Copyright © 2007 by Edward Morris
All rights reserved.

“There’s a theory that we are all citizens of Atlantis. In one of our last incarnations, we all lived in this lovely, enlightened kingdom that sank beneath the sea a long time ago. Now we’ve come back to this special peninsula on the edge of the continent because we know, in a secret corner of our minds, that we must all return together to the sea.”
—Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City

“He who cared for books wept for the beginning of the destruction.”
—A Song By Nezahualcoyotl

“Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
—William Shakespeare, Sonnet #94

PART ONE: EGYPT’S LAND

1.) BLAIR COUNTY POSSESSION RITUAL

(for Bee Zubrod
and Meghan Simon)

05/06/97

Best not to linger long.

Don’t come around here no more.

Above the poison stars of town stands a windblown mountaintop altar in clearing earth, swept clean. Dead hands wave wooden crosses at the edge of sight & underbrush.

This is spent land. This is a spiky ring of standing stones. Here I feel cold sweat of long time gone; here I receive only shaman shadows warning me gently away.

Once upon a time, for all great stories start that way, we came together up here for something bigger than ourselves.
It doesn’t happen any more. It was criminal for us to see so much, in the bad old days, then as now. So we’ll barrel no more down midnight mountain backroads, telling tales out of school, words we never found before echoing out across silent nights & vast green lawns.

We’re dandelion seeds taken one by one, lost and gone. The Possession Ritual doesn’t happen any more, not the way it did with us.

We all prepared in our own way for that silent symbolic revolution, that staged resistance, with sundry marks of solidarity too numerous to mention. We’d get off the road, then walk for about an hour to the top of the Mountain of Sorrows, light great fires, drink of the vine, blare outlawed songs and pass outlawed pipes.

Our drums would echo across that vast gap, rumble down from the Mountain’s great stone face like a prehuman tomb carved in incomprehensible Cyclopean architecture. The music called the spirits, called ourselves in the wind to Cast Off & Rise Above. Fire did not burn us during the Ritual. Knives did not cleave us. Glass did not break.

We passed chains through our noses, vomited poems on command, performed impossible acrobatics and grew scars as thick as vines. We shuffled elder stories, mocked them, and told them anew, and made memories doing it. The ritual was our happy outlet, our Magical Death war-dance paintball where no one died.

A few of the tribe stayed sober to act as spirit-guides. The rest of us returned from the Void just before dawn. Everyone’s role in the ritual was based on what they loved rather than what they did. What they did was only the mask they wore and then tore into a million pieces at some point in the evening, preordained by their true functions, the dream that kept coming back, the General Strike locked inside.

Everyone should just quit work and do what they want, we reasoned then. Then society would have to change.

At the peak of the Ritual, every year, old as the mountain, the Blind Fawn would come to the altar stone, knowing its place in the hunt, blessing our dreams. Sayadio, Orpheus, Thoth; Genetaska, Persephone, Isis. It had Been There and Done That. It was unknowable. It never spoke. What would it have to say to the likes of us?

We drank its blood (Only As Directed), roasted the fawn on a spit and feasted on everything but the bones. The bones dropped into the fire, re-generated, slowly stood and ran back into the woods until the next Solstice. This was part of the tradition. None of us thought to follow it and see where it went in the interim.

We’ll end up lying those nights away to our kids, but look at the state of us now. We could use them back, or something enough like them to achieve the same function. Am I the only one who remembers?

Look at us now. Our symbolic revolution got no further than the Changing of the Barstools. The grownups thought we were so dangerous, but we were just waiting our turn to lag like all the rest.

But one other matter explains it all. See, back then, one of us always stayed possessed until the first rays of Dawn to pass along the date of the next Ritual. On the night of the very last Ritual, three years ago, no one ever brought me out of my trance…

I have thrown myself into my work now, forever locked outside, wearing holes in the floor, foaming at the mouth, speaking in tongues.

I never gave up. I never sold out. I stayed true.

And here I am.

They thought we were so dangerous. Look at us now. Who cares about particulars? It used to work. It seemed so simple, that one cold comfort all we had ‘till it was gone.

When did the Morning After become Forever?