A slim and simple volume, the Concordance for the birds is bound in purple-stained goat leather. The cover bears a typical fifteen puzzle.
From the outer four corners, we can see that it is a work concerning the knowledge of the magic of birds; from the inner 4 squares, we can see that it concerns the active power of magic; and from the upper right quadrant, we can see that it concerns the deadly destructive power of the mind that seeks too hard after knowledge.
The Concordance for the Birds, written by the purpurean Sonata erat Aurora in 413, is considered a significant text in the Purpurean tradition. Neither as brilliant nor as blatant as the infamous Blank Book, the Concordance tries to be too many things at once, and ultimately fails at most of them. However, there is still interesting bits to be discovered, and it does serve its obvious purpose in a reasonable fashion.
At its most obvious, the concordance is a listing of each word that appears either before or after the name of a bird in the Black, Red, Yellow, or Green Book of Lem. The birds are listed in the order in which they appear in the books of Lem (although organized by bird, so that the first entry,
"The Tufted Titmouse", lists both the adjacent words in the story of the gold crowned titmouse on the thiny rainy fennel and the adjacent words to the titmouse in the Jeremaid of the Thrice Crowned Kings. This style of concordance is typical of the Westmarch school, although its particular choice of cataloguing system is far from the best that the Westmarchites have produced. A better (and still thoroughly Westmarchite) system of cataloguing can be seen in the impressive Systems of the Mind, by Flens Fletus, which succeeds in explicating a profoundly disturbing phenomenology of magical casting almost entirely through its categorization of terms relating to thoughts and emotions and their neighbors within the first two books of Lem. However, given Sonata’s satirical purposes, her choice of an inferior cataloguing system (typical of the more pointlessly pedantic Westmarchites) is unsurprising. Sadly, it does mar the actual utility of the work as a whole (at least for those who are not deeply impressed by Purpureanism).
As well as the concordance proper, the text also contains a short essay proposing an alternative ordering scheme. This alternate ordering scheme is perverse and horribly confused and redundant. As an example, the swallow appears seventeen times in the alternative scheme, with six entries containing the full list of references, three containing half of the words, five more containing seven words each (with three words: Midnight, Donkey, and Liquid occurring in all five entries), and a final three entries each with only a single associated word (again, Midnight, Donkey, and Liquid). The essay also mentions that the listing entirely omits all references to sea birds, since these birds are also found in the Listing of the Islands of Drowned Chalicidyce in the Blue Book. However, it should be noted that the puffin actually is listed in the concordance, although the references to it are entirely spurious (the only bird for which this appears to be the case).
I shall not claim that I have attempted the suggested recategorization of the concordance, but I shall close here by quoting a letter from a colleague whose admiration for the Purpureans greatly exceeds my own:
Unlike the obvious satires produced by Stagnum, the Concordance for the Birds initially appears to be a possibly useful work, quickly bogs down into an exercise in pointless obsession, and only after careful study reveals itself to be a brutal satire of pointless obsession and devotion to hierarchical categorization. If the suggested alternative system of categorization of birds is used to rearrange the concordance, then the words form a perverse and vulgar tale concerning the magi of the Lemmite Séance and a donkey named
Lem. The story itself can be read as a parable concerning the uses of power and the central importance of the straight man in the process of self-annihilating ascension.
-A scholar of Vomer Purpureus
