#194 Tu (1/3/2023) - Petra and [OW] notes for a story

The ancient city of Petra is in modern day Jordan. It is iconic and recognizable, just from the view of what is called Al-Khazneh (The Treasury), as shown in Indiana Jones.  But at its height it housed 20-30k Nabateans.  Desert merchants who became fabulously wealthy from the sale of frankincense and myrrh.  Nomads who carved a city into the sandstone rock.  In 312 BC Diodorus Siculus records an expedition sent by Antigonous (one of Alexander's succesors) during the Third Diadochi War, by 50 BC a vast city in the desert, by 106 AD conquered by Rome, by the fourth century forgotten and empty. In the 12th century fought over by Crusaders and Mamluks.  Rediscovered in 1812 by Swiss traveler, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt.

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I had the barest hint of an idea of something I would like to write.

I started with a young Roman Questor or subaltern leaving Rome for his first assignment.  He is posted at the border of Empire, somewhere in the Near East. It interdict bandits or rebels, he leads an expedition into the desert wastes. 

There they encounter hardships until the expedition is almost lost.

(In Borges story, The Immortals, it begins very like this and has the Roman encounter a strange city, populated by trogldytes, who turn out to be immortals, including Homer, the blind poet.  The city is accessed via an underground labyrinth.

Lovecraft's story, The Nameless City is a similar subterranean exploration of an ancient and forgotten city, unfortunately populated by its alien/demonic host, in suspended animation.

I like the idea of the Roman stumbling across the entrance to a city like Petra, at the end of a long and twisty ravine. 

The question I should ask, is what do I want to say with this story?  Why do I want to write it?  What is the plot, and the point?

I am not sure right now.  

I thought perhaps that after passing through an underground, lost city the Roman might emerge again, but remain convinced he is still inside the city, just that the city includes barren tracts, wastes, deserts, plateaus, villages, other cities, etc.

I also thought of him encountering a cylindrical structure within the protecting curtain walls and ravines forming a natural labyrinth around this enormous structure and coming to realize once he had penetrated it, that it was a vast circular tower carved from within the living rock forming a vast library, labyrinth.  The main feature would be a central spiral staircase/ramp extending upwards for hundreds of feet. (Mesas or butte can extend up to 1000 feet upward and have areas from 12000 sf  to many square miles.  This would give something between 10 and 100 stories.  I thought of there beaing a hole at the top of the central shaft admitting light but that the rest of the structure would be warrens and labyrinths of galleries, tunnels and chambers extending many hundreds of feet into the interior away from the central shaft.

More questions?  Its this entirely abandoned?  Is it in good repair or derelict?  Would the books survive?  Is this a magical or fantastical space?  Certainly not meant to be a realistic one.  Is the story about books, the past, history, quests?  (Questor is a real Roman rank and resonates with the idea of a quest.  perhaps the young Roman is setting off to make a name for himself, as they say in adventure stories.)

Some other questions - is the library full of scrolls, or codices, or books, or perhaps cuneiform tablets.  Does he speak the language they are written in or not? A library full of books (or even just inscriptions on the walls) that you cannot read does not tell much of a story.

Is the story about books or about people he meets inside?

Borges' Library of Babel contains a limitless supply of meaningless and incomprehensible books, with the tantalizing presence of a few that could be invaluable.

I do not necessarily want this to be a story about codes or treasure hunts, but rather a more symbolic or allegorical story about journeys, quests and lives spent searching.

In House of Leaves the vast space inside the Navidson house stood in for something else; interpretation of text and meaning, but it also had a specific presence and presented a type of problem itself without being overtly metaphorical.

I don't have any good answers yet. All I really have is a setting and perhaps a set up, but no idea about characters, other than the main one. No idea about conflict, other than, once having gotten into a labyrinth the principal aim seems to be to get back out.

I had thought of making the structure itself a microcosm of the world and fill it with a population of religious cults and fanatics, prophets, con men, bandits, sadists, Roman centurions, etc etc or even just facsimilies of these and have them reenact the calamities of human history outside the Library.  This is similar to what Borges had his Librarians do.  (See also The Lottery of Babylon here, for how the microcosm might be structured).

Without being excessively judgemental, I feel that I lack good plotting, good characterizations and a good sense of conflict/purpose. So maybe I am not trying to replicate existing kinds of writing. Perhaps I am trying to understand or capture a particular feeling when faced with the boundless encyclopedic potential of human culture and history.  I am also perplexed by the problem of reading and understanding that is presented by codes, ciphers and languages.  That wisdom and knowledge are not synonymous. And that we are at risk of succumbing to our own fantasies when faced with too much open text to interpret.

I have also wondered what would happen if I stopped thinking of this as a story and started thinking of it as a game?  What would be the object - walking simulator? Exploration/adventure? There are different aims in games, but I am not all that familiar with game design.  If this was an RPG you would have to populate the space with denizens.  Maybe it is something like Noumenon or Ultraviolet Grasslands? Psychedelic or Kafkaesque nightmares? Esoteric or Orientalist mysteries. Survival/horror. Melancholy or terrifying?  Sublime or quotidian?

I have to ask better questions about these ideas. Borges says he could often glimpse the beginning and the end of a story idea at once and then would have to work out the middle.  For a story like The Circular Ruins it might be "man sets out to dream another being into existence, then comes to discover he is himself only dreamed."

For Funes, the Memorious it might be "a man is endowed with infallible memory of every minute detail of existence, consequently goes mad." 

The Aleph and The Book of Sand both seems to be something like "magical impossible object allows you to hold the infinite in the palm of your hand. Rather than bringing the bearer any benefit, they must be destroyed or disposed of." 

What if the structure that I am calling the circular tower, is not a vast library, but instead a vast book - an Encyclopedia of Tlon type of book.  A complete rewriting of all human existence into an equally valid alternative. What would that be and why? If Lovecraft wrote had written this (and perhaps he did a few times), the book would be from the Elder Gods and be a hideous, unspeakable prophecy stretching back far beyond the birth of man suggesting that Shuggoths ruled the Earth for deeps eons and lie sleeping still, awaiting their reawakening. (Mountains of Madness).

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update: Loneliness, isolation and boredom, these I think are the things I have struggled with much of my life. That is why desolate empty expanses, suggestive of previous human occupation - ruins, cathedrals, libraries, especially.  Library still hold the ghosts of previous inhabitants in the form of their writings.  Their voices linger tantalizingly but sometimes just out of hearing.  

I am struck by the notion that the fire at the Library of Ashurbanipal actually hardened the clay tablets into ceramics and ensured that they would be perfectly preserved.  Yet, 5,000 years later, we have only translated about 1% of them, mainly just because we don't really care that much.  The sadness and melancholy of encountering a burned library of antiquity pales in comparison to the melancholy of a library filled to the brim with hundreds of thousands of tablets that we will never have time or energy to translate. (Seems like a good job for AI).

Petra has certain advantages here because it is at a crossroads; ancient Greeks under Alexander, Nabateans and Biblical references, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks, Bedouins, Ottomans....

A British or Swiss archeologist/adventurer in the early 19th century could rediscover the writings of a Crusader monk who found an even older writing of the Roman expedition around 100 AD, which touches upon the Macedonian invasion 400 years earlier.  Voices echoing through history.  Most of these voices - solitary, intelligent, educated, lonely men.

Maybe I should explore some of my feelings about loneliness and also a repressed desire to so something adventurous or important.  My inability to connect with living people and a tendency to escape into the past and far away exotic locales through books and history.

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Explored this topic further with ChatGPT.  Also watched some of the Jordanian show Jinn, on Netflix which starts with a class field trip to Petra.  Show was stupid and predictable mostly.