Veni,
omnipotens aeterne Diabolus! image by Daniel Y. Harris
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even
A squatter named Marcel speaks while being lowered by gurney from an
abandoned apartment complex. He had been stirring flammable liquids in beakers
with a broken glow stick before the ensuing explosion and fire.
The Bride’s domain is jaundiced, oily declension
of lead foil and subjunctive dust, Vatican and Sistine,
virgin dust of Papal Bulls, chastity belts as a gown
of cracked glass. I should have killed Picabia in Jura,
buried his body in layers of bioclasts and oolitics—nothing
governs slippage.
The flammable liquids, it turns out, were comprised of a composite of
glycerin and potassium permanganate. Marcel had swallowed halon or HFC-227 to
interfere with the usual chemical reaction, which, to his mortification, didn’t
work.
The insectile, monochromatic
triptych with hint of a breast
stirs tentacle
projections of a sexy misplaced ear, arches
the simian she
becomes on a night of skin over wire.
“I am a sodomized
queen, raped by a
rook between slits of broken
pane—my v-shaped
proboscis, mechanical hip, and thrusters,
slender in silk,
recede up a shapely thigh—sheer,
hydraulic.”
“Just drop me, you
fetishists,” Marcel yelled to the paramedics, before continuing to break into
metonymies of a drone-poesis with savage heaves.
Erect on nine malic molds, the Bachelors stir like empty carcasses
or wet shirts hanging from a clothesline. Seven conical cylinders
effect circumcision—rotate, gyrate, penetrate the slow rapture
of the chocolate grinder. Fellatio is exegetical. I mean it as pedagogy,
to be studied and redacted, we of the x-shaped rod, on a night
of ridges, lubricants, and six circles.
The paramedics notice that
Marcel’s head is a circle; not circular, per se, nor circle-shaped, as if one
meant a tad more circular than a normatively shaped round head, but rather a
circle. A perfect circle.
Capped with a sphere to coat the shards (dried blood with discolored
cracks from years of transport), the Bachelors’ domain becomes an
amphitheater of feet churning, the hegemon stuck in a feedback loop
without the possibility of climax.
39 St. Mark’s Street. Theater of the Rollicking Cusp. Rehearsal #4, Blood in Eden.
A narrator, garbed in black
cloak and boots, face darkened by shadow; actors motionless on the stage, ready
to come to life, as it were, enact his well-elocuted words:
The empress-vampire, flanked by sycophantic drones,
paces a labyrinth beneath the City of Eden. She has grown
to appreciate, nay relish, mold and reptilian remains,
the way the earth moans like a didgeridoo. Her powers
now bore her—astral travel, psychic preemption, trans-
defiance of phenomenal law. Blah!
At
night, though, she and her
hematophic flock emerge like starving chiropteras, rising
from manholes and foul sewage tracts. They stalk the alleys
and theater districts, combing Banker’s Boulevard in hopes
of quarrying some drunken broker high on the dragon.
Ah, the city in darkness.
Red nimbus throbbing in the cottony gray. Electric music
wafting from bars. The young men with their ripe dreams
and randy flesh, their desire like breath in a breathless
grave.
No, no, no, screams the director as the leather-clad vixen enters the
stage. You have no sense of timing, he bellows. Skip it, skip it, the director
continues, just move to the next fucking scene. Jesus, people, this isn’t
Shakespeare.
The narrator clears
his throat, resumes at the director’s prompting:
In the hotel off Eldritch River, where bohemians convene
to drink and dissolve, and paramours ensnare their patrons,
The Chosen One (he does not yet know of his epic destiny)
sucks an opium pipe, recalls with nostalgia his provincial
home.
On the muddy banks, the opalescent empress spurs her
legions;
bathed in waves of moonlight, they advance, scaling the
hotel,
hundreds of deranged bugs scuttling towards an open window.
Not sure about this, mumbles the writer. He has been waiting for his
Moo Goo Gai Pan for two hours now. The only saving grace is the vixen winking
at him from across the aisle. Two days prior she had said, so, you’re the God
of this, huh. They had gone out for drinks, though she spent the entire
(fucking) time on her cell phone, bantering with some vociferous and
high-pitched call-girl named Jennie (he had wondered if they were lovers).
Now, the director
blurts, the climactic scene. The climactic scene!
The empress, now redeemed by her love for The Chosen One,
reclines in the velvet coffin where for centuries she has
slept.
You must drive the
stake through my heart, she moans, but
first:
tease me with that
mortal tongue in this place that for years waned boreal,
but now waxes tropical
from your throbbing promise. Together they draw,
the empress’s face, for so long pallid, now flushed with
yearning.
Yes, God, she
moans as The Chosen One lowers his face to her
dewy clume.
And then he
penetrates her sacred cavern, quick and dead
in perfect syncopation. The stake now upon her heaving
breast, she
hollers like a barmaid: Soon,
soon I shall be released, but not,
my love, prematurely!
He feels within his phallus the expanding heat,
grabs the hammer as woefully vowed; and, as he erupts into
her
smoldering loins, drives the stake into her now forgiven and
again
mortal heart. I die,
yes, alas, she groans, I die! The vampire-empress,
gloriously spent, turns to ash in the hoary arms of The
Chosen One.
Final scene: As The Chosen One stares at the now ashen form of his
love, a breeze blows through the open window, dispersing the remains of the
empress throughout the room. The Chosen One rolls onto his back, shaking his
fist at the indifferent sky.
Applause. Cheers. That’s it for tonight, says the director. Not too bad
for a first run-through. Be back tomorrow. 7PM, goddamn it. Now, anybody up for
Indian?
Even—Marcel2 i
= The Chosen e i·ln(2) = cos: The Bride
(ln(2))+i·sin(ln(2))
= Stripped Bare (e 2·Ï€) i = 535.49 i
= 1
0.7692+i·0.63896
= the Bachelor Machine as matrix of eros—prefer French
to Indian. Prefer
the anachronism of 1912: the malic molds
point to eight
liveries and uniforms (policeman, calvaryman, flunky,
funeral director,
constable, priest, deliveryman, footman): Marcel’s
ashen form of
love, the illuminating gas. Viscosity,
which I doubt or the large
glass with its
shaft of freed metal, this champ le du
I bequeath to you,
sex cylinders,
readymades, et al. I have lost singularity—H. Mutt’s
urinal has erased
my name from retina to brain. I am the occultic witness
who owes nothing
to shibboleths. I liquefy in the fractured m-dash,
blending into
yellow perfumes, then reverting back to pistons moved by air
currents. The
dénouement of slippage with necktie and bayonet: severed
between acts and
misdirected to the final scene.
Even—Marcel: bicyclewheelPharmacy
BottleDryerInadvanceofthebrokenarmPulledat4pinsCombTraveller’sFold
ingItemWithHiddenNoiseApolinéreEnamelledTrss
Unhappyreadymade50ccofParisAirL.H.O.O.Q.50
ccofParisAirBelleHaleineEaudeVioletteWanted$2000Reward
FreshWidowTheBrawlatAusterlitzWhynotSneezeRroseSélavyReady
madesunalteredobjectsAssistedreadymadesRectifiedreadymades
CorrectedreadymadesReciprocalreadymadesusingRembrandt
asanironingboard.
Applause. Cackles. You thought it was over for tonight, says the
director. Not too bad for a deja run-back through it from a swerving unfocused
angle. Be back the day before last Tuesday’s postponement. 8PM, for the love of
goddamn it. Now, anybody up for seeing if the body made a crack in the
sidewalk?
Even—Marcel
Stephane is dead. The chalky
crime scene. Paramedics check his tattered pockets and retrieve a marble, a
centime, a thimble, a Mona Lisa cutout, and a crumpled page torn from a
theosophical encyclopedia, chapter MCMXII.
Marcel with a Centime
The thermodynamic orchestra is enclosed in a mobile
cage, its conductor sporting a metallic lung—the earthworm
plays a zither from core mechanomorphic to digitomorphic:
burrows,
cranks—the penal pistons—gears of a motherboard
at night in the rain with a wireless mouse.
I have returned. Not
what you think. Chassis with legs, ideogrammatic tubes, the
magento
of base (cf. the welter of base)— to assume my post
as Chief Elder of the Istic Society. Please bear with my
lustful
masonry as I reveal my inmost self.
The bivector spin
and the electroweak augment complex phases
of the 24-root vector gauge, the wheel’s eight paddles dark and clear:
luminous bardo from Gehinnom
to Gan Eden to the sunspot half-period of twelve years.
Within a few seconds, a later heaven, one eye—
for almost an hour the occultist changing his mind.
(Turns out, to expand the memoir,
that the crumpled page torn from a theosophical encyclopedia is a section of a
far more ominous codex, stuffed in Marcel’s coat in desperation. It’s discovered
postmortem in the small apartment at 23 rue Saint-Hippolyte.)
—Daniel
Y. Harris & John Amen
