One Decadent Life: Part Two
CHAPTER 31
Beast and Scarlet Woman
David woke up screaming. The nightmare had followed him, thousands of miles from the copping-fields of the Lower East Side.
Somewhere in the dereliction of Delancey Street, in absolute torment of body and mind, against his will he is moved to the center of a filthy plaza. He is crippled, damaged, in what his subconscious tells him was “a war.” His feet scumble in rubble and slime, repulsively indistinguishable, broken glass, offal…
Encircling the plaza is a solid wall of slum-tenements; the only way out through one of the buildings, which rise to bizarre, abnormal heights. Iron fire-escapes fret their blackened forms like a skeletonized vegetation — clutching, dead, and permanent.
In the plaza’s center thrusts up an Obelisk,* erected to some ancient species of human pride. It serves as a public urinal, its sleek marble sides gashed by bullet-fire, struck over with spray-painted scrawlings — tribute of the violent races, that persistently live on in the tenements’ cubicles.
How can they stand it? How do they go on?
Ribald jeering replies to his faltering moral compunction… increasing his weakling feeling of being tortured. In the hundreds of windows overlooking the plaza there is frenzied dancing, mass rut in fever-time, celebratory copulations. So life goes on, without any interest in his neurotic perseverations.
The temperature is excruciatingly hot… his dream-self is furious, wants to see blood, wants to kill those who glory in his destruction.
… he is being forced to climb the Obelisk… gazing up with loathing. The pediment is caked with feces, he must climb over the filth, he must rise above it!
The task is too revolting. But the instant he rejects this imperative, an earthquake hits… the asphalt of the plaza shudders, fissures crack open, and in a thunderous birthing the naked raw earth beneath the city sees light, breathes air for the first time in two centuries. Denuded of its green skin, buried under concrete, trampled by a million buildings, now erupts the earth, enraged.
The central fissure widens, deepens, David is magnetized to its edge. Within and far below he sees a faint misty spew. As from a sleeping fire. As he watches, the glow increases, with an intolerable hissing as of ten thousand snakes. In the reddening, brightening light, a black shape is forming, thickening, rising. It is a gigantic black Cat, snarling, afoam with impossible fury. Demon Beast, freed by the Cataclysm, it leaps at his face
He grapples for control as the cat grips and drags him, forcing him to the lip of the crevasse — seething in its triumph — together they tumble in
… into an ovoid abyss, a vaginal pit. Embedded in its sides are thousands of sarcophagi: the layered eons of the dead. Corpses of the ancestors, will they be re-animated by Catalcysm? He perceives the sarcophagi are just about to open.
But in the claws of the Cat, he is forced to descend further, where the crevasse is seen to be sheathed in metal. Huge plates are rivetted to the earth by iron bolts. That Humankind has managed to get to that depth, and imposed an industrial containment … sickens David’s heart with its sealed fatality. Cannot even massive Cataclysm destroy Man’s control? The Beast’s hot breath upon his neck he welcomes as a fate.
And at that moment his dreaming soul merges with his waking consciousness. Enrapt by a strange, fixated love, his eyes penetrate into the Beast’s eyes. Awe, and terror cleanse him… a deafening hissing sound, as of twenty thousand snakes, emanates from the mouth of the Cat. His spine snaps in half… he is about to be devoured… yet still, David fights.
The Abyss is a lens, and he but a speck of dust in its crazed aperture. All fantastic visions melt away, his waking mind clicks into focus and he knows —
The Cat is the Demon Heroin. And just like any god, it will not die.
Further they sink, David held by the claws of the Beast. Past the mechanistic levels, deeper still, where the corrugated sides are again of earth, anciently formed into ledges. Men, women and children are making their dwellings there. A blood-orange light infuses the walls, where swarms teeming, myriad life — eyeless bugs, vile reptiles, leprous flattened-out toads — and his New York friends.
Everyone, everything, friends, bugs, toads… are dancing to the racketing beat of the infernal, rumbling quake. It drums on ceaselessly, fed from above, charged by the tenement dances. David’s subconscious faces cosmic horror… more is coming to an end than the Anglo-Saxon white man’s world, squatting on Manhattan soil its mere two hundred years. He flinches from the faces, the bodies of his friends, the frenzied gyrations, the twitching, turning to the virulent beat. Why is Tere coating her bare ass with white lipstick? Why is Paula sucking a hundred cocks? With flat impassive gazes they jig on, with the bugs…
Can they not know, what kind of place this is? Where they, blase, keep on partying?
This recognition, that they know NOTHING is the climax of the nightmare. He can go on battling the Cat for eons; these people will not blink. Not does anyone pay the slightest attention as the fang of the Beast pierces his neck at the point of the atlas vertebrae …
David woke up screaming. Six days clean.
He had just cracked one eye open when the shattering yowl of a cat pierced his brain. The Cat, the Cat! He sat bolt upright and rushed to the window. He could still feel the dream-Cat’s fang in the back of his neck. The cry rose to a crescendo. Who is torturing it, where is it… whose cat is it?
Along the sandy path that went down to the beach he saw Eunice trundling… following her, darting in and out of the underbrush, was a strange black Cat. Even from that distance David could see it was abnormally large… he rubbed his eyes… was it a small panther? As it got up on its hind legs towards the dish Eunice held, it seemed nearly as tall as she.
In the faint dawn morning he watched the woman stroking the Beast and talking to it. He failed to see her looking his way, so intent, in utter terror was he upon The Cat.
The thing had shrieked right in his window! It wasn’t really a cat! His heart rate sped up, pounded in his temples; he was having trouble breathing.
I’m going to have to kill it.
He stalked back and forth, babbling, naked, talking to himself, incapable of two rational thoughts in sequence. His jerky strides were very like those he’d made, in the dream, trying to walk that derelict ‘Plaza.’
Where is that fucking ‘Plaza’ anyhow? There’s no such thing, past First Avenue. Allen Street is what it’s called, not Delancey… He felt a weird fondness for the old neighborhood wherein he had met his downfall.
He went on pacing, peering out the window… Eunice and The Cat had disappeared.
’The Center does not hold… the Center does not hold,” he vaguely quoted the W.B.Yeats poem.** He flushed hot, then went cold, cold-sweating, then hot… Detox was kicking in with a vengeance. His eyes glittered and he looked insane.
He dug the .45 pistol out from under the mattress. He went through the drill, taking out the ammunition, blowing into the barrel. He wondered when it had been last cleaned.
Can I actually kill a poor cat?
But it wasn’t a poor cat. it was The Heroin Demon.
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Outside her black window, lightning flashed within a range of towering cumuli — like aerie castles, whose white spires tapered towards the ‘plane flying over. The bright, sporadic revelations seemed to startle the castles awake. All throughout the flight, these oddly silent bolts of electricity had terrified the other passengers in the tin-can. But Angelique yawned as the ‘plane shuddered through another threatening rumble.
At the advanced age of thirty-five she was, like many moderns, constitutionally bereft of ideas of stability or permanence. But that had never required her to worship “reality” — only rendered her more recklessly pleased to dance upon the Eternal Abyss — metaphysical insecurity was almost an Ideal. That she might die in a ‘plane crash was accepted as normal.
In less than two hours, she would see David at the gate. Together they would walk, in the tropical night, down a sandy path to a beautiful mansion. He would be beside her, in the perfumed darkness… quickly she arrested this reverie. Certainly her obsession was receiving intense gratification, but she had to remind herself: her own pleasure was not the point of this ‘rescue-mission.’
Only that morning, a five AM call from David had demanded her presence. He had flatly stated “I am going to kill myself, if you don’t come down here.” He had not provided any other relevant details; only where he was — as Rene had told her, the Causewell compound in Ste. Barthelemy — and the ‘plane she should board. A ticket was provided, delivered by a lackey of the painter Branford Causewell. So it was true: David was sick, getting off drugs. He hadn’t filled her in… just that strange insistence, an emotional appeal that he knew she could not ignore.
Angelique marvelled again at her santero’s far-reaching powers. Hadn’t Orestes called David “a bound spirit?” And said “maybe he kill himself?” There was no doubt in her mind that their magic had precipitated this crisis. Their recent inquiry had not only uncovered his anguish, but it had reached the man himself. Evoking the best part of his soul, he was now enabled to drop all facades, permitted to get as sick and crazy as he required.
The lady did not often engage in a relationship unless there were elements, in the other, for a potential ‘usage’ in her literary endeavours. She did not bother much to respond to another’s living, breathing self unless their psychology happened to be consistent with something she was working on. Thus David’s transparency with her character Salvatore was her ‘rational’ excuse for taking the trip, besides the Orestes imperative,
But that demonic priest would never have anything like an ‘anxiety attack.” Nor could Salvatore ever get addicted to anything. He was too much of a freak for total control.
So may we here observe her interior life is something of an arid shambles. Yet it is no critique if we note: the man’s desperation had found in her an echo. We understand she is flying to him because she is absolutely, madly in love… she woke from a short doze to see a little island’s shoreline all lit up, a phosphorescent serpent in the void. Again thunder trembled the ‘plane, as above its descent a white arrow of lightning leapt from cloud to cloud, piercing their soft hearts.
An extra thrill was hers as well: knowing she was going to miss her book party, and with a fairly good excuse. She’d called Rene on her way out the door — he was staying at the Causewell’s, over the holidays — and he’d told her, “I’ll go, I’ll go! I’ll take care of everything.” She gleefully imagined the chaos that implied.
When she disembarked at the Ste. Maarten terminal, she was annoyed to learn she had to pick up her own bags, and drag them to the dinky little desk that served the shuttles to St. Bart’s. There were no porters about, it was after 11 PM, and she had to shove her three heavy suitcases in relays — walk ahead with two, run back for the one.
“May I be of assistance?”
A man who appeared to be something of a perfect gentleman was standing before her. Elegantly attired in natural linen, a white silk cravat at his throat, on his fingers several rings with gems… just as she was confounded to imagine this Dandy lugging luggage, he made a quarter turn, airily waved a hand, and a genuine liveried servant approached and collected Angelique’s pink leather suitcases.
Angelique was made jealous by the livery: a semi-militaristic frock-coat, in sand colour, with gold buttons, piped in white.
“You’re on to San’ Barthelemy, I take it,” and Angelique assented, nearly compelled to curtsey. “I apologize for our service here, Madame. There’s never a porter for this flight, odd is it not. But people must be in bed by 10 o’clock!” She was intrigued further by his accent, which seemed an admixture of French, Italian and Oxford English. “Charmed to be of assistance,” and he offered his arm, which she took, “Madame —?”
“Mademoiselle, Angelique DeMars.”
“De Mars? You are French? I am Luc, French, but not of France, no, I have lived on the islands all my life. The Baron Luc de Montaigne-DuPlessis, a votre service.”
Angelique suppressed her exclamation as to his baronetcy, feeling that would be fatuously American… She admired his light green eyes, as if faded by Caribbean light, his olive tan, his longish, honey-brown hair waving artfully back from a prominent smooth brow. She guessed him to be her age, or a little older.
He conducted her to the appropriate desk, and with a gentle “May I?” plucked her ticket from out of the top of her handbag. Angelique briefly panicked, wondering if it was a scam… the Baron-and-servant schtick… a way to swipe her ticket and leave her stranded. But no, the tedious details of the new embarkation were managed by the servant, called Beauregarde. She watched carefully as the agent wrote out her boarding pass, and she took it in hand herself.
“So yes, we are all taken care of. May I offer you a refreshment? We have forty-five minutes at least, if they should be on time.” Without her sayso he began to lead her towards a gift shop, which was closed; it did not appear to Angelique that there was anything approaching a bar or cafe. She came to a halt.
“Excuse me M’sieur, but I think not.”
He paused in his suavity, looked where she was looking, and waved that airy hand towards an adjacent door. “But of course, Mademoiselle… I am most importunate. Forgive me. You do not know me… you would not know, that through that door is a private lounge, where only I and a few others may enter. But please, “ and he settled her on a rickety bench, “I will send Beauregarde to fetch. You can stay out here, in the open, where you are safe..”
“I would hope I am always safe, when accompanied by you.”
“And so you would be. If you would give me the chance to be of service, to you?”
Angelique heard the sonorous peal, that familiar tonality, of the slave speaking to his Mistress. She relaxed, thinking perhaps she would be fortunate, and find out that this elegant personality was… a submissive.
They exchanged a few more bits of information. She told him it was her first time to the island, and that she was being met by a friend. “We are staying in a house owned by the painter Causewell.” If the Baron knew the residence he did not say so. He admired her strange, apricot colored hair, and her tight, dark red velvet dress, revealed when she shed her black New York overcoat. Her figure was exceptional… she had a turn of the head, dainty hands, that bespoke some aristocratic blood. But he so often found Americans to be flawed, even when beautiful. Though he didn’t yet perceive any flaws in her….
Intrigued, he went further, and mentioned he had ‘a boat.’ — Angelique imagined, correctly, that it was one of the priceless yachts docked in the fabled St. Gustavia port. He let her know that he had just been in New York, shopping… and that he was “back home,” happy to be attending a friend’s wedding anniversary party.
“This friend who is meeting you — a man?”
Angelique laughed, “Something like that. A new friend.”
“I see. And might I invite you, you and your friend, to some gathering where you might meet some very interesting, indeed, tres propre denizens of our fair isle?”
“I think… it might be possible.”
“D’accord. My card, Mademoiselle DeMars,” and he proferred a thin cardboard, embossed with gold seals. “La soiree, c’est tomorrow night, please call, you will be given the address and directions. Or we fetch you. However you wish.”
They were called to the ‘plane, and Angelique was pleased to see he did not attempt to sit next to her. Evidently very well bred, understanding his own rank and place, he had flirted gently, then left her to consider his invitation. Sitting in the ‘plane, getting further acquainted, would have brought them too vulgarly close, perhaps aroused suspicions in whomever was picking up her, or him for that matter. Not that a gentleman with a liveried servant needed to be met.
Indeed, once off the ‘plane, the Baron Luc had only to take a few strides to enter a silver Rolls, parked right on the tarmac. The chauffeur exited and stuffed the trunk of the car with several shopping bags and glossy boxes from New York luxury stores. He was also garbed n the sand-colored livery. After making certain his master was well settled in, Beauregarde got into the front passenger seat.
Again, no porters… though Beauregarde had settled her bags in a convenient location outside the hangar. When no-one had appeared to greet her, the Baron had inquired if she needed them to wait for her. “I’m sure it’s quite safe, to wait here, I mean,” she had demurred.
“As you wish, Mademoiselle. If there should be some untoward event. please do not hesitate to call me immediately. We have a telephone in the car…” and with a wave, which she imagined was his signature, the big Rolls pulled out and disappeared into the night.
Now fifteen minutes later, Angelique was nervously perusing the deserted parking lot, and a plaza beyond. She did not see anything like a phone booth anywhere, so she might call the Baron, or David, or anyone… But how could David have forgotten? He’d made the plans, knew the arrival time. She noted again a single taxicab parked up the block… not that she knew where she was going! But after a few more minutes, she set off across the lot… thinking it was a small enough island, perhaps she could make the driver understand where the Causewell’s was.
As she approached the cab, it honked once and flashed its lights. She quickened her step, for in the backseat she saw a familiar figure, and the red glowing end of a cigarette being drawn. David! Why had he let he stand out there, alone? Had he enjoying himself, watching her get nervous? Such a sadist. But she didn’t care, she was laughing, the driver was sauntering up and she pointed out her luggage, and she climbed in next to her friend, and gave him a kiss which landed somewhere near his nose, exclaiming:
“Oh my Goddesses! The city was dreadful, encased in black ice. Your call was a godsend!” For the moment she might pretend she’d come down for her own pleasure, “And it was SLEETING when we took off! I was astonished we did. All the way down, lightning, thunder, very hair-raising!”
David was watching his driver struggling, “So! Three bags. You’re moving in, I take it?”
“Well I never travel light, and anyhow, I wasn’t sure how long… or what we’d be doing. I needed evening gowns, this is St. Bart’s isn’t it? Jet setter’s paradise? And perhaps I thought I’d go someplace else, after this.”
“Someplace else? Like where?”
“Well it’s Christmas, you know. I don’t know. Island hopping? By the way, I just met a very fascinating man… we’re invited to a party tomorrow night. I think on his yacht.”
“Really? Aren’t you expeditious.”
David was somewhat terrified to see her. But in the relief of having a friend’s actual presence, he somewhat forgot she was there only for him. And he was not used to women like her. He knew the rich, who drifted, and the neurotic who went nowhere. Angelique had actually gotten on a ‘plane, at his request, and had arrived within twenty-four hours. Just because he’d asked her to.
Angelique was trying not to stare at her friend. He was wearing sunglasses and appeared to have been dipped in wax.
The driver sped them down a broad dusty highway between sparse stands of palms. Along the sides of the road, facing the ocean, were tall hotels. A couple were beset with neon, and blocked the view of the sea.
“So Rene had just told me you were down here… and that Tere was with you. We were going to call you, the other night…”
“Oh so there’s gossip already? I’ve only been here a week.”
“Rene’s staying with the Causewells… your hosts. So naturally, they know what’s going on.”
“Tere got a modelling job in London, she had to leave right away.” David’s tone was abrupt, brooking no further inquiries.
The taxi suddenly veered up a sandy side-street, and stopped before a small, drab cinder-block structure. Every palm around it was dead… apparently killed by a lurid green neon flickering LIQUORS … VINS … LIQUORS … VINS. The driver disappeared therein for rather a long time. All this was quite unlike Angelique’s fantasy.
Uneasy with the silence, Angelique tried, “What’s wrong with the trees?” Her friend mouthed, with lugubrious pleasure: “Disease.”
Their cabby at last emerged with grocery bag clinking, smiling broadly and yes, staggering. David was out of the car, rifling the bag as the man attempted to locate his keys…
“Wrong vodka, WRONG! I said, you got the WRONG VODKA! Russian! Stoli, tell them STOLI. RUSSIAN VODKA, go on! I gave you enough money!”
The man rendered David a baleful stare, as he tried to maintain a ‘macho’ stance on two wide-planted shaky feet.
“GO BACK IN… and get the ROSE’S LIME JUICE. You FORGOT the ROSES LIME JUICE!”
Angelique was cringing, unnerved by the two extreme attitudes: David crazily tyrannical, and the driver’s verging on dangerous. She compared the last such duo she’d witnessed, the gentleness of the Baron, with his seamless servant… well, there was really no comparison. Though obviously — David did not know how to manage ‘help.’
David threw himself back into the taxi, and Angelique tried to appease him, “David, what is wrong…”
“Nothing a big tip wouldn’t solve!” he snapped.
“No, I mean… you seem overly…”
David didn’t answer. The last thing he wanted to do was ‘get into it’ with her, now, in the taxi, when he needed a drink. They completed their journey at ninety miles per hour, the driver talking loudly to himself in the island patois… Amidst this angry volley, Angelique arrived, and was further insulted when her luggage was dumped on the ground, the man speeding off without being paid.
“Oh he’ll be back, when he’s drunker, with a machete, demanding his bloody dollar.”
This violent elitism disgusted her. Racism was not a form of ‘superiority’ she ever exercised. Yes… it was all quite unlike her fantasy. Her thoughts circled back to the Baron…
But then she came into the great house’s two-storey living room, and saw the paintings above her, ten feet tall, lozenge-shaped, hovering off the mezzanine on their golden wires like, she thought, Angels…! From the central cores of black, Giacometti-like figures, the paintings emanated their own light. They were alive, she understood them as living entities, and exclaimed, “They belong in a pagan temple!”
“Well I imagine this is as close to a temple as they’ll ever get. The Causewell Temple to Modern Art. Built on some kind of human sacrifice…”
“What do you mean?”
David giggled nastily, “Well… Bram DOES have to sleep with Marilyn!”
“David!”
It was flattering to be worshipped so, but David was suddenly exhausted. The child was naive, and he didn’t have the strength to bring her up to speed. But Angelique was relentless:
“How can you ever dare say, that you will ‘never paint again?’ Can’t you look at yourself? Renew your faith in yourself?”
“I’m afraid it’s all a bit more complex than that. There’s alot more to it, than just ‘believing in myself.’ I mean every time I look at them,” he was gasping for breath — “I want to burn the house down!”
The fiery corollae about the two figures entranced her… indigo, bronze, orange, silver-gray and vermillion, they burst upon the eye as an attack and a challenge. Then, she recognized them. They were precisely the figures she had seen — the creatures in bondage — evoked by the skrying with Orestes.
She followed him into the kitchen and watched as he mixed up a pitcher of dacquiris. She accepted one, took a sip, then took a deep breath:
“So, why don’t you tell me now…” She watched as his face changed from that arrogant rigidity, to a fearfulness, then flattened to a haunted, paranoid gleaming.
It made her want to go to him, hold him. But that was of course unthinkable.
She was studying him so earnestly he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Well, darling… first of all, thank you for coming. Let’s go sit on the deck…”
They passed through the ‘temple’ area, and she thought to say, “You know David just the other day I saw those figures,” David continued to the veranda, and she went on, “My shaman, Orestes, showed them to me, as belonging to you.”
“Your shaman?” He snickered. She felt a door closing… They took their seats, and gazed out to the ocean. A very thin sliver of a moon, what Tennessee Williams calls “a little silver slipper of a moon” was sinking. A faint glow from Porte Gustavia showed that night-life was in full swing…but the jungle protected them.
Angelique decided it might be best to just Keep Silent; since he was going to play cat-and-mouse, she would affirm herself as a cat.
After he had polished off one cocktail, and was into another, “I do apologize,” he murmured, though it came out rather oily and sarcastic. “I have been having a very rough time of it.. Not up to any mental gyrations — those intellectual gymnastics you so love. No, no metaphysical probings tonight, dear Scarlet. I’ll fill you in tomorrow.”
“Very well, David. perhaps I should just leave you be. I’m rather tired myself, after all the upset today.”
“Of course. You are a real friend. But now that is going to be put to the test.”
“Fine with me. I love a challenge.”
“My best Work only oppresses me now. I’ve been… bad. Very bad. To myself. To all my friends. But reformation…” she could hear him gritting his teeth, “reformation is not really my style.”
The effort to control her tender attentions drove her mind into a more rapid, as it were ‘higher’ gear… made her suddenly painfully receptive, yet at the same time, detached. She saw how saturated his entire being was with self-hatred, with the spirit of heroin, and then — in one excruciating instant — she recognized an absolute psychic destruction. That he was, as Orestes had said, possibly beyond redemption.
David was suddenly staring at her, as from the bottom of some sea. The flushed, pretty face, so full of care. The infatuated eyes, and he understood he could use her. Not in any vulgar manner — but that she might serve as a living archive for him. Anything he told her — whatever they talked about — would never be lost. In her was a hiding-place for him. Through her, he would never be forgotten.
Suddenly he could smile at her, and Angelique, his mirror, was cheered.
“Poor Beast,” she lightly caressed him, and went with her glass to freshen her drink, “You are so like that Rough Beast in the desert wilderness,” and she quoted:
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
Surely some revelation is at hand!” **
“I think I was just thinking of that same poem, last night… “The Centre does not hold”
“The inconsolable center.”
“I don’t deserve to be consoled. In fact I think this is the time… my time… to suffer all the punishments.”
“But only if the punishment fits the crime. And the crime is —?”
“You know what it is.”
“Punishment is only another type of Fate. Weather it, cover its bare bones with a romantic Ideal, if you will. Only — take it. Take it now, and grow old in peace.”
“Please ! I have no intention of growing old — peaceably, or otherwise.” He accepted a renewal of his cocktail, then excused himself, “I have not gotten more than a few hours’ sleep, since I got here. Perhaps with you here, though, I shall.”
He gave her a brief kiss on the forehead goodnight. She twisted her mouth at his retreat, the irony of the compliment. So, she might make him sleepy. How nice for her.
Left to herself, she strolled up and down the veranda. She felt a sudden impulse to walk through the garden, but hearing something rustling, she decided not… a dark figure like a ferret, or a cat, rushed through the shrubbery. The stars shed a pallid, uneasy glow. The jungle seemed frozen in an uncanny silence, though the repeating hush of the sea filtered through, stroking her jangled nerves.
Her mind still ragged on David’s condition. Underneath the addiction, which was apparently in some slight abeyance now — what was it that caused him such pain? That had led to the heroin? Was it for her, for anyone to ever know?
Her white hands, pale face, the pale pinkish hair seemed disembodied, hovering in the black air. The blood-red gown she wore congealed darkly into the night. Within her soul, an exaltation was growing; a joy, that rose to her throat, as she looked back into the house and saw the Ikons gleaming. The cat, or whatever it was, gave a low growl, as if of approval, as a wisp of Orestes’ song broke from her:
Quando La Practicando! ***
her voice trailing out into the perfumed void around her.
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Footnotes
*Obelisk… being a symbol was believed in Egyptian times to actually contain the god to whom it was dedicated. Often this was Ra, the Sun God. David’s Obelisk is apparently uninhabited. Their shape manifests the idea that it is a petrified ray of the Sun, beloved of Ra.
** From William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
*** “Que linda es, o mano mio, que linda is,
Quando La Practicando:” How beautiful it is, my hands, how beautiful
when you practice/Work…” A paean to Magickal Workings.
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COPYRIGHT Held and ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
by
TERENCE SELLERS 1985-2015
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