Why X Travels Around the Axis – Part 2

A gust of wind stole into the room through the open window and obtrusively pushed its way between us as we moved hand-in-hand along the outer rim of the garden. The upsurge was so swift and violent that our arms were suddenly disengaged. When I attempted to reach for her dangling hand I met with peculiar resistance; an unseen obstruction, a wall-like, almost tangible force prevented me from reaching towards and seizing hold of her. Perhaps this was due to some mysterious natural phenomenon, a whimsical cosmic quirk that had arbitrarily sprung into this world, the emergence of which had thus far remained unobserved by science, and now found itself upsetting the pregiven harmony of two unsuspecting substances. Or, a result of the machinations of imperceptible ascetic garden-dwelling creatures, offended by the obvious display of affection. Whatever the case, between us arose an ineffable and seemingly impenetrable layer of distance. Only with considerable cunning and determined artful maneuvers did I manage to reestablish the symmetry of our bodies, which just so happened to coincide with the wind’s forcefulness subsiding. Yet, another even stranger event followed, when I looked up at her face in search of an eloquently reasoned response to what had unfolded, I found only a barren expression. She did not seem to have even noticed the scene. The only marked change of her entire contour was a lock of hair which had come loose from her bizarrely sculpted Victorian hairstyle and swung in a cumbersome rhythm below her ear, like the arm of a pendulum clock, anxiously ticking away in its solitude.

Why X Travels Around the Axis - Part I

Her voice was softly melodious and subtly spacious, drifting uninhibitedly around the room. It swam through a quiet gathering of dust, cradled by morning sunlight, and awakened the particles from their hovering suspension, sending them flickering into a restless spectacle of patterns. A perplexing array of multi-layered spectral figures emerged, conjoining and separating into pulsating forms, eventually coming together to create a vast spiral which gently swiveled around itself against the illuminated background. Through the center of the spiral I observed her eyes, those pure, glaring contraptions, locked in a lucid and steadfast absorption of their object. Though her stare was fastened with almost reverent warmth, the movement and shape of her mouth, the curvature of her colored lips, seemed to contradict the concrete affirmations of the words that poured so intimately towards me.

τέλοϛ - The Dream Railway

Prelude

It seems, in order to set the stage, sense guides those luminous hands as they busily weave the fibers and, for rest, when the unwinding threads run backwards, they warily return to faith. Vague preliminary remarks aside, let us venture into Opacity pure. Those icy waters of unfathomable depth, on whose waves crystalline figures gather, emitting blinding light. Cast your eyes along the soft edges, and avoid the bewildering brightness of the center: it is amidst the icy vapors, gently arising from the margins, where the metamorphosis will unfold. The whirling structure will eventually tire of its self-imposed flux, and slowly solidify, sublimated into a frozen whirlpool of knowledge, unaware of the anxious rotations that were once its ground.

Chapter I

The 17^th Century

In a sense, there is a “place” where inside and outside meet, and around which the resolute path orbits, sketching the outlines of the whole cosmos, and where travelers setting off in the opposite direction will never again graze each other’s bodies. And before it wistfully forks, it finally splits the psyche; the tracks of the dream railway.

Reality is held by a razor thin string, and wavers at the faintest blow. The real exudes from cracks and crevices of crumbling structures, growing in folds like emerald moss over ordered walls, as shadowy figures of the haunted past never tired of illuminating. Now, the mystics are confined to asylums, their treasonous diviniations and sophistry pacified, even the painful cries of the ancients, like in Phalaris’s bull, are transformed into soft plumes of melodious air.

At the banquet their positions are assigned by a different kind of destiny, a necessity born from the womb of a dying sun. In the far corner, her womanly textures tightened, while other ends came loose, and the others remained fettered to their footnotes. Before them, a feast of animals, their metallic taste arduous to swallow, on their skin the constitution of the new order is drafted, and their bones decorate the walls, in hieroglyphic verse. Acting upon the vast table, the machinating philosopher takes the helm, guided by an influx of visions, devising the system of his self-inclusive being as it goes along. A radiating canvas ex nihilo. His anatomy, his frame, his body, as distant as the world drawn out before his photoreceptors, orchestrates the significance of sight at the tip of his skeletal fingers, looking beyond the vanishing point, mapping the malleable contours of the horizon. Building scaffolds towards the heavens, populating the firmament with portraits of the architect himself. A fractal affair. Man made mathematics, those vacuous, amphibious automatons lurking outside your window, tantamount to burning globes caught in a storm.

A boundless storm; where the sea conspires with air, in a spiraling chase of waves and wind. A solitaire captain, determined to prevail, to escape his doomed vessel, despite their immutable bond. Close to shore, a lighthouse bellows its beacon, running its lucent tongue furiously across the mist, though, to no avail, like weary taps against a mountain wall. Inside, a tiny figure scrutinizes a ceaseless cascade of images, unaware he himself is being watched.

Epilogue

In fact, that primordial globe can never again arise. For a brief instant the sky grew dim, and as the fragile shell broke, its shards raining over the earth, shadows emerged and in one stroke swallowed the masses of phantasmagorical creatures that had scoured the earth among us. Faces without attached bodies, arms drifting without shoulders, wandering eyes seeking lost foreheads, androgynous creatures encased in dizzying specters, men merged with beasts, beastly flora, plants that spoke, insects capable of poetry. One patient claimed, with the exuberant assertiveness of a philosopher, in the process of that great purge their prophecies were swept away with them. Another cried: “they never vanished, they now inhabit the very shadows that were sent to do away with them!”

Nods ∞

Part I.

A thing of infectious persuasion burrows its way into the far corners of being, and though incapable of dreams, a routine cause of nightmares. A furnace of mechanical fatalism, infinitesimal reason and will inversely proportioned, driven by an insatiable voracity for its own identity recast. When mirrors meet, a mute rhythm is set to pulsate in aimless vibrations, echoing within the tenuous hollow of that living kernel. Inside every fibrous enclosure a factory of effigies quietly drawls away, in continuous, seductive murmurs. It is only when the host amicably offers her own shelter, and as the walls close in on themselves, that in one stroke she guarantees immortality.

Sometimes, daydreaming unriddles secret glances

A forest of hungry eyes, wind rustles the piercing branches,
Scraping the ground from time to time, in a rhythm of abandoned organs,
Nibbling at her cheeks, tracing maps along her skin, charting voyages,
Reverie dangling from the mouth like gristle.
“Isn’t it chilly here?” she whispers, though he doesn’t reply, since he cannot speak.
The great circle, aged leaves crumbling under delicate footsteps,
Withering principle supervening in layers, radiating reciprocal invitations,
Being is a matter of geodesics, hidden trajectories and
Hurried vectors pouring through lattice walls.
“Quiet! The Catcher lurks!” she cries out, though he doesn’t stir, since he cannot move.
Overlapping curved flyways, forming invisible embraces,
A network of glances, hand touching hands that touch, though,
Countless spheres amass on fingertips, quivering drops of dew,
And the Ambler’s gaze unties the knot, and weaves her way among the trunks,
Carving predetermined paths in the moist soil,
All stretching toward the same horizon.

Leaders Today, Vol. I

You (men) and mothers of all nations lived execrably well until you were won by the presence of kings. By today progress will equal life, issued from that soldier low with truth. You and I, rather we, were trusted with my sorrow, but it lay hidden in the advancement of rights. Though her diametrically opposed thoughts are policed by liberty and taxed in the court of Brahmins, the sound of her voice will eventually be restored. Because they who feel according to patient proposals, are citizens taught to love the battlefield. A sentence is upon the women strikers: their bodies are mere land to be labored. The insulted and tardy will of the people, should therefore be decided less by cannibals. I shall have it! The white market will not be overhauled under our boss’s entirely vile foot. That sister Sara and her three possessions fell, like wages, from the country into the streets, where she now dines. One of the sons of socialism works off his revolutionary lungs in sweated malignity. And their brains, first politically contained, then supported by catastrophes, will in time be abolished by work, the day when no corner of the West shall be weakened by the death of just mothers. A feeble Siberian peasant stands like iron by his speech on counterrevolution and the violence of conquest; his mind assembled, the sword blessed, before the theatre of high treason. The mountaineer slowly loses his teeth, imprisoned by the red god: these ain’t unlimited dreams! They escaped their local caste into the night of a new dialectic. A Network backed by partisans of imperialism wants to poison the soil with propaganda of grief. Rise little age! There the new land!  Society marked with peculiar instruments of justice, continents of progress, all embracing the end. You must have my next prophet killed. Leaders form classes, who cannot supersede them whilst firmly deceived by songs of beasts. An almost possible concept: decisive act tears and divides the institution of blood. It retreats. You wounded system that fought reconciliation: separate yourself from truth, part with promise, and we blind people, whose values of sickness and death you defended, will at last obtain the right to replace you. In the land of freaks, her monstrous imagination is not held by time, but signals strength. Sacrifice all our incapable words, every image of origins, to the living language of need. Spirit! Trade my name for the manifesto of the people. The reservoir of time births democracy; consciousness arises from the painful fog of compliance. Your socio-political machines organized our bitter and warring memories. A sole subject destined to power, a martyr of her own will, has nothing but community, so we the rich proceed to justice and sense. On change, and the cultural empowerment and imperialism of the poor: provide people the occupation of knowledge, Capitalism’s field of everyday life. Farewell to this infamy.

Her mind is made up

Nods ∞ 


Part II 

Once again, her body became a vessel for objects, a curious condition she had not been afflicted by for years. During her adolescence, and those ambivalent hours of dawn, she would often steal away and climb on top of the hill overlooking the valley (maybe as a minor token of rebellion or an effort to domesticate a growing array of confused sensations arising and consolidating in her chest, which made her mouth water and a faint smell of dried flower buds swell up in the back of her nose). Her body motionless, hands limping alongside her torso, yet her eyes wakeful; observing as the morning fog would rise and billow in quiet translucent waves seemingly out of nowhere. It traveled in a hunched mass across the landscape until it had folded itself into every crevice leaving nothing untouched by its obfuscating presence. As always, the sun rose in conjunction, at which the fog would bulge upwards to greet it, all the while glowing from the inside in bright red phosphorescence, like a giant deep sea creature that had washed ashore and wriggled its vaporous tentacles in elation at the introduction to a new world. However, she did not habitually return to the high cusp of the hill because she found the spectacle aesthetically pleasing. She was rather lured by arcane thoughts on the vacillating being of the fog, its strangely wavering structure, which seemed to straddle two worlds, or none whatsoever. It was not of the earth, and not of the air, but marked the condensation of the two, without properly being either: a nexus of effusion, metamorphosis, obliteration, all at once. She contemplated this as a pastel sheet made its way up the hill and wrapped itself around her ankles, diffusing her feet, which made it appear as if the two had merged. This would replace her earlier ruminations with something entirely else. Filled with a brief sense of weightlessness, only to be suddenly gripped a moment later by an urge of being pulled down into the valley and swallowed by that inordinate body. Of course, this scenario never presented itself. Instead, she would nod in resignation and languish, drooping over the hovering surface, until the fog had evaporated and she finally found the courage to retreat back home. But this time, the last time she ever returned to the hill, the fog did not dissolve, but congealed, encircled her body and then entered through every pore of her being. A river of objects followed suit, amassing like a wave on the horizon and sweeping in roars across her visual field, then uncontrollably pouring into her, each thing evoking a distinct sensation upon entry. The world was attached to the fog as to an unyielding string, drawing every object, every phenomenon in its wake, even her precious woods, through which she usually found her way home, came tumbling toward her, tree for tree. Until alone, amidst omnipresent quietude, and before her, a plateau of barren and shapeless space.

Now that these spells had returned to plague her, they never presented themselves in the same manner as they did the first time, never the same enveloping placidity. Each time, it brought with it as much distress as it did satisfaction, though once contained, a richer quantity of the latter. To avoid this, and to properly delimit the boundaries of her being, she developed a method or tactic of sorts. A habit of nodding timidly toward strangers, mostly men wearing the pattern of clothing that seemed to trace a fortifying outline somewhere deep within her, an almost tangible cord. When night had fallen, she hid under its covers, and placed herself at the precise center of the town square, a point in space she had gone to considerable amount of trouble calculating the coordinates of. Moving her head with the same integrity as a factory worker maneuvers his limbs in concert to the machine invented to act as his servant. At first, she stretched her hand upwards and blithely ran her finger across a prefigured segment of the darkened sky in arbitrary undulations rather than straight lines. Erratic, though circumspect, strokes of a blinded calligrapher conjuring an orchestra of bizarre figures from sand. Pulling back at times, as if to start anew, her pace then quickened and steadily the glittering sketches grew increasingly rigorous and systemic, the elegance of which would have made a geometer weep. A flurry of stars gravitated toward her celestial engravings and mirrored the procession of her movements with scrupulous mathematical precision, until they broke loose from the faintly shimmering wall, piece by piece, and finally trickled down to the square, replicating the prior markings by rotating and bending in the exact same patterns. Hoping to produce the desired constellation, the neutralizing alignment of unattached fulfillment, but only if someone chanced to reciprocate her nods at the exact same moment. On most occasions she only succeeded in awakening the attention of loners, drunkards or misfits, and an ancient vagabond routinely gave her majestic bows before disappearing into the crowd. Once, she felt as if the universe had shifted its center to mirror precisely where she bent her body: after a graceful exchange of nods, an unusually pleasing person drifted hesitatingly toward her, and said, “I apologize for my lack of creativity, but have we met before?”
“We have not.”
“Are you sure, may I ask your name?”
“Fuck off please, I’m quite engaged in something.”
“I see.”
She resumed her nodding, as if nothing had happened, as if the entire doleful trajectory had not exhausted itself, and finally reemerged in another orbit.