The seeds I once scattered in Midnight’s womb to this night seek their pleasure with the same moon and devour the darkness with their eyes.
Because their creator is otherwise engaged, and there are far more of them than he could ever dream of pinning down, they live their lives without shame.
Manzana swiftly enters this conscious dream to introduce herself in tiny fragments: piece by piece she lays herself upon the freshly steeled railway line, whilst I myself arise from the assertion of her unquestionable licence to be: from moment to moment… oh how we grow.
‘All of these situations are therefore raised from empirical reasoning, even if the majority deviate from precise observation and the rest are purely imaginary. My own narrative can be measured by time and naturally forms the greater part of the sequence, whilst other narratives (and how can we ever evade these?) are received from varying quarters and never escape my pen.’She receives me with a lifeless smile, forcing me to conceal myself, as though I were seeing her for the first time, and know not even her name.
‘Thus we have a literary style which, together with the born aesthete’s sense of colour, presentation and individual flair, has absorbed the public’s respect for quality and its need to retain the intrinsic properties of each part, with the politician’s and the cleric’s skill in the use of sophistry and rhetoric.’All artistic ventures require locations although, as you can imagine, such settings are often random, and are not worth a jot!
‘It is from inner worlds that I have garnered the passages for this book; most of which are claimed by Life’s spiritual and emotional realms which, at their peak, are the most exhilarating of all domains. The adventures stimulate raw nerve to the utmost degree and have no call to contend with the contrived and self-proclaimed High Civilization—a pompous flea of a culture masked—that has defined the essence of breeding for some twenty, once teen, centuries.’Moonlight stretches exploratory fingers across her body. Fingers as sure as those of jewellers, searching with broad strokes and circumspect probes. They inch across her temples and twine ebonite locks deranged by conflict. Wide eyes fix upon the moon. Lips stretch far apart: capacious, bitten and swollen. Their blood flows around her chin, melding saliva with the tearful sweat of eyes and brow. Her eyes and teeth claw the darkness, searching distant streets and alleys, so that whosoever they might encounter will feel the contact of a dread of which they had been innocent, and never forget the touch of those bestial transports which animate them. Rare stars for strays and deserters, gazing within and staring without, engagement and tryst. Can one stand by the old paths of this madness and blindly refuse to see new ways?
I sustain my observation: impenetrably transfixed, silent and alone.
Luminary fingers traverse a body of ages no longer concealed. Her dress, unbuttoned by the impatient and savage claws of darkness, displays a thirst as violent as that of our searching eyes: behind which, a primal urge, wherein those too compulsive to accept invisibility devour a mystery with their taste for clear and unobstructed views.
The moonlight now reaches to caress her breasts, whose perfection, embodied in small, rounded mounds, raises high-peaked nipples to a night still raw from chewing, and continues its search at the swell between her fan-spread thighs, stretched wide for gainful access.
Her blood there guides its probes about swollen lips. Scarlet tongues that glide from a twin-headed serpent breathe fire where the shell unfurls.
‘For this is a book about fertility, not dearth. It would smash walls with words of hammers, spurn progress with its logos: counter blows to slaughter creatures out of songs. Yet here am I, submerged within a spell of names that goes deeper than I can reveal.’Beyond the aromatic folds of a womb flower where lies an ancient well a new life pulses, awakening (is this new life or old to stir the waters that now flow a lifetime from our recollection?), turns and trembles for a moment, and then surges.
‘What is seen is seen.’Repulsed, I spin my head away from its shining white body; the Wisdom Fish.
As breathless as Manzana, it fades with eyes wide, drawn toward the stars by the cry of a speechless night, a final passage. I gaze from the moon to a mouth that yawns to grasp air, whilst its confines and expanses merge. Two voices joined:
‘For these observations I rely solely on experience, though I am certain that similar could be made on the basis of instinct: directly and through a simple process of understanding.’to pass through the abyss between those fears walled in (the honeyed walls, the walls of words) or walled out (foetus, corpse), as one. To conjure silence from the distance between my cries. A night for no-one, Embracing my vision. I see Nought.
Inside this mouth, where nostrils combat a hideous stench and garbage seethes, swarm lithe and half-demented rats: their mass above, their mass below. They move with the weight of bodies disenchanted, with wills to know. Their bodies spark in passing but never touch my own, as I traverse all roads uncertain: shall we collide?
“You may, though you won’t ever discover the spark, or find the fire,” breathes Haar.
“We’ll chase the phoenix over pyres far and wide, Till in the end we chase her out of sight, When death at last will sever her connection.”
‘Each face hereby sustains a mask in liberty. A knowledge passed down to us by our father, whose revelation was made perfectly transparent in Great Mother’s City, a best-seller of dubitable authorship, ceaselessly reiterated and translated, whilst its precepts have been raped for the sake of clarity.’I question I [Idea untranslatable; beyond self-referential constraints]: “Are we so far removed? Our hell could never be this dark, even should we constantly die!”
‘And how soon we found that with the end of life we consumed more earth than fire, such merit being incumbent on return to dust!’
“Quackshit!”
‘For whilst a fond hope for order dawns in the antique ideal of these time-grasping hands, they wait upon all that they desire.’Propelled by these feelings of remorse I push into the mists of the Great Hearth Flesh, a veil within the mouth of Regina Piscis, our Apple Queen; lost member of so many thousand years.
‘To summarize her influence, Pagina Rosa, Director of the Altruistic Museum of Unnatural Histories, wrote: ‘Her presence was so awesome that most reverently evoked her as “The Primordial View”’.’She shivers now. Her mouth exhales and clamps with breathless haste. I enter depths obscured by nets and fog.
“And you will scarcely gain Manzana’s heart in there!”“Oh show me, please, if you are able, the route to lead me through blind skies!” These, twisting, winding, twining strands impede the realization of my will. They shape my progress in accord with my decline and lead toward a halt away from true fulfilment. So must this man leave all his mists and trappings far behind and let his vision be his guide.
With both eyes open I am witness to that which I have come to know as beauty, though through time I have learnt to observe from behind my fingers’ span, remaining speechless, anticipating her flight beyond me. Though I intend to follow her wherever she deigns to lead, and use her as I deem fit.
Beauty resolutely strides away. Her chestnut hair, despite the haste in her step, gently rises and falls: Reinette swathed in blue (veiled); youth, warmth and pale (fragrant) skin.
Suddenly, and I have no idea why I hadn’t noticed this before, I see that she has a companion who appears to be much younger, with a complexion that is darker, and who is manacled to her waist.
With its bonding of this pair, the chain, implores obeisance; enjoining blood to not staunch the ash of its flow, as they course through Manzana’s “core to the seed of time.” I digress, this has no great significance:Temptation is its own rawest state.
It is my aim, with this book, therefore, not to ignore the deviations, but to spell out both beauty and crime in each truth contorted, even the humble and witless distortions of our inner lives, so thoroughly promoted by those without. ‘Steeped in hocus-pocus blood for two millennia and secreted from the risen sun to purify.’ How many times I have been told.At this precise moment I see Reinette and her partner, Malina, disappear beyond the fog, which desperately clings to its vast web of temperance. While I summon “the blood of the man,” I crave lost fruits and am suddenly overcome by an acid blinding as of bile from an unseen hand; a weightless span of thorns that rains about my head of empty. Momentous thorns of guilt and of desire. Empty dreams and collective fears, revere and adulterate.
‘Between these two extremes subsists an entire gamut of more or less liberating constraints, themselves the focus of a partial disorder since the creation of time.”These are my reason when I don my rainbow cloak in the unforeseeable chaos of natural things. These are the general solution and their vacillation lays its burden squarely on our shoulders, but is ultimately ineffective.
In our fertile age:
I will try to give you only the details that you need, and assemble the fragments for you, so that labour may be eschewed.There is surely merit in disregarding fish heads, bones and scales, for the vultures and hounds.
A mounting body of evidence suggests, and I am sure that even paltry investigation will confirm, that the growth of the rational mind over these twenty centuries has steadily and surely devastated even those supposedly most primitive quarters of our hallowed globe. Nor should we forget power: a ladder for spineless worms (tiny star craven worms) who have many needs for reason, or the precious metals and lures for sucking our spirits from their shapeless holes: though if you wish to be consoled by these definitions you may remain disappointed, even should you read them to the end.When the soil calls: I then emerge from the fog, a seed—of giant star anise, far strewn without its pod (some say its body, some say its heart)—reach out, a long but unassuming finger:
Into a thunderous hum of bees
Nine golden serpents
two silver orbs (I see and scent)
While obscurity contains all enigma regarding the genesis of these nuclei, the theories that sweeten their actuality demand paradises that are totally fictitious:
THE MEMOIRS OF KING VÍABORRA OF [missing section: “It is an … flayer of mantles.’] Abominations, they bustle and crowd upon the moist earth that surrounds the pool: arms detach from bloodless sockets in the constant fray. Their artificial torsos topple and hit the ground.
Some wish Manzana to be esteemed the rose deliverer of our frail race, for she has given its ‘members’ balance between their heated will and their frozen means. Such creatures, though sentient, act indiscriminately.
as light by motion intensifies with scents dispersed by the dew of anise in night beds I doubt my fate: whether I can fill this grain with life, a wheel, a horseshoe’s curl, to reveal a gutted self still breathing; the desert hollow of a body drained too deep, in need of fluid to meet halfway its thirst. A maw to guide me to a deeper passage, through new veins in untried waters. These could feed and give life to those with which I have grown used:
“Doubtless it would be my wisest move to approach these waters’ edge [To pursue my star julep].”
a mortal: my four limbs crawl. Stray visions from an orchard pool of mead draw the change that has its grip upon my frame.
“You need never arrive,” rings the wash.
Whilst hypnotising ripples, through the cool waters build: ring upon ring lift their heads and fan their wings, to spangle the pool’s silver light; so too it’s awesome guardians, who rise a bloodless, headless corps: on legs firm and strong, with arms hung limp as useless members.
Archetypes: selectively bred and reared as the chosen race for this dawning age; the one now to live with. But contrary to these saviours’ efforts to derive their “volition” from subaqueous depths of pure desire, their necks release steam into the moonlight ether. This emission is the constant stream of their labours and their brightest thoughts, and it is this that creates the fog. All has been miscalculation: their dynamism?, their drive? Within their vascular bodies our portents brew, not only the virtues of efficiency, accuracy, speed and dimension, but other rare optimal potions.
These are the sacred brews. They will yield the answers from which our kinder true shall rise; for we need believe that this is how it is and even that we will witness miracles: no longer able to peel back the outer skin, which is to say the life and death mask.
How weak the nine roots that trail the stump of the hour and the sacrificial three?; the blossoms and the thorns of our Sacred Island Apple Queen, Great Mother of Translucence [How such vessels must appear from beneath the skin of these waters]; in whose age of uncertainty we at first glimpse the immense power of the project we have become a part of and thus begin to ascertain the base of its coercion.
For those who strive fall hard if progress through them slays the nameless feeders of its dawn; when they have built their city and lent the name “Capital” to its walls, after the substance of their law.
‘Dear Friends.’
My breath is in pain.
I see one amongst them who appears to me whole. Can that really be him? The One: both the eyes of his head shut tightly, tightly; beating a course through the pool: a rhythm, its central core, a body and heart that throbs with a flow of crimson blood to his cheeks.
And now I realise, as the face of the Seer Fountain twists in speechless concentration, that words are a search for the present, but that speech for posterity is simply a loosening of untried vows.
His dumb show is drafted from the freshest flesh of Earth and of the Universe. This desert death as fruitless as pure union: a mute unction that fails to break down artifice. His ends are unattainable but it will by no means be harmful to pass his whitened kernel or its sweet carmine eclipse through the constant and exalted flame of an artful rite. He will therefore be consumed by the maws, his own, and engage his divisions in journeys that no restitution could begin to assay. Should the need arise (and it is senseless to assume that his is the surest path through all these cycles) it would be wiser for him to aid his passage with a thorough cleansing from purifiers than to hack away at it with blades or savage it with tasteless carnal contortions (smoothly executed gyrations would do no damage, but a well timed dash attack or forward plunge is quickest) in the belief that so long as no blemish afflicts his passage no harm can come his way.
That a single grain of utility might gush forth from this twilight walkabout is known… bringing rains to animate the cryptic soil.
A sovereign commerce for frauds and witnesses alike. Haze and relation: civilized through and through.
Transparency: the fictitious, even aimless eye that flashes toward Earth and far beyond shows little sign of resistance and the branches of his deceptive trunk reach far into the sky.
While I watch the tamed waters recede, nursed through my compassion by his crudely drafted postures, spotted by a hideous stud of flies and washes of rare salts, I see dust-barbs sprout from devotion’s “twinfold discord”: biting.
This ape claws the soil with developing fingers and reveals the making of the man, as does his spine that stiffens as he rises. The genesis of Homo erectus, with characteristic big toe and thumb, as flawlessly beautiful as those illusions of development and stability we experience daily in our present lives.
Evolving: to be man is to walk tall.
Water yields to green magma. His firm resolve surely precludes the shedding of tears, thick with head and heart, in favour of a pure scent of purpose and a veneer that slowly hardens to a tempting crust ‒ to walk his ingenuity:
In this strange world, how might he summon air? How might he quell his hunger: so far removed?watching the stubborn nails of his hands as they tear so painfully and the nails of his feet as they likewise scar. Slashed by unseen blades from a wind unfelt.
And these abrasions seem simply to be: stone avengers of all destined roads, of his existence and communication with those who gave him life.They heal as suddenly, and his throat is racked by a din from the hell of his ignited ens, followed by a measured calm.
Central to the silence of this stage a Man stands tall: his nails are painted, his helmet is red, his penis erect.
I hear the cocking of guns.
