Rispuosemi: “Così com’ io t’amai
nel mortal corpo, così t’amo sciolta:
però m’arresto; ma tu perché vai?”
Dragging Mr. Emerson along by the thumb.
Take my hand, lovey, coxcomb, and we’ll be one motion of a swishing horsetail, a dappling rainbow. I am leading the way! Pulling you along, a motion afflux, over the aeolian dunes, sifting their tops. Their sprinkles are golden agleam in the air they join. The wind is playing the pipe for the sand and the pipe music gives my running-step which is twice the step that two people dance, you and me, lovelydovelydum.
Emerdumb ―― falcon of my fist. I take you through all the chasings in the nightwood. Around your neck a locket is hung, a loopheld heart,.
EMERSON:
A fascinating doggerel to be sure.
Now this romance of course has its double data.
For all things are bound in the belt of the.
Laura and Emerson ran through the woods in an azure summer palace day.
Parallel, two shapes of full-size humans ran through a gallery, the sash windows flung open to invidious May’s typhoon: oily blasts of yellow lightning that blotched the sea and swirling darkness above.
She had him by the hand, he had hers, but the damp and the wind and the falling crashing breastsummers and things tossed from shelves caused them to slip from each other, and they were parted across the swimming galleries —
She saw him! There! She saw his feet, shod in the jangling bell pointed shoes.
A trapdoor slammed shut, hiding him. She ran for that place, she lifted a portcullis, a fallen beam had blocked the three portals and the trapdoor, so she pulled herself through a rose window and a garbage tunnel and slid up it with muscular power. But in the courtyard where she’d seen the shoes there were no shoes and the man was gone. He had left for worlds unknown.
So she would abide like a lotus on the black waters.
Her name was —.
His name was —
Cincio Sinforoso was the priest deputed to the wedding― assigned, in one ambit, not just to perform, render, effectuate, engineer, execute, fulfil, wangle, consummate, and discharge the ceremony (only ecclesiastic dictionaries note that the word ceremony also oft stands for a very specific type of container, one which holds and binds together smaller ceremonies as songs are foliated in a cantorino, or breastsummers are canted in a folly) but also the bringing off of the legal legwork, and the statutory spadework, were tasks belonging to he. And if it was quite so much the trial and quite so much the bother then there were certainly novices that would like to take his place forthwith, and glean all the baked goods and tithes and so on. The Westsylvanian emprise was bureaucratic in those days but not nearly so much as it became later, so it was still considered reasonable, and the most simply done approach, that one chaplain take care of it: the matrimonial concern; the same usance prevailed in matters of death. Even then the men and women of the cloth had begun to struggle with the breadth of all this, but also in those days, an ecclesiastic, low or high, male or not, was the product of years spent in ardent sit with the canon of universal instruction. Many broke their spines to sip this flagellant tap. Which comprised the stories of all saints, which comprised a machinery of seasons, and engaged practical education too: actually, nothing was viewed as disparate in this way; the idea was to magnify heaven’s light through a lens, and make fire, cooking a repast or putting ungodly bugs (like Tineola bisselliella) aflame.
Many of the holies ran little repair shops. Their firm was entirely responsible for the local production of ale.
The wedding to which Deacon Cincio was deputed was of one Ubalina Udalrica, to the gentleman known as ________.
Curiously the gentleman’s name is lost, in the parish record.
« Ah, the work never ends. » said Deacon Cincio. « I avow, I can accomodate them in the administrative compass of the Parish of Diocese. »
« It should be ideal for their purposes.»
« And ours. » (Speaking to self, across the gap where, some certain majesty, did verily split him, though not quite with an ambivalence for he always liked to take his own part in these discussions.)
«Reasoning. Firstly, the suggestive epicyclic scheme of the round interior assembly, the demilune nave that approaches the sanctuary and altar, the whole room emplaced around its rim with the sequence of small round rooms that are cloakrooms, studies, and miniature altars, tailing slender tails that are corridors, vacancies, libraries, cellars, escapes. Secondly, the fine soft alabaster that practically froths in its whiteness, setting off the cake which I shall certainly have to bake, I think. Ah, what an exhaustment of our lifeblood, doth life!
Third … I might register the Acoustic dimensions. The softly alabastrine roundy walls make for roundy wells so that even the wisdom of the tyke and the cooing of a babe would carry to each roundy ear. The syllables spoken will exult in the weddingplace to become public treasures. Our intentions can be draped in velvet and spoken low, yet catch the ear of every attendant as if delivered by their shoulder's whispering angel. And this is important because I am told to expect assassins.
Assassins … of love.
Moreover. The roundy rim of the mantle, the swelling translucence of domed windows and the ecstatic transparence of round open portals (many rooms have no ceiling and the chapel proper is a convertible). Daylight’s magnificence will readily absorb the hymnals that rise through these lacunae. The smiling sky will be an artist for the celebrants between these parentheses; decanting hues with its fulgurance of change. Change, that shifts the mood when the mood is just right ― supposing I pull this off ― from the shouting azure choir to the adagios of gloaming and then unto the bergamasks and the other insomniac delights for the grinagogs in sparkling shadow under sparkling stars and there will be fireworks also come to think of it — frames of resplendence, oriflammes, illuminating tableau-scenes of hallowed fableaus that prompt without strain soulful reflections even amid celebrations that incoporate drunkenness, these oriflammes on the sky hung in symmetry with the catenaries slung, by me, from clerestory to counterlight.
The Deacon Cincio wrote to the Party of Intent.
Concupiscente cavalliere,
If you accede, then let us accelerate, for I have accomodated you two, and accompany each one, ‘til I may leave off, so you can accompany one another, and here we accredit, and here we account, and here we acquit, if all aquiesce, and here we acquiesce, if everyone’s arrived, and here we’ll avow, and advertise we did, and here we alter, assume, associate, and ally. Time to articulate, blandish, and for those assigned this function, to blather and boast. While the page of the ring and the princess of the cup and the lineages amble the floral path, the musicians kick up the bridal suite. A vivacious whimsy of fife and flute balloons in the ears of all but in short time above this fulsome expansion is heard that greater clatter which none may mistake: that of portcullises being raised, one after another, on the outer wall, before the churchyard, to the vestibule, approaching, and a hush following these noises is cutting, severing into the hapless crescendos of the hired band, like that snowdrift that infilitrated the narrow gate of morning on solstice day, dressing the fine needles of green life everlasting that tunnel and shiver forth from the top of the slush, to feel a bracing ardor that is chill and brilliant at once, and feel a splinter in the heart, and a silence that is that silence which pertains to a thousand things happening at once, all at once, all over the land, and their noble or nobly rustic dresses ― we discuss several things, now ― glint with a million new crystalline eyes. But watch out — I have received clandestine warnings from not just one party — for the bridesmen. Oh, certain of them, certain of them, may mean ill. That has been suggested to me. Someone is up to no good. It could be any of us, besides the two of you, or myself, or other members of the cloth naturally; also children are innocents and cannot be believed to partake in the malevolent intrigue that remains, mind you, only a possibility, only a bit of intelligence.
An irrelevant letter, said the Recording Angel.
And put its two-fingered hands out like so —
“Fifthly, the historical significance. Needless to say it has stood as witness to vows through centuries— I think it has been centuries ― if not more ― if less, then approaching centuries — I believe it dates to the founding of the Westsylvanian colony at least ― the historians of course differ distinctly on the dating of the Westsylvanian founding ― the doubtful redoubt, it has been called. Nevertheless, look around you, at these stones that are soaked with joy, and the urine of sainted squirrels, the rare blue ones which conduct themselves in total Satanic latitude in the arbor of our circumambient holly, aspen, and blackthorn trees. I kid. Ha — they are not Satanic. They lack history, it is fair to say. But down here each couple etches their John Handcock and Jane Preggers onto the leatherbound ledger I have placed so that people bang into it as they sharply turn the sharp corridor to the latrines. The guests are also to providmarks.”
“To wed within this history ….” Deacon Cincio trailed off, his gaze reflecting a profundity borne of years shepherding souls towards unity, or disunity as the case may have been, sometimes was, or bored of years shepherding souls towards unity or disunity, though this was actually his first rodeo. He was replacing the outgoing prelate, who had suddenly been called on urgent and prestigious business, back to ― here a gesture of thumbs-up performed in a manner that in other contexts would be suggestively loutish, and earthy, despite the fulminantly anabatic character of the motion. ―
There had been hardly any time to pack and everything had been left more or less in midsentence. In a way it was rude for the prelate to have done what he did, when he did it. Prestige is one thing and what one owes to one’s immediate dependents, and to one’s sub sequent ― the Deacon had his own thoughts on this. But at no time did he write these thoughts in this leathern logbook.
He was naturally lazy but this did not arise from a self-interested character; he was not especially self-interested. He liked other people and architecture, to the extent he could. He treated his flock better than he did deathwatch beetles or the entoptic phantasms his ptotic amblyopia made amble across the canopy of his limitations. He treated them, man and woman, girl and boy, young and old, as―
"And last but sheerly not the least," he paused, allowing his glance to encompass the entirety of the ecclesiastical edifice as though embracing it whole with his pride alone, "its capability to transform. Within the alembic of my humble church, mere individuals unite into entities way beyonder their solitary totals. Each union symbolizes not just a personal journey fulfilled but a transformation up, up above.”
"Heaven itself conscripts us to be architects of Love,” he concluded, “and chemists. Also gardeners.”
“How boundless is the faculty of collaboration and the fusive concatentatory power in us all! — when we swim, of course, with the Most High.”
His attention would slip often in the coming days, with a sort of delicate ceremonious two-step, away from what needed focus such as the composing of the march and the afflowering (moreso than beflowering) of the chancels and the sealing of the pews and the restaining of the lectern and the hiring of the various.
But it would come together.
It was when he saw the bride that he truly left the farm — or bought it — depending on how you view and interpret this betold farm, said the Recording Angel. Perhaps it is a mill?
Will? Nihil? What there is to relate about Cincio and his bride Ubalina, goes on still― icicles for your heart, listening beneath winter, tongues of flame on your spine, thou unhorsed grassblade! — havenless reflexion from the cloudwashed summerland!
(Continuing in a following section, The Deacon Eloped)
Her hair was somehow august-austere, imperially placid, whilst civically equanimous and ungrasping, yet even in this and perhaps by it the same hair was a cataract of inflamed destiny, of crimson spiritual ardency; enchanting and aweing and dazzling and queerly nightmarish in its tesselated combing interior architectures like any waspnest placed, like stingers applied to the eyes, upon the granular intensities of attention. Eyewidening, vomitous though neither of sorrow or disgust or the vertiginous festoonry of Joy and its coterie of the Euthymias, making gawk and gawp — at once.
Line edit to: « And ours. » (Speaking to self, across the gap where, some certain majesty, did verily split him, though not quite with an ambivalence for he always liked to take his own part in these discussions.)