Saturday, May 10, 2008

• Snow White & the seven dwarves.

  It's a hole opened into some forgotten cache of Hell, claustrophobic and wet with the heat and spit of human exploitation. Its jagged-hewn walls are joisted on timber crosses so wide you couldn't imagine the trees they were cut from, and its air is thick and black as a clot in a vein. In the dark a generator rumbles like a deranged old man and fills the hole with miasma, while a leaky hose snakes down from above to power a piston-drill and make the ancient granite slick with hydraulic fluid. But for all this, the Dwarves feel right at home here. Each day they turn the mine into a rampaging demonic carnival with the Teutonic furor of their labors. If this place was the precipice upon which Sisyphus was tormented, they would chase the boulder down the slope and strip it of every mineral before it reached the bottom. They would do it gladly. They do it for Mutter.
      Up above the hole you come into a small ugly dwelling like a flea's Heorot. The floor is bare Earth carpeted with hay and animal furs. The rickety doors to the mine dominate the room like a foreman standing watch over the mess-bench. This is where they consume the skin and tendons of sickly animals in milky stews and it is also where they sleep on cots warmed by the glowing coke of the forge. Here, Mutter comes each night for inspection. Christol with his cloudy goggles pulled down around his neck holds up to her like an expectant child the shining morsel they'd found in the mine whilst Lind, Odel, Schneidoff, Krichard, and Plaul sip anxiously from their wooden bowls and watch with waiting eyes.
      Properly speaking they are not Dwarves but men, and Mutter is a great woman like some sublime graven deity, ten-foot tall and more beautiful to behold than all the gleaming metal they could pluck from the rocks below. Her skin is white as snow, lips red as blood, hair black as ebony. To her the greatest stone is but a mere pebble, and tonight what they have to offer her is a stone at best. Christol is sent sailing backwards across the mess-bench at the end of her flawless fist. Mutter's discipline is strict and hard, but just. She punishes them with the boundless love and conviction of her massive heart. The silky skin of her hand feels like pearl upon their bare asses, and she smiles with the pleasure of knowing that they are learning from their mistakes, and growing.
      Some nights, Mutter sits in front of a tall mirror fixing the rose-red bow upon her head while Lind runs a brush through her beautiful black hair until it shines. They can't take their eyes off of her then, in her stunning gown of golden-yellow silk and midnight-blue velvet, bosom heaved up high beneath a low-cut neckline like a pair of milky ambrosial apples. She raises the hem of her dress, exposing an exquisitely long leg upon which she adjusts a gartered stocking, and Schneidoff bows down lovingly to polish the blood-red pumps on her feet.
      Some nights, after these little berserkers climb back up out of the Earth encrusted in nine layers of filth, their faces like Cheshire cats against their blackened skin, Mutter comes ducking in through the doorway to share the evening with them. And again they can't take their eyes off of her, as they put sopping pieces of bread inside their mouths. She sits there in her huge chair and draws gold dust up through a straw—one line, two lines, three lines, and she draws the golden-yellow silk of her skirt up and curls her legs in snugly against herself to watch them with a serenity they imagine only Heaven knows.
      And some nights, when the wind outside howls like a forlorn beast roving the desolation wilderness and they are cold and frightened and insecure about their places in this wide world, Mutter gathers them around her and presses them closely into her warm, firm torso like a ravishingly beautiful saint. This picture of rapture is what they will always hold in the very bowels of their souls. Odel mouths this over and over again into her breast: Mutter, we love you. And so, they are at a complete loss for words, thoughts, and even feelings when they find her one fatal night asleep in her bath beside a syringe on a saucer, and can't awaken her. Now they know not what to do, except cross her tender arms around a rose and lay her inside a box of glass so everyone can see her beauty, then return again to the mines, out of sheer habit.
  
  

  • 10:21 PM
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