prologue.

There is Somewhere a land of wonder, where wise and heroic kings rule over subjects who have never known hunger, where delicate beings of air and light spout fountains of poetry, and rosy, fragrant slave-princesses reside in palaces under star-blessed skies, guarded by stern creatures of fire and iron. In its universities, learned men and women calculate, debate and pontificate. Under its benevolent patronage, artists uncoil themselves in exhibitions of senseless beauty. Love and warmth and happiness abound in this fortunate kingdom.

But there another place, without a name, where wonder is an insomniac’s dream undreamt and great deeds moulder undone in wasted limbs. It is here that we must begin. Follow…

[Elsewhere : There is no fool like an old fool, and an old fool is like a witless child, continually born anew. Existence is small and sweaty for those as Mooncalf, guttering influences continually at work carving channels in his callous heart, but with ne’er a lesson learned. Each step he takes in a fibrous cocoon of sacred innocence, separated only by the thin primary closing-membrane from the light of the world. Innocent in his cruelty of mercy or beauty the Holy Fool, Mooncalf, sits and stews and pulls moth’s wings in the dark. His place is known, his face is blank, and his stunted fate is clear until, in an unexpected ray of silver light, the delicate membranes are ruptured by the gleaming of the cell walls. Excess of wine and aromatic spirits reduces Mooncalf’s days to hours and obliterates his nights – never had he seen dusk fall and rise reborn as dawn - but on this rare night he awakens to a sight ever unseen. So begins a tale of a different color (saying rather an off-color tale), told with colorful diffidence and hang-dog portrayal.]

Mooncalf stricken, sickened, spinning head and stretching, peels away from sodden cot and staggers, still slugging brown-bag bottle of disreputable content – trips to the window, torrent of tedium broken by faint animal terror. Eyes given to daylight, to clouded and steaming afternoon, gape at the wrongness of the scene.

The air of his room lives and writhes, wrapping cold into his darkened spaces with silent slivers of silver gleam, reflections in dewy-mad delirium eyes. . .

At the window, in the sky - of the sky – impossibly filling the dull grey sky -

The Moon.

Staring, staring – staring (silent slip of bottle to boards).

Baneful, bulbous, bright-lit and threateningly near, The Moon shone down on the pathetic prodigal, fainting falling overcome. In a damning moment, Mooncalf knew Wonder, aware and trembling, faint from the light in the sky. His cramped world of perpetual stupor had never been lit so clear, so furiously bright. His eyes never before felt dazzle and hurt of brilliance that enters and echoes in thrumming heart. Never? But no….

He called. Desperate and pitiful thing, Mooncalf mewled and cried out to the frost-limned orb. She knew him, he cried - he knew he had known Her, once upon a long time ago. In deep pockets of shrouded secret memory hid the face of this Beauty. He loved Her, his addled spirit whispered, remember, remember that love, the Love that strips bare and lays open and guts and leaves to cool – the distant perfect sky-Love of The Moon. Come to me, come down to me, again he called, and wept, and knew sorrow – new sorrow for a heart ever untouched (but for once, ever ago – oh to remember!).

Watching in riven agony, seeing Her sink slowly, but not to him, not to Mooncalf in squalid hovel on edge of Nowhere. Sinking inexorable and elusive toward unseen demesnes, swallowed by the jagged horizon down down down until She lit no more the night sky, and stars danced needle-pricks across the eyes of the fool.

Waiting, hurting, Mooncalf sat out the dismal grey day hours with bottle unopened in hand until fall of night and Moonrise. For many long days and many silver nights the fool sat in his window speaking lines of broken eloquence to his distant, unhearing love. Slowly, by painful increments, her blessed bulk diminished, reduced each night until naught remained but a splinter, a shred of holy light. Mooncalf wailed and gnashed and tore his beard when her final light faded.

pause.

Within the wilting four-wall chamber – mud and wattle, beam and bench – Mooncalf sits with unaccustomed knitted brow, pondering beyond his ken. Alone and aching from eyes now opened, his heart hard yearning to reclaim the light: Whither had she gone when she fell from the sky? Whither the hole that hid her light? Had she melted like ice, seeping away never to shine? Silently the idea dawned, until unthinkable action was inspired. Mooncalf bound on his black-soled boots. Mooncalf seized his steel-shod staff. He flung wide the door of his wretched hovel and took the first of a million steps.

Confronted by crossroads Mooncalf cowered - the world so large and loud and sign-less - who would help him find his love? He put his trust in the person of the Painter, fearsome friend of old, that she might put him on the way (she casts the bones, and is therefore called the Bone-Thrower). To the Bone-Thrower go, wondering new thoughts.

Enter the Painter:

[The Studio: the margin of the aperture echoes from each reflecting surface to fulfill human needs for experimental realization of an open system. Pigments, preparations, and the like are sometimes applied by means of a very simple type of ground-driven pump in the trenches. This, by a system of mirrors, carries to the Painter below a reflection of what is occurring above. An integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating multiplicity is one of the most terrible that any human being can have to bear, and the Painter’s audience bore the brunt, scurrying and glistening and hiding amidst the groaning engines. Crowding and crushing was ejected in little spurts, in a very liquid state. The Painter could remove and install any of the requisite imagery by using impact wrenches to manipulate the connectors at the ends of her protean prostheses. Mooncalf wavered, approached, fell back, then plunged in…]

Pallid Painter towered in tilted harness bolted taut to whirring automata. Mooncalf small below:

“O Painter, please for a moment cease your pastime, hearken to me and hear my cry!”

“Mooncalf,” said she, a hundred mouths speaking in silvered mirrors, “Why speak’st thou so clear? ‘Tis unbefitting in one so dull.”

“O, Painter,” he cried, “my voice has been loosed, breaking open the crust of sleep that has so long lain on these lips of mine! I am in love, and seek your counsel!”

He stepped long over palette knife and cable and bottle, and claw and limb and tattered canvas, skirted pools of paint and tallow and turpentine, ‘til he rested at the feet of the dead Muse’s daughter.

“O, Painter, she was in the sky, the treacherous sky! Her face alight with chilling glow that sets my heart a-fire!” He scratched and shook and tremored and seethed to add eager emphasis to his speech. “What is this thing, this light-ridden thing that shakes me from my easy rest?”

“Thy Mother, Mooncalf, thou simpering curse-wretch. Hast thou never unraveled the plain mystery of thy name? Cool thy o’er-eager heart: thou looked upon the bitter Moon.”

Her straps and cables pulled and clacked, tubules expelling their pungent potions on carefully cut vistas of canvas. Steams and fumes of debased description scoured and pranced over the scarred, soured surfaces. Mooncalf, discomfited, averted his attentions – set shivering by the words of the Thrower of Bones, the Painter revealing his impossible origins, his would-be lover a thing undreamt: his Mother!

“O Painter, the words you speak are strange to hear! Never have I heard my name on a mother’s lips, never known a parent’s touch! This creature, then – this ovoid angel – she it is who bore me forth? How know you this when I do not?”

The Painter whirred and stopped her nozzles, regarding the wretch with a pitying gaze. Pressurized paint swelled and squealed behind tight-screwed valves.

“I throw the bones, Mooncalf mine. Their empty voices utter many secret things. “

She splayed her hands in serrated gesture, casting forth from unseen pocket a morbid rain of many bones – hand-bones, shin-bones, thigh-bones, collar-bones, bones of humans, bones of cats, bones of horses, bones of birds, skulls and ribs and hollow wing-bones, tiny translucent bones of fish. They bumped and rolled and rattled down, forming fearful patterns of dreadful import. To the Thrower’s eye, each intricacy invoked a world entire, the past and future fused as one.

Hands over ears from osteal clatter, Mooncalf made for safer ground – from beneath a workbench, called out quivering:

“But why, O Painter, does she seek me now, her lazy, sodden son? Why does she rise now to light my dismal sky? Has she found me for to take me home?”

“Put that thought to rest, poor boy. Thou art Mooncalf now, walking blind, and such thou wilt ever be.”

“Is that the word of the fate-flung bones? Say to me that it is not so!” He tore his hair and stamped and stammered ‘til the Painter’s patience began to fade.

“That is the word of thy friend the Painter, who fears for thy life if thou dost journey forth, questing after the chilly Moon.”

“But please, O Painter, surely you know: A boy must to his mother go, when once she has given her commanding call!”

The Painter sighed and consulted her oracle, her ossuary counsel giving vexing voice. “The bones say thou wilt wander long, seeking thy Mother along darkened ways. But the choice is thine, so heed my words: be content with thy lot as Mooncalf, simple and sacred fool. Try not the patience of the world with thy prattling quest.” Was it tenderness choked the Painter’s words, or weariness only at her work’s interruption?

“If thou wouldst insist on thy own way, then let me tell thee what I know of thy cursed path: follow the Wood-road toward the deepest dark, cross the river and come unto the Ringed Cities of Night. Therein dwells thy forbidding Mother, in the silver tower in the midst of the innermost city, for so it has been beyond the years of my memory.”

Mooncalf bowed and scraped and gave great thanks, but Painter shushed him with an admonishing cry.

“Mooncalf! Think hard and long, though it be not thy strength! Let thy accustomed sloth be thy shrewdest counselor, and return to thy home to sit and drink and be Mooncalf. The journey would change thee, make thee hard. Thy Mother would not welcome thee, thy idle life would be wasted, and thou wouldst no longer be Mooncalf.” The Painter shut her eyes and thought sore thoughts. “But if thou wouldst go, take thy umbrella.”

She twitched her tethered hand to wipe away a gleaming tear, and a suppurating sore of deepest violet erupted across her straining still-life. In a matching fashion, blooming rage suffused the volatile Painter’s corrupted countenance, and shame at her own softness. “Filth!” she screamed, “Pestilence and bloody ruin! Your foolishness has damned my godless Creation, my tomorrow flashed on tight-stretched skins! Leave behind thy cursed quest! Get thee to thy mud-house! Go!” She struck out savagely at the offended artwork, mighty gears and pistons empowering her movements.

Mooncalf startled, ducked and dove, dodging the flaring waves of nausea spurting from spigots in the Painter’s machines. She flailed her extremities, shedding sparks and stripping gears, and wrenched her cumbrous prosthetic bulk free from the frame of pumps and hoses. Her supporting automata bore her headlong, heedlessly heaving her creations aside.

Mooncalf looked on in shivering distress as the Bone-Thrower crashed and lurched her way into the depths of her cavernous Studio, all spider legs and sparking wires.

[If legend speaks true, she will lie sour and dormant, leaving her works to rot ‘til her anger is spent. Many lifetimes the cycle has spun, many paintings left to the worm, for many a smaller offense. Her defenses dropped, her fortress falls prey to a thousand ravishments, treasure-seekers and belligerent vandals. The audience has long since fled.]

Mooncalf straightened and cast about, seizing an umbrella from the shard-spattered floor, and set off singing toward the deepest dark.

END