TO BE BEAMED DIRECTLY INTO THE HEAD OF FERNANDO PESSOA ON AUGUST 31, 1930, ANTICIPATING THE ARRIVAL OF ALEISTER CROWLEY (FOR THE PURPOSE OF PROTECTING FERNANDO FROM “THE BEAST”)
You’re your zillions. Sometimes invaders, they are the swarming little animals of Leeuwenhoek’s account plus proteins, sporing glum motes, balloons cratered and pustule’d and painted the dull gray of cellular triumph. Drifts of balloons parade your system, sickening you, haling you, morphing you from one second to the next. Fatty walruses (pink and sated on dermic morsels) travail the blinking crests of your Picos’ lids, then tumble, sometimes, as after a fatal misfooted slip, into the broad shimmering of your two brown Azores. Your anatomy is like the universal anatomy. Heat death contours and fats each galactic lymph. And though monstrous, it is a colossal body and beautiful. The void form’s sinewed by vacuum. Maturation by the happenstance of planetary knocks is called physics; also, time is the accident of its own procession. All bacteria is is the material concentrate of time. All time is is the flux of its own incessancy. Thus the body, thus the self, thus life.
Life invades life. Biology’s altar’s suicide’s host; conquest’s kept in the senses’ covenant arc. You have often felt a possession come on, like when in your aunt’s room, writing with the ferocity of driven scribes. Rapping from under the table, the candle lit. The gentle or violent knocks of ordinary furniture, footstools shifted one inch to the left, the squeals of believing women. Séance. You are a séance unto yourself when one of the others moves with murderous intent to vanish Pessoa and occupy the sitting room of his mind and from the sitting room window glance, with crystalline vision, into the environ of this or any other place. They vision the street, office, electric trolly and printshop, the closet where you sleep. Invaded and displaced, you write not you, but you, an other you, they, but not they, me, but I. I is always who writes.
In whose voice do you hear these words? Caeiro’s? de Campos’? Is it Reis’ low basso that’s pressed to your ear (there are grazers on the cochlea, grazing on wax) and rumblingly asking, Who? Cast a chart but you will not find me; I’m born after you, Fernando.
Yesterday, you ought to have been a landscape. You were in your dreaming habit and felt diffuse and ecologic. You’re ill today, so you ought to be your own bronchial rattle, sputum, ache. I mean that I urge you to disappear. To fly into the atom of your mood. I do not think you can invite the sickly bits to consciousness (they wouldn’t think of nesting there), but your mind may sink into the sick peat that’s gut-bubbling. Because, bacteria celebrate their installation in your chest. Because, the scrape in your throat’s the rhythm of a little tarantella. Rasp? Chortle. Germ-strength is your strength when germs germinate in you. I figure ones like oxen, sheep, slitherers too. Crawlies, stompies, relative giants and dwarves. Some look opaque. Unimpressive strep just gawps automatism. But others are elementals at play. There flies the mercury sprite who’s passed aeons. She’s prehistoric, the queen of your bloodstream, fever dream. Isn’t she the eldest concentrate of longevity who, for a little period, is allotted your body’s dominance? If you like the locus of your head then you can have it once you’re healed. But try the minutiae, the microbial plane. This will be practice for death. Because, death is a part of life. It is wrong to draw a distinction. Seeming death’s just birth, assumption, prompting, instatement. The living is installed against the living and the living refuges. All life is is Cain’s hot left arm dropping, Abel’s decomp, exile last. And when you’re flush again tomorrow, drooling lucent like the Tagus’ deep and sniffing damp tobacco’s burn and ribboned hyssop sold cheap plus other vegetable whiffs, banknotes’ musk, the crisp of fresh bread, lipping the smack of brandy’s smart, won’t you have invaded you, conquered you, exiled and outbounded whatever’s the elder in you? Do what thy will and divest. Grace flows the way of stigmata naughts. And all is increase. All.
And but so now, Crowley rides an English ship. Blackly aura’d as the stack’s steam backing him. Toady faced, try and grasp his flab, anal fixation; he’ll outsize you in vim and malpurpose. Wants to priestify you, call you Frater, Dominus, his own personal missionary. I urge you to displace to the privater Fernando. Meet him with your rarer charms of cancer, urinary stones, time. When his presence oppresses and you want him to leave, hex (demure). I’ll demonstrate:
Just the utmost lively meet suicide right. A lady walks herself to a public place and’s doused in kerosene. She hurls a curse and toasts herself. Burns. Endures each second of her crisping. Only sole second of her crisping. Incarnate in fry. Or, it’s her prerogative to suspend in prickling hemp’s twist. Or, hers to hear the long crack of infinitesimal fracture, a fast lead ball the lady’s shot to her cerebrum. Or, pill fading. Xanax, NyQuil, Ativan. Klonopin hid in the bedside drawer. Suicide is an act of will.
So if the Beast means to use you…
Or, the defamation of her name.
And when I leave you…
Or, a loved one’s loss.
Abel’s blood secreting to lacunas, the hollows of the earth…
Be willing weird increase.
Parables not parsed…
Private Fernando again.
Dead Jesus Christ…
Again he said to them, “I am going away, and you will search for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going, you cannot come.” Then the Jews said, “Is he going to kill himself? Is that what he means…”
John 8:21-22
-- Eitan Benzion is essays editor at APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL. He is currently seeking representation for his debut novel, II RUTH. He may or may not be contacted @natienoizy.