Fictions – Logomancy

Tomahawk Sal’s Complaint

One of the projects I began working on last summer was a science fiction novel about an artist who works on stories in a Western genre. This framing device surrounds a sub plot which is an American Western retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. The novel is in a rough an unedited state, but the following lyrics are from that sub-story. The character of Tomahawk Sal is a version of Innana, the Sumerian goddess of erotic love and death, cum Calamity Jane of Deadwood fame. She is also something of a witch. Sal’s lovelorn complaint for the attentions of the main character echo a similar episode from the Gilgamesh epic, and is voiced as a campfire song after being transmitted into the speech of the Enkidu character, known as Hard Luck. Tomahawk Sal is also a mélange of other mythic and liminal figures, including Baba Yaga, Hecate, and Olive Oatman, a frontier woman from Illinois, who was captured and raised by Apache Indians in the 1850s.

Love me in the haylofts
Above the cattle lowing,
Or love me off in golden fields
Before the reaper starts a-mowing.

Your love is like a winter wind,
Slinking in through gaping chinks.
Your hearth is cold and ashen,
A chain of broken links.

Will you not love me in the corn?
No, the corn is green and sour.
Will you love me in the barley, then?
Alas ’tis poor man’s flour

Will you love me where the wild goose flies?
The cliff is perilous and steep.
Then love me where the jackdaw nests?
Her voice is harsh and cheap.

Love me in the bell tower
While the pious mime their praying,
Or under mourning willow
With leaves so gently swaying.

Your love is like a lightning fire,
Running o’er droughted grass.
Your love is hard and stinging,
Like the drover’s flashing lash.

My love is true, my hair is silky,
My ankles white and dainty.

My arm is strong my wisdom keen
My spirit one third saintly.

My love is true, my fingers fine,
My plaints entreat thee “ruth.”

Your hair is grey your face is lined
I spurn your love for sooth.

Then curses I’ll heap upon you
Upon your sons and daughters:
May your lands be barren wastes
And brackish be your waters;

May your fence posts fall to splinters
Your bullets fall meek and harmless;
May your herds incline to wander
And your horses flee the harness;

May dogs snap at your heel spurs
And fortune always spurn you;
While ravens mock your daily toils
And haints be bound beside you.

Sneak Peek

NYRB edition of Nightmare Alley / William L. Gresham

I am just starting with William L. Gresham‘s Nightmare Alley as I continue to read film adapted novels. After only the introduction I am pretty sure that this will darkly outshine even the most recent movie adaptation by Guillermo del Toro, which, by the way, I loved. This appears to be the real deal as far as the author is concerned, and it turns out that Gresham was a student of Ouspensky as well. He is talking the talk, in other words, and this looks to be an insightful read. The grim stars are all aligned on this one, so, let’s cut the cards and see what the future holds.

Descriptive Muchness: a narrative fragment

To the northeast the beach continued along as straight as a razor until its sandy edge eventually merged into the slate grey of the sea and sky in a triple vanishing point of morning drizzle, only just beginning to show the pink and golden flecks of a still uncertain sunrise, lurking just below the horizon line of Neptune’s watery realm.

In the opposite direction, the strand continued along for about a mile of open shore, bounded on the landward side by a wide and up-built concrete promenade overlooked by a seemingly endless line of dreary and desolate hotel high-rises, now all but abandoned, their black gaping windows like empty sockets in a mirthless jester’s grin.

The slightly arcing line of sand and sea terminated abruptly to the south, truncated by the great pier, demarked dimly by the haze smeared warning lights, which kept its linear bulk distinct from the yawning chasm of the night shadowed sea.

The twinkling halogen line extended perpendicularly out into the susurrating breakers before abruptly vanishing into an abyssal gloom, a limit beyond which all was shrouded in the impenetrable mists and fog choked atmosphere of the still-not-yet-dawn.

Except for one winking golden globe at the farthest edge of visibility, a trawler’s searching beam, perhaps, floating on an indistinct boundary of dark on dark, which vaguely separated the under deep from that greater depth of space above, which sheltered, beetling over. And this distant lamp so bewitched and beckoned the eye, that it was like some maritime willow-the-wisp of ancient fancy, steering the drowsy beachcomber’s weaving walk, ever so slightly towards its numinous pull, so that pant cuffs, incautiously unrolled, became suddenly salt sodden in the foaming thrusts of shushing surf, pouncing abruptly at the stillness of the shore.