—Tungsteno—sneered another.
—Tusitala.
—Barbelognostic.
—Sircular Cymmetry.
—Sircular Cymmetry is the way for expats to die far away from here, too far to make their way back home. Sircular Cymmetry is nature’s way of distributing ash in the cartographical game of chance. Hazard. Azure.
—You must have seen it—interrupted the Basque—but if you haven’t, here’s the test. Place the remains of a loved one on a stable, uniform surface—smooth and flat, like language. Not a carpet or rug, please. They’re not in the same category [“stable”]. They tend to move, travel: from Tripoli to Beirut, from Baghdad to Missolonghi, from Algeciras to Istanbul. Then, in this rapacious situation, force yourself to a helping of the divine air so small its inhalation doesn’t add to your cultural malaise, or its exhalation blow a single annoying diptera away. The [vegetal] rustle of a pubic hair, [or] the baritone bellow of an irregular verb.
Hell came freely through the narrow doorway of the monastery. All doorways lead to Rome [which is precisely where you won’t find it (La Haya)] …
The world is purely rhyme, conjecture. He enters dressed as a gallows-bird, a maimed cowboy in spurs who walks with the mien of a prince consort in front of the gardener and makeup artist, who take turns as his manservant. For the Spaniard, at least he does the favor of treading loudly.
Mock-Tudor house in Kenwood, in the abbey of exorcism, far from the first instance of excess—or abuse?—that didn’t even come close to leading us to the palace of wisdom. Or would it be a basilica? It makes the ship stink to high heaven. The Angels have reached the foothills crawling on their knees. The smoke, swamp fumes. Moreover. Cloister without threshold, shadow of an ash cloud. From here his beloved left, and his circumflexed spirit, and from there it will depart. Repeat undirected. Repeat undriven.
And later it left for good, departed. And gone was the interval between departure and return.
[Everything seemed better.] Help us, Urbain Grandier.
But no. Once experienced, the sea air up in arms or an orbit around Saturn, the rest goes back to the black caviar cave of the inevitable return. Or the inevitable path. For the unshod. For the odd ones. Now nothing preoccupies us. Now we’ve seen that justice will collapse through abuse of hendiadys. The critic of art through calumny, the white wisdom of her bones, the brush of a fly. Capellane. Toe cap. And next, an epigenetic phenomenon, the retinto ally of both. And the Episcopalian Italian, incidentally, gasping for breath. And all multiple forms: the snail, the Holy Bible, the landing strip …
A son of Aberdeen of two Hereford males.
—I can’t leave—said the starling.
—Sircular Cymmetry, yes. The inversion was the tangential formula—continued Madurga. That’s to say, the tangents of his religion, the thurifers, the censers [none other than the progenitors of the epsilom]. And there were even secret tangents, well-rounded symmetries. The tiger he spoke of was Sumatran, which, I’m not sure if any of you noticed, has a crazier aspect than any other tiger. It was said he was to come bearing justice. He was surely something like what Blake saw between the bars of his art before writing of that “fearful symmetry.”
—Yes, yes … —said Seregni who, for the first time, seemed interested.
—The tiger belongs to a narrative tradition we’ve ignored. Gobeluncz knew this, although he was as ignorant as we in every other respect. We had to accept the blame—he said—never the punishment. The incorrigible God, he said. The collector of prepuces.
Gobeluncz knew things we didn’t know by his cold nose, his borrowed nose, because he was a European, because of his extensive reading, and because, unlike us, he didn’t work in an office. The preputial bridle. He invented a type, a category—many ways to classify us. Those who came on Thursdays—which included our group, for we came to this very place to play billiards—he called Jovellanos. Those who came on Wednesdays, a group none of us had ever met or even seen, he called barbelognosticos. But rest assured, there’s no need to fret, I’ve already made inquiries. I never encountered any of them but I did discover this much: it seems, the barbelognostics were a Christian sect whose members—at the end of their ceremonies, their rites— … drank … semen. It wasn’t thought unchristian, but something divine, a mandate or commandment. Thy statutes will be my songs.
—The whimsical heifer used me so the rebellion would go unnoticed. The nuptial colloquy above leaves me more eager than before. Not because we competed [by the whim of the heifer] but because we won. The proof is in this scapular. The sestina and chalk drawing thrown in for good measure.
—Where did you make your inquiries? asked Seregni, firmly.
—Not far from here. There’s a subsidiary nearby … a branch, I suppose you can say.
—You mean a parish. I’m a member. And now all of you …
—To pretend you were born earlier, you use a monocle and take snuff … —said Madurga, erroneously.
—No sir, no gentlemen. I’m Gobeluncz—said he who sought to remove Seregni’s mask—. But don’t deny me—he continued—the punishment I deserve.
Lie. Like a good Christian, like a modern, a good Pollack, he preferred punishment to guilt. He’d rather die with his eyes open. He’d rather die. Genteel petit bourgeoisie.
To please him, Angus and two others pounced on Seregni. One of the two was he of the nasal passages [giant nostrils]. With the effort of the three, he was, as they say, subdued. And although it wasn’t a fair fight, the result wasn’t exactly a foregone conclusion. The fray resembled a certain hand game that consists of putting one hand atop another, the other hand atop that one, and so on successively. But the lack of manual parity between the two teams made it a fiasco. Moreover, the game isn’t suited for a lot of players because the number of bodies gets in the way of all the hands. Another failure imputed to the lack of bilateral symmetry among featherless bipeds.
Gesu Bindo was the last to throw himself upon the body of Giordano Bruno Seregni, after Angus had already exhibited the mask in triumph. In that moment when he was thinking (when Madurgo and I, when I thought) the worst—that we weren’t going to be able to make it happen, make the seregnate follow the gobeluznate, vicars of power, exemplary dictators—we heard the overtures of morning. Muffled overtures.
Peal of bells. Treat yourself at the close with a brief [zealous] beat.
The feral beasts—by reputation for truthfulness or a slavery to thirst—are often wary of discarded rotting flesh, flesh they themselves discard, flesh that is generally discarded. Some, schooled by boredom and disgust, even shun [it] (although it’s been often witnessed that they crave it: odd parity of the times). This is also called (in another world, another circumstance, another latitude) Sircular Cymmetry. Cymmetrical like surgery, sircular like seismic. Gobeluncz said everyone on Earth is at fault for having a limited vocabulary. How quickly they putrefied in that strip of garden, the zen Serengi and the basque Egozcue!
It wasn’t easy negotiating the entrance to the library, which seemed impassable as a Schliemann obsession. The feral beasts had swallowed the custodian almost without chewing and continued onwards. Their subjects, however, halted long enough to lick her makeup. The beauty of these posthumous acts derives from the skin that’s marked with a sacred rubric, as that arbiter of taste, Osberg, once divined. Streaks, ocellations, grooves. The martial monotony of death is always distant, always behind.
Everything went well, as the feline [feral], ferocious troop advanced, as the regiment invaded the temple, the workplace, the factory, as the accursed, white giant’s gastric requirements were sought. As they made their way upright. As they asked for the whereabouts of the principal equine body.
Such are the factious fictions, the apocryphal affiliations. Such are feral beasts.
But for the sake of symmetry, we will stop here.
Lalo Sabatani, The Debut or The Mass in Tongues
(unexplained in Lycergical Glossary)
21 Agai
n: Giordano Bruno, John Florio, Philip Sydney
Shortly before getting out of bed, Annick Bérrichon perceived that the animals that smile in the dark were absent from room 103 of the Maria Cristina hotel in Mexico City. If it was true, then she must’ve been somewhere other than the Maria Cristina Hotel in Mexico City, because, though they were invisible, she sensed they were very near her. How strange! She hadn’t been afraid of the dark before, while she was very afraid of the animals, but now those fears were reversed. She tried calming down by thinking that it was only a result of her being in a strange place … but what place, since she wasn’t certain where she was?
Dark is the way, light is a place. Who’d said that? Which of her poets? Or had it been uttered in seventeenth century Spanish by one of the creatures in her room, a room that may or may not be in the Maria Cristina Hotel in Mexico City?
She extended an arm. Instead of finding the switch, her fingers brushed against the wing of one of the creatures hanging from the ceiling (they weren’t all of one species, but she had to somehow identify them), which caused a disturbance that from initial stirrings led to shrill and raucous protestations [that infected the others] and, in effect, multiplied the noise into a clamor, a general uproar [although fleeting and retractable] that, in effect, multiplied her fear. They seemed to flicker in and out of view, their eyes blinking, searching in the darkness. Their laughter illuminated them. Her memory must have failed her to not find some justification for this nightmare.
A.B. had recklessly abandoned her studies of Balkan literature … And besides, this horror has been going on the past two days! The interminable journey, her proud and condescending peers always near her: a nightmare on terra firma. It’s not that she [Annick Bérrichon] lacks the courage to insult them and be free of them. She doesn’t do so because they’re her “colleagues,” and together they form a single body, so that any insult would only bleed [spread] like a lacerated organ; indeed, any repudiation, calumniation, would only redound on her, lacerate her, multiply her fear. They didn’t matter to her personally, individually (although they’re all her “colleagues,” they each belong to different species), it was the group that mattered, the corp. The historical fact. It was the collapse of its reputation she feared.
That the creature hanging near her left shoulder (she recognized the general design and principle parts of its corporal vesture) was a female, she was in no doubt. She’d learned from Sister Juana’s First Dream that bats are birds without feathers. Of all the obscurities to unveil, [for God’s sake]! Incubus / Succubus: taenia saginata. She was well acquainted with the delay, the docility, the asthenia: for whole semesters she’d been afflicted by self-reminders of her corporate guilt. Orphaned girls in rags, scribblers of theses and dissertations, of papers and ponencias, like the ones she read on campus, safe offerings, inspiring clumsy harmonic and acoustic reverberations by others, avoiding all the risks she herself had taken. Behind mirrors. Behind the mirror of the stand-in poet’s indrawn conceitedness, of the cheiroptera’s tremulous [trembling] voice that whispers near her shoulder (on which she believed it was now perched) a soft interjection that through impatience would grow into a peremptory demand. And this will be the last straw, provoking her, Annick Bérrichon, to an angry boast about having never been corrupt, about having never stooped to be a quadruped, about having acquired as much knowledge as she needed. For she knew everything. And yes, she was female.
And how strange [it was] to be [so] exposed, so visible! At her age! [During the course of her long life,] she continually shed her coquettish vestures although she continued to make them the butt of her jokes. Even now, with her wrinkles, her involuntary whistles, her sudden outbursts, her habit of praying, and her occasional lapses of memory, she’s managed to retain her peculiar style.
How long it took to impose it on the others! Almost as long as it took her to adopt it herself. An ugly old crone who became well known for her wit and wisdom. What seminal moments in her life [or her biography] vindicate this reputation? None. They were foisted on her all at once, as if she’d lived her whole life in a daze until, one day, when she was ugly and old, she awoke and found herself famous for being witty and sage.
Lie. She’d been ugly from birth, and only became intelligent long afterwards. Ugly as sin. As she discovered when she looked in the mirror and saw her distorted features and lamented the fact they were immutable as stone, and afterwards, sought the intervention of these animistic powers that now beleaguer her, imploring them to make her literary hobby a cosmetic and prosthetic veil—to make a covenant, a pact with her: that they allow her, at least in part, to be someone else, to be their half-sister (they didn’t have a sister, but she suspected there would be a temporary easement of parental divisions). Her ugliness had moreover two aspects, one distinctive, the other alarming: together, they aroused sympathy in no one except herself. It wasn’t the consecratory effect of the whole that made others recoil, but a meticulous examination of each part. For example, her eyes, her nose and her mouth had each been considered ugly per se: one had to get used to seeing them in combination to appreciate the coherency of the whole.
So it was perfectly understandable why the animals approached her, [then and now,] curious about something that wasn’t very different from themselves. Unseen, timid, ignorant … without a theory!
Another of the friendly, filthy zoomorphs had landed on her left shoulder, biting her [corresponding] ear. It didn’t hurt very much: a mere pinching sensation incident to the mechanics of mastication. A sensation that bordered on pleasure, an act that seemed to solicit from her a [reciprocation] reciprocating gesture. Something she was unaware of because of her age—78 years—as she was of many things except the things she already knew. Her vast knowledge of Balkan literature, for example, brought her great renown. But, in compensation, Annick Bérrichon knew nothing about Malagasy fauna. In compensation, indeed, because, in that ultimate or penultimate hour, all her experiences seemed to vanish, evanesce before all those snouts and muzzles, the beaks and claws surrounding her—the sudden intervention of a gifted imagination, or the chance effect of light on the surrounding scenery. What a pity! Otherwise, she’d have known the imperfectly penitent occupant of her sinister shoulder was actually an aye-aye.
Atrius Umber (pseudonym of Belisario Tregua), “The Dreadmist.”
“The Dreadmist”
And Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was.
Exodus XX, 21
God was, and Annick Bérrichon also was. They weren’t speaking. Madame Scardinelli was searching in the dark for those diurnal creatures that a long night’s digestion had caused her to imagine. Madame Obstreperous had learned to cross herself far from the mirror. She did so that no one but God would notice. And the preponderant maki on Annick Bérrichon’s left shoulder, which unlike the owl that hung upside down, could not see the future, but both cried in unison: “We can’t get out.”
Side discussion with Cornelius Sacrapant (Wynthrope-Smyth)
—I could hear them on your shoulder—said Cornelius Sacrapant—although it just struck me that they speak with great authority about something they know little about.
—You mean about the mysteries of the sects and French songwriters?—I asked.
—No, no, about English Literature.
—Do you think you know more than we are ignorant of?
—The question isn’t well phrased. You are ignorant of far more things than I happen to know. Don’t take it the wrong way: You ignore without knowing you do so.
—Then please give me an example.
—If I take yours and your Argentine friend’s taste for naturalism seriously, I’d have to point out the fact that, of all the practitioners of the genre, you omit the only names that are actually worth mentioning—said Sacrapant [smugly, pointedly].
—I don’t believe we mentioned any names, but how about …—so I ventured—Ford Madox Hueffer, also known as Ford Madox Ford?
—Nonsense—dismi
ssed Sacrapant—. That’s [logically] the one name I’d expect one of you to say. An outstanding exponent of international modernism, his reputation’s been challenged a thousand times over, but he never seems to go away. A kind of walrus carcass, long since emptied of its innards, which the ingenious hidalgos of cultural journalism float to the surface every now and then. So eminent is he, that they suppose him—not that I’m changing the subject here—the “discoverer” of D. H. Lawrence. (You can imagine that “discovering” Lorenzaccio wasn’t the most difficult thing in the world, true?) No, not Ford Madox Hueffer, nor his cognate.
—Then who?—I asked in mock reverence to conceal my dudgeon.
—Hubert Crackanthorpe, for example, a matrilineal ancestor of mine, or George Egerton. I know erudition is misleading in every language, and the sea in every language is deaf, but have you heard or read anything about them?
Without saying a word, I admitted no. But [I must say in my defense that] the gesture of admitting denial isn’t an easy [simple] one.
—Well, I won’t be too hard on you; after all, your cases aren’t exactly unique. Many things were obliterated in the Great War [as, for example, proper instruction on methods of reproach], but I have to find at least one book on which I can speak with the same authority.
—What about this Terry Eagleton fellow? Do you think you’ll be able to get a copy of his book in Cambridge?
—Eagleton is just plain Terry, whom I sure you’ve already met. Egerton, like the other George—Eliot, Mary Evans, as you’ll recall—is a lady: Mrs. Golding Bright. As in my case, remember the dash [between the two surnames].
—I see, I see …—I said, nodding.
—As regards your Argentine friend’s favorite subject, the metrical arrangement of Spenser’s Mutability Cantos, it wouldn’t hurt to consult T. S. Omond …
—He consults it regularly—I said, trying at least to preserve his honor.
—The Oxford edition or the mutilated new edition?
No Variations (Argentinian Literature Series) Page 18