Thinking of Odin Tonight

Nefas Dictu

I fully intended to sit down tonight and write a bit of poetry for Odin. I wanted very much to do this thing but poetic fire comes but seldom even to one who has tasted of the Old Man’s heart, and swallowed breath from the roughness of HIs lips. I am a savage thing, and when the bite of His fire spends itself within me, there’s often little of me left for poetic musings.

He breaks open the head. All Gods do, I suspect. They wind Their way into our hearts, They seep into the fissures in our minds, They expand. They fracture us. They break us down. I have been a thousand broken shards lying in a glittering pile at His feet. I have been an anguished scream echoing in a heart too weary to loose its pain. I have been on fire, joyous, a madwoman dancing, leaping through the charnel House of a dozen savage worlds. Or maybe just nine. One loses count after awhile. I have been His Valkyrie and I have seen the glee born on the razor edge of His spear. Of these things I will not speak. This world would break in the onslaught of that pounding pleasure.

He has wrung me out, this God Whom i adore. He has wrung me out until I am a broken trembling thing awash in fear and the passing breath of His ecstasy. He has wrung me out. I have lost count of the many masks of me He has devoured. I have lost count. What I remember are the rhythms of the Tree, the rushing flow of wyrd, the incantation of His presence, the melodies of power whispered to those who paid a price in blood to hear them. I remember the gifts He has poured into me—I am empty enough to hold so much—and the careful selection of the one into whose hands I have been placed. I have been blessed indeed, but there are times, in the midst of my blessings when the echoing remembrance of His passage through my world drives me to my knees again, that I might remember the broken places He tore away.

But first, before anything, He broke open my head. He spat fire into the gaping maw of me. He allowed my heart to be shredded until for Him, I was transparent pain. He swept me up in a joy so vast it shattered worlds. He bound me together in ecstasy and hunger. He knit me up with sinews, wrought of His will and vicious power. He taught me to dance in the crackling wyrdfires of the Gap. He taught me to sing as He sang when the runes pilfered what passed for His soul.

Do you know what it’s like to be destroyed by a God? Do you know what it is like to be plunged into madness, shoved into death, cast deep into the terrible brine of the Gap and to be pulled back again? I know His secrets now, this God of death and madness. I know what He saw when high He swung in the boughs of the Tree, the Tree that knows neither mercy nor satisfaction. I know what His eye sees, having been plucked by His own bloody fingers and cast away in exchange for power. I know these things. I have seen those dark places that haunt His eons. I have seen the nightmares of a God, and i have tasted the heat of His dreams. These things have made me. They have washed my humanity away.

Because of Him, I hear the worlds screaming their secrets. There is a clamor in my brain. Even silence holds no quiet on days when the dying place exerts its claim. Because of Him, my soul gleams like a polished damascened blade and cuts as keenly too. Because of Him, I bear a map of scars marking all the many places of His passage in the terrain of me. Because of Him, I am a madwoman dancing, or shrieking, or sobbing, or laughing, spitting forth runes, spasming with His power, vomiting up oracles, and standing down His foes. Because of Him, my flesh marks the Tree. Because of Him, its fire runs in my veins. Because of Him.

I do not know how to end this thing the force of Him through my world has writ. It is monstrous, as He is monstrous. It is beautiful beyond longing. It is a key or a lock, or a tiny crevasse through which one may creep. I do not care. I would poison the world with Him if I could. I would breath Him out with every word and carry Him into every threshold. I would scream Him into being in the desiccated flesh of Midgard. I would scream Him into being through the window of me.

People ask me all the time: how do you know you are His. How do you know it’s Odin. Howdoyouknowhowdoyouknowhowdoyouknow. and i laugh and laugh and whirl about madder than any dervish. fuckfuckfuckfuck. How can you not? Knowledge of Him comes not through the lips, or careful words carried in muted tones from bloodless lips and ancient tomes. It comes with the wrenching tightness of His hand on your heart. It comes with the punching blow of His fist through the cavity of your world. It comes and when He has come nothing is ever the same again.

So laugh and dance and wail and plead…He will not heed you but go ahead and plead….and swallow the joy He brings, and roll around in the pain and throw yourself into every abyss His bloody hands carve out for you and in you. You’ll know. You and me, the Godfucked few. You’ll know. and then your world will burn. Then you, if you tend your lessons well, will burn the world in your turn. Praise Him.

(Excerpted from “He is Frenzy,” G. Krasskova, Sanngetall Press).