Originally posted on Weibo by @粟添. The original has already been 404’d.
The King’s Name
The first forbidden thing in the kingdom was the king’s name. Speak it, and your head would roll. But there was no subject in the kingdom except the king, so the people invented nicknames for him.
The king’s name could be broken apart, inverted, and reassembled with all the tricks of philology. Children who grew up in the kingdom understood it, so they carved it into walls, wrote it on scraps of paper, and let the wind carry them off for shepherd children to find. The king’s name also had countless homophones, so the shepherd children turned those words into songs and sang them from south to north for years.
When the king found out, he forbade the singing of anything that might refer to his name. The king’s men were sent out. Many words that merely resembled it in sound or shape were swept up in the purge, and many dictionaries were burned to ash.
After that, the king’s name could only be approached through metaphor and fable. A metaphor was like someone far from home trying to guide a blind man over the phone. A fable was like someone who had never been to France dreaming, somehow, of every brick and every tile in Paris. Chief, driver, dragon tailbone, welcoming pine, revenge, pot, lake, fortune stick, sir, wife, satire, Shakespeare, Chilean, sewer, he, they, you. The cleverest makers of metaphor even learned how to put pronouns to work.
When the king found out, he ordered the formation of a Meaning Committee to censor meaning itself. The committee members clutched their bald heads and worked day and night, reading every word in the world and digging for every possible implication. Along the road of interpretation, they pursued the makers of metaphor without rest. Every time the committee seized one metaphor, the metaphor-maker would mint another word.
On the final day, the metaphor-maker discovered that meaning itself had run out. The king’s name had consumed every meaning in the world. Panting, the committee buried the metaphor-maker. But by then the king’s name was already known to everyone. Every person in the street knew it, even if they could not say it aloud. And though they still could not utter the name, whenever they spoke of flowers, birds, or trees, they were always talking about the king in daylight and in shadow alike. The committee could only stare.
When the king found out, he banned language altogether. Every mouth in the kingdom was shut. But the committee had not expected this: once the king’s name had swallowed every meaning, it became silence too. The king’s original name no longer mattered. He now possessed countless names. Those countless names contained every possible arrangement of sound the human throat could produce, and silence as well. Every mouth in the kingdom was closed, and the silence of that kingdom was deafening.
The king’s true name rang through the universe.
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— 喵流青年 (@midwaydude) April 4, 2020
《404》 pic.twitter.com/3KvJ9cAeh1
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