Originally posted on Weibo by @粟添, now 404.
The King’s Name
In the kingdom, the first taboo was the king’s name: say it and you lose your head. But in the kingdom there was no topic other than the king, so people invented nicknames for him.
The king’s name could be rearranged, inverted, recomposed in philological ways. Children raised in the kingdom understood it, so they carved it into walls, wrote it on scraps of paper and let the wind carry them away, so that shepherd children might pick them up. The king’s name had countless homophones, so the shepherd children wove those words into songs, sung from south to north for many years.
When the king discovered this, he ordered a ban on singing anything that referred to his name. The king’s men went out, and many words that resembled it in sound or shape were struck down; many dictionaries were burned to ash.
After that, the king’s name could only be pointed at through metaphors and fables. A metaphor was like someone far from home giving directions to a blind person over the phone. A fable was like someone who had never been to France dreaming of every brick and tile of Paris. Chief, driver, dragon tailbone, welcoming pine, revenge, pot, lake, fortune stick, sir, wife, satire, Shakespeare, Chilean, sewer, he, they, you. Clever metaphor-makers even learned to exploit pronouns.
When the king discovered this, he ordered the creation of a Meaning Committee to audit meaning. The committee members clutched their bald heads and worked day and night to interpret every word in the world, digging out every possible implication. On the road of interpretation, the committee chased the metaphor-makers relentlessly. The moment a committee member caught a metaphor, the metaphor-maker forged a new word.
On the last day, the metaphor-maker found that meaning had been used up. The king’s name had exhausted every meaning in the world. The committee, panting, buried the metaphor-maker. But by then, the king’s name was already known to all. Everyone on the street knew the king’s name, even though they could not say it. Even though they could not utter the name, when they talked about flowers, birds, trees, they were always speaking of the king in sunny negation and shadowy affirmation. The committee stared, stunned.
When the king discovered this, he ordered a ban on all language. In the kingdom, every mouth was shut. But what the committee did not expect was this: after the king’s name had absorbed all meaning, it also became silence. The king’s original name no longer mattered. The king now had countless names. Countless names contained every combination of sounds a human throat can produce, and also contained silence. Every mouth in the kingdom was shut, and the silence of that kingdom was deafening.
The king’s true name rang through the universe.
網友投稿
— 喵流青年 (@midwaydude) April 4, 2020
《404》 pic.twitter.com/3KvJ9cAeh1