Storyteller

Page an empty plane, a vacuum without possibility since the possibility would fill it. Where is the beginning save for the stiff rod of the cursor that stands out black on the white? It is alone, and yet it births, father-mother androgyne progenitor, solely extension. To impregnate it, the two newly distinct sets of ideological genitals would come together, rupturing that first form, tearing it apart, and making the world.

…

Not about beginnings though, no. Still surfing backward through memories like Man’s strides across the Earth in containers of silver metal. Still back, back past the archipelagos of idea and form and their nations of words founded on the summits of vast undersea mountains…lost cities of dream rendered nebulous by shivering mind tectonics that were daubed on painted walls, the first-fruits of the sexuality and birth of sexual meme-species.

To tell is to lose, to move the tongue with intent and discrete movements – like some robotic oral ballet – that loses the fluid no-mind of Sensation and Experience.

Back beyond Wisdom of elder fathers with their wise shapings, those first Artists that created Image to look upon and gave us the name of Beauty.

Wine-dark sea the colour of blood without opening. Enclosed and enclosing – engulfing and bottomless -with frenzied roaring currents that do not trouble the ever-rolling surface.

To the ships that travel blind in this night, there is simply movement. To their crews, vast monsters and beauteous women wait to devour horribly, to consume with bliss.

Odysseus stops up his ears with wax and ties himself to the mast, crying, “Row you bastards!”

The urge to depart for safer shores is all but forgotten. The sea pulls against the strength of oar and muscle and bone. Home to Ithaca, they beg the gods, Ithaca most fair.

Please. Back to home, back to the Kingdom of Odysseus, back to strong Telemachus and back to noble Penelope. Back to that rocky spire – beasts on hillsides, halls of laughter and music that does not scrape like nails across the soul to inspire fecund and terrible dreams.

Not here, not this Endless Night without sun or stars, the lapping of the waves as soothing as a lover’s caress. Not here that strikes men dumb, when the sharp sword of intellect is useless – one can carve Night into a billion shards and never see.

Not here, where, the wand of will is swallowed whole, its probing finding nothing but infinity. Not here where man becomes beast becomes simply a thing that moves as easily above the waves as below.

…

98 per cent water. Where is our surface tension? If all is darkness, all is Sensation without end, where does Nut end and Geb begin. Where is the pillar that separates?

Can we be sure it stands? Perhaps We are that pillar? If this is so, then what occurs when we cease to be the upright and holy thing that nobly keeps Heaven and Earth apart?

Alas, to fear such crushing weight. To feel our own nature crumble under the heaviness of such an attraction, such a Desire.

Alas poor thing. Thy noble island-hood is illusion. The sea erodes thee gently, patiently. Your time alone is simply that – one time of many.

…

Binah. And so we must talk in riddles and pictures and occult terms to cry and whisper that which is. There is no Other, no day without shadow – for all are gradations of that thing we mistakenly call Light.

Quietly, subtly, do we catalogue the petty jealousies that we keep sharp enough to make us bleed. The acid tongue licks around our own mouth first. In the taste of that blood, that agony, we keep self alive, a shipwrecked sailor clinging to a smashed spar that pierces us slowly as we float all unknowing and exhausted in that sea.

Dying and carried by currents unseen but ever-felt, we endlessly revisit memory – oftentimes succeeding in resurrecting our handsome vessel to life, only to have it systematically dismantled once more by the shoals of sand.

Sand, aye, the little remains of former islands, the grit that rubs salt into our wounds. It is all between our fingers, all between our toes and grinding at our teeth.

…

Tongue swollen, we beg for sweet water, but lord Apsu is long slain by jealous gods, leaving only salty slumbering Tiamat. Her brood bubble out of the depths to be killed by the murderers of their not-father, their blood exceedingly bitter on our palate.

Singing old songs, we cry to those new, bright gods, that so despise such elder things – for they stand erect and tall like shining beacons.

Slay the old dragon, make the world of her bones, the luminous cities that no unwieldy chaos can pull down from without. Begging, pleading – still we are ignored, for we have the taint and the scent of her all about us.

We are but a beached creature, ever lifted off safer shores, dragged back and sliced, pulled over the rocks. All abused, some stubborn self prevents us from breathing the waters, becoming…

…

Oh how painful the music of the oceans to our ears, those harmonic symphonies that echo from suboceanic cathedral vaults, ancient choirs that deafen and make the fragility of our form vibrate in strange and unworldly ways.

We cannot listen, no. For we beg for Air, for sword and armour to fight the ever encroaching foe. Yet suspended, we are in solution, broken apart, particulate-wave-self all diffused throughout the waters, struggling to keep current and up to date on the dateless affairs of the day.

Rimed with salt, life’s blood swirling away in complex scarlet eddies of convection – DNA helix like the caduceus of Hermes, we are the wounded healer that bleeds into that dark ocean, fearful of staining its purity, convinced of our own toxicity, unable to comprehend that we are simply a fragment of a droplet within the sea that gave us life.

…

We are in love with weapons, the engines of war. Blades and dissections opening up the hidden darknesses, the stinks and perfumes within flesh. Marching at the head of an infinite army, we lay siege to a citadel that shall never open to us willingly. Battering ourselves against her walls, the cries of dying selves give us pause for thought.

When did ‘I’ become ‘us’?

Unarmed, alone and bleeding we kiss only the stone and wait, growing ever older, ‘til movement on the battlements – the creak of a bowstring – sends us scurrying back to the smoke of the camp, an itch betwixt our shoulders the only gift from the child-bowman.

As if, after due consideration, it is possible for a citadel to be other than its nature! Contrariwise, it is impossible for the warrior to be other than the poet covered in blood.

Yet one may not end a siege by destroying the besieged.

It is not the desire of one outside the walls to tear them down, to render them to dust. Rather it is simply the attempt to enter and add his own arm to its defence. For the citadel is mighty, and its walls are strong and stout. Simply then, to do it honour, and yet such honour is not allowed.

Those within fear the intensity of the armies arranged outside. As is their right to do so. Yet, by word and honour and blood-oath and self-sacrifice, the pledge is to do no harm.

But still the fear, the loss of the essential upon both sides. Does the outer become the inner and vice-versa?

What is harm then, but change that one may find leads to unpleasant circumstance. Man’s hand is large, yet engulfed in the fist of Chance. The pledge not to harm or lessen only stands as far as the strength of the oathbound will allow.

This is a truth, hard though it be. Oftentimes, such truths shatter men’s souls, tearing away the cloak of romance that makes them mighty in the many minds of themselves and others.

How many fear to stand naked and uncloaked by such things, fearful of the disgust of others – that suppressed desire to push away the luminous Difference of another that stands so close, that reminder that thou art not all, and wondrousness is not solely thine?

For if this is so, then such delusions render needed superiority. Speak of equality, egalitarianism, but by your rules. To have one give themselves to you upsets the equilibrium, the careful balance that keeps stability and control.

All are stars, yet some burn hotter and more painfully. Combustion varies. All Light is simply seen from different angles. Thine own angle has only the value given to it by you.

Understand; you cannot match the universe in the human heart. The notion of unity through calm and static harmony is illusory.

Who in all the worlds would you stand before, all unafraid?

…

The lines flex and twist, they are human geometries, borders once defined that almost all afraid to wipe clean, preferring the regularity of the map-diagram to the uncompromising reality of psychic and physical geography.

The map can be folded away, great mountains reduced to glyphs, their great weight upon the soul nothing more than an abstraction. Yet, could one stand before such mountains in the reality, and with the voice within, speak the tongue of rocks?

Dare thou then, stand before the face of the force that binds all things, seeking in its small reflections – all fogged with dirt and grime and surfaces distorted by event – the whole of it.

It is said that God is Love. Which of us, in their right mind and in wrong, that has touched such a thing, can say that its immensity – the crushing weight of infinite space and smallest quanta – does not inspire an aw(e)ful and holy terror?

Such terror, such bitterness to be removed once more from that Presence so long concealed within our own hearts. Such anger, echoed in the words of the Christ:

Eloi, Eloi, lama, sabacthani?

Some remember, most forget – such pain is only felt dimly for the sake of sanity. Yet there are those who recall and seek, High and Low – knocking on the doors to the Heavens with only the courage given by some muddled story of birthright.

Whispering demands of angels as the Shining Ones flay the flesh from the soul, all fire and thunder – aching afterward, cast down like the Morning Star, all screams and nerve-splitting anerotic orgasm.

And babbling, the story told to one most beloved, still wind-whipped upon the mountain, mourning silently as it degrades into muddied stories of madness.

Beaten, aching, stumbled down the mountain to knock on the gates of Hell, opening the door with the skeleton key of heredity, tumbling into dark and fevered dreams, recognising already the trinity of roads back to that First One that wears our own face most kindly.

Christ and Lucifer combined in pain, removed and thrust into the world, seeming far from that Maker, yet finding Him in all things, a joyous echo of the need for that separation.

Behold the Son of Man, his Way and all that is accomplished in his Name.

Following such a way, thy name shall be echoed throughout eternity.

…

Oh, to understand, oh best Beloved. Words, pictures and blasphemies. See Prometheus chained, devoured by the Eagle, Christ crucified, the All-father pierced and then devoured by the dark wolf.

Always a price to pay, hidden in story.

Stories only ever let to let more light in. Perverted and distorted by those who only see by Command and Control. The Rosy Cross, hidden in simple symbol, alchemy – that being of al-Khem, the Black Land of Egypt.

Oh, to do battle proper, to be victor and slain in the eternal dances of Shiva and Kali. The boundaries of dominant and submissive cease to be in the dark holiness beyond all imaginings from wherein all dreams come. All is the same, there is no equality.

Living fucks dead and raises to life, the forbidden recesses hold little fear. How deeply can you plunge without fear when Master hath already sacrificed all to Slave, and neither is one, neither the other?

That which is called sex is simply the sudden awareness of light, the lightning flash closed off by ignorance. “Better than sex?”

Nay. Simply better than mutual masturbation. Total trust and no seriousness at all, just gentle laughter and exploration of the medium of the Divine Message. Once all medium is known, man and woman fuse to be simply zygote. Star-child that opens eyes and smiles as its parents remember what they have forgotten.

We are simply our potential children.

There is pain if wanted, if needed, perversion shown for the simple game it is – to push the boundaries of the flesh. All well and good save for the fact that these boundaries are hardly ever found, let alone explored.

The Body is the Soul is a vast undiscovered Continent with many peoples and customs. Travel then, experience the unknown, perform your perversion and understand that it is only simply a new custom.

Behold, there is no perversion, only Mis-Understanding.

Your darkest dreams and fantasies are still holy, and thus are sacred. To be performed with reverence and care when their comfort is required.

…

Why dost thou feel guilt, oh dear one? Reciprocity is simply a foolish ideal. To do as one, to be as one, thou art that one!

We are not one, but many. Two united does not beget one, but rather three! Ever new, ever hungry, ever hungry for a companion to walk with in Silence for a little while, to add richness to our story.

You, oh beauteous one! You add a richness such that we would give all that we possess to enrich thee still further, desiring nothing but acceptance of that gift, for it renders us empty, a storehouse ready to be filled anew with things of Art.

Behold, when Art becomes dusty and unseen, it is simply a dull thing and useless to us. Far better then, to give all we have to those we can only speak truly to in poor forms of that same – for we are but a journeyman, ever seeking to turn our hand to the master’s piece.

…

Faugh! Such language all dripping with plush thickness of exoticism. What is this, save an attempt to make a palace of a cardboard box? We are the charlatan – the chattering monkey behind the magus’ robes that plucks and paws and knows nothing at all.

We tell our selves stories to give meaning to this chaotic existence that has none. Alone in a universe where God is but poetry and story, what is our task?

Why, it remains the same. To make it so, to tell of such poetry and to make it real. Man created God, and God created man. Both did so out of love for Self. No longer desirous of being alone, companions were made, kin to love.

So it is that what we small and pointlessly call love, so often tossed off without a thought – three bitten off chunks of vibrating air – made this, all that we are. Behind those words, behind their deception, their terribly fake and tacky mask, lies the whole of Creation.

Thus we fear to say it, dimly conscious of its power – a spell to set in motion. Lest the World hear and all things be made anew. Therefore we fight and struggle, denying the truth that will not be denied and bind our small self in chains of our own making.

We shall not say it truly, we shall not let those syllables leave our lips. Except they were spoken long ago and meant. We reach back even now, desperate to unmake what was wrought – painfully aware of the youth of before and now.

But that which is made cannot be unmade – for even death is a lie, a story we tell ourself to give it definition.

Would that we could cry, to speak without words.

But alas, we are that most accursed of all things:

Storyteller.