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Derrida, then, is asking us to change certain habits of mind: the authority of the text is provisional, the origin is a trace, contradicting logic, we must learn to use and erase our language at the same time
showing that the two terms of an opposition are merely accomplices of each other
Nevertheless, the subject of how and when we become certain that what we are doing is quite possibly wrong but at least a beginning has to be studied in its full historical and intellectual richness.
Some stood about all but naked, squinting in the sun, while some wore elaborate skirts and belts and necklaces, most of the women and half the men with dark wings of paint laid about their eyes, some sleepy and slow-moving, some with quick smiles and inquisitive comments to every passerby,
taught Gorgik the double lesson that is, finally, all civilization can know: The breadth of the world is vasty and wide; nevertheless movement from place to place in it is possible; the ways of humanity are
various and complex—but nevertheless negotiable.
the city’s name was now, in fact, Kolhari—as every beggar woman and ship’s boy and tavern maid and grain vendor had been calling it time out of memory. (It was no longer Neveryóna—which is what the last, dragon-bred residents of the High Court of Eagles had officially, but ineffectually, renamed it twenty years before.)
Still, the whole experience had been enough to make her decide that the institution of slavery was totally distasteful and so was the institution of war—that, indeed, the only excuse for the latter was the termination of the former.
And Gorgik learned that most valuable of lessons without which no social progress is possible: if you are to stay in the good graces of the powerful, you had best, however unobtrusively, please the servants of the powerful.
What interested them in him was his difference from them.
His language, blunt and blistered with scatalogs that frequently upped the odd aristocratic eyebrow, adhered finally to a very narrow range: the fights, feuds, and scrabblings for tiny honors, petty dignities, and minuscule assertions of rights among slaves and thieves, dock-beggars and prostitutes, sailors and barmaids and more slaves—people, in short, with no power beyond their voices, fingers, or feet—
No doubt this means the distinction is of little use. But we are trying to map the borders of the disposition that was, indeed, the case.
Gorgik, who had survived on the waterfront and survived in the mine, survived at the High Court of Eagles. To do it, he had to learn a great deal.
Gorgik, because he brought to the supper rooms no such preconceptions, soon learned, between evenings with the Vizerine, dawn rides with the Baron, afternoon gatherings in the Old Hall, arranged by the young earls Jue-Grutn (not to be confused with the two older men who bore the same title, the bearded one of which was said to be either insane, a sorcerer, or both), or simply from gatherings overseen and overheard in his wanderings through the chains of rooms which formed the Middle Style of the castle, that the hierarchy of prestige branched; that the branches interwove; and that the
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Olin, thought Gorgik. Olin’s warning …?
Indeed, among slaves Gorgik knew what generated such complexity: servitude itself. The only question he could not answer here was: what were all these elegant lords and ladies slaves to?
For it is precisely at its center that one loses the clear vision of what surrounds, what controls and contours every utterance, decides and develops every action, as the bird has no clear concept of air, though it support her every turn, or the fish no true vision of water, though it blur all she sees.
For all the temperamental similarities we have drawn, Gorgik was not (nor should we be) under any illusion that either the lords, or their servants, accepted him as one of their own.
Each time he came around the narrow circle, a sharp breeze caught him on the right side. Suddenly he stopped, dropped his head, and, still holding the decanter by his thumb, leaned his forearm high on the wall (the decanter clicked the stone) and vomited. And vomited again. And once again. Then, while his belly clamped once more, suddenly and surprisingly, his gut gave up its runny freight, which slid down both legs to puddle under his heels. Splattered and befouled, his inner thighs wet, his chin dripping, he began to shiver; the breeze scoured his right flank. Bread and bottle away from his
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learning that power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of the nation—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge. Yet, as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away; only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.
‘For the Empress to declare the elder gods are older than the monastery is to concede me a theological point that I support and that, till now, she has opposed. Over this point, many people have died. For her to say she wishes to go there is tantamount to declaring war on Lord Aldamir, in whose circle you and I both move, and who keeps his center of power there. For her to choose you to deliver this message is … But I shouldn’t trouble you with the details of that meaning.’
he really is an exceptional man.
‘He was wasted in the mines, My Lady. He is wasted at the castle. Only consider, My Lady, what is such a man fit for?
can think of no place where he could put it to
The basic education of Gorgik had been laid.
man who was—in his way and for his epoch—the optimum product of his civilization.
But for the civilization in which he lived,
he was a civilized man.
(and in that long-ago distant language the term applied equally to men and women)
(Venn had a curved mirror that she had once shown to Norema; and had made up a term in that language which might as well be translated ‘focal length.’)
Venn?
Norema first knew her as a woman who had been a close friend of her parents. Later, through anecdotes (and both Quema and Snar were still fond of the elderly woman), Norema realized that the closeness with each parent dated from different times. As a child, her father had built boats with Venn, and together they had invented all sorts of tools
even before then Venn had figured out, by herself, a system for telling where you were by the stars. But that...
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he’d also taken her navigation system and used it for a series of metal disks—rhet, scales, and map, which, today, sailors and travelers called an astrolabe.
Her mother had married her father; and somehow contact with the woman who was eighteen years older than both of them faltered and all but ceased. Yet both swore that Venn was the wisest woman on the island.
some were for words (Norema’s own contribution to the system, with which Venn was appropriately impressed)—
‘We must stop this,’
‘Or we must curtail it severely. I did not invent this system. I only learned it—when I was in Nevèrÿon. And I modified it, even as you have done.
And do you know what it was invented for, and still is largely used for there? The control of slaves.
If you do this, you can maneuver your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery.
Since we, here, do not aspire to civilization, it is perhaps best we halt the entire process.’
But Venn had started to tell them a story.
We are sitting in the shadow of knowledge; knowledge is written all around us, in the trees and on the rocks, as clearly as my marks on reed paper,’ Venn often told them)
‘I know something. I know how to tell you about it, but I don’t know how to tell you what it is. I can show you what it does, but I cannot show you the “what” itself.
the women do far and above more work than the men toward keeping the tribe alive.
Now one of the prestige tasks of the men is to make trades with strangers to the tribe—whereas the women do all the trading and exchanging within the tribe.
‘Now money, when it moves into a new tribe, very quickly creates an image of the food, craft, and work there: it gathers around them, molds to them, stays away from the places where none are to be found, and clots near the positions where much wealth occurs. Yet, like a mirror image, it is reversed just as surely as the writing on a piece of paper is reversed when you read its reflection on a boy’s belly. For both in time and space, where money is, food, work, and craft are not: where money is, food, work, and craft either will shortly be, or in the recent past were. But the actual place where
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The women are unhappy, for now the men make them work, pit them against each other, blatantly and subtly chide them with the work of their co-wives.
When I went up into the hills last to talk to my Rulvyn friends, I found that since money has come, the young women are afraid of the men.
‘In the Rulvyn before money, there were always many more unmarried males than unmarried females.
