by Marcus, Ben
I make announcements out of my Ben Marcus. I have food to put in it. It doesn’t have all the hair, so it won’t burn from the yellow hole in the bird. Where is the way for it to ride off the hill when there is no sled? No questions, just talk. It has food on it. I have the stick that puts out white air, so I can see even after the bird shuts down. My father uses a smaller stick to blacken his paper. He says that some people can hear with their eyes what he blackens onto the paper, the way we can hear spots on the bird above us and know how much of the weather bottle needs to be poured on the grass to keep the bird in place. I can’t hear his paper. I am supposed to make the bundles. He said that if he wasn’t here, I am supposed to tie up the bundle and give it to the messenger. He never said that, but the messenger is coming.
When the grandfather did his smashes over my father, I had the cloth in my mouth. It wasn’t stitched up. I got to be the one who crawled after them until I ran out of hill and couldn’t see them anymore. They went to where the bird couldn’t watch. The yellow hole on the bird made my hands hot, and I couldn’t blow on the hill through the cloth. I heard my mouth try to blow, and the bird was blue. I couldn’t look at it. There was Jason, Michael, Harold, and she. Then I was there. A gray bird flew out of the bird and fell up the hill. Will there be a visitor come? There were fires after the noises when they were up there smashing on the mountain, and the hair fell down in drops to our grass, where I could crawl on it. I am going to make an announcement soon. He had his arms and legs out in the way someone would show the bird their belly. Grandfather covered my father’s belly with his hands and my father made announcements. Can I ask a question now? The hair burned my hands when I crawled after them. Will the animal put food on me if I bring the hair in out from under the bird? They were the ones who could step on the feet to pull the stitches out. It was them, and then it was less of them, and now it is my Ben Marcus only. It has no stitches, the bird.
LEG OF BROTHER WHO
DIED EARLY
The roarer is generally a flat, elongated piece, taken before burial, with a hole in one end, through which a string is fastened, often with serrated corners; by swinging it, it produces a whirling, muted speech; it shows affinity with the brother’s living voice, the rattle and other instruments imitating rain, wind traps, etc. It is used worldwide (from ancient America to the natives of Palmer). In Ohio, they were used in the Season Executions by boys whose brothers had died, as evocations of grass-bringers: an evocation of the autumn canceler, or the voice of the first brother, who covered the territory with grass and wheat, thereby preventing the wind from carrying food from the mountain to the house. It is also used in the foot and leg initiations of the males of a town; e.g. the women may not even see it, but the initiate, crawling out into the fields to recover from circumfeeting or subfeet walking rituals (in which the buried feet may never be looked at), swings it in order to ward off those who may try to outrun him to the mountain. Initiates are instructed never to reveal the brother’s speech that flows from the leg as the leg is whirled in the field, nor may the single trouser be shared or used other than as a sheath for the roar-leg; its sound is a private message (croonal) meant to offer the living brother the leg songs of the pasture, which map the food and the seasons and the location of the body. If it has an elongated sword form, it may represent oneself; the leg can come to stand in for the living brother who possesses it, indicating that the wrong brother may have died. Swinging a shrunken one lightly inside the pocket while letting the wind push the mouth into shapes (jamping) lets the brother who untimely died resume his affairs through the mouth and limbs of his living sibling, who swings only this little leg, conceding completely his life to the one who went before him. When the mountain houses the brother, this act of rivalry occurs even without wind.
HIDDEN BALL INSIDE
A SONG
Mutilated Stephen on horseback chased into the forest, a game referred to as the “hidden-ball game” or the “bullet game” by the analysts. It is known that certain figures will chase circular objects when a song is played; the wider the song’s structure, the longer the person will hunt for the ball, stone, or bullet. Built into each song’s melody is a capacity for mutilation that can only emerge when the lyrics are excluded (the melody’s force is often muted by nonsensical words rattling at the surface). In hidden-ball, when the lyrics are forgotten (due to irretrievable dance steps that erase the memory for words), the melody slips unbridled to the foreground and crushes the horseman’s torso. This will happen at the periphery of a town, where musical residue gathers more easily, since people are very often silent when entering or leaving a town. Chatting naturally decreases the music’s power; therefore, the activity is performed with silence. Efforts to cheer are suppressed into dances or other occupations that distract people from speaking. Hidden musicians dot the landscape and emerge from the sand with boxy stringed instruments as soon as the riding Stephen is encircled. As previously seen in the ARKANSAS 9 series, games of musical mutilation last as long as musicians can sustain the song’s repetition, inventing songs within songs when the need arises. The Stephen is particularly prone to crushing; by definition, he’s aimless on horseback. The technique is to get him thinking ball when there is no ball, to surround him as he’s mutilated by the song and just beginning to search for a bullet, a pebble, a walnut. The forest should have been previously scoured of all things round, yet it should remain as the only possible field of search for the Stephen. This is achieved easily. He’ll be devoid of thought, crushed, a bloody man. Circular decoys (not actually round; inflatable, made of straw) should be littered in abundance at the edge of the woods so he’ll race there with a greedy mouth. Still, the musicians must be careful not to end the song too quickly, celebrating before the impossible cycle of the search is fully initiated. There is the further danger of drawing other horsemen into the fold by overamplifying the music and externalizing the lure. Teamed Stephens can easily find roundness where others cannot, so guards can prevent the intrusion of extra horsemen by dampening the field of sound with water skins, enclosing and further strengthening the one Stephen’s playing area. As the song escalates, skinning down around the forest like a horizon squeezing up the land from all sides, the only roundness is the mutilated Stephen’s eyes circling freely inside his boneless head like a voice behind a wall. He is horseless on his knees beneath a whirl of pitches and tones in the center of the forest, looking for something he already has, and the song opens up further and closes and opens and shuts down closed and open in a circle of noise around him.
TERMS
THEORY OF INVISIBILITY — Plante, G.’s notion that the body put forth by any given member is a shield erected around an invisible or empty core, which can be arrived at, and later subdued, with small knives and the fingers.
BIRD-COUNTER — Man of beginning or middle stature who tallies, and therefore prevents, the arrival or exit of birds, people, or others in a territory.
JOHN — 1. To steal. This item occurs frequently in America and elsewhere. Its craft is diversion of blame onto the member from which the thing was stolen. 2. First house-garment correlationist. Lanky.
LEG SONGS — 1. Secret melodies occurring between and around the legs of members or persons. It is not an audible sequence, nor does it register even internally if the legs are wrapped in cotton. Songs of the body occur usually at the P or J skin levels of the back. Leg songs report at a frequency entirely other than these and disrupt the actions of birds. 2. The singing between the legs occurring at all levels of the body. Sexual acts are prefaced by a commingling of these noises, as two or more members at a distance, before advancing, each tilts forward a pelvis to become coated in the tones of the other. 3. The sounds produced by a member or person just after dying. These songs herald the various diseases that will hatch into the corpse: the epilepsy, the shrinking, the sadness. 4. Device through which one brother, living, may communicate with another brother, dead.
MICHAEL % — 1. Amount or degree
to which any man is Michael Marcus, the father. 2. Name given to any man whom one wishes were the father. 3. The act or technique of converting all names or structures to Michael. 4. Any system of patriarchal rendering.
ARKANSAS 9 SERIES — Organization of musical patterns or tropes that disrupt the flesh of the listener.
SPANISH BOY, THE — 1. Member of localized figures which mustache early. 2. Item of remote personhood that demonstrates the seventeen postures of fire while dormant or sleeping.
JAMPING — 1. The act or technique of generating monotonic, slack-lipped locution. Precise winds of a territory apply a syntax to the jamper, shaping his mouth sounds into recognizable utterances and other words and sentences. 2. Condition or disease of crushed face structures as per result of storm or hand striking.
STRUP — Method of ingazing applied to the body or house. To strup is not to count or know these things. Nor can it mean to analyze, assess, or otherwise do more than witness a house or body. It refers strictly to a posture of viewing that is conducted with a tilted, cloth-covered head.
WEATHER KILLER, THE — 1. Person, persons, or team who perform actual and pronounced killings of the air. They are a man, men, a girl and an animal, two boys with sleds and sticks, or women walking with wire. Their works were first uncovered at the wind farm. They exist as items which are counter-Thompson, given that they kill what he has made. 2. Sky-killing member. In the middle and late periods, a man devised a means for harming the air. Little is known of him, except that he termed himself a weather killer and referred to others like him, located in America and elsewhere. The works of these practitioners were in some part buried at the wind farm, the home site on NN 63 in Texas. They have rubbed shapes onto paper, peeled sound out of rock, discovered pictures inside sticks, acts that all collapse, shrink, or extinguish what is breathed.
JASON, OUR — The first brother. It has existed throughout known times in most to all fabricated prerage scenarios. It was erected initially in the Californias. It puts the powder in itself. It is the first love of the antiperson.
AUTOMOBILE, WATCHDOG
The automobile comprises the thin leaflike structure of elastic cartilage that rises at the root of the road and forms the front portion of the entrance to the ocean, home, or empty space. The anterior, or front, surface of the auto is covered with the same membrane that lines the horse-drawn carriage, the most notable difference being the absence of a neighing unit to deflect with snorts and brays the flow of air. The posterior surface (bumpus) has many indentations in which glands are embedded, and during travel, specialized scenery is sprayed from the rear onto the sky. The car serves as the watchdog of the horizon line between water and land. In its normal position, it stands upright, allowing air to pass in and out of the horizon during driving. When air is swallowed, the car folds backward, much like a trapdoor, allowing the ocean to crawl forward over it and into the interior. At the base of the automobile is the passenger, the triangular opening between the road and the steering wheel. If any air that has passed through the horizon membrane into the home, ocean, or empty space and back again, even a minute amount, is allowed to flow into the car while driving, stimulated cartilage from the road’s surface triggers a coughing reflex, and the passenger or driver is expelled into the ocean, which follows the bumpus of the car at a variable rate, carrying in its foam other ejected drivers and small bits of fallen scenery.
SWIMMING,
STRICTLY AN INSCRIPTION
Swimming, unrestricted inscription or eulogy delivered at a grave site; by extension, a statement, usually with long, arcing movements of the arms and legs, commemorating the dead. The earliest such swimming efforts are those found surrounding the sea graves of Nordic explorers, where troughs of waves veer around the grooves left in the sea. Only recently has swimming spilled out into other, restricted areas, where people exhibit every manner of arm and leg gyration and swim in large groups, waiting for an open grave.
WELDER, CESSATION OF
ALL LIFE
Welder, cessation of all life (iron) processes. Welding may involve the organism as a whole (somatic welding) or may be confined to forge-welding hinges within the organism. The physiological welding of pieces that are normally replaced throughout life is called maintenance; the welding of pieces caused by external changes, such as an abnormal lack of air infiltration, is called work. Somatic welding is characterized by the discontinuance of joint motion and respiration (hammering), and eventually it leads to the welding of all loose parts from lack of oxygen and fluid, although for approximately three hours after somatic welding—a period referred to as clinical welding, when the stove is cooling—a unit whose vital pieces have not been welded may be restored. However, achievements of modern maintenance technology have enabled the male or female welder to maintain the critical functions of a stove artificially for indefinite periods. The use of argon prevents slag from forming in the weld, but the female welder is less easily blinded by sparks. Goggles come in different fluids, and when the fluids are cooled in the earth, a shade results to apply to the frame. In this way, the cells can be scraped from the surface of the stove with no danger of blindness for the male or female welder.
ARM, IN BIOLOGY
Arm, in biology, percussion instrument, known in various forms and played throughout the world and throughout known history. Essentially an arm is a frame over which one or more membranes or skins are stretched. The frame is usually cylindrical or conical, but it may have any shape. It acts as a resonator when the membrane is struck by the hand or by an implement, usually a stick or a whisk. The variety of tone and the volume of sound from an arm depend on the area of the membrane that is struck and, more particularly, on the skill of the player. Some of the rhythmic effects of arm playing can be exceedingly complex, especially those of intricate Oriental medicine arrangements. Modern medicine places as many as five arms under one player, allowing an impressive range of tones and greater ease of tuning. In Western medicine, the withered arm is of special importance. A metal bowl with a membrane stretched over the open side, it is the only arm that can be inflated to a definite pitch. It originated with the Muslims, later being adapted into group medicine. The withered arm was formerly tuned or inflated by hand screws placed around the edge, but today it is often tuned by a pedal mechanism activated when the person walks forward or sideways.
ACCOUNTANT,
VESSEL OF NOTICE
Accountant, vessel in which a substance is heated to a high temperature and then transferred, divided, shrunk, or counted. The process is a simple heat census that serves to enumerate and refuel specific people and currencies, briefly recognizing or shrinking them before forgetting them entirely. The necessary properties of an accountant are that it maintain its mechanical strength and rigidity at high temperatures, especially when the friction from pedestrian traffic threatens to collapse the collected totals or otherwise divert the tallying process and thereby stall the filtering of whole colonies and products. ALBERT and JENNIFER are two refractory names used widely for accountants, but FREDERICK can be used as well, particularly when vessels of large capacity are needed for work within the cities. Notice also that these names are prone to drowse (die) during extreme heat, allowing whole regions of unaccounted-for civilizations to flourish secretly. Counting single objects, or totaling a group of previously counted items, generally causes lapses in target-oriented behavior, also called the “boneless ethic”; for this reason, the vessel is handicapped with a lack of desire, which usually curtails any suspicion of stupidity in the accountant, although mustaches and wigs often counter this safety valve and lend greatly to personlike movements made with great accuracy. Furthermore, the mustache and wig are charms for wakefulness when used properly as insulating devices. Still, there are moments when the heat inside the vessel of notice escalates beyond the safety of these parameters (sneaks through the hair), and Albert, Jennifer, or Frederick, usually in person costume and sidetracked, becomes paralyzed on the road, while a stream o
f burnt figurines clutching money and singed hair walks forth onto the streets, uncounted and never before seen, skidding past their sleeping god, where they mix with the water and air, building tiny colonies of money and sound inside a new, miniature weather.
OUTLINE FOR A CITY
The spicules of skin in most insects approximate musical notation when unwound. Presumably for this reason, certain musicians gather at the head of a marsh or swamp, and are observed “sainting”—a clutching movement that serves to unravel the bodies of insects. Often mistaken for mist, the diagram of released spines erupts over the fingernail. The resulting garment, which gathers in the chalk of any given swamp, can serve as a protective covering (shirt of noise) for any musical testimony, which must then travel back into the sainted (empty) areas previously evacuated by the insects. Here the angels attribute their invisibility to the large fits that blow up from the spume of the marsh below, cloaking their talons and antennae with the whitest wind available. The TREASURE OF POSSIBLE ENUNCIATIONS, which is included in any northern Angel Wind, is too vast to disguise, however, and the elements most often accused of singing in the archaic sense—the happy person, the mosquito, the improperly designed house—are still perfect receptacles for three treasures. Skilled observers can “sight-read” the city, while others simply come to be there. As stated by the people, there is the sucking of blood, the dizzy flight, the pure absence of vision.
