Vespering, driving west to Delhi NY once
when the Bluetooth in my car glitched
and repeated one word of the podcast about witches I was listening to:
a woman saying
widdershins widdershins widdershins widdershins widdershins widdershins
The car radio wouldn’t turn off
I couldn’t stop the eerie repetition
I had to pull over after six minutes of that
disembodied voice
and turn the car off to get it to stop
I was spooked chilly:
widdershins is the term for the counterclockwise movement
of Northern hemisphere witches
around a circle,
against the rotation of the sun
some say for necromancy
banishing spells
curses
It happened again just the other day:
I was driving while podcast guests
were talking about
Rocco’s Basilisk:
scary tech geeks
sincerely believing some future AI-god
will torture a simulacrum of them forever
if they don’t do everything in their power
to bring about the AI-god’s existence
when glitched the Bluetooth
computer computer computer computer computer computer computer computer
so these two words were given to me
by those old angels who interrupted inkflow
from my pen all those years ago
just as I was writing the cursed number,
who kinked up headphone wires
to make the music stutter in arcane meaning-patterns
(Malebranche’s busy editors againe)
Bluetooth (mayhaps a runic symbol
of King Harald’s Norse paganism
giving way to Christianity)
is their newest mechanism
to effect angelic revelation to us
of the widdershins computer
that scatters us all
techne maledictio
Love this.