A Drunken Treatise on Water, Memory, and Culture

WHEREAS the war in [Daggerfall] has destroyed my livelihood as a librarian, and…

WHEREAS I had previously sought comfort in the female form but have now fallen in love with what may be a time-ghost of a man I’ll never see, and…

WHEREAS I was formerly a teetotaller but have now spent the last of my savings on Cyrodiiliac brandy (and a number of wheeled nirnroot planters)...

I present to you, in unedited form, A Drunken Treatise on Water, Memory, and Culture, by Ancelmar Oderion, former librarian, now elf-about-town.

I must first confess that, as a librarian, my primary skill was always in organizing and locating texts. Research, metaphysics, and genuinely original thought could safely be considered beyond me.

Since converting to the worship of the fermented drink, however, I do find my muddy thoughts often turning back to a recent theory that was heatedly discussed amidst our stacks, that being the quality of water where it also functions as memory.

The particulars of the theory are above my head. That the earth is also the bodies of those beings who gave themselves to create our orb is clear to me. The water theory is similar (I think); the liquid medium of our rivers and oceans is also memory stuff, possibly of the dead.

Again, the particulars of the exact process is beyond me, but I find myself considering the larger cultural implications while rolling through my dependable drunken hazes.

On Nords

Water is memory, and memory is the past. What can be said of ice, then? The decisions of the Nordic race are often driven by biting, blinding memory--the cruel past yearly puts them in a place of life-or-death decisions.

Is this why Nords are so honorbound and traditional? Because they live in a realm where memory is a solid thing? A thing that will kill you if you don’t live your life according to its demands?

And so they go to the sea, where memory is softer and easier to navigate.

On Khajiit

Those strange, guarded beasts from the deserts--where is their tradition? and where is their memory? Dried up and blown away, I assume, and so the Khajiit feel free to wander off and pay heed to no one. If one lacked memory, life would be a delight! No regrets, no guilt, no ownership.

(What of their loyalty to Alkosh, their time god? Maybe they’re not loyal to him--maybe he is loyal to them. Or maybe they love him for going back in time and scrubbing away their tradition to anything but themselves.)

On Argonians

What can be said about a people who are at as at home in water as they are on land? For Argonians, memory is a medium of their life. They swim in it, eat from it, are sustained by it. Their Hist suck it up and dispense it as sap, and Argonians gain from that sap a deep reverence for their tradition and their past. And even when on land, they sulk through water-turned-air, through memory mist.

When one can float through memory all the day long, the future doesn’t seem so important.

This may also account for the Argonians’ longstanding attempts to regain their lost lands--to them, breathing memory, those lands are still theirs. The past is alive in their lungs or gills or what have you.

On the Other Races

I am drunk now, and waxing imperial. It’s easy enough for me to wonder about the more savage people, but examining the “civilized” cultures of Tamriel is too similar to examining myself, and that holds no appeal to me.

On Drink

Have you watched drink ferment? Little bubbles fizzing out. It’s my belief that the process turns water and memory to air--to nothing. I’m blessed by whatever alchemical process is able to turn water to alcohol--memory to forgetfulness. Memory fizzes away like bubbles, off to old Herma-Mora’s black books.

On Books

Prideful things, aren’t they, in light of all this? A vain attempt to try to match water; we put our memories down on vellum and cloth. I seek to recapture the hubbub and impassioned discussion of my fellow librarians, but I have only my own dull tongue.

Memory can be water, and it is beautiful and flowing and sings over rocks and steams into the sky. Memory can be books, and they sit and collect dust or shrivel and die at the touch of a flame. Who needs books?

On Things Being Other Things

I am good and gone now, and I’ve exhausted my thoughts on water being anything other than a drink. I don’t like it, you see. I don’t like when something is something else. I lived my life as one thing--a librarian--and now that’s gone. Now I have to be other things. Multiple things. And I have to be a not-thing. I have to be a not-librarian.

[the paper ends with a poorly rendered outline of a head filled in with many words:

drunk

not-librarian

gardener musician

milk drinker]