Atavism » fragments

Soviet Era Constructivism

Leo Cole — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:27:19 +0000

Travesty! A case of shameless plagiarism:
Lang’s Metropolis was unoriginal.
It was a composite of Shelly’s Frankenstein,
the silent, Nesferatu, which stars Max Schreck
as a ghoul, and also, predominately
Мы, the Russian poetic novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin.
It was written by anonymous – D-503,
another cipher in unif. The book is his
quotidian diary he keeps while losing his mind
in a hyperstructuralist society. He, far more than
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko, is
the father of constructivism. The One State
isn’t communist, had nothing to do with Lenin’s
October Revolution. Of course that was
the CONTEXT; but not the content – you see?
This most perfect dystopia could easily take place
in the United States of America or
the People’s Republic of China;
Der Tercer Reich des Deutschlands
(dein goldenes Haar Margerete,
dein aschenes Sulamith…); the monarchy
of Isabella La Reina, queen during
Columbus’s rape and the Spanish Inquisition:
the massive, towering Auto da Fe.
Science fiction under the psuedonym
Arturo de Leon, Bolano, Archimboldi.

The Sunset Smoke Sutra

Leo Cole — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 10:30:55 +0000

Be standing as the sun goes down
no matter how much you may want to sit.
This is an holy moment. Show piety
to the Osirises making their way to light
up the adumbral underworld. Think:

The sovereign flag of blue and red
waves to the right of your head
knocks the smoke, the breath
out your mouth the moment you notice it.
[The flag] Sends an ardent coal
to land in the skin of your chest
and burn a hole in your heart.
Golden blood, singeing pain.

The disc sinks behind the Western Mountain
leaving a rainbow trail in its absence: space.
To fade in a blue violet green arc above;
a white splotch in the vision I carry
on into the night. And three birds
to the rightward South fly past.

A Folded Note in My Pocketbook

Leo Cole — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 05:06:29 +0000

Whoever wrote me this note I find
written in girlish print on Clarion Hotel stationary?

“Just when everything adds up to nothing
and anything hurts to begin. Turn around.
Lose keys, lose eyes. Let go of friends.
Divorce so easy sometimes [illegible]ime
(I’m me?) I’m dead.” – Shaina –
1st Being
Venice, CA

I have no recollection of her.
Present yourself, my dear Shaina.

On the Internet Engine

Leo Cole — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 01:15:10 +0000

Wires should drop straight to the floor
rather than bunch, coiled on desks.

Burn this Email. I am writing
at once three different things:
continuous story, fragmentary poem
and slew of informative messages.
I am tweeting to my Twitter followers.
Facebooking the book that I am authoring.
Telling friends to call me*. I have something
secret to convey, to which I do not want
Google or Viacom to gain illegal access.

We should create our own portals
for search through eponymous websites,
the passwords to the administrative pages
to which we should be the only ones with keys.

*telepathically

The Renunciation

Leo Cole — Tue, 24 May 2011 23:24:09 +0000

God is within me, eh? You are an idiot. Am I, this voice inside your head, then God? Well then, noble seeker, he said sarcastically, here I am, you need go no further. Abruptly the diatribe took on a plaintive tone. Don’t go. Look what you’re leaving: your beloved wife, your family. All of your past will be wiped away the moment you set foot on the road you choose to take and set out resolutely. Think of the memories; what will they be worth when you leave their correspondents behind for good. Feel how bitter they taste in your brain as you consider them now. Their bite will be many times worse as you advance more into the future, remembering over and over the glorious chances you had and the ultimate mistake you made by choosing this erroneous, quixotic path to your own subjective god-fantasy. O how I suffer, and have suffered until now. You will suffer worse for stubbornly persisting in your suffering. Go then, the voice inside his head coldly resigned itself to his decision, if this is what you want. You are free. I am free. Take the risk. In my humble experience, the rewards always end up being worlds apart from how I had cast them in my imagination. And the main, recurring lesson in life is that the final arrival hasn’t happened yet, so which is the correct course from here to take? the equanimous or the dynamic?…

Reverse Alchemy

Leo Cole — Tue, 24 May 2011 23:11:44 +0000

He shooed away a few munchkins and dropped the brick at her feet. “Could you please render this gold into straw for me?,” he requested her politely. “I need it to make a scarecrow,” he explained frankly. “I thought you had left,” she said puzzled. “You said you never wanted to see me again.” “I said no such thing!” he clarified. “You said something to that effect,” she retorted. “I might have. I can’t remember. But I didn’t say I was never coming back. Will you help me? I need you to do me this favor,” he begged. “I might,” she answered slowly. “But Reverse Alchemy doesn’t come cheap. I will need something in return from you. Especially since we are no longer lovers, I cannot be doing pro bono work for you.” “Alright, what do you want?” “To know your name,” she told him curtly. “So you can cast spells on me when I’m gone; conjure my spirit to participate in those rituals you perform using your minions the munchkins? No way. Anything else?” “Nothing but that will do, I’m afraid. Give me your name. Or go find another Witch to perform the process for you.” “I wish I knew another witch, but you’re the only one so far in the Garden.” “Maybe there are others out in the Beyond,” she suggested. “There probably are,” he acknowledged, “and I’m certainly going to find out. But as of yet, beyond the Garden is an unexplored Waste. In order for me to get there to explore, I need you to make this gold into straw for me.” “Pity you aren’t a wizard,” she mocked him sarcastically, “practiced in the art yourself.” “I have every intention of becoming one later on when I have time. For now I still depend on you. Be a good witch and help me please?” “I can’t unless I know your name.” Desperate and frustrated, he thought of the poor little sapling, at the mercy of the black crows. In his mind, one swooped, and gobbled the nascent Tree away. “Fine. You win. I’ll tell you. But first the straw.” “First your name,” she insisted. “I’ll tell you my first name. My middle and surname I’ll tell you when you’re finished.” “Deal.” “Arthur.” “That’s it?” she asked, a bit disappointed. “Like I said, I have two others. You’ll know them straightaway.” Defeatedly, she went to work, performing Reverse Alchemy, a process which is much like grinding hamburger meat. Out of that single golden brick was produced a bale of yellow straw. She tied it tight with a string. “Thanks!” he quipped as he picked it up, swung it on his back, headed out the door and ran like a mischievous trickster away. “Arthur!,” she called after him, “you liar, cheater, deceiver, storyteller! You’ll never become a wizard in this lifetime with the amount of negative karma you’ve just taken on. Come back and tell me the rest of your name-” She said more but by then he was too far away to hear her. Why didn’t she chase after me, he wondered once it was over, and decided he was probably the main character in someone’s dream. The Witch, meanwhile, had foreseen that she would not get the full name out of him, but regardless, helped him along on his quest for two reasons: because it would later on behoove her to have done so, and she did manage to get ‘Arthur’ out of him, which was enough to inflict her curse on him, whoever might be the bearer of that much storied appellation.

Apparitions in the Storm

Leo Cole — Sun, 22 May 2011 08:00:29 +0000

The flash of lightning stunned him.
He then was jarred by the rumbling
thunder. A shadowy apparition emerged
out of the limited distance through which
he could see in the heavy storm.
It marched in the opposite direction,
off to his left, and without having become
any clearer, was gone. Another followed next;
this one to his right. It too passed by.
One came after the other. None manifested
quite close enough to reveal any more of what
it was than a blob out in the rain. They went
west in some kind of procession, which never
crossed the man’s way. He did not count
their number; though there were many.

The Origin of Christ Superman

Leo Cole — Sat, 21 May 2011 08:54:42 +0000

A young American boy named Clark grew up keeping it secret that he was different from everyone else. At the age of seven he found that he had superhuman strength: he could lift a car over his heard. At twelve he was able to fly: one night he dreamt himself a bird and woke up when his erection bumped against the ceiling. A year later he discovered the power of his mind: he could affect things just by thinking them. But he never could understand, throughout his introspective adolescence, what these talents of his were for, or why he of all people should have been blessed with them. His intelligence told him not to share his uncanny capabilities: if others were to find out they would either adulate with an eye toward exploiting him, or fear and shun him altogether. He became accustomed to hiding his true nature, even from himself, and grew to be sullen and withdrawn. He had hardly any friends. He could not reciprocate the love of his adopted parents. On his fourteenth birthday he went for a fly around the world and wound up in the North Pole. From the sky he saw an ice cave that looked like a fairytale castle. The sun was shining pale midnight light as he landed. Inside the cave was dark, but darkness didn’t hinder his sight from penetrating the crystals that adorned the ceiling, floor and walls of the sloping tunnel; admiring the intricacies of their structures; and appreciating the millennia it had taken the stalagmites to form. He came eventually, having gone very deep, to a chamber with an altar upon which a rooted rod was glowing green and emitting a subdued hum. As he neared, the rod started whirring. He brought up his hand opened his fingers to surround it. The pulsations intensified frantically to the rate of a hundred gyrations per hundredth of a second, as he was able to calculate. He grasped the rod and stilled it. He had then his first taste ever of excruciating pain: the object was imbued with a temperature a mere fraction above absolute zero. He clenched his teeth and held on tight. Now, energy is indestructible, according to the laws of physics: the inherent force in the phallic outcrop of green crystal transmuted through his hand and flowed throughout his body, resonating with all the cosmos. His cells became blue. The lymph that held them together attenuated like gossamer. He had to concentrate his core strength to keep from being decimated. He centered himself in his pituitary gland, which like the rod was green, and from there sought through several forays the red that was his heart. He crossed the colorless gap between, and after such travail, rested in the warmth emanating from his system’s center. Out of the peace he attained, the right side of his father’s face appeared in profile and spoke: ‘Tiphareth, my son.’ ‘Father,’ Superman answered, ‘why have you forsaken me on this lonely planet, Earth? Why couldn’t I have stayed with you? Why couldn’t you come with me?’ ‘Because,’ the voice within him replied, ‘you were not meant to perish here in your place of birth with us, your primary family. Even as I record this message, which you are to receive on the first day of the twenty-first year of your stay on that planet, an event horizon looms. The black hole is momentarily imminent. But before the existence if every trace of me, but these words I speak to you now, is wiped away, I will inform you of your purpose. I have only just bid you farewell and cast your newborn body off into outer space in the cocoon of an intergalactic pod. Your journey to Earth will take two thousand years. Once you arrive your body will begin to mature at the rate of a human being. Today you are two thousand and fourteen years of age. You are what they call there an angel. As are all cognizant spirits who incarnate on the material plain. Our race is of the seventh order. You see, every micro and macrocosm has its place within a nine-fold hierarchy, under God, the ineffable One (zero). I am sorry you have had to suffer the implacable angst of being sundered by vast chasms in time and space from your race and kindred. I did not want to part with you. I had thought it fit that you should be annihilated along with the rest of us. But in the mansion of my most recent dream, where I wandered watching the walls fall down, an archangel of the ninth and highest rank came and unfolded to me your divine destiny. The black hole has spread its reach widely. It already has consumed most of the entire universe. While it once in time was rich spheres hospitable to life, and civilizations at various stages in the course of evolution, after I and the rest are gone, Earth, situated at the outermost frontier of all of infinite space, and its inhabitants, human beings, will be God’s last hope of redeeming his great creation. Our race has ascended to the seventh angelical rank, where as purified as we have become, we still are restricted to bodies and their functions. It took us, incidentally, millions of years to do so. Humanity, however, exhibits astonishing potential. Within the span of sixteen thousand years, they have evolved to the eminent fourth angelical rank, which for us took over eight hundred thousand years to achieve. Ultimately we have failed to ascend high enough. God needs armies of archangels; those of the eighth and ninth ranks, to help him fight back the doom bearing black hole. Earth will now be the proving ground. Humanity must accomplish the hyper-evolutionary feat of leaping from rank four to eight or nine in two years or less. It seems to me impossible. Throughout the course of eternity, of the billions, trillions of species of life forces that have navigated the path of evolution, not one has risen so fast as it is now incumbent for the children of Earth to. The archangel allayed my doubts. He reminded me that the messengers of God do not counter futility. The future remains unwritten. As long as there is hope, there still is light, however formidably darkness may threaten. You are to be that light, my son, so that the human beings, the last hope of the great creator might rise to a position of potency in the battle over all of tomorrow’s perpetuity. Evolve them, Tiphareth to your natural born state, the seventh rank. Teach them to fly and move mountains, to alter multifarious courses of reaction through no vulgar physical touch, but only their purified minds. Lastly do not begrudge them from advancing even beyond your semi-perfect example. From where you are able to lead them, let them go on by themselves, if they have not by then already discovered that true transcendence is the individual’s responsibility. And, my final word to you is hurry. If only that planet had not been so distant, you could have arrived there sooner and had more time to fulfill your mission. You could have taught the humans to evolve each other, and passed away, long ago, from your body to the eighth rank of the angels. You are so young now, only fourteen. I fear you may not be mature enough to comprehend what is at stake. But event horizon looms over Earth. There was no more time to wait. Time… I will miss it when it is gone. Listen to me, the black hole is cold and perilous. I feel now the pull of its twisted gravity. It is here now. Good’ Kaaabloooeeeee!!! The black hole struck. The transmission in Superman’s heart trembled and went dead. He let go of the rod with his hand. It no longer whirred or glowed green. Inanimate, it was flaccid and gray. The cold had drained out of it. The rod began to melt. The liquid it turned into was hotter than boiling water. The melt spread like wildfire from the altar to the chamber and all throughout the cavernous ice castle. Superman left, walking in a dejected posture as the edifice came down in drops, then in streams through deepening rivulets. Though he could have flown from the North Pole back to the American continent, he walked the entire way, as an ascetic man of God would; slowly, step by step. The thirty head like a cool swimming hole to a sweaty boy who has exerted himself playing games on a hot summer day. O the exhilaration of zooming in a beeline up to the outer limits of the atmosphere, and plunge down in a nosedive, faster than freefall, into a glacial ocean! I would touch the bottom, take a handful of alluvium then like a flicker be off again to the Atacama desert, where I would watch the mud dry out in a matter of several seconds and scatter the dust to the wind as I laughed. It was not long ago that I would amuse myself with rearranging things in forests. I would roll boulders to stop streams and create waterfalls. I would uproot the dead, the wild fire charred trees, and out of the plain where they had stood, dig expansive holes in which to lay and cover their trunks over as graves. As for epitaphs, I would plant seeds in the open sun at the surface layer of my cemetery, having imparted to them through touch the secret of my super powers. Elementally, they understood and germinated without delay. Their roots budded and reached downward to embrace the rotting bodies of their progenitors. The lot of them wove subterranean webs to catch the precipitation that slipped through the porous soil. I would then sit, a golden flower in bloom, in the center, my seminal work for the day complete, and summon rainstorms to my arborous circle of regeneration. Through my tantric inhalations I would circulate winds that caused the clouds in the sky to come and aggregate above my head. Then I would facilitate the ice-crystal and coalescence processes: once there were enough to elicit condensation I raised my body heat to boiling and spread the heat out around, agitating the discrepancy over the freezing point, which is resolved producing rainfall. Trees sprang and grew to towering heights all around where I sat, wet, in contemplative delight, listening to the burgeoning patter of thick drops smacking on fleshy leaves. And where has my hunger gone? Why aren’t I tempted to make alimentation of the stones? They once had been like bread to me when my body craved earthly minerals, my intestines needed fiber, and my steely teeth wanted to chomp on something crunchy. That biting vacuity that once would spread no farther than from my stomach to where I would go to take food has swallowed and holds in undigested abeyance my whole conception of the universe, now that I have glimpsed the dawning on earth’s warm sun of the event horizon. Emptiness abides forever and everywhere. Once I was so quick to fill it, and so eager for more after I was through. Now I recognize it as being contiguous as the total ocean and penetrating as space. I see what comes ahead in what has always followed behind. The black hole has vanished the illusion of the end that I have incessantly chased from the moment I was pushed forth through birth, even before my father cast me into outer space, destined toward earth, ahead of a pending cataclysm, the last remaining hope of a god on the brink of the destruction of his tragic, pathetic eon-long dream. How can I ever go on? Superman stopped. Having crossed the continent, he collapsed and lay on the ground. His respiration diminished to one shallow breath per day that rose from dawn to noon and sank unto the crepuscule. During night it did not stir. His heartbeat synced with the phases of the moon: dithered as it waxed, ovoid and round, and calcified like a seashell in the dregs of the tide as it waned and renewed. He did not die. Though his life functions had all but ceased, his soul, like his body, had nowhere to go. The purgatories radiated the same negative force that he and every place else in the world had been inculcated with. He was fit for neither heaven nor hell. His soul, while it atrophied, could not cease to perform its function of animating his spirit. He fled, not for fear of, the black hole, but because he could not abide where it did. It pursued him as he ventured deeper within himself than any man has ever gone; prodded him onward without any effort on his part. Semi-consciously he was seeking something of substance to be his respite from flight. He came to trudging through swamp; bushwhacking his way through jungle growth; swimming across the surface of an expansive ocean to another shore; picking up his feet, over and over again, from the sand rifts they’d sunk into, as he passed through desert. Finally he arrived at the base of a mountain. He climbed, negotiating cliffs and crags, until he reached the top. His spirit sighed as it looked out over the form the illusion had taken: kingdoms multiplied throughout the earth; their fixed buildings scraping the circulating sky. Here the voice that before had asked why he had no appetite for stones returned, no longer in first person guise, and posed to him a more insidious question: ‘If you are Superman, why not fly away? Why do you waste your time here on earth in commerce with these unscrupulous slave dealers in economies? You are an angel, remember? You are free, yet you could be freer. Go from here, fly! Ascend to the heavens. Explore the moons, the planets, the galaxy. You know you do not need the bread, the air, nor the climate of earth to survive; that you are immortal. You could adapt to and live on Mars, or Saturn, for example. Or find some other sun in whose night, this one you have grown up under, will be but a shimmering star. True, you would be lonely. But at least you would not be bored. Have you ever not been lonely here, where you have spent all of your memorial life? Despite that you were surrounded by your simulacra, was there ever a single time you communed with one of them and did not reflect later on that your connection had been ephemeral and elusive? Why still hold on to the hope of emotional fulfillment after you have proven a thousand times over already that it is impossible? Fly away, Superman. The universe is yours and yours alone.’ ‘My name is Tiphareth,’ Superman responded calmly. ‘I hereby abdicate my super powers of flight and strength, etc. What good are they in the service of humanity, to whom my mission is dedicated?’ he concluded, rhetorically, and set out to descend from the mountain to the kingdom. The voice followed him, close behind, like a sulking companion, who remains silent only to give greater impact to his next word. Superman arrived at the city and walked through the crowded streets to the temple in its heart, which was then under construction. Scaffolding surrounded it like an exoskeleton. He climbed the ladders and steep flights of steps to the uppermost parapet. He stood beside a stone statue of an angel with wings. He held one wing and leaned out over the edge to look down vertically at the neat pavement below, where no one was today, while all throughout the periphery was populous. ‘Let go then and fall,’ the voice resumed, fanatical now, as it was clear that they had come to the final battle ground. ‘Kill yourself and die if you shun your immortality. You could have escaped this solar system; flown out of the reach of and saved yourself from the dawning event horizon. You chose to remain on earth, an insignificant one of billions of human beings, who can’t fly, but wish they could; who all are doomed to die – no, worse, be eradicated by the now inevitable black hole. You are stupid, they would say, if they only could see you and know what you are doing. But they can’t because they don’t care about you or anyone but themselves, who they don’t even really know through their layers of false identities. What did you expect when you in infantile naivete entered this city to save it? That the people would be gathered in and around the temple, which is nothing but a decaying relic that soon will be torn down so that the land can be sold to a real estate developer, solemnly praying as they waited for you to come and teach them? They could never learn your secrets, Superman, even if they wanted to; and as is apparent, they don’t. Humans will never fly, much less attain to the orders of angels to be of any good to God.’ ‘Out, bearer of light,’ Superman, having lost his patience with the voice’s plaintive rant commanded. ‘You’ve shown me enough of my mission’s purpose through the constant error that ran through your words. I have listened to you without losing sight that this temple, this kingdom, that mountain, those swamps, deserts and oceans, your voice and the sense are features of the deepest dream that I have ever experienced. Now I am about to wake to the real world, which I share with my fellow human beings, where I will bring the resolutions I have made here, thanks to your help, like a promethean flame. I am man, unqualified and without expletive. And you have only been the baser part of me, concerned exclusively with and trying to tempt me to selfish preservation.’ He swung from the angel statue’s wing like a child from the monkey bars. The stone snapped. The piece he had gripped broke off and he fell laughing onto the temple’s courtyard. His landing shook the city. His continued laughter followed in tremors. The populace was curious. They gave up what they’d been doing and proceeded en masse to the center, around the fallen angel, lying prostrate, laughing and laughing.

The Rape of Ariadne

Leo Cole — Fri, 13 May 2011 11:26:18 +0000

As a girl I was interested in butterflies and spiders. I read picture books on caterpillars, cocoons, chrysalises, etcetera. I could spend hours examining the patterns in the final butterfly’s wings. The process intrigued me most, however: the metamorphosis. I studied the way the worm wove with silk the casing in which it would die and undergo transition. My research led me to the spider and its wonderful work of art, that intricate trap, the web. It was more beautiful than the butterfly wing; its design was purposeful, rather than simply an end in itself. I resolved to weave one. I set out for the woods with paper and a pencil to sketch exemplary specimens. At home, later on, I tacked my drawings to the walls in my room, then sat in the center with raw silk and set myself to work. Boldly, I wove and wove late into the night. Finally finished, I hung my web up in my room, from one corner to the other, crossing through the center. I went to the woods again, armed with a jar made of glass, and upturned leaves in search of a caterpillar. When I found one, I jarred it and took it back to my room. I stuck the creature in the vertical web. I blew on it with every exhalation. It shivered and wheezed. My warm breath must have tickled its cold, wormy epidermis. It grew in length and girth until it was as large as me. I took a knife from my mother’s kitchen and sliced the giant caterpillar open. I extracted its organs and viscera and placed them into glass jars, which I lined up along the windowsill to catch the sunlight and heat. Shadows of liquid bobbed on the floor. I stripped and squeezed my body into the cavity. I sewed myself up in the skin. Now there is no way out, I thought, except to become a butterfly. I waited. Nothing happened. Horror seized me. Will I suffocate? I wondered. Patience, I told myself. Emulate the spider in its imperturbable tranquility. My mind, however, fixed upon the image of the eight-legged creature crawling, from strand to thinnest strand toward its dying captive: the butterfly. Brilliant! I cast away the context and focused on the kaleidoscopic transitions of purple to blue within one wing. Red, lined by yellow, gleamed. In flight it revealed alternately the dazzling sun and the umbrage to support the cerulean sky at the fluttering rate of a movie reel. The design multiplied twice, a thousand, times over. The manifold view was from the spider’s eyes, keen enough to see through darkness and honed in on a kill; from a multi-faceted temporal dimension. No! I reacted initially. An instant later I calmed. I was (was not in) the center of the web: an inert void being filled by a man. Theseus, the hero of this story, is lost inside the labyrinth. He is now in the center, the farthest point from the hope of any egress. Minotaur, a spider the size of a dragon, stalks him, salivating venom, so intent on his human blood she can taste the salt. Help! he implored. My death, I’m afraid, is imminent! The passages open are infinite. The one, the zero, that will lead to safety and success is indistinguishable from the rest; despair flashed in his mind as he passed, by feel, through me. Next came Minotaur on Theseus’s heels. I was filled with her distended belly, which comprised her entire body apart from her head and stalk-like legs. It was so vacuously empty that I, denser space, was absorbed by means of osmosis. From within Minotaur I watched it sight the hero darting about arbitrarily in a pale, blind panic. I was revolted but could not turn away. Even if I could control my vehicle, spider’s do not have eyelids. They, in fact, have hundreds of eyes, through each of which I saw Theseus fall under the fang that sinks into his shoulder. In Minotaur’s mouth I could taste the adrenaline that had been coursing through his bloodstream. It tasted rather good. I acquiesced at that point, no longer protested vainly, as it bit off morsels from his body and without chewing or spitting the bones out swallowed them into me. I was filled inside its belly. I felt sick in being satiated. I became empty again; too light to hold to form. I was taken up and thrashed about, up and down the windy conduits of the labyrinth. I was too insubstantial even for chronological time. I drifted back to the center, the navel of convergence, at the previous moment when Theseus was coming through. Help! he begged again. Now I knew what to do. I entered him and seated myself inside his bright, flashing brain, while at the same time maintaining a link to the space outside, particularly that which hung around his shoulders. I used his memory to envision the butterfly mosaic. I borrowed light from his core flame and cast it out to my space, with which I then molded a majestic pair of monarch’s wings. Fly! I commanded. Minotaur caught up to him (in the center this time, not on the outskirts as before), but despite her hunger she was mesmerized by the fluourescence of Theseus’s wings as he opened and closed them to test how they would work, and only stood there drooling. The light his appendages gave off showed him the spider’s face. He wasn’t afraid. He pitied it its ugliness. He lifted himself up. I went with him, dancing through the air as he shined on it with his flying wings. We left the labyrinth below and behind. We made for mount Olympus. A fire was burning on top. Smoke rose grey in the light of a giant moon, which must have been as large as earth, and just as close to it as our diminutive one is today. We hovered in the upward tending stream. I materialized into woman in the strong arms of my beloved Theseus. My eyes must have gleamed as he bore his white teeth smiling before putting his lips forth to kiss me. “Thank you Ariadne,” he whispered. I swooned; was speechless. We descended to the ground. The extraterrestrial observers of the vigil taking place were cloaked entirely. They might have been anything from skeletons to glorious youths, to empty space as I had been only recently before my hero rescued me. The only characteristic they had, apart from their height, which was tall for a man, was voice: “At last you have arrived, Great Savior, welcome. Who is this you have brought with you.” “This is my woman Ariadne.” ‘Theseus, you know these beings?’ I wanted to ask but was mute. I had no tongue, it seemed. “Who is god here? Poseidon? Jehovah?” he asked them without any further explanation about me. “None of the above,” the extraterrestrials replied. “Our god defies description and vulgar nomenclature.” “I seek to know him,” Theseus said. ‘But Theseus what about me?’ I attempted to implore. He ignored me. “Normally your kind is too dense, but now that you have the monarch’s wings, you might stand a chance. We can help you but quid pro quo. You’ve been summoned here for a reason. We have a message we need you to deliver to our god.” “What?” “It is somewhat ineffable. But let that be of no concern. If you succeed in meeting god, the message will be made manifest. All that remains to be done, is to get you on your way.” “What does the preparation entail?” “Sacrifice. First listen, proceed toward the sun, which as you can see to the east is now about to dawn, but take caution as you ascend. Your appointment with god is in twelve hours exactly. You must show up as the sun is setting from this vantage point here on Olympus. Set the correct pace the moment you set off. Later on you will not have the opportunity to alternate it.” “And if I fail?” “No time is left for superfluities. Look, the sun is rising. Go to it. God awaits!” “But you said there would be a sacrifice.” “Leave that to us. Just go!” Theseus, forgetting to say goodbye, lifted himself on the wings that I bestowed on him, and flew off to chase the sun. The extraterrestrials took off their hoods. Their heads turned out to be busts. The hackneyed visages of Poseidon, Zeus, Apollo, and assorted other gods of the western pantheon were revealed, stony-eyed and expressionless. They opened up their cloaks around their waists. Their phalluses jutted out. Non-physically, they subdued me, forced me to the ground, spread my legs and gang-raped me. The stone felt cold in my vagina. Their ejaculate, however, burned hot inside my womb. (You are the product of that unholy union). Once the male gods had all had their way, the female ones, led by Hera, slaughtered me with several knives, flayed me and spitted my meat. They roasted me on the fire. They consumed me with copious cups of blood-red wine in a decadent feast that went well until noon, at which point they rested from their revelry. “I wonder how Theseus is doing,” Zeus, the fattest and most otiose among all of them, posed idly. “He failed already, hours ago,” Hermes, who knows all, answered. “He is now wallowing in an abyss, where he will be for an eternity.” “So much for our message to God,” Apollo sarcastically chuckled. I stunk on all their drunken breaths as they mentioned casually the demise and perdition of my former beloved. As the sun reached its pinnacle and proceeded to descend west, the pantheon of statues ceased to be able to speak or move.

The Effects of the Mystical Flute

Leo Cole — Fri, 13 May 2011 11:19:38 +0000

The tootles of the flute unsteady him. He senses vibrational currents as levels of bodies of water. First, the one surrounding his head, starting at his neck and comprising the entire sky, gently urges his mind and causes him to think cardinal things that an instant later he cannot recollect. The ocean he perceives sinks next to his body, which feels as if it is proceeding through a gelid substance opens up around him in response to his heat, then reseals once he departs. He is swayed by it so that he constantly must check slightly his next step in order to keep it in line. Last and most abidingly, he has the sensation of walking on water in a chaotically shifting sea. He can control his own core but not the places he steps or stands. The profundity of this idea forces him to stop. He looks to the hill, not to orient himself to its peak, but simply to examine its contours. All at once it appears a small mound that is not very far away; a sheer mountain, the base of which it will take over two days to reach; and neither large nor small, but definitely close, a mere several steps away. He turns to either side. The landscape is flat and featureless. It might be a facade, it occurs to him, covering myriads of details. Possibilities begin to come forth, but the image of the straight finger blocks them from his mind. Remember to walk straight, he said. Perhaps he meant not only spatially, but temporally as well. Shadow looks ahead and steps forward. He is already almost at the top of the hill; only a few more paces to go. He scales the peak. A grave gapes open at his feet. He almost fell in. Inside lies the body of a boy. Shadow, who has never seen a reflection, identifies vaguely with the face. He touches his own, but cannot feel any details through the mitts that cover his fingertips. He would like to ask who he is. He turns around, but no one is there. The flute music, he realizes, has long since gone quiet. Still, he thinks, I can clearly recall every note of how it sounded.