‘Sigavls’

Further requisition from the codex has been so widely requested

[image from City at the Edge of the World] — Lionel Feinenger

Definitions. A wing is a tissue of scenes. What is a scene?

A scene is There is a roadside inn. Not far as that. But across the world, yes. Down this talon. Smoke curled out of the stone ashjars of the clerk-owner, great terminus of a 14-century tendon. Very tender child-meat turns on revolving spits piked around the door and up the pathway to the well where cool water is available. This is prior the ban on such activities in inns by the roadside. A long hallway sweeps.

And behind every wooden door is a subscene. Mostly domestic. Such as, a Subscene is Man in a kepi (being the hat of the French Foreign Legion) with no shirt, no pants, a shackle around his bare leg which attaches to a 1671.9951 pound iron ball. His sallies at getting work done (he has acquired himself a saw, with which he wants to bisect the chain between his legcuff and the ball) are interrupted by his large orange cat who is regularly petitioning pets, which the man gives. On the TV the news is playing: the man has escaped. Across the hall, behind a round door with a painting of a medusa on it, a door missing a knob, only having a round hole, a Subscene is a man in a man’s sheer dress. Kimono, but more like a rag. He has a simpleton face, of the kind that makes you want to pour a bucket of water on it to wake it up. He is lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling fan. He is waiting for the fan to stop, so that he can climb up the wall and look through the vent-hole. Possibly escape if the situation of the vent-hole has changed, widened. He was not always so circumspect. But prison has taught him to be circumspect.

And behind every steel grate is a short ways to go before the debouchment― I knew a jay who regarded all generations—―I mean, those that antedated the originary garden and its sterile (for lack of instructional videos, or a compelling artistic need) staging of platonic plenitude — to fundamentally be at all events, improbity, of the gluttonous daemoniac type, and whether the question was of the ductile disport of protists, or the Green world of myriad bifurcation, cervicorn moltings in Spring, or the ceremonious avant-couriage of new types of facial beauty in the Archipelagian city, it all was called to the same score. «Harlequin visage of the neversated devourer. Ever new amusements, to last a year, or an evening, and then — off with their heads!» Like Shahrazar the Sultan, I said. «The two of them worked together» mused the Jay «to madden us all.» I replied, for I was very curious, you and I precede this ‘flood’ but our feathers, cornucopic bouquets that burst newly each year from your axillaries and covert places in subconscious play with the dartings of golden fishes in the stream, and reflecting in their deep black and blue hues the upside-down and uncatalogued vision beheld by the newly born humans — what of these?” «I hate them also.» “You hate my feathers also?” «I do not. Of all the nouvelle vague your feathers are that which I do not hate. I understand many of them to interpret each other, to file, to systematize, to catalog, a smaller but still profuse set of beauties. Will you bide with me a while?» “I cannot, for the sword of fire belonging to our creator is already carving a chasm between us. I am called to roost in the troposphere, whereas you are going to become a moral caution.” «Poor Jay!» said the Jay «who loves thee well, but I think that —» Here our conversation ended, for she was thrown by a gale.

And behind every veil, in every new country, and every new name for a country, was a short dissevering of hearts, and the sound of living matter coursing through bifurcating tubing; one came unto scenes natural and spiritual, mountain scenes, forest scenes, aceldamas. The pennon flying four across and one down, to find oneself in a secretive pirate cove listening to the tales of ― “oh dear!” — pirates. The whole affray and yet-unresolved but-to-be-or-not-be-resolved oppugnancy of this plot, is whether the Traveler taken hapless captive (so these mortals think)  will, through the raucous, hoarse, craggy, uneven, pungent, rasped, onerous, and inappropriately jangling syllables of the Pirate crew (or erstwhile Crew, for here they have been stranded, and the pretty parrot they’ve caught is the first modulation in their alternation between pure silence and the experience of those syllables, which end up being for all their discordancy highly institutionalized and consistent, because they tell the same stories, because these are the stories of their lives, and they lack insight, or in any event, they have heretofore lacked a parrot, and so they grew bored with each other, and then they grew wretched, and then they grew silent, and there is nothing more wretched than a wretched silent set of pirates without a ship and without a parrot. One day they would, at once, as a silent group have decided they might try the storytelling again, and all would repeat just the same way — between timbral malaria and shipwreck) manage to be delivered, the traveler, or really whether to deliver oneself, to a sympathy for the troglodytes; this is the overarching matter under which the miniature rustic plots of the pirate tales play, each tale crying “pity me, pity me, pity me” like the mouths of the newhatched altrice and “feed me, feed me, feed me” like the altrices too because a few of them are also considering — since they think this is a possibility — putting their parrot on a skewer and turning it slowly, when the moon comes up behind the ‘palazzo’, which the Italian pirate named their hovel; these pirates are not nearly the most fearsome and piratical that ever sailed, but they are the model of a certain type of human foundering and shipwreck, far from home, with answers abounding and bobbing in the glassy, endless sea as numerous and as easily grasped as handfuls of plankton. “There is a certain music, a certain jig, to the workaday prayers sung by they, who lived without mercy, to their merciless god of signal fires.” This is the remark that might be placed by someone who is literate but ultimately untutored in mastmaking or shipwreck, on the smuggled bundle entire. Can we now detail some of these pirate tales? Is it worth doing that?