Radiance

Where there is milk, there is mating, isn’t there? There are children. The ghost-voice of Amandine comes over the phonograph as the final shot of And the Sea Remembered, Suddenly flickers silver-dark and the floating Neptunian pleasure domes recede. Everyone knew where Severin was bound next, long before principal photography ever began. You could see it on her face. To Venus, and Adonis; to the little village rich in milk and children that vanished two decades after its founding, while the callowhales watched offshore, impassive, unperturbed. You would have gone, too. You would have yearned to go. Chasing after an ending to a story already in progress. An ending means there is order in the universe, there is a purpose to events. There is a reason to do things, an answer to be found, a solution key at the back of the book that maps to the problems posed. Find one ending, a real ending, and the universe is redeemed, ransomed from death—but death can never be that ending. It is a cheat, a quick shock, but no story truly ends with a death. A death only begs more questions, more tales.

Across your ribs her ship speeds over the ice road as fast as it can go. You almost want to cheer it on—but it speeds toward cessation, toward negation, toward sound and darkness and a final, awful image flickering in the depths.

But you can see her thinking, see her new film, her last film, taking shape behind her eyes.

They are documentaries, yes. They are also confessional poems. She is her father’s girl, though she would rather no one guess.

Severin asked the great question: Where did Adonis go in death? The old tales know an answer. But it can never be her answer. We offer it anyway.

Adonis returned to his mother: the Queen of the Dark, the Queen of the Otherworld, the Queen of the Final Cut.

The Miranda Affair

 (Capricorn Studios, 1931, dir. Thaddeus Irigaray) 

Cast:

Mary Pellam: Madame Mortimer

Annabelle August: Wilhelmina Wildheart

Igor Lasky: Kilkenny

Jacinta LaBianca: Yolanda Brun

Barnaby Sky: Laszlo Barque

Arthur Kindly: Harold Yellowboy

Giovanni Assisi: Dante de Vere

Helena Harlow: Maud Locksley

Father Patrick: Hartford Crane

[INT. The observation carriage of the good ship Pocketful of Rye, barrelling down the icy, starry tracks of the Orient Express. Ferns and chaises and brandy and cigarettes in gold cases. Io looms overhead, volcanoes glowering, electric cities glittering and blinking. The Pocketful of Rye is thundering through Grand Central Station, the heart of the Jupiter System, a thick knot of gravitational whirlpools thrusting the ship toward beautiful and dangerous Miranda, moon of a thousand seductions.