#lsigprose

"You need me as much as I need you…" says the mortal, looking their god in the eye.

"Maybe more," says the deity, nodding, dwarfed in the mortal's palm. "Is this what it feels like? To be divine?" the supplicant says as their now world-sized deity holds them on a fingertip in the very center of the night sky as nebulae and black holes revolve around them. "I could never know, because I always Was. I never Became. But you Became."

The mortal nodded, brought the divine being into their embrace, looked them in the eye, and held them,

Every morning he woke up and kept his eyes closed for a while.

He would move his fingers ever so slightly, feeling his sheets, feeling the bedwarmth, feeling where it grew cooler at the edge. He would move his foot to feel the weight of the blankets, to feel the weight of his cat curled up down there. He would listen to the apartment he lived in alone. Sometimes his upstairs neighbor would be awake if they had to open at the diner. Sometimes the next door neighbor would be saying something to their kid. He would smell the coffee already being made by the coffee maker, and he would smell the last traces of last night’s dinner, if he actually cooked it and didn’t microwave it.

He would lie there taking it all in, wanting something he couldn’t have. He tried to be grateful for what  he did have. Usually he could be. Some days the only thing that got him out of bed was spite and the inertia of routine.

In short, he was no-one special, and that was fine. But he did want to be special. He wanted to be held, completely. Totally held. Held in such a way that he was erased from everything but the hand he was held in. He wanted to be small, very small, so small that he could disappear under someone’s curled fingers. And he wanted so to be something he could not be, he would lie there taking it all in: the voices of neighbors, the dimensions of his life and how they were too much.

Every morning he woke up and kept his eyes closed for a while and this morning he woke up and kept his eyes closed. For a while.

He moved his fingers, and the sheets were not his sheets.

They were coarser, and they tented oddly. Normally the weight of them spilling over the side of the bed kept them flat, but now they were somewhat stiff. The pillow felt scratchy on his ears, and his head was sunken into it.

The cat was not there, but that wasn’t unusual.

Last night he had cooked, braised cod with garlic, lots of garlic. The scent was a comfort to him, something his grandmother had cooked in her years living with his family. It was a smell that pervaded everything. He would have found it a bit unpleasant if he hadn’t done the cooking himself. But the smell wasn’t there this morning. Nor was the smell of coffee.

In its place: a clean smell, totally foreign to his home. Not that he let his place grow filthy by any means, but deep cleaning was a thing that only happened once a year at most. People didn’t tend to visit, so he didn’t see the point. And anyone who did, he reasoned, knows me and would understand. His house smelled human.

This morning, the room he was in smelled lived in, but clean. Cleaned. An effort had been made.

He couldn’t hear anything much at all. Not a neighbor, nor the shudder and weary sigh of the air conditioning, nor a semi on the interstate a few blocks over. He heard humming, light humming. A song he thought he might know. It sounded wrong. It sounded like it was coming over a stadium loudspeaker a mile away. Not tinny, just the size of the sound. A whisper that could fill a concert hall.

He recognized the song at last, after lying with his eyes closed for what seemed like forever. Lefty Frizell. “Saginaw, Michigan”. It made him smile as he remembered all the crazy rhymes in it.

He opened his eyes.

It wasn’t his room but he knew it wouldn’t be. The sheets were as coarse, no, coarser than he had felt them to be. He could almost poke a finger through the weave of them. The walls were covered with a riot of printed words and huge pictures. A string of lights, the size of watermelons and dark, around the top of the wall at the ceiling. A chintzy plastic chair, all molded as one piece, sat in the corner looking as if it would buckle under the weight of nothing.

My dad was a poor, hard-working Saginaw fisherman Too many times he came home with too little pay.

He swung his legs out. The floor, too, was plastic, and instead of the slight chill of his floor at home this one seemed to be perfectly room temperature.

He heard a rising noise that became a whine, then a cry, then a shriek as a tea kettle came to a boil. But again, it was from so far away, but sounded so close.

He stood up and looked around. One door. The window, as it turned out, was a sticker. It showed a nice scene of a grassy hillside. It occurred to him that he ought to be terrified, but he wasn’t. He felt that he was on the edge of something. He reached up distractedly and felt his pulse in his throat.

The doorknob was the color of the trim around the door, and did not turn.

And you can tell your dad I'm coming back a richer man I hit the biggest strike in Klondike history

He smiled. Saginaw, Michigan. Young ambitious man. Saginaw fisherman. All those rhymes that Lefty Frizell knew were a reach. He thought of him laughing as he wrote them down.

His hand was on the doorknob. The humming had stopped, he realized. It had grown quiet. His hand was on the doorknob. He tried to be grateful for what he did have. He tried not to want what he didn’t have. He couldn’t. He wanted it.

And now a thumping, not heavy but large, as if the weight of several thousand pounds were being gently placed on the ground. Over and over, in a regular rhythm, and louder and louder. His hand was on the doorknob. He thought to turn around to look at the bed but what if he turned back and his hand was on his own door?

He opened the door. She was sitting cross-legged in front of it, maybe a hundred feet away. The rest of the house had been swung away, he could see the stairs with no railings going up to a second floor. He looked back at her, looming sweetly, holding a mug the size of a cistern with both hands. She wore a fuzzy housecoat and was two hundred feet tall if she was anything. A room larger than anything he could describe stretched out behind her, filled with everyday life, of a size that dwarfed him. In front of him, on the ground, was a dimpled metal can full of something brown and clear and steaming. Tea. A life he could disappear into but not disappear. A star in a night sky that loved him.

cw: violence, gore, Christianity

A little preamble to the story (there's a story) (I wrote it) (it's farther down, feel free to skip this bit).

I have been listening to Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis a great deal recently. If you don't know the piece, it is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, a motet meant to be sung by forty voices, I think it's supposed to be eight groups of five voices, positioned around the church. The music swells and swirls and draws itself up and... well, maybe you want to check it out. Tallis Scholars - Spem in alium

It was sung by Judith, according to the Apocrypha, after she had slain the Assyrian general Holofernes. She presented herself to him, got him drunk; after he passed out, she decapitated him. There are many many paintings of the act, some quite beautiful, others terrifying. Afterwards, according to the deuterocanonical Book of Judith, she sang this hymn: I have never put my hope in any other but in You, God of Israel, who will be angry and yet become again gracious, and who forgives all the sins of man in suffering. Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth, look upon our lowliness. Every time you think it couldn't get any more beautiful, it stops, breathes, and becomes even more beautiful. I collect versions of this hymn, I imagine Judith bearing the head of Holofernes like a lantern, walking home, singing. Of course, being size trash, I literalized Judith's powerlessness. I made her small. I made the story fractured (violence fractures, ecstasy fractures), in many voices, although the main voice is that of her handmaiden. 'Handmaiden' is here literalized as well. There are academic voices, religious voices, the voices of those who were there to hear Tallis present his motet to the Queen. All of them bear equal weight. But still, in the end, the voice is Judith's. Still, in the end, she opens her mouth and sings.

Of Judith

THE DUKE OF ____, bearinge à great love to Musicke asked whether none of our English men could sett as good à songe, and Tallice beeinge very skilfull was felt to try whether he would undertake ye matter, wch he did & made one of 40 p[ar]tes wch was songe in the longe gallery at Arundell house…

She is small, and she is cutting off his head in slow motion.

The authenticity and the canonicity of the Book of Judith are strongly contested.

I am her handmaiden. She is the size of my hand spread out. And this much is true.

10:3 And she washed her body, and anointed herself with the best ointment, and plaited the hair of her head, and put a bonnet upon her head, and clothed herself with the garments of her gladness, and put sandals on her feet, and took her bracelets, and lilies, and earlets, and rings, and adorned herself with all her ornaments.

It is considered by some critics to be the greatest piece of English early music.

Was she always small? Yes, she is of the tribe of the small.

13:1 And when it was grown late, his servants made haste to their lodgings, and Vagao shut the chamber doors, and went his way.

Blood in a perfect arc.

Throughout history the small stand before the kings.

Codex B or Vaticanus on the one hand, and Codex Alexandrinus with Codex Sinaticus on the other.

The kings beckoning and the small walking into their shadows.

Despite Jerome’s claim to have translated an Aramaic text, no ancient Aramaic or Hebrew manuscripts have been found.

Holofernes frozen bleeding gouts between history and teleology.

In Jdt 9:10 and again in 9:13, she petitions God for “deceitful words” that will wound those who have planned cruelties against the Jerusalem Temple and their homeland.

I have never put my hope in any other but in Thee, God of Israel.

She has stood in my shadow as well but always I stood in hers.

13:2 And they were all overcharged with wine.

She is so small she fills the room.

See: Hagiographies.

Judith walking into the shadow his shadow. She stands before his sandals in her celebration gown.

Like Jael, who drove a tent peg through the head of Sisera (Judges 4), Judith kills an enemy general.

He could burst her asunder like a grape on his tongue.

who canst show both wrath and graciousness,

She smells of sandalwood. He smells of copper. Dried blood in half moons in his fingernails. His hand slowly unfurled before her.

A gout of black blood and he sighs in accession, a matter of record.

Pope Saint Clement, who also recorded the Apostolic Constitutions, cites it in his epistle to the Corinthians. 

10:9 And they that were there said, all with one voice: So be it, so be it.

Served Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I.

The warm dry palm, her feet barely make an impression in it as she steps on.

I stood as always waiting.

1:3 At its gates Nebuchadnezzar raised towers one hundred cubits high with foundations sixty cubits wide.

Creator of Heaven and Earth, regard our humility.

Beginning with a single voice from the first choir, other voices join in imitation, each in turn falling silent as the music moves around the eight choirs.

As you know, I belong to my Lord.

Holofernes smiling like an open wound.

10:18 And his officers said to him: Who can despise the people of the Hebrews who have such beautiful women, that we should not think it worth our while for their sakes to fight against them?

In Gentileschi’s treatment I am businesslike. In Caravaggio’s, I am so old and grim.

Here the word “lord” has a double meaning, indicating both Holofernes and God. Much irony is evident in Judith’s conversation with Holofernes (e.g., 12:4).

11:4 And Judith said to him: Receive the words of thy handmaid, for if thou wilt follow the words of thy handmaid, the Lord will do with thee a perfect thing.

The sound of an idiot’s flute as she severs the windpipe.

Which Holofernes hears as deference to him, but Judith means as reference to God, Judith promises to tell him nothing false.

where it was part of the 2014–15 exhibition "Treasures of the British Library".

I tell you this: she is small in the Lord, but she is enough.

Judith liberated her homeland of Bethulia from Nebuchadnezzar by assassinating his general Holofernes.

11:9 And because the children of Israel know they have offended their God, thy dread is upon them.

Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr.

11:16-17  Because these things are told me by the providence of God. And because God is angry with them, I am sent to tell these very things to thee.

He lifts her up to look at her. She kneels, her head is down. 

The column of the spine. In the Lord all things are possible.

The author of the Book of Judith is unknown.

As for the original text, its context of Judith slaying Holofernes and regaining her position fits with Mary's execution of the Duke of Northumberland, who had attempted to supplant her on the throne with Lady Jane Grey, rather than Tallis using it for Elizabeth.

I wrote it, I who was her handmaiden. At times, she bade me dip her tiny feet in ink and she was my quill.

12:12 Then Vagao went in to Judith, and said: Let not my good maid be afraid to go in to my lord, that she may be honoured before his face, that she may eat with him and drink wine and be merry.

In Klimt’s treatment I am not there at all.

The whites of his eyes showing.

12:13 And Judith answered him: Who am I, that I should gainsay my Lord?

The final corded muscle. Holofernes seeming to nod.

after which the choirs sing in antiphonal pairs, throwing the sound across the space between them.

All of the treatments are wrong. 

She goes into the camp of the Assyrians and captivates Holofernes by her beauty, and finally takes advantage of the general's intoxication to cut off his head.

Lord God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, Regard our humility.

13:7 Saying: Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, and in this hour look on the works of my hands, that as thou hast promised, thou mayst raise up Jerusalem thy city: and that I may bring to pass that which I have purposed, having a belief that it might be done by thee.

I held the head of Holofernes in one hand and her in the other.

Saint Clement of Alexandria’s book IV of the Stromata, Origen’s Homily 19 on Jeremiah and vol. III on Saint John, chapter 17 of Tertullian’s On Monogamy, and book 3 of Saint Ambrose’s De Officiis and De Viduis all mention it also.

Spem in Alium​ in historical context: why was it written and where was it performed? Spem in Alium ​over the centuries: why has the work been so greatly admired, and why are we still so fascinated by it today?

She was only as big as my palm spread wide. In the book it says it took her only two blows from his sword, but it took all night to sever the head of Holofernes.

14:14 But when with hearkening, Vagao perceived no motion of one lying, he came near to the curtain, and lifting it up, and seeing the body of Holofernes, lying upon the ground, without the head, sweltering in his blood, he cried out with a loud voice, with weeping, and rent his garments.

And I was not old, nor was I grim. 

Final cause, for the sake of, nothing in vain, complete, perfect. 

I was so happy to bear her bloody frame in one hand, and his head in the other.

… wch so farre surpassed ye other that the Duke, hearinge yt songe, tooke his chayne of Gold fro[m] his necke & putt yt about Tallice his necke & gave yt him.