Celebrant (2 page)

There’s a groove here between frozen, stone-solid snow drifts.
He can go only forward
—
preceded by that bird, whose passage opens the only way for him and pulls him on like an ox hauling a plough.
The wind batters him so he rolls with its gusts, feeling his body lunge this way and that
—
but he knows he’ll freeze on the spot if he stops moving.

The path narrows ahead.
Hanging motionless in the air with wings outstretched, the bird leers insanely back at him
—
it has a wolfish muzzle instead of a beak.
Hot acrid air bursts over him and there, just ahead, orange fire gushes on white snow.
The wind lapses suddenly and he staggers as its force leaves him, gaping at bulbs of impossibly brilliant orange, like blown glass, swelling from this white snow.
They collapse in plumes of howling steam.
It’s lava, or no it’s metal, bursting in gobs from the rock like a hot spring.

A shadow engulfs him, and he feels sick.
A rough hand spins him around and all the strength abandons him.
With a feeble cry he is flung naked into the fire.

Will it happen?
That is the idea.
But this is an opportune moment
—
the dim sun has just departed behind the horizon, and now the only illumination is a shower of tiny meteors slanting down through the trees.
The shadows of trunks and branches slide like criss-crossing screens, as though the trees were silently rushing around in all directions.
He can sense he is missed in the dark and confusion.
He is eluding him.
He is eluding...

Celebrant

by
Michael Cisco

Chômu Press

Celebrant

by
Michael Cisco

Published by Chômu Press, MMXI
I

Celebrant
copyright ©
Michael Cisco
201
2

The right of
Michael Cisco
to be identified as Author of this

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published in
June 2012
by Chômu Press.

by arrangement with the author.

All rights reserved by the author.

First
Kindle
Edition

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author
’
s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Design and layout by: Bigeyebrow and Chômu Press

Cover art by Christopher Conn Askew

E-mail:
[email protected]

Internet:
chomupress.com

To Robert Parker and Karen Kahler.

Contents

Celebrant

About the Author

Celebrant

deKlend:

As for me, I don’t dream, I
am
dream, and I can’t look down and get a clear look at the process that brings me about from moment to moment.
That’s deKlend over there.
I am here, and
...
he’s there.

Imagine approaching a park bench, up on your right.
You crouch down not far from one end of the bench.
deKlend appears on the bench, one leg casually thrown over the other.
It’s raining.
His right hand rests on his right thigh, and holds upright his capacitous umbrella.
The left elbow is cocked onto the back of the bench and a long, elegant left hand hangs in space.
The head and shoulders are nearly lost in the crosshatched shadow beneath the umbrella.
The rain falls straight to the ground, and the umbrella makes a column of rainless air.
He sits with his head tilted back a little, wearing an expression of self-satisfaction, although he might simply be enjoying himself.

deKlend is the type certain positions give rise to, or he likes to think he is, imagining he came into being like the figure between the shapes of a mobile.
An optical illusion, like the vase with two faces confronting each other, one day happens to twist in the breeze and there he is, with feline self-complaisance licking his hand and smoothing down his eyebrows and moustache.
No embarrassing memories.
No shameful home.

He has a somnolent milk white oval face, and large circular eyes like liquid coal under heavy lids.
A black muffler of fine lamb’s wool is wound round and round his neck, and he keeps the ends tucked into his jacket sleeves.
This makes his neck seem longer, and causes him to tilt his chin up.

He might be seen sitting on a park bench in Union Square or on the Author’s Walk too close to a fine romantic drizzle, his right ankle across his left knee and his left elbow resting on the back, drawing the sleeve of his jacket, the exposed cuff glows white in the gloom beneath his umbrella.
He does absolutely nothing, but seems ready at any moment to pop up onto his feet and deliver a sheaf of fluorescent papers to a bureau.
At the moment he simply broadcasts his gaze, holding the long loose fingers of his beautiful left hand slightly extended;
the nails only look dirty
—
actually there are fingernail hyphens printed there in ink at the rim of the pink crescent.

He can be found going to and fro in the street with an attache case or a portfolio or loose papers or documents he’s had to vaccinate with his own signature.
deKlend is strictly a go-between;
he never originates anything.
Even when he originates something, he does it as his own go-between.
He conceals a principle in everything he does, and it’s not
his
fault if people are too stupid to see it;
all his images strictly adhere to the hidden pattern in the hidden centers, but, as I say, he is his own go-between, and is no more to be found in those hidden centers than anywhere else.
I suspect he went from folly and shame to dignity and shame, and since he is already somewhere toward middle age, from there he became furious, sweet, wistful, and resigned.
With a ruthlessness that is often shockingly like downright stupidity he returns to images of the sky, the weather, the landscape.
These are his Gorgon-turning shields.
Clouds, the sky, the air, its smell, the trees, the horizon.

He spends all his time thinking.
He shuns desks and often conducts his affairs, whatever they are, sitting beneath a table in a lot stacked with domestic furniture
—
wardrobes, sideboards, bookshelves, nightstands, hatstands, a great many wooden hampers and bins, all in rows many tens of feet high.
He climbs under a table that happens to be standing on its legs, on the ground, as part of the bottom layer of one of these gigantic stacks, and writes, setting the papers down on the black, sticky ground before him and curling forward with his shoulders between his knees.
While there, he savors the smell of cut lumber and varnish, and the smouldering aroma of old springs and stuffing of the upholstered furniture stored inside the warehouse.
Often he stares with glazed eyes at the underside of the table’s far corner, which is braced with a crosspiece to form a triangle all bunioned and corned with brown glue that oozed from the joints and congealed lacquer.

Hopeful people with things to sell make use of the alleyway, which runs perpendicular to the wind and so is one of the few places where it is bearable to stand outside for any long period of time.
The period is necessarily long since practically no one has any money to spend, less and less, and what money does get spent is spent on food.
This means that the ones who want to sell books, clothes, household odds and ends, must offer food as well.
A basket of puny, dried up potatoes, or a little jar of pickled plums, chocolate powder compressed into a cylinder and wrapped in newspaper.
There’s no shortage of food, but it goes elsewhere.
Having found, to his complete astonishment, a coin in the return slot of a pay phone, deKlend has come to the alleyway with the idea of buying something to eat.
Immediately next to a tangle of rusted plumbing there is a bare table with three broken, weatherbeaten pies on it, and he makes for them at once.
The man vending them also has a few dirty cardboard boxes packed with books, and some of them have been hastily slopped onto the table next to the pies.
This man only missed being tall;
there’s a shawl of undyed wool draped over his head and it dangles along his corduroy lapels like the ends of a judge’s wig.
He watches deKlend without getting up from the high stool he sits on, with a blazing little clay stove just in front of his feet.
Taking deKlend’s black coin with a brisk turn of his puffy hand he gestures to the books haphazardly stacked by the pies.

Go on and take one (he says) if you like.

There’s no charge?
(deKlend asks)

Go on (the former replies)
They’re not worth my carrying them around any more.

As often happens when he examines lists or rows of books or other labelled or titled things, he looks too closely, is immediately confused, and fails to take much of anything in.
This makes close perusal necessary, and what feels like a great deal of needless effort.
But presently he chances to select one of them and so takes possession of it.

On examination, this book presents itself as a geographical encyclopedia, surveying a great many different countries.
The authors, whose names are not prominently displayed anywhere in its numerous pages, but only intercalated with the material in the undemonstrative way one would expect from a genuine ency
c
lopedia, invented these countries and their peoples and customs by modelling them on familiar ones, mixing traits, modifying some, reorganizing large social shapes, such as monarchies, often by tracing the ramifications of a very minor change.
The article that deKlend finds most interesting describes Votu, a country on a high plateau surrounded by gargantuan mountains.
The entry goes on for over a hundred pages, and the writers even went to the trouble of supplying a great many photographs.
Some show people who seemed to be very cleverly made up, or they might come from somewhere west of the Roseate Lamina.
Although there are no mountains like those in that direction to the best of his knowledge, which is small.
This imaginary country is stuffed with
monasteries
, each one built around a small library of precious texts which, far from being very old, are at the same time premature and as old as or older than the orders themselves, because they came from the future, and have yet to be written.
These books, spelled b-o-o-k-s, are called
books
(pronounced like “flukes”), to distinguish them from books (like “hooks”).
It is an invarying tenet of these monastic sects that
books
are not sent from the future with any deliberation or addressed to the past in any way, they simply happen to appear.
Time, they say, only seems to have a single direction;
in fact, time runs in all directions, which is another way of saying it just runs, period, and disciples who have achieved the highest state of mental skillfulness are able not only clearly to conceive of this abstruse idea, but even to observe time’s emission or scintillation on a grand scale, ocularly.
Books
are borne back into the present from the future in what is vaguely described as a kind of ambient current.
They can be read, and naturally the mathetes pore over them, but their sanctity has less to do with their content, which is as diverse as any chance sample of books, although not all mathetes are convinced that the content is diverse by chance, or even diverse at all.
Regardless of and above the question of opinion with respect to content, the
books
are sacred because, in reading them, one is reading words that exist in the present as words that
will be
written, and not copied, since these are the original words.
They will be written, and that means there is an invocation, a summoning note, that calls from them.
Their content ultimately comes down to what answers, more than anything else about them.
The mathetes read the
books
, whatever their other reasons might be, in order to remain within their call and be near to what is to come.