The Old Man Speaks

Some things are true. Simple things, beginnings and dreams. Origins are always
true, always pure and appropriate, then- then changes come, aberrations are
introduced into the matrix. All systems tend towards disorder dreams spin out of
control, assume diabolic form and destroy the sweet and simple people who birth them. These things I know- these things. I know that I was content once. We were suffused with light and everything was ordered and good, the world was all beauty- I remember. I remember the songs that we sang and the ceremonies we enacted, the endless chanted hymns. The sun was fat and luminous, and it was cold, it’s heart was sterile. I remember when she grew, sprouted whole from my body and I loved her. The sun was endless, and those dreams, I will never have them again; day was long and soft in that idyll. In that time I did not record anything, no random compiling of lists, no numbers, no labels for things, that was his task, Him silent and looming. I was just- pure existence. I was a child, back in that time, before they began to curse my name and make elaborate significant gestures with their hands if they felt or thought they did my presence, to keep it away from them, that malign influence.


I’ll never know why it happened, or what indeed it was that occurred, just that it was in some way necessary or perhaps it was only inevitable, perfection is only an illusion. His offspring was caught in the deep folds of jealousy, his words, and traitors are in all places. There was an irrevocable change in the order of things- I know. Memory now, memories and dreams are powerful things, though insubstantial. I remember the music of the spheres even now, filling the air like a great liquid joy. The harmonic that I will never hear again, shut off and sealed away until the fabled last day. The words were random at first, vague glancing blows, frantic insects against glass, frustrated gestures of discord. The eternal song was changing, slightly at first one note at a time like a single thread out of place in a pattern, which echoes and twists it slightly first. Which gently wrenches it over time and causes grotesque deviations. The whole, the collective was nervous, it had been her, when she descended, and I had loved her. I still remember her voice, I hear it still when all other sounds have fallen away, when the pain gushes over me freshly.


I remember the faces and the fear, the rank smell of it that penetrated every corner every crevice. We huddled and thought of the past, we dredged up the collective memories, searched through the entirety of the pattern for something. For a sign of the origins of that taint, the black leprous thing that creeps relentlessly over all things in time. The unseen withered hand which touches you on the arm somewhere away in the darkness, somewhere shuddering in the mouth of the wind. We moved restlessly through the crystalline thoroughfares, through the cold passageways, across the smooth floors. All of us, every last one, in our emaciated shadows, growing less substantial, and I fancied, becoming things, taking shape as we stalked along in narrow file. I cursed my legs that they should begin to clump so heavily though once I had been the most graceful of my kind, despite my best efforts they resounded against the perfect surfaces, and I began to hide my face from the others. At times I caught myself weeping for no apparent reason, for her, for all of us, for the whole unfolding pattern that was going astray.


We are all past, present and future, we are impulse and effect. I have learned over the ages, through the passage of millennia, learned dark things. It was brutal and sudden when it happened, I felt like an unripe child plucked from the breast. The pattern fell away, the huge intricate lattice suddenly meant nothing to me. The great cold edifice was alone in the vast seething emptiness, we were alone there and his words had begun to give us less comfort than in times past. She was changed also, we saw her now, she was withered and different, only her liquid eyes were untouched. Then they were on me all of the time I was bound before them, I saw fear and uncertainty in those eyes like I had never seen before, then came the time for justice and for retribution.


Vengeance is cold and implacable, it is ugly and awe inspiring. I could no longer believe, this was not the song, the endless pure melody. There is much that I remember from that time, and much also that I disremember. Everything seemed to occur with such rapidity. The sudden despair and that feeling of impossible inertia, thought, desire becoming flesh. I think that of all of them, I was the one most akin to him and in many ways, the least. It was all such a horrible procession, a heavy brutal fate, there was only one possible outcome. From time to time, I see again the solemn faces intoning the lists, the protocol which stretched away beyond us, into the silent sea surrounding, into the fluid eternity. The words and names continued, the frowns and the corrections, the flaws which entered everywhere, though I knew then that there was only one possible resolution to this sequence. I attempted to weep, but I was glass, was inorganic, because he was so near to me then, once more.


Judgement is blunt and heavy, it knows only sin and sinners, Judgement tightens about the throat like a living thing. I think that I felt the spark grow then, calling all of the clumsy heaviness into me, redoubling it. I felt my limbs writhe in a new-born agony, as passions flamed in my chest. I remember the pain and the wind rasping at my skin when they took me and cut my bonds, it is strange to think that a gesture such as the cutting of bonds could represent slavery and bondage, and that freedom could be so confining. The enumeration of those symbolic acts, the ceremony that dulls the senses and inures the spirit. I remember the downcast eyes, the heavy hands and I wondered was there shame there, shame or something else, something deep and cruel, which shunned the light. Scenes flashed across my mind, in a rush of searing flame they cast me out to fall forever, I spun in my grief and I saw some of them cast themselves with maddened cries and burning tears after me and into my fate though they could have chosen their own, their love chose mine.


I burned and fell, always with my eyes cast backward, toward him and toward her, cradled in his arms, still beautiful though unresponsive. I fell, we fell with the void rushing about us, time held no meaning. Shadows howled in my ears, visions of death and of beauty blinded me. I learned life and death there, in the cascade until we came to a deeper, concentrated darkness. We crashed violently against the teeming void and bled vast oceans of molten life. My limbs were twisted and mangled by the impact. I was the one who bore the worst of it, of that gruesome contrapposto, the first shock of life, the writhing agony of love and loss. We lay splayed and bleeding, our flesh mating with the solid darkness about us, forming black mountains and valleys, bare vistas, silent but for our pain. Our eyes were always cast upward to where it burned aloft, to where it’s arid immensity sang to us. We shook and wept in each other’s arms, finding no comfort but the flesh and blood of this new land. We continued in this way, we moved about as battered shadows while the land formed itself beneath our feet. We breathed strange mangled words into the air, formed twisted shapes with our hands. In time we learned the strength to turn our eyes away from the light for short moments, to perhaps form images, vague and equivocal images of that time long since past, of the fields of innocence where we ran once in the shadow of his hand.


Time mixed with our blood and our bodies healed, but differently, scarred and misshapen. The cicatrices ran deep, in hollow eyes transfixed by the great dome above. There was no laughter but the steady pulse of life. We became somehow a part of our new environment, though always separate in spirit we were the implacable masters of an endless abyss. The yearning never left us, never died away though we were there for many an age. Over time our limbs grew heavy and our eyes filled with sleep. Always we watched the firmament and I realised that we were waiting for something, for a sign, for a reply to our anguished calls. We waited for the exoneration, which must come when a judgement is found to be erroneous, but nothing was forthcoming ever and still we waited.


Over time the anger grew and smouldered within my being and I could find repose in no place, I began to wander out in the wastelands, beat the lands with my twisted fists. I hobbled on my bent limbs and waded through oceans seeking for some answer an explanation that I thought may have been found in this place formed of our pain. Onward and wearily I moved without companion thinking always of her, in his arms, in that final vision before exile.


I journeyed through fabulous vistas, I walked through lands which never seen the light of day before, through empty plains where no living creature had drawn breath before, where life had not yet begun to penetrate and I felt again something akin to the old feeling. These silent landscapes were like Heaven had been when it was in it’s perfection, the beauty was stark and haunting as death and the inevitable rebirth. More and more I wandered those silent valleys and hills running from life as quickly as it swept along in my wake, my implacable pursuer. Night was endless here as day was up there and I fell to absorption on her face her eyes which could never know death, the more I wandered, the more I remembered of her and wished to see her again, even though only for a few moments.


Gradually a slow anger built up in my heart it was he who had denied me her company, her words and her beauty through his own jealousy and mistrust, then one day all of my accumulated wrath rose to the surface violently. I flew in a fury to my cohorts, exhorting them with bellicose words in my shame, they were affrighted by my transformed appearance though truth to tell I did not realise, I had not noticed how much I differed from them having grown fearsome through my self-nourishing hatred while they cowered and languished waning without my guidance. We grew great and fiery then, filled with the stored venom of the past I restored and moulded them until they were almost as fearsome as I had become, I hardened their hearts against self-pity and taught them that they may have vengeance also. Into the airs we hurled ourselves in a storm of passion. We roared upwards into the aethers beyond, fixed on that cold hard point in the firmament with no thought of reason or moderation. Our limbs worked convulsively and we rode a trail of fire to a terrible confrontation.


The palace grew larger and larger in our eyes and caused our anger to change, to become something more of yearning, with false esperance of a glorious homecoming we rushed onward. When we finally arrived, we dashed our ecstatic bodies against the gates, our flesh rang and resounded against the walls. But it was empty and silent, barred to the outside, all life had long since left it. The cold sheen of the gates seared our flesh and blackened our countenances as the final and gravest disfigurement. Our minds were seized and wracked with the horror of an eternity in exile and we fell again as wounded doves. We fell and formed great rents in the land so that it’s blood poured forth this time and pooled around us, cooling as it touched our gelid skin.


The land reared up and swallowed our forms without our protesting or moving limb to avert it; we were the land and the land became us, fire and earth as one. How long we have lain here, trapped and grieving in the chains of this unceasing cycle of decay and rebirth, all time in this shadowy undeath wishing that we could forget the past that presses so heavily upon us. We lie cradled in the bosom of a land created of our grief, in time I grew to realise that we could never have returned to our first home for we had changed too much, had we been able to return amongst our brothers and sisters, had they survived we would ever have warred ceaselessly and questioned every proclamation we would have felt ill at ease with our heavy solid bodies in that airy place as we were when first we formed this place of ourselves. I lie here now and I see clearly your endless hordes of humanity, our children. I see you ever curse my name and build ever-taller towers toward heaven, while you sweat and pray in the closeness of night to a god who has ceased to be. You turn toward heaven as I once did with madness in your eyes, with misshapen grasping hands you claw toward the gates. Fools, the gates of heaven are closed forever and for all, you worship nothing more than a light in the sky, what we have is here in this moment, in this life and in no other!