“Oh, I’ll give your bores back!”
Joanne Kyger, “The Pigs for Circe in May”
She is with me evenings.
My ear is funnel for all voice and trill and warble you can conceive this day.
She is with me mornings.
Came back to the house early. They have brought wine for New Year. There were musicians down in the white city. I remember a year and a half ago when I finished The Fall of The Towers, saying to myself, you are twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two: you are too old to get by as a child prodigy: your accomplishments are more important than the age at which they were done; still, the images of youth plague me, Chatterton, Greenberg, Radiguet. By the end of TEI I hope to have excised them. Billy the Kid is the last to go. He staggers through this abstracted novel like one of the mad children in Crete’s hills. Lobey will hunt you down, Billy. Tomorrow, weather permitting, I will return to Delos to explore the ruins around the Throne of Death in the center of the island that faces the necropolis across the water on Rhenia.
Writer’s Journal, Mykonos, December 1965
Throughout most of the history of man the importance of ritual has been clearly recognized, for it is through the ritual acts that man establishes his identity with the restorative powers of nature or makes and helps effect his passage into higher stages of personal development and experience.
Masters & Houston, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience
The lights of Branning were yellow behind mist and brambles as, through the chill, night made its blue, wounded retreat. Sun streaked the east while there were still stars in the west. Batt blew up the fire. Three dragons had strolled down to the pavement, so I rode down and ran them back. We ate with grunts and silences.
This close to the sea morning was damp. Beyond Branning, boats floated like papers towards the islands. To My Mount then, and the jerky, gentle trail down. Hisses left and right as we prodded them, but soon they were stomping and pawing in easy convergence.
Spider saw them first. “Up ahead. Who are they?”
People were running along the road; behind them, people walked. The road lights, tuned to an earlier month and longer night, went out.
Loosely curious, I rode to the head of the herd. “They’re singing,” I called back.
Spider looked uncomfortable. “You can hear the music?”
I nodded.
His head was still; the rest of his body swayed under his face. He switched his whip handle from hand to hand to hand; it was a quiet, beautiful way to be nervous, I thought. I played the melody for him because the sound hadn’t reached us yet.
“They’re singing together?”
“Yes,” I told him. “They’re chanting.”
“Green-eye,” Spider called. “Stay by me.”
I put down my blade. “Is there anything wrong?”
“Maybe,” Spider said. “That’s the family anthem of Green-eye’s line. They know he’s here.”
I looked questioningly.
“We wanted to get him back to Branning quietly.” He flapped his dragon on the gills. “I just wonder how they found out he was coming in this morning.”
I looked at Green-eye. Green-eye didn’t look at me. He was watching the people along the road. I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I started to play. I didn’t want to tell Spider about the man in the dog cart last night.
The voices reached us.
At which point I decided I better tell him anyway. He didn’t say anything.
Suddenly Green-eye urged his dragon ahead. Spider tried to restrain him. But he slipped beneath one hand after the other. Worry perched on his amber eyebrows. Green-eye’s mount stomped ahead.
“You don’t think he should go to them?” I asked.
“He knows what he’s doing.” The people were thick on the road. “I hope.”
I watched them come, remembering Pistol. His terror must have spread over nighttime Branning like harbor oil. Dragons herded down the road; people herded up.
“What will happen?”
“They’ll praise him,” Spider said, “now. Later, who knows?”
“To me,” I said. “I mean what’s going to happen to me.”
He was surprised.
“I’ve got to find Friza. Nothing changes. I’ve got to destroy the Kid. It’s still the same.”
I recalled the look on Pistol’s face when he’d fled the Kid. Spider’s face was shocked at the recognition—twisted under the same fear. But there was so much more in the face: strength rode the same muscles as terror. Yes, Spider was a large man.
“I don’t care about Green-eye, or anyone else.” My words were carapaced with belligerence. “I’m going down to get Friza; and I’m going to come up with her again.”
“You—” he began. Then his width accepted me. “I wish you good luck.” He looked again after Green-eye, swaying ahead of us towards the crowds. So much of him rode ahead with the boy. I didn’t realize how much of him lingered with me. “You’ve done your job, then, Lobey. When we turn the herd in, you’ll be paid—” He stopped. Some other thought. “Come to my house for your pay.”
“Your house?”
“Yes. My home in Branning-at-sea.” He coiled his whip and kneed his dragon.
We passed another signboard. The white-haired woman with the cool lips and warm eyes looked moodily at me as I rode by.
THE DOVE SAYS, “WHY HAVE NINETY-NINE WHEN NINE THOUSAND ARE THERE?”
I turned away from her mocking and wondered how many people swarmed up through the morning. They lined the road. As they recognized the young herder, their song crumbled into cheering. We entered the crowd.
A jungle is a myriad of individual trees, vines, bushes; passing through, you see it, however, as one green mass. Perceiving a crowd works the same way: first the single face here (the old woman twisting her green shawl), there (the blinking boy smiling over a missing tooth) and following (three gaping girls protecting one another with their shoulders). Then the swarms of elbows and ears, tongues scraping words from the floor of the mouth and flinging them out “—move!” “Ouch! Get your—” “—I can’t see” “Where is he? Is that him—” “No!” “Yes—” while the backs of the dragons undulated through the clumps of heads. They cheered. They waved their fists in the air before the gate. My job is over, I thought. People jostled My Mount. “Is that him? Is that—” The dragons were unhappy. Only Spider’s calming kept them peacefully heading forward. We crowded through the gate at Branning-at-sea. At which point a lot of things happened.
I don’t understand all of them. In the first few hours a lot were things that would happen to anybody who had never seen more than fifty people together at once thrust into alleys, avenues, and squares that trafficked thousands. The dragon herd left me (or I left it) to stumble about with my mouth open and my head up. People kept bumping into me and telling me to “Watch it!” which is exactly what I was trying to do; only I was trying to watch it all at the same time. Which would be difficult even if it kept still. While I watched one part, another would sneak up behind me and nearly run me down. Here’s fragmenting for you:
The million’s music melded to a hymn like when your ears ring and you’re trying to sleep. In a village you see a face and you know it—its mother, its father, its work, how it curses, laughs, lingers on one expression, avoids another. Here one face yawns, another bulges with food; one scarred, one longing with what could be love, one screaming: each among a thousand, none seen more than once. You start to arrange the furniture in your head to find place for these faces, someplace to dump all these quarter emotions. When you go through the gate at Branning-at-sea and leave the country, you retreat to the country for your vocabulary to describe it: rivers of men and torrents of women, storms of voices, rains of fingers, and jungles of arms. But it’s not fair to Branning. It’s not fair to country either.
I stalked the streets of Branning-at-sea, dangling my unplayable knife, gawking at the five-story buildings till I saw the buildings with
twenty-five stories. Gawked at them till I saw a building with so many stories I couldn’t count, because halfway up (around ninety) I kept losing myself while people jostled me.
There were a few beautiful streets where trees rubbed their leaves over the walls. There were many filthy ones where garbage banked the sidewalk, where the houses were boxes pushed together, without room for movement of air or people. The people stayed, the air stayed; both grew foul.
On the walls were flayed posters of the Dove. Here there were others also. I passed some kids elbowing each other around one such poster that wrinkled over a fence. I squeezed among them to see what they looked at.
Two women gazed idiotically from swirling colors. The caption: “THESE TWO IDENTICAL TWINS ARE NOT THE SAME.”
The youngsters giggled and shoved another. Obviously I missed something about the sign. I turned to one boy. “I don’t get it.”
“Huh?” He had freckles and a prosthetic arm. He scratched his head with plastic fingers. “What do you mean?”
“What’s so funny about that picture?”
First disbelief: then he grinned. “If they’re not the same,” he blurted, “they’re different!” They all laughed. Their laughter was filigreed with the snicker that lets you know when laughter’s rotten.
I pushed away from them. I searched for music; heard none. After the listening stops, after the searching—when these sidewalks and multitudes will not bear your questions any more: that’s what lonely is, Friza. Clutching my knife, I made my headlong way through evening, isolated as if I had been lost in a City.
The shingled tones of Kodaly’s cello sonata. I swung around on my heels. The flags were clean and unbroken. There were trees on the corner. The buildings slanted high behind brass gates. The music unraveled in my head. Blinking, I looked from gate to gate. I chose. Faltering, I walked up the short marble steps and struck my machete hilt on the bars.
The clang leaped down the street. The sound scared me, but I struck again.
Behind the gate the brass studded door swung in. Then there was a click in the lock and the gate itself rattled loose. Cautiously, I started the walk that led to the open door. I squinted in the shadow at the doorway, then went inside, blind from the sun and alone with the music.
My eyes accustomed to the dimmer light: far ahead was a window. High in dark stone, a dragon twisted through lead tesselations.
“Lobey?”
But I have this against thee, that thou didst leave thy first love.
The Revelation of John, chapter 2, verse 4
My trouble is, such a subject cannot be seriously looked at without intensifying itself towards a center which is beyond what I, or anyone else, is capable of writing of . . . Trying to write it in terms of moral problems alone is more than I can possibly do. My main hope is to state the central subject and my ignorance from the start.
James Agee, “Letter to Father Flye”
Where is this country? How does one get there? If one is born lover with an innate philosophic bent, one will get there.
Plotinus, The Intelligence, the Idea, and Being
Spider looked up from the desk where he’d been reading. “I thought that would be you.”
In shadow behind him I saw the books. La Dire had owned some hundred. But the shelves behind him went from floor to ceiling.
“I want . . . my money.” My eyes came back to the desk.
“Sit down,” Spider said. “I want to talk to you.”
“About what?” I asked. Our voices echoed. The music was nearly silent. “I have to be on my way to get Friza, to find Kid Death.”
Spider nodded. “That’s why I suggest you sit down.” He pressed a button, and dust motes in the air defined a long cone of light that dropped to an onyx stool. I sat slowly, holding my blade. As he had once shifted the handle of his dragon whip from hand to hand, now he played with the bleached, fragile skull of some rodent: “What do you know about mythology, Lobey?”
“Only the stories that La Dire, one of the elders of my village, used to tell me. She told all the young people stories, some of them many times. And we told them to each other till they sank into memory. But then there were other children for her to tell.”
“Again, what do you know about mythology?—I’m not asking you what myths you know, nor even where they came from, but why we have them, what we use them for.”
“I . . . don’t know,” I said. “When I left my village La Dire told me the myth of Orpheus.”
Spider held up the skull and leaned forward. “Why?”
“I don’t . . .” Then I thought. “To guide me?”
I could offer nothing else. Spider asked, “Was La Dire different?”
“She was—” The prurience that had riddled the laughter of the young people gaping at the poster came back to me; I did not understand it, still I felt the rims of my ear grow hot. I remembered the way Easy, Little Jon, and Lo Hawk had tried to brake my brooding over Friza; and how La Dire had tried, her attempt like theirs—yet different. “Yes,” I confessed, “she was.”
Spider nodded and rapped his rough knuckles on the desk. “Do you understand difference, Lobey?”
“I live in a different world, where many have it and many do not. I just discovered it in myself weeks ago. I know the world moves towards it with every pulse of the great rock and the great roll. But I don’t understand it.”
Through the eagerness on his drawn face Spider smiled. “In that you’re like the rest of us. All any of us knows is what it is not.”
“What isn’t it?” I asked.
“It isn’t telepathy; it’s not telekinesis—though both are chance phenomena that increase as difference increases. Lobey, Earth, the world, fifth planet from the sun—the species that stands on two legs and roams this thin wet crust: it’s changing, Lobey. It’s not the same. Some people walk under the sun and accept that change, others close their eyes, clap their hands to their ears, and deny the world with their tongues. Most snicker, giggle, jeer, and point when they think no one else is looking—that’s how the humans acted throughout their history. We have taken over their abandoned world, and something new is happening to the fragments, something we can’t even define with mankind’s leftover vocabulary. You must take its importance exactly as that: it is indefinable; you are involved in it; it is wonderful, fearful, deep, ineffable to your explanations, opaque to your efforts to see through it; yet it demands you take journeys, defines your stopping and starting points, can propel you with love and hate, even to seek death for Kid Death—”
“—or make me make music,” I finished for him. “What are you talking about, Spider?”
“If I could tell you, or you could understand from my inferences, Lobey, it would lose all value. Wars and chaoses and paradoxes ago, two mathematicians between them ended an age and began another for our hosts, our ghosts called Man. One was Einstein, who with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man’s perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives.”
“I’m familiar with it,” I said.
“The other was Gödel, a contemporary of Einstein, who was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined: In any closed mathematical system—you may read ‘the real world with its immutable laws of logic’—there are an infinite number of true theorems—you may read ‘perceivable, measurable phenomena’—which, though contained in the original system, can not be deduced from it—read ‘proven with ordinary or extraordinary logic.’ Which is to say, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Lo Lobey-o. There are an infinite number of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein defined the extent of the rational. Gödel stuck a pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that it held still long enough for people to know it was there. And the world and humanity began to change. And from the ot
her side of the universe, we were drawn slowly here. The visible effects of Einstein’s theory leaped up on a convex curve, its productions huge in the first century after its discovery, then leveling off. The productions of Gödel’s law crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, then leaping to equal the Einsteinian curve, cross it, outstrip it. At the point of intersection, humanity was able to reach the limits of the known universe with ships and projection forces that are still available to anyone who wants to use them—”
“Lo Hawk,” I said. “Lo Hawk went on a journey to the other worlds—”
“—and when the line of Gödel’s law eagled over Einstein’s, its shadow fell on a deserted Earth. The humans had gone somewhere else, to no world in this continuum. We came, took their bodies, their souls—both husks abandoned here for any wanderer’s taking. The Cities, once bustling centers of interstellar commerce, were crumbled to the sands you see today. And they were once greater than Branning-at-sea.”
I thought a moment. “That must have taken a long time,” I said slowly.
“It has,” Spider said. “The City we crossed is perhaps thirty thousand years old. The sun has captured two more planets since the Old People began here.”
“And the source-cave?” I suddenly asked. “What was the source-cave?”
“Didn’t you ever ask your elders?”
“Never thought to,” I said.
“It’s a net of caves that wanders beneath most of the planet, and the lower levels contain the source of the radiation by which the villages, when their populations become too stagnant, can set up a controlled random jumbling of genes and chromosomes. Though we have not used them for almost a thousand years, the radiation is still there. As we, templated on man, become more complicated creatures, the harder it is for us to remain perfect: there is more variation among the normals and the kages fill with rejects. And here you are, now, Lobey.”
“What does this all have to do with mythology?” I was weary of his monologue.