Helen Sees an Idol of the Goddess

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In a cave in the desert, Helen came upon an idol of the Goddess. It was carved of black granite. Or else it was cast iron. Either way, it was faceless, breastless, sexless. It rose up from the ground as a cylinder sloped inward toward a blunt, cylindrical head [I surely meant rounded here], was symmetrical at all heights. Reflections played upon its rough  finger-smudged surface.

              --A Dream

I forget whether this was an actual dream or meant to be a dream in the novel. To the side, I scrawled l. u. proper phrasing. The l. u. means "look up," and the curl at the end means "ing" in m own private semi-shorthand.

Waking, she recognized the idol as something she had seen as a very small child--a propane tank, perhaps?--and been inexplicably terrified by. On reflection, it seemed to Helen V. that what she had been terrified of was the simple, implacable fact of existence.

If the first section came from an actual dream, this was a waking continuation of the dream-image.

There's also a nude with the caption "Idol of the Goddess."

Oh, and Helen V. is the other protagonist of the novel. It's complicated.

Tomorrow I'll show you what Helen saw. 

Above: For those who came in late, my latest novel, The Iron Dragon's Mother, will be published in 38 days. To draw attention to this fact, I'm serializing the Image Book I made to help me imagine a strange world for the book.

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