Song for the End of the World - Part 2.
Prologue.
So
We turned our backs to
the sun,
headed outwards
towards the farther stars,
the beacons in the darkness,
out towards the horizons
of the universe......
Weaving intricate patterns through the void,
electronic eyes scanned our course
fixing their gaze behind us, toward home
and before us, toward fire, life-
bearing,
remote in the bright darkness,
the residual hue from a palette of ten billion colours
crushed into the One.
(Chorus I)
I am both younger and older than I appear.
As life bleeds from me
in stasis and in contemplation........
Cool logic clouds the heart,
the body is divorced from the sky-stretching mind.
One part earth-bound, no escaping the physical
reality of the body inhabited, orbiting and phasing with
the moon.
(Ebb and flow, wax and wane)
Another part, cool as winter
sunlight piercing the iceflows
To waken the life beneath,
sits motionless but watching.
Both inward and outward this,
diving to the depths of psyche and stars
To create a wholeness at the centre
where infinity meets itself
yet is part of the whole.
One.
Light years out.....
One came to us, out from the darkness,
moving to a rhythm unheard by us,
His eyes the hearts of stars.
He beckoned us onward, neutrinos streaming
from his fingertips,
towards the tenuous veilings of a nebula,
thirteen lifetimes distant.
Within was death.
He rode the tidal stresses, hands outstretched,
the right pointing back to the centre of our galaxy,
The left -
fierce energies flaring along the arm -
along the path we followed,
while in the hollow of his throat the nebula's pulsar span and
winked at us
Through spaces relatively infinite.
And a voice as deep as time echoed through us and beyond us -
"Kneel to me small beings,
for I am fire and air and the wind that streams through
interstellar space.
I was the first created thing in all infinity,
and all the bright things of your multitudinous lives
were shaken from my outstretched hands,
and in my eyes they rest and are reborn."
(Chorus II)
Touching
There are those who can combine
or so they say.
Personally, I am unsure
the light of others' glancing through, dangerous and untouched.........
And trying to separate
fundamental dichotomies.......
the outer and inner
Into holistic harmony -
as to the validity of such a suggestion.
There must be tension -
A thin skating of ice across the divide,
supporting spread eagles in the air
where coldness turns insubstantially solid -
cracks within the surface of your reality
through which, if you turn your head, you may see
Two.
We paused, uncertain.
(Chorus III)
And I watched from a distance in time, unsure - as always -
where was my place in this patterning of one small
continuum.
They call me Flare.
Amongst those of my own species, I am a rogue talent, a law unheard and
unrecognised. And disapproved of.....
Three.
One amongst us, who in a former life had seen visions and
dreamed dreams of life and glory, awoke from startlement
and spoke.
"Say on. We do not recognise you."
Creation held its breath
The raging fury of fission blinded us
And his voice screamed in the very essence of our beings.
"You dare not deny me!"
There were those among us who had longed for a newness, a chance to erase
the earlier mistakes, to live for life instead of death,
and they wept in their blindness as annihilation
crashed down upon us in crushing
waves,
Their innocence raped, their hope raped, their souls raped as the darkness of
infinite destruction drowned their light...
(Chorus IV)
Enough
Four.
And suddenly we could see - rainbowed through tears...
and some
could not
believe...
From out of the void leapt a figure.
We saw it as a lion, a cat so vast it could swallow the sky and roll
galaxies underfoot as pebbles.
It stood upright and silent
in challenge and its mane flowed flashing along the
stars too bright to look at,
and the godfigure screamed once in fury and fled across the sky.
(Chorus V)
I am not that powerful. However, I believe my appearance was sufficiently startling to both parties to ensure the safety of the weaker.
Later, my rashness was vindicated..........
Five.
Things move too quickly here.
We move at Earth-normal speeds, and so could only faintly grasp,
subliminally, what happened next.
We watched, as best we could, the feline shrink in size,
become - somehow - a more... approachable beast,
that flickered closer to our viewscreens..... and closer.....
Until it stepped through them......
And stood before us,
A creature of myth, head high and huge eyes
flickering, lightning flashes too bright to bear,
regarding us with perilous curiosity........
(Chorus VI)
They were small, stulted in structure and logic, chaotic in their lack of conceptual realisation.
wefting myself into the nature of things I reached into
Nevertheless, I had made my choice...
the language they held in common and spoke to them as
best I could not mind to mind
*and all is grey* *goodbye fool* *in your silence* *weep for the young ones*
*weep for the unborn* *weep....* *it wasn't us it wasn't us it was them we're innocent...*
Six.
Flare spoke:
Some have debated long and with asperity if in fact you can be saved,
I am undecided.
"Your innocence was lost
millenia ago
when you decreed your boundaries were sacrosanct.
Inward you looked, measuring your own logic against some mode
alien to us and unacceptable to yourselves,
leaving you lost and terrified in the yawning void you saw
as reality. No meaning. No reason. No future.
Creating needless complexities and locking yourselves within
psychotic strictures,
structures resembling the labyrinthine convolutions of the surface of
your brains.
There are those who will help you to continue on that path,
Who will come to you with promises of glory, hope, or power,
Which in your self-deception you will acknowledge as your only true desire
And confirm the promisor as your Master and your Lord.
As you have seen.
They lie, of course.
and if - indeed - you should be.
There are those among us who believe that they should intervene this once:
Others who declare that this will set a precedent, and we should remain
silent and unknown,
Pointing to the time when last a species such as yours evolved
And resolved the dilemma for us by their self-destruction,
Not-uncommon or significant in the larger scheme of things.
I am too far outside my people's frame of reference for my thought to carry
any weight in the councils of my elders.
Yet I can appreciate the beauty of a many-layered universe, and relish
diversity in all its forms, see potential where they
see defeat.
I would not see you die."
(Chorus VII)
I curled in upon myself and wept, again.
I think I knew you once, but that was long ago, in the
innocent days when I knew that my love encompassed
eternity, and I wrapped you within my self and into
the eternity of my love.
Now this..... being..... says that we are wrong,
and have been, since our time began.
Now I am lost.
With you.
This marks the end of the completed section. The following are rough drafts for the continuation of the story....
(Chorus VIII)
Ah, the courage of this tiny band,
blindly groping out into their darkness,
No mind light or time light to guide
them through the dangers yet to come........
Nine.
Flare spoke:
"Once, in my earlier times, I was lost in the dark
and dangerous alleys
of a dim gloom-ridden city
on a damp and dark-shrouded island
on a world not of my making.
A thrill there was
of unknown and - possibly - fatal experience
tumbling headlong into synapse and neural reaction,
sprawling
freely across the recognised headlands of
prior cognition and diving
headlong and whimpering
into the dark.
Ah, it was EXCITING!
The sound of footsteps in the inner ear,
a narrowly glimpsed shadow,
a glimmer of eye,
a scent of hotfear and a tingling
at base of brain-stem:
Swift and silent movement out from narrow darkness
onto seashore,
where I stood, benumbed and dazzled beyond speaking
as the borrowed mind attempted to assimilate
the rising of a glinting globe
shimmering in the darksunset,
the dying day reflected from a thousand
thousand rivets
as the vast bulk, full a half of the horizon,
hauled itself up the perimeter of the sky,
wallowing beyond the evening clouds, partway between world and moons,
its precious cargo sleeping,
awaiting the command to start
the long, slow, sluggish trudge
towards the nearer
stars.
No sleek starliner this - rather
a squat and spherical pig,
its grunts and strains faintly audible
through the torpid evening air - yet
a proud and joyous thing
for the race that bankrupted itself to give it birth,
A thing of beauty
and of life.
It was the last thing I saw before
the stalker, forgotten, behind me,
thrust hard and sharp and stained the sand a deeper shade
with my life, as the shock of death threw me backwards, out from the borrowed mind,
To land, rebellious, once again,
in the historians' chamber,
hard on the stoneflagged floor,
once more to face censure for love of sensation
over the purity of knowledge. Had I not been so
skilled in their most needful art, I have no doubt
my studies would have been curtailed then and there!"
He paused awhile, then sighed.
"They tell me I am dangerous to know. I could inflict my presence
on your company without your approval - or indeed, if I so chose,
your knowledge.
But I would go with you willingly, for once to take my place
in history, not simply to watch and record
timelines and matrices linking past and future.
To go blindly forward, unaware - ah, the wonder of it!".................
Chorus
Shearing the curve of a sinuous wave,
sine and square motion in equilibrium,
we plot parabolic planes through the angles of the void
towards a soulstar
known by its brilliance
to be a comprehensive mind,
and reaching a neuron into this mind unhampered, asked
the reason for disturbance here-and-now............
Joules Taylor, 1992 - (ongoing)
© 1998 Joules Taylor (writing as Flare)