Michael Cisco Passage of the Day.
April 16, 2005 4:10 a.m.

So tonight I'll will do that by sharing a random Michael Cisco passage.

This can be found starting on page 46 and ends the top of 48 of The San Veneficio Cannon (which is a book that contains The Divinity Student and its sequel). ..This is of course from The Divinity Student by Michael Cisco. I thought about posting something from The Tyrant, but I already did that. Again, this was chosen at random, I just opened the book and thought this was lovely. Enjoy.

When he's done and turns--there's a black boat waiting for him, motionless in the narrow channel. Rock steady, it neither tips nor sways as he gets on board and sits--it's small, carved from the trunk of an ebony tree, and polished. Once he sits, it begins to move, drifting towards the black recess in the wall. As he draws near, the Divinity Student can feel spray misting in his face - in he goes. The Orpheum weighs heavily down atop the arch a foot above his head, a turn, and all light dims and vanishes.

The progress in the dark is quick and steady, cobwebs of stale air brush against his face. It's lightless and slient as empty sleep.

Presently, a dim phosphorecence limns of dirt shore before the prow of the boat. Drawing in close, a narrow beach, with cypress and willow trees beyond, stiff blades of grass, lit with eldritch yellow light. The boat glides hissing up onto blue sand, and the Divinity Student disembarks. He glides across the beach leaving no footprints, and moves cautiously thought the copse to an open patch beyond. He looks up--no ceiling, around--but not walls, the light has no source. He sinks to his knees, pulls out a matchbox with a small mirror set in the bottom. He holds it in the palm of his left hand, and swings his pendulum in an arc over it. His right hand is the still point. He listens to the crickets, the cries of the mourning doves from dead trees looming like spiders; in the gloom, the pendulum is a pale smudge drifting over his palm. It takes a long time, but eventually it stops, pointing straight ahead toward a break in the trees.

Where he passes the leaves change color. Stepping over a low hummock, the grass beneath his feet shifts from yellow to blue, and up ahead--a ruddy glow, grainy at the edges, halos a boulder. The Divinity Student draws in close, and feels the rock warm against his palm as he feels his way to the light. He finds a small clearing borded with frosty blue and purple-black flowers hiding in the lee of a rock face, crowned with flaccid tendrils of moss, and dead trees. Tombstones and crosses shine bleakly in clumps of grass all around, ringed round by a ruin wrought-iron fence. (Raven: Isn't that a fantastic sentance!! READ it again!) A few ghost lamps hang from posts, the grassy face of the clearing is litered with parcels, bundles. Dimly he can see small gray forms skipping over the ground like pebbles on water, carring things to and from an open pavilion spawling in the center of the clearing. Coming closer, the Divinity Student sees Magellan lying on a couch under heavy veils, his face still painted white and black, but now he's wearing regal garments, a yellow half-coat and long green vest, ruffles at his wrists and throat, knee-pants and white stockinged calves marble-smooth tapering into black slippers. Insense coils around his dreaming head from braziers fanned by his imps, who pour him cups of poison that he drains in contempt of death.

The Divinity Student enters the burying-ground unchallenged, lets Magellan's blood-purple canopy draw him in, up to the couch. The high-prist's eyelids are painted dark, now two diamond-shaped openings in his face, the Divinity Student feels their non-gaze settle on him. He sits down in front of the couch, an imp slipping a cushion underneath him as he kneels, and opens the music box again, slowly, letting the air calm his fingers, not talking nor trying to talk, but just playing as the oro in the oak grove had directed.

That is the reason that man is my favorite author.