“ ‘He will be born here,’ continued the priest, ‘as here all of us are born, because here all our minds and sexes meet. Here all uteruses intersect and become one alone. The central point of our world is the central point of each of our beings. All women ever inseminated were inseminated here, just as all people, however different from each other, meet in the idea of a person. He will be born somewhere, sometime, from a concrete and living woman, but we must conceive him here, first. How could someone become a prophet, without having the model of a prophet? How could a god ever be born, if we did not know that gods existed?’
“Fra Armando turned toward the raging column of milk and sperm, whose vines rose and entwined in rapid vortexes. He spoke to it, his arms spread, in an unknown language. Sometimes, I thought I recognized the gutturals of Somalians, or Arameic glottals, the lip-smacks of the Dogons, or the fifths of the Javanese. ‘Mineymoe,’ he often shouted, like an obsessive cadence of speech, and when he uttered (barked? cursed in torture? ground his teeth?) this word, he also made a gesture with his hands, half masked by the golden ephod and the maniple that doubled his brocaded sleeves. It seemed he sank his claws into his sternum, yanked out his ribs with a demented effort and tore his heart from the roots to offer it, with incomparable terror and devotion, to the vertical Jordan. The flame ignited again, flickering and fluttering into the consistency and light of liquid gold, whipped, it seemed, by the barbarous consonants, the hisses and whoops of the great priest’s voice. Fascinated by his bizarre invocation, I had hardly noticed that the formerly still crowd had begun an agitation: one by one, a few dozen girls, naked to the waists, their hair in hundreds of braids, their pupils dilated by belladonna, came to the front, pushing their shoulders and hips past those around them. Some had their nipples pierced with glassy jade rings. Others had a violet swastika tattooed between their breasts. More than a hundred girls filled the space between the priest and the crowd. Wherever they stepped their bare feet on the gentle floor of transparent stone, they left a moist footprint, surrounded by vapor, which slowly evaporated.
“ ‘Mineymoe!’ growled the officiant for the last time, and the hundred virgins imitated, in an echo, the holy syllables. Their thick-lipped mouths, crudely tattooed to their gums with blue signs, hung open, showing their red, voluptuous tongues in all their length, under the arches of their shining teeth. It was a strange and frightening vision. With their eyes dilated and tongues stuck out to the maximum, the girls trembled. Entire groups of muscles on their thighs and arms, but also along their spines, beat with a life of their own, like the muscles of an epileptic, or a great hysterical seizure. On their muscular tongues small swellings appeared, amplifying the texture of their taste buds. They grew larger and larger, until they turned into white cysts, frightening to see, that burst one after another, drawing screams like labor pains from the martyrs’ throats. With still-wet wings, with a bead of sparkling liquid at the end of their raised proboscides, hundreds and thousands of butterflies emerged from the blisters. At first as pale as embryos, they quickly took on kaleidoscopic colors, velvety or metallic, and took flight from the rent tongues. Soon, the entire cavern teemed with them, but the largest and most beautiful, with eyes like Chinese fish and stalks fluttering a handspan past the ends of their wings, swirled lazily around the steel flower and brain at the edge of the abyss.
“ ‘Mineymoe!’ murmured the multitude, and I found myself whispering, along with them, the barbarous word. The virgins collapsed to the floor and lay like the dead. Only a shiver at times agitated their gelatinous flesh. Dozens of butterflies, with their wings full of peacock eyes or branches of coral, swarmed now onto the bare brain of Fra Armando, like a thick pollen of plush and velvet. Months before, in countless places on the earthly sphere, young girls had taken walks through fields of flowers. A large, heavy butterfly, out of nowhere, spiraled around them, and the two tumbled to the ground between marigolds and daisy chains. Then, impelled from within, as though it were winter and she wanted to catch a snowflake, the girl stuck out her little cat tongue so that the butterfly could land and caress her striated palate with its wings. The tentative steps of those six feet across the lingual mucous proved to be an unexpected pleasure, yet soon a vibrant pain took its place, because the winged beast had stuck its toothed ovipositor into the scarlet tongue’s flesh, inseminating it with eggs as small as poppy seeds. Then it took flight again and vanished, leaving the girl to sob among the flowers like one violated by a fairy-tale flyer.
“The cerebral shell of the priest began to radiate an aura of fire, which incinerated the lepidopterous wings like dry leaves. Then, like a hydrogen balloon, his pink and snotty encephalon began to rise, with the cerebrum and stem, pulling the spinal marrow out behind it, freed from the yellow canal of the vertebrae. His body, emptied of noble substance, fell to the ground like the robes of a courtesan, leaving this second, truer body to float, free and glimmering, in the thick aspic of the hall air. It hung above our heads, immobile, for as long as the unbearable torture of Cecilia lasted. For soon The Albino emerged from our group. His white Pierrot face accentuated his black features. He snapped his rawhide crop now and then against his military boots, and when he reached the crumpled body of Fra Armando, he used it to push the body over the edge, into the abyss. He turned sternly toward the crowd, advanced on the first rows, and lashed them as hard as he could, gasping, until the whip tossed squirts of blood and pieces of torn ears and fingers into the air. People shoved each other and screamed, until a large amphitheater, full of fallen bodies, flayed to the bone by rawhide, formed an arc around the Master some distance from him. The silence was total; not even the wounded, some with cut throats, others with crushed eyes, dared to moan. Frightening, in this silence, was the sound of his metal-tipped shoes on the hyaline tiles. As for the silence of the central cascade of lights, it was mystical and negative – compared to this kind of silence, the lack of any sound would have been a monstrous cacophony. It was a quiet outside of hearing, or the ear, or consciousness – it was Outside. Monsieur Monsú reflexively straightened his colonial uniform and turned toward the ivory flow. With the end of his crop, he drew a complicated, indecipherable weaving, which persisted for a second in the air, like an illusory macramé. The viscous column stopped flowing at once, and the silence, terrestrial this time and greasy, drenched us like sweat. The edges of the column were sucked slowly toward the center, until only a sphere, a pearl as large as a cathedral, remained, floating on the black abyss. The pearl collapsed rapidly, greatly increasing in density, to become in the end so spacious that its central diameter could be subtended by a person with arms and legs spread. Strange chemical processes were unleashed in the milky bead, until it changed into a tomb of blinding crystal that emitted prismatic flashes …
“The butterflies below the volatile vault fluttered their wings more slowly, like wind-up toys when their interior spring releases, until they fell to the floor, by the thousands, and rotted there almost instantly. And when the ragged keratin blackened and molded, we saw that the insects had skeletons and skulls, but their bones as fine as needles seemed to be made from the same blinding quartz as the tomb in the navel of the earth. After their aspic flesh scattered into the air, their bones crumbled too, each in two pieces, each piece in two fragments, each fragment in two granules, each granule in two sparks, violet and orange, each spark in two white bits of dust like ground sugar. In a few moments we were enveiled ankle-high by fine sand, shaped in waves, glowing in places with miniscule crystal.
“ ‘Nothing, nothing exists,’ The Albino uttered slowly in the deafening silence. ‘We are thin spiderwebs, inflated and torn apart by the wind. We are the fringe of interference on a soap bubble, multicolored, wet, despairing … We are mites in the skin of the soap bubble, laying our eggs and dirt … Our world has no weight or sense. We are simulacra of the unreal, itself in turn a simulacrum. This stage of the unreal becomes opaque and real only when seen as a whole, from the top end or the bottom, page after
transparent page. But there is no top or bottom, and there are no eyes to see from that perspective. Page over page over page, our world is a book made of onion skin. And this skin has veins, and nerves, and glomeruli of stinking sweat.
“ ‘The people of old knew, and said, that every world is a book containing a book, and inside every Gospel is a Gospel. Once the sun stopped for an entire afternoon and another time shadow took ten steps back. Another time, everything was still, and pastors ate without eating and birds sang without singing … And Jehovah appeared in his pillar of cloud and fire, unexpectedly, between two pages of a pastoral as it happened, like a bookmark, one of those made by little scholars, decorated with stitches … It wasn’t time that stopped and turned back, but the long fingers scanning the pages, turning back to a passage they found dear.
“ ‘We are children and reproductions, but whose, whose? We are written in calligraphy, with gold and feces, but for whom? Who reads the poor story of our lives? Of course, only Him, the Writer. And he reads it once, in the moment he writes it. For the duplication of worlds is a process of writing/reading, as though an umbilical cord connects them, and through the cable, simultaneously, reading and writing cross from both ends, because if he blows his Spirit through the tube, inflating our bubble of soap, we, in turn, reflect his face in its curve, and through the tube we can see his zirconium larynx. And whoever swam against the terrible current of blessing, climbing like salmon toward the source, would escape the balloon of illusion and cross the cord that connects us to His mouth and His lungs. He would settle there, in the alveoli. He would multiply there madly, in Abraham’s breast. He would metastasize in the liver and balls. He would fill the Hierarch with the anarchic swirls. The god would die in unimaginable pain, and his howls would shape the deicide’s eternal crown.
“ ‘For all of us, at the end of time, murder and eat our God. Otherwise we could not become him, we could not be in him and he could not be in us. Devotion, therefore, is murder. Prayer is crucifixion. Love is torture. Adoration is strangulation with the wide hands of cherubim. Limitless pain is the deisis of our lives. That is why all gods were hacked and maimed and hung up by nails. Fra Armando has shown you the way of unification, I have shown you the way of dismemberment, and no one tells you: Choose!
“ ‘We will invent the being that will invent us, but not from pure light. Our world is no diamond. In the earth, the dead and crystals shine and reek. In our guts are worms, in the worms are guts, and in their guts are worms. Even the divine Dante pissed foully on the bark of the oak tree. But the humble prostitute delicately places an iris in the vase of earth. Thus the Creator will be man and light, and also woman, black and slave, with the mind of an angel and the heart of a bitch. This is the only way the hemispheres, schizophrenia, and paranoia will be left behind, and the sexes, man and woman, will annul each other, and the powers, master and slave, will become one, and wonder of wonders, good will be corrupted by evil so that it sparkles stronger, and evil will rise through good so that its darkness increases, and at their meeting, and above them, where they will arch out of themselves and come together, they will become identical, light and dark, in a single, ecstatic word:
BLINDING.
“ ‘Blinding!’ the crowd shouted, just as, minutes or centuries before, they had shouted, ‘mineymoe!’ I shouted with them, feeling the roof of my mouth go numb with fear. Meanwhile, The Albino transformed. The skin of his face, pale as one forever dead, now became transparent. His groups of facial muscles became visible, red and striated, and held at the ends by white tendons. Rings of flesh dilated and contracted around his eyes and mouth. Then we could also see through his muscles. His brain appeared through its phantom of mist and wind, phosphorescent green, and the seams of his bones were violet. Toward the end of his speech, even his bones became smoky, and then they went clear like frozen water. His brain, irrigated by black blood, pulsed under its glass bell like an immense toad. At its base, the pituitary gland glowed like a sapphire grain. I watched its slow and slovenly migration to the surface, on a peduncle like a snail’s horn, until it came through his brow, where it opened, the blue eye between his eyebrows, in a triangle that could have been divine, if the tip weren’t turned toward the earth. Monsieur Monsú’s neck and arms also became transparent, covered with crystal scales. A fascinating monster now stood in front of us and spun its hippopotamus-skin crop.
“Melanie, dressed in fantastical fabrics and fluttering her great wig of ostrich feathers dyed the color of carrots, passed to the front, holding a paper bag in her arms. She emptied it onto the floor and began to assemble, with the awkward dexterity of a child, the bizarre machinery of rods, indicators, bolts, pinions, and cuffs of a metal that shone dully like aluminum. She placed Leon the crystal, withered now like an old mushroom, on a stopper of spiraled lamé. Engraved tubes, metal strips, and electrical conductors in colored plastic connected various parts of the machinery. How could the bag have held all these parts, the entire assemblage? Where had Melanie gotten the syringes, the blades? The blue oxygen cylinders, with rusted pressure gauges, rose up like out of nowhere.
“ ‘Cover one eye,’ continued The Albino, ‘and see with the other: the world will look flat and wilted, like a drawing on a plate. Look with both eyes, and the hidden dimension will explode. The water will be deep and clear. One disjuncture is enough, a different angle of the two balls under the brain for the anaglyph to swell into bas-relief, hautrelief, into statues, and perhaps, if our eyes converge to the point where they can see into each other, the statue will also swell into something with multiple dimensions, an unimaginable object. Look now at this carpet of gaudy colors; this abstract leopard skin – and truly, at the distant walls of this hall, beyond the black precipice, will be painted an enormous shimmering rectangle in sapphires, emeralds, heliodors, and chrysoberyls – but look at it with dreams and distraction, taking it in at a glance, dissolving yourself in it. Your eyeballs will accentuate the convergence. The left image and the right image, phantomatically, will slide onto each other, will fit and join together, until the hologram comes to life and the wondrous chimera of the Book that contains us will be revealed in undying glory.’
“A colossal butterfly now spread its wings before us, inside a cube of blue light like an aquarium. On its purple velvet thorax glittered the brilliant tomb, suspended between heaven and earth, as though protected by the filiform legs. The vision lasted only a few minutes, until our sight grew tired and the incandescent spots became unformed again. Whither had the winged buffalo disappeared?
“In the same way, you can gaze at the gaudy spectacle of our world, the objects and deeds piled together, without reason, in heaps around you. Take each in turn and touch, smell, and think about it: useless. Chaos will constantly grow, because mystery is the father of an endless line of mysteries, and solutions are always partial and self-devouring … But think of everything at once, with a distracted and dreaming thought, until your cerebral hemispheres converge and the two slightly different images, rational and sensual, analytic and synthetic, diabolic and divine, male and female, glide onto each other. Suddenly the carpet of spots disappears and, clearly, in thousands of dimensions, we can think, for moments or millennia, of the undepictable face of Divinity. We will see then, face-to-face, what we have only glimpsed, partially, in mirrors and enigmas. Face to face: because our face is incorporated into His face. Eye to eye, because our eyeballs are in His eyes …
“Fra Armando’s brain pulsed like a pillar of fire over the people, emitting polygonal beams. Its medullar tail undulated gently, like a flagellum, in the gelatinous air of the immense, vaulted hall. A fine, fluorescent tattoo mapped out its complicated pathways of catecholaminergic, noradrenergic, and acetylcholinergic neurons: red, black, and violet lines strangely intersected and interwove. The brain began to glide slowly, propelled by spiral movements of its tail, toward the atrocious contraption that Melanie constructed with the meticulous, unconscious attention of a mantis religiosa. An operati
ng table? electroshocks? torture? a rape machine from a libertine bolgia? Bearings and gears shone through a small window framed by hydraulic cylinders. In a bath of opalescent liquid floated a spongy fetus with wise, oriental eyes. Dental floss connected filiform electrodes to its head, and the cables were plugged into the machinery. Under a bell jar, connected also to the assemblage of switches, a leaden sibyl read from a thick book, following the black spiders of letters with an unspeakably dry finger. An appalling skinned cat, nailed to a wooden plank between two inductive bobbins, was the last organic component of the machine. A few ivory nerves had been detached dexterously from its flesh and spread on both sides of its martyred body, in a fine network, numbered and inscribed with thick, inky letters. The animal rolled its clear eyes, with vertical pupils, and now and then its whiskers twitched.
“Finishing her work, covered with yellow beads of sweat, the Magdalenian-era woman sat unmoving, like an ebony idol. She reeked of armpits and wild arum, and drew thousands of flies with metallic-green or blue-cyan thoraxes, which soon covered her like a living shirt of fluttering chainmail.
“The Albino, in his new incarnation as an underground insect, had lost his eyes, and in their place were two vague atavistic swellings under his skin of crystal scales. But the eye in his brow had lit up like a great sapphire and projected an intangible cone of light, which turned Cecilia’s chocolate skin a charming shade of blue. The nubile girl was already naked, rubbed with aloe and narcissus, painted black on her lips, nipples, and the delicate folds of her hairless pubis. Her lowered eyelids, painted with kohl and dusted with gold, projected constellations onto the colossal vault, madder than ever, creating a sweltering and luminous summer night. On her neck, on an iridium chain, was a row of seven raw emeralds, untouched by any jeweler’s tools. On each emerald, a Hebrew letter was written in reverse. Two murex shells hung on her ears, like earrings. A creamy yellow cornelian gem covered the divot of her navel. Her nails, however, were truly wondrous.
Blinding: Volume 1 Page 40
