Post 14: Under Construction
28 August 2025 // Pages 324-44It has been a while. I left Schattenblog, not through any conscious choice, but mostly because of pain. I had a migraine for three straight weeks and barely slept. Then, I had to get my doctor to get my insurance company to approve the very expensive medication. There are special codes for migraines and your doctor must invoke the right ones in a kind of sorcery to get your medication paid for:
• G43 (migraine). This code applies generally. If there are more specific symptoms, another code should be used.
• G43.4 (hemiplegic migraine). This code describes familial, or genetic, and sporadic migraines.
• G43.1 (migraine with aura). Migraines with auras and refractory migraines fall under this code. Auras can take different forms, but are most often a flashing light or blind spot shortly before the onset. Even if a migraine with aura is caused by a seizure, it should be classified under this code.
In a way, Schattenfroh prepared me for all this, the exquisite calculus of pain as systems management, as learning new arcane alphabets for its expression. Bureaucracy as extension of that pain and extended Christological metaphor. Passion, as in Christ, as is nails, as in cross, is ultimately from the Latin patior, whose past participle is passus. We return to our narrator in the novel just as he is passing into the second city of the tapestry, being evaluated at the gates, where he carries a map with a letter of permission written on the back. He also has a giant Tau on his forehead, which stands in for the cross and grants him passage. This reminds me at once of T-O maps, the medieval map system of reckoning the world and encircling ocean.
Nobody arrives at a city where his map presents a problem, but there are more immediate ones first: the walls. The walls of the second city are maintained by its prisoners “… in such a way the wall inscribes itself upon the body of the delinquent as punishment… their bodies themselves become part of the wall.” When they run out of prisoners, which despite an energetic gallows, seems to be often, the city forces its citizens to take up work on the fortifications. Paging Michel Foucault! But aside from Foucauldian biopower and its imbalances in the state, this evokes something more immediate to the 17th century in which this city lives: Bruegel’s Great Tower of Babel, one of two of his renditions of the subject, painted in 1563:
The head builder of the city talks to our Narrator, discusses at length the various materials used to build the wall, including “… ashlar, basalt, bookstone, fired or unfired “Ziegeln” he says in a German that could mean either bricks or very thick books…” Schattenfroh has not forgetten to nosce te ipsum here, it’s doing the postmodern reflexive flip. When I got the galley in the mail I specifically called it a brick because it’s the right size and shape for one at about 1000 pages in English. It knows what it is, what edifice its building as you read it. Right now, non-galley copies are just arriving to readers, and each feels the brick-ness of the thing for themselves. Each inscribes their body into the reading, their own pain, their own power and labor, just as I do.
The work of transporting stone and chiseling it don is detailed lovingly in the foreground of this Bruegel. The individual metal tools, the tiredness of the worker who seems asleep on a block of stone, the way they meekly prostrate themselves before the much more lavishly dressed king and burgher nobility that pass through to evaluate their progress. This is a known feature of Bruegel in general in art history, his almost tenderly accurate depictions of peasant work.
Unfortunately for Nobody though, he’s not just a peasant in this impossible tower of language. Mateo, his father’s evil secretary, whispers in the ears of the city’s authorities, convincing them he should be tried for the possession of the map, the same one he bought from Zellen Warhol. It’s dangerous, Mateo argues, for either the enemy to know these fortifications, or for the people themselves to know their city and be able to leave or take ownership of it. Images, and maps, are powerful things.
Why spend the lifeblood of a city building such a wall? Mateo’s overhead answer is haunting:
“The city with its wall is a singular prison, Mateo says. I ask myself how the ugliness of this world is possible, he says. The city wall, he says, is a desperate attempt to vanquish beauty as a fleeting form and appearance and to enable persistence in these same forms, a city wall as a temporary means of preservation and healing , and that, he says, makes it vulnerable, the external enemy is often indistinguishable from the internal, the enemy, incited to jealousy, would like to tear down that beauty, thus does he make a run against the wall and thus there are always tow forces at work, the will to beauty and the will to ugliness, he who creates wants eternity, which, however, as it no longer makes any difference, is meaningless, and soon comes to appear as ugly in its ossification…. But beauty is an effect of pain, and thus, does he say are those workers on the wall who suffer this pain prisoners of beauty.”
But no prisoner chooses to be a prisoner here, it is compelled—forced upon even our Narrator. So the extracted pain, the price of beauty, isn’t voluntary, like Christ’s, does not buy any atonement, but merely serves the cycle of some cruel overlord’s vision of eternity. Unless… Unless you’re building the thing, the book big enough to be a brick, and the pain is your pain only, and the edifice you wring your body into in writing is worth it. Anyone who writes knows what making that choice is; the hope of trading the temporary excruciation of the act for the eternity of the finished thing. I think good writing is exquisite like pain. I didn’t—and wouldn’t—choose to descend into migraine hell again, but when Lentz descends into Schattenfroh’s Boschian hell of the soul and self-fashioning, something comes out of it that’s worth it, no matter how many pieces of him are buried into it, stuck behind some buttress or structural layer.
So: which of us are the prisoners chiseling the stone, and which of us are Bruegels, painting it into a thing that is eternally ping-ponging on the formal persistent beauty-ugly cruelty dialectic? Can we even know? G43.1—Migraine with aura—if I had looked more closely at the spiked distortion of the light would have I seen the city and its walls? Would I know if my pain meant anything, if any pain ever ultimately did? For this, I don’t think there is a map.
-- A.V. Marraccini
Back to the homepage
Back to the previous post