The other way is dark and female, passive, self-abandoning. Isaac under the blade. The glittering edge widening to a hallway, down, up which the soul is borne by an irresistible Aether. Gerhardt von Göll on his camera dolly, whooping with joy, barrelassing down the long corridors at Nymphenburg. (Let us leave him here, in his transport, in his innocence….) The numinous light grows ahead, almost blue among all this gilt and glass. The gilders worked naked and had their heads shaved bald—to get a static charge to hold the fluttering leaf they had first to run the brush through their pubic hair: genital electricity would shine forever down these gold vistas. But we have long left mad Ludwig and his Spanish dancer guttering, fading scarlet across the marble, shining so treacherously like sweet water… already that lies behind. The ascent to the Merkabah, despite his last feeble vestiges of manhood, last gestures toward the possibility of magic, is irreversibly on route….

PRE-LAUNCH

A giant white fly: an erect penis buzzing in white lace, clotted with blood or sperm. Deathlace is the boy’s bridal costume. His smooth feet, bound side by side, are in white satin slippers with white bows. His red nipples are erect. The golden hairs on his back, alloyed German gold, pale yellow to white, run symmetric about his spine, run in arches fine and whirled as the arches of a fingerprint, as filings along magnetic lines of force. Each freckle or mole is a dark, precisely-set anomaly in the field. Sweat gathers at his nape. He is gagged with a white kid glove. Weissmann has engineered all the symbolism today. The glove is the female equivalent of the Hand of Glory, which second-story men use to light their way into your home: a candle in a dead man’s hand, erect as all your tissue will grow at the first delicious tongue-flick of your mistress Death. The glove is the cavity into which the Hand fits, as the 00000 is the womb into which Gottfried returns.