Leonora Carrington - The Ancestor, 1968
Extract from James Champagne - Grimoire:
The movie that night was named Idols of Eigenlicht. It was a color film, a collection of short vignettes, some of which lasted a few seconds, others a few minutes, though I don’t believe that any of them exceeded five minutes in length. I lost count of exactly how many of these vignettes I saw, as they seemed to unfold on the screen like a hazy opium dream, lulling my senses into the usual hypnagogic state. I was, fortunately, able to recall a few of the more memorable ones, which I shall now relate.
The very first vignette took place on a vast, flat arctic field, the sky a blue void unblemished by clouds. In the center of this field was a square etched in black chalk on the icy ground, and drawn inside this square was a circle whose interior was marked with eight lines, each line meeting to form a point in the center. Crouched down at the diagonal cardinal points of this circle were four small creatures who had a very strange appearance. Their bodies were covered in white fur, while their legs and feet resembled those of albino frogs. Their faces were vaguely bat-like, with large pointy ears, while their eyes were hollowed-out black orbs, like empty sockets on a human skull. They were barely moving at all, and appeared to be meditating. In the background, the instrumental song “Nzambi Ia Lufua” by the band known as Whitehouse played throughout this first vignette.
Then, a woman seemed to rise right out of the snow outside the circle. She was completely covered up in a white sheet, like those cliché ghost costumes one always sees around Halloween time. Into this sheet two eye holes were cut. The right eye hole was just a simple round circle cut in the sheet, but the left eye hole was smaller, and a piece of diamond-shaped fabric was sewn around it, the eye hole located in the center of this piece of fabric, the fabric itself resembling a floral design, reminiscent of some rare species of nosferatu convolvulus. In the woman’s hands there was clasped a immense black rose, just the bulbous head of the flower, with no stem. She slowly marched into the center of the circle in a stately manner, carrying the black rose before her as if it were some sort of holy artifact, or if she were the sole member of a solitary and somber funeral procession. Upon taking her place in the center of the circle, she stood still, as if she had became a statue, while the little furry white creatures began to become animated, as they chattered excitedly to one another, masturbating themselves in pagan abasement. The composition of the scene reminded me of Leonora Carrington’s 1968 painting, The Ancestor.
The woman began to softly wail in a barbarous tongue as she stooped down to place the black rose in the center of the circle. Kneeling over it so that her left eye hole hovered directly above it, I watched as red droplets began to issue forth from this eye hole, landing with small wet splashes on the flower below. She wept tears of blood on the black rose. It was then that I knew I was witnessing some malefic type of evocation, as the Whitehouse song continued playing in the background like a stellar hymn to some obscure African god of death. Sure enough, green mist began seeping out from the circle, curling around the prone form of the woman, and as the mist rose into the sky it began to stabilize and coagulate into a new form. While all this went on, the sky became dull gray in color, and a tremendous, pulsating black star appeared in the distance. Or maybe it was the mysterious transyuggothian tenth planet known to the initiated as Nu-Isis? The mist formed a shape in the center of this dark planet, and soon the transformation was complete: the summoned entity resembled an enormous mass of ears, ears of all shapes and sizes and from all different species, in the shape of an orb, an orb that was the size of the Unisphere at Flushing Meadows in New York. This bizarre god (whose name I later found out was Urluk) hovered above the woman, the ears throbbing in grotesque undulations, and it emitted a weird metallic buzzing sound, like the kind cicadas make. The woman looked up, then took off her white sheet. Underneath, it was revealed that she was actually a quivering, holothurian mutant, just with a long flowing mane of black hair streaming atop her virescent skull. Then the vignette ended while the dark planet hummed over this surrealistic tableau.
Here was another vignette: the scene unfolded in a bedroom, and the only objects in the room were a bed, a night stand, and, against the wall near the door, a holy water fount. The room was illuminated by a bare light bulb which hung from the ceiling. I watched as the door to the room opened and a teen boy entered. As he did so, a gong sounded from off screen. The boy looked to be somewhere between the ages of 16-18, with short reddish-brown hair and intelligent blue eyes, his face achingly beautiful and without blemish. The boy was naked, and his penis was quite impressive to look at. He closed the door behind him, stared at the bed. Then he dipped his hand in the holy water fount and did the sign of the cross. With that done, he walked over to the bed and lay down on it, flat on his stomach, his ass now exposed to the camera. He lied in this manner silently, without moving.
A minute or so later, the door opened again, and a mysterious figure entered (once again, a gong sounded off-screen). The man was clad in a black robe that draped down the entire length of his bumpy body, and this robe was decorated with a number of cryptic sigils, done in red. His face was blocked from view by a mask which resembled that of an angler fish. Like the boy, the man dipped one of his gloved hands in the holy water fount, only he did the sign of the cross backwards. The masked man walked over to the bed and climbed on it. He stared down at the boy, then lowered his gloved hands until they rested on the boy’s ass cheeks. The man gently opened the ass cheeks, exposing the boy's asshole. The man lowered his masked face to it. Bumblebees began to buzz out of the boy’s asshole. This didn’t shock the masked man, though. He positioned himself so that his mask was faced directly over the asshole, and I watched as the bumblebees flew into the mouth portion of the fish mask, as if they were being swallowed whole, like souls being sucked up. Finally, the bumblebees stopped coming forth and the man let go of the boy’s ass cheeks. He turned to look at the camera, then pulled off his mask. To my shock, he had the face of a giant bumblebee, and I realized that what I had just witnessed was an invocation to Zam Pollum, the queen of all bees! Though in retrospect it could also have been a rite of Beelzebub, who though often linked with flies is also known as the ‘Lord of the Buzzers.'
I will describe one more vignette, though certainly there were many other ones that would have been just as interesting to choose from. On the screen before me was a vast library, whose ceiling was so high it was shrouded in darkness, so that one was unable to see how far up it truly went. The walls of this library were lined with very tall black bookcases, with about 6-7 feet in between each shelf. The reason for these huge gaps was due to the fact that the shelves were crammed with human beings, humans of all shapes and sizes, some wearing clothes, others completely naked. These humans were neither alive nor dead, rather they existed in a twilight neither-neither state in between those two states. Thus they were all standing up along the shelves in formation, as if they were in a parade, paralyzed. The library was then a mausoleum of human incunabulum.
The library itself belonged to an odd-looking race of creatures who I shall try my best to describe. Their heads resembled giant open books, only the pages that made up their faces were blank. The book heads were connected to the bodies of the creatures via three spindly necks covered in purple fur, while the bodies themselves looked like round, bloated Christmas Tree ornaments that had been coated in ichor (I should add here that these necks were adorned with frilly Elizabethan collars). Instead of legs and feet, the creatures thumped along on two thick stumps that looked like grossly overgrown human thumbs (with the curved toenails serving as feet), while in place of arms long green vines protruded from the sides of the creature’s bodies. As if all this wasn’t flamboyantly weird enough, they also wore black and purple capes whose shape brought to one’s mind the semblance of a bat.
In the vignette, I watched as those very large and odd-looking creatures took humans off the bookshelves and placed them on long wooden reading tables in the center of the room. They would gently lay the paralyzed humans down on the table, then “read” them by placing their vines against the foreheads of the human. By doing so, they read the brains of the humans, extracting memories and dreams as if they were downloading data from a computer. As this process went about, the images that entered in the minds of the creature were displayed on the blank pages of their book heads, the pages flipping as each new memory was extracted and recorded. After they were finished “reading” the human, they would rise from the wooden table and exit the library, stepping onto the street of a futuristic city. They would then go to a public gathering place and wait for a crowd to amass around them. The citizens of the city were small books, only they were books with spider legs. There were also flying hourglasses with the wings of bats. These spider books and bat-winged hourglasses would gather around the book-headed creatures and watch as the pages began to flip, from the first to the last, displaying for the spider books and the bat-winged hourglasses the thoughts and memories of the humans that they had just read. After the book was done, the book-headed ones would return to the library, place their vines back on the foreheads of the human, and download the memories back into the human books, until once again the pages of their faces were blank. They would then return the humans to the bookshelf.
Ah-ha, I thought to myself. What I’m looking at here is a society in which books have evolved, become sentient, a world in which books have taken over everything, switched places with humanity. These book-headed creatures are the storytellers of this strange new society, it would seem. A conclusion that anyone would have come to, by my estimates.
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.fr/2012/04/welcome-to-world-james-champagnes.html
Tuesday, 8 May 2012
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