Myths of Origin

1

Look closely. This is not the Way.

Up or down, I could not say, I could not say. I ate the severed halves of a Compass Rose seven-hundred-and-negative-eight miles back, covering

the yellow red meat with lime skins and choking it down. Now it is Within. So I could not say northwest or south, only the veil-fire that way and the moon-forest this way, this turn or that turn, round the oleander Wall rippling underwater or over the mandrake Wall salivating on my hand as I execute a three-quarters pike half-caffeinated flip over its thick shoulders. My body is bound with guitar strings, nipples like fawn’s hooves strumming E minor chords and finger-picking a Path through resonant briars, redolent of the desert bellies of blue lizards. By now my feet are worn through, holes like mouths gaping and smacking in cathedral soles, pounding, thrusting on the Path like a drum-skin stretched into incandescence, finding that old comfortable rhythm that by now I know so well, that I invented out of dust and the sweat beading prettily on my own calves.

It is all familiar now, after the passage of constellations and the ingestion of the Compass Rose, holding now that flaming cross inside me, in this sign thou shalt conquer, north-brow south-hips east-wrist west-thigh, in this sign thou shalt walk until the end of days, in this sign thou shalt blaze and burn, in this sign thou shalt stride tall through this Place, this happy Garden of Lies, in this sign thou shalt eat berries and lie under the moon, and let it tan your skin silver.

I carry Direction inside me like a child, a watery infant daughter of a circuit of dawns, connected by the fibrous strength of my spinal fluid and thread sun from the enamel of my teeth. She, in all her diamond gills and sunfish fins is anchored in my rich belly, wrapping her precious little Compass-form in my umbilicus like a mummy, and so I am her sarcophagus, too. Her mother and her coffin.

And the directions never change, magnetic north is always at the crown of my mercurial head, south always at the arch of my holy foot, for I carry the Rose within, growing like a Vedic moon. O serpentine I, having a tail fat with scales linked like opaline chain mail, and thus no way to give birth to this precise little cat-child, kept inside an adamant muscle wall. It pushes against my ribcage, stretching the skin of my lifting belly. Amphibious and infertile, webbed into frozen fecundity, Great-With-Child, never Birthed, never Mother. Trapped in the swallowing, breasts heavy and pendulous with milk, unable ever to feel the tug of that small mouth against them. Ever huge with the weight of oceans, of a thousandthousand mountains, halted in freeze frame like an urn. Ambrosial blood swimming between us, the eater and the eaten and the eater again, sucking at the soil of the womb like a clear-petalled lilac. And in this habit of motion-forward, I have learned:

The Void of the Labyrinth does not exactly stretch, or exactly coil, or exactly twist. But it snarls. A bolt of belligerent lightning-silk angrily unraveled, corded, torn, circumnavigating itself in a rattling feint, coming apart and crushing in. And it changes, like the horned moon, cycling without pattern. Walls mutate like film noir rape scenes, tearing at pearl skirts with mud-brick fingers that leave stigmatic bruises.

Roads. Oh god, I cannot speak of it, but the Roads have filled me entirely, stuffed and crammed into every corner, oozing out of my body like icy caviar. They are my avenue-bracelets and my fat sapphire street chokers, my gold scarab short-cut armbands and my boulevard harem anklets, they are my cobblestone coin belts and my alleyway-agate earrings. Long Paths criss-cross my torso like ammunition belts, and the innumerable dead-ends pierce my breasts beautifully, hanging pendulously, swinging with laughter, slapping triumphantly against my bronzed belly.

And. There are here tremors of Doorways. They appear in the morning like dew-dampened butterflies, manic and clever. They travel in packs. At night the hinges change from right to left, or vanish completely. Some are no more than flaps of fur, iridescent in the light of the Walls, or sweeping veils of gauze and silk, long curtains like a woman’s hair. Like my hair. Some are hard and ornate, carved with a fantastic code of Arabic and Greek, letters drawn in a paste of crushed diamonds and the hooves of a drowned horse, written with the elegant tip of a black cigarette holder. These have heavy knockers and bulbous knobs, brassy and baronial, in intricate shapes; I have seen a knob like a griffin’s fierce mouth, open in a scream with her tongue made of rose quartz, feathers fanning out magnificently in silver on the face of the Door. And a falcon-claw knocker all of amber, the reptilian talon, the three terrible nails ending in their razor points, all wrapped about with the leather of bondage, the flying trails of a hunter’s bird cascading down the polished Door, ending in a large lacquered ball with which to strike and enter.

But they are not beautiful to me, any longer. They cluster whispering and break and dance in and out of vision. And they hunt. Like sleek foxes they creep along the places where the Wall meets the Road and wait. They will glide up silently and swallow you as you lie beneath a sighing willow, or stalk you through three dozen twists and turns of the Labyrinth, seizing you as you come upon one of the long boulevards. They are savage creatures, and hungry. On what do they open? I have learned only to avoid them, and I could not say.

I did not exactly come here, and I will not exactly go. I have always been Here, I have always been about to escape. I have never been arrived, always in transit, slowly digested by the Road with Doors snapping at my heels. I will never tell the tale of:

“One day I woke up and I was here.”

But perhaps it was so, I could not say. Then equally perhaps I shall one day fall asleep and be not here. If this is true, what came before has dissolved from me, lost like milk teeth. But I think, rather, that it has always been as it is, and there was never a beforethis nor will be an afternow. I am accepting. This is not a thing to be solved, or conquered, or destroyed. It is. I am. We are. We conjugate together in darkness, plotting against each other, the Labyrinth to eat me and I to eat it, each to swallow the hard, black opium of the other. We hold orange petals beneath our tongues and seethe. It has always been so. It grinds against me and I bite into its skin.

I accept. It is not always unpleasant under this particular cubic yardage of sky. I once (will? never?) thought in miles and leagues, counting my measured footsteps with my abacus-lips. I once chanted the low, quiet black magic of numbers and distance, of meters and kilometers like coiled snakes in baskets. I wrote over my whole body with sap, calculating how many times my feet had abused the earth, how many times the stones had gnawed my toes. No more, I have forgotten numbers. I washed the sap in a marble fountain of a serpent-woman spewing clear water from her gaping mouth, that despairing cavern. And I walked on, my pack secure on squared shoulders. I accept.

I am not exactly alone. There are Others. Of course there are the Doors, and they are company of a brutal sort, but I glimpse now and again a flash of golden fur or tinfoil tail in a stream. And I hear rustling in the nights that is not the sibilant gliding of an impending Door. I could not say what creeps and whispers through the branches and down the threaded Road, but I hear it, and I am not afraid.

2

I have stripped myself of light.

The Wall-light and the moonlight and the Road-light and the willow-light. I have pulled it down like a pair of blue jeans, scuffed and spattered with paint. Fountainlight and shadowlight and cobblestonelight, roselight and ivylight and dragonflylight, hyacinthlight, applelight, fleshlight and Doorlight. I have pulled it all away, the yarrowlight and Mazelight and fingernaillight and eyelight. Slid off the pirate’s planks of my thighs like a river of nascent rain. Waterlight. Underneath that mummification of light, underneath that other body which was so well-wrought, like Milanese leather over my little scaffold of bone, I have grown a new skin. The color of sun-heated coffee skimming the cream off of my shoulders, perforated with cinnamon and licorice, tinted with wind-etched Sea-pebbles. It sloughs down over my arms and elbows, creasing itself like the thick folds of a marble toga. The heat causes ripples; it is not yet accustomed to my frame. We shiver and slithe around each other, combining slowly, slowly.

It is not quite like a molting, for I am not quite like (but not quite unlike) a snake; more the regeneration of a limb by a desert creature, tongue lapping in and out. There was

the setting of the sun red on red on red, and the sky scalding, and the new skin over my fingers like petroglyphic gloves. Sand caked my hair into long sheaves, curling sticks of stiff driftwood, frozen fleshy-fat river eels. I am a stone Medusa sitting by the Wall, late afternoon light nosing her face like a curious wolf, knifing the supper-meat savagely, turning a pitiful hare and wild greens to jasper and sodalite. And all around her form the crackle and hiss of new skin, growing, growing, growing, covering her serpent-hair with that fabled horse-flesh. And now I walk in a body of darkness that is light, skin seething black, seeking the next sinuous trine of this Path.

I stand as I have stood a meaningless number of times on one of the long thoroughfares, lined with wild pear trees alternating whitethorn and prairie grasses, blooming as though they were planted with some purpose, to shade the heat chattering off this Road, pushing into the air with oily hands, tracing a finger-pattern into the image I see. (Though it may not be real, the Void of the Labyrinth has no shape, and thus no constancy). I have come through a considerable snarl, and the new body I have won does not make it easier; I cannot see my legs move beneath me, they blend so into the liquid night and shadow, swallowing stars into my knee pits.

When I bend to examine the Path, nebulae are crushed to glittering dust beneath thigh on the anvil of calf. It went: left left right straight left right circle back right straight through the portcullis and under the bridges three sharp lefts two gradual rights through the roundabout over the creek and seventy perpendicular left turns spiraling inward.

But it has all changed by now, of course, so that map does little good. And it means nothing, to say that I have come through a snarl or found a thoroughfare. I catch myself thinking in the old ways of distance and arrival, of a goal, of a center, of an end. And even then thinking in the ways of time and linear movement. But there are infinite tangles and straight Roads; that I have traversed one (of a multitude my feet have enumerated into meaninglessness) and spilled out in my dark puddle of self onto another is less than nothing at all. I have found the Colossus and been enfolded.

A whale’s ribcage is almost visible against the sky, long and bleached white. The comfort of its linearity glows in a spectral nova. And there is something comforting about the length and breadth, the Road like a woman’s smooth brown leg extended into the infinite, her toe brushing the corona of the sun, heel pressing the rim of eradication. Yes, it alters and mutates and flicks through its shapes like a nickelodeon, but it cradles me and keeps me and I am defined more by Walls and Roads now than limbs and brain. It is a wide womb and I am born over and over.

It is a game we play. There is Vision here, to be stolen, seized, taken at knifepoint from the black-scaled baobab. Vision, yes, but no Will. Will has no meaning, or has lost it, under the dusty whitethorn leaves with their filtered light, no meaning behind or before the marauding Doors, no meaning in my palm or a greater one, crossed by arcane lines that I cannot read, cannot say. I move like the breath in a pan pipe, and walk as I may, but it ends in nothing, the Path determines. I am within the Colossus, within the Whale, and though my footfalls echo on its entrails and my voice stabs the lining of its stomach, I am in the fish and I go whither it swims. No meaning. I balance on a crown of babble, teetering and tottering on four-inch heels over a cobblestone Road, straps of biting black scoring my ankles with pricks of blood like decimals. The fan of four bones demarcate. My stride is weary with gin-streaked sighs. Grey sky wind in my face and breath of thorns. Swamps and marshes and crushed cellos, cracked air and bamboo beatings. There is no other than this Road that looks so linear and ever-going. Plod, plod, plod, one lacquered/unlacquered toe after another, red, white, red. Into the horizon, perpendicular I against the degreeless slope of hills and dales. All the paints in my boxes are ash, all the inks black. I carve my world in monochrome.

I am at the sword-point of all amplitude and fold/unfolding. I reside in voluminous wreckage. It is beautiful, the hide of the leviathan reflected in mud-brick and trellis-work, the suggestion of a thing concealed: a Queen, a Talisman, a Treasure, a Castle, a Monster. At the very least some secret knowledge to be won. The threat of an oblong head rising blackly out of the water, lake beading off its reptilian brow makes the liquid promise shine with voluptuous beckoning. I am I, can be no other, and my little mind, encapsulated in skull and void, insists that a center exists within Wall after Wall. I promise myself not to think on it, knowing as well as I do that there is nothing, that the whisper is a lie, but I slip. I slip and drown in the root system of the Labyrinth.

3

Time flickers on and on.

A half-realized body stretches out coral-encrusted fingers to seize it. Useless, of course it is useless—each spindle-moment gone before my limbs could ever escape the glassine softness of their essential corporeality, could achieve escape velocity and roar away from themselves in a bloom of fire. I walk (will walk, have walked, I told you there is no coming and going here) in the Maze, a spinning silver coin in the sky, and the names of the flowers float out of my honeycombed skin, the mystic botany I once knew when I was (am, will be) wrapped in my sanguine turban. Crocus, narcissus, chrysanthemum, orchid. I name them for the air’s ears, for the benefit of the enclosing Walls, touching a thick petal with my tapered finger, one for each syllable. I walk rhythmically, battered tattered cloak folded under one arm.

Today it is warm and the sun is on my back like a peacock’s fan. Hibiscus. Asphodel. I carry the Gardens with me, and name the flowers in infinite repetitions, even in my sleep the names trickle from my lips like blood, like rainwater. Delphinium, amaranthus, asiatic lily. Lotus, pennyroyal, poinsettia, marigold. Roses and opiate poppies and bluebells. The rain-washed flagstones bear the imprints of my sandaled and unsandaled feet, my pleading knees, walking the same Path again and again. Nephthytis, larkspur, foxglove, hyacinth. I do not pull weeds or comb the soil. I often catalogue, to pass the time, though it is equally useless since the topiaries and terrariums change like a dervish spinning. I note the growth patterns of hibiscus in the humidity of July. I commit to memory the cross-pollination of red dracaena and night-tulips. I twist moorland heather in my black hair. I walk in the green shadows of tropical leaves, in a contorted Babylon.

The gold which is no-gold on my fingers is heavy, weighting me to this desert place which has no great umbilicus of river, rooting me to it, binding my body to these very shades of blackberry blossoms. This expanding microsecond now contracts so fast I cannot even touch its saturnine rim before it vanishes like the up-spiraling smoke of a silver hookah. But even to consider this pinwheeling threatens madness, to engulf the howling mind that weeps over every lost instant, crying to the rings of Jupiter to slow and remain in the center of one fuchsia-breasted moment. But non-linear travel is forbidden here, in the realm of the sternest of all gods, and I swoon (have, will, might) beneath the weight of such endless forward movement.

I arrive often in a rosemary-scented Courtyard rimmed by manzanita trees, low and twisting. I have seen it perhaps seven or seven hundred times. It means nothing, not truly an arrival. The Sea laughs and beats a drum with blue-palmed hands down past the line of my vision, (but oh, I can hear it as it foams and thrills in my collarbone!) at the bottom of a convoluted Escher-like staircase, jumping and arching over itself, doubling back and spiraling crab-wise, chasing its long helix-body down to the edge of the tidepools. Into its stony flower-boxes and hedge-creatures I glide, still wrapped in my darkbody, leaving tattered scraps of shadow on the thorns as I pass. Didn’t I want to be a dark woman in some longagoothertime? The Labyrinth has covered every whiteness with violet petals and the dark pollen of night-lilies. I have crushed the thousand gardens into a vial of pigment to hide myself from its eyes, painted like a pagan, chasing after deer on the steppes. I march like a good soldier on the shell of a Sea-snail. It goes on and on. The Sea is unseen, beyond the Walls, and I will never float within its blue.

4

“It snapped at her,” a Thing intoned.

“Did the Door, and she fell in, downdowndowndowndown. Silly, running—why grumble, greymalkin, when there are violets about, and sweet?”

It was a pair of fat auburn haunches, chocolate and honey, fur like velvet gloves, long, eloquent ears pink as girlhood. It startled me, this new thing. An enormous Great Hare sat calmly on a patch of thick grass and wildflowers, as though guarding a corn-maiden’s tomb. I marshaled language like reticent troops in my dappled head, so long had passed without another Voice but the echo of mine. Her nose twitched, staring with liquid eyes, chewing industriously on the lip of a daisy.

“Did the Door and swifter than I could. Was it a nice Door? Was it soft and delicious? Did it lead to a sweet thicket? Will you see its teeth when it comes like a hound? Silly girl-thing, why not stay and flower-eat? Wait and they will come. You will travel well enough.”

The Hare stretched her long feet as though trying for a marathon. She nibbled at a toe, yawned. Nonplussed, I reached out a hand to scratch her head, and she leaned warmly into my palm.

“Where did you come from?” I touched, gingerly, her face.

“Away! Away and away and away and away! Do you know the Way? I do, I do, I do! I am the flower-eater and the grass-devourer. I am the swift sun-runner and the apple-thief. I know the secret. What are you?”