know what became of them.  There exist certain long short stories that are never told. Too personal, too deep, too raw with pain to speak. Too charged with forbidden longing, too sexual, too scandalous, too close to crime. They are sealed in silence by those who lived them—rarely even breathed between the two who shared the secret. Best forgotten, yet never truly forgotten. They die first a death of silence. Then they die again in the minds that once recalled them with nervous, shameful, guilty joy. Lost to history, they drift into a black and soundless void, never to be heard again. Yet these unspoken tales shape the universe as surely as the great songs the bards have carried through the ages. We will never know their weight. They are quiet poems once spoken with meaning in an empty forest—a tree that fell and made no sound.