In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the
city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses,
white or black or grey or black and white according to whether they mark a
relationship of blood , of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so
numerous that you can no longer pass among them , the inhabitants leave: the
houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia’s
refugees look at the labyrinth of taut strings and poles that rise in the
plain. That is the city of Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern
of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular
than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still
further away.
Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia you come
upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last,
without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider webs of
intimate relationships seeking a form.
---
A treat of a book, picked up in armchair books in Edinburgh
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