The Decline, The Fall

Posted on: 13 October 2022 by Beren-Dain Delbrooke-Jones in 2022 posts

As part of our ACE & Creativity Series.

I originally wrote this short piece in response to a Flash Fiction competition in the early days of lockdown. I had not yet put my PhD proposal together and was cycling through a number of ideas about the Ancient World, with no real traction. A Flash Fiction competition may seem a strange occasion in which to ponder academic interests, but I found it just the opposite: It took otherwise nebulous thoughts and set them within a context that required at least an element of sense-making. There is, I think, a powerful, creative element within academic pursuits, and having the opportunity to think “creatively” about a particular, “academic” problem was an intriguing prospect.

At the time – one in which a new, global problem was conflagrating – I found myself thinking of endings. This wasn’t as morbid as it sounds. Studies of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” are nothing new, though there is growing disagreement in scholarly circles about the terms in question: Did Rome really, ever fall? Or did it just change…? It was another example of how Rome (and the Ancient World more generally) continues to provides such a fertile analogue for contemporary society.

Along with the concept of Endings, I have always been fascinated by frontiers, both in the spatial and the experiential sense, and the relationship between the Roman limes and the phenomenology of littoral spaces seemed to provide a perfect union in which to consider what it is like “on the edge”. In Decline, a legionary’s memory is what connects the Germanic frontier to the sea shore, a wrecked galley providing an Ozymandias-like premonition of the Empire to which the legionary is dedicated.

While I will leave the relative success or failure of the piece to the reader, it was my intention that these notions of endings and edges, of memory and premonition, are received in the open-ended, speculative way. That was, I think, one of the advantages of the Flash Fiction format: It provided just enough space to ponder such themes - to play with them, if you like - without having to dissemble the wreckage plank by plank. Perhaps it is this mentality which may account for the story’s shortcomings, but it made for a stimulating, fun and satisfying thought-exercise all the same. I hope that at least some readers will agree.

As a postscript, I was accepted for doctoral studies about eighteen months after writing this. The focus of my research – Greek mythology and sea-lore – still considers marginality, the sea, and memory (albeit in the form of myth and folklore). I have no doubt in my mind that, while the process and output of formal study is different to creative writing for pleasure, the latter gave me the impetus and the encouragement to tackle the former. - BDJ

The Decline, The Fall - Short Story