"Carol Emshwiller - Acceptance Speech (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emshwiller Carol)

it
were your favorite syllables. The absolute, you said, is where and what all
science comes from. It took me many hard lessons to come to terms with that
and
to answer, as was so often called for: "Absolutely."

But I began with: Ab, baa, baa, ab, ab, baa, and after those first bits I got
myself the drink, but then my cage was tipped up over a puddle and I fell out
and landed in the mud. Unwashed, just as I was, I was tied to a pole and
carried
to the poets palace and taken in through a. small back door. Hooded poets
came.
"Sing," they said. All I knew was my, "Ab, baa, baa," but now it wasn't
enough.
I tried: "Cha, poo, tut," and was told to go back to ab and yet ab was wrong.
I
was pinched and pulled and slapped at until, three days later, I could answer
properly with: "Ab-so-lu-la-la," and when I could answer with the "word" for
poet in all its syllables as we, in my homeland might say: "Po-et-ti-ca-la-la"
--when I could say these two, I was taken to the president,
Humble-Master-of-the-Poem, he who is called
The-Uncertained-Among-the-Certained,
and also sometimes The-Certained-Among-the-Uncertained. Not as I was, all
muddy
and red, but washed and dressed in a backless robe of your form of silk, with
the worms that made it still attached here and there so that all could see
what
it was woven of and marvel. I didn't know then why it had no back to it.

I was not allowed...of course not allowed to actually see the president of
poems
who talked to me from behind a screen. He, however, could see me, and from
there
could reach out with his whip and snap it over my head with a great snap, or
let
it fly onto my back, in which case it made, instead, a flat, slapping sound.

"Sing," he would say, and I would answer, "Ab-so-la-la," but by then, that was
wrong.

In this manner I learned your syllables and syntax. I learned the prefix for
the
poem and the suffix for happiness, and I learned to call the president of
poems
sometimes: Humble-Master-of-the-Names-of-Things, or sometimes:
Humble-Master-of-the-Thingness-of-Things-that-Objects-Should-Speak-Through-Him
.
And I learned, whatever I wore, to bare my back in his presence or in the
presence of any of you poets of the palace as a temptation to the whip. Yet, I
must confess it, I still, even at this moment...I still don't know what a poem