FROM THIS SWAMP
Henry Wessells
For years after I left the City, I was the only human being in this section of the great swamp. Very rarely, once a month or so, I might see a botanist or an ornithologist poling through these innermost channels, but they would never see me, for their eyes and minds were intent upon a single, visible aspect of this marshland. I know the intensity of their quests for a rare lichen or an elusive woodpecker, because when I first entered the swamp I was a brilliant ethno-botanist, researching an old legend about medicinal plants once known to the original tribes and to the very first settlers who listened to them, for a time, before the Kirititsa vanished. I had read the hints and notions recorded among columns of numbers and harvest totals in the forgotten chronicles and accounts of the Trading Company shareholders who founded the City. I was certain there were plants and medicines in this vacant tract of swamp that would make my career at the University.
I found the olordu, “it would have been”, the healing plant I sought that first afternoon on the long coulee, and over the years I have discovered a vaster pharmacopoeia than I had ever suspected from my readings in the discoloured pages of legends and ledgers. That afternoon, as I thrust my single oar into the mud to begin the journey back to the edge of the swamp, where a faint path connected to end of the road to the City, I caught a glimpse of secret knowledges that I have been exploring ever since. There was never any question of returning to the City once I became aware of the patterns of energy that control this swamp. What I witnessed that afternoon made all my ambitions at the University seem petty. Even the first transmission confirmed my resolution to remain and preserve the links with this vast, secret awareness.
I learned how to survive the heavy snows that turn the great swamp into a blinding labyrinth of white ice, how to survive in turn the repeated thaws that erase the harsh lines of winter, and flood the meridians and channels rushing in to the center of the marshlands. Today, as on a certain day in previous years, the sunlight seems warmer than it has for months. After having been dormant throughout the long winter, the continuum of decay and germination processes has resumed. Smells from all points of the compass mingle in the erratic breeze, rising from the water and the soggy coppices of birch and cedar I have come to call dry land. The swollen ground, the splash and cry of waterfowl, the warming sunlight, are all evidence that a new season of growth has returned to this swamp.
I have endured the brutal familiar hardships of winter, but I am not sure I will survive the coming spring. In the distance, where the channels evolve into streams draining the swamp into the River, or dwindle into seeps and damps, at the edges of my dank, greening refuge, I can hear the metal howls of their machinery. Long ago, when I read the thick account books of the Trading Company, I marvelled at the greed of those first shareholders, at a greed I could not fathom, and which I thought no longer existed.
Raised in a scholarly environment, I was unworldly, without the slightest suspicion that such greed had, if anything, multiplied itself with the increasing prosperity of the City.
Now, there is no denying the encroachments of this greed into the swamp. Along the tangled water meridians that nourish and define my existence, I can see silent ripples of winds that are too faint to stir the dead leaves along the banks. In the same way, I know that circumstances outside the swamp are moving with a momentum that will change the shape of this terrain and compel me to take actions I have delayed for as long as I have been keeping my vigil in this marsh.
In the tiny cress sprouting among the brown compost of histories, in the hooded purple skunk cabbage pushing through the last patches of snow, I can read the unbroken green promise that has sustained this realm, outside the boundaries of their world of cinders, drought and steel. The secret I preserve in this fragile swamp shelters me, but it is an old secret and I am alone against their massed numbers, trucks and greed. They are frightened of the simple equations of change, the process of continuous and unavoidable change that rules the swamp. They are frightened of the glimpses of infinity preserved in the ancient network of canals and reed flats, just as the first settlers were terrified by the knowledges reflected in the eyes of the Kirititsa and those of us who have drunk of these waters.
Here, almost at the central intersection of wood, water, wind and fire meridians, there is an appearance of pristine, unchanged wilderness, but this is a balance that is constantly shifting. Everything in this swamp is as transitory as all our past existences, and they are frightened beyond speech by this. In the empty sectors of the marshes, their maps and their philosophies show themselves to be meaningless assemblies of barren lines and dry sticks. Since I have come to this swamp, and shaped my existence within this geography between water and earth, I have had no need for maps, because I cannot lose my way. I breathe, see, taste, dream the swamp I inhabit. The same elemental energy which flows in the water meridians pulses in my veins. This is part of the secret knowledge they seek to deny, and to destroy with their trucks full of cinders, ash, garbage and heavy metal slurry, the fruits of their poisonous civilization dumped into the shallows. As their bulldozers and graders advance further into the swamp, so I must retreat into the central channels.
When the runnels feeding the marsh swell with heavy rain from unseen hills, even the outlying moors return to their watery origins. Gravity and the solid network of earth and woods are in continuous, shifting balance with other visible forces, wind and water. But the unseen channels and meridians of wood, metal, water and fire also shape events as forcefully as flood and storm and drought.
At dawn and dusk, a cleansing pulse of energies surges along metal channels, through the bogs and paddies. A blue heron explodes into flight without apparent cause, slate wings sweeping past rust-dry cattails. The transmutation of toxins is the energy of metal surging, electrons migrating toward the sluicegates. All of us who have lived here feel this pulse, whatever our elemental alignment, just as we all have come to know the deeper secret of the swamp.
The line of their trucks stretches beyond the horizon, beyond the web of awareness I know through the meridians.
As their landfills rise into mountains, my perception of these marginal areas becomes clouded, the flux of energies becomes diminished, and the metal and fire channels function incoherently. Experiencing these poisoned states, I have come to understand that madness is the basis for their existence, for the existence I abandoned long ago. This is why they are frightened beyond com-munication by the knowledges I preserve. Here, at the heart of the swamplands where all lines converge, a small hill rises from the surrounding waters. Sparse grass, green throughout the winter, a cluster of ancient birch trees with younger trees rising from rotted stumps, and a single lighting-struck cedar.
Here at the central point, the water, wind and wood energies are strongest. Strange translations have occurred in the past, when the Kirititsa vanished from the swamp.
What I witnessed years ago, that first afternoon here on the long coulee, was something I have seen many times since I have lived in this marsh. As I stood in my flat boat near a small grassy mound, straining at the long pole, I saw a wall of brilliant light appear before the three birch trees at the center of the island. From this luminous space a small woman dressed in coarse beige cloth emerged, and stepped onto matted grass. Her face was serene, delicate-featured and unadorned. She held a small leafy plant in her left hand and she beckoned to me with her right. I stepped into the shallow muddy water and walked toward her. In silence, she advanced and handed me the seedling. Her eyes were huge and brownish green, with no pupils. She stepped back to the shining wall and disappeared into the light. I heard the rumble of bullfrogs that starts at dusk in the swamp as the luminous space dissolved. This was the first time I witnessed the opening of the water doorway, when the Kirititsa invited me into their tribe with the gift of the medicinal tea plant they call gelishiguzel, “beautiful coming into being.”
The white bark of the oldest birch on this sm
all island is smooth and luminous, with hints of pale orange where the bark is freshest, paper whispers where it has silvered and dried. The entire history of this swamp and the controlling channels is written in the scarred black lines of the trunk. So, also, the scrawled circles record the entire history of the once distant City and its rapacious growth, the long series of decisions and land transfers that have turned this swamp into a dumping ground. Even as the bulldozers rumble throughout the night, across the new mountains rising from this swamp, the water channel is still radiant.
Energy floods into this region from a luminous void, brighter than the light towers they have built along their roadways and landfills. When they reach the center of the last marshlands, I will travel along the fading channels performing brief rituals to open all the doorways of the wood, water, wind, metal and fire meridians. From this swamp I will return to the source, to the vast, empty silences from which we once emerged.
When their bulldozers have filled the shallow winding maze of streams and coulees, they will clank and twitch over this low mound. The old birch trees will snap under the metal treads and be crushed into the mud. I will have left no traces visible to their eyes, but the forces that control this region do not need walls or markers. One day, the intangible, luminous doorways will open again. I do not know what special technologies or substances will be brought through, as the medicinal herb was given to me many years ago, but the elemental energies will return into this poisoned world and once again connect the meridians of a new geography. Before long, the inhabitants of this poisoned city will awaken to a new landscape, and some of the inhabitants will, like me, step through into the unfamiliar void.
RED MASS
Dan Kellett
*A Memory. Nothing else. Smoky Asian hotelroom — girlish dreams of first sex — dark stranger climbing down from her balcony — she never saw him again — moonstruck — dreaming demons — smack dreams in distant dungeons — moulding bad books — black and white postcard memories — brown medicine bottles — the warning: half-sunk skiff on rocks — Lorelei — the oar smashed, the maiden drowned — stranger on the shore whispers invitations like the moonlit night in her dreams — the stranger, unnamed. No other memory.
*A Letter. The Baroness Massey-Head, trustee to the House of M—, to Miss Viola O—, aged two and twenty.
—Despite your odd record, and your hypos, I am able to give you employment as governess to the family of M—, as from the last day of July, 1929. Report to the Warlocks, the custodians, late that day, and thus gain passage to the House of M—. To you are entrusted the three children of M—, in the family’s absence. You will be instructed in your duties as they arise. Be sure to remember nothing else.
*The House. Vast estate. Place of ancient dread. Stands amid miles of overgrown land, where no one goes. Simple villagers wake screaming at the name of M—. Shadows move there at night. Dark cancers. Sickly pantomime figures lay human hearts bare and weeping. They have seen the horror. Breathing graves, burning wicker-men, the sinister teaser. By night they walk in the House, in the gardens. Who walked there, walked alone. Arrival. The gate left unlocked. Viola walks through unaware. Eyes follow her.
*Arrival. Warlock crouches at the gate, laughing. Withered old rustic — stained clothing — smell of dead baby boys on his breath. There goes the new governess — watching her virginal steps — dead laughter from knowing lips. Glance shifts to under-growth — grotesque Madonna shrine: MOTHER OF ALL PAIN, shrunken breasts trickling blood, wailing lips of sword-wounds.
—My wife is waiting for her. He knows.
Viola struggles with pangs of deep madness, the same horror hollows Warlock’s eyes. Now he is gone, she never saw him. Through a grim woody path Viola glimpses grey gothic bulk of the House, walking mesmerized as black moths settle on her brain. Flashback smell of burning heroin in distant dungeons. Memory of the phantom always behind her back, always awake in the dark.
Seeing the house a hot finger prods her heart — she sinks in visions of dripping red Hosts elevated to savage congregations.
*Watching. The House stands grey and cold in the sunlit courtyard. For a long time Viola stands looking up, warm summer silence feeling her hands. Sinister breezes crawl in her red hair — uncanny fingers — old track-marks itch again — her pale face against the blazing sun — sudden clouds. Flashback to black and white film horrors. Those dark windows above glaring down COME HOME knowing the sandstone church between her ears. We have always lived here. Memory of the dark stranger climbing down from her balcony. And he never ripped her.
*Warlock. The Housekeeper. Pale hideous Mrs Warlock standing at top of stairs, tired grey hair — Viola gazes up lips parted — red velvet carpet — Mrs Warlock’s weary face, eyelids half-sunk. Walking death-wish.
—We have always lived here, my husband and I.
The House takes us under its wing of noble blood. You’ll love the House ...Viola listens with shivers... Here we lose all time in velvet haze, lost memories in dark varnished wood, dusty chandeliers in the ballroom, cobwebs on the mirror where Maudeville stood — maze of corridors underground — tarnished relics — Oriental statues follow you with their gaze, never talk to them — ashes everywhere in red stone urns... Mrs Warlock’s Gestapo shoes thumping up the spiral staircase where she found the hanged man — dried foam on lips.
—Here is your room. Wait here. Open for no one.
Your duties start when they instruct you... Viola knows there’s no one here.
—Ever been snuffed out?
Flash vision of the House — sixteenth century — twisted bodies festering in dungeons — screaming sickness.
*The Flower. Night — waking in moonlit room — curtains shuddering — something outside beckons — garden full of overgrown marble statues — shadows dance on the veranda — streams trickle feverishly — haunted melodies echo from the hills — the ground opens as your dreams so often showed you — flower blossoms in moonlit soil — young limbs sprout from buds half-closed — white arms, red lips — sudden reek of menstrual blood!
Scene fades. Viola stands on the riverbank. A dark shape rises from the water. Flashback mirror in the ballroom — cobwebs on the mirror where Maudeville stood — tearing cobwebs from the glass she glimpses a face from long ago, the Master. Figure wades from the stream — dismal black eddies — recognition: we know each other, and Viola knows. A scorpion kiss and she falls in visions — the phantom always behind her back.
*Nightmare. Gloomy black giant moths occlude the blazing moon. Maudlin shivers. The House rests like the horizon — closed book of spells. Black moths descending on human hearts. Viola finds herself tethered to a dark monument, naked, yawning vulva streams clear juices. Mrs Warlock appears withered and twisted carried on foaming dogs. From the hand of a screaming statue she snatches a chewed strap-on dildo, leashes it between her grey labia — plunged deep into the girl’s body — red rivers bubble in her ears — ripping sound from stubborn hymen — thought the dark stranger ripped me — strap-on metamorphoses into bronze pastoral staff glimpse episcopal ring on the stranger’s phallus — scream of werewolves copulating in the distance — Mrs Warlock has changed to a hectic phantom holding its head back in rapture — moonstruck.
*Viola’s Diary. Still no memories. Only the dark figure. The House is all that ever was. Restless red haze nights. Smoky curtains, cobwebs on the mirrors. Not even sure why I came.
Days float past in silent shivers. At night moonstruck shapes court me, I wait for them in the Folly. I feel a red madness coming. The House whispers of Maudeville. Locked volumes of magick. No one tells me. Suppression in folds of smoky curtains. I think I know the horror they have seen.
I have always been the governess. But no one is here. Only the Warlocks, seldom seen. Mrs Warlock’s obsession with sickness bothers me. Some lunatic sickness has led to nightmare, only one homecoming — to the House. We have always lived here. Always that memory of distant dungeons, the mysterious balcony. The same stranger.
*A Warning. The Baroness Massey-Head, trustee to the House of M—, to Miss Viola O—, informing you of the sudden death of the children of the family of M—, due to unforeseen family complications. Unfortunately we were unable to cancel your employment; this incident occurred on the day of your arrival, some weeks ago. Nevertheless your contract of employment must continue until the arrival of the family of M—, over the next few months, if at all.
Just as the moon pours down wine to our eyes, the walls of the House weep thick cloying wine, intoxicating us all. Never ask.
*Maudeville. Night again. Fantasy of corpses — moon stares on with dead shine — stars mourn down, pale lamps in a crypt — cancelled junk eyes — a bustle draws closer to the vault — spectres dumb and hollow and haggard — the fool, the man-woman (the sinister teaser) pierrot lunaire — black and red death march — obscure village rituals — a veil of shivers descends and all night lives in a grave.
*Red Mass. A ghastly eucharist, all hideous injuries relived, diseased moans, blood spattered throughout the crypt.
Blinding gleam of gold — a dark figure approaches the altar — congregation of cackling shadows dance and drool, veins open in red shouts — reek of brownstone — diseased cocks and cunts alike drip fresh blood — Viola feels every hole in her body drip blood. Watching in a corner of the crypt. The figure bursts into frenzy. His clawed hand tears at the priestly robes, nails driven clean into his pounding chest — thin screams twitching flesh — elevates his Heart with thanks-giving...in bloody fingers — overgrown Madonna statues trickle red — the crowd explodes in screaming sickness.
*Escape. Panic erupts in paranoiac night-mares — chased by invisible murderers — growling evil dead — Viola runs through endless undergrowth — past the raven — hoarse croak — its tongue is a bloodied phallus — beak in her heart — giant moths and vultures give chase in phantasmal armies — sudden change of scene — Viola running through candlelit maze that never ends — on a dark hilltop lightning strikes a tower — scene fades — pounding blood in her ears — silent YES!
The Starry Wisdom Page 9