The time was mysterious and incandescent. Everyone was walking
suspended as if by strings of liquid gold from an overarching
sky-dome, speaking to voices arousing and refreshing, each breath
partaking of immortality. "You are a beautiful soul" was often heard
in day to day conversation. The trees in the central park radiated
thin filaments into the eyes and the hearts of runners below, and
light wove a tapestry from the golden skyscrapers that enraptured the
hearts of the cognoscenti in thin and translucent nets.
People came up to him often and asked him if he was OK. "Oh," he said
matter-of-factly, "I'm in Woodstock." Punks hassled him but could not
touch him. He often stared into the eyes of passerby. Their worlds
flashed before him and became part of the entelechy. From which he
drew and on which he sculpted the work.
A friend showed up in Manhattan. He was away in Woodstock however, and
her elegant style and finely attained intellect went unappreciated
over a sumptuous lunch in Hard Rock cafe. It was given perhaps greater
stimulus at the New York Museum of art when he stood her up in front
of a carved stone idol of Mayan warrior and asked her to meld
consciousnes with it. Asked her what it made her feel. When she
responded in broad evasions and sociological language, told her,
"Don't you feel like shooting some aliens?"
Realizations dawned on him as he passed the daimonic art of the Mayan
civilization.. the art that is sheer emotional forces leaping out from
cups and idols; forces like blue Amazonian toads splattering at him,
shooting their spitballs inside him, gaping at him with their mouths
half-open, eyes like saucers, bodies like stars. His friend told him
that European art was sterile. He thought that this was the obvious
fact of presenting the psychic reality in terms of rationalistic
symbolism.. crafting, weaving, misrepresenting, misallocating,
taming.. imposing an avalanche cask over something volcanic.. arriving
at a dual society of Parthenon and land of the Minotaur; a society
that could only exist through traumatization of psyche until nobody
could be clear; a world of internal slavery in which an expression of
inner truth was necessarily met with tragedy that manifested in
outside world a copy of the man's inner condition, demonstrating
clearly in lifecourse the horror that lived in the mind.. He thought
that the Mayan context of emotional forces must have been just as
complex and intricate as the European one of rationalizations and
structural impositions, presenting a model of human mind just as
extensive and perhaps more honest. He did not wish aletheia to be
either tragic or toadlike. He wished it to be beautiful, consummate,
triumphant, attaining through arduous craftsmanship a culmination of
matter and making the world a multifaceted diamond, a translucent
nectar, a weaving of refined matter and refined energy into shooting
white light. So he built a temple of Kether, with Paris and Helen
standing triumphantly at the top of a Troy beautiful, spirited, nobly
woven - with Cassandra his interim partner having split off on a
treasure isle - with Agamemnon vanquished in all his false glory into
the speck of fear that was his original motive - Odysseus returned to
the land that he never had wanted to leave - and the brown screeching
landfill monster, a thing unreal and existing only through induction
of error and fear into the minds of people, that had animated this
Greek misadventure outmoded and extinguished through a happy peace
treaty between Ceres and Pluto, his understanding of her role as the
Nurturer and her acceptance of his role as provider of human
fulfilment that only blind ignorance and stupidity had the arrogance
to deny and to fear. He talked with Lucifer and freed him. He was
mistrustful, angry, resentful, twitchy at anything that might seem
like a slight or a violation. He lifted Hypateia from the arms of the
murderers and introduced her to Jesus. They instantly fell in love.
His heart was always breaking. It was full - bleeding - shattering
under axe and evolving toward diamondlike multiplicity. There was
always menace and always beauty. Contexts imposed and were thrust
apart. He was a fine string spanning the depths and the heights.
Things came along to assail him. He kept talking to Cassandra at all
times. Any irrational exuberance or imposing vibration typically
spelled Greeks bearing gifts.
Somewhere out in the distance parts of her called all the time. At
other times they were closer. They made love across the distance. They
merged into a golden egg and ascended the stars. They were bestriding
a raft of stars, their bodies constellations, composing and reciting
poetry. The viruses of the mind screeched and frowned. He reached out
into the sky and plucked stars from the sky to place in her chest. She
breathed cold star-spangled galaxies into his heartzone. There were
new temples on the horizon, new machines designed to shoot them, new
art and new forms of censorship, new radio stations and new jammers.
Everything always begat its polar opposite, which rose to complete and
invert it - and was itself inverted and consummated when eros rose out
of its slumber and burst to life.
Women were contacting him to help deal with residue of the previous
generation, the context bears, the obstructionist. He did the task
obligingly, diligently, purposefully, leaving nothing but clear
gushing streams in his wake. He liked clear gushing streams. he liked
clarity. He wanted life to be like a gushing stream, delicate, pure,
refining past rocks and trees, giving birth to new lifeform. Mobile.
Unpatterned. Once subdued and polluted by man acting from fear, again
freed to run in ever more beautiful patterns by man acting from love.
His mind wandered and stumbled into traps, many traps. They had
learned to mimic the Tree of life and create imitation copies that
dealt with the same faculties but lead to a low limiting and
obstructing place. He did not begrudge them their Star trek imitation,
but he liked the real thing. There were souls always crying out, seeds
struggling into manifestation. He watered them like a thousand flowers
on a meadow that had once begun to bloom - flowers that he tended with
laughter of someone who knows Ceres and Pluto; flowers that he loved
to kiss. For the only thing he wanted in life - his highest value -
was this: a world rich with soul, informed by the soul, and informing
the entirety of matter and structure by the passionate, laughing, and
radiant genius of the divine manifest through human and with human
craftsmanship given form.
Fireflies were weaving sweet and delightful trajectories. A scent of
bittersweet weed was in the air. There were many enlightened
solutions. Some people stopped and stared. Others splattered
invasively into existence and were returned to the source to learn to
be beautiful before they became part of the great work. There was
always some kind of screeching and some kind of contextual conmanship
of machine- mind. These he took as axiomatic and resolved in their due
course. The context had been inverted upon its head. And life
continued to blossom.
It was midnight, midnight at noon
Everyone talked in rhyme
Everyone saw the big clock ticking
Nobody knew the time
Elegant debutantes smiled
Everyone fought for dimes
Newspapers screamed for blood
It was the best of times
Every place around the world it seemed the same
Can't hear the rhythm for the drums
Everybody wants to look the other way
When something wicked this way comes
Sometimes they tie a thief to the tree
Sometimes I stare
Sometimes it's me
Everyone told the truth
All that we heard were lies
A pope claimed that he'd been wrong in the past
This was a big surprise
Everyone fell in love
A cardinal's wife was jailed
The government saved a dying planet
When popular icons failed
Every place around the world it seemed the same
Can't hear the rhythm for the drums
Everybody wants to look the other way
When something wicked this way comes
- Sting
Originally posted 2000
http://ibshambat.blogspot.com
Ilya Shambat
