What is the weird of the vagabond?
Is it sacred or base to succumb to lackadaisical destitution? Is enlightenment the total freedom from bondage - even the restriction of concern? Is apathy a transcendence from vanity?
Is the cliroc's choice of deprivation more meaningful than the no-choice of the leper? Is suffering quantifiable?
If possession is the having-of a thing, cannot a man ever relinquish his own being? Is it selfish to be self-aware? Can a man conjoin with all things, become oikoumene, and remain a thing called a man?
Or would it be said; There: He is no longer man. He was a vagabond, and has wandered into the infinite.
June 30, 2011
June 25, 2011
Lull
He is often now between places. The gaps wider, the walks longer. Fatigue is absent; blocked out by a shield of muscle, callus, and a terrible impetus. Even grief's leaden weariness is fading, its crust has made him inure. Drained of the fluid of empathy, at first he benefited from an efflorescence of apathy, but it has degenerated into a loathsome grime, a patina of fear.
He often wakes and is still walking. Rest is beyond his volition, automated, overseen by the power impelling him. He does not dream, and his waking memories are garbled by an ubiquity of horror and the confusion of peripheral omniscience. Everything so fragmented that he suspects he is skipping through time, inchoate.
But there are idyllic lulls when he is between places. A high meadow jubilant with so much clean, open air. A nestled hollow in a wooded gulch, evocative of his halcyon cloh. He will stop, void of urge, and breathe, and listen, and feel, for a while. Sensing nothing artificial, the strict conditions of ecology, he speculates that this is the last god's last ambition.
Then a stir of discontent murmurs in his empty stomach. No. The creations of men. All the made things burning, unmade. Destroyed! Murdered! Razed!
And when all the makers are gone?
Silence, a lull. He walks on. The world is vast. There are many empires still.
He often wakes and is still walking. Rest is beyond his volition, automated, overseen by the power impelling him. He does not dream, and his waking memories are garbled by an ubiquity of horror and the confusion of peripheral omniscience. Everything so fragmented that he suspects he is skipping through time, inchoate.
But there are idyllic lulls when he is between places. A high meadow jubilant with so much clean, open air. A nestled hollow in a wooded gulch, evocative of his halcyon cloh. He will stop, void of urge, and breathe, and listen, and feel, for a while. Sensing nothing artificial, the strict conditions of ecology, he speculates that this is the last god's last ambition.
Then a stir of discontent murmurs in his empty stomach. No. The creations of men. All the made things burning, unmade. Destroyed! Murdered! Razed!
And when all the makers are gone?
Silence, a lull. He walks on. The world is vast. There are many empires still.
June 18, 2011
Twilight's Spark
In far-flung Mousk the doom of Hyuri's flame is not yet known. Women still love according to the Attar Laws; men work and drink and covet, and love the women out of spite if not out of need. Bronze bells and the night's murders herald the dawn; noon's heat is pacified by the wind from across the steppes; twilight's spark is a scintillating jonquil buoyant in an indigo mere - that same color as the velveteen chitons worn by Diagne's hierodules.
The slums reek with the fetor of fertility, like a pond teeming with algae, while the heights are as clean and arid as a desert; and both creep across at uncertain borders.
Lissome willows that blossom crimson in middle-winter curtain Rivern Street - a two-story defile vivisecting the din and press of the Aestival Court - but the galleries of the goliath-tree in its center are all azure windowed, selling talismans of hubris, trophies filled with the pith of greed, and icons of the motherland's quondam glory.
The worship-places hum and nod with rituals of meditation, beds laid out for the ascetes to drink the poppy-milk of torpor and transcend misery. The flesh-houses sweat and roll with their older arts, parlors made murky with jasmine-smoke for obfuscated strangers to couple, slither, and fuck.
Spice has become more valuable than gold. The death of a prince is celebrated. Virgins are fungible with slaves. Tomorrow, a handsome vagrant will come in by the west gate. He carries only a coat, pack, and walking staff.
The slums reek with the fetor of fertility, like a pond teeming with algae, while the heights are as clean and arid as a desert; and both creep across at uncertain borders.
Lissome willows that blossom crimson in middle-winter curtain Rivern Street - a two-story defile vivisecting the din and press of the Aestival Court - but the galleries of the goliath-tree in its center are all azure windowed, selling talismans of hubris, trophies filled with the pith of greed, and icons of the motherland's quondam glory.
The worship-places hum and nod with rituals of meditation, beds laid out for the ascetes to drink the poppy-milk of torpor and transcend misery. The flesh-houses sweat and roll with their older arts, parlors made murky with jasmine-smoke for obfuscated strangers to couple, slither, and fuck.
Spice has become more valuable than gold. The death of a prince is celebrated. Virgins are fungible with slaves. Tomorrow, a handsome vagrant will come in by the west gate. He carries only a coat, pack, and walking staff.
June 8, 2011
Let Go
Far past Eridu the Broken Land; grey-swathed in the Sea of Dust, there slept in that cauldron a flock of isles that had lost its god and people, and so its name. A domain of tombs. An intestable kingdom.
Fat with the pogrom of Arcadia, his master slumbered. So he the vessel risked all to sojourn in a place beyond places, so to be alone with another god's ghosts, and behold no beauty he must later bring to ruin.
The outer orbit of its principalities were wholly barren, so in his sandskiff he scudded to the crux. No proof survived of its cultivation. He tried to vivify its walls from reefs, its avenues out of negative space, its donjon from a central spar of ashen rock. But he was no more and no less alone.
Would this be the fate of all men?
He was once a drupe in a weald. Now the pit is corrupt, the world denatured.
Fat with the pogrom of Arcadia, his master slumbered. So he the vessel risked all to sojourn in a place beyond places, so to be alone with another god's ghosts, and behold no beauty he must later bring to ruin.
The outer orbit of its principalities were wholly barren, so in his sandskiff he scudded to the crux. No proof survived of its cultivation. He tried to vivify its walls from reefs, its avenues out of negative space, its donjon from a central spar of ashen rock. But he was no more and no less alone.
Would this be the fate of all men?
He was once a drupe in a weald. Now the pit is corrupt, the world denatured.
June 4, 2011
All the Lights in the Sky are Stars
Time is not a stream, it is not serial. Time is observed. A man recalls a day past, but he merely observes his memory of his past observation. A woman recalls the same day, and her new observation of the old observation overlays the man's just as warp and weft make a tapestry. Many years hence each recalls the same day again; but the memory is already different, their interpretations filtered by new experiences; the tapestry has changed.
Time is the night sky. There is no emptiness there: Behold a constellation, limned by stars at unfathomable heights, and the illusion of darkness between them; but the light of every sun is a volume, not a point. So memory encroaches on experience, making time like a feedback loop. But "loop" is a tricky word. It conveys two dimensions, it is a trap of linear motion. Experience is a system of opposing forces!
Remember yesterday; wade into its galaxy. What binds the memories, the stars? Gravity: "Observe, it falls." The length of a day: "Observe, the sun rises and sets." Every man says: Who will remember me? Some say: My children. Others: My works. They are all the same. You have made a thing to be observed. And I am the final witness.
Depth does not accumulate, comprehension reifies it. To live a thousand years, the vastness of time becomes awesome as the whole of the night sky seen at once, the gaze unfocused. This doesn't belittle him. The world burns to its socket, but he will not shut his eyes to spite vision. On a winter morning in the charnel guts of Old Iylum he watches the sun rise, and thinks: This sun too is one of the lights in the sky. The heavens are not a place apart, the past is not gone. I am the corpse of history. This is how the world ends: The fish have ceased to swim, they have become the sea.
The god within is laughing at him. Relativity is the science of detachment. Solipsism! See: I am the fisher of men. I am the eater of time.
Time is the night sky. There is no emptiness there: Behold a constellation, limned by stars at unfathomable heights, and the illusion of darkness between them; but the light of every sun is a volume, not a point. So memory encroaches on experience, making time like a feedback loop. But "loop" is a tricky word. It conveys two dimensions, it is a trap of linear motion. Experience is a system of opposing forces!
Remember yesterday; wade into its galaxy. What binds the memories, the stars? Gravity: "Observe, it falls." The length of a day: "Observe, the sun rises and sets." Every man says: Who will remember me? Some say: My children. Others: My works. They are all the same. You have made a thing to be observed. And I am the final witness.
Depth does not accumulate, comprehension reifies it. To live a thousand years, the vastness of time becomes awesome as the whole of the night sky seen at once, the gaze unfocused. This doesn't belittle him. The world burns to its socket, but he will not shut his eyes to spite vision. On a winter morning in the charnel guts of Old Iylum he watches the sun rise, and thinks: This sun too is one of the lights in the sky. The heavens are not a place apart, the past is not gone. I am the corpse of history. This is how the world ends: The fish have ceased to swim, they have become the sea.
The god within is laughing at him. Relativity is the science of detachment. Solipsism! See: I am the fisher of men. I am the eater of time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)