The flames have to be burning something, you say, how destructive you are, Medea.
They’re burning all my old thoughts.
You’ve done this before.
I do it over and over. I have to in order to continue. To be this ghoul I am.
Whose flames are we? We’re us, our own. Are we more than one fire? I’m my own flame. Talk to Medea, Dido.
Dido is burning. Founding.
Her people burned babies to the gods. Later. They did that after she died. Isn’t dead. She was never dead.
She’s a fiction. She burned nothing. Nero burned Rome. She killed herself burning.
They discovered vases of babies’ ashes within Carthage, the archaeological site.
We’re not like that.
There is no Dido.
Dido is a poem who has permeated you; one you can read within people who never read it.
She didn’t found Carthage. She was abandoned by a lover. What did she do really?
If she founded Carthage, it was on the blood of babies.
Founders who are women only burn.
Dark Ray, in his Dark suit, his dark tie, stands in his coroner’s office, trying to read the new corpse. Why does it speak of burning? It didn’t burn.
Send your children to war; they can burn up foreign cities.
Dido: I’m a multitude of flames of cultures.
Dark Ray peers at the text in my corpse: murdered again, just a few Dead nights ago.
I was sitting in the Palms Motel, my feet on the linoleum floor, looking at books.
This is a photograph of pieces of Afghani antiquities. They were broken to be sold on the black market. Read the photo in me, my corpse says. Heads of buddhas, truncated thoughts. Each the same and different: pointed topknot, rounder topknot, long earlobes, longer earlobes. Does that face look more serene than that one?
I AM A BROKEN CULTURE!
No, I’m burning.
No, I’m founding a culture for you the fire.
Medea: The flames of course say I am pure. Red lines which spread out tissue-like.
In the city of ghouls I must found something substantial. In the culture of ghouls.
Why is Dark Ray wearing such clothes? The Coroner pretends to mourn for me. He’s trying to get the story, reading and reading.
It’s a new corpse, recently found in a trunk. Her face peeled off and glued back on her skull, a smile cut into her flesh. Pool of blood around the trunk. Is it me? Of course.
I’m sitting in the Palms Motel. I’ve been reborn, you sucker. I look rather like a statue again.
Dark Ray: I’ve got to keep something for my death, my real death when it comes. What can I keep? I know it’s here in this text. It’s got to be here this time.
You’re not supposed to keep something for yourself; you’re supposed to found a city.
Are you?
When Dido crawled onto her pyre, she cursed the man who’d abandoned her. After the Romans burnt Carthage, they said a curse against any who would refound the city.
In my story, who is cursed? It depends on what city’s being founded. It isn’t Carthage after all, but the city of ghouls.
If Dido and Medea have been abandoned by their lovers, they will never mention it here. They don’t care any more.
I have endured. Why?
Why do you keep talking about Medea and Dido? Dark Ray asks. Why don’t you give me something, something to keep?
Proceed with greatest delicacy, the text inside the new corpse says.
The region is rich, it is true, in relics; and coins of every sort show almost straight through the soil … Persian, Parthian, Sassanid medals are no less common …
Does it really matter where I was? I always wanted to get beyond, before then. Now that I’ve been around so long, am a ghoul, I don’t care much. I pursue the thought as a reflex.
When I was traumatized in my sex and ceased to mate with anyone. For you will understand severe breakage of a work or cultural entity results in myriad heads stolen, small masks that might be dug up only—no temples or grand monuments. And as I was repeatedly broken and possessed by scholar-archaeologists as well as starving natives and conquering soldiers. After the love loss. Those are inconclusive sentences, as you are an invader too, my coroner.
There was a fire somewhere, I remember. People jumped from a roof. My poems were up there in boxes; my poems were burned in the fire. Or am I seeing the future?
That isn’t about sex, Dark Ray says to my text within. Why does your thought wander so?
He needs words to claim. For what purpose but cultural: personal, general, both. What does he really want? A form of self-justification. Thus he breaks my form repeatedly. To understand it, have it, destroying everything but himself. Ah, sorry, I’ve accidentally broken your culture! Will there be an intact statue left anywhere?
My manuscripts are lost our language
forgotten
who’ll know the letters people fall from the burning
loft where my manuscripts
were stored
my poems are gone
This isn’t about sex! Dark Ray screams into the corpse. You said you were traumatized in your sex. Why don’t you stay on the subject?
The Ghoulish Club Member, the murderer, has entered and says, I put a dress on her. I bolted it to her skin, to go with the mask I made of her face this time.
It’s hard to say, about sex, my text continues. And, I am going further back. Many things the same.
The hands of new warriors are pushing up through the ground. They’re always growing somewhere.
Again, proceed with delicacy. I was precisely abandoned, but the death of a lover freezes the statue, that is, body. I know you thought the statue was a form, the shape of a work, that any one—man—might earn or own. The statue was also my remains as sex the flower states whose color is probably red; but we are seeing obscurely in this region of Dead which evidently shifts. Because I don’t want to tell any more. If someone’s gone, you stay at home.
It’s cold for me on this cooling board, and I don’t like the mask my body’s forced to wear.
An important production of small masks—which often bear a suspension ring—characterizes the Punic world, these works, seeming by their technique to be jewelry, have without doubt a magic value … and were considered to be talismans protective against evil forces.
He wants me to protect him. By being dead and carved by him, I’m a fetish against evil. Evil to him is his real annihilation. He’s afraid to die, as a ghoul can, finally, die. We don’t talk about that much in Dead.
Who shocked you so? Should say ‘what.’ What shocked you, love? Death shocked me, not mine though. And so have no more sexual visions, who knows if I miss them? busy to die again, be read.
Other women, torsos, broken in war. The conquerors pick them up, put them in sturdy sacks and leave… As far back as I can recall.
Dark Ray: I’m drawn to her in all her corpses but I don’t know what to do with her. Do I prefer her cut up in cultural fragments, or smiling from the Club Member’s incisions? My own incisions are gentler.
I can’t die without knowing what she knows, but I know she can’t really know anything. One must arrive at the point of actual death having evinced more scientific rigor than she’s capable of. In whatever one’s studies. Because. Though I’ll be dead. And I won’t know I’m dead. Will I? I’ve only died once or twice, but really to die … But Really to Die.
Ghoulish Club Member thinks: Does Judgment know about me? She must approve of my murders—Because they’re mine. Everyone knows that whatever’s really theirs is more than acceptable.
I:
I understand who I was: the dream of the foreigner.
Composed of parts of your show
I, I thinking this thought, is it mine? You have
to love, for it’s apparent you do. And even ghouls
hundreds of us somewhere like center of a city.
Or Motel to be a
lone in. Anywhere else one’s a martyr
to these ghoulish features of continuance. He was
hung up for meat, marked for carving, too.
‘It’s the only way to stay alive.’ She looked at the
butcher through her glasses demanding her husband.
Ghoul, said the butcher, don’t you know what he
was for? To serve the species; go on on your own
If you can keep your parts together, you’ll get something.
What will I get? I can’t tell you.
I don’t know if it’s “can’t” or “won’t.” Who the hell wants to serve this species?
I call to Medea most seriously to prove a more magical point. My point: that one must find a way to be her; and has not been allowed to for all of our history, thus the claptrap of the murders she’s supposed to have committed when the real murder goes on all night. Who is being murdered if not I?
I want to hear something. Something between the words. Something from somewhere else. Some truthful music.
Case a tear wood. I heard the sounds of that. ‘Tear’ sounds like ‘tier.’ Neither ‘case’ nor ‘wood’ need necessarily be spelled that way. Case a tear wood.
The Coroner stands in his bulk radiating his dark suit. Monomaniacal, cut and read, cut and read, until he knows everything as material standard decided by whoever says the evidence is mounting. So why is he so frightened? The evidence is never conclusive. I’m not there; I’ve escaped again leaving poetry.
Bring me her corpse he says.
I just did that the Club Member says.
I didn’t like the expression on her face, Dark Ray says, it was counter to the complexity in her … her … what are these bodies? Are they like errands she assumes? Anyone assumes?
You do it this time, the Club Member says. You murder her. I can’t do it again. I need a break from this bloodshed.
They keep saying that she loved too hard; it’s what they know how to say. (Did I love too hard?) In order to speak of a life. For example, to see a poet that way is easier than reading her poems, especially long ones (but when will I ever be dead enough for this to happen?) Leave me alone, no read me.
Medea: I can’t even remember her, Creusa. Did I meet her? But the children, procuring food for them each day, cleaning their baby bodies behind the foreign buildings on my own, for everyone suspects a skillful woman whose possessions are diminished for whatever reason.
To be me. That is to know the language, a golden inscription felt under the skin. It, the language, trembles, not fixed, in Dead. And no it’s not the names of kings or gods:
In the beginning there was inquiry: can change to enmity or enemy, your job, poet, is to hold it on inquiry long enough for a note of the choir—inquiry—to transfer the letters to sound which liquifies the statue/body so it moves. This is moving. This text is always changing. What alphabet doesn’t matter, which language. It’s mine.
I’m sitting, I, in the Palms Motel, attempting to read my palms, before I am murdered again. I believe Dark Ray may engender my demise this time. I seem to see into his mind, for he walks about fearfully. Does this move me? I wonder if anything does. There is an M in my palm but it stands for Medea not Me. Symmetrical, the same going forwards or backwards; some say the citizens of Corinth stoned her children in their grief for Creusa. More lies.
YOU MUST STOP MURDERING ME.
Medea: They implanted their words in me and implanted lies about me in everyone! I’ve stayed alive this long in order to see the story recanted, burned. As you do that for me—change my story, I teach you my arts. And we found for all ghouls a ghoulopolis, I suppose.
The Palms Motel is our first edifice. This tawdry place. Though it is a local landmark on account of its age. Built on a ramshackle base but never breaks down. Several palm trees outside. The neon still comes on, spells “Palms Motel” in green script.
Page: “… and finally a sort of death-wish denial that the key to proper understanding can ever be recovered”—key to the first texts within, beyond Carian, Luvian, Linear B. Or cuneiform. Or middle European signs. I’m not reading palms anymore.
You can of course read your own body, Medea says, better than any self-importantly, black-clad, doomed Coroner can. You read it whenever you move, or don’t, you statue! You look somewhat Etruscan now. Long nosed and smiley.
She continues, I am already showing you the interfaces between Dead and Day. I know a rigor that no one alive remembers; you know it without awareness of it. Our city full of echoes and broken things; our city stripped of its plaques of inscription and celebration; our city of all souls, interpreted as ghouls, is in each’s own body. Dido, can you hear me?
Who is Medea if she isn’t what I do now? But I keep acting like a statue.
Dammit I’m still trying to tell my fortune after millennia. Will I make it, to what? I want something else to happen—more than vindication for Medea. So I stare at my palm, which hasn’t changed since, 3000, 5000 BC. Why can’t the human change? Then I play poker on a hand-held machine: my version of the Casino. Playing poker by myself. Somewhere in between the palm and the poker I talk to Indians: do you care if I call you Indians?
We don’t bother about you, they say.
Your casino’s the loudest one I’ve been in, I say. Loud music that no one ever moves to.
We can’t bear the silence of the night, this era.
No one can stand it, but at least it isn’t my palm. If I stare at it it starts humming a backwards hum, that is, it tells me the trouble with my fortune is that it all lies in the past. Everything I did, but also everything I don’t know. What is a human, I mean ghoul—is the answer in the past or in the future?
What do you think, Indians?
You know we think we know—knew—but we were conquered. The human truth is eradicated, by coins in slots, blackjack, money games.
You have a school and a power plant.
In Day. But in Dead, the pieces are windblown and where whites drift along the water, everything we knew made insecure is present but partial; all the Ghouls trail coins they don’t care for. Coins are the archaeologists’ love, and the love of the short-sleeved, smoking old, pushing buttons in order to go on. No one cares about any of it except to go on.
Dark Ray is part Indian. That’s another piece or part. But Dido and Medea are part of his heritage burning. I am part of all of them. But I know I can only see right now. Look, it’s ugly!
The M in my palm, Medea leaps out shrieking:
The original Black Sea was really full of black water. It looked almost like fizzy cola when the waters rose. The ship I was in contained me. Well it had some sailors—ghouls now—and so I see ghouls aboard; there was no Jason (there I’ve said the name), because there is no Jason here now. This is to be precise and change reality. We were seeing what was there. Scattered bones ashore. BUT. You will notice the one consistency in all the stories of myself is that my end is deferred. The only truth of me. Now backwards into the future the ship goes …
Dark Ray: I must defend myself before she kills me. I believe she is killing—trying to kill—my modernity. Whatever she may say in the manner of pacifism. I think I need to kill her in the final way; this sort of pursuit of ‘truth’ goes nowhere. I want a life in Day, interaction with people not ghouls. That’s what the truth’s about: the human situation of grave crises in the background, everyone doing something in relation to blood flowing; the problem of money, money as problem (i.e. necessity); the atmosphere of the quest among contemporary gestures and figures. Doesn’t that sound like freedom? I could fall in love. But I don’t understand if it’s she I should kill or Medea.
I: I’m sitting in the Palms Motel. It is an enclave within myself. Outside the ghouls sing in famine, for famine penetrates into Dead. You can only sympathize with such urgency yourself— if you’re not hungry—when the borders between bodies are down. Why you (the reader) like to wake up, but I never wake up. The hungry, who are or will be the conquered (conqu
ered by both those who withhold food and those who feed them) have the dignity of starvation; their ghoul-souls are quiet in the extremity of their fatigue.
Will blood-sacs be given out tonight? But I don’t even know how I get mine. There are so many more ghouls than before, dying, dying again, for the conquerors.
The commanders regret life’s brevity for themselves their parent beard
they are the class thousand wars to whom only comes the elusive spring
came not to me magician though I broke the gods of their procuration
startled the common places ripped to bear up their navy or oral possession
they neither rule me nor sequester my bitterest regnum of itinerant fact
I arrived to make fold of auric tendancy in the atmospheric transverse
unturned to necessitate honesty’s pay while they cynically bade us
address a plaint to feigned arbitration assemble and expend in invention
primarily to please the fleet not the deep, oh fasten up smoothly
your accessible beauty its unnecessary and illimitable mode
you are the conquerors paying no one, being vantage’s own surly breath
being the simplest invective mantled in the letters of victorious lead.
Meeting of the Club. This is an anxious ancient group who love to seem knowledgeable. They are in Control of their Club, but they are afraid of having done to them what they do to others.
So I have to kill her next time, Dark Ray says. Ghoulish Club Member number one now refuses.
We need some new literature desperately, says Member. We haven’t had text in days.
You mean sext, says Member.
There is of course one woman Member who now says, Objtextion. In Dead, for in Dead, for in Dead whatever transpires is only almost funny, only almost makes sense.
They’re forgetting me for a minute, Dark Ray thinks. No one can forget about me even a minute. I’m thinking of trying to finalize her death, he announces in a louder voice.
Do we know how? says Member.
It isn’t possible in Dead, says Member.
Nothing can die in Dead, says Member, since one’s already dead. Except for when it finally just happens.
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 5
