“Star differs from star in glory.”
-The Bible
“When all the evil things of this world are whispering your name, remember, I am screaming yours at the top of my lungs.”
-Rileyreede
Oak and Ziggurat
“The oak tree under westering clouds at the fork in the road has lived a century longer than anything else alive in sight. From the ziggurat nearby, higher, formed by man, smoke trails floated before the moon, an affront to that luminary, making new the spikes of the stars and shining memorials about the grains of sand by the sea. There were thoughts of constellations in the yearning, reaching tips of grass at the oak’s feet, their king, who thought not to yearn for celestial knowing nor divine blessing found nowhere on earth. He knew only the sun.
And the incense fires of the great city offered up man’s similitudiness entreaties. Proud oak, tall king, subtle grass, able subjects, bitter slaves, and final offerings: one collusion, ceased.
Armies of stars and sand conspired together to make all these things we see whole and unified. One unseen unity in all of it, perhaps that leaf or this glimmer or that blade.
In the temple, a broken clay cup is swept up by an attendant and cast into the trashpits over the southern wall. One day complete. One day. One day, this city will suffer the same shattering amidst all this indifferent, calamitous yearning. Hope, despair, why such clear diction? Speak in garbled tongues of uncertainty instead. That kind of causality leads to knowledge from endless natural cycles of aphorisms.
Drugs will harm this vision, not aid, no matter what the world says. Two eyes, one heart, an attentive ear. Just rely on something overhead for now, higher. Your own place is in the grave. Not the stars.”
Couriant and the Waking
-King Rylian
…and Hospitals
…They had run for only several minutes but the sweat was stinging like the flush from taking niacin, and his legs felt uncommonly weak.
“I need to stop, dammit, I need to stop,” he was now pleading, with a strangling in my voice, and then at reaching the small park he cast myself down onto the ground without waiting for any permission. “That heat…how do you stand it.”
The building in the distance loomed like a magnet in his mind, as if a black presence, yes, that demented place, as or like a monument of solitary evil in a world of mad chance and illusion and lost principles of reason. It felt like a furnace at his heels. Yet his friend who had delivered him, as he thought, like Paul from prison, like some kind of valiant angel from a star, had stopped silently and imperceptibly at the edge of a park bench. The light from the street lamps across the way felt cold and harsh in his eyes. So he reclined, shuddering with little gasps, and looked up at the full moon. He thought of werewolves, and the Passover. It was probably just past midnight.
Full moons, the “faithful witness:” Two in a man and the sky…
He lay back on the prickly, cool grass, closing his eyes to the moonlight. When the exertion had somewhat left him, he rose, unsteadily, and as if waiting for his gaze his companion was there, looking him steadily in the eyes, and at this he felt his brain jump. Silence crystallized in his ears; and he heard, not quite aural but a mind sensation, something like the promising ring of steel, or the plaintive death of a gnat, perhaps the dullness of a winter wind, the ascent of a jetplane, maybe a fowl’s shriek, all fading rapidly. There was some kind of epiphanous shift to how he stood now, much like a carven statue without a name. The moment passed like cotton in his head, and he heard his teacher as if from a drum-deep distance, looking away into the stars.
Teachers…false, veritas, shining suns.
“You know, I’m sure a thousand poets have penned about the freedom in the stars, have dreamed of the industry of ants, or tasted the honey hum of bees or believed in the love disposed in flowers.”
Although it was the deep of a city night, at those opening words, being austere, uncommon; laughably romantic, but for some absurd reason undeservedly commanding, he felt momentarily like a bright sunny day had dawned in an urban garden. Then there was a gentle breeze, and in a crazed instant his rescuer’s face looked black and pallid in the watery streetlight, a tone of dark condemnation in the way his eyes seemed to gaze, ungleaming, unforgiving, and boring at him like wild beetles through a nest.
He stooped and picked up a stone from the side of the road, selected like young David picking pebbles for his sling, so that his observer thought quietly to himself. What will he do with this trinket of mundanity? The stars would know.
As if perceiving being observed in such a delirious manner he tossed it, catching with brevity, then he stepped, held it up in front of his standing comrade’s nose and smiled patiently. Now there seemed to be portents cast outward by a steely glimmer in his eyes.
a voice in a crowd of stars…
“I know it’s a tired notion of existence but a rock is not ever just what you see. There are hundreds of trillions of solar systems on a lesser scale composing this solid union. An infinity of light, endless energy, boundless frequencies of atoms, electrons, protons, bosons and the wasted efforts of a godly, unequaled wisdom. A careful symmetry, a pattern of design and mind, no parallel in a painter’s brush or any human machine. Yes, and there are weakening, insidious forces in this pebble that conspire to keep this, and everything else, to be together, contained, and also forever. There’s a fragment of your memory stored in this rock, the same atomic trust as in any particle, piece of iron or stardust. It bears a tiny tune of resemblance to that galaxy Andromeda, that one there,” he pointed with a strange, unearthly certainty at the sky, “or maybe that one over there, galactically disposed or not.” He pointed vaguely but surely at what now seemed a painted point of light, that could just happen to be a distant supernova whose light had not yet reached earth to announce it’s cataclysm, his listener thought wildly, but with a fearful doubt.
Agents of the underground, sidereally:
“It doesn’t really matter, after all. Sometimes, a rock is just a rock.” After this, they walked out of the park, and after a while he tossed the contained, miraculous universe of gleam flecked granite to the curb and shoved his hands into his pockets, leading a bit into the wavering, austere, and vividly haunting street. There was a sense of sullen defeat in the moment, the stars overhead unchanging, as if carried on his companion’s shoulders. Perhaps it was a lack of communicative force, or an uncertainty in the nature of reality, then perhaps shared, with a distinct sense that he was in the presence of a teacher. He didn’t know well enough to try at probing for a concerted continuance of conversation, so he simply tucked his hands into his hoodie and labored onward.
In the short span past the park and leading up the hill, he thought frantically as the silence rolled on, racing through reflections, began to have thought of telling him how dung beetles in Egypt navigate almost primarily on the light of the Milky Way, how Terence had spoken of this and extraterrestrial involvement with the pyramids; and then angels, with a mocking tone, “do they have wings?”, informing him how there were only good, and bad aliens, and the world was controlled entirely by computers.
Secret society, and cosmic radio…
He thought better of it, in a lack of courage, spiritual horror, or perhaps with the insight that this friend, with his mysterious cleverness at the hospital and the desperation of that escape, yet still fresh in the night, wouldn’t want to hear the thoughts of a Freemason, nor any other spiritually infantile mind. There was a common command to his words despite the vague weakness in them. Like his listener was lost, a cause of a foolish child who could not learn. Now the frost in the air began to grow palpably more uncomfortable.
Now the streetlamps seemed to bristle with a dull humming energy he had not noticed before. At the top of the hill a police car passed, it’s wailing sirens intermittently bursting along with colorful red shine, menacingly trailing off into the distance. He at once remembered the punk band Strung Out’s lyrics;
“Magnolia, don’t pray for me, all the warning signs, I did not care to see…”
-Strung Out, Jason Cruz
…and with very little alertness he dodged the urge to remember the song, pushing the dark thoughts of that music out of his mind. They passed like shadows through the street, he staggering and winded, his guide brooding and sure, past dark alleys, upwards towards the summit where an intersection crossed. To him it reminded him of the apostles following Jesus on his way up to Jerusalem to be impaled; a sense of oncoming fear and a deep wonder.
“Incidentally,” he finished, finally, as they reached the crosswalk, and with a hint of disdain, “that was the same rock King David used to kill Goliath.”
