Unable to tell myself: this is a dream.
I know what it is we are looking for. It is the grave of the poet Ovid - Publius Ovidius Naso, Roman of the equestrian order, poet. In all this desolation, no one knows where he lies. Called Naso because of the nose.
I speak to you, reader, as one who leaves in another century, since this is the letter I will never send. It is addressed neither to my wife nor to my lawyer at Rome, nor even to the emperor; but to you, unknown friend who do not exist at this time of my writing and whose face, whose form even, I cannot imagine. Can one imagine the face of a god? For that surely is what you must be at your great distance from us - the god who has begun to stir in our depths, to gather his being out of us, and will, at the other end of the great cycle that has already rocked our world with its quakings, have evolved at last and come into being. I cast this letter upon the centuries, uncertain in what landscape of unfamiliar objects it may come to light, and with what eyes you will read it. Is Latin still known to you? I bury it deep in the ice, in one of the tumulus graves whose rocks are sealed with ice that never melts and where no one from our Roman world has ever ventured. Only after a thousand years, when the empire has fallen and no longer has to power of silence over us, will this letter come safely to your hands. I am the poet Ovid - born on the cusp between two houses of the zodiac, where the Fishes, tugging in their opposite directions, plunge below the horizon, and the Ram ascends; between two cycles of time, the millennium of the old gods, that shudders to its end, and a new era that will come to its crisis at some far point in the future I can barely conceive of, and where you, reader, sit in a lighted room whose furnishings I do not recognize, or in the late light of a garden whose blooms I do not know, translating this - with what difficulty? - into your own tongue.
Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue? Has some secret admirer kept one of my poems and so preserved it, or committed it to memory? Do my lines still pass secretly somewhere from mouth to mouth? Has some phrase of mine slipped through as quotation, unnoticed by the authorities, in another man’s poem? Or in a letter? Or in a saying that has become part of common speech and cannot now be eradicated?
Have I survived?
I write this by candlelight. It is dark as night in this windowless room. Little spiders and other insects live in the thatched roofing and crawl about the floor, falling in your hair or in the bowl of soup you are eating, swarming in the folds of your garments. You get used to it after a while.
I had never had much contact with the creatures before this, not even with dogs or cats. Now I find something oddly companionable about them. Like me, they too cannot speak. They move about in the cracks, in the gaps of our lives, and are harmless. Even the spiders, poor creatures. Do they have a language of their own, I wonder? If so, I might try to learn it. As easy do that as master the barbarous guttural tongue my neighbors speak.
I have begun to recognize some sounds in it. But just to hear the old man shouting in the yard to his grandson, or muttering in the twilight to the young woman, some close at times to maddening me; it is like trying to remember something you have forgotten, that glows at the very edge of your mind but refuses to reveal itself. I feel cut off as one of those spiders. Or a rat balancing on a rafter and hearing the poets read. It is as if I had suddenly slipped back a step in the order of things, or been transformed, by a witch’s curse, into one of the lower species. But of course it is no witch who has done this. No magic has been practiced against me. All that has been evoked is the power of the law. I have, by the working of the highest known authority, been cast out into what is indeed another order of beings, those who have not yet climbed up through a hole int heir head and become fully human, who have not yet entered what we call society and become Romans under the law. But they are, even so, of our species, these Getae. I listen to them talk. The sounds are barbarous, and my soul aches for the refinements of our Latin tongue, that perfect tongue in which all things can be spoken, even pronouncements of exile. I listen, and what moves me most is that I recognize the tunes. This one, I know, is tenderness; this regret, this anger, this an old man’s tune for soothing a child who falls over, weeps, tells his ills, and must be led back to call the stone by names one might almost recognize out of one’s most distant childhood: "Naughty, naughty stone!"
Meanwhile, there are the spiders. Could I tune my ears to their speech also? Since they too must communicate with one another. I might begin to write again in the spiders' language.
The New Metamorphoses of the poet Ovid in his Exile, in the spiders' tongue.
Sometimes wandering aimlessly about, I stop to watch the women at work in the courtyard, sorting and grinding grain, and one of them will look up and scowl, or smile, out of some world of her own that I cannot touch. There are many seeds: gold, greenish yellow, brown, blue. I guess what some of them may be, but do not recall their names. I know the names of seeds, of course, from having used them for the beauty of the sound itself in poems I have written: coriander, cardamom. But I have no idea what any but the commonest of them look like. Once or twice I have taken one of the seeds on my forefinger and placed it on my palm, while the puzzled women looked on. On one occasion the youngest of them laughed and said a word:
Korschka. I looked at the seed and she nodded, as if I were a child, and said again, rounding her lips in an exaggerated fashion, Kors-chka!, then took one of the seeds on her tongue and bit through it. I did the same, but failed to recognize the taste. In isolation, and without the hundred other herbs and spices that might have gone with it in our Roman cookery, it brought no shock of recognition to my palate and no name to my mind. So I know the word for this seed now, and its taste, and its shape and color, but cannot translate it back into my own experience, Must it all be like this from now on? Will I have to learn everything all over again like a child? Discovering the world as a small child does, through the senses, but with all the things deprived of the special magic of their names in my own tongue? There is nothing to be said of our village except that it has a hundred or so huts. The narrow streets between them are of mud. A few pigs wallow in it, or a few dirty geese, and the mud is compounded of one part earth and nine parts the trodden mess of these creatures over what must be a thousand generations. Naked children come out after the rain to sit in pools with the geese, or they chase the pigs between the houses, their squeals and the squealing of the piglets, to my ears, indistinguishable. Beyond the walls of the stockade are a few patches of grain, which the women gather and pound, and among the stalks grow herbs and other plants whose seeds have to be separated by hand from the other wheat, the wild oats and the barley. They have no other form of cultivation.
It is midsummer now. The river flats stream and hum with midges. But in a few weeks the first of the winter will be upon us. The north winds blow in across the river, out of the Scythian steppes, laying the reeds flat, whipping up the water. Already the men are out cutting slabs of peat, which they will lay up in piles against the cold. The women are stocking the garners with grain and smoking sides of pork they hang beneath the rafters. Once the river freezes we must stay in the stockade day and night, and day and night men will keep guard. The river now is our protection. But two months from now it will become a bridge of ice and the hordes from the north will come pouring across it, plundering, raping, burning. The real barbarians I have yet to see. I have only dreamt of them.