The Icelandic Canadian - 01.12.2001, Qupperneq 39

Vol. 56 #3
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
165
working to move everything around, purity is difficult to maintain, the
constant cleaning, the constant moving of buildings one inch to the west,
one inch to the west, uprooting parks and rivers, even those who were
trained in the arts and non-labouring professions have been made to
give up their vocations—not without some highly understandable embit-
terment. the cost of freedom is an enormous undertaking, in fact, the
only thing that keeps the tension bearable is the unimaginable promise
that the next move will be the final one, the escape from the shadows,
the final divorce from the evil twin.
the divine city
through wild cities race the children of god. they will overtake the
cities, make them slither back, the snake cities—the charming children.,
the buildings will rise (some say “loom”) and dance (some say “quake”)
and women will fall (some say “leap”) from the building-tops only to snap
their necks on the silent streets, the men all cry out in unison: “why must
so many immaculate conceptions create such travesty?”
the trouble is that each of these women felt unfathomably
deceived, if honesty were not so lacking in the sinister and corrupt cities
and times into which they had been born, they may have been more for-
giving of the fact that their immaculate child of god was not the second
coming but one of many such second comings, jesus Christ was so.so
singular unlike these multiple messiahs. divine repetition (some even
thought “indifference”), one can easily understand how this would dimin-
ish (some would say “devastate”) the pride and self-worth of these
women who had imagined themselves to be the mothers of a new god—
an utter fiction, a complete fraud.
“why did he do this?” the men wondered as they picked up their
women, the children continued to laugh and dance with delight, the city
would soon be theirs to rule, in time, the men would become completely
entrance by these children, swooning at their every word, servile to the
end.