First we had to lower all the standards. Many of the eldest men refused to do this and had to serve a different function, and nothing was wasted. Then the various implements had to be lowered, shrunk, repainted in special gnaw-resistant paints.
A lot of everything was guesswork: what would the goddam things like? You couldn't count anymore on flan or bodywork. The cereal displays of this or that mortification ritual ("In Bombay, saddles wear hats!") might succumb too quickly, remove the user to a shivering over the nothingness of it. That was not the intention! But then even the idea of the emperor not wanting to know his own deaths--might it apply much less?
The cloth was a scream. Just an example for you, the battles between the nylon-touters and the cotton-loyal, the running through halls decrying the virtue of ambling blackly in that kind of fuck. The swinging around and around! only to bounce back into the next room, shivering badly, being helped to vats of thick argent tea by your latter-flash enemy.
What?! when they marched (marched?) in, flushed (flushed?) from their acme (acme?) parade, their laughter (laughter?) echoing to the ends of the scene--how much, for example, of that echo? A dream-built stream of nuisance/horror/acme or a mild whunga-whunga? If not laughter, correct, then what if their noises to them are like bathroom habits to us? Problem, then, given the walls which we find so elegant. Or what if there are no "their noises"? What if they live with only the other making a dent, being painted only by the flutter of corpses past the derision (??) of their open windows, their past and future a (metaphorically nylon?) mesh of wars and events that increasingly seem to entrance only the liquidity of the populace (or is their grief air, their bulldozing rock, in which case, for example, there will be no rhetoric, and no social occasions?)?
The wallpaper, the lights, the timers on the lights, the servants' number and aptitudes, the vanities' allowances, the directness of connection to this or that essentially ugly (?) service, the love that might accidentally result from a floorplan, the floorplan's plan for such contingencies....
Few of us will admit it, but secretly we hate the mice. We feel that if we understood them, this move, the ideology or whatever of the whole thing, we would feel better in our putterings and fights, our sweat and deaths. We would perhaps not feel so much better but we would feel much less at the mercy of the rawness of it all. We would not cry. But they have told us nothing. We have never heard from the mice. The only way we know the mice is from their scuttlings out of the way. We imagine them doing more but it is not easy. We try. We consider whether they will see the insides of our minds and whether we are perhaps already offending them by wondering about all this.
Poor us! Hard work lies ahead, behind. We still enjoy the palace, we like its construction, its intended uses, perhaps fulfilled, perhaps not. We do not know that the mice will be bad. Perhaps we will respect them far more. Perhaps they will be more imaginative and use all the effects of the palace to greater extents and in different ways. Perhaps something will happen within us--different rules. Surely!
We can only observe! We can only live! We will see everything, everything, everything that we can and that will be so much that soon we will be drowning in ourselves, and that will be very exceptional, and then the mice will come in and save us, exuberantly