Chapter 1
GAUNTLET VERSUS SHADE.
So the woman pushed him out, and when he was thrown down upon her belly, the sun was six degrees past high. The woman took him to a place where she stayed and other people were there, and a book. Fresh malleable out a mold steaming, the babe was ready, a cake to be shaped, tho with a tiny dark hard seed no one could touch embedded in his center.
The next day the woman presented the babe to the gauntlet. She took him from the home, wrapped him in a blanket, the tiniest mouth suckled her, and she carried him thus to the masses assembled in the garden lawns. Every one gaudy in iridescence and fragrances awaited the first spill, merry and enchanted by the child, content. The woman stopped at the edge of a patio, she uncorked him from her breast and snap-rolled him from the blanket unto the grass and lo he rolled and tumbled from.
The momentum carried him across down a hill until his little body jolted firm against a stone in the middle of a ring of the celebrants, the family of man. This outrage bruised all of him inside and out, and he cried out where he lay. The next second whatever breath remained was driven from his body beset by a book applied with a whack which again sprawled him across the rough grassy dirt. Many eyes followed his trajectory he was thrown from the force of the book. The woman now gave back to the hands of his siblings. The woman exhaled and regarded his injured form tiny and mauled at the base of a rock, too stunned to waaaaaaail.
The crowd glittered and swayed forward as an inhalation of expectation. They saw his face tight contort and a whoop as he turned color and screamed ignorant of being actualizing pain and suffering and dashed from comfort onto rocky grounds. They all the crowd exhaled at this at once turning one to another and chattering as field birds as to one, ignoring the wailing babe in their midst.
The gauntlet was over for this day the first after birth and so the woman wrapped him in the same blanket and carried him to the shade of a tree, and left him there alone. He was doubly fragile from the gauntlet, birth, the ignorance of self, he vented his displeasure of his injuries until weariness wrested consciousness from him in the forgiving coolness of the forgetful shade. He neither knew this event to be good or bad or anything, all of the whole world being presented at face value as it were, with eyes and blows he could not conceive, but his wounds to him said indeed this life is rough, cousin. He could not judge the least little thing for all the sensation was introduced to him on the moment he was squeezed from the womans body.
As he wallowed dazed in exhaustion still, his nourished body put the milk to work restoring the tiny body told itself., and the psyche and mechanisms inherent in the development of thought and surviving the night ignited.
The woman came back then, later, picked him up and suckled him to the fountain where she dunked him to wash. They find a house and lay down to sleep to sun. the next day [ a good lie to think is I know you know better and I will go with it- HOW ABOUT THIS-.] the woman awakes and eats. After she eats she puts a machine powder milk into his mouth, and he did not know any one thing but he spit it out first taste, grievous wounds applied him and the pain spoke and taught. Then the food put back into the throat mouth and he swallowed it all, wrapping his soul in tummy.
She napped him and again wrapped him in a blanket on this second day he was taken to the lawn. He was so unaware and soothed by the signs of love the gift of food and warmth and the sensation of the air itself. The woman stepped to the edge of the patio and snap-rolled him from the blanket to hurtle across the lawn a bouncing rubber gnome of pliably fragile ends and bands the body flung rolled hard and stopped off of a bounce which landed him upon his face.
His small frame was gashed and bruised and breaking blood, re-injured. The familiars were there also roundabout, witnessing judging from being and deeming to continue breathing for this is the rite.
The woman took a book from someone she heard and ran at him laying openly vicioussed out unknowing babe, still intact tho woe-ridden, and the tiny hard dark seed within his cake begin to assemble the progress of the shocks the squeeze of birth and now two rolls thru the gauntlet of miserable tortures pain came way into and etched into the seed and somehow the infant survives go the woman again went and ministered to his wounds wrapped him tight unsoiled him and fed him and fed him and hold him.
And the woman slept with the book. And the men stood back to back over the book they made before and the women followed them and this woman who also spat the child from the back to the ground and littered transistors and screens too followed the books and all men and this book had the hand of the woman who spat him out and hit him the mass behind her in waves of deaths from the beginning. Ali calls it rope-a-dope. Mealymouth only calls it names. And now all is smiles.
And the woman takes the child out smarting from the gauntlet most hideously with weeping crevasses grieving him bundled with fat red juice and leaves and mummered the child bundle to the lands at night dipped in surf the salt in brine eat away decay and pulverize the infant nerves. It is water suffused his tenderest flay wounds, we know this person 2 days old tho he may be. The tradition is hostility against the flesh, mechanical fact. And the judge is mean-spirited, dull as it knits in the aches.
The woman next lays the child 8 cups length from a house in the shade where little of the sun is touched down, tho roundabout it rebounded. And he dreamed in his swaddles and sighed and be still, for there were voices inside and out, and a gentle sway as the earth cupped the babe.
So the child was embrace enveloped in the exposure of the tree shade. Inside of his head was dreaming storms, so agitated they his frame and rattled him, sounds he would never hear again flared and blared a silent scream, nature soothed her infant in the damage. The stone cup buried there with ceremony pomp and YOU. He slept and was made strong.
Now when the woman came again she touched his eyes and caressed his face, she medicined and brothed him, laid hands upon him, releasing fluids from his wounds releasing the binds of aggression that grips every one, soothing and building on as to heal the 3 day old body and the bodies cuts were opened and all the womans and books attendants passed stain hand to hand among them and then hand to hand themselves. The woman then took the babe up and passed him to the first person and into the childs body passed a mark stained into all his wounds wrapping his body from the stain which was in the attendants hands, in which designs were found from chaos the manifest of a streaking universe. Everyone of the masses from the oldest people touched him, some others brought all sorts of corpses whose rotting hands and paws were inked and pressed tattoos into the babes skin, even the tiny babies hands were applied by force of persons into his vessel. Every hand could touch him and mark him and the mass and press of people and the colors of the marks overlapped rubbed in every skin on the new person smarting him who bled salt into his open wounds and stings of the mark.
The searing flashfires sucked air from his bellow pushing his body into belief. His skin took hold as the woman tended him, making as if to heal him in the blanket which she carried straight to where they took in that land the gone people to pieces and spirits sing winds. The trees there sprung stuck to the fix of the middle fork to the sky planes of earth chunks pierced with the root fount. The woman left him there amongst the tombs and the burning pots where they all breathed streams of those peoples loosed there in the smoke where there. This is all I can say.
Beyond all that, the child was stung buzzing wounds all over and numerous to having hundreds pulling into one mark to another uninterrupted. One other said of him was more mark than color haaaa. He is dark hard seed sprouted, welted to manifesting, initialing his grasp of the order of life itself to and fro it swish and tickled him even in the midst of the tortures that wrung his body a fire smoke. And this seed sprouted into the delight of interior piece in defiance of any of the peoples acquired abuses and chunks of themselves transferred with force and impact upon him.
This was a beginning of the understanding of that and what was demonstrated more than any other act performed by others with him as the focus, way marked as he was made out to root. Pots charred of those the disposed of the woman took up the child in the blanket and passed him thru the flames. No one of the people were there save those who are gone over where there. With them both as the woman passed him thru the flames again and times more and more the heat and power of that saturated the blanket, and then the child. Infusions with fire and smoke fires to trust for the woman she shook and squeezed him in the blanket, smothering the blessing into his ointmented starked skin heating the blood to the surface to stamp over and arrest the blood to forge back into itself barreling back into the body to take heat and to heal, and crusting into to fight off rot.
The holding blanket balmed and soothed him as the stories and histories apprehended from behind the hands of the people came before, smoked him solid and his breath was not blocked and the woman fed his belly and the next morning, she took him to the patio in the blanket and snap-rolled him a fast spinning body bouncing from the blanket onto the lawn and at this he gave up his body forevermore as every onlooker stained around the hands and ground some more as the babe was passed around to everyone again. They said, his skin is tough, his limbs are rigid and spiked and tell him to get used to this kind of activity.
Then woman took the child and wrapped him comfort in a blanket and fed him from her. The woman took him to a shade from the night and left him with his wounds closing over the ink pressed into him by the hands of the others. This night the earth came to him in rocks and trees and winds speaking and a rabbit on his chest tapped him, saying I see you have eaten enough. You have drunk enough, listen to us for we know you have been broken enough and played. Tap tap tap the rabbits pause paws tapped thru the blanket smudging the ink in the boys skin with his own prints.
Pebbles and roaches rolled and gathered under the babe and a turtle with a mossy back crawled under his neck and stayed there pressing against the mattress of the pebbles and the roaches and all of them touched his blanket and left their marks in the ink smudged into him by the mass and left a pattern there closing the wounds on his back and the roots of the tree he was cast upon nestled him between them supporting his ribs and spine. Tap tap tap the rabbit on his chest, the turtle stilled and gurgled. The wind came into the infants mouth and the infant vented out the results of the insults suffered him with the strength afforded by mothers milk and the blanket the grasses tufted up under him and softed spiny giving waves to undulate him as his infant heavings rocked him two and from and the nights and shades dropped down dark and dry brought him silence and recuperation. And his tongue brought forth those winds and they said truly this chimer is a one entitled capable of bringing us curious and enchanted, so they too mantled him with what mantles they have the winds and soothed unloosed upon his face which was seen from the midst of the bundled blanket marked. And he received all this and babe tho he was he was seen and could see and yet had no way to say the seeing.
So the child lay down in shadows and they soothed him close and he willed them closer still, and they were inhaled, wringing in his lungs, filling him up and out, assuaging this his battered body and they did this, and they did that to him and the friends rabbit and turtle thumped and growled on this earth bringing this beings voice forth, and started a hole beneath the child. Shades pushed down, earth pushed up and around him into a lip of dirt that rumbled and cliff under his body, buffeting him with winds and the friends stayed with him, knowing nothing of this. The child was heal, became the name of heal, and slept with this, forgetting all else as the sun came and its rays heated the body of the child, a disk of light compressed and injected self into the dark, hard seed.
