The Windpaper Pyramid was the oldest and most well known mnemonic monument of Middle Themis. It was constructed from colossal scrolls of windpaper, parchment and papyrus and was notable for its alleged ability to organize memory impressions, improve recall, and assist in the combination and 'invention' of ideas.
There were three known chapters located within the monument. The first was cut into the pulp upon which the Pyramid was built and consisted entirely of introductory hieroglyphic text. Among these inscriptions, “capture” could be clearly seen, but who or what was captured was unknown as the corresponding glyphs were incomplete, indecipherable.
The second and third chapters of the Pyramid were larger in dimension and connected by an descending corridor ('linear narrative'). Located within these passages was an abridged chronicle of Themis and its changing role in the culture, including four human skeletons, an organized collection of finch bones, and an obsidian blade. For various philosophers and scholars, proximity to these offerings and reference material was said to function as "as a thought-form incubator” and “aid in information retention”, as well as cause other supernatural or paranormal effects. If such an assessment is correct, it has been suggested that the combined use of ‘symbolic magnetism’ and ‘chronicle architecture’ to develop and preserve mental content (masonry of loci) may have been a vital technique in Themis memory arts.
Of equal compositional importance to the Pyramid’s inner narrative was its outer facade. At completion, the monument was surfaced by white "windpaper" – slant-faced, but flat-topped, scrolls of highly polished white parchment. This near transparent casing served as a palimpsest for societal amendments and meteorological commentary, so that Pyramid may continue as living monument beyond its initial construction. The exposed and pending nature of this parchment was associated with views that contemporaneous continents should be taken into account when interpreting Themis history, or else the Pyramid itself would exist as nothing more than an open grave or gesture of defeat.
Many alternative, often contradictory, theories have been proposed regarding the Windpaper Pyramid’s intent and capacity for communication. Most accepted hypotheses were based on the idea that the symbolic exchange of context created from the monument’s fixed inner history and it’s continually inscribed outer casing could be ‘read’ as a type of 'writing', and not as something different from it. The ultimate purpose of this dialogue, however, remained unclear. Certain researchers have speculated that that Pyramid may have had no prepared intent or directive, or that it may not have been a mnenomic structure at all. Rather, the construction itself may be seen as an inevitable discussion of recurrence and vulnerability, a conversation never meant for paper, papyrus, or parchment, but patiently waiting, misplaced, aching to escape them.
Jillison, we both knew it was an obvious ritual. A pyramid of pain as a consent to pain, a monument to a trauma body.
What surface of it were you still tricking yourself into worshipping? Bruise marks as building blocks towards a body of your own, Jillison, I understood why you wanted to relive it, on purpose this time, but what did you expect would happen next?
Scars were stacked on the bed. I hoped you were underground, blood heavy, inheriting nothing. All those bodies ago, that’s what you said you wanted anyway.
What geometry do ghosts learn as language, either alone or together?
Cause and effect comes first, and then consequence, and then control. It wasn’t an unexpected outcome, it wasn’t anomalous terrain. You can never heal or humiliate yourself more than never existing at all.
Still, I was angrier than I thought I would be, watching you act it all out, erasures of us in your hands, windpaper chained and whipped to white out your skin.
You had to know you were taught to act like that, trained to crave it, as a narrative, as an infinite regress (or the illusory alternative). Anatomy as reclamation material (humiliation), all those empty blocks of mirror box therapy you stacked to an apex and then kept going.
Even if you did it right, Jillison. It was already a well practiced revenge.
Jillison, I didn't want to talk about practice. Rewrite it however you want, you already left me anyway.
What were the stereotypes of being called sensitive? Or more appropriately, "over sensitive?" What were you thinking when you told them it hurt only as much as I let it hurt?
What did you think would last? A phantom instinct or a phantom pain? Is there a difference now?
(More questions I didn't mean rhetorically. I meant them honestly and completely. What about us were you still hoping to avoid or unknow? Jillison, what did that mean, geometry is a language with no word for grave? Or living.
There were times I thought our trauma would translate each other, I thought shared ruins were almost all we could need. Believe me, it never lasted long.
Blunt force, breaking point, a blankness for clothes and mouth and sweat. Arm hair and leg hair left in heavy portions. Palms covered in sweat and both colors of blood (lost and loss). Just another performance of pain for a body that couldn't speak on its own.
Parchment scraps and pieces, one last paradox of the heap. Death may not be removed from language, but its location may be translated to loss and shame.
If you wanted to call it a power dynamic, that was your choice. They taught you the Prismatic Scale of Saints and Angels, didn't they? Self-dual, shadow limits versus spectral density. By now you had to be young enough to know there was no resurrection coming. All that the edgework of expectation and demand, I know I don't have to remind you.
No matter how much of your past you think a pyramid will protect, no matter what architecture of pain you think it will outlast.
Be careful with a broken record Jillison, don’t use it as a base to hide inside.
Wrong geometry, wrong time, when you ripped up wind paper to write over your past, when you let your skin look like that again.
Cheeks hot and red and soaking well. Welts waiting on dry water, eyes off-white from all those addictions ritual without me. Discipline and punish and how else did you expect an afterlife to find you?
We were different, maybe too different this time. Windpaper kept you clothed, rewrote our name, but it was a bandage, a temporary ache, not a whole body, or even close. I didn’t want to keep trying to build a natural language to try to and hold it in anymore. I was taught courage is not in leaving, it’s in never coming home.
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