TCOTNK 2.4 Letters 11, 12, 13 and 14
If you haven’t read the first season of TCOTNK the following writings will not make much sense. I suggest you read those fifteen chapters first….
Season 1 is also available as an e-pub (compatible with most e-readers) for paying subscribers.
back to chapter 1 (of season 1)
The 11th Letter
Charlotte Sapi?
Could that be your last name? I hadn't thought of that yet, which probably is very stupid of me. Unable to go online right anymore. I'm by the sea! A quiet stretch of sandy beach. Now I have to come up with a plan before I can get to the other side and further north.
It is warm. I can swim every morning. Have money for groceries (because I sold a painting). My beard is longer and wilder than ever, my body better than it used to be, I even grew some muscle by walking a lot and doing as much physical work as possible. Yet I am on the run, stuck with the picture book query, and not getting any closer to you.
I miss you. More than I thought possible. The weeks at the festival seem to gain brightness with distance. They have become more valuable to me. Something happened there. And I can't see it, just like in the book, I can't grab hold of what is constantly moving just outside my field of vision. Maybe I spend too much time on my own.
The dreams have started again. I write them down when I wake up. Every day. I'd like to have a psychologist with a moustache and a pipe to help with explanations. They are so bright, so real. Inner doors are opening that lead to places unvisited. Is it all imagination? It seems as if the picture book stirs up those nightly visions. I need to know what triggers this.
For lack of anything better, I started making word lists. Like a crazy Newton, I am puzzling with the texts, counting words. And all the naming and labelling is of my own doing of course. I juggle with initial letters. I copy the symbols. Sketch parts of the illustrations. The weirdest thing with a picture is that the illusion created is not just an illusion. Imagining to walk right in is more real than we think. I’m afraid the whole thing is starting to become obsessive. Among other worrying things, do you know what is 'the most disturbing'? I see so many of those fragments all around me lately in the real world. Popping up in the most unexpected places. The imagined connections, shapes, faces, doorways, appear to show themselves. Like the book is entering my life for real. Sick, as you would say.
R
12th letter
End of August
Scarlotte,
It could be that the loneliness here on my deserted beach is nibbling away at my sanity. It must be the eternal wind that sandblasts my brain. I turn into that crazy artist who talks to himself.
At last I got things moving. Have set up a large army tent next to the camper as a studio (still had that in the trunk behind the butane bottles). Some good news: whenever I sit down to paint on the boulevard of the nearby town, I sell the loosely painted landscape. Like every single time. Even though I keep raising the price a little further and hardly utter a word. So plenty of money at the moment. My most indifferent paintings appear to sell best. Seaside clichés. Dunes, water and sky. Framable frozen light. How harsh is that? Five hundred a piece; it's just art prostitution. Money like water and no expenses. What a strange world it is.
But I'm happy when I can get away from people again. Back to my project. I have made enlargements of every page. Poster size. I cut them into parts and make collages out of them. Rearrangements. A kind of story-board-puzzle-for-the-insane. Really impressive, life-size amplification. I have started to wonder if there are several möbius strips in this parallel place. A weave of infinite loops that somehow….you know….tip of the tongue…I can taste it, sense it but not name it. TCOTNK.
Gradually I am getting closer to the mystery though. There is a banner in four places in the book. Always just partly visible. Half behind a tree, falling out of the frame, far away with the head of a horse in front of it. They are mismatched jigsaw pieces at different depths. But they are pieces of the puzzle. There are letters on them. Also not matching. Sometimes the letter is formed by a cut symbol, sometimes it is in the form of a rune-like sign, or it is calligraphed and one is mirrored on the back of the flag. I think I have found the title of the book! And I'm starting to see how Sapi thinks and works. I have no words for it.
R
13th letter
My dearest Scarlotte,
You know about the dreams I have. They are so intense that it almost tips the scales. Which of the two is more important? The bland day on the border between sea and land, that sandy sunbleached void, where the wind no longer plays, but works indifferently to move the earth's dust? Or the night? Where I flow freely between kindred spirits and am immersed in colours whose names I don't know. The playground of the weave is so wonderful. So much more real than the world of people and their hassles. It is not the starry kingdom of the night that is without light. No, the narrow slit of the visible spectrum is the actual darkness. Blindness caused by images without depth. Without dimension. We drown in a flood of words that have lost their meaning. Language has become inaccessible to the warnings of the inner voice. Navigating the skin is simply not enough. No wonder people feel empty.
As soon as I close my eyes, even during the day, wherever I am, I hear the music of all these voices. The mutual harmony is indescribable. Despite my attempts. I'm writing like crazy, but I'm afraid it will be unreadable for non-insane people.
And the content? What is the nocturnal world all about? Need I tell you? Actually, I don't think so. I dream about you. It is you who speaks to me.
14th letter
Hey Charlotte,
What a strange day yesterday. I can barely remember what I wrote. I probably put the envelope in the old fashioned red mailbox at the shop while sleepwalking. I spent the rest of the day in the tent without consciousness. Am I on the right track? Or am I standing still and just shuffling imaginary content?
Still, I understand what is happening better than before. This is the conversation we're having. The rhythm we keep. In these letters I tell you what happens to me during the day because you are not here and when I close my eyes for the night, you speak. The call and response of a song unfolding.
There was a bird of prey on the roof this morning watching me while I did my exercises. I felt ridiculous under her gaze. Her sharp eye seemed to judge all my tinkering mercilessly. We looked at each other for a while as I lay on my back, until she ducked her head and took flight. Spreading her wings lazily, she glided right over me. I could hear the air slide through her feathers. It took just two pushes with those magnificent wings to bring her across the beach to above the water.
Am I done here? Should I continue? That's what I wondered as I stood watching her disappear to the other shore.
I no longer have any doubts about the title of the picture book. The solution for TCOTNK is so beautiful and fitting. After a few hundred ridiculous word combinations, a few plausible sentences remained. One of them has burrowed into my head. That's just what it's called. It's true, it really is a title for a children's book, funny yet mysterious. It can’t be anything else.
'The castle of the naked knights'.
I have no idea what it refers to, but my head is buzzing with suspicions.