Cinderloo
(Dawley Riots)

Golem

In the Prague ghetto, the Vlatava heavy, sullen in the faint moonlight, men digging on the banks. Filling sacks with silt. Working through the winter night, the year turning under turning stars. Rabbi Loew and his golem. In the tenements, the high-leaded, narrow windows in the light of tallow candles, the suffusing of the silt with the stuff of light: are you certain these are not the works of the Qlippoth? At the hollow of the tree where nothing exists, one may postulate a Golem. Remember, the reverse of the Sephira. We are looking for a protector, for a being to save our murdered children, looking for the nighttime fallen angel, aborted through time and distance to the service of man.

In the rabbinaical year 5332, the small group of men left the ghetto at midnight, through the huddled streets and scalloped roofs that tilted to the streets; the stench of the ordure and charnel was muted in the frosty night. The moonlight showed faintly on the freezing puddles; racked with dreams of power arrogated to themselves they passed through the city. The far off cries caused them to pause and to fall into the shadows until certain that they were undiscovered. Rounding the corners into the many small squares had the edge of fear of discovery. Onwards to the river: the sharp abutments of the bridges hissing as the thick water passed. Moving upstream, past the moored rowing boats and dinghies to where the sand fell away in a thick and smudged outline under the towers of the cathedral. The ordinances prescribed death for Jews out of the ghetto at this time: to be apprehended in the precincts of the cathedral itself was unthinkable: the profanities laid against them would be limited only by the imaginations of their accusers.

Arriving from Marienbad, to make the golem. The secret of Albert Magnus awaited rediscovery in the silt and clay of the Vltava. Kneeling in the sucking mud they scooped handfuls of the mud until a figure was fashioned, about ten feet tall. Rough lines indicated the features. They stood back, perspiring in the chill air. Circling then, the words chanted from the Kabala, bringing flashes of red light to the clay: indistinct at first then brighter until the mud man glowed with intensity of heated coals. Light leapt to the eyes and the figure struggled pulling itself free from the womb of clay. Sephiroth or Qliphoth: what power have we assumed, what knowledge usurped? From the tiny homunculi in the stoppered jars in the laboratories and garrets of Marienbad to the broken prophesy of Albert Magnus' talking head.

The figure dragged itself free of earth and rose to tower over them. Rabbi Loew reached for the parchment and placed it within the creature's mouth. The features were clearer now, indistinct rather than unformed. They walked away. The river was already obliterating the signs of their excavations. Following back through the nest of streets and alleys. The wooden doors bolted against plague and the child-thieves.

The visitors made for departure. We return now to Mirienburg, it is a journey we must take. We have seen and when the time is right we will tell the world.

Forgotten light, the figure patrols the ghetto. It will serve but only as long as it is controlled and who will remember when the Rabbi is dead?

Would you believe me if I were to tell of a strange and fabulous world all around us? The strange creatures that live in the periphery of vision are inhabitants of that world. With practice one can follow them back through the white gates, down overhung, green paths, antiseptic corridors.

I have never seen the world on a night like this, a lunar emptiness spilling over the roofs below. Quicksilver and shadow, quicklime and lovers, stone angels and gargoyles: endless sleep on moonlit terraces. I drink chilled wine under ivy; my companions are lamia, homunculi and the figures in shadow, their faces concealed. We are waiting.

I think of Old London, corrupted now; turned gaudy with greed, tawdry with money: the stars recede before the neon and sodium. The old idols dead under the rubble of building.