Why is Ciplusius a man?

When the lights go up, a statue of Dante Verticordia is revealed in the centre of the stage. Two people hold a red ribbon in front of it. A shy youth in a white robe holding a giant pair of scissors walks up to the ribbon, and is photographed by the crowd as they cut the ribbon. Lights go down.

When the lights come up again, the statue has been moved a little off-centre, and a framed photo of the youth in white is now hanging beside it, with a plaque: ‘Ciplusius, dedicating statue of Dante Verticordia’. Crowds pass by, stopping to look at and admire both pieces. Lights go down.

When the lights come up again, the statue is now in ruins (missing an arm, maybe the head), but the photo is still intact. The plaque has been updated: ‘Chaste Ciplusius, dedicating the statue of Dante Verticordia. 3rdcentury BC’. Crowds pass by, stopping to look only at and admire the photo. A couple of people sit on a nearby bench, contemplate the photo, and then begin furiously writing in their notepads. When each reaches the end of a page, they tear out the page and place it in a pile between them on the bench. Lights go down.

When the lights come up again, the statue has been removed, and the plaque has been taken off the wall. The photo is still there, but has been destroyed by time. Crowds pass by, only taking quick glances at the unidentified photo, if any. One person stops for a rest and finds the pile of pages on the bench, reads them, looks up at the photo, and then stands up and quickly tapes them up over the photo. Lights go down.

The beginning of the end was when one said to another “you should look him up, something strange is going on here”. A slip of paper with my name was passed from one hand to the other, and tucked away for a few months. Then the holder of that slip of paper moved away, to find themself, start a new life. It didn't work. So they returned, found that slip of paper, and made it their mission to focus on that name, rather than their own.

There were many strange stories going on around this name. My name. It seemed so clear to the person in possession of the slip of paper what was going on. The usual story, really. The name was a fake. A ruse. A sleight of hand. A metaphor. Why this person got it and no one else did wasn't a mystery. But why they would care enough was.

If I could ask them why, perhaps they would say the name on the paper matched the sound of the ringing in their ears. Matched the story in their own head. Matched their own fake name.

Perhaps.

I want to read writers that make me want to write.

I want to read sentences that make me stop in my tracks, do a double take, require multiple repeated readings.

I want to read pieces that break my heart, that are hard to read, that make no sense, that make everything make sense.

I want to read genres that play with genres, forms that play with form, novels that make you question what a novel is, poems that make you question what a poem is.

I want to read words that attempt to redefine their definitions, to redefine what it means to be a word.

I want to read things that are transgressive, marginalia made text.

Story is secondary, narrative potentially not relevant.

And perhaps therein lies my approach to Ciplusius.

It's not about what the story is, who he(?) was. It's about what the story isn't, how to see yourself in it.

The first time they saw a supposed portrait of Ciplusius, they didn't think too much of it. It was a bit flattering, sure, that someone was inspired enough by their writing to create art, but it was only one limited interpretation. And, in their opinion, it was rather flat, as it only captured the surface qualities of Ciplusius, a portrait painted after only a single reading, without sitting with the words for days / months / decades to appreciate the nuances, to tease out possible alternate readings, to guess at what the author may have been trying to do with Ciplusius given the context...

No matter, it was fan art, and only one piece of fan art. It didn't have that much impact on them, on Ciplusius. It couldn't.

But it did.

Over the decades, they watched, first in slow motion and then whipping down the track like a high-speed train – that one piece of fan art, that single, 2-dimensional rendering, began to be regarded as a portrait of...them. The author had become equated with Ciplusius, the writer with the written.

And there was nothing they could do about it. It was a mindfuck, walking past a bookstore and seeing a supposed portrait of them watching over the table piled with copies of the newest edition.

Assigning the face someone had given to Ciplusius to the author had suddenly made their poems a bestseller. An overnight sensation, after centuries of largely being ignored. It had gone too far to stop it now, being equated with that face – beautiful and serene, but a face with no reality behind it.

If they suddenly stuck their hand up now and said “actually, that's not what I look like”, they would most definitely be ignored. As they had been for centuries.

They didn't look anything like Ciplusius, whether in the form of that particular piece of fan art, or anyone else's imagined rendering. Other than the same colour of hair.

The fan art: a seer, a timeless but unapproachable being, hiding some sort of arcane knowledge behind that peaceful but piercing (and slightly judgmental) gaze. The colourful garb indicating taste, contentment, perhaps wealth.

The actual author: an androgynous artist, uncomfortable with meeting anyone's gaze, wearing their nearly all-black clothes as armour, posture nearly permanently tilted as an outward expression of their constant questioning of everything, their suspicion of everything, their guardedness against everything.

And they weren't entirely sure they cared enough to correct the mistake; they could just avoid walking past bookstores until the interest in their poems inevitably died down.

But, some nights, they dreamt as if they were Ciplusius. Not about Ciplusius, but being Ciplusius. Like, they'd look in the mirror, and there was the fan art face. The fictional face was becoming merged with their own. A face they'd managed to keep secret for centuries – nearly millennia – for no reason other than their face didn't matter, shouldn't matter, for reading the character of Ciplusius.

Now that Ciplusius' fictional face had been made their own by consensus, it completely changed the reading of the poems. Ciplusius had been made real, when Ciplusius was never intended to be real. Ciplusius was an exercise, purely an creative exercise.

That researcher 10 years back had somehow managed to dig up their number, had followed the very small trail of breadcrumbs they hadn't bothered to sweep up. They had asked permission to publish their piece – an exposé on the fan art phenomenon – and I had granted that, curious if anyone would even care. But then that researcher dropped off the map.