ARTIFACT 16: The Life Within, by Robert Kloss

by Amber Sparks

Ah, the hiss and seethe of man, of man no longer man, of man enclosed in brass and gold and steel. This man who will not rot, nor sag nor droop nor gray. How we cut him open and found the life within. How his gas fled into our vessels at the last incision. How the flesh unfolded and our red scalded hands.

Finally how the life of man extends beyond the flesh of man, the vapor once locked within a house of meat and sinew, now freed into our architecture, polished and shined. Finally, no more eyes but what eyes our science paints. No more mouths but what mouths our science sculpts. Finally, no more the words of man but the seethe of mans’ mist, finally, this language older than the oldest teeth and tongues.

Ah, to lean close and hear the counsel of the wisdom beyond, to scald an ear and know the bloom and light of the world we discovered. This world older than all worlds. Now all men may know the infinite, to speak a language of steam, to fill the shapes of swords and lutes, ducks and phalluses, dogs and tigers. To beautify bedrooms and clock towers, courtyards and country homes, common areas and reading rooms, to bloom our lives with the life beyond life, to fill our habitations with moon-shaped men of copper and brass, of diamond and tin, the language of the infinite, the life of all lives within.

Robert Kloss is teaching too many classes this semester.

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Amber Sparks is our September 2010 Writer In Residence. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in various places, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Annalemma and PANK. She is also the fiction editor at Emprise Review, and lives in Washington, DC with a husband and two beasts. She blogs here.

Excavating the Ancient City

by Amber Sparks

At the site of the Ancient City – now a barren valley – soil and rock and bits of grass grow over and under the past. The natural world segments and flattens and finally buries the City’s stories like layers of sediment. Of course, the City itself is one vast story. It is in fact the same history that every city shares, that every city eventually sheds along with inhabitants, structures, and finally even the land it sprang from. It is the story of civilization itself. Of a whole world bubbling, born, and eventually burned up; it is a world folded up on itself like an old newspaper, lost as the elderly and new-found as infants.

But each city is also unique, is also its own body of stories sliced open on the dissection table. As we cut deeper into bone or bedrock we find shorter and sharper stories, narratives grown wild and strange. These stories are buried deep in the earth at the site of the Ancient City. It is up to the writers who’ll appear here through September to piece together the tales that make up the city – not through the people, who are long gone, but through the objects and artifacts they left behind.

The excavation of the Ancient City is not a fixed event: not in time nor in place. It symbolic, ongoing, the constant unearthing of the stone walls and battlements of a very old place in the world or maybe in the world’s consciousness only; it is the always-discovery of a thing that was once a city and is now the collective shuttered memory of a forgotten people. Indeed, we will be the City’s forgotten people someday, only our bravest buildings and basest metals left to mark the spot like stains.

On the original mound of the first City, our Ancient City, the following successive settlements have been discovered: an early prehistoric settlement with a wall built of small stones and clay; a city built in a mid-classic period with a large public square, temples, and a massive colusseum; a heavily fortified medieval city, with strong ramparts, a palace, and a village; a sprawling and heavily industrialized city built from the ground up after the older portions were destroyed by earthquake; and finally the city, modern, at the height of technological achievement, and completely destroyed by a massive and devastating fire from the sky–man made or natural, we do not know.

Each object, or artifact, found at the site of the City dates back to one of these five periods, so labeled:

Agriculture & Discovery:  Prehistoric Village
Trade,  Craft, & Art:  Classical Capital
Nobles, Peasants, & Priests:  Warring Kingdom
Industrialists & Explorers:  Golden City
Technology & Sky Fire:  Ruined Land

This is a collection of those artifacts and their stories, meant to shape the broad outline of the Ancient City, to give it a face and a history that, though perhaps entirely fictitious – based as it is on guesses and mysteries – represents a kind of larger truth about the City. Indeed, it represents a larger truth about the world; it tells us about how we live and die and and yet we go on, always, ever, just the same since our history sprang up on the surface of the world.

Please visit tomorrow for the first artifact and an accompanying piece by Robert Kloss, and on Friday for another artifact-inspired story by Anne Valente. We’ve got lots and lots of amazing writers lined up to help excavate and catalogue this City, throughout the month of September – some who you know, and some who you’re going to be glad to discover. And at the end of the month we’ll unveil a website with the entire collection of stories and artifacts for you to peruse and absorb and uncover.

Welcome to the Ancient City!

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Amber Sparks is our September 2010 Writer In Residence. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in various places, including New York Tyrant, Unsaid, Gargoyle, Annalemma and PANK. She is also the fiction editor at Emprise Review, and lives in Washington, DC with a husband and two beasts. She blogs here.