The Republic of the Unfinished Star

A free-improvisation review of Lesabéndio: An Asteroid Novel

Some books construct worlds.

Others discover a small door behind the world, pry it open with a spoon, and invite the unwanted through.

Beyond that door there is no Europe, no factory whistle, no landlord climbing the stairs, no respectable uncle explaining how reality works. There are no inherited chairs arranged around an inherited table. There is no portrait of the emperor watching the soup cool.

There is an asteroid.

There is a sky that has not yet learned obedience.

There are beings who have never seen a human face and therefore do not know which parts of themselves they are expected to hate.

The place hangs in darkness like a jewel dropped beneath the furniture of the universe. It does not orbit so much as dream around something. Its mountains are thoughts that hardened before reaching a conclusion. Its caves retain the warmth of unfinished arguments. Its atmosphere is thin, peculiar, perhaps breathable only by creatures who have not been informed that breathing must be practical.

Everything is invented.

Therefore everything is temporarily free.

The made-up world is often treated as escape in the guilty sense, as though the imagination were a drunk slipping out the bathroom window while history knocks at the front door. But escape is not always cowardice. A prisoner escapes. A refugee escapes. A beaten animal escapes beneath the fence. A worker escapes the factory for ten minutes and finds, behind a pile of discarded bricks, one stubborn flower growing without permission.

Sometimes escape is the first honest movement.

The downtrodden are repeatedly ordered to confront reality by people whom reality has upholstered.

Be realistic, says the man with the office.

Be practical, says the woman whose family owns the building.

Accept the world as it is, says the world’s beneficiary, pouring another glass.

But the world as it is was also made up.

Its borders were invented.

Its titles were invented.

Its currencies, uniforms, punishments, calendars, office hours, property lines, manners, hierarchies, and small words stamped onto large gates were all imagined first, then hammered into the ground until everyone forgot the hammering.

The invented asteroid is no less real than the invented nation.

It is merely more honest about being invented.

So the poor, the rejected, the odd, the humiliated, the over-sensitive, the politically inconvenient, the aesthetically excessive, the socially unplaceable, and the children who have already begun suspecting that adulthood is a badly managed warehouse may enter without documents.

No customs desk.

No explanation required.

Leave your name if it has become heavy.

Take another.

The book begins somewhere beyond beginning, with the peculiar serenity of an orchestra tuning inside a crystal greenhouse. A note sounds. Another answers from a crater. A third arrives through the soles of the feet. The melody is not declared. It develops by recurrence, by variation, by forms returning altered after traveling through unusual weather.

A creature desires height.

A structure desires completion.

A world desires to touch what lies outside it.

The melody returns.

Height becomes architecture.

Architecture becomes religion.

Religion becomes appetite.

Appetite becomes a ladder leaned against the invisible.

The ladder begins growing roots.

The roots begin discussing astronomy.

Nothing is permitted to remain merely itself.

The asteroid is landscape, body, workshop, metaphysical problem, playground, political rumor, and half-built musical instrument. Its inhabitants do not live upon it in the ordinary sense. They occur with it. They are protrusions of its curiosity. They move through it as thoughts move through a sleepless person at four in the morning, distinct but attached to a common fever.

They are not allegorical citizens waiting politely to be decoded.

This one does not equal the artist.

That one does not equal the worker.

The tower does not equal progress.

The stars do not equal transcendence.

The instant the equation appears, the book throws sand into it.

Meaning is poked, never pointed at. It is mugged in an alley by celestial hands. Thin knives descend from above the rooftops. One touches the idea of utopia. Another prods ambition. Another slips beneath the ribs of individuality. Another taps gently against the reader’s private belief that worlds exist for their inhabitants rather than the inhabitants existing for the world.

No wound is clean.

No wallet is taken.

You leave the alley carrying more than you entered with, though several of your categories are bleeding.

The writing moves in this manner, loosely, almost carelessly, as if sentences were being released from a basket and allowed to choose their own corners of the room. It wanders into description, forgets the description, becomes speculation, remembers an object, follows the object into philosophy, then returns holding a feather, a construction plan, and news from a star that may have died before the first paragraph began.

Porous writing.

Moonlight goes through it.

Dust goes through it.

A whole civilization may pass between two clauses without disturbing the punctuation.

Yet try to tear it apart and the softness tightens.

The page is a spider’s web made from rope.

It is wispy as wet concrete.

It drifts like smoke and lands with the weight of municipal architecture.

The apparent looseness is structural. Each repetition adds tension. Each eccentric detail secures another strand. The book seems to improvise itself, but the improvisation behaves like music in which every stray note has secretly been teaching the walls where to stand.

A figure looks upward.

Later, a structure rises.

Later still, upwardness has become a disease passing through the community.

The melody returns.

Not repeated.

Reincarnated.

The made-up world becomes refuge precisely because it refuses the existing world’s measurements. Here, usefulness is unstable. A shape may be important because it pleases the eye. A task may consume a lifetime without producing anything that can be sold. A creature may devote itself to a structure whose final purpose cannot be demonstrated to a committee.

In the ordinary world, the downtrodden are exhausted by proofs.

Prove you are sick.

Prove you are poor.

Prove you were harmed.

Prove you looked for work.

Prove you deserve the room.

Prove your art is serious.

Prove your grief is correctly organized.

Prove your dream will eventually become revenue.

On the asteroid, existence has not yet become an application form.

Desire may precede justification.

The unnecessary is allowed to develop organs.

This does not make the invented world harmless. Refuge is not the same as comfort. The asteroid contains ambition large enough to crush its admirers. It contains collective purpose, that glowing and dangerous animal. It contains the strange violence produced when one being’s vision becomes the atmosphere everyone else must breathe.

Utopia always arrives carrying lumber.

Soon someone has a plan.

Soon the plan has measurements.

Soon measurements acquire a moral tone.

The tower rises not as a simple triumph but as an obsession around which an entire world begins bending. It is a needle pushed through the fabric of the asteroid, stitching the inhabitants to something they cannot see. It is architecture as longing made rigid. It is a monument to the suspicion that the world is not enough unless it can touch another world.

There is grandeur in this.

There is also terror.

The visionary gazes upward and sees communion.

The laborer gazes upward and sees another floor.

Made-up worlds can shelter the downtrodden, but they can also reveal how quickly shelter becomes project, project becomes destiny, and destiny begins demanding volunteers.

The book dreams without surrendering to the dream.

It permits wonder to retain its teeth.

That is essential. A lesser fantasy would create a better world by removing contradiction. Everyone would cooperate. Beauty would prove goodness. Technology would harmonize with nature. The visionary would be vindicated. The community would become a choir whose members never need to cough.

But contradiction is the oxygen here.

Beauty may be coercive.

Community may be claustrophobic.

Aspiration may be both magnificent and absurd.

The tower may be a ladder, a wound, an antenna, a spine, a boast, a prayer, a civic improvement, and an extremely elaborate way of becoming dissatisfied with the ground.

The asteroid’s inhabitants are free from humanity but not from existence.

They still misunderstand.

They still compete.

They still turn temperament into philosophy.

They still confuse personal inclination with cosmic law.

This is reassuring.

A world without human beings does not become pure.

It merely discovers new methods of being ridiculous.

And ridiculousness is one of the book’s deepest mercies.

The downtrodden do not require a refuge where everyone behaves nobly. Nobility is another uniform, expensive to maintain. They need a world where strangeness is not immediately converted into evidence against them.

A being may be vain.

Another may be impractical.

Another may be consumed by a single shape.

Another may dislike the great civic enthusiasm and prefer some private corner where the stones hum quietly.

None must be corrected into normalcy because normalcy has not yet been manufactured.

The invented world does not demand that its exiles become saints.

It allows them to remain difficult.

This is the political electricity beneath the colored clouds. The fantastic does not merely replace one landscape with another. It reopens the question of what a person, a society, a body, a purpose, or even a world might be.

Reality says: these are the available forms.

Fantasy opens a drawer and releases twelve more, all with too many legs.

Reality says: a life must proceed from childhood to labor to respectability to death.

Fantasy replies: perhaps a life is a mineral singing inside a hollow moon.

Reality says: architecture shelters the body.

Fantasy replies: perhaps architecture teaches the body to desire another sky.

Reality says: the stars are far away.

Fantasy climbs onto a chair.

This climbing is not naïve. It knows the chair may break. It climbs anyway.

Throughout the book, the cosmic and the homemade touch elbows. The stars are immense, but the path toward them is assembled piece by piece. Transcendence requires materials. Mysticism develops construction noise. The infinite appears at the end of scaffolding.

Somebody must carry the beam.

Somebody must argue about the beam.

Somebody must suspect the beam has been installed incorrectly.

This is where the asteroid acquires its strange tenderness. The impossible is never cleanly separated from labor. The universe may be visionary, but vision still produces errands.

Perhaps that is why the world feels habitable.

Not because it is perfect, but because the extraordinary has not exterminated the ordinary. Cosmic yearning lives beside inconvenience. Revelation must wait while someone adjusts a support.

The made-up world becomes refuge not by floating beyond material life, but by allowing material life to become enchanted without ceasing to be material.

Stone is stone.

Stone is also frozen intention.

A tower is a tower.

A tower is also a question asked vertically.

A body is a body.

A body is also a local weather system through which the universe briefly experiences doubt.

The prose keeps returning to its melody. Matter wants spirit. Spirit wants form. Form wants height. Height wants contact. Contact dissolves the difference between self and world.

Then the melody returns in minor key.

What happens to the individual inside the grand design?

What happens when refuge begins pointing upward and saying, there, that is where we must all go?

The celestial knives return.

One pierces collectivism.

One pierces individualism.

One pierces the comforting belief that the two can be arranged into permanent balance.

The book does not answer. It prods.

The wound shines.

A novel set on an asteroid may appear to be the ultimate withdrawal from human misery. No slums, no monarchs, no wars with familiar uniforms. Yet distance intensifies the question rather than avoiding it. By removing the recognizable world, the book removes our excuses.

We cannot blame a particular government.

We cannot blame a particular church.

We cannot blame industry, nationality, inheritance, or custom.

The inhabitants begin almost clean.

Still they build structures around desire.

Still one vision grows enormous.

Still the group must decide how much of itself to give to the dream of one member.

The asteroid becomes a laboratory without white coats, testing the ancient substance called togetherness.

It bubbles.

It changes color.

It escapes the container.

Yet even when the experiment threatens to swallow its participants, the book never becomes a warning against dreaming. It understands that the alternative to dangerous imagination is not safety. The alternative is inherited danger, the dull danger already built into the walls.

The downtrodden know this.

They are often told not to risk fantasy because fantasy may disappoint them.

Reality has already disappointed them professionally.

Reality arrives each morning with a clipboard.

The invented world may wound, but at least it offers new wounds.

It may fail, but it fails in unfamiliar colors.

This matters.

A person denied political power may still possess cosmological power. A person trapped in one room may design twelve planets. A person whose name is ignored by history may create a species that has no need for names. A person told that nothing can change may change gravity before breakfast.

The rulers of the ordinary world fear this more than they admit.

Not because imaginary worlds directly overthrow governments, but because they reveal contingency.

The prison wall becomes one design among many.

The boss becomes a temporary character.

The market becomes a peculiar local superstition.

Once you have visited an asteroid where bodies, buildings, and social arrangements obey another logic, the existing world loses its costume of inevitability.

It remains powerful.

But it begins looking embarrassed.

The invented world whispers: things could have been otherwise.

That sentence is a match.

The book does not strike it loudly. It keeps it cupped in both hands, protecting the flame from the wind of explanation. The reader sees brief illuminations: a face, a structure, a ridge, a communal excitement, a private resistance, a form reaching toward the sky.

Then darkness folds back over the scene.

The melody continues inside it.

Variation after variation.

One passage becomes translucent. Another becomes architectural. Another seems tossed off, almost foolish, until twenty pages later it tightens around the ankle.

This is the spider web again.

You thought you were walking through whimsy.

Now whimsy has you.

The asteroid itself may be the web, suspended in the dark, catching not flies but possibilities. Each possibility struggles, glitters, and becomes nourishment for another.

The invented refuge is never empty. It fills with the materials brought by the refugees: hunger, pride, tenderness, resentment, wonder, the need to organize, the need to rebel against organization, the hope that somewhere there is a form large enough to contain every contradiction.

There is not.

So they build upward.

Perhaps the tower is the book.

Perhaps every chapter adds another level to a structure that cannot reach its destination because the destination recedes whenever language approaches.

Perhaps the reader climbs anyway, carrying a small lamp.

Below, the asteroid becomes distant. Its creatures shrink into gestures. Its arguments become patterns. Its surface appears almost peaceful from this height.

Above, something waits.

Not God.

Not certainty.

A larger uncertainty.

That is the true refuge offered by the made-up world: not a final answer, but an expanded unknown. The downtrodden are suffocated by answers imposed from outside. You are this. You belong here. Your limits are these. Your future has already been priced.

The asteroid returns uncertainty to them.

You may be otherwise.

The world may be otherwise.

Even the stars may be doors pretending to be lights.

At the highest point, language thins. The sentences become atmosphere. Ideas lose their shoes. Identity begins leaking gently from the body.

The great ambition, which first appeared as construction, becomes transformation. To reach outward is also to become less bounded. The tower touches the possibility that the individual is not a sealed house but a window temporarily shaped like a person.

This could be liberation.

It could also be annihilation.

The book refuses to choose the safer word.

The downtrodden understand this threshold better than philosophers sometimes do. When the self has been injured by the world, dissolving the self can sound like freedom. But the injured self also deserves preservation. It deserves a room, a name, a ridiculous possession placed carefully on a shelf.

Refuge must offer both.

A place to disappear.

A place to become more distinctly visible.

The asteroid hangs between these desires.

Its inhabitants seek union without fully surrendering difference. They seek greatness without ceasing to be eccentric little beings with preferences, jealousies, textures, and private rhythms.

They fail beautifully.

They succeed alarmingly.

The melody returns one final time, though finality has become impossible. It arrives as a low vibration in the architecture. The stones remember the hands that placed them. The height remembers the ground. The communal dream remembers every reluctant body absorbed into its construction.

The book does not close.

It changes altitude.

You return to the ordinary world carrying asteroid dust in the seams of your clothes. The street is still there. The bills remain. The landlord has not transformed into a luminous geometric organism, though perhaps his tie now suggests the possibility.

Nothing practical has improved.

Yet reality has suffered a small breach.

Through it comes colored air.

The downtrodden gather near the opening. Not because another world will rescue them, but because imagining another world interrupts the spell that says this one is complete.

It is not complete.

It is a rough draft guarded by men who have confused possession with authorship.

The asteroid drifts overhead, invisible in daylight.

Its tower continues rising through the private skies of readers who have been told to keep their heads down.

The melody returns.

A world is made.

A creature looks upward.

A sentence becomes scaffolding.

Somewhere, an unseen celestial hand draws a thin knife and pokes a new hole in the dark.

Light enters without permission.