Common flesh…. Instinctive bond like a great tightening … valley of constraint … singing in one’s ears…. Had the phenomenal mechanism of one’s world, fathom, hearing aid, sounding line, truly struck the shell of recollection, echo and choir of elements, macrocosm one had never dreamt existed in the wave-length of silence?
The “waiting” room — part-present, part-past, part-future, it seemed — was falling through the dust of space, axe of memory, chopping sea, flying chip or vessel whose strain, leash, trough and course had become participle of its own crust and loaf — headless plunge … ocean … devouring perspective, joint, ground (mill of the gods), “vanished” species, felled season.
MOUTH OF THE VOID…. Shroud of “subjective” fate torn by the irony and compulsion of freedom: two edged sword, teeth, which in exercising (while appearing to uphold every reinforcement and mistress of nature such as … mute skull … beloved flesh) sang for the first pointed incredible time, it seemed, out of its round and garment which had long appeared to demolish every miraculous bone and horn of protest in sheer animal voluptuousness: sang for the first incredible pointed time, it seemed; and one was drawn by the skinof the vortex into the other’srentand beauty of consciousness….
Book 2. The Vortex
ONE. Image of Conquest
Susan Forrestal stroked the curious horns of the antelope upon the wall of the room. They seemed to twist and wind their way through the palms of her hand as if they were intent on plucking her from their living grave and vortex. The sensation drew her into his arms again: the man she had loved who had abandoned and betrayed her a long time ago. Was it ten years or as many centuries ago? It was his gift which stood upon the wall like blades of water.
The vessel of the room was almost pitch black save for the spiralling light of the horns — the glowing constellations of flesh which rose and exploded within the dark premises of memory restraining them. The axes of the horns drew her both sharply and gently down into the vicinity of the animal’s cured skin — holes for eyes — until she trembled with the new senses of an alien figure of conquest. It did not seem to matter whether it was she who lived to cast aft echoing net about him, or he—horn and cane she grasped — who lived to tap each sound along the way and propel her into the ghostly music of the stars.
And in fact — as she stroked the “blind” and “deaf” beast that had been flayed and pinned to the wall, it gave her, in tune with everything else, the thrill all over again of pursuer and pursued, the thrill of execution: the sensation of catching him again and again and compensating the defeat of herself within the pregnant fold and field he still inflicted upon her; the magical womb of the hunt was now hers to confer upon him as she wished (shroud or skin or sail) to silence the clamour of bruised instinct he had once aroused within her like an orchestra of fury, and which she now calculated she had repaid by rendering him senseless as stone, mute and void.
She felt an enormous desire to puncture him again and again as “he” had once punctured her: holes for eyes within waiting room, half-sanctuary, half-confessional — masked “seeing” eyes against a torn “speaking” mouth, and she drew the nail of one finger across her lips (as if embarrassed at the thought of being converted into his cloth and vision — half-curse, half-blessing or prayer) like the breath of a sceptical axe upon his neck where he stood pinned to the wall.
In truth — had she not long since lost all desire but to preserve an eternity of jealous distance from him? And thus — as if in fear of a “broken” contest (wherein he had invoked the voice of fiends within her breast) — she fell on her knees and addressed him as god of fair weather and foul. No wonder she wanted to participate his own defenceless crew and grow deaf, prostrate beneath masthead, figure-head, to whom she yielded pride of place in the end, token of godhead she insisted all must pay for flying from and still overshadowing her.
This hieroglyph of storm — seizure of reality — was the literal vessel she half-worshipped, which became part and parcel of the medium of history upon the deck of which she froze to dwell — despite all movement — like the sovereign mistress of both the apparent flux of love and the apparent flux of fate, maelstrom and passion.
Perhaps it was only natural that void and vortex should sound and exist within creatures whose original lust and desire inevitably drained them within a confluence of times, of the music and fever of the chase, until all that remained was but an imprisoned echo in a shell — the hollow conversion of each other’s compulsion and reflection into each other’s god, or into each other’s muse of god….
Upon the floor of the waiting room of fetishes where Susan knelt — half-pinned herself, it seemed to her more clearly than ever now in the “eyes” of another, stone-deaf lover, as he had been pinned by her against a wall of flight — the low hum of traffic from the street of memory without (like an ocean of enterprise) died and rose again with the curl of each wave to enclose her and spin her round, up, down, until the fantastic spiral of horns ceased and seemed not to grip her at all but to return to becoming part and parcel of “his” abandonment of her all over again in the end…. And yet it left her with the taste of the vortex in her blood….
There was a sudden movement in the room. Susan rose to her feet. She began to drift after a while in search of whatever it was — propelled by a springing concert of need towards the magnet of the void, the open door of the room she vaguely recalled she had forgotten to close. A draught struck her and she moved against this, pinpointed and encircled by a spirit of control, apotheosis and birth of a fiction — electrified, as a consequence, into accepting the shock of diminished perspective, ancient of days as well as infancy of nights, infidelity of monument ceaselessly curdling and branching into something less than one feared or loved.
She drew close to the open door — located and gripped the knob — pulled fast. But even as she did so, a nerveless sensation, running water, swept along her arm as if the door had not been moved by her at all but had slammed shut of its own crooked spring and accord and her presence was but a curious agent of eternity within malformation, disfiguration, living and abandoned fluid tissue. She knew she stood on the threshold of resigning herself, even before she properly knew it, to the imbalance of season and eternity, a third seeing vessel and party — the displacement of which — lying between “him” on one hand, and “herself” on the other — she could not fathom save that here sailed the riddle and clasp of the chase seen through “pilot” eyes (holes for eyes) of a fiction which exercised upon her an uncanny demolition of premises, power of concentration and penetration, “drain” of attention, scrutiny beyond every apparent cloak to the essential fabric of freedom which “they”—in spite of a marriage of weakness, half-hunter, half-hunted, half-nothing, half-something, half-besieger, half-besieged — had become.
TWO. Watchman. Watchman
The church clock, a stone’s throw away, struck three: Susan turned, made her way back into the room towards a table with a book upon it. Ancient “log-book”. It seemed to her as she touched it that the fluid tie she had sensed within the room a moment ago, subsided into a pool at her feet, part and parcel of an aridity of vision, the unemotional stricken watch of place. Bond of freedom through which she felt herself related to a desert of expectation.