In the lower quadrangle of impossible stone,
Where the funding was abstract and the furniture grown,
The Professors of Gormenghast gathered in black,
With syllabi sharpened and rhetoric stacked.
They wore their authority like ceremonial frost,
Each paragraph polished, each reference embossed,
And declared (with composure appropriately grave)
That the Snore must be hunted, disciplined, saved.
For the Snore was a menace of methodological doubt,
A whisper that turned confident systems inside out,
It crept through assumptions, unseen but complete,
And rearranged premises under their feet.
I. The Darkness
The corridors dimmed into institutional night.
No lamps were permitted — only conceptual light.
For light, said the Dean, must be carefully sourced;
Unreferenced brightness would weaken our force.
In mirrors that multiplied tenure and rank,
They glimpsed themselves climbing a bottomless plank —
Each reflection promoted, each echo assessed,
Each self a committee reviewing the rest.
The Snore moved within these reflective arrays —
Not loud, not dramatic, not asking for praise —
But quietly altering margins and lines
So conclusions dissolved into nested designs.
The Professors advanced with calibrated dread,
Their shadows preceding them, formally spread,
And discovered that every staircase they climbed
Descended simultaneously, duly timed.
II. The Institutional Satire
One Professor of Policy, brisk and severe,
Proposed a new framework for managing fear.
“We shall operationalise absence,” she said,
“And quantify silence with metrics instead.”
Another insisted the Snore must be framed
Within grant applications carefully named,
With deliverables, outputs, and milestones defined —
So uncertainty could be administratively aligned.
A third, more reflective, adjusted his tie
And suggested that Snore might be structurally shy —
Perhaps it existed between every claim
And the footnoted proof that authenticated same.
They drafted a report in triplicate form,
Which described the Snore as a procedural norm.
It was filed in a drawer that required no key —
Since drawers in this building opened recursively.
III. The Mathematical Spiral
Now Escher’s Relativity shimmered above,
A hall where ascent was indistinguishable from shove,
Where figures traversed perpendicular floors
And exited rooms by entering doors.
The Professors pursued through kaleidoscopic glass
Where identity fractured in symmetrical mass.
Each mirror contained a mirror within,
Producing a hierarchy without origin.
They encountered themselves in scholarly pairs,
Discussing the Snore on intersecting stairs,
While another version, slightly to the side,
Was hunting the hunters with academic pride.
In one chamber tiled with rotational schemes,
The Snore appeared as a function of dreams —
Not y = something, nor theorem nor fact,
But the remainder when certainty’s extracted.
They tried to diagram it. It diagrammed back.
They built a model; the model built lack.
Every structure constructed to corner the beast
Became part of the beast’s expanding feast.
IV. The Recursive Collapse
The Snore, now visible in fractal form,
Began to resemble institutional norm —
A pattern of patterns, a mirror of claims,
A ladder of ladders that renamed names.
It did not attack. It did not resist.
It simply existed where premises twist.
It thrived in the space between statement and rule,
Between formal clarity and rhetorical tool.
The Professors paused in a corridor bright
With mirrored conjecture and recursive light.
They realised — too late for dramatic despair —
The Snore was the system reflected in air.
For every declaration of certainty made
Had strengthened the angles in which it was laid.
Each attempt to contain it, to measure its core,
Had multiplied corridors, doors, and more.
V. The Kaleidoscope Ending
At last they stood in the centre of space
Where every direction shared the same face.
Above, below, left, right — indistinguishable plane,
All perspectives folded into refrain.
The Snore hovered gently, neither near nor afar,
Like the shimmer inside a conceptual star.
It bowed — not mockingly, but with care —
And dissolved into structured air.
The Professors returned to Gormenghast’s hall,
Slightly diminished — yet slightly less tall.
Their syllabi trembled with recursive delight;
Their mirrors retained them through infinite night.
And somewhere within that reflective terrain
The Snore persists — not as loss, nor as gain —
But as reminder that systems that claim to be whole
Contain their own shadows as part of their role.
