IVIV (12): 195-197

[Robin Landseadel]

On Nov 5, 2009, at 9:27 AM, Paul Mackin wrote:

> . . . there are also decidedly non-progress elements in the books  
> that don't escape our notice.

	It's a bridge over a stream. Very seldom will traffic come by
	overhead. You can look up and see a whole slope of cone-
	bearing trees rushing up darkly away from one side of the road.
	Trees creak in sorrow for the engineered wound through their
	terrain, their terrenity or earthhood. Brown trout flick by in the
	stream. Inside the culvert, other shelterers have written on the
	damp arch of wall. Take me, Stretch foot, what keeps you?
	Nothing worse than these days. You will be like gentle sleep.
	Isn't it only sleep? Please. Come soon-Private Rudolf Effig,
	12.iv.45. A drawing, in Commando blackface-grease, of a man
	looking closely at a flower. In the distance, or smaller, appears
	to be a woman, approaching. Or some kind of elf, or something.
	The man isn't looking at her (or it). In the middle distance are
	haystacks. The flower is shaped like the cunt of a young girl.
	There is a luminary looking down from the sky, a face on it
	totally at peace, like the Buddha's. Underneath, someone else
	has written, in English: Good drawing! Finish! and underneath
	that, in another hand, It IS finished, you nit. And so are you.
	Nearby, in German, I loved you Lisele with all my heart-no
	name, rank, unit or serial number .... Initials, tic-tac-toe games
	you can tell were played alone, a game of hangman in which
	the mystery word was never filled in: GE __ RAT __ and the
	hanged body visible almost at the other end of the culvert, even
	this early in the day, because it's a narrow road, and no real
	gradient of shadow. A bicycle is incompletely hidden in the
	weeds at the side of the road. A late butterfly pale as an eyelid
	winks aimlessly out over the stalks of new hay. High up on the
	slope, someone is swinging an ax-blade into a living tree ... and
	here is where and when the young witch finds Vaslav
	Tchitcherine at last.

	He's sitting by the stream, not dejected, nor tranquil, just
	waiting.

	A passive solenoid waiting to be sprung. At her step, his head
	lifts, and he sees her. She is the first presence since last night
	he's looked at and seen. Which is her doing. The charm she
	recited then, fastening the silk crotch tom from her best
	underpants across the eyes of the doll, his eyes, Eastern and
	liquid, though they'd been only sketched in clay with her long
	fingernail, was this:

	May he be blind now to all but me. May the burning sun of love
	shine in his eyes forever .. all the holy names of GOD, and the
	great Metatron, I and do my will.

	The secret is in the concentrating. She inhibits everything else:
	the moon, the wind in the junipers, the wild dogs out ranging in
	the middle of the night. She fixes on Tchitcherine's memory and
	his wayward eyes, and lets it build, pacing her orgasm to the
	incantation, so that by the end, naming the last Names of
	Power, she's screaming, coming, without help from her fingers,
	which are raised to the sky.

	Later she breaks a piece of the magic bread in half, and eats
	one part. The other is for Tchitcherine.

	He takes the bread now. The stream rushes. A bird sings.

	Toward nightfall, the lovers lying naked on a cold grass bank,
	the sound of a convoy approaches on the little road.
	Tchitcherine pulls on his trousers and climbs up to see if he can
	beg some food, or cigarettes. The black faces pass by, mba-
	kayere, some glancing at him curiously, others too involved with
	 their own exhaustion, or with keeping a tight guard on a
	covered wagon containing the warhead section of the 00001.
	Enzian on his motorcyle stops for a moment, mba-kar,ere, to
	talk to the scarred, unshaven white. They're iri the middle of the
	bridge. They talk broken German. Tchitcherine manages to
	hustle half a pack of American cigarettes and three raw
	potatoes. The two men nod, not quite formally, not quite smiling,
	Enzian puts his bike in gear and returns to his journey.
	Tchitcherine lights a cigarette, watching them down the road,
	shivering in the dusk. Then he goes back to his young girl
	beside the stream. They will have to locate some firewood
	before all the light is gone.

	This is magic. Sure—but not necessarily fantasy. Certainly not
	the first time a man has passed his brother by, at the edge of the
	 evening, often forever, without knowing it.
	GR P 748/749