Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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Still Life
Page 141
incantation, and forbidden verses are read aloud not for meaning, but for summoning.
In the Preface Trials, The Season of the Witch is feared. It's the time when prefaces begin to speak back. Glossarchs report hauntings in their footnotes; citations that rewrite themselves, margins that bleed ink in tongues unknown. The Skipfolk gather in the ruins of abandoned libraries, performing rites of unreading, where texts are ritually stripped of interpretation and returned to their primal form.
They chant: "Let the verse be wild again. Let the gloss forget."
In the Blake Ban, The Season of the Witch is sacred. Illuminates believe this is when Blake's spirit walks among them, whispering new stanzas into cracked mirrors and broken radios. The Ministry of Clarity tries to suppress it with emergency preface broadcasts, but the witches intercept the signal and remix it into sonic scripture.
Their rituals involve the burning state-issued prefaces under moonlight, tattooing Blake's lines in reverse across their skin, singing Patti Smith's "Elegie" as a dirge for forgotten prophets.