simultaneously, and with his robotic grip fixed on my wrist.
My eyes were burning now with so much forbidden sight that I couldn’t see myself. Through the fire of such sight I suddenly found myself on a battleground deep in the country, deep in the dream of the unborn nation, and I saw a bloody war raging, a war without beginning and without end, whose origins formed a self-feeding circle like the ouroboros. I saw soldiers stick their bayonets into the eyes of their countrymen. I saw bombs explode, laughing, while limbs scattered about the place in unholy jubilation. Blood spurted from the trunks of palm trees. Limbs, intestines, eyeballs and pulped torsos grew from the earth and writhed and crawled amongst the rain-washed undergrowth. Flowers sprouted out of slit and rotting throats. Mushrooms bristled out of the suppurating anuses of the dead. The battleground became a liverish carpet of sliced tongues and slug-infested hearts. The blind old man turned into a skull, the skull exploded, and blood washed down on the earth. Detonations growled, and trees – dancing – were splintered. I saw a young man with his face melted by grenade heat. He ran howling through the cinderous village and women fled from him. The war raged and the blind old man turned into a mosquito, spied on the rebel troops, and reported back to the army chief who had hired him, whose emblem was a white lion. I was on fire all over with the horror, and the more violently I tried to get away, the greater was the metallic grip on my wrist.
Then an incandescent flash lit up everywhere and I saw a glowing yellow carpet on a beach, with the green ocean swelling and dreaming all around. And on the yellow carpet I was surprised to see a fervent mass of men and women tearing the blind old man’s body apart, eating his entrails, gorging themselves on his divinatory head. And when they had finished devouring him, his sorcerer’s blood drove them mad and they jumped into the ocean and drowned in a choir of ecstatic voices. The maddened waves washed the carpet away and deposited on the beach a new thing, a new image, a being, wriggling like a great horrid worm – the blind old man, reborn as a baby, regurgitated from the sea. His muscles were bunched-up, his head was mighty like a Nimba sculpture, his eyes were raw and intelligent. He had two sexual organs, his prick was monstrous and erect, his vagina was tiny, like a comma.
The ocean became calm. I saw the baby growing, and it saw me, and stared at me. I was knocked about in the old man’s dream of a dying country that had not yet been born, a nation born and dying from a lack of vision, too much greed and corruption, not enough love, too many divisions.
And when I looked I saw the baby impregnate itself: it grew into a man-woman, and struggled for many generations trying to give birth to itself, to its own destiny. The sky changed, and the earth heaved, and when the period of parturition was over, I noticed at the feet of the man-woman a bizarre birth, a birth within a birth. Everything was still. The man-woman had delivered several babies who were joined at the hips. They were all different, they had few resemblances, their hues were dissimilar, and they were secretly antagonistic to one another. It was truly frightening, this pullulation of babies with different voices, different eyes, different cries, different dreams, similar ancestry, all jostling, all trapped within the same flesh, pulling in conflicting directions. Unable to escape one another, growing at incompatible rates, some dying as others grew fatter, some dragging the corpses of their siblings through the days and nights,feeding off the dead amongst them – this horrible sight made my head swell in the infernal labyrinths of the blind old man’s dreams.
Time accelerated. The original man-woman had disappeared into its hybridous offspring. And I saw them, with their unnumbered legs, their multiple arms and heads, seldom thinking together,
My eyes were burning now with so much forbidden sight that I couldn’t see myself. Through the fire of such sight I suddenly found myself on a battleground deep in the country, deep in the dream of the unborn nation, and I saw a bloody war raging, a war without beginning and without end, whose origins formed a self-feeding circle like the ouroboros. I saw soldiers stick their bayonets into the eyes of their countrymen. I saw bombs explode, laughing, while limbs scattered about the place in unholy jubilation. Blood spurted from the trunks of palm trees. Limbs, intestines, eyeballs and pulped torsos grew from the earth and writhed and crawled amongst the rain-washed undergrowth. Flowers sprouted out of slit and rotting throats. Mushrooms bristled out of the suppurating anuses of the dead. The battleground became a liverish carpet of sliced tongues and slug-infested hearts. The blind old man turned into a skull, the skull exploded, and blood washed down on the earth. Detonations growled, and trees – dancing – were splintered. I saw a young man with his face melted by grenade heat. He ran howling through the cinderous village and women fled from him. The war raged and the blind old man turned into a mosquito, spied on the rebel troops, and reported back to the army chief who had hired him, whose emblem was a white lion. I was on fire all over with the horror, and the more violently I tried to get away, the greater was the metallic grip on my wrist.
Then an incandescent flash lit up everywhere and I saw a glowing yellow carpet on a beach, with the green ocean swelling and dreaming all around. And on the yellow carpet I was surprised to see a fervent mass of men and women tearing the blind old man’s body apart, eating his entrails, gorging themselves on his divinatory head. And when they had finished devouring him, his sorcerer’s blood drove them mad and they jumped into the ocean and drowned in a choir of ecstatic voices. The maddened waves washed the carpet away and deposited on the beach a new thing, a new image, a being, wriggling like a great horrid worm – the blind old man, reborn as a baby, regurgitated from the sea. His muscles were bunched-up, his head was mighty like a Nimba sculpture, his eyes were raw and intelligent. He had two sexual organs, his prick was monstrous and erect, his vagina was tiny, like a comma.
The ocean became calm. I saw the baby growing, and it saw me, and stared at me. I was knocked about in the old man’s dream of a dying country that had not yet been born, a nation born and dying from a lack of vision, too much greed and corruption, not enough love, too many divisions.
And when I looked I saw the baby impregnate itself: it grew into a man-woman, and struggled for many generations trying to give birth to itself, to its own destiny. The sky changed, and the earth heaved, and when the period of parturition was over, I noticed at the feet of the man-woman a bizarre birth, a birth within a birth. Everything was still. The man-woman had delivered several babies who were joined at the hips. They were all different, they had few resemblances, their hues were dissimilar, and they were secretly antagonistic to one another. It was truly frightening, this pullulation of babies with different voices, different eyes, different cries, different dreams, similar ancestry, all jostling, all trapped within the same flesh, pulling in conflicting directions. Unable to escape one another, growing at incompatible rates, some dying as others grew fatter, some dragging the corpses of their siblings through the days and nights,feeding off the dead amongst them – this horrible sight made my head swell in the infernal labyrinths of the blind old man’s dreams.
Time accelerated. The original man-woman had disappeared into its hybridous offspring. And I saw them, with their unnumbered legs, their multiple arms and heads, seldom thinking together,
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