TEMPLE HQ
THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
9-15-2022
Arms yanked back to near-breaking, they walked her between the evergreen boughs, feet dragging in the interior earth. Biting - the sharp end of a muzzle digging into the flesh and the threat of a splatter to be thrown into the shadows. Trees arched up, a canopy forming like a cathedral of the heavens and all the firmament enclosed around them. They had made camp out here, a fire leaping into the night, stars spinning as the world ran through eons of night. The adversary was leaping in tongues through the golden tree and the men took smoke while Endor waited. Unceremonious. The stars shimmered through water and the firmament went through every state of matter. The abyss seemed to blacken like soaking ink between the points of light, their guns heavy in their hands, glowing molten-hot in the echo of the flames. They were talking about something. Endor stopped listening. Line up against the tree. Beyond the firepit, she saw the golden tree arching upwards, its branches curling, angels upon its boughs and the adversary whispering through its trunk. Her own leaf tenuous upon the end, upwards and upwards, the roots curling outwards, gnawing at the soil around it, spreading by its outlines of molten gold, curling around the black egg at the center of lead, the leaves shimmering upwards through the purifications of its body. The stars continued to swirl. Sheltering them, the trees arced a canopy overhead. Branches above twisted with each other, intertwining and fucking in the starlight. Another moonless night, where the shadows had affinity with the abyss between each little pinprick of brilliance. They stopped talking. The golden tree was overpowering now, the flame only a distant memory. The rope was no longer digging into her wrists, melting into black, as all was. Endor became part of the shadow, standing still inside the night. God is that which blackens all equally at night, as Spinoza writes -
- I never heard the guns crack, only that eternal instant, frozen. The moment when my flesh was rent and the soul was torn apart from my body and there I, in that moment, transcendent and hung -
Each shard of the crystal fragmented, splintered in collision down rocky slopes and ground below the trodding feet of tires and men, hooves and anger below which the glass became dust before the eyes of the world. Waves trod bodies into sand that made the body of the Earth in that looping period where the first and last dust intermingle, where forces were felt and soon even sight left the picture, only a flowing with the whole of things, as it formed the loam, the sand, the bottom of the sea.
It was in that early age, when the men began to rise and fall around fires reflected in the lights of forgotten artifacts from the city they lived in the wreckage of. Seaspray buffeted their backs as surely as it did the columns and archways of Atlantis rising still half-revealed from the devourment of the sea, their boats wedged into the same sands which swallowed the skeletons of kings, and the calloused hands of these algae-eating fisherman now the sole users of long forgotten dreams, synthesized into mechanical marvels gone brackish with the decay of fecund tidepools that congealed the workings into one mass of barnacle and rust. A few of the smarter ones might defer to the bearded men who spoke of oracles and tomes, inscribed on the papyrus only the most educated of the far flung necropoli can read, while the rest could only glimpse at what could be - seen as though it were as primitive as they were, rude hands grasping and making their own in crude mental renditions, the purpose of strange mirrors, shattered glass amongst a long-corroded shell, with only the soul of the machine left alive to hint and tease at what its true name may be.
One day, their sanctity died as a young man climbed that tall peak overlooking the whole of their village, overlooking the ancient agora whose mosaic floor had been washed over in tides of sands and whose half-ruined walls now made a shallow tidepool in which they moored their fishing boats while they made fires on the shellcaves surrounding. The young man shouted from on high, and they all looked up, into his form illuminated by the radiant day behind him, his arms sweeping around him - look, look, some god of the sun! He cried as he showed them in his hands, what they couldn’t see but could feel - hints, glimpses at some secret soul of the mountain. Each of them knew that day in their bones, that there were doors below their feet they dare not open, lest they find the terrible things the people of this long-crumbled stonework knew. A wise man approached the mountain peak where the young man still pored over the intricate patterns carved into the sealed gate, the little mechanisms beckoning him with their mysteries, hand on the younger’s shoulder - don’t you realize, that you’ve had enough? What happened to those people, lad? Do they remain with us today, or do they reside below the waves in places so secret even our best fisherman cannot find bones they left behind? Do you want to know the doors they opened, the secrets they took with them to a watery grave? What good is a map, the wise man asked the younger - that leads you to sure demise? What good is a ship that only steers to the bottom? Come my boy, as he led him down the mountain, come to the simplicity of the wood. Feel the salt in your hands and caress each splinter as it comes. Pull it with a knife and hold it before the gemlight of the sun glinting off the sparkling sea. Remember what’s eternal my boy - that these pains don’t die whether you feel them atop the marble floors of a long gone people or here, on the soft sand of the fathers you know.
Yet time passed as surely as it does and the sun arose tomorrow. Despite the best efforts of their wise men, even the glinting of the moon could never stop reflecting amidst the mirror-like surface shattered by crater after crater. Men like the younger would look into the sky and see the dazzling lights like stars, like broken crystals before the embers of a raging fire, and feel the sun as it was forgotten, radiating over the firmament and down upon them. Like they had been cheated, like they had been condemned to live in the shadows of memories promised to them by some dim birthright they had forgotten all but the existence of. The wisemen said nothing but the knolls of simple teaching as they tracked inwards in ancient echoes, to dwell not only on the seashore, but on the riverbanks, to hew wood from the trees and scalp meat from the prancing deer in the lower hills of the mountains of the gods. New beings emerged on the hindsight of their neophyte eyes turned against the shadows of the wood, the wisemen saying nothing but a calm remembrance of the sanctity of fishermen as they felt for water in the soft grass atop those damp hillocks overlooked the fires and campstones. How many men would be sacrificed to these whims? Their honored dead disappeared beneath snowpacks in rocky passes they dared cut above the foothills, searching in vain against the course of the water, hoping to reverse the flow of that they had taken for granted so long. You fool! The wise men would cry to them, overlooking the mad processions. What are we, but the creatures of that lowland! The sea, the sea! Look upon it, the waters at the bottom of it all! Are we not the creatures of the low, of the fertile, of the million colors in the bosom of the sunlight! And yet their words lapsed into obscurity as the men pressed on, upwards into snow, into daggers and against the tides of the rivers that fed their watery mother, gnawing on the hardened, desiccated bounties she gave them.
They didn’t know what they expected to find, and it could only have been underwhelming when they finally found that ancient story true again. They stood in a semicircle atop the clearing, shivering, as snow began to pack their legs below their timid bodies looking upon the bones half-buried in the rock and snow. The skull alone, up to the eyesockets and half-smashed against the surface of the mountain, was the size of a single tent, while the ribcage, pelvis, and limbs, stretched in scattered pieces down a whole slope of the mountain they had only now discovered passage into. Similar to it, the skeleton’s brothers, countless, strewn across what they saw was a sharp, violent valley that collected snow and ice in the clasping hands of the mountain. Had they been nothing but this? Small men, rodentlike, in the shadows of their betters? The skeletons of great races, both behemoths and architects, making the whole of the world, that they should cut farmfields in the furrows left in the bootprints of beings vast beyond their wildest reckonings. Each of the men returned that day, shrunken and with a painful, searing knowledge of their place. As the men aged into wise men, they in turn forbade the youngers from even visiting the mountains, pushing their people back down the course of the water and onto the beach. There, the world simplified again and the wise men could rest easy with closed eyes, watching their people forget that these arches, pillars, even hints of mosaic, or the shattered glass encased in corroded brinerock was anything but a strange formation of the world, left for their mooring and pleasuring.
Later men would approach the site and break down weeping before it - the imaginations of the civilized running rampant as a legion of soldiers looked onto their famed general, off his chariot and without servants, bawling below plumage and cape. The marble they left behind, what all had imagined but never seen - the life they had felt gripping the warm pillars of their own palace became affixed now in the deathly pale of their servant’s imagination, and the whole world seemed to collapse in - their own kingdom now a prison of mute stone, choking about their neck. The generals could see bodies paralyzed in the sand leagues below the sea, dormitories, workshops, temples, palaces, poorhouses, baths, all swallowed up and its people forgotten to time, its pride made into a prison for the most foolhardy of its lions who took the flag in their mouths. The generals asked for a standard to be brought before them in this hell against time, and were offered no such reprieve. Mute misunderstanding and a timid valet asked - “what’s wrong?” as if he could ever know. As if some pageboy below the stature of even a horse could understand any distinction between the life the general could feel pulsating in the walls of his own marble and the cold of this sea. The soldiers would whore and laugh in the sunken ruins as surely as they did in the shadows of greatness back home, but here - only here, could the general comprehend for the first time, what it all meant for those who weren’t him. The tragedy overwhelmed, not that so many would be subjugated, or even that his own empire would collapse - no, that it already had. That so few, indeed, none but himself, could ever know the pleasure of the standard itself, of being the living embodiment of that resplendent beast stitched across the cloth waved before god and the world as an affront to all the Adversary could offer up to them. The general sharped his claws on the construction of what - a noose around his own neck, an appian throne, some grand joke to enshrine a stiff corpse on silent stone, that all except him were in conspiracy to commit? Should he cut the throat of the man beside him and feel no blood, but cold, brackish seawater? Should he strip to bone and only find the half-standing wireheld body of a mannequin mocking him, static and impotent, that he should only take and never give, that all doors are as rotten as this one, only to slam shut as sure steel behind him, sealing his fate to the eternal stillness? That he could have played a hand, nay, that his hand could merely be the instrument of the masons and slaves, nay, nay, nay, he barked in sobbing fits. Hands splayed, water ran up his skirt, knees and elbows deep in the sand, while none dared approach the ruins of the agora where he prostrated himself to nothing. Should heat be so dead as this, nothing but strange alien lights, glowing in some register unreachable by his touch, should that be the only life endogenous to any of it? Should he commit such conspiracy to rape the soul and plow the bloody back of the hot, just so that it could all be cold in the end? No, no! Yet the general could find nothing. The general looked, tore the city open and found only pearls, the sand and effluvia of the countryside filtered down into cold, hardened balls of “it all”, reflective in a fractured, distortion, the same visage he had tried to hold vibrant and true and yet now, now… The general looked about and saw nothing. The general looked below and saw nothing, felt only cold as he wrenched the gladius from his belt and fell upon the speartip blade, piercing his own heart to finally decide against all the destinies arrayed against him, to let his coldness by that motherly embrace of the sea, knowing that should be swallowed, it shall be by that same mother which swallows even the stone conspiring to imprison him.
When the body came in parade back the city of wheat, the brother took the gladius from the petrified eldest to the ancient hillocks in the wild North, where the men worship pillars of wood and the women dance naked in the flaring light of still-living gods. They held council around his skull and the rusted iron sword dropped shattering against the stone floor of his mother’s palace - upon his shield, upon his shield. No rest for a civilian army. That was when I took their lives originally - my commander had been shot, crawling in the dirt. I knew I had shit myself, as artillery flared overhead. Everyone was dead. The wire now crawling across the mud and mangled trees, sandbags spilling an almost neon yellow that melted into the low puddles of shell craters, the gold glinting reflections off medals. Their officer was wearing his dress uniform, torn apart like Orpheus, now rising in a hundred pieces embodied behind the empty eyes of the failed rush. They were all dead in the ground, their bodies melting into the same flesh of their fathers which broke the old General and would eventually be broken - the gun, the gladius. The service of the man comes to an end here. The younger took the sword to the ancient hillocks in the wild North and fell to his knees in prayer. The barbarians decapitated him in the last honorable death to happen on the continent. A fell toll was sounded and the last fires quenched for an endless daylight, the sweat of the peasantry all that would remain of the people who felt their soul wrenched out of them here. There could be no hope. The brother took his sword from the city of wheat and fell to the knees of his lost brother, the trees swirling to meet the stairs. Gold glittered as the face of the Adversary lept in the tongues of flame licking against the shadows they put up like shields against the horrid light. Knowledge, knowledge. Axe-wound cunts birthing the babies thrown upon the knives of the enemy - look, look. Horror. Drenched in blood and semen. The brother took sword to the ancient hillocks and the barbarians smeared him with shit. Fire could transcend them all. The grandson wet his own pants with semen, encrusted and evaporating in the desert sun. The tribesmen were below that copy of a copy. They made their own sun that day, when the aluminum canister fell and the stone finally poured with blood. A light, the world burning from within - inversion, the solar light brought to lie. The great-grandfather had crawled in the desert, burning dung while his betters sought refuge in the lightning.
“Here we are, here we are” - a mouth would say, hungry and mewling. The sweat of the worker in the ziggurat’s shadow, while the royal baby sobbed in hunger. Pacing to feed, his fatness only intensified his greed. The mother could only beg. The sun shone through the prongs of her gilt crown like a magnifying glass cooking ants. The baby was starving, as he nipples ran bloody and empty. The baby’s hunger was endless, it was growing now. Tanned workers, naked still, were growing in the form I know them today - rope-like muscles, sinewed bodies, toiling. The sun wet, a red oil that dripped down upon their backs, their fingers adhering a layer of mud and brine as they picked through the dirt. Sugar springs up in the image of it all the baby continues to cry. Seasons pass and the baby’s only grown. Mewling, crying. Fights break out. The baby continues to cry, now echoing across the land, the piercing sound breaking through the canopies of the jungles and forests, the North and South put beneath the shovel and cross of the workers. The baby continues to cry, now outgrown the ziggurat. The mother’s long dead, the father unseen for years. The baby continues to cry and beneath its shadow the sun turns red, the darkness liquifying it to that dirt - a new sand adhering to the backs of their necks like concrete dust crumbling around the rusted rebar. We raise our own young and kill them, eat them. A rare prion disease broke out amongst the pork-eaters and the memory loss became a mark of distinction. That was the bulletin of the sheriff beneath its shadow, as fat as his namesake child upon the pyramid now overgrown to seem almost mountainous, the baby a celestial body unto itself. Indolent figures lazing in the shadow of the temple, as the leatherskinned sharecroppers spake - “I reckon, there’d be a sight many of ‘em in them hills we ain’t seen still yet. Course they can’t ignore it now. Nothin’ but fieldhands they is. Course they ain’t comin’ out yet. Still. They hearin’ it. Don’t hear it, see. They ain’t knowing hide nor hair of the obla’gation a man’s got to give to this wurrld. Don’t y’all know it.”
So it went, low and subtle beneath the shadows of old trees and protected by new thorns - the flesh cut itself free and broke through baptism in the river they couldn’t cross. I saw their dogs drown in my dream once, the old things I can’t help but remember. I remember the night it all came true - my grandmother used to tell me stories, fairytales about the old times. Log cabins among snow and the glass windows that turned to crystalline frost. The time of King Winter, when even the enemy armies would decamp and die before our eyes. This was the blessing of our god, that moonlight which saved us. My grandmother told me she left through the sea and spent an endless night in the bowels of a leviathan as it rode across the primordial dark. A satan with glittering eyes stoked coal to the forest before she could find land again, another river, another forest. Even still - like the enemies of old - no winters here. We had to find our own. I remembered her stories the night they came. The cold spot of waving flashlights, the flashing red and blue between the glass and drywall, smashing and shouting. Their boots marched, I ran. I saw the cold spot of their flashlights against where I hid, dogs barking fruitlessly against the river which baptized me. Running, cold - the river water of my second birth went from a searing rejuvenation to the same flesh which holds me always. The pain of the cold, my soaked clothes and skin, burning like moonlight and vodka. It was silence now, as the sirens and headlamps and flashlights and dogs and radio crackles receded, the sound of my breath drowning them out minute by minute as my legs carried me through greater magnitudes of exhaustion. Like an octave’s logarithmic jump, each hour passed by and the moon drew down until the sun was beginning to rise over the mountains and I finally stopped - broken through and bloodied within, I looked upon the world as it was born again. Clear as the quest before me. Clear as a new day, the first light of God cast upon the Earth. The satans were still after me. I breathed, I slept. The morning was clear. An eagle flew overhead and I heard the birds, rabbits. Spring was turning to summer slowly, as the clocks of the seasons turned around. The buildings, the men, the cars receded to horses, to forges, to raw forms. The world turned back around me. Here, this moment - the first daybreak of the first morning, all else left as mere illusions falling away like rain washing a dirty window. The sun, clear - orange, red, receded, and liquid giving way to gas, to plasma, to purity - light. A brilliant clarity overtook me at the very beginning, when God spoke at Alpha, and all that ever is and ever shall be in that light, the primordial light forcing itself like the first sight of an infant crawling from the womb, darkness without form divided into Everything, the light, the light -