The Opening of the Records
A virgin will rebuild from ash the burning library at Alexandria. She will not take any prisoners. Her large eyes will be tests that you must pass. For a third time will the Argo sail, outperforming Voyager One. You will learn of how this ship is not different from your body. It will move beyond the speed of light. Records opening onto records will be present to your touch. You will live them, even as you simultaneously observe them from above. You will speak the words you find there, those words describing events that have long since taken place, that have not yet occurred, those words that make no sense to you, no more than to some stranger passing on the street. And yet these records are real, and speak their words you must.
The zodiac will swing, back and forth, forth and back, as will your memory of it, until you have consumed the subtle logic of each sign. All but the dumbest stones will be scholars, however much they keep their studies to themselves. Ants will recite the Koran, and bees will discourse on Kabbalah. Space will be curved by a bell. The four worlds as at once will interpenetrate. The orange orbs of Ra will spin above Eastern Europe. Knowledge will explode. Hieroglyphs will appear to thousands over Prague. Long dead, you the traveler, will sound, like a gong that is struck, like a flute that is blown. You will call the Tablets of Destiny from the cold depths of the Apzu. You will not hesitate, you will call them, in spite of your having no idea of what they are. You will not know what you know, what you do not dare to know, and yet, for all its weaknesses, your body will respond.
Memories aimed at the Muse will evacuate the stars, for the sky is far too noisy. A space will open just beyond them, a space of bottomless nostalgia, and this space will be far closer to you than your breath. From there, the Muse will issue her suggestions, which you will not have the option to pretend you didn’t hear. Shadows thrown by geometry will lash the oceanic fort. With all hope gone, with all their towers shattered, the Cathars will return to the arms of their Beloved, to she whose love can be harsh, to she whose calm eyes can still terrify the ocean. At Montsegur, at dawn, to the tolling of a bell, scorched Perfecti will sing when they see their poems burnt. You will sing when the flames consume you, for what else can you do? A trickster will crow. Ahriman will hang his body sky high on a hook.
Twelve concentric tribes above your century will fly. They will involute the earth. They will triumph over their shadows by turning them inside out. Each seer will be right, yet no two will agree. Fish-suits from Sirius will attach themselves to diplomats. No culture will be trusted that does not veer far from its orbit. You, the young sun, will flex at full strength out of Vala. Your gnomic sayings will be heard by those with ears. You will not weep at the inevitable wave of mistranslations, no, for some degree of confusion is inherent in their meaning. You will decimate all those who disrespect the glyphs, then back you will fly to the gnarled roots of the circle, to the sound of the first bell. A rising tide will free the dead gods from their glacier. Arks will party. The Reichstag will again burn bright with dancing human UFOs.
From the inside out, from the outside in, you will deconstruct the living catalogue of your crimes, the DNA of a sphere. The height of the primal teacher will be no more than an inch. A ziggurat in Babylon will sing out in ten thousand tongues. You will wonder how a tower can have a bottom with no top, but you will nonetheless make plans to renovate its grammar. Shards will wheel clay citizens. A blackened branch will light a leaf. A race will run with the remnant of Methuselah, those who will, as a bell transforms them, grow younger with each year. Rabbi Akiva will teach doctors how to heal with Strontium-90. There will be no nuclear waste, for each ounce will be put to use. The Desert Mothers will return with urns to the Euphrates. They will laugh at Krystalnacht. They will outlast their destroyers. At the end of a long trip, they will unlatch the doors to their houses. Their floors will be as spotless as they were the day they left.
Zion will again put on the laundered robe of Io. War will be declared on the improper use of trees. Books will have no pages. Telepaths will judge the haunted farms. Few of the many will not at first go mad. Joy will punish death. No year will be required to follow the one before it. The bell tone of the spheres will no longer shatter cities, not regularly at least, no more than the Keepers of the Records might demand. It will be a drone in the background, a weapon held in reserve. As it was before the Deluge, you will not need eyes to see. Your nostalgia will deepen and then continue to deepen, until the pain in your heart becomes a rhythmic pleasure. Alpine horns will ram through the wreckage of the internet. At midnight, they will make a little zone of music. All secrets will be open if well-guarded.
The One will fix itself.
What an extraordinary mind that can produce such a text as this. Every sentence is loaded with mystery and symbolism and challenge. A profound pleasure to resonate with and sink into. Thank you, Brian.
Hi Andrea,
Many thanks! This is one of the prose-poems from The Preexistent Race Descends—hope this title won’t get me into trouble—a book I just finished revising a few months ago. The earliest versions of many of the pieces, however, go back quite a ways. There is line in one of my essays that reads, “The shortest distance between two points may turn out to be a labyrinth.” I only wish this were not so true. While I can write pretty quickly when I want, it can sometimes take three or four decades for a work to go from inception to completion, even a piece as short as this.
In 1984, I published—for friends—a book called X: Revenge of the Autogenes. I was happy with it, and it got an enthusiastic response. The book was the culmination of six years of creative experiments and flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants spiritual explorations. Spiritually, though, I had gone as far as I could go on my own. For the next six years, I studies yoga and meditation with a variety of teachers. Sadly, nothing I wrote during this period really came together. My attempts to create a literary/visionary synthesis, to use my writing as a kind of yoga, came off as laborious. Then, in August, 1990, I received an initiation in Kundalini Yoga from Anandi Ma, and things began to flow.
The problem was, this flow had no fixed boundaries, no beginning or end, and my explorations sprawled in all directions. One poem, To Akasha: An Incantation for the Crossing of an Ocean, which is now 38 pages, had to be cut down from several hundred. Dozens of pieces were started; not even one was finished. On a visionary level, the poems worked, and I was enormously grateful to Anandi Ma for prying my energy open. On a literary level, the poems were more like creative ultimatums, or seeds. It was only after I started to write prose, after my father’s death in 1998, that I could begin to see them more clearly, not that this did much immediate good.
The updated problem was that I couldn’t find a way to bring my editorial and visionary selves together. My attempts at surgery did produce many new variations, some of which sort of worked. And then, over the past three years or so, the boundaries between the different aspects of my consciousness came down, and I was finally able to “walk and chew gum at the same time.” So far as I can tell, all of the pieces started in this period have now reached their final form. I hope to publish a book or so per year. If you are interested, the foreword to The Preexistent Race Descends was published in Dark Mountain last December under the title “Entering the Tunnel of Time in Cappadocia.” (Somewhat amusingly, the blog editor, Charlotte DuCann, asked that I come up with a half-dozen possible titles, all of which she ignored. I found out what the essay was called the day that it went up.)
Image: “Homage to Dhyanyogi, number 10”–from a new series of oil pastels