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!”