The Hunting of the Snore

In a corridor carved from impossible light,

Where staircases looped in municipal fright,

The Professors of Gormenghast assembled their gear —

With tweed jackets solemn and eyebrows austere.

They carried fine notebooks of rigid design,

And compasses humming in disciplined line,

For they’d heard, in a lecture delivered at dusk,

Of a creature called Snore (not to be confused with Snark).

It lurked in the angles of rooms that were round,

In echoes that travelled but never made sound,

And nested between every surface and plane

Of Escher’s grand architecture of brain.

The hunt began briskly at Quadrant Four,

Where ceilings were floors and the floors were a door,

And ladders ascended by descending first,

Which somewhat confused the departmental thirst.

“Observe!” cried a Professor of Syntax and Stone,

Adjusting his spectacles etched from bone,

“The creature must surely inhabit the gap

Between proposition and diagrammatic map!”

They stalked through reflections that multiplied space,

Each mirror revealing another mirror’s face,

Till identity shimmered like powdered chalk

And footsteps dissolved in ontological talk.

In a corridor tiled with kaleidoscope hue

They encountered themselves in triplicate view —

Three Gormenghasts arguing slightly apart

About whether Snore was a method or art.

One version insisted the beast was a trope,

Another proposed it resided in scope,

While a third took meticulous notes on the light

And classified shadows by scholarly rite.

Above them, in spirals of chromatic flare,

Staircases twisted through midair air,

And Professors ascended by standing still,

Which satisfied part of their theoretical will.

At last in a chamber of mirrored delight

They glimpsed what appeared to be Snore in full sight:

A whispering absence, impeccably clad,

With footnotes, citations, and posture quite mad.

It bowed with precision. It shimmered. It sighed.

It fractured in angles that could not divide.

It existed precisely where existence withdrew —

In the space between theory and something that’s true.

The Hunters consulted their notebooks in haste,

But found every page had been neatly erased.

For Snore, being subtle, had rewritten the plan

In margins invisible to diagram.

So they paused in the hall of kaleidoscope air,

Surrounded by versions of everywhere,

And agreed (in a tone of profound analysis)

That the hunt was complete — though lacking premises.

And thus in Escher’s reflective domain,

The Professors returned — though not quite the same.

For each had acquired, in recursive delight,

A small appreciation of infinite night.

The Snore, meanwhile, thrives in academic terrain —

In footnotes, in mirrors, in structural strain.

It prefers not pursuit, but the tension between

What models declare and what might have been.