Blood Ritual: Wolf Dog Hybrid Humans Contact Boy in Third Dimension, Mayor of Albany Implied
I got an old police scanner and found a station where people were leaving some early version of beeper messages for each other in the fall of 1985. The voices would recite a code, a telephone number I guess, but very different from local number combinations, followed by a series of tones, a strange bubbly static noise, then a voice message. I spent a few days sitting on the front porch after school, drawing pictures and writing down all the numbers. I filled pages with them. I got up the courage to call one. To my surprise someone answered. I used the name that was in the message, and the person was clearly perturbed. In fear, I slammed down the receiver and threw out the papers I’d kept track of the numbers on.
Later that week, after throwing out the numbers, I heard one of those distant sirens that they use for volunteer firemen, the one that makes the long weeping sound, gradually increasing in pitch then decreasing. Air passing through a spinning mechanism makes the sound. As this sound rose and fell, making long echoes, I listened as I sat in history class on a cold grey October day, with the window slightly open. I imagined myself as a dog headed man trained to get out from behind a desk when he heard that siren. I fantasized walking to a metal bridge over the Hudson River, and committing suicide by jumping off the center of the bridge in the damp afternoon light among the metal structures of the bridge and inner workings of the industrial landscape along the riverbanks. In slow motion, I kept looping that jump, inhabiting his body, feeling the contradiction of wanting to stay in that body even though I was about to jump. Wanting to stay in that jump. It kept going until the siren stopped. It haunted me the rest of the day. The bus ride home I was fixated on the sound the windshield wipers made in the driving rain, fixated on death.
My first contact with the dog people occurred in Albany NY at the Empire State Plaza, during some evening festival, while I was staring at a mechanism that held up little cars and spun them in a circle. I couldn’t have been more than 6 years old. I looked down at the mechanism, and then I stared up at a giant treble clef, made in a grid of lit-up office windows of the 44-story Corning Tower. Past the tower, stars were coming out. I looked up, down, up again, thinking I knew something about the dog people and I was one of them. Or I was a helper. These are the words I use now. Back then no words. It was a visual message in bolts, wheels, light grid, treble clef, stars.
Around that time I made primitive sketches of these creatures. I’d been having dreams of being guided though forests by wolves, and preoccupied by these thoughts of dog-headed people. At first they were figures in dark suits. One set of drawings I’ve been unable to find, one of the earliest, involves them putting cat people in ovens. Wardrobe and species evolved over time, and they became erotically charged. The felines returned as lioness women dominating male wolves in wrestling matches. Dogs became more numerous, with depictions of them in combat with other dogs and wolves. It has something to do with militancy and transgression. I imaged them all as secret ceremonies. Secret Circuits.
I had this nightmare where a person from the future found a swerving path of stones buried in the well-kept lawn on the edge of Washington Square Park in Albany, leading to a disused structure hidden in the trees. Then the person experienced a vision of a ceremony happening there many years prior: Erastus Corning, the mayor of Albany for 42 years, the man the Corning Tower was named after, was conducting a ceremony with sacrificing of animals and convicts. The assembled audience was all decked out as if attending a costume ball, wearing velvet masks with eyeholes. They were gathered in a mansion there on the edge of the park, with its numerous half-circle windows obscured by oak trees, vines and tall bushes with ornate flowers. The air was filled with sickeningly real sounds of the screaming, wiggling, and strangulating noises from the victims, hung upside-down, their feet pieced on a taught metal wire so they could be slid into place over an altar. The assembled crowd was perfectly silent and still, while the hypnotic twanging of a primitive bowed instrument yowled away and shackles tinkled. From the altar a torrent of blood drained down a stone channel in the floor that swerved and turned in the floor at odd angles, but at a steady gradient downward, through a patterned drain grate where the sparkling crimson stream disappeared.
Imagine my surprise when, years later, I discovered Erastus Corning was a member of Yale’s Wolf’s Head Society as an undergraduate. In light of the contact that was made under the building bearing his name, I am haunted by the conjured image of the man as a fresh-faced boy, crossing that campus day in and out, wearing his club’s pin: a snarling wolf’s head over an upside down Egyptian Ankh symbol.
