Mordew

  On how the weft may be altered

  So, then, how can it be that the weft is perfectly dense and yet can still be moved? It is because of time, which moves the weft as a tide moves the sea, and because of the warp, which is to the weft as the weft is to the realms. If we think of the weft as a perfect piece of cloth, then the warp is the manner in which one folds that cloth or makes it into clothes by tailoring it. In what way it does this we can never know, since only the weftling knows or feels the warp. We are insensible of it in the same way we are insensible of the weft, but it must be so since cloth has both warp and weft when made on a loom. The loom relies on them to do its job, and if there were not warp then what would hold together the weft? The answer is ‘nothing’, and so the fabric of the world would fall apart and become as a pile of threads – tangled, formless, useless. This explains, too, why the weftling is male (as is evidenced from his corpse) and the warpling must be female, since where is the sense in having one without the other? A unity is made of two opposing things, joining together.

  On where concepts are in the weft

  If all of the matter and the energy of all possible things is instantiated in and through the weft and yet the weft is not the material realm, where then are the concepts of the immaterial realm to be found in the weft? The answer is that they are everywhere and infuse everything, except not entirely in the weftling – the set of the concepts that are contained in the body of the weftling are self-identical with his will and no other concepts are allowed there – since they have no dimension, only conceptual separation.

  On the size of a concept

  If matter is divisible down to the vanishingly small, then even this tiny atom of a piece of matter can contain within it all the possible concepts that came to be in the world, and all the possible concepts that might have been but did not come to be and, through the weftling, all of the impossible concepts too, because a thing with no dimension of size needs no space at all to be in, so it can be everywhere. For this reason, the concepts are like the colour of an object – they are an aspect of it, but not contained by it. A red thing is red not because it is covered with minuscule inseparable red dots, but because it possesses the quality ‘red’ which is recognisable by the eye. So, in the weft, matter possesses the quality of all the concepts, though this is not to say it possesses them evenly, since those concepts proper to matter as it was or might have been used in a realm other than the immaterial realm causes these concepts to inhere more strongly in one place in the weft than in another.

  On the concepts proper to the weftling and which represent his will

  Within the places in the weft where the weftling is are those concepts that represent his will, and all others are held in abeyance. Say ‘goodness’ is contained in the weftling, but not ‘cruelness’, which the weftling wills away. Some say this is the source of evil in the material realm, since if the weftling pushes it away from himself then it must be more concentrated in the parts of the weft that are not him, and so bad thoughts, bad actions, bad intentions are more proper to the rest of the world. Also, in this we can see how the weftling is both knowing and ignorant – he knows what is proper to him, and is ignorant of what is not. Moreover, his knowledge is of the things he wishes to be and not in the things he wishes not to be, and this is how he came to be killed, since he did not know that which was against his will lest that, by containing it, he be contaminated or make of the realms chaos by forcing congruence on them with those concepts which are incompatible with rightness.

  On things the weftling does not contain and the chaos dependent therein

  Nor does the weftling contain combinations of concepts which, by virtue of his congruence with the weft, he might make to come real across the realms through the power of the Spark and which are deleterious. These concepts, though, are the source of the competing gods, notions and manipulations of the weft because, since they still exist and are outside his understanding, it takes only a failure of his concentration, if his will is required elsewhere, to instantiate themselves in, for example, the material realm through the excesses of Spark energy that, like excretions from a person – sweat, urine, faeces, breath – are a natural product of life. These his will must suffer to be until he chooses otherwise, which, while he still lived, was never for long, but, now that he is dead, is forever. More and more of these there are, ever accumulating, since the Spark is left without his controlling will, and throughout the realms powers run amok, unchecked by his controlling hand.

  On where a concept is the most in the weft

  It is found concentrated in the places where the material presence of objects requires the concept. Just as a moving object requires the energy to move it, so a thing requires its concept to be it, and just as matter is infused with energy in the weft, so it is infused with concepts. This can be said in another way – that the concepts are infused with matter and energy in the weft, both the possible concepts that came to be and those that might have come to be.

  On dreams

  The part of a person’s self that finds instantiation in the material realm by virtue of their existence timelessly in the weft has, as a counterpart, a conceptual identity in the immaterial realm which consists of all the thoughts and experiences that are required for that person to experience the world of matter. Experience is the use of the immaterial concepts to facilitate the navigation of the matter of the material realm, which without the concepts would be undifferentiated and unrecognisable since a person finds their way by understanding, not by the senses alone. As time is proper to the material realm, but known only strangely in the weft and the immaterial realm, all those things from a person’s future and past, whether unknown or unexperienced yet, are still available and present in the conceptual counterpart. Through the weft, these concepts drift into and out of a person’s mind, since a mind is simultaneously a thing of matter – the fleshy contents of the skull (and, some say, the gut) – and also of the concepts it thinks. While that person is awake, usually, the perceptions of the senses are sufficient to drown out this drifting, but when these sensations wane to nothing, as in sleep, the mind becomes sensitive to the concepts of the immaterial counterpart, and this is what a dream is.

  On ghosts

  Just as the Spark animates matter where it finds it and makes it live, so it does for the immaterial concepts. In the weft, where the Spark meets matter, in the material realm life is made, and one type of life is a person. Where the Spark meets the same concepts in the weft, the immaterial counterpart of a person becomes a ghost, which is how life is in that realm. Matter and its movements and arrangements have an effect on the concepts as they appear in the immaterial realm, and the conceptual equivalent of this in the immaterial realm can influence the material realm, and when this happens in the form of a person we understand this to be a ghost (though how they understand themselves and how they live in their proper realm we cannot understand, since we need time to understand anything and there is no time as we know it in the immaterial realm).

  On manipulations of the weft

  These are alterations in the material realm made by alterations in the weft and are ways of changing one possibility into another by tying immaterial concepts to material objects and, while God lives, are suffered in the way that a man will suffer the crawling of an insect on his skin – reluctantly and not for long – and the weftling will eventually force the material realm back into its perfect possible form.

  On perversions of the weft

  These are aggressions against the form of the weftling by changing and destroying the proper structure of the weft so that the material realm naturally adopts the form of an improper body incompatible with the weftling. It is through perversions of the weft that the weftling was killed and the Masters came to be able to perform their magics, since he would not suffer it otherwise.

  ‌Acknowledgements

  Thanks as always to Emma, to my editors Sam Jordison and Eloise Millar, and to Alex Billington, who typeset
the manuscript.

  Thanks also to Sarah Terry for her copy-editing, and to Alex’s brother, Mark Billington, for his suggestions.

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