Why X Travels Around the Axis – Part 3

It’s getting cold, would you please close the window. I had to climb over her body in order to get out of bed, and as I awkwardly did so, our eyes met, and my body automatically came to rest, held in tranquil abeyance directly above hers. Why are you looking at me like that? The words issued from under her breath. I did not answer, but she was right. The looking-glass above the bed spoke volumes; the strange air of composure which enveloped and transfigured my face was altogether questionable. The pupil of her left eye expanded in a sudden dilation until it occupied the diaphragm, almost entirely obfuscating the iris, a darkened rock vehemently pushing its way up to the surface of the encircling waters. It then retracted, propelling the waves into vertiginous ripples across the luminous green disc. An ocean of possibilities. I could not be certain as to what she desired from me, whether she wanted me to linger in that position, to advance further, or to leave her in peace, so in an effort to avoid unnecessary contemplations and potentially painful confusion, I planted a carefully devised kiss on her forehead as compromise. I then shuffled hurriedly to the window. I peered out, or rather, I attempted to peer out the window, since, outside the darkness was so dense, so ubiquitous, that it was if the window looked out unto an omnipresent nothingness. Not even vague silhouettes or obscure outlines, not a single specter foreshadowing a visibly near-present existence. Nor could I discern that close to inaudible breathing of things, the dawdling, winged droning of joined worlds that remains when everything else has fallen into silent slumber. Nothing to indicate that life stirred outside the confines of the room. If it had not been for a sole persisting remnant, the last surviving proof – frost – gnawing away at my arms, as they rested on the windowsill, like an infinitesimal icy legion of pronging fangs, I would have believed that the universe had somehow been emptied of its content. In fact, the hushed darkened negation was so convincing that I began to doubt whether the world had ever existed in the first place. I shut the window, thereby erasing the last remainder of reality exterior to that of our own. Encapsulating us within a private sphere of being, entrenching a selfinclosed region from which not even the minutest flicker of light could escape. Time is likewise ours now, I thought: this would perhaps provide the chance to restructure the room, in its entirety, as we had fantasized about on numerous occasions, coiled around each other in bed.

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!”