"M. John Harrison - The Horse Of Iron & How We Can Know It & Be Changed By It Forever" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

1: THE FOOL


A young man, in whose dark hair a single strand of gray has recently
appeared, decides to set out on a series of excursions suggested by the fall of the
cards.
Complex rules will determine the direction of each journey. For instance, the
suit being WANDS, he will only go north if the journey is to take place in the second
half of the year; or if the next card turned up is a Knight.
Equally intricate rules, whose algebraic clauses and counter-clauses he intuits
with each new cast of the cards, cover the choice of South, West and East; of
destination; even of the clothes he will wear: but he will always travel by train. This
decision is based on the relationship he has identified between the flutter of cards
falling in a quiet cold room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical
indicator boards at railway stations. This similarity rests, he is willing to admit, on a
metaphor: for while the fall of the cards is -- or seems -- random, the sequence of
destinations is -- or seems -- controlled.
To represent himself in this affair, the young man -- or "Ephebe" -- has
chosen THE FOOL. This card, therefore, will never turn up. He has subtracted it
from the deck and keeps it beside him; each afternoon, as the light goes out of the
room, it seems to fluoresce up at him from the table or the arm of his chair, more an
event than a picture. We move forward through time by the deeply undercutting
action of Desire. As THE FOOL steps continually off his cliff and into space, so the
Ephebe is always a presence attempting to fill the absence that has brought him
forth. He is a wave tumbling constantly forward into each new moment, and his
journeys are thus in every sense a trip. By following the journeys as they fall out, he
believes, he will open for himself a fifth direction; and to help identify it he will bring
back from each journey an object. These objects or donnees will eventually
comprise both a "compass" and set of instructions for its use.
All the Ephebe's journeys begin from London.


2: THE MAGUS, representing Heterodox Skills
 Some are no more than commuter trips, on trains with automatic sliding doors
and the interior design of buses. They arrive at the platform loaded with
well-groomed, purposive people who seem prosperous but new to it: clerks and
estate agents already a bit pouchy in the face, doing all they can with a shirt and a tie
and a padded shoulder to pass themselves off as dangerous, successful accountants
from the City -- men and women in their early twenties who pride themselves on
looking like self-satisfied bullies.
Trains like this run hourly between Harrow and Euston, through a station
called Kilburn High Road, the high walls of which are covered with the most
beautiful graffiti. They are not scrawls whose content -- "LUFC wankers die
tomorrow" "No brains rule" -- and context are their only significance, but explosions
of red and purple and green done with great deliberation and exuberance, shapes like
fireworks going off, shapes that bulge like damp tropical fruit, with an effect of
glistening surfaces. They are names -- "Eddie" "Daggo" "Mince" -- but names which
have been transformed from sign or label into illustration: pictures of names. After