Hunger's Brides

by W. Paul Anderson

  In First Dream she relates that, while her body slept, her soul ascended to the upper sphere; there her soul had a vision so intense, so vast, so luminous and dazzling, that she was blinded; once recovered, she longed to ascend again, now, step by step, but she could not; as she was wondering what other path she might take, the sun rose and her body awakened. The poem is the account of a spiritual vision that ends in a nonvision….

  Enchanted by the image of souls in transit while we sleep, for the first time in months Beulah finds herself not just cannibalizing texts for quotes and selective truths, but actually reading again. Inspired, she plunges headlong into the literature Paz cites: Athanasius Kircher’s Iter exstaticum, Artemidorus’ Onirocriticon, Cicero’s The Dream of Scipio, Macrobius’ Commentary on the Dream of Scipio …

  But after a two-week binge of consuming texts she lifts her head, synapses crackling, fluorescing with points of light—and feels no closer than before. A sharp swing in mood, a return to a familiar pattern. Her notes here revert to near incoherence and to her sedentary fetishes—‘the rank red-gummed rotting smile / the stink of failure clinging to my clothes like fear—animals and children smell it on me….’

  What moves her at this precise point to copy the following quotation?—an exercise of sympathetic magic, a conjuring. Or maybe it is just to write down something coherent.

  First Dream is the first example of an attitude—the solitary soul confronting the universe…. The solitary confrontation is a religious theme, like that of the voyage of the soul, but religious in a negative way: it denies revelation. More precisely, it is the revelation of the fact that we are alone and that the world of the supernatural has dissipated. In one way or another, all modern poets have lived, relived, and re-created the double negation of First Dream: the silence of space, and the vision of the nonvision. The great and until now unrecognized originality of Sor Juana’s poem resides in this fact. And this is the basis for its unique place in the history of modern poetry….7

  Hardly, it seems, has Beulah taken Paz as spirit guide than he teaches that Sor Juana, unlike all the dream voyagers who had ever gone before her, travelled without a guide. Maybe this is why Beulah is now so quick to discard Paz, her esteemed guide and teacher—again, the familiar pattern: blame the teacher, not the method. Hoping to limit the avenues of approach by following him, she has instead discovered them hugely multiplied. She has badly underestimated the breadth of Paz’s erudition but, more, she has once again failed to grasp the fundamental lesson: the labyrinth that is one mind. And so, repenting her ill-invested hopes she finds herself alone again. Perhaps it is in that solitude that she came closest to joining her Sor Juana.

  At any rate, it seems strange that she should think herself at another dead end just as she is led from medieval dream theory to the sprawling corpus of labyrinth scholarship; and that in the very midst of a tangled bower, our maze-runner stumbles at wits’ end into a vast library devoted to … labyrinths. Despite her own childhood intimations, Beulah was not at all prepared for the reach of the maze phenomena across the ages and around the globe, from Neolithic Scandinavia to Tierra del Fuego to the hedge mazes of twentieth-century Nova Scotia.

  This business of labyrinths must seem to the modern reader quaint and antic, his most recent acquaintance stemming perhaps from childhood trips through the fun-house mazes of seedy carnivals. And hedge mazes—really. Even those of us craving the exotic, the mildly dangerous, would find ourselves hard-pressed to conjure anything more threatening here than some geriatric Priapus hobbling through a set of well-trimmed alleys with a silver tea service in one hand and a set of bloodied pruning shears in the other.

  If the reader’s patience had not already been sufficiently taxed, one might sample the catalogue Beulah was about to acquaint herself with: mazes in malo and in bono; mazes with centres and without; mazes concealing grail or monstrosity; mazes in two, three or four dimensions; the maze as pleasure dome, bower of lust; mazes of the mind and mazes of the body—palaces of the intestines†—inner pathways of ear, brain, bowels….

  Yet all of this would amount to no more than an arrangement of markers charting the maze as idea.

  In 1967, at Montréal’s World Exposition, more than one and a half million people lined up for hours on end at the Labyrinthes Pavilion for one thing: an authentic experience of the maze. For this is precisely what is lacking today, not the view from above but the view from within. Not the thin, tepid wash—the littered flood of meaningless information, but the avatar it displaced: the deep, blue dive into an infinite complexity. What most eludes our grasp today is not the maze as idea, but as experience. Or so my own research has suggested. What the fair-goers in Montréal are on the verge of discovering is that each maze-runner is the architect of his own labyrinth, each forking in the path is marked by his doubts, each passageway excavated by his questions, each blind alley walled in by his ignorance and errors and pretensions. From metaphors to myths and on to dreams, thence to voyages of the soul and labyrinths, what we lack today is the experience of blundering through a maddening series of detours into the tangled heart of a mystery that conceals what we most fear—that there a monster waits, and that it wears our face.

  †êkal tirâni, the palace of the intestines evoked on the ancient Babylonian clay tablets describing divination by animal entrails

  TEOCUALO

  THE FOLLOWING ODDITY seems addressed to me, though Beulah never sent it. Maybe it was intended to echo a certain strain in the Baroque, recalling the salty side of Donne or the Coy Mistress of Marvell or any number of romps by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester—“The Disabled Debauchee,” to name one. I do not know how it was to be taken. I offer it here not as one of Beulah’s amusements but as an exhibit in my defence.

  Some background on the text. According to her notes, in pre-Hispanic Mexico there was a rite, since compared to that of the Christian Eucharist, that involved moulding an effigy of God out of amaranth or cornmeal moistened with blood, then proceeding to eat it with the cry: Teocualo! God is eaten. What I still cannot decide for myself is when she wrote this—it was lying among other papers traceable to early 1994, which is to say, before she left Calgary. I can’t even begin to imagine the strangeness she would have felt to have written this, only to experience the actual rite first-hand a few months later on a mountainside in Mexico.

  I would be your maker—please let me be.

  There are other wonders a wheel can wreak.

  Let me show you, you shall see

  There’s more to this than pounding meat.

  ‘Top a wheel I’d throw you—

  yet like clay, not kindling,

  not a breaking nor a grinding down

  but a building up—from the ground.

  I would spin you hard and long,

  shape you on a potter’s wheel

  —milled and turned, a meal

  not of earth, but harvest corn.

  To start:

  these stiffening carp—

  your bony feet,

  hamstring strung,

  tarsal-finned,

  arch, pedestrian.

  Afoot! the nascent effigy:

  tickle-ankled, razor shinned—

  the fluted drumstick of

  your fatted calves,

  kidskin ’cased, racked

  and pinioned to the knee

  where it hollows—

  a dollop’s scalloped gap,

  a nice cream scoop

  of delicacy.

  Soft-gloss’t horse-meat

  of your thighs: all but hairless—

  unbranched cedars—

  their striate checks

  and bulges I’d

  approximate

  with celery sticks

  (and Velveeta).

  Next a platter nudge—

  swift-trick, artfully turned:

  about face, fella!

  … to (dis)simulate

  your low-slung base,

  your bottom—g
lobed

  with musk melon

  or else, cantaloupe.

  Still to assay, still untried:

  the tough, reluctant nut between …

  to probe and crack and crease

  by a deft tongue’s

  delving auguries.

  Then just athwart the tailbone’s ridge,

  that sacral scar mimicked

  with an edgy bit

  of star-fruit

  topping—

  heralding the unclasped bracelet

  of your plaited

  vertebrae.

  Rising, still rising,

  by cupped-palms sculpted,

  just above that lightless

  nethermoon (melon-saddled),

  there squat the addled cod-cheeks

  of your frowning, stub-winged

  saddlebags—O flightless

  groundling Pegasus

  of corn!

  Ay, but that crab-back,

  Tin Man—now there’s the rub!:

  savage concave, vexed …

  blackfired and hardened

  on cynicism and sun,

  brazen of despair,

  embrittled on distemper.

  Pivotal point, fatal curve—

  invert it, crack and peel it back!

  So, plattered on that convex carapace

  together yet, might we dine—

  I thine, thou mine—

  as kings, as gods

  as matched and

  blissful equine

  arthropods

  browsing spines and thistles,

  crowns-of-thorn,

  men-o-war—

  we two: paired now,

  fitted,

  slow enstabled,

  embayed, ensilted …

  not delta-hilted

  but spitted, gorged, and

  lordly gored.

  After that shelly back,

  your doughy head’s

  a little simpler,

  if by a hair and not

  a ton;

  stubborn topknot,

  prickly scalp,

  I’ve thought of cloaking it

  in kelp.

  For the features

  of that dimpled face—

  a knead, a

  knuckle, a

  pinch, a poke—

  gouge the eyes,

  thumb the nose,

  cleave the chin,

  fork the tongue.

  That shepherd crook of larynx,

  (by macaroni elbows, aped)

  into your wishbone’s flaring

  V-neck, tucks, so

  as not to rudely flop,

  into the pulmonary

  cranb’rry

  sauce.

  Gizzard, crop,

  sweetbread mysteries

  moulded, folded, rucked

  like pennies in

  a cake;

  subsurface currants, plotted

  in the vaunt and swagger

  of that swelling plover’s

  chest—

  O Tin Man, lovelorn,

  forlorn cockerel, crowing,

  dying

  to save face.

  So now into that fowl barrenland—

  breast of partridge, breast of quail—

  I would place a transplant

  heart of amaranth meal …

  dampened, formed,

  blood-wetted through

  a catheter of

  thorn.

  Thus emboldened, over

  your blood-sped cadaver

  heartened, spurred,

  my tongue would trace

  and serpent-track

  a slippery path—

  a zig-zag,

  snail-silver,

  tongue-lashed race.

  To and fro, would I course pell-mell—

  chocolate nipple—macaroon yon—

  over the belly’s pursing velt,

  leaping in long

  marsupial bounds

  ‘long the grassy pout

  of your abdomen.

  I’d there pause, against

  this salt-lick graze,

  and on it place

  the leech and linger

  of my calf lips

  —groined, insatiate—

  and rash my chin on

  that bearded nest’s

  asperities.

  Seaweed beach, desert strand,

  shovel-tongue, tremblehand …

  I’d score and scour and palp and,

  from this turbid littoral,

  coax and glean

  the raw—so raw!—materials

  for the sandcastles of

  our ecstasy.

  On!,

  my sickle fingers’

  curlew swerve

  o’er amaranth sand,

  and in the hand

  the brief-cupped, meaty curve

  of thickening blood

  in its silken gut;

  Heft!

  the swallow’s

  plum-swelled,

  dewlap

  nest;

  Pluck!

  the dew-harp’s

  gristled

  fret;

  Flush!

  the nightingale

  of flesh

  to sing

  its bloodrush

  melodies;

  Mark!

  the long-

  billed carnivore:

  through sweet-stemmed

  reed-brakes mapling sap,

  a heron stalks

  the shoaling corn

  —eyeblink bolt

  falcon stoop—

  epiglottal juke—

  and crane

  to shuck

  the throated

  husk.

  And now the heron—

  minnow necked

  in a pelican

  maw—

  begins

  to hump

  and thrust

  its prim

  bobbed

  camel walk …

  homing ’cross

  the blood-dimmed

  dusk of

  lust.

  Drumbeat galley,

  gullet of oar-song,

  draw and scull and

  featherstroke home

  from the weary wars—

  Row! row for

  the foaming

  shore!

  Thrum the drumhead

  gourd—Hum that anthem

  Sound that triton horn—

  Thumb and Cock

  the apoplectic

  mushroom cap—

  Uncork the vial

  of tantric storm—

  To the sinner—succour!

  the sot, liquor

  the fasted, sup—

  Ship!

  the last

  long gleaming

  oar in its salted lock

  of gushing

  spawning

  salmon

  roe—

  now Dock!—

  with a Venus suck,

  a sparrow swallow,

  veined and bitted,

  smooth as spittle,

  lithe as licking—

  TEOCUALO

  Don is eaten.

  ZOMBIE

  WE RETURN BRIEFLY to my own little life. The first day of 1995 offered the usual bleary hours of unwelcome reflections. Maybe it wasn’t the career of high academic adventure I’d once dreamed of, but I felt I was learning at last how to settle into my future, into what it might no longer hold. The dramatic mists of my own early promise had begun to thin, revealing the berms and hummocks of a more regular professional landscape. To thin? The verb, I believe, is dissipate.

  Even so, the lamp of ambition smouldered bravely on like a censer, flickering with some recent successes. A new line of publications well-received, nomination to the committee organizing an important cycle of conferences slated for Calgary—‘the Learneds’ were the scholarly equivalent of the Olympic Games but with more bloodshed. There
was an invitation to guest lecture at a good school in Britain. Madeleine and I were talking about a European vacation with stops in the U.K. for meetings. As we are about to see, I was working in what was for me a new area. One, in fact, that Beulah had put me on to. One more thing I have to thank her for.

  But the charges of academic theft, one does not give thanks for. The official penalties pale next to the unofficial. The tainted party is, academically speaking, a pariah. Once the stain sets, it’s almost impossible to remove. The stain has set.

  So yes, perhaps a motive for serious countermeasures—but not this degree of violence. Shattered glass everywhere, blood smeared on the walls, sprayed across a ceiling, a bed. Sane, educated people do not do this. It is counterproductive.

  And for anyone prepared to consider that I might care, I believe there are moral issues.

  If I had to guess when she decided to drag me personally into her apocalypse I would have to trace it to the weekend of the craft fair, the weekend of my fortieth birthday in May of 1993. But over the course of our last summer together, I handed her the tools to do the job more professionally. If our weekend adventure had begun rancorously it was only because I’d insisted, where I usually made no effort at all. I had taken a genuine interest in an aspect of her work. Yes, the first ideas were hers. This is not theft. This kind of cross-pollination happens all the time between students and their advisors. I’ve already conceded that my work had gone somewhat stale. If I had a vocation it was Scepticism. Postmodernism had been a career accident—a fact of which she tirelessly delighted in reminding me. But in the spring I’d said something off-handed about the Baroque, to which she’d replied that the Postmodern was just the Baroque with its heart torn out. How had she put it? “Bled—bones cracked, marrow sucked. Your Postmodern is a zombie.”

  The remark got me thinking. About using the Baroque as a way of getting at the Postmodern. This too, I admit, was her idea first—though I’d always had the impression that for her it was more about getting at me. I believe subsequent events justify me in this completely. Or incompletely.

  But this is not theft either. She had no interest in the Postmodern, which was part of her charm, while I had none in the Baroque, per se, had in fact to overcome a certain squeamishness. I had conquered a similar antipathy towards things Latin American, initially by telling myself that the great master of the maze, Borges, was really one of us, his mother being English. It was a start. Surely I could do as much for the Baroque, by means similarly primitive if necessary. So when shortly after my birthday weekend she slipped through my office mail slot a copy of a Baroque play, I read it with attention. Love is a Greater Labyrinth. Partway through it I saw a connection, saw in the idea of a labyrinth something I could use. It was a fresh avenue by which to go beyond the usual: of pointing up to what degree the postmodernist repudiation of authority relied on quotations of their own godlike authorities; of pointing out that deconstruction was a construct like others, that Foucault was dead—indeed had always been—and that his texts and intentions were the flotsam of power discourses to the same extent any other author’s were. This was where I had begun with The Liar Paradox.