Radiance

Look Down

Look down.

Across the stage of your skin. The graceful proscenium of your clavicle, your shoulder, the long bones of your arms. The apron of your gentle belly. The skene of your skull, where all the gods and machines hide away, awaiting their cues, clanking away in their cases, puffing smoke and longing. Look down; something is happening on your navel, your omphalos, your knotted core of the world. You cannot feel the light playing over your skin, but you prickle with gooseflesh anyway. Light has no personal temperature. But your body knows instinctively that light is cold. The idea of light, the narrative of light. Light will chill you blue. The trickster hemispheres of your brain insist that the flickering images do have weight; they press on you like greyscale fingers, corpse fingers, angelic fingers, unworlded hands. The touch of images alters you—it must, it cannot help but. And more than touch you, these pictures, these maps of illumination enter you. Photons collide with flesh; most reflect, some penetrate. You carry them inside you. You carry them away and far.

You feel them, though they cannot be felt. You shiver, though there is no cold. You take them inside you, though they asked no permission.

It feels like breath. A breath spent long ago, arriving only now.

Severin’s face dissolves into another. This one is more beautiful. Anyone would admit that. It possesses the pressed-moth-like quality of a person born, through sheer chance, with precisely the face that her era prized. It’s too delicate and arch for our modern tastes. Too crafted, too distinctly feminine to suit our current rage for the androgyne. The small, sullen, Christmas-bow mouth. The immense, slightly wounded eyes. The pale hair curled like a statue of Apollo, crowded close in to her heart-shaped head. The perfect and somehow vaguely perverse jut of jaw. Her eyebrows spring high, high, high, like parentheses over the sentence of her face—a sentence that goes, “Love me, and I will laugh for you, and if you can make me laugh, my laughter will, quite simply, ransom the whole of the world from death.”

This is Mary Pellam. The Moon’s Sweetheart. Ingénue for Hire. Seventeen years of age, in her first significant role: Clementine Salt, heiress with a pistol in her petticoat. Meet Me On Ganymede (dir. Hester Jimenez-Stern, Capricorn Studios, 1908), in which Miss Pellam appears on-screen for a scant four minutes, one and one half of which she spends shut into a stasis cask, banging on the glass with her fists like a Snow White who hasn’t read the script. But she quite makes off with the picture. She will work steadily but not spectacularly in the maiden mill after Ganymede, her look too innocent for villainess roles, too cherubic for the fallen woman. In distress and out, she remains an upstaged damsel until wrinkles sign her resignation letter. Only then does her career really crack off. With a Hamburg hat and an eye patch she will become Madame Mortimer, greatest detective on nine worlds. With a shot through the eye of a villain she enters our concerns.

Mary’s smile is a spotlight—whomever it lands upon becomes brighter, becomes more real.

It lands upon us.