The Alphabet of Unfamiliar Symbols

That's about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Margaret Atwood, ‘Happy Endings’

We begin, as always, with a question – ‘Why?’. Why do we write, why do we subject ourselves to the torture of it? It’s not an easy thing, creation. We split ourselves in half when we write, conscious and subconscious, mundane and mystic, parent and child – one thinks of Athena springing fully formed from poor Zeus’s head, spitting venom and fury at her father as he gives birth to her – so our creations betray us. Our creations are, inevitably, so much better than we are. We are feeble pink things, writhing and mewling like pigs meant for the slaughterhouse –but our creations are bright, well-lit, adorned with streamers and jewels. Pretty things, while we are ugly.

We are like ravens, stealing the shiny bits.

***

They built her prison walls from bones and skin.

She scrabbles at the stone floor. The first and second fingers of her left hand are nothing but bone now; bone to match the perverse scaffolding of her home. She scratches lines in the stone, marking every day she still breathes. Not for hope, not for remembrance; it’s just that the pain feels so good.

Some days she thinks she has been turned inside out, and the bars of her prison are her own bones, dislocated and splayed, her own skin stretched tight across the impossible contours of bones and cartilage; and she is sloshing about in the soupy wreckage of her innards, nibbling on her own slippery heart, sucking the blood out of her fat arteries.

Other days she simply thinks she has gone insane. Neither of these things is true.

In truth, the Dogs are her jailers. They bring her cat food to eat, from time to time; they enjoy the irony of it. They have constructed this elegant little prison from the bones and skin of previous prisoners; they delight in telling her this.

***

Me and Alice man, we were so fuckin’ high that day, man I don’t even know…But we saw things. Alice saw things. You know me, I’m not that fuckin’ reliable, okay, but Alice…she’s pretty goddamn straight, right, I don’t even know how I got her to take the pills, but she did, and the things she saw. Jesus. City of Bones, that’s what she called it. I mean, I saw some weird shit, but Alice, she saw something real. Something fuckin’ realer than you or me, that’s for sure. She said she always knew it was there, the City she called it, and I swear I could hear the fuckin’ capital C when she said it. She only told me this when she was drunk, and I thought it was some funny shit, Miss Proper letting off steam and narrating her own fuckin’ fantasy novel for kicks, but that day I fed her the pills she saw something else. Something even more out of this world, seriously. She asked me if I saw the City of Bones, coming up ahead, she said it was thundering towards us, the City made up of the bones of giant elephants, all these buildings made of dead animals, she said their bones were welded together with something the Alchemists called rubedo (I looked it up, man, it’s a real word, she didn’t make this shit up), and the rubedo allowed the creatures to move even though they were actual buildings where the people lived, only the City was always moving ‘cause the bones could never stay still. Man, I looked where she was pointing, and I could see the City coming, I swear I saw it, but only for a second. It was like that Dali painting, man, you know the one with the naked chick and the tigers and the elephants in the background, on those long thin spider legs, walking through the ocean? Except it was nothing like that, it was hundreds of white buildings crashing like a herd of horses towards us. I saw it man, I swear, I saw the fuckin’ City of Bones. It was there in the distance, and there was some music playing too; I couldn’t catch the melody of it, it faded in and out, I know I’m a fuckin’ musician but I couldn’t figure out what instruments were being played, it sounded like harps and timpani sometimes, other times like screaming and violins, total dissonance, fuckin’ Yoko Ono shit. I still hear that music in my nightmares, some nights. I’ve tried to re-create it, but I can’t man, it was the music of the City of Bones, I’ll never…

***

In Which The Author Steals Shamelessly from The Wasteland

how long
how long dragging our bones
across the earth, across the red rock
and the river,
the waterless river

at my back
at my back i hear
the dead men the stuffed men
the men who are not hollow
merely nameless
faces with pearl buttons for eyes

whisper a children's song
whisper it while the day is long long long

long ago
a long time ago men drowned
when the water was queen and we sailed
greeting dead men waving
and we sailed

while the women the women sing a tavern song
and the hours are long long long

and the man
did you see the man
the man with a pearl a pearl for an eye
muttering unblinking
the songs that we sing
the children's song the women's song

the man
the man folded in on himself
the cards folded in two
the drowned man
the sailor man
the fisher king
here are his lands
and his river
and there is no water

***

Nothing but pastiche, ragged at the edges, quoted so many times as to be a kind of word-wallpaper, the lettered and intellectual equivalent of elevator music – familiar, inoffensive, nauseating.

***

The priests and priestesses built their bone Temple next to the waterless river, on the red rock, far from the City and its extravagances. They unearthed the bones of long-dead creatures, apocalyptic Leviathans, tyrannosaurus rex, wyverns. They cleaned the bones and carved their symbols into them, built their Temple scapula upon fibula upon skull upon clavicle. On the red rock, next to the waterless river, they built the Temple higher and higher. At night they circled the Temple of Bone, and sang a children’s song.

London bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, London bridge is falling down, my fair lady

Round and round and round and round, around the Bone Temple they went, and they go.