Kissing the Mask by William T. Vollmann

Author:William T. Vollmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

IN THE SERPENT’S BED

As Odin says, we are all doomed to die. Doom’s strides are as long as Sleipnir’s eight legs on an ancient picture-stone — but I prefer to reify doom as Hallgerd, the vengefully irresistible heroine of Njal’s Saga. “She was very tall, which earned her the nickname Long-legs, and her lovely hair was now so long that it could veil her entire body.” Ketilrid Holmkellsdaughter of Viglund’s Saga, who is “blessed with beauteous hair” and a “fair white brow,” enthralls her own Viking-poet, who praises “the bright lady’s nature, like a swan swimming.” She dooms him to love her forever. And in the old tales and lays, and in every magic mirror and unexpected darknesses of the world, the white arms of half-known women prepare to ensnare me in ambushes of overpowering glamor. It is not so that they are all alike; they are sisters merely in their blinding brightness.

The white-armed woman holds sway over her gold-adorned hall. She adorns herself in kennings which dazzle my wearied eyes. My bedazzlement is my failure. (Sometimes when I see Noh actors from the back, their strangely flat beetleness, the way their arms can outstretch and freeze; or when I lose my way amidst the music of the chorus in brown plaid kimonos in front of that pine tree, staring straight ahead, then I forget that movement of striped kimono sleeves will extend into wings and grasp something supernaturally black. The real world is stylized into slow neutrality here; for the sake of what will come, it must be so. The boy’s pure high voice answers the man who kneels down on the polished floor. In the audience, old couples are following along character by character in well-thumbed or immaculate books. I envy their knowledge. This is the lesson I must take to heart: A perception of monotony is the result either of ignorance or a failure of attention. That may not always be true; sometimes the performer fails; if this book reads monotonously to you the failure may well be mine; but it is in my interest always to make the grandest assumptions about whatever offers itself before me. This boy in his robe and conical hat, he has what Zeami calls the false flower of his youth; let it be his youth, then, not his talent, that I reverence; or rather let it be his youth as tightly controlled by the play and by his training. They adjust his hat for him; they give him a bamboo staff taller than he is. A scowling man in a tapering black hat and a kimono of black, white and gold haunts the stage. Between periods of immobility and silence a sudden shimmering noise beats from a triangle of outstretched hands; I glimpse the child, then get overwhelmed by a line of elaborately identical kimono’d men all pivoting at once.) If I truly wish to see the loveliness of a bygone Norsewoman, then I must gaze at her with all my might, until my eyes burn out.

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