In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's
life, the inhabitants stretch strings
from the corners of the houses,
white o black or gray
or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationshipt of
blood,
of trade,
authority,
agency.
When the strings become so numerouse that you can no longer pass
among them,
the inhabitants leave: the houses are dimsantled;
only the strings and their supports remain.
From a mountainside, camping with their household goods, Ersilia's
refugees look at the labyringht of taut strings and poles that rise
in the plain.
That is the city or Ersilia still, and they are nothing.
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of
strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time
more regular than th other.
Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still
farther away.
Thus, when travelin in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon th
eruins of the abandoned cities,
withouth the walls which do not last,
without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away:
spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
