The Ecteiroglyphs of the Lorwolm

XLI. An Army of Yellow Horses

2011-05-14T10:36:00.000-07:00

In the ladder gyre of the Age of Eichenblon's Crater:

One scanty quarrel wakens an army of yellow horses
While the flat ghosts of thirty slain captives unfold
Between the furrowed skin of orphaned wealth.
One known detail of a buried inmate's lost promise
Illuminates the harmony between earth and sheaf.

The tradition of giving shelter to the fugitive
Aids the aged deity followed by unarmed guardians.
False alliances will guide the hidden rescuers
Along a journey of avoidance and encounter.

Alone in a boat without oars, a swimmer
Carries to his ship a round portion of felt
Chased with the fourth eye of chaos repeated.

XL. The Cinct Generations

2010-09-07T12:14:00.000-07:00

In the gyre eclipsed of the Age of the Good Remainder:

Technological obsessions rule the cinct generations
While four times turns the cycle of Nousparltut.
When elections filled with distortion and fanaticism
Bring fatal strategies as incessant as monsoon rains,
A natal chart is drawn for a second birth in winter.

Grassroot forces hide three counterspies within the house
Marked by a golden thorn under spirituous water
And by the instalment of pierced casements uplifted
Over laments of oceangoing brides written in drawn wire.

The three are unreliably known, and laughingly,
As the Invertebrate, the Witness, and the Libertine,
In a common language of unlicensed supplicants.

XXXIX. In orchards rough-handled by hope

2010-08-29T02:07:00.000-07:00

In the hooded gyre of the Age of Eichenblon's Crater:

Descendants of Azargalatzin, known as the Pryoglau,
Court, love and marry like the native bees
Who overwinter in hollow stems of bamboo,
And house their families behind walls of mud
In orchards rough-handled by the hopes of spring.

A compass wall separates the northernmost hotels
From the city divided into schools and embassies,
Where nomenclature and mansions are never remade.
A boundary tower is a major landmark of atonement.

A nation of faith is slow to regenerate after plague and fire;
Treaties are secret and documents of science are censored.
A polyglot violation of sentiment and status brings upheaval.

The Name of God

2010-08-18T12:29:00.000-07:00

Ga-ukogomen asked me, while I was drawing the markings above, "What do you think they are?"

"I don't know," I replied.

"Ignorance never stopped one of your kind from thinking." That sounds like he was sneering, but I don't think he was. Ga-ukogomen has an ego, which is very evident, but I do not assume I am able to understand how his ego works.

I paused and looked at my paper for a moment, but I really did not need time to consider it. "I think they are the names of God," I said.

"You don't believe in God, you are an atheist," said Ga-ukogomen.

I know it does not make sense, but that's what I feel when I am drawing these things. Like I am writing the name of God. "Maybe I'm a bad atheist, or a lapsed atheist," I told Ga-ukogomen. "It is not an easy thing to be."

I had been eating peanuts earlier; there were a few scattered shells on the table. I watched Ga-ukogomen peck at them and wondered why he needed to feign a bird's inquisitiveness. "They might not be the names of God, but they are names, right?" I asked him.

"All names are the names of God," he said.

I tried to hide my frustration. "That does not actually answer my question."

"All names are the names of God," he repeated.

"How can you say that? You are a far better atheist than I can ever hope to be." Ga-ukogomen, Nihr Avna-attu and Tsitao-utna have lived and died untold number of times, and have never encountered God. All three angels are convinced atheists.

"When all names are the names of God, it is easy to be an atheist." Ga-ukogomen abandoned the peanut shells and pretended to be interested in the sugar bowl. "You can hope."

Drawing angels

2010-08-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

This is a portrait of the three angels of the Lorwolm.

Ga-ukogomen is the largest figure in the center. Nihr Avna-attu is the figure on the right, Tsitao-utna is on the left, and on the far left is a fourth angel, an entity named Yohrdith Eondhel. He is a faint presence in this picture because I have met him only once.

I met the new angel in the grocercy store. I was in the pasta aisle, gazing at jars of Newman's Own spaghetti sauce, when I became aware of someone standing close beside me, at least a foot taller than me. I turned and looked up into a face that bore a smooth porcelain resemblance to a young Paul Newman, as Nathan Hale perhaps, or Billy the Kid from The Left Handed Gun. A Paul Newman with long hair in greenish brown Pre-Raphaelite curls, more green than brown. He was the biggest, most solid, most human-looking angel I had ever seen, with the round limbs of angels in Italian Renaissance paintings, best described by the word "comely". He was dressed in a dull red t-shirt and worn-out jeans, and for a moment I thought, no, this cannot be an angel, this must be another shopper. Then I noticed he was barefoot, and his feet were clean and pale. I looked back at his face and I no longer saw anything like Paul Newman because that face was composed in a serenity I am sure no living human can achieve.

A feeling like terror clutches my heart when the Lorwolm appear, but it is not terror. It is a physical clenching; it is my body's recognition of an angel's presence. I felt this signal while standing in the grocery store beside this angel who seemed to be studying a dead man's face on spaghetti sauce jars.

"He wears a different hat," the angel spoke. It sounded like a solemn pronouncement of great significance.

"Who wears a different hat?" I asked.

He lifted the index finger of his left hand in answer and pointed to a label on one of the jars. His finger stopped an inch short of touching the jar, but the jar jerked and rattled against the other jars. The angel lowered his hand. The jars became still.

"Who are you?" I asked.

The angel turned his eyes to me. They seemed to be perfectly normal eyes, I was glad to see. They were clear and beautiful, gray-blue in color.

"I am your death beyond hell," said the angel.

That was a nasty shock. "You are my death beyond hell? What are you talking about? There is no hell, right?" Ga-ukogomen had told me there is no hell. It is not needed. Human souls manage to punish themselves more than adequately.

"I am not your death. I am..." he began to speak slowly and with empahasis, "...your...death...eyond...hell."

"I don't get it. You are not my death, but you are my death beyond hell?"

"No. No. My name is not "my death". My name is Your Death Eyond Hell." He peered at me with a look of bemused anxiety that made him seem quite human.

"Your name is Your Death--wait a minute." It finally occured to me why we were misunderstanding each other. "Spell it. Spell your name in English, can you do that?"

"Surely. I can spell my name in thirty-three languages and fourteen alphabets." His smile was beatific, his tone was supercilious. Until I met one, I never realized how much angels like to brag about themselves.

That was my introduction to Yohrdith Eondhel, three months ago. I have not seen him since.

The Fourth Day

2010-08-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

I "forgot" to put away Tsitao-utna's pencil. The next morning (on the fourth day), in the middle of eating my oatmeal, I picked up the pencil and doodled this on the back of an envelope:

Six Gackles, One Robin, Twelve Blue Feathers

2010-08-12T10:20:00.000-07:00

I walk two miles to the post office every weekday and nearly every Saturday, to pick up my mail. Approximately every week, usually on a Wednesday, I walk the same distance (but in a different direction) to the library. On most Sundays I walk to a Catholic church a mile and a half away, but I do not go to mass, I just walk back, sometimes stopping for a bagel on the way home. That is my excercise program in its entirety. Last Wednesday I returned from my walk to the library and opened my front door to find Tsitao-utna strongly present in the house. Even though I stood only in the front hallway, I felt like she filled every room. Her presence oppressed me with urgency as I hurried to the kitchen, and I was so awkward in my haste I almost dropped her blue blowl as I removed it from the cupboard. As soon as I set her bowl and pencil on the table, she spoke. Her voice was harsh, hurried, and full of metallic clicks. She said a single phrase: "Siksga kelzwun rahben." And then she was gone, and the house was clear of all sense of her occupation.

Her abrupt departure left me a little shaken and I sat down in a chair, plopped like a sack of potatoes. I sat there for a while, staring at her bowl, thinking of nothing much. Eventually I heard a tick-tick-tick at the window and I looked up. A tiny gray bird was pecking at the window frame. It was Ga-ukogomen in his kinglet smallform. I hastened to my feet and opened the window. It is a peculiar thing to hear words of unmistakable clarity spoken from the beak of a bird. You almost feel you should look for a puppeteer or a ventriloquist. Ga-ukogomen spoke only five words before he flicked away through the Tecomaria vines that crowd the light from that window. He said, "You need paper and coffee."

After I made coffee, I sat down at the table with my mug and a piece of typing paper. I stared at Tsitao-utna's bowl and pencil, drinking my coffee, trying not to think about what I was going to draw. Messages from the Lorwolm are not meant for me, and I believe I might damage the conduit of transmission if I try to interpret them while I am in the process of writing them down for the first time. After I have written them down, clear and complete, a certain order might suggest itself, and only then do I allow myself to edit.

This is what I wrote:

I left the bowl, pencil and paper on the table. The next day, I added this to the first drawing:

On the third day, I added this:

I was staring at the page, wondering if I was finished, wondering if there was another line or squiggle I needed to draw, when a flicker at the edge of my eyesight made me look up. Ga-ukogomen was perched on the back of the chair opposite me, snapping his wings as birds do when they are setting their feathers into order.

He repeated Tsitao-utna's phrase, "Siksga kelzwun rahben." Except this time I heard, "Six gackles, one robin." And Ga-ukogomen extended it, so the whole sentence became "Six gackles, one robin, twelve blue feathers."

"It will be the name of the last Mesiok, " Ga-ukogomen added. "She will not leave this planet until the second gyre of the Four Wandering Moons."

When the Lorwolm use the term "leave this planet", I think they are talking about death, but I am not sure. They might be referring to a journey. To the Lorwolm, death and life are part of the same journey. They do not think of death as an absence of life, since they have died and lived many times. They regard death as a process of life, and fear it no more than we fear things like sleeping and digestion.

"Will she be an important person?" I asked Ga-ukogomen, but as soon as I spoke I realized it was an unnecessary question. Everything the Lorwolm tell me will have significance, some day in the future.

"She will be the last Mesiok," Ga-ukogomen repeated. "Her name will be a key to a locked book and a doom to a continent."

XXXVIII. The bandaged cardinal

2010-06-26T15:28:00.000-07:00

In the third gyre of the Age of the Nascent Vaunthald:

Poisoned battalions ride as if on the ocean, awed by cold,
Suffering optical storms of transparent shadows
Magnified by the fierce temper of galling suns.
This sleep of opiates stretches its illusion on all sides,
No distant landmark breaks the monotony of its fragile glory.

The bandaged cardinal, born in the delicate ruin of a
Narrow six-story mansion, a bitter man with little regard
For marbled halls, abandons his beggarly church
And succors the remote expedition to the Byalkakeyl Zone.

A new vital energy is found in this itinerant branch
Of an ancient dissolute family. With rigor and purpose
A disquieted soul proves its genuine worth.

XXXVII. A flooded city falls diminished

2010-06-24T12:07:00.000-07:00

In the ladder gyre of the Age of the Glass Council:

Where kings once toiled as goldsmiths and soldiers,
Where merchant princes financed poets and popes,
A flooded city falls diminished, its stout walls of honor
Shadowed by wet decadance, an ambitious mausoleum
Under trees with violet-eyed blooms and lush dark fruit.

Seven immodest artists challenged seven bullish judges
In laborous directions, two double-edged swords
At right angles to each structure of the foreordained body.
But they could not gain new force from the ceremonies.

Lost is the wealth of precision built by scholars
Who wrote their own fame, decided their own destiny.
Genius cannot collaborate with hierarchy.

XXXVI. A plague of austere years

2010-02-28T17:12:00.000-08:00

In the seventh gyre of the Age of the Immersed Desolation:

When a summer wind brings a plague of austere years
To snowy boderlands, ten thousand cypress boughs
Will freeze upon glass pedestals. This formidable threshold
To patrimonial fortunes of haughty merchants, unbound
By constitutional restraint, is overturned and cleansed.

The pale-faced enemy, who sold pies in the cast-down streets,
Sits on a broken turret stone, smoke rising from his clothes
Crusted with a red plaster of thick blood and wood ashes.
His sharp head is uplifted, his hair drips with black ribbons.

In the absence of liberality, all winds chasten bitter shelters
For the intact soul: houses gone, chimneys fallen amid
White wings of paper and floating particles of thin ice.

XXXV. The Boar's enlightenment

2010-02-20T21:22:00.000-08:00

In the clauted (cleated?) gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

Ringing sparks rise at the strike of a sharp wheel
Against a charred crucifix sheathed in square iron,
Wrapt in the mystery of the swift-coming collapse.
A future shaped around nine days of storming fire,
Final proof absorbed in burned stones still steaming.

A barefooted visitor with red eyes, crouched shoulders
And coy palms disembarks from an enclosed courtyard
In a maze of shrines. At 36 years of age, this lone Boar,
Unfit for the purpose, is briefly allowed to hold dominion.

Unable to avoid unyielding strain after a sleepless year,
A necessary act haunts the Boar's enlightenment
As revelation continues in pages in the fourth part.

XXXIV. An obsidian burl

2009-12-27T15:01:00.000-08:00

In the ladder gyre of the Age of Broeudhe-bas:

Grimm's lawyer gains the heir to a corpse of hardened ash—
His first voyage of spiritual apocalypse will be undertaken upon
The tipping point of ten thousand tons of monastery burnt black;
His psalms of revelatory verse, lacking pain and fevered speech,
Grinned without color, discount his claim to lyrics of fire.

Brittle monstrosities surface in data from scientific journals,
From skeletal pages fragile, faintly yellow and nearly
Transparent.
Asymmetrical bodies, earthen and nightmarish, emerge from
Paper folded
In unquiet thirds, rashly unearthed from extinct sediments.

Disrupted small light begins to swirl within an obsidian burl
Separated from the good and secretly buried under soil
Once the ruins of a winter empire in the valley of the sun.

XXXIII. Three Silences

2009-11-19T19:56:00.000-08:00

In the second gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

The infected hermitage looms over exiled roofs,
An island in a sea of wide chimneys crumbling,
The heated metal edge of its the ridgepole steaming
In sleet rain falling, sifted by winds, while shadows
And doubted apparitions root themselves in water.

Three silences dowered with outside properties,
Three ghosts obedient to outside laws, each carrying
All their owned disbelief: a woman protected by a shroud
Of flinching caterpillars, her right eye is blue—

Two malign green eyes carved in the upraised hands
Of a stony saint—and a child prodigy skull-split
With ink-dark blood braided into an imperial coat.

XXXII. The red-masked summer

2009-11-08T15:39:00.000-08:00

In the gyre vaunted of the Age of the Tilpimultuk Truce:

Strife in the skittish beginning of the red-masked summer—
Several hooded, whispering devils appear on the eclipse;
They stand outside doors of imminent peril yet never enter,
While odd and discordant young frogs overrun all the land,
Crying loud and full-throated, for two hundred and
Twenty hours.

A wise and subtle advocate suffers a transformation on the
Fourth day
After the first volumes of his monumental work are published
By virtue of his office. He is led by a string of sudden and
Desperate crimes
Into brotherhood with pirates, abiding day and night in
Their ships.

Within a small empty village a white-soled girl hallucinates,
Her tears astir with joy and hope, dreaming from perilous
Heights,
Winged as the sunbird, in circling flight above a twice-blest
Realm.

XXXI. A map of midwinter stars

2009-11-07T04:30:00.000-08:00

In the seventh gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

The eighth man laid upon a rough table is the largest object
Within a single niche lighted by wax candles carved
With a red crescent moon and a map of midwinter stars.
This spare form is dressed in ragged and torn cloth,
The raiment of those that are slain by their own hand.

His banner is a yellow sycamore leaf torn and caught under
The wooden haft of a knife sunk deep in a gentle heart.
His feet point towards a door low in the western wall,
Towards a destination that must be reached by discovery.

His head rests on clay bricks stamped with the edge
Of finger-rings.
His legacy bequeaths the stilled heat and light of day,
In four mismatched jars, to forty-four thousand children.

XXX. The king's niece

2009-11-04T12:15:00.000-08:00

In the dialected gyre of the Age of the Yequirthed Crisis:

Three sons and a daughter of a northern king,
Exiled in silence—
Nothing known of their unexplained crime and shame—
Are harassed by the fearsome army of the king's niece,
A warrior much renowned for her great malice, cruelty of will,
And the thick veil shrouding her forehead and left eye.

Pity her, this gnawed figure of strange vibrant power
Wrapt in clouds of catastrophe half like blood,
Half like fire, forever in the shadow of her white brother,
Who died at ten years, his tongue thickened with poison.

By cause and reason of pain, and by reason of guilt,
She will endure the continuous suffering of one accursed;
Only to strangers in battle does she ever seem fortunate.

XXIX. To the wife of Goats-for-Horses

2009-11-02T10:54:00.000-08:00

In the fourth gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

An interpretation of a wild dream half-remembered:
The stones of the pit cast out of your stripped grave
Will be trodden under foot by your foolish beloved,
Who will emerge from middle bones and other books,
Waiting for the sky to break over lost deserts, lost islands.

Your husband's spirit-stirring drums will speak fear
To a god in a crest of birch-trees on a gray-clouded rock.
He brings forth the roaring of the seawall taken down,
Decimating a becalmed population steadfast in its refusal.

All those who have come before will ascend soundlessly
Upon the abdomen's third mute breath. Thus cleansed
And lightened, they fly to the Dome of Intermittency.

XXVIII. A battered limestone head

2009-11-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

In the clauted (cleated?) gyre of the Age of the Good Remainder:

After feigning death, the secondary wife of the white
Moth pharaoh
Provides part of the key to unlock the wooden shrine
Of the mysterious occupant of the Dessoae tomb,
The faceless hero with a battered limestone head
Sheathed in pearls, his skull pierced with a gold arrow.

The noble face on the unstained coffin had been broken
In the notorious century following its discovery,
Needlessly mutilated by the hostile scrutiny of scholars
Seeking clues without the holy quality of mercy.

Forty minutes before an unequalled storm of rain and fire,
Earthquakes and gravity halted the discredited work;
Two upper spans of majestic high-ceilinged rooms
Were obliterated.

XXVII. The penitent coward

2009-11-01T14:10:00.000-08:00

In the fifth gyre of the Age of the Middle Gohlguanarchy:

A bone-linked pair of poets die without heirs in year 13.
Their unrhymed words strike bronze upon a secret chamber
Beneath a vacant labyrinth: two royal monuments
Carved into the skull shape of mummified fetuses
With four miniature faces of goat, ram, boar, stag.

The penitent coward who was never a killer,
A conqueror, or a liberator, finds himself far from his goal.
He becomes the blackskin companion of a hired archaeologist
Whose knowledge of his monstrous subject is unique.

They unearth the abandoned book of a heretic coregent;
This burned and scratched object of temporal power
Seizes weak minds with dreamless sleep and early death.

XXVI. Agot's piteous error

2009-10-28T16:11:00.000-07:00

In the hooded gyre of the Age of the Bunin Kings:

First introduced under obscure names and disguises,
The Fool with a narrow forehead and one subdued eye,
Cloaked within a foxskin hood with tail dangling,
Will confound the throned monarch wrapt in pease-straw,
Whose cold wounded hand grasps two fatal aspects.

At the hastened hour of the forthcoming Sun,
Malice in the blood whips the summer sea high.
With all dread ramifications of Agot's piteous error,
Floodwaters shatter the immense vault of the quarry fortress.

The burning children of Anterrabae and Shukimanu
Walk in the master's footsteps, house to house,
Village to village, clothed in unapproachable light.

XXV. Three silent virtues

2009-06-25T08:15:00.000-07:00

In the itinerant gyre of the Age of the Sinquel Memorial:

The clouded child marked with royal wounds and
Grievous wonder,
Born in subdued circumstances to a wedded pair of captains
During the ice-locked border-war between winter nations,
Will unshaken bear the assault of glorious engines,
Their rude throated noises become his summer lullabies.

When twelve years older, the boy will meet with much
Injustice;
All quality, pride and circumstance becomes counterfeit.
The narrow line of ambition fails with unlucky deeds;
Faith nailed down hard to a well-worn place can yet be lost.

In solitude, with tranquil mind, fate recovers the gentle skill
Of three silent virtues felt along the heart of the man,
Immortal richness greater than the tribute of all his tribe.

XXIV. Lightened by one alone

2009-06-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

In the gyre eclipsed of the Shielded Immaltant:

The congregated powers of heaven's antique empire,
Built on eldest faith, tainted by cruelty, stained by blood,
Will make garden cities into a lampless unpeopled world
Lightened by one alone, whose fierce reproach and
Reluctant prayer
Hurls up a tinge of gray in the void world.

Thirty witnesses will return, with thirty infants,
Nameless vagrant dwellers in houseless woods
Walled with witchcraft and flower-inwoven jasper,
Green to the very door of the long absence.

Seven common names of the unextinguished fire,
Stamped onto the frame of twelve windows in one form,
Usurp the codex vigilans of the unremembered throne.

More doodles from Tsitao-utna's pencil

2009-06-01T13:32:00.000-07:00

Tsitao-utna's pencil

2009-05-31T12:39:00.000-07:00

The smallform of Tsitao-utna is invisible, but her herald, her sigil, is a small blue bowl. When she wishes to speak to me, I take the bowl from its place in the cupboard and set it on the table and put a pencil beside it. Her voice comes from a place 14 diumalks above the bowl. A diumalk is approximately a half-inch, according to Tsitao-utna.

Through a period of trial and error, I discovered that Tsitao-utna prefers a Turquoise drawing pencil with a soft dark lead, 6B. With this sort of pencil, she seems to converse longer and more naturally, with less distraction. She often seems hurried when she speaks and I believe I can perceive a certain tension in her voice. I think she is intimidated by Ga-ukogomen. Sometimes when she speaks to me, I imagine her looking over her shoulder, afraid she will see the na-awult. I imagine her as a young woman, with long dark hair, very straight and waist-length. I have no real reason to picture her this way, but that is the image her voice sounds like.

One day, a few hours after she had spoken to me, I picked up her pencil and began to doodle. The marks I drew are represented below in figure 1. This has happened to me many times since. I don't know what they mean, just as I don't know what the ecteiroglyphs mean, but I have ideas. I think the first doodle represents Tsitao-utna in some way. I believe figure 3 is a representation of Ga-ukogomen and figure 4 is about Nihr Avna-attu. I don't know if these doodles are their names in written form, or if these figures tell a part of their stories, like a lineage or a history. I have to conclude that these forms are for the future to decipher and are not for me to know. I am just the stenographer.

The forms that are closed are filled with yellow color because I feel it is somehow important to emphasize that those forms are closed. The forms that are unclosed, that have gaps between the lines, have a different significance than the closed forms.

XXIII: Books of a feather-robed sage

2009-04-09T05:45:00.000-07:00

In the sixth gyre of the Age of Four Wandering Moons:

A new mood stirs under those yellow leafed boughs
Which shake
Within the impressed abstraction of scrolls from both
17th centuries.
A spring of words overflows the closest drawn goal in steel—
Poetry generated in a wide range of free-given street noise,
Raising delicate hopes for the strength of the resolved city.

The first two lines of the books of a feather-robed sage
Written on a thousand rolls of silk kept for all good:
Elusive time immediately experienced is frequently unfair.
Question or believe, but light travels slowly within the grave.

From the tale of the count who has not yet named a successor:
The countess arrays her daughter in her most resplendent robes
Clear-cut as laquered satin, gently shaped as the lining
Of a seashell.

XXII. Illuminating the lotus spirit

2009-04-08T11:04:00.000-07:00

In the fortenth gyre of the Age of the Nascent Vaunthald:

The hooded frog, a great silver boss on its iron forehead,
Stands above the red cedar temple for seven hundred years,
Guarding the imperial headdress wrapped with silk wires.
Granite clouds coiled and dusky loom over balanced pools
Illuminating the lotus spirit before the perception of every eye.

A rough devouring entity with no rules or principles
Will live unknown and dominate the hollow crown;
According to true etiquette he had vowed his constancy
To an allegiance lost not in fire nor earth but in water.

Black rain sickness will lay siege swift as a shadow,
Livid outlines forming round the mark of measuring metal
Stamped in the reddened throat of the secret usurper.

XXI. A fatal child

2009-04-05T21:52:00.000-07:00

In the ladder gyre in the Age of the Bunin Kings:

Behold, in a field thick inlaid with yellow patines
Of summer roses,
The flower of men, a fatal child driven by the deep power of joy,
Indifferent to restless violence surrounding the pendant world,
Ignorant of the bright sunset gold of painted pomp and blind
To the glare of glass thrones charged with mystic change.

A long entwisted circle of allies bound by sympathy in blood
To this Queen, will stand in her proper greatness and hold out
Against great thousands, when monarchs play the tyrants
In the barren mile of the Mediterranean's common age.

The Kindly Race, never-resting, with gentle work
And endless care,
Diffuse the false art of ancestral sermons wreathed
In golden theaters,
Unloosing the chained foot of cold winged Oumesan.

XX. The ironic peer

2009-04-02T15:25:00.000-07:00

In the second gyre of the Age of the Glass Council:

The herald of a hideous winter, careless of what he brings,
Comes with stout rage strapped hard to the locked thunder
Of heavy machinery lumbering under the inland sea.
His rude marshal counts random correlations and predictions
In a given splatter of yolk, wine, grain and gravel.

A seafaring force from the cavernous island of adamantine
Confounds him with news from all emerging nations
And a patriot's blood well-spent in a blinding landscape
Of milk-white sand overflown with the divinity of myth.

The ironic peer, drawing a line of natural light
And simple color
With a cart map and tripod compass, will guide the flagship
Through unwilling sleep, driven outward into godlike hardship.

XIX. The fall of Nagarjuna

2009-03-31T12:00:00.000-07:00

In the gyre vaunted of the Last Gohlguanarchy:

Eighteen thousand watch a stark dorsal cross rise
In the sky behind the toxic brim of Jirreshnag's moon
Fallen in dim eclipse, air shorn of disastrous twilight.
The sole ruined shareholder of an isolate empire
Sends them forth into serried ranks of horizontal mist.

Their passage through air begins with a pair of hours
When the broad sun new-risen weighs heavily between
Two slaves.
The second one in the light of a double-edged threat
Cuts and binds brass and stone to blunt the lion's paws.

Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
Nagarjuna's gates of steel in rocks impregnable
Are no stronger than summer's honey breath.

The Ecteiroglyphs by Paul Holman at Geometer

2008-12-17T18:11:00.001-08:00

This is a link...

...for an article about the Ecteiroglyphs, by Paul Holman in the online magazine Geometer.

XVII. The serpent's skull

2008-05-14T16:28:00.000-07:00

In the sixth gyre of the Age of the Good Remainder:

A multitude of believers follow the dog-headed beggar
Over darkening thresholds and under sheer canopies
Of ceremonial pavilions standing fast in the
Churning current.
The rushing darkness is partially broken by reflections
Of a shower of gems through the spiked wheel.

After arguing with a bull-throated pagan disguised as
A hermit,
The Moskeel in a threadbare coat and a crown of nails,
With the devil on a leash, gives up his kingdom
For a broken cup, a basket of quail, and a branch
Of oranges.

Entangled hands form into an inverted bowl
That hides an alabaster box that holds
The serpent's skull carved from green-tinged ivory.

XVI. The noble dwarf's watchman

2008-05-10T20:54:00.000-07:00

In the gyre vaunted of the Age of Eichenblon's Crater:

The pyre of the mob does not satisfy the vengeance
Of the excommunicated tribe of the Northern Deep.
The subtle blood of this breed becomes infirm
With smoke;
They tremble behind a line of unnatural towers
And draw their harmless swords against themselves.

After Orion's third sister marries the noble dwarf's
Watchman,
Her indifference becomes reluctance and regret.
They are parted as her carriage passes slowly
Through the gate of recent woe, never to meet again.

Opposite a vine-clustered chair two faces are depicted,
One in the forlorn grandeur of eternal marble,
The other in the dead shrewdness of sullen iron.

XV. The poet's wife

2008-05-07T14:50:00.000-07:00

In the seventh gyre of the Age of Broeudhe-bas:

The poet's wife pregnant with eminent consequences,
Digging dreams in a narrow circle of fading light,
Loses faith in her star and yields up a ghost.
Winter's first message freezes her inside her coat,
A garment of parched grass and scraps of paper.

Two wild beasts uniformed with brilliant cloth,
Strong in talents, character and property,
Rise in opposition to an antiquated system
Gathered round a dangerous madman.

Three half-brothers sleep in the grasp of a
Curious transformation;
After three years, they will be unearthed
From their tombs
In the last gray hour of Saint Dymphaena's morning.

An Unpleasant Dialect

2008-05-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

When I wrote that Nihr Avna-attu knows twenty-seven human languages, I perhaps should have mentioned that he/she knows sixty-two inhuman languages as well. Or so he/she told me, and then demonstrated one of those languages with a sentence that sounded like a teapot whistling on a television channel full of static, but with a strong animal nasality modulating it. Very unpleasant to my earth-born ears. Nihr Avna-attu said it was from a dialect of intelligent beings that lived on a planet too distant from our world for any kind of contact with earthlings. Their species died out about seven hundred years ago.

I wonder if referring to Nihr Avna-attu as "it" would be less clumsy than "he/she"? Or would it be more confusing? I wonder which would be more accurate?

XIV. Falling salamanders on the wing

2008-05-03T12:23:00.000-07:00

In the third gyre of the Age of Eichenblon's Crater

The bald standard-bearer marked by the severity
Of her injury:
She hides herself in manacles and loses the use
Of her hands
For the duration of the Winter of Stone Grass and
Brown Ice.
When the links of frost come unhinged,her grasp
Is re-built
By the clock-makers of a far city in the West.

While following a strange course through black mist
On the path to catastrophe on the mountain of shadows,
She is trusted by falling salamanders on the wing
With no gentle sentiment in their ponderous eyes.

An unseen hand digging between mortar and stone
Yields a ghost with a dragon's claw scribed upon his
Funereal bands.
The countersign is the facsimile of a scarlet ornament.

The Lorwolm Index

XIII. A blueprint from a madmen's reveries

2008-05-02T08:15:00.000-07:00

In the clauted (cleated?) gyre of the Age of the Nascent Vaunthald:

With a blueprint from a madmen's reveries
And the hands of the forerunners of Thessarret,
A wanderer builds a new house of pale green jade.
The stone walls cast their shadow upon a stately cedar
In the old castle garden of Aureospa's grave.

War will come to the hollow streets of the outer verge:
The cloud-fringed vanguard fights in silence,
Bearing black dishonor along with misfortune,
Scorned by all those who battle beside them.

At the appointed hour between three citadels,
The ashen-haired servant with tattooed hands
Will claim the natural shelter of her attending blood.

XII. Overtaken by the Dawn-breaker

2008-04-30T08:50:00.000-07:00

In the second gyre of the Age of Four Wandering Moons:

A critical juncture will be overtaken by
The Dawn-breaker;
Queer and base, his sublimity is barely perceptible;
Cunning and brave, no-one will judge him at his
True value.
Three unimpeachable historians will call him villain,
A shabby clown performing in tapestried parlors.

In iron shoes and a steel jacket with prismatic
Dorsal plates,
A prisoner languishing in the cavern of a hundred walls,
Retains stewardship of ten thousand illuminated
Manuscripts.
Light and glory, honors and commendations, reward
Her perseverance.

Parched encroachments into every water on earth
Will be forestalled by a deep reservoir for the
Entire planet;
The lion's share for two million in the sacrificed
Territories.

XI. A summer's marriage-feast despoiled

2008-04-29T11:27:00.000-07:00

In the dialected gyre of the Age of the Middle Gohlguanarchy:

From a summer's marriage-feast despoiled in reel
And rout,
The knight stands aloof; he wears upon his shield
The puppet crown
And slays with his sword fifteen long-suffering captives.
In thirty long years he will defeat twelve generals,
Burn ten churches, demolish ten temples, and build
Ten cities.

His denatured bride, widely praised and most
Closely guarded,
Arises with his silver-bedecked allies to supplant him.
The perfect cavalier cannot comprehend this opportunity
For ambush;
In the absence of the sun, fountains spring like a cloud
Of fire.

In a great arc she brings down the cursed hilt of
His saber,
Forged in witch's oils burnt green, blue and white,
Which fractures his unwary skull but does not kill him.

X. Quaint and infamous traditions

2008-04-26T23:59:00.000-07:00

In the itinerant gyre of the Age of the Yequirthed Crisis:

Quaint and infamous traditions prevail after
The quakes
Caused by the gravitational anomalies
Of the Y1 asteroids.
Sailors melt down the entrails of manatees for salt;
Soldiers carve hawthorn for bullets and scatter
Poppy seeds and amaranth before the thrones of infants.

Such is the fruitfulness of the original chaos:
Green child-like primates, clothed with flames,
Living along rivers and streams, bury their coffins
Filled with rich food and eat dirt from their tombs.

Gypsy bandits paint the thumbs of sleeping travelers
Held in place by a circle of rice paper and javelins,
Secured by their necks and shoulders with violin strings.

IX. A vampire tainted by burnt blood

2008-04-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

In the sixth gyre of the Age of the Yequirthed Crisis:

On the crib of a child born with a caul
A starling finds the inscription of the Venirregantha
And tells of seventeen boundaries of existence.
A new voyage around the world will measure
The demeaned climates of several coasts and islands.

The torture of pilgrims of a children's crusade
Along the borders of the Field of Wrathful Dieties,
Will be avenged
By a bronze-footed creature, a vampire tainted
By burnt blood,
Victim of murder on the adjacent soil of Letlapa.

Foxes and jackals swim through black water beneath
The cleft gate
On the near side of Royal Asia's western fortification,
Descending into the belly of the largest kitchen of five.

VIII. The towers of the humming world

2008-04-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

In the fourth gyre of the Age of Eichenblon's Crater:

All things are parallel, yet many are askew,
And a new leaf will be locked fast into a skin
Of consequences.
Across the wine-soaked fields of chamomile and poppy
Stand and fall the towers of the humming world;
White crows feed on the seven spleens of the coastal
Wardens.

A dusty adder marks the grim man's mossy face
With the bloody token of the mercury ion.
Inscriptions of a greatly distant empire are drawn
On the linen cloth placed under him when
He is beheaded.

The air is replenished with various living creatures
Shown in orange-red weather on rising lake waters;
This intensely cold isthmus is not of the earth.

The Chosen Wolves

2008-04-23T12:20:00.000-07:00

I first thought words like "phinnaft" and "diumalk" were words from some kind of angel-language. The Lorwolm let me labor under that assumption for quite a while, until one day I asked Nihr Avna-attu about it. That's the way they work, they're not big on long explanations. If I want to know the details, I have to ask a specific question. Nihr Avna-attu informed me that there is no angel-language, that angels use mortal languages when they need to speak. Different angels know different languages--Nihr Avna-attu knows twenty-seven human languages, although he/she might have learned more since he/she told me that fact. Any particular situation will usually dictate their choice of language--for example, there would be no point in speaking to me in anything but English.

The Lorwolm give me words like phinnaft and na-awult (words from the future, from a language that will be called Bruyeil-Pacifican) because these words come from languages that will be spoken by the people who will be able to decode and understand the ecteiroglyphs. These people will be the true prophets of the Lorwolm, called the Alleiliosek in Uru-nauwi, another future-language. Which means the Chosen Wolves, but you must understand that they are not chosen by God or any Entity, they will choose themselves.

The next question I asked was the obvious one: if the Alleiliosek will be speaking Uru-nauwi or Bruyeil-Pacifican, shouldn't I be writing the ecteiroglyphs in those languages?

Nihr Avna-attu's answer to that?

"No."

VII. When ring draws upon ring

2008-04-22T16:48:00.000-07:00

In the fifth gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

When ring draws upon ring in the sky
Towards the right,
The flesh and spirit of the ransomed king wanes
In the growth of the moon's scorched stone heart.
And a new sickle cuts no sharper than the song
Of a skylark besotted with a frost-broken brute.

In one burst gun fate opens for a follower
Of the acorn mage,
Walking with a scroll in the sole of his shoe,
Holding in a bird's-eye glove a blossomless vine
With spined husks from the branch of a barren tree.

Hidden will be the changeling, a rough female
Of one talent,
As she crouches in the round grave of storm-dogged
Loa Mu,
With a tooth in each of the twinned bodies of law
And faith.

The Poet and the Woodlouse

2008-04-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

By Algernon Charles Swinburne

Said a poet to a woodlouse--"Thou art certainly my brother;
I discern in thee the markings of the fingers of the Whole;
And I recognize, in spite of all the terrene smut and smother,
In the colours shaded off thee, the suggestions of a soul.

"Yea," the poet said, "I smell thee by some passive divination,
I am satisfied with insight of the measure of thine house;
What had happened I conjecture, in a blank and rhythmic passion,
Had the aeons thought of making thee a man, and me a louse.

"The broad lives of upper planets, their absorption and digestion,
Food and famine, health and sickness, I can scrutinize and test;
Through a shiver of the senses comes a resonance of question,
And by proof of balanced answer I decide that I am best."

"Man, the fleshly marvel, alway feels a certain kind of awe stick
To the skirts of contemplation, cramped with nympholeptic weight:
Feels his faint sense charred and branded by the touch
of solar caustic,
On the forehead of his spirit feels the footprint of a Fate."

"Notwithstanding which, O poet," spake the woodlouse,
very blandly,
"I am likewise the created,--I the equipoise of thee;
I the particle, the atom, I behold on either hand lie
The inane of measured ages that were embryos of me.

"I am fed with intimations, I am clothed with consequences,
And the air I breathe is coloured with apocalyptic blush:
Ripest-budded odours blossom out of dim chaotic stenches,
And the Soul plants spirit-lilies in sick leagues of human slush.

"I am thrilled half cosmically through by cryptophantic surgings,
Till the rhythmic hills roar silent through a spongious kind of blee:
And earth's soul yawns disembowelled of her pancreatic organs,
Like a madrepore if mesmerized, in rapt catalepsy.

"And I sacrifice, a Levite--and I palpitate, a poet;--
Can I close dead ears against the rush and resonance of things?
Symbols in me breathe and flicker up the heights of the heroic;
Earth's worst spawn, you said, and cursed me? look! approve me!
I have wings.

"Ah, men's poets! men's conventions crust you round and swathe
you mist-like,
And the world's wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod:
We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight,
And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells sweet
to God.

"For He grasps the pale Created by some thousand vital handles,
Till a Godshine, bluely winnowed through the sieve
of thunderstorms,
Shimmers up the non-existent round the churning feet of angels;
And the atoms of that glory may be seraphs, being worms.

"Friends, your nature underlies us and your pulses overplay us;
Ye, with social sores unbandaged, can ye sing right
and steer wrong?
For the transient cosmic, rooted in imperishable chaos,
Must be kneaded into drastics as material for a song.

"Eyes once purged from homebred vapours through humanitarian
passion
See that monochrome a despot through a democratic prism;
Hands that rip the soul up, reeking from divine evisceration,
Not with priestlike oil anoint him, but a stronger-smelling chrism.

"Pass, O poet, retransfigured! God, the psychometric rhapsode,
Fills with fiery rhythms the silence, stings the dark with stars
that blink;
All eternities hang round him like an old man's clothes collapsed,
While he makes his mundane music--and he will not stop, I think."

The Heptalogia, 1880

VI. A lunar wolf will emerge

2008-04-15T13:25:00.000-07:00

In the third gyre of the Age of the Recluded Star:

After years of seclusion frequented by terrifying
Hallucinations,
The fugitive from the sky becomes the arcane priest
Stirring mad dreams in the younger son
Of the saturnine mogul.
Torture, paralysis and remorse are the gifts
Of the gaudy Moccawmune
Who speaks of truth and patriots with a ferret's tongue.

When machines believe in cold ghosts,
From the depths of a maze, a lunar wolf will emerge,
Followed by a coarse terrapin with two legs of lead
And two legs of silver,
Bringing a map from the echidtors
Of the diminishing moon.

Strange objects cross the unnatural verge
Into the alkali soul of the immaculate triangle,
Shattering the turning point of a serene world.

Heaven: You're soaking in it

2008-04-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

I have asked all three members of the Lorwolm about heaven.

Of Tsitao-utna I asked "What is heaven like?" There was several moments of silence, then a voice unlike Tsitao-utna's customary voice spoke from above the blue bowl: "You're soaking in it."

I refer to Tsitao-utna as a female because she uses a feminine voice. This voice was also female, but it was apparent to me that someone else was speaking. The voice was weirdly familiar; I felt like Tsitao-utna had played a recording of someone I had known in my childhood. It took a few days, but I finally realized who had spoken: "You're soaking in it," had been the catch-phrase of Madge, a character from an old Palmolive commercial. Madge was the manicurist who praised the gentleness of Palmolive dish soap to customers who were surprised to find that their hands were soaking in it.

The actress who played Madge was Jan Miner; she died in 2004, but I am sure it was not her speaking from beyond the grave.

Ask yourself:

2008-04-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

What do you think is more memorable--Dante's Inferno or Gustave Doré's illustration of it?

V. An edictal bloodline is born

2008-04-11T08:44:00.000-07:00

In the third gyre of the Age of the Glass Council:

An edictal bloodline is born: the poet Maogul-atoda
In the likeness of a daughter of the moon.
She recounts the sorrow of her long search
For the lake named Throat of Omaplar
And the headwaters of three major rivers.

The riven serpent unites before going to war.
Those of the unwavering earth will hold for their
Outcast prince,
Singing to their sacred lamps, plumes tied to their hair.
Those of the white lily will fall for the guardian churches.

Twelve oxen caparisoned with flowers, amber
And gold foil,
Kneel before an ornate dais crowned by an arrow
Of raw iron
Etched with fire and spoilt with thick pink rust.

IV. The odabild of Zaurik

2008-04-09T18:07:00.000-07:00

In the ladder gyre of the Age of Four Wandering Moons:

The odabild of Zaurik, the buried host, a lord of ruin--
His transport vessel crossing the waves of the air realm
With Percevirmal’s lions, guarding the velvet bones
Of ninety-seven books,
Is finally demolished in three attacks from
The fire griffin,
Before his testimony can be heard by the poisoned seer.

A red branch and a white branch act for
The unawed nations
Exiled to the farther coast of the female pope called Salt.
The male pope known by his peacock dagger and graffiti
Demands that they return a great relic they stole.

The innermost walls of the giant planet fall away
In copper and arsenic, in plumes
Of white, yellow and brown;
The satellites fall silent amidst the roar
Of erupting sulfur.

III. Within the vanished margin

2008-04-07T23:09:00.000-07:00

In the hooded gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

A small force of besieged soldiers,
Sent into the midst of a storm of clamor,
Intervenes too late on behalf of the depraved ones;
Marking the empty doors with charcoal and chalk
Within the vanished margin
Of the four-volume epidemic.

A radiant wheel formed by the league of the frostborn
Is offered in wrath against the king
Of unblemished reputation.
A celebrant raven in a false costume
Feeds his infants and usurps his wives

Upon the date of execution, the outland nations
Stand with the obscure youth rising
Against thirty-five years of wickedness.

The phinnaftu of the Lorwolm

2008-04-04T14:15:00.000-07:00

Each of the Lorwolm appears as a different phinnaft, a smallform, a form that is unlike their true form. A diminishment. Ga-ukogomen, who sometimes shows signs of vanity, says if he showed me his true form and then left me, I would kill myself with longing and loneliness. His most common smallform is a little gray bird, smaller than a sparrow, a kinglet. Other times he is a crow, but in miniature, no bigger than a finch. His vanity shows itself in the brilliant black perfection of his feathers; his claws, beak and eyes shine like onyx jewels.

Nihr Avna-attu's phinnaft is a warm, white mist which sometimes fills the whole room and her/his voice wanders within the mist. The voice is both feminine and masculine, or neither.

The smallform of Tsitao-utna is invisible, but her herald, her sigil, is a small blue bowl. When she wishes to speak to me, I take the bowl from its place in the cupboard and set it on the table and put a pencil beside it. Her voice comes from a place 14 diumalks above the bowl. A diumalk is approximately a half-inch, according to Tsitao-utna. She was about to tell me what a gyre is but Ga-ukogomen told her to shut up, in an angelic kind of way, with a very loud sound like glass breaking, like a thousand windows breaking. I had a ringing in my ears all day afterwards.

Tsitao-utna can remember the name of her last mortal life: Claudia. Ga-ukogomen and Nihr Avna-attu are much older and say they do not remember their mortal lives. Ga-ukogomen once told me there are tasks angels cannot do if they have not forgotten their mortal lives. Yes, angels have tasks: they are always learning something new. Ga-ukogomen told me that the learning never ends. Tsitao-utna said she thinks the learning will end but it will take a very long time.

The Elder

2008-04-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

Ga-ukogomen is the oldest of the Lorwolm, called the na-awult, which means the elder. I once asked him how old he was. He said he is forty thousand hundred gyres younger than the Arc of Lauma-athorin. I asked him what is the Arc of Lauma-athorin? He said it is a galaxy whose light will not yet reach the earth for three hundred gyres. I told him I do not know what a gyre is. I told him that his answer did not help me understand. He spoke a sound that was not a word, not a sound a body can make, an angel-sound. It was like a shrug. It meant, "So what? Not my problem."

II. The mountains feel the accumulation of the whole

2008-04-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

In the gyre eclipsed of the Age of Broeudhe-bas:

Cities of grandeur, ruins sculptured by water, gouged
By ice,
Are made plentiful along the streams and rivers
Of the throne plateau.
While two companies are disputing a hill folded in gold,
An auspicious voice fades in the brigade of wax.
Northwest of the Dragon Aspect the volcano expells
Fire and rock.

The mountains feel the accumulation of the whole in
The days of the ungrown castles.
Liddewsinough goes searching in the corners of
The planet;
A cup of wine is balanced on a branch over his head.
Courage, vision, cruelty and pain are the force of four.

Two dead nightingales dream among
The Temple's brown liquor;
Seven Hundred of the canyon owners drink deeply
Of both vials of blood
In the cisterns of the crossed village and go mad
With greed and riot.

I. When the noble tribe goes to war

2008-04-02T12:23:00.000-07:00

In the second gyre of the Age of the Shielded Immaltant:

When the noble tribe goes to war in a holocaust
Of law,
A true choice can become round and bloody.
When they touch death, those choosing the right hand
Of life,
Decorated by any distinction, by any ornament,
Order silence and denunciation with false songs
Of mourning.

A small kingfisher with a long curved beak,
Her two hands under her chin, she will design
A woman dressed in black, open-headed with
Clean hands; her sister is closed with bittersweet.

Shadows opened up by the eyes and feet of a child:
White, gold and green lose one hundred killed in
This battle,
Four thousand wounded and taken by the black and red.