Carcosa: /akogare no Paris/

Mon 29 Nov 2021 12:52:51 EST

There are many learned scholars who will deny outright any suggestion that the city of Carcosa is located in, or in any way associated with Earth's Dreamlands. These scholars are partially correct — Carcosa is not limited or exclusive to the Dreamlands. But it remains the case that the Dreamlands are the most reliable and most consistent means of access to the Dim City for natives of this Planet.

Carcosa is the largest of the cities of the Dreamlands, and generally the most modern. While much of the Dreamlands remains pseudo-medieval in character, and even the larger towns partake of that drear regency between the rise of the merchant princes and the smoke-clouds of industry, Carcosa itself has always been progressive, often in the most corrosive sense of the word. The relationship between time in the Dreamlands and the waking world is not as simple as many scholars believe. It is not, for example, that the Dreamlands merely reflect the inner aesthetic and cultural life of the mass of dreamers, or even that of the more advanced True Dreamers. It is closer to say that the Dreamlands reflect the level of society that dreamers have internalized to the point of taking for granted, and that most dreamers are, psychologically, barely post-medieval. However, this is also not accurate; time in the Dreamlands often flows in a different rate and direction from that in the waking worlds in a way that is quite independent of the mass of dreamers, but sometimes exquisitely sensitive to particular Dreamers.

So it is that by the end of the 19th century in the waking world, Carcosa, /at least as it is experienced when reached through the Dreamlands/ had taken on a decidedly modern quality, its music and art all extremely /avant garde/. It is no wonder that in the waking world, this decade became known as the Yellow Nineties, and that there was significant /leakage/ of Carcosa into the waking world, through the literary work of Chambers, of course, but also notably through the music of Eric Satie. Subsequently, the rates of time between the worlds have diverged, but Carcosa remains the gem of the Dreamlands, today in the 2020s often having the overall feel of an exciting metropolis of the 1920s or 1930s, with jazz spilling out of the nightclubs, and a few automobiles carefully threading the cobblestone streets. There are also occasional disturbing anachronisms from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1990s, especially pertaining to secrets which came to public attention in those eras.

All this said, Carcosa remains first and foremost, the capital city of the King in Yellow, and as such a cognitohazard for dreamers of Earth. It is all too possible to be lulled into a false sense of security by the relative familiarity of Carcosa after the savagery of the wild parts of the Dreamlands. And one may find that one has brought Lost Carcosa home with them, and that their home city is dimmer, stranger, and more yellowed than it once was, a little more with each visit.