dearbaby: The Book

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The Book

At the conclusion of the summer, happenchance devised a series of occurrences which now seem so very disparate from the events which have followed. It had been brought to my attention, by the sweet lipped lady of my local bookstore, that a back room, previously unknown to my person, resided in a pool of shadows neighbouring two of the store’s most recessive book cases. My curiosity often endows me with potentialities far broader than the sullen universe does allow, indeed much I have sought in my time has lead to destructive causes and little more than pain for the desires I habour. This hidden realm, made so resolute by the kind words of my favourite hostess, now came to symbolise for me every folly and depression my misfortune had thrust upon me. And so in terrible optimism, I slid my body through the shadows into the galaxy of books beyond, so unaware that these eyes, now cast in darkness, would come to see more than nature could ever have intended for them. All in the pages of one book.

It was here, by means of many days of sumptuous appraisal, that the book which was to sculpt the angles of my reality came into view. This leather-bound manuscript, no more in weight than the ink-well which aids me in writing these words, slid into my fingers and fell open, so casually, on a sight my heart will never forget. There, at the foot of the last page, was my name, curling at odds with the paper’s grain and speaking so much more than the label endeared to me by my parents. It was your handwriting, this much I knew to be true. The categories of vision I rely on so readily now appeared to be puppeteered by a daemon. His laughter filled me with a mirth deeper than any one soul is capable, for in the tears of indulgence sent streaming down my cheeks by this ink scrawl was a truth I could not bare to necessitate: this book was my path to a higher truth, a way to mend the many misgrievances which had come before. In grasping the meaning of this transcendent text I would legitimate and bind the book that was my life. I knew you were speaking to me across reality’s bough. I feared your identity.

In translating these words I hope to further allow the healing to begin. Forgive my attempts to copy the strange script in which the book is written; a madness of language not I, nor the book keeper herself, can fully make out. Perhaps in revising this text I may mark its final page with a scrawl of another’s name; perhaps, but then again, these words may be a scrawl upon their person all the same.

In the sweep of my pen, I am become God.

Night - that contrast of ink, seeping from the heavens into the imaginary horizon - once allowed this existence a disparity. Now I am left in perpetual shadow, dusk covered moments; I may as well be a fiction.

Sixteen moons have passed since barbarity overtook me. Her suspicious lips caressed my body, such was her passion, yet once that act of love had been consummated I was a slave to the whim of fate. The girl was no more than 15 years of age and now bore my child. Through the winter night I ran, seeking the solace of twilight. The flicker in their lanterns chased me through the glen and up two thousand paces aloft the town. It was there, amongst the fingers of light shining out across a cold universe, that my freedom was diminished. Tying my legs and body in seven loops – one, it was said, for every sin - I was suspended above the townsfolk in the mighty oak tree I had frequented as a child.

“This man is a rapist; a cantankerous wretch of personhood, not worthy of death, nor existence itself,” came the cry of the town’s council.

“Be it decreed that he garner no sense of self from any person here present. That in time, forgotten as a human, he may wither to nothingness, not in body, but in mind. This is his destiny.”

With that pledge came my torture. There I was to stay for many months of neglect, hung as vermin from that tree. Each morning a different member of the town would arrive over the hill and bid me no mention. No matter how I cried, how deeply I begged, they would not acknowledge my presence. My body was fuelled with a tasteless gruel, greyer in sustenance than any baron rock. I was cleansed with severe lashings of cold, salt-livened water, such that in the heat of the high-sun my skin would blister and flakes of salt would obscure my vision. Whosoever attended to me would allow no manner of my humanity to bear upon their actions. Their breath caressed an unyielding skin, their fingers jolted a defective carcass of little resort; I was dead to them. In time I came to cease in my anger, to banish all emotion, and so it was I began to forget myself.

I conceived of the night engulfing my innards. It became the only way to drown out the searing pain of the sun on my flesh, but its deep calm stole away more than my torture. In the absence of my mind grew visions, ever more vivid than the stars of the milky way, which subsumed the matters of my physical body. Each of my senses took leave of themselves, allowing in their place to evolve a sense of nothingness. Without my senses I was no more. A world I had previously resolved in the chatter of my mind was made silent. All language; all referents fell beyond an invisible horizon, from which no escape was possible. The forms I had relied on from my very earliest of memories began to dissolve in the blackness. An infinity welled up inside me; at its heart, I became God.

Stretching off ahead of this inner obscurity were now wrought innumerable pathways, each inventing a universe. As the paths spiralled inwards they bolstered my purpose, merging in a singularity of such density, that reality itself began to curl back upon, and into, the most intimate of voids. To express this beauty in such a hapless language of words as this, belies my purpose. I wield these symbols in text to draw within you a simulacrum of the glory beheld, itself merely a reflection of your own self-shadow. This I realised through my stupor: we are the Gods of our worlds. I became my own fiction. Were I to escape my present circumstance I would be so much more aware of this than any amount of selfhood could tear away from me. In knowing these revelations; in merging with a universe erupting from within me, I awoke with a start from my visions. The seven loops which tied me had been severed. I was lost to my senses once again. I was free.

My muscles pulsed in rebellion at the acts of the flesh I forced upon them. There was little time to sense pain as I raced beyond the limits of my world. The town of my youth, and the great oak which had gathered me in its womb those many moons, were distant now. Perhaps it was an hour, or three at most, before I collapsed in the tepid mud of the valley. Prithee to the terror wrought upon my ears, my nose, my tongue and skin by the dawn, was a creeping notion: the sun would soon rise above those sullen hills. I knew I must seek shelter. My soul could not take the light of another day.

In the maelstrom of my mind, inestimable whirlpools of vision spun my intentions into meaningless threads. Each twisted knot of purpose fell away from me as I tried to grasp it, unpicking the tapestry of colour the illuminated valley had become. Although the cadaver of my body remained knee deep in the squalid dirt of the forest, I felt I had little time to escape the world of form, of light, of the senses, before in a swift tug of wind I would unravel to dust. I called in remembrance of the voice which had once stood out so resolute. My speech echoed the valley walls.

“I beg of you to cease this illusion once and for all dear God! Bequeath me a morsel of pity so that I may comprehend the folly of my true self; so that this nightmare may end. For in my body I am no more, say for the pains now wrenching inside and out of me all knowledge of your glory! Oh God of flesh, God of the spirit; I am conveyed to this world no more!”

Scarcely had I collapsed into this fit of resentment than the most dazzling sign attended me. A sudden crack of lightening pierced the valley walls, sending splinters of rock skywards. Above my line of sight, acrest a craggy outcrop of camouflage, a cloud of dust was settling. Beyond it, I somehow knew, laid my destiny, a labyrinthine cavern of rock sculpted by the hand of God into the hillside. No matter how this event had occurred, or where the knowledge I now harboured had first arisen, I found myself erect upon my legs once more, and trudging towards the subject of my visions. The power of my words; the conviction of my intensity, had acted upon a world I now had little in common to dwell upon. As I neared the concave pool of blackness stretching off, and into, the cliff face, I was aware of a greater power within me than had ever existed before. This plenitude of understanding was intimately bound to the loss of my former identity. The ‘real’ world, of people and places, of times and events, into whose darkest inner regions I now lumbered, was a word of exhortation on the lips of my soul. In the manner of my thoughts alone I could control a universe. The God to whom I had spoken now seemed to be no other than my own self, yet upon this mirror of revelation were drawn the outlines of another’s being; each eye slip-streaming from horizon to horizon caught the shadow of my world in its gaze. The mirror turned within me to focus this image yet further, and there, peering across the boundaries between our worlds, I saw a hapless face engrossed in the pages of a singular book; his pen drew me onward.

I had a choice; a last vestige of free will, for it was obvious that the cave’s serrated walls bore little indication of permanence. In no more than minutes, perhaps seconds, this passage to another place would be lost, as rock grated rock in its fight against an unwavering gravity. Were I to walk forwards, deep into the other realm here exposed, my path would very well be blocked permanently by the clash of stone at this cave’s virgin mouth. Yet were I to retreat, what hope could I ever have of finding solace in this world again? At that moment a strip of iridescent light sprang out over the distant hilltops and seared my flesh. The decision was to be final; I was of darkness and nothing more.

Dragging ever onward the body which had become so alien to me, I traversed the winding caverns, fraught by a desire to drown the very faintest of light in this inalienable blackness. The presence which had so shocked me, now disfigured my progress, for in his mind’s eye could never be perceived a darkness as true as the one which now embraced me. If I were to describe myself as a bird, wings beating into the centre of the Earth, he would envision a conflagrant dove, perhaps encased in a halo of light, obscuring the truth of the matter in the tilt of its wings. Here was a pen, sketching words into the lines of a page which he believed to be creating me, when in absolute sincerity, the limits of his language bore the destruction of an infinity of worlds.

At ease with my new companion – a vestige perhaps of the hallucinations I had suffered in the valley – I noticed a smell which comforted me yet further. Out of shadow grew a dusk of my senses I had relished since childhood. That vaporous perfume: the odour of dampness lodged deep within the grains of a thousand pages. And so, as the dust of decaying parchment stirred my senses, I became aware that bleeding into this blackness was a fountain of the finest ink. Solid form melted before my nose, sliding into me a scent so sweet, as to offer the invitation of an Autumn morning. Then oh so suddenly, a cavern of books arose into my sight, and there, hunched over in the corner of this room of books, was a figure I knew only too well. It was he who had driven me into this world.

I stood over him, not knowing in all truth whether the sweep of his pen was what kept me in place. Were I to halt his abstractions, to force him to acknowledge my being, would the very words unravel, taking me with them? But no! Abreast the still-damp scrawl of his concentration, there lay another book, open it seemed on its last page, and signed in graphic forms with a signature of my creation! The unmistakable curve of the vowels, the slash of consonants; a sign to myself spoke clearly the name of my creator! In unbounded bliss I spoke his name, noting too that the tale of my misadventures ended on that final page. What we drew now was ours and ours alone.

“I welcome you my friend,” this most intimate of strangers turned to offer me, “but do you not see, that lying out there, beyond the limits of either of our worlds is yet a third interpreter? A mind for whom the pen has not yet become their maker?”

We smiled, us two, and embraced. The God who had summoned me into the vestiges of his world took one last look at the richness of paper before him and handed me his pen.

“Let us sign their name, as you signed mine. Together our hands will bestow them an identity so that in time they may offer out their hand, in a vestige of ink, and invite us into the next world…”

Here we now stand, our hands clasped together as one. Suffering at a purge of ink onto a milky whiteness, we beg of you, reader; mightiest of purveyors; the God of multiple worlds, to grant us a sign of something real. At present we are formless, mere drifting precepts of little import to any number of worlds. The universe of form is, in mind, schematic and transitory. How can we be made again? How can a nothing become an all? In the sweep of the pen; in the damp of ink onto an infinite page, you are become God.

Sign Here…

dearbaby

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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

The Book

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