Dhalgren Family/Aristobulus Dhalgren

Aristobulus Dhalgren

Aristobulus is a young man taking his firsts steps on the path of the Chevalier in Aurvandil. Unfortunately, like many of the Dhalgren Family, his destinity is overcast by misfortune. The youth is plagued by melancholy and anguish, and yet he stoically hides his malaise and does his best to climb the steep path of honor.

The Diary of Aristobulus Dhalgren

From the Diary of Aristobulus Dhalgren, entry 229

Still in Candiels, I lie like an ancient corpse in the Crypts of Saamael. My crown encased in spiderwebs, I silently look upon my kingom of dust. An apt metaphor, for my men get fat and restless and my soul flickers like a moth in darkness. The fire I need I cannot see, the distant flames of battles only reach me through reports and tales.

I shall, my friend, soon start rotting. Or perhaps I shall travel, away from here and all around the Islands to discover ancient and innumerable techniques of preservation. I heard of those mummies of the west, wrapped and left in hot sands. Or perhaps I shall be pickled! Like those tubers up in the west. Like those red bulbs I shall forever rest in jars, offending with my pungent smell of vinegar and spices the venerable nostrils of noblest knights and, alike, the clogged and callous nostrils of the peasantry! Or I shall squander, and get a thousand slaves to bring the ice of the northern slopes, an endless stream of them fighting time and heath to bring me frost so I can defeat putrefaction.

So many options, and yet I suspect this immobility is just another face of the faceless void that plagues me, just another boil on the plagued body of my existence. Shall I forever be cursed?

I ask the sky for a sign, a jest perhaps, and no clouds can be spotted in the windless day.

From the Diary of Aristobulus Dhalgren, entry 223

My faithful friend,

today I walked to the training grounds and watched my men running, wrestling, and clashing swords against wood, straw, and armour. When I saw sweat and downward gazes I stood up and joined. I shouted and sweated amongst them. I faced many in sparring, and it quickly spiralled in the frenzy of battle. One, I knocked to the ground too violently, and all watched upon me with surprise. My hand hurried to help, and a friendly mood was restored. One almost defeated me, my grip loosening around the sword. I pushed and struggled and won, and in my last blow I looked deep in his eyes and understood that his defeat was willed. For sake of hierarchy, loyalty, and perhaps a rising warmth towards my person, Captain Siegmund staged his own defeat.

What an irritable mood I was in, emptiness sometimes takes the form of a thousand needles, too small to remove but too many to bear. That gesture somehow washed them away, and instead of cleansing my flesh from sweat and dust in a bathhouse I walked to the ocean and sat. The amorphous waters, like primeval matter waiting for a demiurge to impose form upon it. In the north, three stars would cast downward influence and shape it into events and history. Somewhere else, a blind god would plunge his enormous hands in its depths and drag the world out like a giant fish.

What would I form out of pure matter? This amorphousness soothes me, it is the vulgarity of form that hurts my soul. An unsuitable candidate for the role of a god indeed, I would just leave the amorphous to its shapelessness and walk away. And is this not just a metaphor for my own life? Shape your own destiny, what a nonsense! Is it not infinitely purer to drift above this shapeless ocean of life like driftwood from shipwrecks or mangroves, instead of imposing upon it the vulgarity of shape?

From the Diary of Aristobulus Dhalgren, entry 218

What a fool I am.

I sit on the balcony of the "Sauterie", one of the few decent dwellings for the visiting nobility in the Imperial city, and write this memoirs of mine. Here, caressed by the morning breeze of the ocean, my foolishness seems small thing. I open this diary and I see I haven't written in days, with the move and all. Who would have thought that moving with a group of armed man would be so long. How frustrating it was to wait for a boat in the insalubrious air of the port, not knowing if the price I was told was a fraud or the beginning of the sick game of barter.

Alas, I have no desire to recount the petty events of the end of my time at Tower Fatmilak, and yet I promised myself this diary would be my most faithful friend, so be it. With a coat too heavy on my shoulders and a heart almost too heavy to walk I descended onto the squalid northern fringes of Tower Fatmilak. In my fantasies, while walking part excited and part already sensing the defeat that awaited me, I pictured myself as a carrion crow descending on the rotting carcass of an ox. For a while I indulged in this fancy of mine, picturing my powerful wings hitting the freezing air of winter while I circled around my motionless prey. Slowly and effortlessly I would descend, silent like the snow that coated all in surreal stillness. Silently I would land on the shoulder bone and observe the stomachs opened to the elements, exploding with maggots. That crawling multitude, like an army marching against the blizzard, fought the cold immobility of death and snow with the frenzy of decay. The pleasure, in seeing that spectacle! My mighty beak would plunge between maggots and flesh, my muscles flex and my eyes close in the pleasure of fulfillment. After hours of walking I noticed a small tavern. From its windows loud screams and laughs, and an ugly mistress eying me with surprise and opportunism. Her eyes quickly passing on my refined boots and rings, an almost toothless mouth distorting in a lascivious smile and a hand rushing to move the fabric of a dress and reveal a breast.

So I walked in, and I shall not describe what I saw. Indeed I can barely recall the few minutes I spent in that hellish grotesque nightmare, stunned by dozens of gazes, each working out how to pickpocket me, stab me, blackmail and use me. My head started spinning, under the attack of the foul smells of the peasantry. Silenced reigned like a tyrannical mistress, amorphous demons all looked upon me. I walked to the bar with unsteady legs and a strong hand grabbed my arm. "Here it is", I thought, "the blade that shall reveal me the secret of life!", but that thought was rehearsed and fake, a reflex I nurtured in my fantasies before loosing myself in the fecal reality of the alleys. A voice intimated: "Sir! What are you doing here! This is no place for you". The militia, my friend! I was saved by the militia, someone must have alerted them or maybe that man was seeking pleasures and fun after a night of patrol. And so I was humiliated! Escorted away to a safe neighborhood I could only stutter a world of gratitude that I did not meant and leave too much gold in that strong hand that took me away from my pathetic adventure.

And so I stopped a carriage and got home, in the empty dwelling where I now assert my birthright. A change! The battlefield! I needed to get away from that absurd circus that is Tower Fatmilak, a huge canvas tent full of gypsies and clowns. What is more, I forgot to look at the tower, to the mystical northern face.

And so I gathered an army and marched, towards the imperial city and the battlefields. There, I thought, I shall enjoy the pleasures of martial life and routine, plunging my sword in a thousand enemies and shouting orders to the absent faces of my soldiers.

From the Diary of Aristobulus Dhalgren, entry 217

Today I walked through the alleys of Tower Fatmilak and a strange fancy took hold of me. This town, this bizarre agglomerate of towers and caves where humanity makes its nest, this monster I grew up in, you see, I don't know it. You, Tower Fatmilak, are as estranged to me as the icy landscapes of the north or the swamps of the Far West. How many times have I watched the tower! And yet, I have never truly known it. So this fancy made its way silently in the streets and corridors of my mind, and this crooked thought whispered to me that if anything truly exist in this world, and mind you I am not convinced, that tower - which looked over me desperately grabbing my mother's breast for nourishment, lazily reading the poems of Sib Liglu, or driving myself into oblivion through the sweetness of liquor curled up in fine sheets - that tower indeed must be the one thing, the one solid being in this world of illusion. This old man grabbed the curtains of my mind with deformed fingers and whispered that I must try, I must try to know the tower. All I knew was one face, the view from the noble quarters where I dwell and from the road that comes into the city from the south. I must try to see its secret face, the northward face from the docks where grotesque peasant faces utter obscenities to vulgar prostitutes, where shady figures exchange money and spices and illegal wares, where the famine and the plague impose their rules over the destinies of the commoners. The docks! Perhaps there I shall find life, thrill, and danger. Perhaps something there shall stir my insides and awake my soul. To fight for my life in a dark alley, to feel the cold of a knife against my ribs and the rotten breath of my pursuer against my soft shaved cheeks. To sleep with a vulgar woman, knowing that she hasn't washed in days and laid with men only worth to be called animals. Perhaps I shall meet contagion, become blind, and spent the last of my days cursing this fancy of mine that drives me there. And amongst the dizziness of the lowest of lives I shall see it, the tower! Its northern face that never was revealed to me shall shine against the ocean of night and take pity on my muted soul. Like a forgiving mother, the tower shall cast judgement on my emptiness and reveal to me the secret of life. Its secret face shall make me one of them, those who love, suffer, and starve between dirt tracks and palaces, and I shall cry with joy and pain and exultant meaning.

--

I re-read all of this and how pompous it sounds. It almost succeeds in conveying emotions. Sometimes, on this stage of parchment I take on a role and play it for a while. Inspiration, it was today. And yet, that fancy did touch me. So today I shall wear my best coat and descend to the forbidden city, to the palaces of filth and lust. Something might come of it.

From the Diary of Aristobulus Dhalgren, entry 215

Walking through the corridors of the house is strange today. Soon, I will be leaving, claiming my blood-right and become a landed noble, if fate smiles on me that is.

I remember endless hours at the desk, tedious hours in which the void pokes at you like to glittering embers in the fireplace. A rush of oxigen, boredom swells and the world becomes more untenable. A, once again, new tutor would infallibly remind me to humble, to know that that the hand of destiny caresses us all and there is nothing the human race can do with will and passion. Perhaps that why I don't feel nothing; a teaching hammered deep into my soul.

If fate smiles at me, with rotting teeth of an old servant coming back to ask for money. She asks pity and my throat swells with nausea, I taste yesterday's dinner and throw some coins at that pathetic creature. What is pity? Suffering together is such absurd concept, I can barely entertain the thought that - maybe - those pompous creatures that busy themselves around me have anything at all inside them. Hollow shells; if I cannot conceive their flesh, the fancy that they might be thinking and suffering strikes me as the utmost absurdity! Why should they be suffering, if I cannot? How can I conceive their feelings through the absence of mine?

I remember youth, distant and unreal. One day I ran with others to the river and watched them get naked and jump in. The erotism of bodies and gazes, of pushes and laughs, I did not understand. I watched them jumping in and sat waiting. Then they got out and laid on the fresh grass, talked and unwrapped dried meet and cheese and ate.

Once alone, light dimming and the breeze getting cold, I slowly walked in. A slippage and I was down, under the water. There, where all sounds are dimmed and all gains an uncanny solemnity, I suddenly felt at home. Here is were I always belonged, the underwater realm, where all rests in silence and immobility! Walking home I felt something, not happiness perhaps, but a kinship with the water and the void.

From the Diary of Aristobulus Dhalgren, entry 211

Misery! Misery and more misery! Where were those pleasures and sweet absentmindedness the youth is supposed to feel? The years slithered by like a fat snake or a dying slug and I did not feel a thing. Where is the sweet love that tears your heart apart like a rabid dog? All I felt was mild annoyance at the stupidity of the youth that idly surrounded me. Where was the quivering of the flesh, the absurd transcendence of sexual union and the brief ecstasy of fulfillment? Nausea is what I felt at the saggy body of a naked servant or a blushing virgin!

Vacuity. All has been vacuity. Everything has come muffled and deadened, like through the cloth Master Triuvius used to put under the strings of the grand piano to play late at night. My youth was a sonata for the deaf, a wasted banquet for the fasting monk!

But I cannot even feel rage for the cruel destiny that deprived me of my youth. I went through all the motions without emotion or care. I ate game and smiled at the nervous cook that served me, but I felt nothing. I kissed the white lips of a virgin and whispered sweet words of love, but the worry for the gathering clouds was stronger than the weak feelings in my heart. I trained everyday in the art of the sword, but every victory in training did not leave me any joy.

And now I am to leave my timely dwelling and embrace the sword. Become an adult and cast light on my tainted family name. Who cares? I shall do it like I ate, kissed, and killed before: with no emotions, expectations, or joy.

I feel nothing, and the void clutches its bony hand around my throat.

The future, what an absurd concept! Emptiness lies behind and ahead; and also above and below for all that matters! Why should adulthood give me what youth did not?

I expect nothing, I shall plunge my sword in the hearth of a thousand men for the kingdom and yet my own hearth shall remain dry.

Emptiness, my mistress! The absurdity of this life leaves me amused sometimes, though a mild amusement. Anguish is perhaps the only movement in my sonata.

Alas, I shall start my act, the pretense of feeling and life.