“When thou from hence away art past,
Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last,
And Christe receive thy saule.”
— “The Lyke-Wake Dirge”
(traditional, as early as 14th century in Yorkshire, England; first written down in 1686).
Over and over. I don’t need a map anymore, haven’t for years. My body knows the way, like an experienced lover’s hand becomes accustomed to the curve of a hip or the sweep of a thigh around torso. But not in a good way, the anticipation flows in the wrong direction. Its the dead opposite of sex, except maybe for the occasional fumbling around at the start. And you wish you could keep your clothes on.
I should give you some context. I’m a scapegoat. Not metaphorically but in the flesh, straight up out of the Bible. Before the Bible, actually. I was born in the great Germanic forest, long before the Romans invaded. My little tribe warred on our neighbors, of course, no more and no less than they warred on us. As a boy, I herded the swine as they feasted on mast among the beech and the oak. When I was 17, a man but with the scantest of beards, I was chosen. Doomed: to be put in place, to be judged, put to death. Every nine years, the tribe – like all our neighbors – chose one amongst us to eat and bear the sins of the community. I drew the odd-colored lot, and became what I am, the Sündenfresser, the Trauertrinker, the one who swallows the corpse cake. The Romans recognized me when they marched across the Rhine, identified me as the caper emissarius, which I found funny because I was more used to pigs than goats. Forgive me, such passed for a witticism back then.
I already knew I was just one of a multitude, a host of the chosen from every culture around the globe, each carrying the sins of their community. Later I found myself described in Leviticus with all its instructions and requirements (odd to be a character in a book I had not known existed). The in-gatherer of wrongs, the collector of turpitudes. And once again, though scholars might not agree with my interpretation, in the prophecies of Isaiah: the suffering servant “despised and rejected of men,“ the bruised carrier of sorrows. Throughout the Bible, I saw described the roads I traveled: the highway across the rough places and through the valley of dry bones, the valley shadowed, converging ultimately on the place of removal.
How to describe it, the great refugia, landfill, the place with its turrets, tunnels, and dovecotes? A registry and archive, because each and every sin was inventoried from the least of peccadilloes and the near endless variety of venial to the reeky pungent mortal. A furnace of affliction, wherein the sins are calcinated and sintered. A slag heap for tossing the scoria, purified. From the heap, we scapegoats were resurrected, again and again, and sent back into the world for the next nine years. Consume, absorb, retain, then travel across the wastes of Azazel to the disposal place. Die to release the cargo. Ballast-free sent back.
I have been consumed and reconstituted 277 times by my reckoning, though I may have missed a couple because, well, even their finest technicians cannot erase all trauma, and that entails a little memory loss. I recall all the broad strokes, though, and most of the details, so bear with me. As I say, the trudge back to the refinery fortress every nine years is hardly something I look forward to, but I am used to the cycle and certainty of it. I pride myself on my ability to withstand the rigors of the coking process. Sometimes, what kills you, does in fact make you stronger; Nietzsche was not always right. Besides, as that Rilke fellow said, “whoever rightly understands and celebrates death, at the same time magnifies life” (or something to that effect; I find the translations take liberties and I cannot locate the poet’s words in his original German, descendant of my own mother-tongue). I love the airy lightness on the way back, naturally, who wouldn’t? The little hope that maybe this time I might not be filled to the loadline. Never happens but hope really does leap up from fresh bright flames.
I recall that particular journey all too well. Replete I was, of course, with all manner of sins, some gray, some blood-red, jostling with fulgent purples, sloshing within me, so that I resembled a giant walking on uneven stilts. I remember what they had playing for me, the celestial equivalent of audiobooks: a Top Forty of old funeral chants, the keening best from the north of England (home to my many latter-day Germanic cousins, how restlessly we roamed). And then one of the sonorities came on to recite from the Golden Legend. Ah, give me a good hagiography any day, not the dry-as-dust pronouncements of Origen or the overbearing confessions of St. Augustine. Tramp, tramp, tramp over the heckling thorns and through the briar brakes I went, regaled by stories of St. Blandina tossed by the bull and St. Sebastian skewered by arrows.
So it came as a complete shock when I arrived at the gates of the place, only to find them shut. I was not alone. A growing crowd of us milled about, flummoxed. I knew a few of my peers, individuals whose territories overlapped with mine, what with people ever more mobile, communities crumbling or emerging, borders moving about. We’re as gossipy as members of any other professional trade group, eager to swap tips and hacks. Sort of like a knitting circle for the soul. I tried once to come up with a snappy name for us, along the lines of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, but nothing stuck.
Anyway, on that day, we tried everything we could think of.
In many languages, we hailed the portal. We conjugated spells to reveal hidden passcodes, chanted our pleas and prayers. We sang to the doves in the clefts of the rock, hidden in the cliff-spirals of the place: “please let us see your face, let us hear your voice.“ No response.
ome of us called out to the shade of St. Jerome, our guy of the wastelands, our champion against the opposition. Others invoked the spirit of Hildegard, singing to her in her own lingua ignota. No response.
One especially enterprising eater tried dreaming his way into the visions of St. Teresa; another called out the itineraries of Erasmus, our patron of the weary feet and broken shoes. No response.
Some among us assumed the role of Zadokites, setting up a replica of the Temple, complete with shewbread on a gilded altar made of acacia. They burned the appropriate amount of frankincense, swung bundles of hyssop, lemon balm, and sage on ropes through the air. No response.
Some of us tried to pick the locks, which merely closed up altogether. One clever-boots constructed a balloon; after a day aloft, he returned to say that the walls of the place appeared to extend beyond the atmosphere. Another ingenious colleague tried to burrow under the wall, but was thwarted by foundations that seemed to descend into the magma.
I am embarrassed to say that eventually we resorted to yelling at the walls, banging on the gate with our fists, like a bunch of barbarians or errant schoolchildren. We wailed and gnashed our teeth. The place gave no reply, not then and not since. The silence hurt more than voiced dismissal would have. Despondent at the mute rebuff, one by one we turned away. I have wandered since, wending my way back into the roar of the sinful world. I know not what my mission has become.
What I do know is that I am compelled to eat the sins that blossom ever more vigorously in these latter days. I eat and I eat, and – while I do not show it corporeally – my soul’s belly bloats. I carry a grave banquet, and have nowhere to deliver it. I have returned four times to the place since the gates were shut, every nine years as ordained, only to find it just as implacably sealed as when I last left. No message hangs on the gates, no “power main break, come back later,“ or “shut for scheduled maintenance, please see our website for updates.“ I have had ample time to muse on the nature and vagaries of life during my journeys, and, while I would never claim to be any kind of system-building philosopher, I wonder if perhaps Nietzsche got some things right.
All I know for sure is that the sins I carry mount and saturate the table, flood the feasting hall. I never much liked the dying, but its regularity was a comfort. Now I know there really is something worse than death.