argentine rotted headress, as prev. mentioned, with words around
face (skull) in script (French-style handwriting ): cosa
matissus: meaningless. The torso separate ( head severed)
the heart removed but left near. Legs are bones.
The heart
onyx-covered
the heart sliced open with rock-cutter showing that
it is black and weighty. Are we speaking of myself.
I could propose many other bodies of mine, but to continue—
words within her torso everywhere on all organs
but covering the liver most densely and over each other
so it is difficult to discern the language(s) much less what
they say.
The suggestion is that all bodies are full of words, in fact. This particular coroner, Dark Ray, can see some of it; writes double reports, one “normal,” one for a “ghoulish” club who relish such morbid text. There is a murder plot involving a club member who kills to provide the coroner with bodies for the club’s eventual reading activities. He especially likes to murder me.
Below the box below the Casino lies the Black Sea. Which has by now infected all my seams.
When I eat the blood-sac, I think of Judgment, whom I’m loathe to call on. She makes the atmosphere pompous, up to the point where she might eat me, her blood-sac, as it were; she must go on too. Even a goddess has to survive, even if she were the goddess of compassion or other soft rot, for there’s a lot of old rot in this story of ghouls.
Dark Ray: I found a transcription within the corpse of a meeting between her and Judgment—Maat.
Ghoulish Club Member: If I devour these words myself, they may protect me from adverse judgment.
Dark Ray: Better than a blood-sac?
Ghoulish Club Member: A blood-sac is just more blood. Let’s see some transcript here.
FROM TRANSCRIPT:
‘I found you in a precise room within by calling out to you. I need you to find me and tell me what I’ve done.’
‘How can I identify what exists as social phantasm? even with the crown of thorns you wear.’
‘My cultural headress?’
‘You kept trying to go past it.’
‘But I don’t know if I believe it. If there really is a weight of passion … On the highway there’s no one to tell me if I’ve gone wrong, so I’ve picked you.’
‘Is it important that you have a weight of passion?’
‘It’s important that I have my own weight. Why has this life been so serious? Do I have to explain it to you, as if you weren’t only another such one? How can I be judged if I don’t care about my past? I only doubt it—mere story, though don’t doubt its weight.’
‘I’m not weighing stories only your heart. Nothing
you tell me
can change your heart’s
weight. You are the
creature
of its weight.’
‘Do you really have the right to weigh my heart?’
‘My own heart is heavy.
If I
weighed my
heart against
my own
feather
I’d stand
condemned
You must
never
tell
as I learned
from the other
gods, never tell
where you’ve been.
I am a
part of your
being
from before
your
birth; you and I
know each
other so
well we don’t have to
almost
don’t have to
do this.’
‘In all my automatic parts—as in calling to you—there is an element I would have called lies before. I know that I am speaking to you now. What have I done with my life? Is that question the weight of my heart?’
‘It doesn’t have to be unless it takes the weight. I’ve brought my scale, at your call. I’m tempted to throw the scale away. But, put your heart on the scale—’
‘It’s there. . .’
‘This feather
is a lie. But
it covers you,
for your heart is as
light as my feather.’
‘How can that be?’
‘Your heart is judged
weightless, by me
I am Judgment
the goddess of this moment
which weighs nothing.
Above
I float spread my arms out over
your horizon—what else would
I do? I came to balance you;
You are free from Judgment.
Your heart is a feather, replace it
within you. Continue.’
Dark Ray: It isn’t fair, I’d say. Who could believe this anyway?
Ghoulish Club Member: Swallow it; I’d swallow it.
Dark Ray: I have to be a scientist in order to keep cutting her open; I can’t go off into myth. But I need to know where she’s been—the murders are so necessary.
Club Member: What would you do without me?
Dido: The purpose, even goal, of Fortuna is to render those it favors unknowingly stupid: it—she—whatever—is saying, you are so stupid you think you’re rewarded for your national goodheartedness, your democratic airs; or your personal intelligence. God’s gift. You are not rewarded at all; you eventually die into a pile of shit. For her amusement. History seems oblivious to the irony that, thus, only mouth-breathers (people too dumb to inhale through their noses) succeed. People who think they are more than future fertilizers. A reading of history demonstrates that the Americans, the British, ancient Romans and Greeks, many others, are thus cretins.
Especially the ancient Greeks, Medea confirms.
I: As the destroyed cultures seep into my consciousness, air of the Black Sea, claiming me in Dead. Women have always been in Dead, ghouls dreaming a poisonous vengeance, supposedly on each other (story of Creusa), but I am trying with every syllable to infect the Coroner’s club and also make my way around the maddening dark Business Suit often blocking my way, the suit of Dark Ray.
Dido: When Medea and her not-to-be-named Greek lover—man of no depth whatsoever (how was she so dumb?)—left the Black Sea for Greece (did this really happen), he and the Argonauts helped engender the Casino—business. Vote management, female and “minority” management: keep them calm while counting the votes of free Greek men. Keep them calm while counting. Cash, but also the “kinds of life” observable in Day. Ownership of shapes, of species. Invention and maintenance of borders: count those countries, so you can take them over. Don’t let ambiguity infect your mind. Mind? Fortuna says, You have no mind; I’ve proven that by seducing you in my sometime-did-me-seek, off-the-shoulder garb.
I’m sorry if you don’t get all the allusions. You dumb ghouls.
I: I’m a ghoul, Medea’s a ghoul, Dido’s a ghoul, the club member’s a ghoul, Dark Ray is too: we all swallow red to go on. Descendants of lost cultures—do you really think women don’t automatically belong to one of those? The club member, male, is also historically descended from slaves (I won’t say which slaves, there have been so many in history) and is propelled by the urge—oh these Latin-rooted words—to free himself though he’s free. He knows, just knows, that if he could read the inside of my body—bodies—his manumission would be complete. Why? Because I’m a writer, a truthteller and prophet. This is perhaps outmoded, but he is old, a ghoul. He will swallow blood-sac after blood-sac until he is free, that is to say, alive. Alive again. Then it may be possible to die.
I am a ghoul, and I preserve my remains by living. I too have to find things out. I don’t kill, I am killed. In rhythm to what it is presumed I have found out.
As for Medea, Medea should never have left the Black Sea, she says.
It was literally black then. I am Medea and I have nev
er been pathetic, as portrayed by Chaucer. I have transformed my own history by swallowing enough blood to have lived so long as to have rewritten every word within me. Being the sorceress who changes history all the way backwards. You think I did everything with herbs, having been trained on the banks of the Black Sea? Herbs?
The Poet may have listed the names of plants, in script or oral tradition, as if by his lists he could imagine me, but he knew nothing of me or of the original Black Sea. All of my power comes from the original Black Sea. All of Dead with its red dots of blood-sacs for Going On. One will try to control me again by putting me in regular meter or justified prose, but I will say a different shape that flows. Dark as the opals red-specked he’ll try to give me: Fortuna will bless him again so that in his nightmare brain he wins. Any known he. In Dead they are worthless. Why the successful never sleep. You are so clumsy in your dreams, my love. But in Dreams Medea has the power not just of names but of seams: I can flow easily when your legs fail. Because you counted your parts, you idiot, and so made your legs be separate from you.
Anyone might inhabit borderless ghoul air
Dido continuously founds Carthage there
as writers try to control her, placing her on her pyre
she cuts up the bull’s hide enclosing the future
citadel, called Hide. (Around this fort Carthage rose.)
I was in flames. They were lines. It was a drawing
Trembles emotively? This was no location of self-hatred
I was in flames, but they were straight lines, drawn by
me, burning up; I founded a city. He founded
the city which destroyed mine entirely: have you
ever read a Carthaginian poem? With ghouls
I’ll found this city, until our poems are obvious
confirming the magical nature of our human
art: in straight lines myself a girl burning
I was in flames, presaging thousands of corpses
‘What is it to lose your country, a great suffering?’
Lost it once before I came here; again after I died
when the Romans extirpated ‘our race’: as if we were any
repulsive people in any modernity; needed our blood
Do you need it too? (My name was really Elissa.)
Dark Ray says he has to know what I know. Why does he have to know this? He isn’t clear. Partly he needs to make sure I don’t know too much, more than him, about anything he knows, because if I know what he knows as well as what I know, I’m superior. On the other hand what I know— should know—is only what a woman knows and though that may be considerable knowledge, it’s only known by a woman … As long as it doesn’t become operative. But then again, what if I know? The truth is, he and his club are hooked on me, there’s no other way to put it.
The transcriptions from inside your corpses are upsetting him, Medea says. You seem to know everything by now. What if you do become operative? After all, my job is to make you so.
I will probably soon become a corpse again, in my room at the Palms Motel. I will escape that corpse and eat another blood-sac.
The Ghoulish Club Member is trying to stay alive long enough to know enough. Why can’t he know it on his own? Can only read; I am like his most precious blood-sac. And what or who is my own most reliable blood-sac, someone might ask? I’m not clear on this matter. Suddenly I am eating a literal sac of blood; I become reddish, the color of my hair and my lips changes. Reddens. What am I swallowing, Medea? Do you know?
Eat it, she says. It’s knowledge. From dead cultures. It’s also blood.
Elissa. Should I call her Elissa or Dido? (For years I myself have been told my name was actually my husband’s name, one or another of them.) I think the Romans renamed her Dido: a culture is the same as a husband. Her people had traveled from Phoenicia to settle in Africa. Where I recently passed through Judgment, encountering Maat, in another country. When Dark Ray read of this, in my corpse, he was furious. He hates the non-regular nature of Dead. He just knows ancient countries can’t arise and dissolve like that. They are stationary, dissectable like bodies. They died of discernable causes: poor health or, more rarely, murder. Accidents (marvelous Latin word) like being in the way of an empire’s velocity. They can’t have a life after death.
It was a most beautiful torso—my last corpse, marble with traces of paint: in the Afghani manner more Alexandrian Greek than Buddhist, the sort of cultural mix that art critics can disdain for its lack of purity—which is perceived as lack of originating genius and of intensity.
But how did an exotic, broken statue come to be at a shabby motel?
Inside me will be further poems and texts. I am working on them now. Will they be poisonous to the coroner, Medea?
Beauty’s often poisonous.
The Palms Motel has an old blue linoleum floor, blue background, with a lighter pink-shaded floral pattern against the blue. All of that flickers and darkens since this is Dead. I find the floor beautiful.
Has Dark Ray read my palms? Was I fortunate? Oh I had no palms, it was mostly a torso. My last hands are in another country, but any proper conqueror-scientist could find them.
A serious historian was present at the crime scene. Says: Can you tell if it’s a buddha or a woman? Because if it’s just a woman …
Official in some bureau tries to convince you your name is your husband’s. You were married weren’t you? This is a poem I’m not bothering to set in line breaks. It’s raining outside, don’t do anything dumb, official says, don’t try to change your civil state. Which must of course be my husband. Official’s brown-skinned and from a colony. Originally. Originally …
How many times have they changed your name in which countries.
Don’t be pathetic, Medea says, like Elissa/Dido.
How many blood-sacs has she eaten in order to keep trying to found a city in Dead?
Colors … Creusa … seen. That was for awhile.
Now I can’t be. Changed the terms of my existence. Before your eyes. So I can’t be.
They wanted to see it in me, what they put there.
Certain that their instruction would be received. Having seen the true advantage of the story of Creusa burning in a dress. You did it, they could say to me, Medea. Or that the children …
To give me the guilt that would freeze my actions. Or make me despised (I am that—despised or pitied.) So that I would stand to the side.
Creusa: not a lead part though she suffers. I’m offended—yes—that she can’t be a lead. I have no interest in dramatic hierarchy, though no one can believe that whatever the age. I stand for a fiery truth that every being is a lead. How else talk to a bird? a plant? if it isn’t a lead. You can’t even let Creusa fill up her own death.
And then suddenly that damned implanted image cluster was inside me. It had probably been the Greeks. I can’t extract it the butcher said. Not so far from where I began. But probably much later than when I’d begun. It’s always like that.
I’d asked him to remove it. Form of brain surgery. Have never wanted anyone else’s thoughts and feelings to be mine. What would you have if you didn’t have those, Medea, the butcher said? He thought you start out empty.
With the mind, with existing, does it even start? Does a two-millimeter-tall man click it on?
They were trying to set up their action in my mind, way back then in ancient now. A Greekish blonde woman slipped it in before I could know. I began to wait to see it happen, to have to deal with it. Hallucinations. The blonde hovered. I’m messing with your head. Why? So you can see a story. All of us want you to see it. How are you doing this? Magic.
Then out in the hypermarket I see it though it doesn’t blot out the whole other one: it’s their Creusa story playing in the middle of shopping for food.
I see what they said, the robe and she’s burning; I didn’t do that: Yes you did the blonde says it’s in your memory now, it’s in your psyche. Greek word. And now we all know. Know it and know what y
ou did. This is your internal corona, she says. She’s low forehead, bossy without much intellect. How does she know about magic? It’s wherever anyone finds it.
So I go to the butcher. Suggest surgery to get out these tumorous ideas that are the people’s pleasure (oh fuck the people): You did it, didn’t you. You’re like that, aren’t you. If I say no … Because I thought it was a thing.
My mind’s too textured for this crappy story: do you know the language of the thrush? I do. Above you I have seen. Sometimes I can understand all language.
You understand too much, they said. We must drive you mad, before you change everything. MEDEA, YOU’RE A MURDERER!
So what did I do about this, use my magic? It depends on what you think that is. I pushed the story out of my mind.
I’m a technician, aren’t I? No how did I get it out? I made my mind hard (a specialty) and pushed the implant out of my head. It still existed in everyone else’s head, it still exists in the world … The story, the lies about me. Images, that you’ll always believe. That I poisoned another woman, killed my brother and my own children. The purpose of the story: to establish as reality, that a woman of power can only be evil. This phenomenon has been truly magical.
We want you, Medea, to be the worst thing that there is.
I make my mind as ancient as I can: to expel you. You the story, still alive a larval slime. A grim little being they love so. Here’s the expelled story in my hand, writhing pus.
Do you believe one thing about yourself, I’d ask all of you—you the world—but you’d say yes. I’d say, there’s nothing in your reality but random stories.
If you want to kill something, kill that story of me. No, you love it too much.
Flames everywhere in front of me; but they aren’t a story. They’re an example of who I talk to, because you can talk to anything, and if your mind isn’t full of implanted stories, anything might talk back. The guild of scientific personages will call that projection; I don’t work with them.
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 4