Radio Paranoia, Albedo

Every city, if it is true, predates its inhabitants
and follows its ruin. Before the houses there was a
trace; before the trace, a desire for order; before order,
a tremor. This tremor — which the ancients called
kosmos to contrast it with chaos — took the most
parsimonious form of geometry : the circle . The
doctors of the East said that the shore of the world was
a ring of water; those of the West, that thought returns
to its point; the copyists of the Middle Ages, that all
writing, if it perseveres, ends up drawing its own
prison . From these three conjectures this city is born: a
perimeter that corrects itself, a center that moves, an
alphabet that has turned to stone.
Surveyors will remember that no plane is innocent;
theologs , that no circle is. To draw a border is to
suppose an inside and an outside; to inscribe a center,
to choose a god. The superstition of architects , no less
noble than that of poets, has repeatedly said that the
perfect radius exists only at the cost of life; the circle ,
to be fulfilled, demands stillness. (The maps of
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Radio Paranoia, Albedo
antiquity , which feigned humility with their sea
monsters, knew more than treatises ; the orbis terrarum
was less the image of the world than the pedagogy of
its limits .)
The alphabet is no less guilty. It is narrated — in an
apocryphal gloss to a grammarian of Alexandria — that
letters were not invented to speak, but to measure. The
city is supported by these invisible rods: the alif that
straightens a street; the lamed that summons a portico ;
the mim that curves a courtyard toward shade. These
letters, repeated to the point of fervor, engender
custom, and custom, government. They were once
called archons to honor the equivocation : they
command and are, at the same time, commanded by the
form they dictate. It is not necessary to attribute a face
to them. The seal and the correction are enough .
Anyone who leisurely wanders through this circular
city will notice a condescension: the circle does n't
close. A worn-out slab, a wobbly corner, the tiniest bit
of slack in a door — everything conspires against the
dogma of enclosure. I suspect the founders, wise or
weary, left that pore out of mercy. They raised a city to
be read , not believed . (There are devotions that are
extinguished by a detail; there are prisons that a
mistake saves.)