Author's note: New York City's 1910 Pennsylvania Station was a neoclassical marvel of marble gods and goddesses and Doric pillars, until its demise in 1963. Almost four decades later, a movement was begun to recover bits and pieces of the statuary from Jersey landfills, marshes and people's backyards -- an arm here, a pillar, a crown of laurel there. What divine manifestation could best preside over such an undertaking, but the one encountered after a particularly messy and delicious summer rite? The following is a recollection of such an encounter.
Now, everyone is sleeping underneath the sun of morning
whilst a lone figure
creaking with the previous evening's exertions is out amongst the shafts of
sunlight. Not a single one of the revelers who had been tossing their clothing
into the night before is now standing. Not a one, that is, except me.
My name is OutOfSight. I am the spirit of garbage dumps and empty rooms, of bloodless coups, and I am the one that ensures that, through their own solitude, all coups will fall. However, I am also the one that makes you observe the damage you cause, I am the one who suggests to you the long arduous task of rebuilding, but unfortunately I can only be there as damage control when you finally begin. I am the one who ushers you down to the junkyard to pick and choose amongst the treasures there, I am the one who weeps at the rusting hulk of something about to be rescued, I am the one who shows you the bottom of the well, and yet you stand, in the open air, as though the well did not exist at all.
What am I doing here? you ask. Why am I standing here when everyone is huddled in their dome-tents and blankets trying to erase a powerful alcoholic night from their livers? Might ask you the same question, since you're the one rubbing your eyes and feeling the ache in your thighs and the lingering scent of opium poppies soaked into the punch. Look, they're still there, and the mist is starting to clear from the grass; it was a dry night, you've nothing to fear from the mud, the Aurora Borealis that came sheeting down from the night-domed heavens left nothing for you to tread upon.
Now tell me what purpose this scattered debris serves; who will appreciate it the way you do? Who will look and see that it sketches a glyph upon this field, who will read the glyph as the poetry of living, and who will refrain from resenting the duties it represents?
That's right -- you. To whom does the task of restoring the field to a less annoying condition fall, then? Yes. Get to work.
Hawk Touhy is a Seattle author and occasional ritualist who has most recently participated in the Rite of Mars and the Rite of Horus, as well as various and sundry private rites whose purpose and content shall be left to the reader's imagination.