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Let me tell you a longer story. You know it already, of course. A woman told me this story in a tarot-reader’s shop in San Francisco, as she shuffled her cards with hands like a hawthorne tree. And I think that she knew from the lines on my palm that I would meet you when I grew up, because now I know this story is about you.
Once there was a boy, and he was very bright, the most promising child in his village. His hair and his eyes and his skin were all gold, so that he looked like a young lion. His father was very proud of him, and smiled when he saw how strong and clever his son had grown. But he worried that since everything came so easily to this boy, that he would never be the kind of man to lead the clan. So one day when the boy was fourteen years old, lean and strong and skilled with his fishing-spear, his father took him away from the village, to the edge of the forest, and told him:
“My son, I am very proud of you. You have become the strongest and cleverest of your brothers. The women in our village look at you with willing eyes. But though you are as tall as I am, you are not yet a man, and I fear that you will always be clever, but never wise. So you will go into the forest for seven days, and you will not take your fishing-spear. You will not take your hunting-knife. You will not take your water-skin. You will go away from the clan and seek the manhood you have not discovered in your father’s house.”
The boy was afraid, for he had never been away from the village without his father or one of his red-haired brothers. But he knew that he should not show his father his fear, and turned silently to go into the forest. But his father called after him:
“Wait, my child. Like all warriors who go into the wild, you must have a geas put upon you, a thing forbidden. Listen carefully, for if you break your geas, you will never lead the clan. Whatever you catch to eat, whether it be rabbit-flesh, or mouse-haunch, or fish from the river, you must roast it over a fire, and not touch it, or eat of it, until it has been scorched black. This is the way of your geas. Come back to me with your belly full of this scorched flesh, and you will be a man, and not merely a clever boy.”
So the boy went into the forest, and he found it full of voices, the voices of trees, and streams, and the earth covered in dry leaves. For three days he could not catch a rabbit, or a mouse, or any fish, since he had not taken knife or spear. On the fourth day his belly ate at his spine, and he walked into the cold and racing river to catch fish the way he had seen the old men of his clan do to impress the boys, with their own hands and no spear. He walked into the river until it licked at his waist, and he shivered, peering into the swift water for a glimpse of silver fish.
Three times he saw a fat salmon, and three times he plunged his thin hands into the water and felt the slick animal escape. He began to cry in frustration, even though he knew it was not strong or clever to cry, and his father would be ashamed. Night was coming, and he was certain that he would never have to worry about eating foul-tasting scorched meat, because he would never be a man, because he could not catch anything.
As the shadows grew long over the water, he saw another fish, but this one was thin and small, hardly the length of his hand. Once again he pushed his hands into the icy river, and this time he felt the fish firm in his grip, and he drew it out with a whoop of triumph w
hich the oak trees heard with satisfaction. The boy made a fire to roast his victory, and soon the salmon was blistering away in the red-gold flames. The boy thought how proud his father would be, and how his broad-chested brothers would clap him on the shoulder and tease him over the size of his catch. The smell of the fish was rich and sweet, and it was beginning to blacken.
But the boy was a boy, and very hungry. He looked at the fish, which was not at all scorched yet, and with the eyes of hunger thought it to be quite black enough for him to have a little bite. He put his fingers into the fire to tear off a piece of fish, but the flames burned his thumb and forefinger, and he put them to his mouth to ease the pain.
And then the boy saw why he had been forbidden to do this. For some of the oil of the fish was on him, and when he tasted it he knew in a torrent all the things in the universe, and he understood the voices of the trees, and the river, and the earth covered with dry leaves. He knew the thoughts of his father and his mother and his red-haired brothers. He knew all the things that were and would be, and he knew that he could not now lead the clan.
So the boy went deeper into the forest, further than any of his clan had been. And he was mad for a long time, with these things scorching his mind. But one day the madness passed over him, and he was a pool of standing water with the moon on his back, and he stayed in the forest, finding his fate in the deep-within places.
And your father wept, for you never came again to the village.
Perhaps that salmon was like me, not a salmon, not at home in the fish-skin, a wanderer whose journey to the sea ended in your campfire. I journey to the sea now, that’s where all these forms take me, slowly, against my will which is not strong enough, to you who wait in the forest, on the long pier in seagullight, at the end of the gray and foggy streets of Southern California. Because all these places are the same place, and I know with the certainty of an earnest seeker that the locus of the Grailcastle is nowhere/ cannot be sought, unless one eats the salmon and his insides are lit up by it like a silver-rose lantern.
Last night I was a pen, and it was a sigh of movement. Motion, motion, linear and serene. My consciousness focused in the brass tip, fierce and sharp, devouring the parchment in swoops and whorls of black ink, diving like a seabird, in and out of the golden sea of paper, catching fat fish of verbs and participles in my metallic beak. And swept back, the rest of me flowed like a wave of light, into a long, creamy feather tipped in scarlet, I quivered and vibrated with the shivering motion of writing, illumination, conjugation, culmination of thought, spilled in a rush onto the expanse of page.
I danced with myself: tip, quill, ink, in waltzing time, Viennese in the extreme, the vanilla of silken feather as it crossed highways of finely wrought paper, crescendo, denouement, a box-step of being, tip yielding to the forward motion of statement. I yielded, yielded, to the waxy cold of the scholar’s hand that deftly drove my length, his skin made phosphorescent by moonlight singing in through the iron-crossed window, shifted into cobalt by the stained glass. We swam in blue, were washed in it, purified as though floating in the hand of a river-nymph. The scholar’s lashes fractured the light, casting long, sweeping shadows on the page, blue within black within blue, bars of darkness breaking the expanse of watery light, as though waves blowing forwards and back, whitecaps of my own quick steps through the lines.
It was relief. I did not have to create. The salve of his icy hands on my feather-spine, flowing over me in a blanket of snowy flesh, silencing my voice grown so hoarse with speaking, with screaming over the sea to be heard. He slid me through words, through the alpha and the theta, through the wide forest paths of chi, the violet shadows of omega. He made his letters carefully, small and delicate, dipping me into his little clay pot of ink which swirled around and into me in a rush of glistening darkness, like the Nile through the throat of a crocodile, glutted my mouth with black, with thick, with the absence of light.
It flowed in and out of me with equal ease, in inklight and moonlight, and I could let it because I did not initiate motion, because I was an instrument and not the voice, the ever-sounding voice that could not afford silence for a second, else the world would fail. I could release something nameless and accept the passage of liquid through me, and its pouring of self onto a valley of dry and rasping manuscript. The glyphs formed so beautifully, shimmering slightly before drying. The cuneiform magic of their arch and fall sang through me.
And yet how strange to be vertical, held upright like a heron poised on one leg, maintained in a tall line, the mast of a ship catching wind and expelling storm. How strange to feel inkblood draining out of me, all sensation focused downward as the vellum received my raven-throated exhalations. Horizontal is the direction of dreams, of the otherworld, of sharp-hoofed Time and the eventuality of death. Thus we lie on slabs and mounds of furs, on cots and grasses. We lie and gaze upwards into a sky-mirror, there to see ourselves become fantastic, become legend. Verticality denied me this, I could not cast upward to the sun. I was timeless in the hand of icicle-skin, without present, in motion so slidingly that pause by death or dream was inconceivable.
Is this what you feel, out beyond the breakers, beyond the desert and the stream? You do not move, but are in motion, shaking with it, sylphlike in the water-shadows and reeds? Your tentacles and umbilici snake out over the miles of earth and sand, coils of bodylight snatching at the air to find a remnant of me still gasping in the wind.
I want to shake you, as I have been shaken by you, to see the lake ripple behind your eyes and demand, demand, demand:
“Why are you drawing me?”
My voice is pathetic to my own ears, a whimpering, sheeting tears, child’s wet-nose:
“Why me?”
Why is my figure so circumnavigated in your mind, so realized and defined, drawn as surely as a an angel out of Raphael, shaded and colored by your palette alone? Why am I bound to you?
It isn’t worth anything, protestation. In these metamorphoses how rarely do I have pockets for a few dismal coins, but no lump of copper or silver would make a single cry of negation a thing of substance or meaning. I know it, I know it, I know why this road was built, why it goes forward and not back, what lies at its end.
I am peeled like a raw almond, bright green, down to the pure whiteness of fruit, so that you can take my skinless and shivering form into yourself and make me like you. Purity flows from your hand like a curling vine, and you will have me white or not at all. Purification, purification, scouring the sands of rivers dark and hushed from my arms, pulling the mosaic teeth of ritual crocodiles from my feet streaked with the black mud of the Delta. My body is restful and leaping and rippling like the lake that bore the sword, but it cannot yet birth such a thing.
I hate what you want to make me. You encourage my limbs, seduce them into rigidity, into dissolution, into the silver aurora of a blade, beguile the line of my lips into the twisted gold of a hilt. Or is it the stem of a Cup into which you would have my body form itself? My mouth open to the heavy sky in its silent howl to mold the agate and ivory bowl of the chalice? Are the very fingernails of my hands to comprise the milky jewels of its rim?
Yes, I am angry. I have floated like a barge of lashed birchwood on the fantasy of my Will, and you steal it from me. Every time you smile beneath the curtain of your briar-beard, every time your face goes benevolent and sorrowful my hatred rumbles like a sheet of tin. If I shrink into the corner of a cinnamon-scented café, if I bury my face in a chipped green cup so that the steam will encircle and hide me from you, you appear before me to ask in infinite gentleness if I want another.
If I recede behind a bookcase in the Library, examining the bindings, you materialize to tell me that silence is mandatory in such places. I cannot escape you and I will never forgive you that. Only in the nights, as I flee into shapes and lines not my own do I find respite from your compulsion and sympathy. You see in me some core of purity beneath all that which does not exist. You will allow me no humanity.
