*
The bar -- or is it a casino? or a communal performance space? -- or a sick child's video game, hidden from parents? -- what word fully covers this space? Is it the inside of a pinball being tilted by Satan? Tell me, is this the inside of your fevered nightmare? Or the side effect of a drug from the sixties? Or is this someone's everyday reality? And where is God, can our loving God be found even here? Even in this space? So is it that even in the human's denial, God cannot deny himself? Can this truth be applied?
The entrance is of tapestries but the tapestries move. They before your eyes and cling to you as you move through. Zeus and Apollo gallop through their multitudinous loves. There is a hologram of a Christian politician consorting with the Caesarites. He holds up a coin with his face on it, winking and smirking like a fratboy. Is this what it means to be "wise as serpents"? As the spectators clap, Sans Foy and his gang walk through the image and disperse it into a flickering migraine.
Of these images some are real and some are merely projections of brightly dyed photons that the sound of a gong will destroy. They say that fiction hardens people and encourages them to treat their neighbors as only fictions like itself. Watch what happens. Duessa dances on the bar while Moloch her slothlike manager (predatory old guy in leather and steel) ogles her wiggle from a low side table. Is it really a woman dancing or an animated image? What a terrible thing to have to ask. Is it real, the little dagger hanging from her heart? Or is it just a prop on her costume?
You tear my heart in two, she sings.
*
I want to stop living the life I'm leading, she cries. An Arab boy walks up to her and tried to touch her. Her image goes up in flames but there she is on the other side of the room, wearing a new non costume and surrounded by Renaissance cupids. She has 2 leashes in her hand. Each holds a man topped by a dunce's cap. I can't seem to get them to heel no matter what I do.
Do not describe more. Allegory's deepest wish is to point to God. When Allegory discusses the world it does so reluctantly, in deep and resonant euphemisms. If you touch the world without a mediator you will be defiled, and this she knows. She wants to lay all her words in God's hands so that what they depict will become tolerable and cease to harm. But artists (like myself?) exploit her and use her to depict all the things that are too vile to be described on this "as is" basis, things whose depiction outside God (if there is such a place?) would make the heart stop -- as for so many people it already has! The way evil invades the soul -- that is the very topic that Reader's Digest decided not to tell you about. Not everything is external. Nor can an artist safely discuss it without becoming unwillingly immersed in what it is and what it does. You must somehow learn how to walk through dirt and stay clean, like a forties gumshoe. But the Black Maskers pretend it is easier than it is.
*
Inside the mildewy vestibule with its dripping glitter, Dave fell onto his knees because, as Lincoln once said, "there was no place else to go". Elf hovered beside him looking fiercely left then fiercely right. She carried a knife from Wisdom's kitchen, something Dave didn't know.
Thank you , Lord, for existence. Thank you for pain. Thank you for this plowing and harrowing of my heart because in this condition it is just like a heavy metal dial pointed straight at reality. At least I beg you to make it so. Yes indeed.
Even here, God is good.
*
Then the 2 giant brothers, Sans Loy and Sans Foy, dragged their brain damaged uncle Sans Joy into the room and propped him up against the bar. The wood shifted with distaste. They saw the interloper on the edge of the battlefield. Pressed forward.
Colors of some other team, a gang we don't like. Not good not good.
Their movements were slow and larded over, as though their inner heat was on reserve or their memory was running low. The closer voice was unsteady like a frayed tape: Get out of this place, stupid Christian. The one in front had a power saw in his hand. Dave was about to be cut in two. And the fool was on his knees praying! So Elf closed her eyes and plunged forward with the blunt knife, hardly good enough to cut butter, but terrible all the same, and she felt herself as much under attack as the goon, because she had been a committed pacifist all her life, but was someone else now that commitment was more than a name she liked to use. And it seemed that something inside her was painfully tearing, now it was torn. Yet the knife fell as through butter or Jello, there was no body inside the person she attacked. Sans Foy split open like a vegetable as Sans Loy bellowed in pain, was it pain or a construct's rendition of pain? The moan came of herself. And Dave cried out: Please no violence. Let's find another way.
The 2 dogs were loose and one of them, hardly human anymore, was nipping at the image of Sans Joy on the bar floor, but it was like one delusion chewing another. Were they real? The Cupids fled screaming, the allegory dispersed. Moloch withdrew for a better occasion, or fled like an abject coward, pursued by a man in the shape of a dog or the other way around.
*
The blood is supposed to be over. The blood of Christ is to be the last blood shed on earth, an end to the shed blood, so that all the violence afterward -- in Iraq or at home -- is really just the thrashing of the ones who have not heard the news, not really heard it, like the soldier on the island who didn't realize that the war was already over so kept fighting. And there are others who can't seem to subsist in a world of peace. The ones who need war. Elf, please (Dave said), withdraw your sword and acknowledge the new realm. But when she pulled her hand loose, dropping the sword into the vat of melting lard, she found she had cut the night club's power cord somehow. The delusions sank slowly to the floor. It was nothing but an unused warehouse that they stood within. Duessa now looked 60 years old or perhaps more. Her white mane hung brittle on her shoulders like Christmas tinsel when the holiday's done. I am really a Christian myself, she cried. I go to church. I uphold family values.
This is just my work! It has nothing to do with -- with.
She sank "on top of" her knees on the cement. I don't like anything about myself. I am not going to defend myself.
But if you were inside me you'd know how I got here.
I would pray now if you only let me pray. But nobody listened to her, for good or for ill, and inexorably in the course of the dream time, the melting swirling lard that had been her bodyguards rose and covered her voice for good.
*
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