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Mario Sironi, Composition, 1930
The extended form of growth is always that of a spiral, as they
have shown us in archaic urns. To cultivate the "fire in the belly"
you must depart from home, whether Ithaca, with its clockwork
owls, with its prows that are painted with wide-open eyes, or
South Worcester, with its mix-and-match neoclassical factories
that are manned by hungry ghosts, it is all the same.
Contemptuous of death and, at first, as light as a feather, you must
travel far across the many-colored ocean. You must experience
the changeable hearts of men, the weird will of the gods, the
wonders of phenomena, great and small, bright and dark, only to
return at last to the place that you had started, with a gift to give.
There, you will rediscover the beauty of those objects close at
hand.
I had traveled far, had gained a facility in moving between
dimensions, and had grown, as if from scratch, a capacity to
decode and translate for use the most arcane of traditions. I had
not only explored the depths of the unconscious, I had developed
a certain skill in demanding answers from it. The world was a
kind of living book, which worked like a non-linear storage
system. Space itself was both the hardware and the software of an
ancient but still functional computer. If you could figure out what
word root gave you access to a program, and could determine,
moment by moment, what questions you should ask, then it might
be possible to reformat your whole concept of an answer.
I had thrown my invocations out, not knowing who or what might
answer. I suspected that something would. At the same time, I
could feel a tug from the far side of the ocean, as though I
watched instead of acted, as though even my most absurd
mistakes had long ago been planned. What a relief it was to not
have to navigate among an infinite number of choices. Instead, I
had only to figure out who and where I had been.
My life belonged to some potentially quite undependable
presence. It did not care how I felt. If it bothered to read my
thoughts, this was only to redirect them towards an utterly
obscure agenda. I had once made certain promises, it seems, that
took precedence over my wishes. I had scars that ached to be
probed. I had wounds meant to serve as doorways, which no test
could diagnose. To have asked for happiness would have been to
put my health in danger. There was a certain formality to how a
question should be posed. As my vision grew, it became clear that
my goals were much less personal than collective. The line
between familiar and strange became less and less distinct.
Werner Gilles, Mythological Scene, 1958
My search-nets had conjugated lost civilizations from the wave
-fields. I was present at Gobekli Tepe when the Twelve decided
that the T-stones should be buried. Lifting my shovel, I had
spoken from behind a mask. "Those beneath the earth will
perhaps make better use of our artwork," I said. "Not much will
survive above. The dead have needs of their own, and we must
offer our support. Already, there are far too many to count. There
will soon be many more. Very few are prepared. It is not their
fault if they are ignorant of the rites." "No," said others, "our time
is clearly over. A comet swarm approaches. All but the last of the
gods have withdrawn. Is not emptiness our mother? The waves
are hungry, and the elements should be allowed to finish what
they start." The arguments between factions of the zodiac had
been intense, but, in the end, we had all agreed: No trace of the
site would be visible for the next 10,000 years.
I was present on Crete when the labyrinth was just a gleam in the
eye of Daedalus, before they had traced its 28 U-turns on the
sand. I was present at the crafting of the Antikythera mechanism,
as well as at its rediscovery. It was I who had sealed the cycles of
the planets into a lump of corroded metal. Thieves and traders, it
was my crew that had called the giants' bluff. First, we had
challenged them to a drinking game, which they assumed,
because of their adjunct storm-cloud stomachs, they would win.
Next, we caused the lid of Mount Etna to slide back. And then,
once they passed out, we had only to dump them in. The giants
had been way too literal in their analysis of the importance of
sheer scale. We had three eyes, not just one. We were light on the
ocean's surface. We were currents at the ocean's depth. Like a
weapon's point, we were made to penetrate, then move.
The one-inch city had expanded beyond all measurement. Cutting
the zeros from large numbers, we had renormalized the
hallucinatory vastness of its architecture, with its living friezes,
with its rows upon rows of electromagnetic arches. Again, the
whole of space could be seen in terms of firsthand—and yet multi
-purpose—correspondences, which we did not have to be
omniscient to interpret. We could once more grasp them on a
human scale. We believed that no city should be so big that its
inhabitants, when passing on the street, would not be able to say
"hello" as well as call to each other by name. So too, the cosmos
should be measurable in terms of a single full exhalation. To
inhale was to call a capsule-version of the Ur-Text back. Upon
request, each detail could be magnified.
Some would say that I was unconscious, yes, but this is of small
account, since my operating system had prompted each
connection that had been scheduled. Some might see this system
in terms of the weaving of Arachne, the craft of Hermes, the
stellar clockwork of the Fates. You did not have to be aware of
your means of transportation in order to discover that no wrong
turns had occurred. By means of an algorithm as ancient as it was
incomprehensible—and more to the point, deliberately
incomprehensible—each event had been projected a great many
times before, and yet, to the voyager's eyes, the present world
looked new. It was only at odd moments, when the surface of
objects was ripped away to reveal the wound beneath, that
recollection yawned. At such moments, at first terrifying, a soft
wind would cause my heart to swell, like a sail that did not exist.
Adolph Gottlieb, Night Voyage, 1946
The time had come for a joyous, if at first unacknowledged,
homecoming, in which I would be recognized only by my aging
dog, Argos, a moment before his death. A chaos of competing
powers had surrounded the One Female. I had gotten used to
travelling on the currents of pure space. Ashore, I had to call my
breath back. My left hand would be difficult to find, as would the
bow that it was meant to hold, though I would follow a trail of
footprints towards a row of 33 ax-heads. Those with whom I had
been associated in a former life would then, each in his or her
own way, begin to solidify out of the mist that had obscured them.
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