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Welcome back to DC’s Writers Workshop. This is the thirteenth in a series of days on the blog where writers who are part of the blog’s community present work-in-progress in search of the opinions, responses, advice, and critiques of both readers who don’t normally post comments here and local inhabitants of this place. I ask everyone to please read these works with the same attention you give the normal brand of posts here and respond in some way in the comments section below. Obviously, the closer your attention and the more you’re able and willing to say to the writer the better. But any kind of related comment is welcome, even a simple sentence or two indicating you read the piece of writing and felt something or other about it would be helpful. The only guideline I’m going to give out regarding comments is that any response, whether lengthy or brief, praise filled or critical or anywhere inbetween, should be presented in a spirit of helping the writer in question. I’ll be responding to the work too in the Comments section towards the end of the weekend. So, I guess all of that is probably clear. Giving support to the artists of different kinds who read and post on the blog has always been a very important aspect of this project, and this workshop series represents an opportunity to make that aspect more formal and explicit. This weekend’s workshop features a short fiction work by the writer and d.l. Hyrule Dungeon. He asks for any thoughts, support, or criticism you can give him. I thank him greatly for entrusting his work to us, and I thank you all in advance for your kind participation. — D.C.
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THE GRAVAMINA
Nothing to approach at first. Nothing here to guide, to trail behind or to follow. An assembly of pilgrims gnaws your boots. You dare not look down, in a hallway you awake to between remittent blackouts. A hallway to which light of a natural source finds no access, but whose arches glow endogenously. Lucky are you who have boots on your feet as you traverse the intestine that rounds the cloister. Lucky are you who have not had cut them from the rigid feet of a fellow adventurer, if adventuring is what this is.
The arcade turns at such an angle that you cannot sight what will be met in a mere moment. The rats around your ankles thicken into streams that run ahead a sound of dragging steps, of bundled spears jostled. The tip of a broadsword dragged through the grooves between stones. Forward, ever rounding. Anything that gives itself to sight and to appearing is also immanent. There is no distance. A skeleton glows endogenously, with cuirassed chest at rest against the glowing wall. It lifts its sword speculatively like a mallet above its head only to crumble under its dreamt defiance of you. Now you posses a broadsword and a cuirass.
Nothing here but darkness and the infrequent presence of skeletons which neither attack nor ignore, but who if approached do lunge without ambition, and if you watch them long enough the toppled bones attempt to regain footing, and if you are truly patient you will see them rise up. Watch their solemn backsides flail into the darkness.
Possibilities of windows emerge as webs of blind tracery, igniting the well-humored deceit of truly false windows and falsely true light. If those are panels of filth caked glass recessed behind the motif of the stone rose, what atmosphere, bright or dim, could drip if a rag could rub their surface?
Such is the angle, odd, relentless, suspiciously circular, and unlike the expected form of the more common quadrangle. Skeletons are toppled with the smallest effort. The ones in peasant’s rags slump as if to catch their breaths or organize discordant thoughts. The others, cuirassed or draped in the standard of the cross, gather themselves for uncoordinated lunges, trip over their own feet and fall in heaps, while in the air a whispered warning travels: beware a knight should find ye.
At its length the arcade terminates at a series of graduating ledges, too generous in width to be called steps, below an oak door that one could crawl up to, and on the frame of which a tiny blue goblin sits glowing like an impish lamp, legs dangling, boots tapping out the beats of a limerick. “Have you a flame?” it asks, “mine’s goon in the draft.” He offers a pipe in the right hand, hiding from view the left hand as it lifts from across its knees the goblin’s forked tool. If you are sluggish, acta est fabula. If you are quick, the goblin’s escape reveals a shadowed port.
“Beware a greater beast than I should find ye,” he taunts departing.
The port accesses a cloister unlike any other; a vault of inscrutable height secures the chamber against the sky, and though a blade of grass or audacious vines break through it, the lawn has long been deposed in favor of a floor mosaic. A plait of four intertwined stands frames the mosaic’s interior; a design of concentric circles, each one a plait alternating in increasing and decreasing intricacy: a single twisted weave conjoins and disentangles from a two way strand; two separate two way strands converge briefly into a four way pattern before disjoining again. A leaf and vine motif borders the elongated bodies of arched stags, hares, and hunting dogs in chase. Through open mouths the animals admit colorful tongues of flame that resolve in simple knots.
If followed, the exuberant four-way plait leads to the northernmost reach of the cloister, where you confront a door that does not open and on which an enameled plaque announces MERCY. Followed further, the plait leads to an equally intransigent door marked REFECTORY. This one lies directly across from the port access. Perpendicular to that line, across from MERCY, a southernmost door is the door to PARADISE, and it too will not be budged. Above this door a crescent moon shines its silver light from a ceiling so hidden and so high that it convincingly vanishes in the presence of the rind, opening the cloister to an illusory starless night. An iron shaft hangs suspended from the moon, which is in fact the gap between a circular vent and its coverlid.
A hand grip fashioned out of wood hangs as low as your chest. Above it a gearwheel’s diamond inlet awaits a hand crank. Where could it be? The key to resplendence. Opening the vent would be like opening your eyes after a life of bandaged vision.
Between PARADISE and MERCY a hall of mirrors has for an unknown purpose been erected, comprised of thirty identically proportioned sheets of glass, carefully angled to face each other almost directly, and mounted on modified banner stands of cruciform footing. The uninviting corridor, set evenly between the two extremities of the cloister, is alight with the foggy regress of the false moon’s tender light, captured among rows of reflective faces, and concentrated through a concave glass onto a single point on the door of PARADISE. An eye carved in rough relief surrounds this tiny glob of light, and the light itself, but for a slight misalignment, almost disappears entirely into the darkness of the pupil, which is a recess into the very door.
Across the room the door of MERCY is adorned with an identical carving, and an identically recessed pupil.
At the center of the cloister, where the fifteenth mirrors have been set face to face, lies the mosaic’s central ornament: the black wheel with its twelve radiant spokes. Or, to see it another way, it is the black sun issuing twelve defiant rays. A red square rests on the onyx circle, its four corners holding perfectly the lineament of the sun’s circumference. A folded note written on red velum; its message in black ink is addressed anonymously to Champion.
Champion,
Have you heard the bones speak? Their voices are intolerable, yet they say more than you suspect. They came here once to right the universe. Some sought to rescue a Madonna. Others came to drink her blood. Let the light of mercy guide your way with them. But beware, these grounds multiply violence. The hated will hasten to find ye. Evil returns evil.
Tumbled down the arcade by gales of wind spun by a phantom bat’s wing, your head rattles. Your sword is lost somewhere behind. You lie on your back and watch skull glide on feathered wings overhead. Spiraling in mid-transit, the skull sheds a sparkling dust over your eyes. You rub them, stumble half blind through the arcade. It still turns ahead of you at a cruel angle, hiding the future from your sight, seeming to narrow in dimension now as it had not before, as footfalls converge in directionless echoes. You force back your eyelids. A lone-legged skeleton uses its sorry broken spear as a cane with which it cannot truly right itself. It brandishes the tip of the half-spear as it hops past you on its lone foot, which wears a lone peasant’s boot. Its peasant’s rags are fragrant, surprisingly delicious, herbed and spiced like fine cuisine. You detect rosemary, caraway and mustard. Hooked by its scent, you follow a step behind, listening to its whispered gibberish, until single words have grown audible and fragments of queer nonsense catch your ear, “scary candle,” “poisonous worm,” half sentences teased out of murky prattle. Whole sentences to follow. “The noble’s only God is pride.” “Heia o-ho.” “On the castle roof let the red cock crow.”
You are patient. The skull has turned face, its jaw shivers, presses black corks against your neck; expulsive emptiness of toothless sockets; quickens your heart with a voice suddenly speaking more than gibberish.
“A bleeding king took refuge here, locked himself away with his knights, his princess and pride. We are four hundred terrifying men, to the last prepared to die. In pursuit of such prizes, after all, the gift of death is also ours to bestow. The captain rallies us with mad cries, but in my heart the king is kind. It was a long time ago…wasn’t it? He would meet our terms when the heads of crooked bailiffs and tax collectors who abuse us were removed, I am sure of it. So sure that I compose a personal complaint and sneak it with his Ritter through the abbey’s gate. My claim the we rustici have borne the burden of keeping his Iscariots fed, tunes to a high pitch the tenor of the king’s cruel irony, for I am told to rejoice; my letter has made its way to the king’s very hands, and the king has decided that I should sustain only the king’s monumental metabolism. In the refectory which has become his lordship’s private hall I was sat down at the table. The room is empty but for the thug who clubbed me on the head. I awake to see the king tearing with his teeth strips of flesh from an object of perishable meat that I have no reason to believe has ever been appended to me, in terrible pain, as if trampled by horses. The king offers his own wine, which I admit is splendid, says I can have my fill for as long as my disappearing body will sustain a presence at the table. He laughs, describing how he’ll soon spoon-feed me duck soup once my arms are cut off, but infection from the first amputation has left me delirious, feverish and unfit for my lordship’s company. Death is absolution from the labor which has occupied nearly all of my life, yes, I die knowing that the king has ingested the hatred I had reserved for his court, that my blood is his poison, my bones lodged in his throat, that hatred cannot sustain the king but will burn and ulcerate his lordship…the scar spiraling like a fat worm with a taste for health…ah…my name is Fedor and…I fear I’ve lost my other boot. Where could it be? Where? Where?”
A winged skull bashes through the REFECTORY door.
You hurry to the cloister, avoiding yet another leaping goblin in the arcade, reach through the hole the skull has made and turn the lock. In this modest dining hall a full complement of crockery awaits a final service. A blood stained Bundschuh lies discarded beneath the table’s lengthy slab of stone. You drop down, pick up the boot, kneeling as if before the noble king who took his meals here, wondering if he perished here as well, speared by a fleshless peon. At its two extremities the hall opens on a kitchen and on quarters.
In the kitchen an evil butcher splits a head of rotten lettuce and evaporates. An ensemble of blackened herring, fallen dead over its score and instruments, projects a sustained and sour note; a pile of their eyeballs stares out, in all a compound eye. Dunes of pepper spread across the butcher’s slab where rigid hares display half eaten guts beside stale bread soaked in vinegar. A feast continues here, for someone whom this unwholesome fare does not sicken, whom the redolent air does not nauseate.
A painting layered with dust and grime rests on the stove. There are no markings on the wall to suggest it has hung here, nor are there any in the refectory. The scene is of a celebration of one of those festivals which happen in this region at the end of April, when people will stand on a hill under animal pelts blowing horns to keep foxes and wolves from ravaging their livestock. Below them peasants have gathered for a dance that joins them all in circles that are at once merry and macabre.
Under the painted canvass a folded note has been slipped into the frame. You yank out the red velum and read:
Champion,
How could they have known that this would be prohibited? Something so useful denounced by men of God and banished as a kind of superstition, when even royals act according to their own set of signs and portents. For example, it is said that as he crossed his territory, the king noted how tongues and dialects changed slowly. Never did they shift abruptly at a border and always did they grade and overlap. So convinced was he of his radiant divinity that just as hungry stars consume planets whose earth and atmosphere are purified through their passage; just as language ends in unknown syncretic smatterings at the borders of the civilized world, where only scavengers haunt abandoned ruinations; just as these things change the closer or further they move from perfection, so too would anything brought closer to his lordship for consumption be assimilated into his purity. Not even the flesh of disloyal subjects could vitiate his intellect.
-~~+*^*+~~-
A trail of misheard words brings you back through the refectory, to the sleeping quarters from where the words are broadcast, where twenty beds line up in rows of five, an infirmary for the dreaming, dormitory for the dead. On the furthest cot a pile of rags bemoans existence in a private language. Only its emotive register communicates. A pile of rags, mannequin or doll, puts into the air a more repellent odor than any that the kitchen had to offer, making that part of the room impossible to approach. You stand at the door holding the boot.
*
p.s. Hey. So, I basically explained things up above. I’ll just add that I really hope you’ll put some time aside this weekend to read HD’s work, and I’ll ask you to please offer him your feedback, if you don’t mind. Even a simple acknowledgement that you took the time to read his work would mean a lot, and any opinions or ideas you can offer, from a sentence-worth to a lengthier, thoughtful take will obviously mean a great deal to him. I really appreciate your time and brain-power. As I said, I’ll chime in with my thoughts at the end of the weekend. Thank you so very much, HD, for entrusting your work to the blog. It’s an honor. ** Misanthrope, Oh, boo-hoo about the Westboro people. I’m basically a pacifist, but if there were ever a more deserving target … Well, I agree with you about putting that on the ballot. Too many Americans have long since proven themselves to be the suckers of $$$ and propaganda. I don’t like things that taste like sugar, but they’re often the best looking sweets. It doesn’t get much more charismatic than cotton candy, but it’s Medusa. ** Lee, Hey. Gary Webb vibe, ha ha, nice. So, yeah, I’ll talk to you lickety-split, I guess. I’ll get on there and put my finger on the trigger. ** Postitbreakup, Hey. I forget what an endoscopy is. Something not fun. That’s all I know. Yeah, I just got one of those little broken blue things when I clicked the ass link. Talk about needing a crowbar! ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! Thank you, great! ‘Missing Men’, wow. I can’t really remember what’s in that booklet. I’m sure I was trying for the double meaning of ‘missing’ in the title, probably not very successfully given how long ago I wrote whatever is in there. Mm, extremely interesting: your thoughts on my mechanisms for disappearance and loss. It’s true. There’s this emotional area that I seem doomed to work within. Or sometimes it feels like being doomed. I so love and admire the cleansed and cleansing mechanisms of Blanchot, and Mallarme too. I aim that high, and then I accept how far I can reach or something. I’m so inarticulate about these things, and I guess that’s why I write so much about and towards the inarticulate. That doll you’re getting sounds really cool. Yes, I saw your email! Thank you so much! I’m going to open it this weekend. I’m very excited. Thank you so, so much, my friend! ** Allesfliesst, I had this feeling I might get you in here with that post. Cool. I know, crazy number of them, right? And there were tons more, I just got blurry-eyed at a certain point. Haven’t seen ‘Zebraman’, no. I have heard of it, and, of course, I liike Miike very much, and the trailer will get me there. Thanks. Oh, fuck, it’s raining cats and dogs, and I lost my umbrella. I’m fucked. (Sorry, I just looked out the window). Uh, maybe think of your heaps the way I’m going to have think about the rain in between the supermarket and me? ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you for that, David. As you well know, I’m all I have of George, and that is so very much not enough. But what can one do? That is a very funny cartoon. Gracias! ** Wolf, Thank you, good bud. That cloud monster was my favorite. Ooh. I heard something about the ‘District 9’ sequel. I can’t remember. Some problem, hm, and then problem solved maybe, hm, and maybe it’s being made now? Setting up the WifFi thing is pretty easy, at least with a Mac, if you can sort out the language thing. You just open ‘System Preferences’, choose ‘Sharing’ and then turn on ‘Internet sharing’. That should do it. I just quickly read through a bit of that Polanyi thing, and, yeah, really interesting. This is cool: you’re opening this whole area for me that I think is going to really useful, not with the George book maybe, but in general/afterwards. This is great! Thank you, pal! There is an essay called ‘The Semiotics of Disneyland’. It’s too short, but it’s tasty. I’d write it into a book, but I’m too stuck in my meta-teenage demotic world. Oh, cool. Oh, drat, sold out. I like the Maroquinerie. Let me check my schedule or whatever, and I’ll see. I still have to get my Death Grips ticket. Damn. ** Sypha, So glad you liked it, James! Thanks! That’s an awesome Godzilla scene, totally. Mm, I’ve considered trying unusual ways to make contact with George. You know, I’m a big skeptic, although I’m as open to the idea as I have ever been. Someone is going to do a Tarot reading for me early next week to try to contact him. I decided to go for it out of a combo of desperation and thinking I can do something with it in the novel. I’m not sure about a seance. That idea is really hard for me to swallow, I think because I’ve seen about 99% reports that such things are total fakery, and, hm, I don’t know how/where you would do something like that. Maybe. I’ll see how the Tarot thing goes first, I guess. ** Tosh, Great Kappa stuff, Tosh, thanks! Have you seen the Yonemotos’ ‘Kappa’ video work from the ’80s? I had a still from it at the top of the Kappa part of the post. It has Mike Kelley as the Kappa and a very young Eddie Ruscha as his victim. It’s pretty great. ** Cobaltfram, You’re getting into coffee connoisseurship. Cool. I would do that too, if I had the patience. When I wake up, I just want a thick, bitter gulpfest of caffeine asap. Strange, but cream or milk in coffee makes me slightly nauseous. A Cappuccino looks like one of those Japanese monsters to me. I’m a huge fan of Errol Morris’ films. I think he’s kind of a genius, but I’ve never read his books, and I want to. ‘Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control’ is in my top 10 favorite films. December, soon, nice, and cool about the Little Brown interest. I would say just remember that it’s usually much harder than you think it’s going to be. Have hope, but be very patient. ** 5STRINGS, Probably. Tube socks are hot, it’s true. The Japanese know that one. When I think of skater feet, I don’t think of clean feet. I like clothes, I think. On other people. Loose, saggy jeans, man. Or even black stove pipe ones. Sizzle. My house, which is not a house, has not a single piece of Halloween clothes on it. I have to find something in Paris. Good luck with that, Dennis. Yeah, I know, right? ** Oriol Rovira Grañen, Hi! Good to see you! Another appropriate Miike film. And another one that I’ve never seen and need to see. So, no, I haven’t seen it, but I think I’ll go see if I can find it somewhere. Man, that sounds really good. Thank you a lot! ** Frank Jaffe, So, did he have especially good legs and feet? And, if so, how and why? And, by the way, what was a nice young man like you doing on Xtube!?! ** James, Hey. Fuck polite company. Polite company reads Paul Auster novels. Fuck ’em. Pasadena! Why there? My old stomping grounds! Oh, gosh, I won’t know exactly when I’m free during those days probably until I get there, or probably not until the ‘Them’ gang arrives and Ishmael makes our schedule. But there’ll be a time, and we’ll figure it out easily. I have my car there, but thanks. Can’t wait to see my car. I miss my car. ** Steevee, Hey. Well, of course it’s going to depend on what your friend’s short story is like since different sites have different aesthetics and tastes. There are really a lot of very good lit. mag sites out there now. If I were to pick one to start with, I think I would recommend Metazen. I think that might be my favorite of them. The editors include some really excellent writers/people like Frank Hinton, Janey, Smith, DJ Berndt, and others. So, there’s one idea, but I’m happy to think of others if she or you want. Ugh about all the outstanding pitches. Here’s to a swift breakthrough. No, ‘Argo’ hasn’t opened here yet. It sure is getting the raves/hype, but it’s that kind of ‘Oscar worthy’ hype that so often leads to ‘quality’ meh-type films. Your take is the first reasonable one I’ve read. Thank you for that. Anyway, next up here is ‘Looper’, which I really do want to see, and the next film I’ll probably see is ‘Damsels in Distress’, which just opened here. ** Chris Cochrane, I know, it’s crazy close. Especially for me, since I’m going out there on the 3rd, I think. Very happy that the Rico thing got figured out. Yes, please do drop box it to me, man. Yes, please. Great weekend! ** Rewritedept, I liked the two songs a lot! Excellent, man! I like traveling sort of. Not all the time, for sure. But going home to LA is always a dream come true. I will endeavor to find some ‘Spaced’. Cool! Take care. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, I was just telling somebody up above. It’s a short video by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto with Mike as the Kappa. Very worth seeing. It’s great. Mike is crazed and awesome in it. ** Okay, Now, please, lock down some reading time with Hyrule Dungeon’s piece, and report back to him in the comments arena this weekend in whatever manner you can. Thank you very, very much! See you in the comments arena on Sunday night, and I’ll see you back in this spot on Monday.
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