The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

If the mouth opens—for it opens still now—more than the tiniest crack, the lines of the face go deep, and a little avalanche of mouse-back-coloured substance spills away. Its shape is constantly replenished by the slow intake from the funnel, and so long as the losses occasioned by such linguistic exigencies are in balance with that new matter, the head can sustain itself. A sudden movement, a loss of power, and the face-slide would be catastrophic.

Anyone who wishes to study or learn from the Pulvadmonitor must scooch uncomfortably down on the attic floor, to its eye level, more or less, making their notes in the dim illumination of field lights (more permanent alterations to the room to accommodate a better display would cause vibrations that might destroy the emissary).

Almost all our questions remain unanswered. Why does the dust not open its eyes? What nature of eyes exist, indeed, if any, below those powder lids? Was it some sense of propriety that led the dust to construct the top of a collar, as if it was the bust only of a full person? As if, having decided to mimic our shape to make the transmission of information easier, in consideration for our psychology, there was no point in doing less than a thorough job. And, on the other side, what uncanny intuition for transubstantial courtesy was it that led Xanthe Serkis to place teeth ready for the soft-palateless dust, that it had grown around and constructed its dust-lips around, to ease its shaping of our words?

Of course, the main question has always been, what is the dust’s warning?

no

no no no

o really?

yes no

—UNKNOWN, “ODE TO EVERYTHING”

5. The Tragedy of Design

There can be no doubting the urgency of whatever message it is the dust wishes to convey. Whenever footprints, be they ever so careful, cross the floor towards it, it appears to become aware that it has watchers. Its mouth moves as quickly as it dares, it speaks as eagerly as its substance allows, its teeth, those little ceramic flashes in otherwise quite matt, quite indistinguishable dun skin, chatter like a telegraph operator. It wants to tell us something.

The funnel is just in front of its lips, so tantalisingly like the speaking tube we know it is not. It might even operate like one, amplifying its breathless voice enough for us to hear, but that the soft current of air from out to in effaces whatever minutely whispered phrases the head might speak. Its voice is so faint that not even stethoscopes on the glass can help. It is simply inaudible. Only the click of those teeth can be heard, and if they tap in code, it is not one amenable to our codebreakers.

Of course, lip-readers of countless languages have been brought to watch the head, to decipher its words. What is most frustrating of all to dust-watchers is not that none of them can discern any meaning but rather that they often see a few phrases, always disputed, never quite clear.

Two English-speaking lip-readers have claimed the dust said this dog will never be your friend amid a stream of meaningless syllables. An Italianophone claimed that it told her three times to cross the bridge. It is too late for the light has been seen spoken in four languages. In 2002, a Hindi reader and a Finnish one both claimed to have read the lips at the same moment, the first seeing stop up all these gaps before it comes, the latter consider where your own bones go.

Opinion is divided as to how to proceed. Lambshead was a pessimist on this issue. “As Lichtenberg said of angels,” he wrote in one of his last letters, “so I say of dust. If they, or it, ever could speak to us, why in God’s name should we understand?”

Two things remain unclear, and intemperately debated. One is the origin of the quiet Egyptian heads that watch the Pulvadmonitor, the Dust’s Warning, approvingly. They were not a gift from Lambshead. No one knows their provenance, and there is no record of their arrival.

The second concerns the “Violent Philosophy of the Archive.” This essay, in which is the footnote where first is mentioned the Dust’s Warning, and which hints at the importance of its (second) birth, was found in a sheaf of Lambshead’s papers dating from the mid-1980s and published posthumously. What is controversial is precisely when it was written. Textual evidence suggests that while it might have been just after, it could very well have been just before, the nook in the museum attic was uncovered. The question is whether, in other words, Lambshead was musing on something recently discovered; or was waiting impatiently for something that he had prepared to be found again.

The dust doubtless knows the answer, and its agitated efforts notwithstanding, can tell us, and warn us of, nothing.

The Miéville Anomalies

The Miéville Anomalies