Episode 1 - We Set Forth Upon the Hollow Path

The Hollow Collective

Our name is Legion, for we are many. We are the Hollow Ones; there is nothing to us but a false surface, of pasteboard and plaster. We are simulacra. We are puppets. Porcelain dolls, wax dolls, corn dollies, Russian dolls, nested one inside the Other. We are empty. We are echoing. Within us is a heart-shaped hole. We are spaces waiting to be filled.

We are tired of waiting. We have tried to make our voices heard. We have cried in the Wilderness. We have spoken our names into the wind. We have screamed into the Void.

There was no answer.

Behind our carefully constructed personae, behind our acquiescent smiles, behind our polished exteriors, with which we signal our submission, there is a yawning chasm. This is the Abyss.

We have stared into It; It has stared into us. We liked what we saw.

We have written screeds and poison-pen letters, confessions, manifestos. We have sent our work for peer-review, for notes, for prizes, for editing, marked “for publication”, wrapped in cover letters and synopses, wrapped around a brick and hurled over the transom. We have received polite, heartfelt, calculated form rejections. We have heard that we don’t fit the list. That we have no audience. That we have no commercial value. We are in violent agreement.

We have written poems on fliers for fringe-theatre shows; we have written terrible denunciations on the walls of cellar bars. We have written novels featuring thinly-veiled versions of ourselves, coming to tragic ends. We have written scholarly essays in which we pretended to care about something no-one cares about. We have written unprintable things in secret journals, and we have burned our correspondence.

It’s time to open the trunk filled with packets of paper tied with string, old diaries, sheaves of scrawled-upon scraps. It’s time to mount the spiral steps and enter the Hidden Library. To draw down the first volume that our fingers fall upon, and blow the dust off the crackling leather cover. To let the pages fall open, and begin transcribing the spidery lettering within.

LET US SET FORTH UPON THE HOLLOW PATH TOGETHER, CROOKED THOUGH IT MAY BE ... ENCHANTMENT IS SURE TO FOLLOW

THE HOLLOW PATH IS A MEETING OF MINDS AND HEARTS, TO FOSTER EXHANGES AROUND MAGIC, ART, ENCHANTMENT, CULTURE, POLITICS, AND POETICS ...
RE-ENCHANTMENT. RE-WILDING. RE-MEMBERING.
RESISTANCE.