Monument Maker, page 26
And in the silence of the stone I recognised it. A detail. I have an eye for subterranea, which is how I got my handle: The Flashlight. In this body washed up on a river in Africa, in this sealed stone sarcophagus, I saw the hand of Pierre Melville, the head of Maximilian Rehberg, our spiritual fathers, without whom few of us would have been attracted to the hobby, I saw the hand and the head of these eccentric occultists, these avant-garde artists, these holy fools, these cult science fiction writers, these adventurers in literary subterranea, these founders of this strange initiatory cult, these figures that had inspired and had brought together diverse weirdos from across the world, who had themselves formed a network dedicated to literary and historical subterranea, as we reactivated the Church of the First Stone of Silent Witness, with a charter from no one because who could we ask; Pierre had disappeared or gone into hiding to work on this final commission, this private tomb, Max Rehberg, we found out, through our researches and our exchanges of information with other fans, was dead, and headless, and what about Frater Jim, well, who knows whose face he is wearing these days, and of course we wrote to the address printed on the back cover of the rare private-press edition of Full Length Mirror, as it was erroneously translated years later, but which should have read Two Way Mirror, more correctly, I believe, of the type that are used in interrogation cells, I mean, where one wall is a mirror but the other can see through it like glass, and even now, are watching you through this book, but really it is vice versa, I believe, and speaks of the odd voyeuristic pleasure that small volume affords, that feel of eavesdropping on a summer, as it unfolds, books make you feel as though things could be played out forever and they cure us of time, briefly, is what he means by a Two Way Mirror, I believe, and of course I misconstrue in my mind interrogation in cells as being questions in the body, of haemoglobin throwing its hands up in the face of oxygen, and surrendering, silently, forever, inside the body, in awe, which is the core of our order, this understanding of the sacrificial nature of reality, our order which now consists of a few hundred people from across the world drawn from many different backgrounds and disciplines, and sure, we have our crackpots, who doesn’t, but still, our order has made remarkable ingress, into literary subterranea, into alternative histories, into and out of the past, and the future, I think we can boast, succeeding, in our quest, to open out the tunnels that lie beneath literature, beneath art, within film, within anything capable of encompassing the light of death, of fixing it, long enough, so that if it might not be understood, like God’s right hand, at least we may be less badly disposed towards it, and of course the hardcore practitioners, the ritual magicians with their awful goatee beards and their robes and their bedsits, they would mock us as hobbyists, as conspiracy theorists, but there was ingress, and every time I use that word I feel us sinking deeper, I feel the streams opening out a little bit, smell the effluvia, it is like a trapdoor is revealed that leads us deeper via another set of stairs, and via is a Roman road, don’t you know, and I have come bearing the name The Flashlight, though where I am speaking from, or how you may visualise me as I am speaking to you inside your brain, or perhaps you are shaping me with your mouth, you retard, if so I love you best, I love the marginals, I say, I speak, I write, and it is a sound on the margin of your brain, a sound that makes you think of margins, which is what can succeed in encompassing the death of light, the light of death, for what else is up to death but life, what can contain it than other, we are bereft without endings, we are sick of ourselves without finality, and where once there was a church there is nothing, for there is nothing to build a church on, which is the first foundation, stone, I say it like that because I am an initiate of this book, I learned the way I talk from it, and so I recognised that final silent stone when I spotted the news report about it somewhere, somewhere I had read of a story of how three women in Africa had claimed to have encountered a stone as light-filled as the long-lost skies of their childhood and that there had been a body entombed in it and that a head had been stolen and disappeared, the disappeared, the disappeared, I thought to myself, I have come to return all of the disappeared, I thought, because I am romantic and inclined to poetry and theology I thought that immediately, I have come to reunite all true loves, I thought, and then I thought, wait a minute that sounds like the First Church in action, and I wired a guy I knew from the fandom, which is what we called it between initiates because of course we were geeked out about all of this, and he said, yeah, this has got to be our man, and then we managed to track down a VHS tape that someone had dubbed off the TV of this news programme in Africa where these three women who witnessed this stone on the water were interviewed, and we found this other comedian to subtitle it for us, this local clown without a clue, but then we checked it out and we were sure it was the work of the founding fathers, and I said to myself, this is it, this is the final mausoleum, this is the last working, this is that business guy who commissioned Pierre to bury him in some unmarked crypt that no one could ever visit ever, to be buried inside this thing, is what he had done, is what this head washing up on a river in Africa was all about, I told myself, and then I’m watching this video when the video cuts to what looks like a shaky handheld film of what looks like a garden at night, a garden where you can make out shapes and contours and where maybe there are secret eyes looking out at you and you sit up in your chair and holy fuck, I know that garden, is it yours, I move towards the sliding doors and as I open them the doors open on the video too, I hear myself, behind myself, and behind myself I feel the presence of something that is not me, and at that moment I step out into the garden and it is dark out there with not a soul in sight and when I walk back into the living room the video is dead and there is no sound.
6. CATHEDRAL OF THE FINAL LAKE
OF GARGOYLE
Everything visible is invisible, and everything invisible visible, and bring on the end of the world.
Murder yourself as soon as you reach perfection for fear of falling back and so bring an end to the suffering of the human race and the reign of the devouring demiurge. Birth is the gateway to the prison of the flesh, so nothing copulating ever. Self-suicide in perfection, then, for transmigration is wanderings in the desert of eternity and the body of Christ is a lie. This is what the Albigensian heresy says.
Poverty, renunciation and joy is the true cathedral, is what the Franciscan schism says.
Live in an unheated shed in the garden of your mother all the better to feel the kiss of his mouth, is what the Waldenses say.
The keepers of the true faith have nowhere to lay their heads, is what the peripatetic teachers of the Dominican Order insist, in imitation of Christ, who was cast out of heaven, on the whim of his father, who, being greater than all things, including history, prophecy and time, must have realised the cost as soon as He set the whole thing in motion, and visioned His son, and his suffering, and his death on the cross, long before he entered history as a word, which is called Perfect.
A blind man sits on a bench next to the river on which a stone is held afloat. He raises his rifle to his blind eyes and takes a shot at it, regardless, is what the Church of the Stone of First Witness says.
When the priest at the altar utters the words hoc est corpus meum (this is my body), the wine and bread is transformed into the blood and body of Christ, is what the Fourth Lateran Council says (wow).
The true cathedral is never Gothic, for the Gothic cathedral, as invented, here, in this Island of France, marks a terrible fall in itself, and is a psychologising of God, and a neuroticising of His relationship to man, for the Gothic cathedral is stone in battle, and not in adjustment, which is minute, and imperceptible, and silent stone in the Cistercian cloister at Fontenay speaks, better, and in peace, and in justice, and is the one true church, which is silent stone, speaking, is what the Pierreists say.
Faith and reason are not opposed, faith takes up where reason ends, and reason can help to elucidate faith by metaphor and example, for can you, truly (ask yourself), reason to the end? is what Thomas Aquinas says.
We may reason to the end, is what the fundamentalist pigs say, which is not faith, but belief, which is an entirely different thing, and is not love of the world but truly hatred, which is any word but is, and is what the Marxist scum say, and the historical fantasists say, and the fascist bastards say.
Life feeds on life, is what the mythologists say.
For I am dust, and ashes, and full of sin, and I am speaking to the living, the eternal, and the true God, is what Martin Luther says. And that there is no bargaining with him.
Was it in vain that the Wisdom of God hid what we are unable to see? is what Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, author of Liber de Diligendo Deo (Book of the Duty to Love God), says.
You would not be looking for me had you not already found me, is what Pascal says.
God became man in Christ in order that man might become God, is what the early Church Fathers say.
Union with the ultimate nothing is the highest goal of man, is what Meister Eckhart says.
I opened my heart to the whole universe and I found it was loving, is what the hippies say, but still they hate the bomb, and stand in opposition.
The suffering of Christ was not necessary, as God, in His infinite love and mercy, has more than enough forgiveness of His own, and so the crucifixion was no true sacrifice, is what Desiderius Erasmus almost says (if so, then exactly what was it? An example?).
God is best pleased with adoration, not theological speculation, is what Thomas à Kempis, reputed author of The Imitation of Christ, says.
Heat and cold come together on planet earth to create life, is what the scientists say, but what is heat and cold but love, in relation?
It’s just chemicals, and atoms, and evolution, is what the ignorant moderns say, with no idea of the meaning of any of them, except their concomitant demeaning of the miracle, which is no less when called “chemicals” and “atoms” and “evolution,” and just as little understood.
Ook, is says. Ook.
And this is what The Bible says, about Christ, and his ministry, for the time has come to examine the claims, honestly, and without prejudice, and unmuddied by schism and by misconstruction and by heresy, is what the author of this book says.
Christ’s virgin birth is only mentioned in two Gospel accounts, those of Matthew and Luke, though neither of them can agree as to when exactly this miraculous birth took place. No one else, it appears, thought it worth mentioning. Paul seems to have no inkling of it whatsoever, but he is a well-known idiot, and so means little either way. Both Matthew and Luke agree, however, that he was of the lineage of the House of David, and that he was born in Bethlehem, even though his parents, Mary and Joseph, actually lived in Nazareth. The story is that they were in Bethlehem when this otherwise unremarkable virgin birth took place because there was a census that required the man of the house to be counted in his own city, hence Joseph’s return to Bethlehem. Okay.
Mark, like any good biographer, skips over the circumstances of Christ’s birth altogether, because everyone knows that is always the least interesting bit in biographies (except with Jesus, woops).
Either way, we can all agree there was much rejoicing in heaven but one hell of a trouble on earth after he was born in the trough of a donkey. King Herod wanted him dead. Only three men were wise enough to even attend, along with three dumb shepherds (shepherds get a bad deal in The Bible because I think God hates them). Jesus was a dirt-poor carpenter like his dad (Joseph, not the other one, though we can assume God’s skills include carpentry because He dreamed the damn thing up) and there is a story in the Apocrypha about Jesus miraculously lengthening a plank, which makes this feat exactly half as astounding as his virgin birth. But they remained skint, and neither Jesus nor his dad (the other one) are recorded as doing a single miraculous thing about it. But then there is a gap in our story. Jesus disappears and when he returns, he is preaching the Gospel. What happened in that gap we will never know, but this is a common feature of spiritual autobiography, a disappearance followed by a transformative return. Now he walked the land making flip comments like “the kingdom of God is at hand; repent.” Then he gives his amazing speech about faith and the lilies of the field, which is the heart of the good news and the central teaching of Christ, regardless of what anyone else says:
“Take no thought for the morrow. Be not anxious for food and raiment. Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O men of little faith?”
And here I will take my own little break, my own unaccountable disappearance followed by a transformative return, so that I may privately, and unobtrusively, shed a single bright tear.
7. ERA OF SAD WINGS (2)
[Play]
[Silence]
The light of death is monument maker.
[Silence]
There is something in those so odd drawings of Hans Bellmer that is closest to reality even if he fucked his daughter. There is something about the manipulating and the rearranging of the limbs in sex. There is a picture of Max’s dead body where he looks like a doll by Hans Bellmer in the rearrangement of his limbs. Of course, he already had only one arm, which was so sexy. The rearrangement of his limbs brought on by three impossible bullets to the head, brought on himself by his own volition, like I am doing just now, I am disarraying.
