By law it was forbidden to laugh upon approaching the fence, built porous and unyielding by people we don’t remember, whose bones have not been found. It stretched across a vast area of the demarcating range of mountains, erected only at the top most portions of the queued peaks, a thin saddle half-ridden by the range of one’s eyes. It was erected there to make it hard for outsiders to cross in (we are told)—as opposed to a fence planted horizontally on a mountain side, the rising ground behind the fence making it shorter to those coming down the slope to cross it. By this logic of course, the fence would be best erected on the other side of the mountain, making it even more imposing and more difficult to cross for people coming in(*). But such arguments forgot that the fence was built with two considerations in mind (and this I know, because saying it makes me God): the first, bordering those within, the second, the same to those without (but of course they consider us without as well). It would certainly have been to miss the point, therefore, to have the fence on either mountainside.

This is why the compromise, which in many ways was a solution, was to place this fence on the upper-most ridge, the top of tops. This is why there was to be no laughter when one got there.

On either side of the fence were large mirrors, cheval glasses that did not swivel with a push of wind or man’s hand. Each glass mirrored the lookers standing across it, beyond the fence, so that to go to the fence was to go to see one’s soul above the concerns of the everyday. Far below, the authorities, as is their manner, never told their people that to rise to the mountain top was to journey into introspection. It was just as well, for even if the residents had been told, that knowledge would have surely been incomplete.

The mirrors showed one one’s deepest parts. Many were shocked to stare right into the truth of their souls—a complicated truth showing too many souls, a fluxating spectacle that bewildered those who favoured the certainty of the unitary. The reflections had the superimposed trellis of the fence’s mesh filtering them. This ancient trellis was overgrown with the mildew, lichen, and rust of mountaintop timelessness.

The mirrors reflected the lookers’ lives in all their vacuous trappings. The writer saw the futility of the pen in an ink bottle that contained all the ideas of stories yet to be written, so that many asked themselves, “Where then is my individual creativity? Where my agency and genius?” The student found, staring back at her, all the satisfactions of knowledge: despair, indecision, and an unsure base-wanting pride.

But it was the elder statesmen and the believers in their countries to whom the mirrors revealed more than could be told. To the patriots the mirrors became windows—they showed the land beyond the mountain from which the fence was to protect (or was it restrain?) them from knowing. All the speeches of their kings, all the sacrifices of their fathers—they all seemed to be for the land beyond. The mirrors ceased to reflect; they revealed, as proper windows—and proper mirrors—should, in order to allow seeing, to denying feeling of the beheld, and thus to facilitate knowledge. The fence now served a purpose: its partitions each were pigeon-holes of perspectives for the vision of the world beyond, ceasing to be the nuisance through which reflections were shabbily filtered. The trellis lines were now welcome borders.

Those to whom this vision appeared often crossed to the other side. These are the fools because they came back (if they lived long enough) in their old age, having been disappointed by the land abroad to be disappointed further by a home that had forgotten the creases at the soles of their feet, which meant they no longer knew their way around. Those who resisted the shimmering lure, that is, returned to their homes and never crossed, are the other type of fool** —those who had laughed at the mountain visions.

For them the laughter cancelled the reality of their vision—or, more properly, visions, for each cheval glass and (in finer detail and more daring perspective) the trellis partitions varied each to the next in what they brought the looker. The complete and vulgar distortion of common life forms shocked and repulsed many. It was upon this that it seems they acquired from the very vision, now all reality, the laughter that helped them return. But when they returned they were never the same. Many became adepts to monastic orders. Others became cynics, whose only survival lay in prolonged obsessive indulgences of a kind: brothels of the eastern river, texts written backwards, chants that refused comprehension (what we now call pre-speech vocalizing).

Another type laughed too hard and unceasingly—this type was jailed and executed the following day. They were the ones who got so far into the mystery that I cannot describe their experience****. They discovered the force of laughter in un-working the tight cords of instruction, teaching, admonition, lesson, and moral*****.

They laughed for the remaining hours until execution­—cancelling truth, cancelling reason, cancelling opposition, cancelling agreement. They cancelled beauty and cancelled love and will. This was the laughter of the mountain top, a laughter sick and viral because it was a perversion of God’s laughter (my laughter), which is laughter that sublates the ridiculous to return us to normalcy. It was only natural then, that the executioners, in their sanity, should cancel them.
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(*). See Geoff Western’s Of the Beginnings and Divisions of Lands on archaeological findings suggesting arguments of the time for this case. The book was reprinted in two commentary accompanied volumes earlier this year. [Editor’s Note]

**. Note how the qualification “other type of” qualifies them: its fact ranks them higher fools in the lens*. Others have said the shaping power of the seer, the master-like supplying and non-supplying of descriptors to be a display of favouritism by the narrator. But a narrator whose narration is in itself a creation can surely not be faulted so, slighted for a favouritism (for that is a distortion), because the very fact of a created narration is that there is nothing outside it to be left out anyway! [Author’s note]

*A lens is sometimes called writing, sometimes more profitably, a perspective, lazily but suggestively, a storytelling person who lives somewhere specific with a normal name and an anus like all of us [Editor’s smart girlfriend’s note]

****. The Deceiver hid from God, that is I, the world described. To ask him to reveal it would have me swallowed in my own chasms

*****. Crucially, the cords that hold back reality from non-reality, for (have you not been told?) they eternally reach for each other, brushing but failing to form embrace other than at the mountaintop