Ithaca a Saga
The Ithaca Psychogeographic Liberation Front has sought the council of Sága in the form of a rune reading. We received the following prophecy in reply.
ᚨ (Ansuz)
Screaming, I take up the runes.
A river of language pours from my open mouth–
Alive, the words carve meaning into a frozen world.
A comfort to the wise, and a charge.
Speak;
Your story begins.
In the beginning, then, the word
That sparking leap of conjuration,
Meaning brought forth from dead earth.
The way we speak of kings, in tales of debt and thunder.
The myths and lore. The cunning men who tell it.
This much is known:
I drink with Odin in a sunken place where water flows.
Odin, who screamed forth the runes from which you read,
And learned a woman’s magic.
This is an old tale,
Old as glaciers, a saga written on the earth itself.
He died. He hung nine days upon a tree and died.
Whatever war he fought was lost,
Gungnir’s bite upon his side,
He hung, alone, and died.
This much is known.
This is the magic of the word.
The way the very speaking of a thing creates it.
I say “the crossroads where he hangs”
And you can feel the chill,
Smell the rot and shit from off his body,
Hear the wind trace a lazy finger
Across his freezing chest, which draws an agonal breath
The likes of which there’s what, a handful left?
This much is known.
This is how the story ends.
Imagine it. The flaming eye sputtering out,
The last thing the gallows’ burden sees
My runes, just eight and three.
Among the spots of light that strobe across his dying eye,
He learns their secrets.
And then he screams.
Imagination fails here.
This is a pain beyond words.
A god is dying.
And then he isn’t.
A scream that grinds like ice,
And then escapes.
The rest is lost,
Is just a whisper passed between a gallows pair
Who drink beneath the earth.
Even my name’s an ambiguity,
Derived perhaps from sight, perhaps from speech,
This gap the spring from which my magic flows.
The thing unsaid, or said in lies,
Made up, and then come true.
The text below the text, the hidden word,
The secret cloaked in paradox and metaphor.
This is the magic I taught him
There upon the gallows tree.
The raven tester paid me well.
Gave me a hall,
A sunken place where waters flow,
So radiant a glacier stopped
To drank it in, an ice age nib
That carved a rune into the earth,
A watery digit pointing to this spot.
What? You thought these were just streets you walked,
And not the corridors of thought?
That Ithaca was just a town above Cayuga’s waters
When so much treasure lays beneath its ground?
You ask for omens?
Why look, there’s Alex Haley’s roots,
And there a buried map of Sagan’s cosmos.
There’s Feynman stood beneath the shadow of the mushroom cloud
And Courtney Love beneath her grief.
This is Sökkvabekkr.
This is my hall, and you my people.
Listen: I would teach you things.
A language game with rules writ in pale fire,
Whose every jest is infinite.
The shadow tongue that first created thought.
The alphabet in which the world was penned.
I’ll tell you how learn your fate
And show you how to change it.
ᚲ (Kenaz)
I know of the fire that writhes beneath the earth,
Whose flesh the roots of Wyrd hold tight.
But it is a torch that brought you back here,
Where death makes a pale corpse.
What truth hides in the shadows that dance in such meager light?
A spark: would you know yet more?
I am buried here, beneath the tree
Atop a snow-capped hill
Beside the bones from the birth.
Look upon my grave lights
And know my secrets.
What once was known of Sökkvabekkr, none can say.
Its first people left the place alone, save for a hunting camp
Settling instead in higher reaches round the sunken shore.
Until we came.
In 1779, George Washington sends forth a quarter of his men
To march against the Haudenosaunee
And stop them working with the British.
John Sullivan is given charge and bid
To bring about “total destruction and devastation.”
His forces camp in Ithaca, then move west
To burn Coregonal, near Buttermilk Falls.
The name meant “where they keep the pipe of peace,”
Just ashes now, one of forty towns put to the torch.
This is genocide, and cannot be repaid.
That mound is closed to us,
A story we don’t get to tell.
We are invaders, and must plumb our own depths
To gain an understanding of this stolen land.
This starts in 1789, with Simeon DeWitt
The state surveyor, who carves out twenty-eight new towns
And leaves his clerk, a classicist named Robert Harpur, to find them names.
Harpur draws from myth and poetry,
From stories of the ancient world,
And crafts a country of the word:
Milton, Dryden, Homer, and Ulysses.
This final parcel holds a hidden gem—
A stretch of land DeWitt would buy himself,
Til then just called “The City” or “The Pit.”
DeWitt took Harpur’s cue and named it Ithaca,
The home Ulysses sought.
The place where stories end,
Are buried far beneath the earth,
Come back again as ghosts.
1828 and Ezra Cornell, a carpenter and engineer, arrives,
Takes work with Jeremiah Beebe,
Dams Fall Creek to form a lake where Beebe sets his mill,
Then marries, buys a patent and sells plows.
He’s tasked with laying wire for Samuel Morse
To weave a tapestry Penelope could never dream,
A copper lattice that shrouds the earth in words.
A wealthy man now flush with Western Union stock,
The former plowman sees the light below
And becomes patron of the town.
In 1864 he builds a library,
Then grants his farm and fortune to the state
To found the school that bears his name,
Ensures the city’s nature:
A place where depths are plumbed
And knowledge found.
A century later and M.H. Abrams pens The Mirror and the Lamp,
A study of romantic poetry that says
It changed the very soul of words,
Which once just showed the world, but now illumined it.
His student, Harold Bloom, takes up the cause
And writes upon the Lambeth poet William Blake
Whose lushly drawn prophetic works
He carved reversed on copper plates,
Each copy pressed with his own hand
To ornament in paint and gold.
Blake calls this form “illuminated printing,”
Perfecting it the year of DeWitt’s survey,
Too late to gain a slot on Harpur’s list.
His work describes a bold new pantheon,
A new mythology. The Book of Urizen,
An edda for the modern age,
Describes the tyrant of its name
Who seeks to fix the world in single vision.
A sequel names his spouse, Ahania,
Sees him kill her in his war against their son, Fuzon,
Who Bloom, mistaken, sees the story’s central figure,
Calls my lamentations “haunting” and moves on.
There, beside the apple tree, I die, am buried,
Wait until the longbeard sits upon my mound,
And names me queen of stories
So I can bury mine instead.
ᛈ (Pertho)
Joyful is the laughter of kinsmen
Where snake eyes peer up amidst the pints.
As my luck would have it, it was Odin who found me on that cliff
Contemplating my fate.
“Jump,” he said. “Luck is known only by the bold
And is strengthened with glad use.”
The roar of drunken revelry:
A night upon the town,
Back in the days when it was known as Sodom.
Look, there in the corner of Gere’s Tavern,
Where two men wrestle for a stick
While at a nearby table dice cups clatter
And gamblers extoll the fates
Begging to be made lucky.
In truth, his heart is mine,
The riddler’s brother.
Mine and others, true, but mine.
The Fire-tongued father of monsters
Is always welcome in my hall,
And oh, he’s spent some time there.
Never one to play a single side,
He sells the mob of drunken dockmen out
For William Wisner, a fire and brimstone preacher
Whose temperance is so enraging
That townfolk smash the schoolhouse where he spoke,
And nail his congregation in a barn.
His comrade Captain Cudgel prints The Castigator,
A flyting to put Aegir’s hall to shame.
It’s full of proclamations from Ben Drake, who called himself Tecumsah,
A tyrant teetotaler meting vigilante justice on the town.
Once, when a traveling performer defied his order to pack it in
Tecumsah raised a mob, broke up the show,
And chased the showman’s monkey down to shoot it dead.
“A wild and dangerous animal,” he called it.
He’s in the nature of this place as much words and buried secrets,
His trickster spirit in its very earth.
When William Gallagher draws in the rubes with talk of healing springs
It’s him, not magnets, that provide the pull.
When Ricky Jay, a sometimes student at Cornell,
Sits up at night and palms the ace of spades,
It’s he who guides the prestedigitating hand.
He whispers in the ears of Ira Dean and Johnny Thompson,
Who build a nine foot man of stone
And pay Frank Creque to bury it by night beneath a building site,
Though not enough to buy his silence after.
In 1844, election near, the local paper prints the words of Baron Roorback,
Who traveled through the south and met a group of slaves,
Described the mark upon their shoulders,
A brand placed there by their cruel master:
JKP, for James K. Polk.
In truth, the piece and Roorback both are fake.
A Whiggish hoax; a gambled slander on their Democratic foe.
The bet goes bad, the scandal sticks instead to them.
Polk takes the state, the Whigs cry fraud for years
And Roorback comes to be the name for such fake news,
A fatal template showing how to break the world.
And then, of course, there’s Edward Rulloff.
Lawyer, teacher, herbalist physician, all this and still just twenty-four,
Takes up with Harriett Schutt, the cousin of his boss, just seventeen.
Her family’s alarmed, and Harriett, already with a girl, regrets the choice.
He takes it badly, shows up upon his neighbor’s door
And begs a horse to travel east
Then takes off westward to the lake, a wooden chest in tow.
They dredge the lake, but never find the bodies,
And have to charge him as a kidnapper.
Ten years in jail, he takes up languages,
And pens a book, now lost, that says
That meaning lies within the very sounds themselves.
How very like a husband:
Almost right, yet deadly wrong.
His sentence almost served,
The county tries him for his daughter’s murder
So Rulloff charms a student, Albert Jarvis
Who doubles as the city’s undersherriff,
Slips the noose, and takes off through the night,
Runs off to Meadville, Pennsylvania, less two toes,
And reinvents himself James Nelson, inventor and professor
Til Jarvis writes with blackmail.
His back against the wall, he robs a jewelry store,
Goes back to jail, but beats the charge,
Heads east to New York City,
Forgetting just who drew the lines
That formed Manhattan’s grid.
He hits the philologic circuit, this time fashioned Euri Lorio,
Tries once again to sell his book but fails, is dubbed a crank
And takes again to crime, teams up with Jarvis and another miscreant
To rob a dry goods store in Binghamton.
The dice roll bad: his friends both drown, and Rulloff kills a clerk,
Is caught and hanged,
Boasts at the gallows of his plans in hell,
And becomes legend:
Genius Killer. Two-Lived Man.
Come see his pickled brain.
He can’t stand still his final days,
Writes letters begging that his theories be preserved.
They’re not, another secret buried in my hall;
I’ve little pity for abusers.
They bind him in the end. My friend,
Who sometimes seems the very spirit of this place.
Forsaken even by his brother,
They hunt him down and kill his sons
To bind him, deep beneath the earth,
When all he did was tell the truth.
Him I pity and I love, for all it does.
They say that he’ll betray them if he’s freed;
That he would side with monsters, burn the world.
I don’t believe it, written though it is.
In the end, we only play our roles.
ᛚ (Laguz)
All is quiet, and I don’t know how long I’ve been, this time,
Gazing into the false moon you reflect up to me.
He is distorted, riding atop your waves–a shining lure jutting into the deep.
I would know more of the secrets you whisper to me:
Where you rush off to, and what lies beneath.
Perhaps if I listen just a bit closer. Perhaps if I dive in.
A shimmering of light resolves into the image of a lake,
And of the girl beside it, gazing in upon
A face whose smile’s almost hers,
Like light from off a silver screen.
Pearl White, 1915, and in the water’s mirror
She can see the bravest woman ever born.
She flies a plane, climbs up a cliff, and leaps from off a bridge.
Stood safely on the shore she watches herself swim against a raging current,
Although in truth the water’s placid.
She’s here to film The Exploits of Elaine,
A knockoff of her more iconic starring turn, The Perils of Pauline.
She’s twenty-six, the Queen of Serials, does all of her own stunts.
Immaculate, she turns away and it’s the template for a century of movie stars:
Monroe and Tate and Garland.
She feels a twinge within her back,
An unhealed injury picked up on Perils,
Thinks nothing of it.
This is Ithaca’s nightside; its twilight zone:
A dreamscape soundstage on backlot 49
Where everything’s both mystery and clue.
White works in film for seven years,
Becomes too valuable to risk on stunts,
And so, in 1922, they pay a man to dress up in her clothes and leap from off a bus.
He misses, strikes his head, and dies.
The scandal puts an end to her career;
She moves to Paris, runs a nightclub.
The back injury persists.
She drinks to numb the pain,
Is dead by forty-nine.
In truth she’s luckier than many.
She got out rich, and spent her money well.
But here in dreams she’s every fame-cursed ingenue,
A cautionary first reel tale from some forgotten noir.
The craze begins in 1900 with G.S. Moler,
Cornell anatomist who takes a skeleton
And poses it to snap a picture. Repositions, snaps again,
And strings the images together.
Illusion has its way; the skeleton is dancing;
The dead returned, beneath the placid surface of the screen.
1912, and Theodore Wharton comes to film a football game,
Is taken by the view, and so returns next year;
Shoots Dear Old Girl with Francis Bushman,
Comes back again with brother Leopold
And sets up shop in Stewart Park.
Just one night on the train from New York City,
And suddenly the town’s the center of the world,
Completely starstruck,
So that when they send a trolley hurtling from Stewart Bridge
A thousand people come to gawk and stare.
A couple decades up the road and all this turns to science fiction:
Rod Sterling gravely introducing footage of a UFO with score by Robert Moog.
But here it’s ballroom bombast, proto-jazz age luminescence
Burning like a silver nitrate fire.
In 1917 it’s Irene Castle, shooting Patria
While husband Vernon’s off to war.
America’s most famous dancing duo,
Who brought the world the Foxtrot,
Though it’s named for Harry Fox
Who’d been to town the year before.
Two years later, Vernon’s dead,
His plane crashed in a Texas field,
And Irene’s back to marry Robert Treman.
And then, next year, it’s over.
The Whartons close up shop,
And film moves west to Hollywood
To shoot year round and without unions.
Treman loses Irene’s money on the market.
A few years later, she moves on.
But underneath the surface of the screen, it’s immortal.
Pearl White’s still twenty-six, and cursing out the teenager who chanced upon her sunbathing,
Or making eyes at Tburg cops while speeding in her Bearcat.
Here beneath it’s not the thing that matters
But the meaning which its shape conveys:
The tricks of light and sacrificial brides.
1916 they shoot The Mysteries of Myra,
An occult exploitation piece whose villainous Black Lodge
Is modeled on the Golden Dawn.
They write Aleister Crowley, then on US tour,
And so the Great Beast comes to Ithaca,
Has a gander at this “film” thing, and at me;
Keeps silent, but is soon at work on Moonchild.
He takes another Scarlet Woman, Leah Hirsig,
And dictates Lieber ABA proclaiming magic a “disease of language,”
A sentiment that echoes Blake,
Who calls me “mother of pestilence.”
There’s no coincidences here,
Nothing that is not full of meaning;
Is not significance itself
1915 again, a cool November night.
Pearl White pulls up her skirt to hop a puddle like a rushing waterfall,
Pushes through down Seneca and steps into the theater.
She pays the usher with a smile, takes her seat.
The lights go down.
The wind blows in.
The surface shimmers.
The image decoheres.
ᚹ (Wunjo)
They say that money can’t buy happiness.
Perhaps that’s true, but there are things it can buy.
Shelter. Food. Comfort, and time.
Where can happiness take root in the absence of these?
What joy can be had in constant fear?
Laughter echoes through the hall where Frigg spins
Joy.
That’s what my husband called me once,
Back when I found babes of bliss on my beds,
And bosoms of milk in my chamber.
The dormroom life is somewhat leaner,
Though I can’t complain.
I sleep through two alarms, then rise just like the harvest moon,
Skip the shower, brush my teeth, and spend too long on TikTok.
I grab a fig and pomegranate smoothie, just for old time’s sake, then grab the 43,
And as it rattles down through Varna think how Nabokov would ride the bus through town
To listen to the teenage girls, then base Lolita on their rhythms.
The bus pulls in on Seneca, a block from the old Star Theater.
I step out and smile at the autumn chill,
Then on a whim decide to walk the gorge trail like a fucking tourist just because I can.
I like it here.
Once in Collegetown I step across the decades,
And stop in Johnny’s Big Red Bar and Grill.
I find a day where Peter Yarrow plays, and sit with Thomas Pynchon in the back,
Light up a joint, let myself relax,
And just think about how much I like it here.
As a rule, I don’t appear in stories.
I’m mentioned twice in Blake:
A minor work he printed once, in which I die with one good speech,
And an unfinished one that contradicts itself.
As Sága, just a mention in each Edda.
Enough to name my hall, and little more.
I’ve never liked dwell on things.
Meandering to 1995,
I drop in on the trans support group meeting at Hal’s Deli,
Let them buy me lunch, then wander to the seventies
And dance to T. Rex at a block party to protest Vietnam,
And when cops storm in with teargas I run laughing through the decades,
Taking shelter on the Commons where they’re picketing the fash.
It isn’t perfect here. I’m not naive.
I’ve spent a winter in the Jungle and another on the Rhine.
I’ve shivered sick with typhoid on the steps of Inlet Mission,
And seen the Ku Klux Klan march out across the circus flats.
It’s not utopia, but nothing is.
It’s nice, that’s all,
And after a life of suffering and sorrow that’s enough.
I watch foxes play on East Hill trail, and otters frolic in Fall Creek.
Feed Moosewood leftovers to mastodons.
Stay out all night to party with the faggots and their friends,
And nurse my headache over coffee while I bathe in Potter Falls.
I stand in the middle of the octopus in rush hour traffic eating the first peach the Ithaca Farmer’s Market ever sold, luxuriating in the sticky sweetness on my chin as I laugh at honking motorists.
I’m well aware of my contrivance.
Less a well-supported reading than something you can’t technically disprove,
I’m basically a fanfic.
But I’m here, alive in every aching second of this place.
I’m the aging punk at Wegmans scowling fondly at the kids,
The grad student coyly texting nudes,
The grandmother dying in the hospital, dreaming she’s back in Betty Friedan’s classroom.
Back in St. James with Harriet Tubman.
Back in Coreganol.
I love you.
In the end, that’s all it is.
You live in a dopey college town in the middle of nowhere and I love you.
Sunset and I find myself beside the library.
I stop to see the sculpture there.
Called Songs of Innocence, it shows two figures dancing;
A mother and a son perhaps.
The image is original, though in Blake’s style.
It could be me, in ages long since passed.
I could be dancing with my son, exulting in the being of him,
Before his war against his father slew me.
I look at the woman, measuring her joy and innocence,
And think how I have found experience much sweeter.
I think about Odysseus, and how on his return
The streets and shops that must have seemed so commonplace before
Now shuddered with infinitudes of song,
Seemed holy once he’d seen their absence.
There’s a saga spilling forth from every mumbled conversation,
An ancient temple springing out from every stone.
Every pothole hides a cyclops, every puddle a Charybdis.
Every apple’s sparked a century of war.
I love you.
I don’t need more than this.
I love you.
ᚺ (Hagalaz)
Thunder cracks and stones fall;
Ice from the sky pelts holes into homes,
Its fate known only by the wind.
But seasons change, and ice melts to water.
Surtr knows the truth:
That which is still is dead.
A month of drought gives way to piercing hail.
The fields are torn to pieces, crops dead, already rotting in the heat.
It’s happening more and more.
I am Sága, of Asgard, and our stories only end one way.
Odin, swallowed whole by Fenris wolf.
Tyr, battling with the hound, Garmr, until both lay dead.
Freyr, who brought the harvest in, cut down by Surtr,
Who walks across the earth and burns it in his wake.
It is an age of wind and axes,
Homes painted red with crimson gore.
A story goddess with a college town can’t change that.
But I am not without my uses
So yes, Cayuga Katie rises up to battle Thor,
Who slays her, staggers just nine steps, collapses dead,
The poisons of a million salt mines coursing through his veins.
Or maybe Nalgfir docks at Steamboat Landing,
The armies of Hel swarming upon the Sunday market.
The Priuses are overwhelmed. The city falls.
More likely though, it’s just a metaphor for climate change.
Civil wars, pandemics, great migrations;
Food systems breaking underneath the strain.
This much is known.
This is how the story ends.
Fenris swallows Odin whole,
A specific detail that, it must be said,
Hardly sounds the gore god’s darkest hour.
The masked one collects magics; plots, and plans, and plays his games.
The games I taught him.
His brother, Loki, is among them.
A giant, he is made Aesir
Is promised that wherever Odin drinks he’ll have a seat,
So sits among the gods, assists his brother’s schemes
And there’s no story told that speaks of what it was that forged the bond between them.
But I know.
Loki ensures the death of Baldr, though Frigg nearly breaks the world to stop it
And on his funeral pyre, the high one leans into his dead son’s ear
And whispers words that have not ever been repeated.
But I know them.
I was there when he screamed them.
The stories tell of Gimle, where the war’s survivors gather;
Of Líf and Lífþrasir, who shelter at Hodmimmis hold.
This could mean anything.
Perhaps the planet cooks, its people die.
We try again with sentient eukaryotes.
We’re speaking of a man who had his brother kill his son then jailed him for it;
You shouldn’t trust him.
More than this, I cannot say.
It only works if it’s a secret, after all.
Kept within the shadows, left in gaps;
It isn’t magic if it’s not a trick.
I cannot spare you history or horror.
But I’ll say this: I chose this place,
North and inland, suited to withstand the storm.
I chose it,
With its knowledges and people,
Its poets, farmers, radicals, and drunks.
I chose here to build my hall.
I consecrated it, infused its every breath and block with meaning.
I did this for a reason.
That’s what stories are;
They’re where things happen for a reason.
Go forth then,
And walk the streets of Sökkvabekkr knowing you are holy.
Know that Sága looked upon this place and loved it.
Understand how it was made and learn the rules that built it,
And know that all a rule defines is how to break it.
The rest is hidden underneath the word,
In rumors, mysteries, and lies.
A secret from the gods themselves.
A tale best left un—
Rune poems written by Penn Wiggins with Elizabeth Sandifer
