something of what God has planned, but never mind on that. We talk of the past, not God and the future ..."
Part II Chapter 10
Part II
10
AESTHETIC THEORY
Contrive a poem out of ears. Tell it so that its petals unchocolate like a brain in a jar.
Wax walnut, melting with thought.
Make it a poem almost lewdly knowledgable and make its knowledge ooze, syrup from the punched trunk.
Make it snake up to the molecule whorey and put its mouth atomic against the mouth of its core. Pull on its stem to expose its foetus. Make it have children with sleek ginger jaws, make the dogs moan when it passes, let it out of its jar, make it lie with our corpse, our chaos. Make it hungry, evil, enemy of Death. Put it on paper. Read it. Make surgery its sigh, and of such sting the scorpions call it Jehovah & Who. Make it now before you crap out. Contrive it, sperm it, stroke it, . make it efficient, make it fit, make it more poem than Poem can survive.
Stan Rice, Some Lamb 1975
Now, I begin the story of my two masters and what they taught me. And I assure you that this will be the briefest part of my tale. I am eager to get on to the present. But I want this known and written down by you, if you will be so kind. So ...
"Zurvan announced himself to me dramatically. As I told you, I had gone into the bones. I was in darkness and sleep. There was an awareness in me, and there always is, but I can't express it in words, this awareness. Perhaps I am like a tablet in my sleep upon which history is being written. But that image is too clumsy and concrete.
"I slept, I knew neither fear nor pain. I certainly didn't feel. trapped. I didn't know what I was or where. Then Zurvan called me:
" 'Azriel, Servant of the Bones, come to me, invisible, your tzelem only, fly with all your might.' I felt I had been sucked up into the sky. I flew towards the voice that called me and as before, I saw the air full of spirits, spirits in all directions, and spirits through which I moved with great determination, trying not to hurt them, yet deeply dismayed by their cries and the look of desperation in their faces.
"Some of these spirits even grabbed onto me and tried to stop me. But I had my command, and I threw them off with wondrous strength, which made me laugh and laugh.
"When I saw the city of Miletus below me, it was midday; the air was clearing of spirits as I neared the earth, or at least I was now moving at a different rate of speed and they weren't visible to me. Miletus Isy on its peninsula, the first Ionic or Greek colonial city that I had ever beheld.
It was beautiful and spacious, containing wondrous open areas and colonnades and all the perfection of Greek art even at that early age. The agora, the palaestra, the temples, the amphitheater ... it seemed all of it to be like a hand open to catch the summer breeze.
"And on three sides of it was the deep sea, filled with Greek and Phoenician and Egyptian merchant ships, and the harbor swarming with traders and with long lines of slaves in chains.
"The lower I dropped, the more I saw the beauty of it, which of course was not entirely unfamiliar to me in Babylon, but to see a city with so much splendid marble, to see it white and shining and not barricaded against the desert winds, that was the spectacle. It was a city where people went outdoors to talk and walk and gather and do the business of the day, and the heat was not unendurable, and the desert sands did not come.
"Into the house of Zurvan I came immediately and found him sitting at his desk with a letter in his hand.
"He was Persian, maybe I should say Median, black-haired, though with plenty of gray on his head and in his beard, though not too old, and with large blue eyes that looked up at me at once, perceiving my invisible shape perfectly, and then he said,
" 'Ah, make yourself flesh; you know how to do it. Do it now!'
"This was exactly the tack to take, I guess, because I took great pride in calling for a body. And I didn't really know