Celebrant

Not ready yet!

Just a moment!

All right
—
‘just a moment’ (it says here)
—
ahem

I bid my mind welcome, along every unstained slab of the wide, never-used sidewalk, past the silent tract houses and down immaculate, unused streets, heading out toward the long red butte with pale flanks, into the wind and the purple hills.
There over the fields I can see a huge black bird rising in the air;
it turns and as it comes toward me or swings away from me it flattens and becomes invisible.
I want to remember the necessity of its flight, and that necessity is easy;
so I store these things away in my mind, which is the mind at hand.
There is a mind, and thinking, but my confidence fails me when I try to call it
my
mind.
Nor do I see any reason to consider it
his
.
So it doesn’t matter who I am.
I am a refrain of a larger music, all of which I don’t entirely hear myself.

The clay road gleams silver in the bright grey glare from the clouds.

I am the hallucination of a homeless man named deKlend;
he does not know this, because I don’t appear to him.
I’m a hallucination so I seem more than I am, and I’m always good company.
If there are any indifferent or boring hallucinations, I’ve never heard of any.

Now there is light on the ground but the air is dim.
I feel that the ocean is off to my right, although there is nothing but land.
It may be only an unmoored feeling of spaciousness.

How do I look on land?
At the land I mean.
It isn’t a landscape or a scene, it’s the land
—
how do I look at it?
And, seeing how unprofoundly profound and unsilently silent it is, and its utter innocence of meaning, how do I open my mouth and try to talk to it, let alone for it?
There’s no way.
So, since I must speak, I will speak for myself to no one in particular, and I will listen to nature.
I don’t like the words “shaman” or “spirit.”
I won’t use them any more.
I’ll wait for words I can say, and they might even turn out to be the same words, uttered in a different spirit.
And let there be halting
ceremonial
conversation only
—
absolutely no “natural dialogue.”
Let every word be announced as though a child were reciting it laboriously from a book.

There are trees over there.
Open land before me.
No path and no grass.
Bare clay.
To my left there is a sprawling cemetery.
As I pass it by, snow comes floating out of the doors of the mausoleums, from beneath the eaves of canopies of carved stone, and from the gestures of the statues and parts of the their stone bodies.
The luminousness trembles and elastic fronds of snow steal around me.
Not one flake touches my so-called face.
The cemetery rolls like the ocean.
The mausoleums, statues, headstones, ascend and descend in place just like swells on the sea, in the mute white swarm of the snow.

Entering the world on this occasion, I’ll make a brief, silent address.

The World:
the world goes on forever, the horizon rolls back forever, the earth never rounds into a globe.
Travel on and on, you’ll never come back to where you started from, which is not to say that your journey
changes
you or the
time
that your journey takes allows for great
changes
so that your point of departure will, on your return (having travelled for so long in the same direction and coming around the world) be unrecognizeable to you.
It’s to say that there’s
always
going to be more and the idea that the world was a single limited globe turns out to be a wildly unlikely mistake.
No one has ever seen it or mapped it, and you can go on from land to land follow one after another without end.
The exploration begins inside your own body.
The world I’m exploring is familiar, the oldest I know, but I so seldom try to put into words what it’s like.
People are creatures, among many other kinds, who haunt it.
We speak in murmurs or cries, but there’s no conversation or clothes, cities.
People die because they remain where they are, so perhaps eternal life is travel is forgetting.
Limits, it might be, are precisely what make travelling and forgetting, and consequently immortality, possible, because those limits are also what prevent me from ever reaching the end of the world forever and ever, ahem.

The Journey:
he has to go perform the rite in a pilgrimage destination, and he’s one of many.
The others will know him and he them, that’s for certain although he can’t bring any particular sign to mind any more than he can clearly recall being set the task in the first place (there should be a memory) in part to prove that the world, while it is a globe, is nevertheless infinite, and geographers and map makers have made a mistake.
Perennially novel experiences in nonstop travel are the only proof possible of that.
Travelling beyond the horizon, you will never come back again
—
you will go on and on, the world forever accompanying you
—
in companyless company
—
while space
does
extend to infinity on all sides, and this
is
a small planet, but nevertheless a mistake has been made, a bizarrely common mistake, in thinking that the voyage will not continue forever discovering unfamiliar countries and landscapes, seascapes, animals, plants, people of course.
There is a mystery in back of it, having to do with other dimensions, that is not troubled by any of the contradictions in these ideas.
I’m not troubled by them or by my confusion;
I just let it alone and move on forever and ever, ahem.

All around I can hear the banshees, their wails shrill above the blue, the curse of unrequital belching from their hooded heads flung back, groping for hallucinations with fingers indistinguishable from the wind, calling for me but without knowing my name.

deKlend they know.
He is so alone that even his own hallucination is estranged from him.
I come from him and
I
don’t know him;
he’s like an overcast spot that emits images.
You see him, but then, as you draw near, images come spiralling out of him and carry you away.
Denial has bestowed extraordinary powers on him;
every thing that’s in him is excommunicated the moment it arises, and comes back to him in time like an encounter in the unreal exile of permanent solitude.
I have seen him taken aback a few times;
I think he must have realized, in those moments, how far he’d journeyed away from everyone else already, and how much he’d forgotten and replaced with images.

The silver gleams of the puddles and the wet clay ground are relentless.
They are relentless.
They are relentnesslessly restlentless there’s that empty tree in thickening snow, my going on is like lying down because like the snow I don’t feel myself falling.

Finally I am asleep.

Now I am sleeping, with my sleep all around me, my own placeholder only seeming to wait in the midst of it, just having just parted, united instead to copious sleep.
Shadows of sleep play on my form
...
I see it plainly, all naked as I am, and idiotic.
Remember that, he is
an idiot
.
Sleep playing too close on my idiot homeless hallucinationbody, I can’t say where, but I watch over him.

Something seems to crash into his chest and he doubles up with a moan of pain and horror.
Powerful blows crash down on his chest
—
a hammering beak breaking it open, thrusting in between ribs.
He sees his ribs like rafters overhead.
The ragged opening there, and the blind, staring black bird’s head jabs through, beak snipping the flailing heart.
He is hauled out of bed by his hair.
Dragged along by his hair.
Cloth is slapping his face making it impossible to see.
He twists his neck.
He sees a head at the end of a long arm, an enormous, silk-hatted, caped man veiled from head to foot.
The head swivels and turns its invisible gaze on him.
The floor shakes with each of his swift steps in a kitchen
—
heavy blows crash into his chest, so that he bounces wildly on the mattress.
Now overlapping hands press him down with immense strength like stone rams massaging his already beating heart.
Blood knocks in his head, buzzing in his ears, his feet throb, the feeling makes him despair.
In one wheeling movement he is sent sprawling into a corner as the giant draws up his stool and sits, feet apart, in the middle of the kitchen.
Leaning forward with elbows on knees he clasps hands together, extending index fingers together and thumbs folded over them.
IT lowers the stylus of those two fingers slowly, cutting into the air.
Gelatinous air-shavings plop around its feet like clear rubber rags.
The air spins like a potter’s wheel and IT is cutting a hole in space, spreading waves and sickening discolorations through space and him, bunching in membranous ridges and congealings
—

IT seizes him by his neck and drags him through the aperture, plunging him in dim, transparent beams, like rays of smoke, and shocking cold.

Again he glimpses the veiled head, and two insane glints.
The hat he now sees is a Chinese scholar’s hat with the two wings.
The wind is scathing, veils and black broadcloth mutter furiously around his head.
What is there to see but ice, black fabric jerking in the wind?
And now some bird, flying just ahead, black and intermittent in shreds of flying snow.
That bird is huge, with long ears on its head, and wide, daggerlike wings.
The grip on his head is gone and he alone is struggling to contain his panic and get his bearings, whatever those are.