Pilgermann

1

Pilgermann here. I call myself Pilgermann, it’s a convenience. What my name was when I was walking around in the shape of a man I don’t know, I simply can’t remember. What I am now is waves and particles, I don’t need to walk around, I just go. When I want to appear I turn up as an owl. When I see myself in my mind I see myself flying silently across the face of a full moon that is wreathed in luminous clouds; heath and swamp and wood below me, silvered rooftops, sleeping chimneys glide. Pilgermann the owl. The owl has always been big in my mind. Once as a boy I was in a ruin of some kind, old fire-blackened stones and burnt and rotted timbers. Twilight it was, the dying day shivering a little and huddling itself up in its cloak. Suddenly there came flying towards me with a mouse dangling from its beak an owl, what is called a veiled owl, with a limp mouse dangling from its cryptic heart-shaped face. ‘Hear, O Israel!’ I cried: ‘the Lord our God, the Lord is One!’

Ah! the flickering in the darkness, the passage of what is called time!

I don’t know what I am now. A whispering out of the dust. Dried blood on a sword and the sword has crumbled into rust and the wind has blown the rust away but still I am, still I am of the world, still I have something to say, how could it be otherwise, nothing comes to an end, the action never stops, it only changes, the ringing of the steel is sung in the stillness of the stone.

I speak from where I am; I speak from between the pieces; I speak from where Abram heard the voice of God:

And it came to pass, that,

when the sun went down, and

there was thick darkness,

behold a smoking furnace,

and a flaming torch that

passed between these pieces.

In that day the LORD made

a covenant with Abram…

A covenant with God is made from between the pieces of oneself; it’s the only place where a covenant can happen, no covenant is possible until one has divided the heifer, the she-goat, the ram of oneself. The turtle-dove and the young pigeon being the heart and soul one of course does not divide them. When Abram sacrificed the animals of himself as instructed by God a deep sleep fell upon him, and the dread and the great darkness from which God spoke. Then came the thick darkness after the sun went down, and in that darkness were the smoking furnace and the flaming torch that passed between the pieces. So here already was shown the main theme of the people of Abraham: the furnace and the torch; the consuming fire and the onward flame.

If you measure with what is called time it’s a long way from here back to Abram’s pieces. But still there is the division of the animals of us, still the thick darkness, the smoking furnace, the flaming torch. And still there are covenants to be made between the pieces, between one fire and another. I am only the waves and particles of such as I was but I have a covenant with the Lord, the terms of it are simple: everything is required of me, for ever.