Pestilence here! Not long after, or before, I was in this museum and all the sculptures were talking. It was a while back now, this episode was, this state gallery on the rue Ste. - Catherine in Montreal, which made me think to earmark the city for future use. After all, if the sculptures are this agitated, they may well have got so from the inhabitants who wander in off the street and stare at them. If not from the artists themselves. An intimation that this city has some field of potential! I was abroad in this particular world attempting to think how we might discover an answer to William’s, and my brothers’, concerns. Why there? Plenty of room out front! Any one place is as good for thinking as any other. Now I don’t believe these statues were talking to me, you understand. My own unease, after all my brothers’ entreaties to do something about this crack, can’t have registered on them. Nor can the artworks have seen my wings flapping, as do Tibetan prayer flags, on the convenient pole down the street where I hung them, and thusly known who I was. I’m sure they possessed only pre-sentience, as Koln did not long from then. Or it’s always possible they were more in the manner of broadcasting general SOS’s. What does a human child do, after all, upon its birth? Start complaining. Said one marble imponderable in one exhibition room: “Help! Where’s the rest of me? This idiot artist gave me a human foot, a pin head and a turtle shell for a torso...” Were the creative souls only to know the pain they visit upon their art! It’s akin to G-d and His X-iverse writ tiny. And artists are usually so perceptive! Another, its aspect forgotten to me now, whispered over and over, “Don’t look up, Ecclesia...” There is no “Ecclesia” in our files. Must keep our ears open. Others bleated a sort of ur-glossolalia, never developed fully into true speech. The lack of any “Ecclesia”s aside, these yawps and blathers did rather make me feel at home since it’s not unlike the sort of surface noise one hears both in BAAGAAD, and in the culverts between realities. What might I myself have been if I were only half-aware, spawn of a ‘father’ with not enough or too much imagination, depending on what drug he’d taken (faith? A moldy handful of unidentified berries...?)? Why, minus this certainty, that a master specialist in the pageantry of a final coda dreamed us up -- one of the few definites to which we have access… I think… why, I could be like one of these. Given access to a few modern art books, Saint John could have put us also on a pedestal intercut with animal body parts, sculpted of an unmalleable medium that would prevent us from leaning down to read the name on the brass plate below us, never knowing who to hate. But that was never. Creativity was not called for in an apostle’s job description. Believe it. Right ‘now,’ however, to use the term in as loose a fashion as we can, I am in a passageway just ‘below’ BAAGAAD and ‘above’ that level one down from it (all spatial relationships remaining approximate), watching recent arrivals cavort in terror. One would seem to be an actor in Judas dress. “Where is Christ?” he moans in a fashion not unlike one I recall from the gallery on St. Catherine; “I was supposed to betray him here.” Even history can’t get good help any more. By the way, “any more” is two words, not one. On a promontory, out over Chaos – well into the ‘Bailter space’ in which the hypercolumn stands -- can be noted a shadow and his son. Again, if one squints. Over here an ancient woman wilts from her pile of self-inflicted garbage, razor-sharp needle and thread at the ready, muttering that if you give her a shirt she will make you another. And another. And another. Bit akin to the ‘loaves and fishes’ parlor stunt performed in a dry cleaner’s. You should see her fly! The wrong-way newcomers who recombine in the dung heaps, and don’t ask whose, between realities and who wander frantically through trash and bones looking for the way they came, eventually shall find the path into BAAGAAD itself (if they are very unlucky) and at last realize there is none back out. Even the crack we examined earlier won’t help them; recently I’ve been seeing these potato-sack like beings (I forget what they’re called) leap into it, disappear and come flying back out again as if they had mounted a geyser. The old woman of the rag pile will take the newcomers’ shirts, the inhabitants of the city will take the remainder, and eventually when the town militia run out of rocks for the city catapults, these new undocumented immigrants will be utilized. The siege army will then in due course reuse them, and it will all devolve into a brutal game of ‘catch.’ Once they have extricated themselves from the projectile round-robin, a view of the piss/obsidian sky and the unimaginable drone eternally sounding will take away their last G-string of sense. It’s the inverse entirely of Kafka’s penitent striving to attain the palace of the Law. Already within and maniacally seeking the exit which doesn’t exist -- for them -- only madness is on sale to them in BAAGAAD’s abandoned maidans, only one destination Pied Pipering them into ‘midtown’... now sheared off at knee height, from one siege wall to the opposite, as if a blade had hacked it through. Sorry. Wasn’t us. From the forthcoming MYRRH by K. Griffiths. Dog Ear Books, Indianapolis, IN. Copyright 2005 by the author.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:34:04 +0000
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