The Transfiguration of Kurtzberg
Today is for posting things that I've had kicking around for a while. This thing isn't quite as incomprehensible to the uninitiated as most of my posts, but the reader will benefit from familiarity with:
Jack Kirby and his works.
The Transfiguration of Christ and Raphael's painting of same.
The Bible in general, especially the Torah. If you're unfamiliar with this one, no link to Wikipedia can help you.
"Now basic violence is stupid because I was in war and I saw the results of it. [...] There was smoke all over and you couldn't see the sky. It was just stupid. It got to the point where I couldn't walk in that kind of an atmosphere anymore. I feel that we shouldn't degenerate to that level. I can't. I won't take violence in that form, even if it is the truth. I'm a certain type of man." --Jack Kirby
I caught Creation sleeping at Omaha Beach. I saw what goes on. My wave was the first one that got to walk through the finished product; it was miles wide and ugly as ugly gets. The beach was what you see in a morgue or a movie nowadays, just bodies everywhere that you don't imagine with name and bedrooms waiting. You treat them like they were born to be corpses. But then as the howling sergeants walk you up farther, you see it travel inland and you see that everything is dead. It was busted trees, storefronts turned to wreckage, whole towns murdered just like people. I saw dead birds. So this wasn't something you could fly over and live.
Once I got used to the death, I started to be able to pick out the footprints of the bombs and monsters that caused it. It was so direct, not like at home. There you got degrees of separation between the worst of humanity and your everyday. That's all you need, just some room. Here, it was all straight lines. Everywhere, crisscross gun barrels, train tracks and landing ramps, like a web of iron cables trying to flatten you down against the corpses. Every sick guy who liked to kill had a straight shot to everybody else. No room for maybes and semantics, no asking for a reason. They murdered everybody they could get a bead on just because they could. The survivors, the refugees, would walk past in grieving convoys. You would sit and wait for hours for all the suffering to parade by so you could keep walking, and it still wouldn't end.
When I was growing up, the neighborhood kids would beat me up, and if they really pounded me, they'd leave me on my mother's doorstep. Basically, war is a bunch of guys who don't know each other's mothers.
One late afternoon (but you wouldn't know it from the sky), we found the worst of it. There we were, a confusion of lonely boys, submerged in smoke, picking through muddy heaps of bodies. It was uncomposed, dead men laying at contorted corpse angles, nothing ended. The smoke blocked the sun so the light splashed aground in futile blotches. The color of war dripped through everything like dull gray bleach, making all the live and dead people run together, making cloth blend with flesh. The air was packed with distance. I could see it all, but far away, like yelling at the past from the future. The smell, though, and the feel of the land, they were right there, churning together the bad things I'd seem, pulling at me, holding my brain in the barrens. You need some context to make any sense, and this was a world of its own. You need a frame of reference. There were people and cows lying together, torn open and rained in. I was trying to walk over them with my swollen turning-purple foot. You tell me the angle that makes sense from. I tell you right now, I couldn't have drawn what I saw even if I could stomach it. A picture has to look like something.
I felt that late-night, lonely, masochistic imagination crowding my brain. Somewhere on this world full of holes, my grave was already waiting, only it hadn't been dug yet. But there it was, unmarked, the dirt they'd clear out in a pile then shovel back over my dead and ugly face. Someday I'd be lying forgotten in a dead crowd just like these poor fellas -- only underground, maybe, if I was lucky. I looked for distraction the way you'll do when you haunt yourself, but there was nothing here. The boys were as ruined as the blown-out windows and painted in the same mute colors as the damn hills, the damn smoke, the damn bodies. We were all thinking the same thing, and none of us had a minute to give to another fella right then. So I looked at myself, just to figure out where I was, and I could see myself transparent against this opaque horizon, just a chameleon detail in a mess too ugly to call a landscape.
My imagination wouldn't shut off. I could see the torn bodies lying out over the curve of the earth in all directions, I could see the endless patch of wet-dirt footprints and bloody remainders. More were coming. I remember thinking, those boats were on the water already, there was no way to stop them. There was an ocean full of guys hoping they somehow wouldn't have to come here, but they would, and their lives would end here before they turned into stories. Sat on a boat, got blown up, chalked up as a loss. On a generation of tombstones it would just say, "Nobody could make sense of this one."
Even then, I still had my technical eyes, I still had my intelligence. I saw the trick; finally, finally the bastards had built a graveyard factory. The kids were already raised, and the kids were already on the boats halfway over the ocean by now, and the land was cleared with boots and fire so it could hold the kids' bodies when they dropped. This was planned tragedy, a perfect machine that had to be perfect, because only a perfect machine can do a perfectly stupid thing. But now it was built, and it was built so it wouldn't turn off. It told you to die and you died, with all the mathematical certainty of checkbooks and gravity. The men were numbered, the hills were numbered, the years clicked by and nothing meant a damn. It was a runaway equation; it was a hell of fragments.
I gave up on the ground. I looked up to see something that wasn't so close, maybe something that hadn't been killed or couldn't be killed. Religion wasn't enough. I was raised on a God without a body; fine for rabbis, maybe, but I needed something with a shape. I mean, I was desperate. I had some weather-chewed paper in my pack that I'd saved to draw something good that I saw, so I could show it around when I got home. Like kids we liberated, you know. But I wondered whether I was going to see something like that, or even get home to show it. I got some space, left the other boys with their demons, and I started a sketch. I looked at the sky like a reference, but when I came down to paper, what I was drawing was a person's shape. I was onto something, but I didn't know what. This guy on my page and the light glowing weak through the smoke, making their edges sparkle... All of a sudden, I saw the connection.
Imagine the secret sun the whole universe is wrapped around. Imagine a source so bright that its light is barely even real to human eyes. Now imagine a human being caught right in the path of its most brilliant beam, like a prism throwing off flashes when you spin it in the sun. It's just a human shape; every detail is stripped away, and all that's left is the template. It's at once a silhouette and a star, silver like a perfect mirror, catching the light of the source and beaming it out to the corners of time. Imagine the shape stretching its fingertips out at the sky toward endless space-fathoms, reaching like Adam toward his primal connection. That's who I saw in the slate skies, riding that single glowing ray like a fiery chariot, bound for the outermost mysteries. What can you do with a vision like that but follow it? So I did.
We were heat lightning, skipping through concrete clouds that turned to mist up close. The vision pointed toward the ground, and I watched as our brilliance signaled life across the fallen continent to awaken. As we blazed overheard, hidden brown birds fluttered in dozens from bare trees. Where war burned onward, the grinding war machines stopped, and puzzled human faces emerged to scan the sky; in the fields of the fallen, the silently dying sat up from among the dead and gazed with wonder toward our golden wake. The beauties and the grotesques of a hundred villages, who'd been forced indoors to make way for stone-faced soldiers, scurried chattering from their hodgepodge homes to add their voices to the ecumenical chorus of wonder. The ground below was razed, the dead outnumbered the living, but everywhere the war-worn survivors picked through the wreckage to find one another. Everywhere the birds rebuilt their nests.
The vision tore over the surface of the ocean; spray bursts like ephememal galaxies spun to exhaustion in its wake. From the horizon arose our destination, the great jungle of humanity. The gulls took sparing leaps to one side, clearing a path as we flew low over Rockaway Beach. Then, in a dizzying ascent, we left the humblest denizens of the city and took the vantage of the sky. Skimming upside down across the ceiling of the world, I saw life thriving unchecked, humanity splattering its best and worst alike onto a common canvas. Shouts of hurt and ecstasy, shouts so profound that no soul could utter them without shattering, sounded endlessly from the endless mouths of New York City. I scanned frantically for the source of the sound, shaking with vertiginous awe of the city, but the sonic threads tangled, resolving to deeper and deeper disorder..
In a thousand dens of humanity, sequins turned fiery twirls on the dresses of dancing girls. Bottles clinked and tables rattled while men with melted-chocolate skin blew songs of glass through sun-surface golden trumpets. Born brawlers pushed and wrestled one another with meaty, primordial hands. The dais, the tables, the wine glasses, the slumped anonymous drinkers; all were superimposed upon one another in organic, nonsensical hierarchy. A menagerie of singular faces laughed and roared at mismatched angles, looking to each other as much as to the dancers. The doors, constantly swinging open and shut, meant nothing; within this room was the raucous, flesh-smelling chaos of a Brooklyn street, only condensed and tinted by bright blue music. Outside on the street, where cigarette smoke was replaced by cloud-filtered sun, the story was the same. The world was a narrow strip between leaning tenements as the vision threaded me through the familiar byways of Delancy Street, but still I couldn't
find my bearings. We kept flying, ever faster, our path skewing wild with the spinning of the globe. In a chain of heartbeats, I met all the world's characters, just like a tour of the neighborhood, but fast enough to visit the farthest corners. The world's toughest old lady, who laughs about childhood horrors that would have broken me forever. The nervous teenage boy with the red cheeks who's smoothing down his hair in the mirror for a date; he's been in love 10 times this year, each time madly. The burly, round-faced fella with the constant ape-laugh who's having the time of his life at the center table, making the rest of the audience feel awkward. For the first time, I saw my hometown jump the East River and spill out forever in a tide of rough-edged people hustling like hell. Everywhere from the chessboard streets of London to the lonely farms of Kansas, it was all just the neighborhood, people and houses growing up in bunches like flowers on a window box planet. I saw every type of
stranger, every type of foreign language, people doing every kind of unguessable thing that I'll never understand. And I thought, "just like home."
We followed the cheap suits and pearly smiles of the New World back to the coarse-grained miracles of the Old, but we couldn't stop there. The roots of the people ran too deep, too wet. Impossibly easy, like a fall from a great height, we followed those roots to ancient soil. I heard the hoofbeats a hundred strong in untamed, animal America; I saw the snows of a distant apocalypse falling upon damned but walking hordes; I witnessed the blossoming of the mountains. Life splashed back and forth across the hurtling epochs, soaking red soil and filtering purest white through the clouds. Our sky-sea turned crimson as we plunged through the spectrum of forever. The drumbeat of life pierced the years, hundreds of millions at a time: fever dream ecology gave birth to red skies, ape-men, scaled monsters, lava rocket-spray ripping through the trees, and wet green shoots growing back as beautiful as children. Blood was in the air, and it was heady; the savage giants were intoxicated by the rush of generations dying, newspawn clawing for food and air, rivers tearing canyons through the flesh of the scar-crossed globe. The planet was an echo hall of thunderous footsteps and roaring alien voices, a devil's playground of inhuman heroes. Suddenly, as though propelled by the pressure of air too powerful for
my lungs to breath, we shot past the charcoal clouds. And floating in the velvet folds of space, I saw the planet from above.
That teeming world of giants, that undiminished Earth. It was a blurred point in the distant void, beneath the notice of the living universe.
Space hurtled by as we paused in relativistic light speed stillness. Planets, twinkling weirdly with strange tales and amazing fantasies, blinked before me and then were lost in the endless vault of the vacuum. I heard nothing, but space was not silent. It was hushed. Here in the distance, space thickened and mixed in sacred alchemy, transmuting Can into Is. Free of gravity and suspended in belief, life twisted and stretched in spirals of crazy logic. Genius space tribes learned the rhythm of time and finally, finally joined the symphony of the stars, laughing in golden light bursts at their own boundlessness. Faster we moved, and more still we felt. The mass of endless permutation grew to galactic size in a chain reaction. At the outskirts we reached life taken to its logical conclusion, the extremity of civilization. Whole worlds were awash in the sentient tide, like sand pulled effortlessly into the undertow. I basked in the light pulses and the radio flood of galactic empire; this was the music of humanity, and I knew it by heart. But as we arced across the empire, sudden darkness fell. The radio and laser signals, loose liquid strands from our lightray perspective, splashed apart, and all the noise of an inhabited galaxy was silenced. I asked the vision if the scattered billions were all dead. The vision's eyes were mirrors with inky black borders. "No, they have only gone quiet," it said. "They are hiding from me."
Before I could ask the vision what horror it heralded that could silence a galaxy, it showed me. We reached the edge of the universe, beyond the last bastion of human aspiration, where space and time and the imagination of God fold in on themselves. We were perfectly still, yet I still felt motion: the undiluted light speed acceleration of Being at the cusp of Nothingness.
They overcame me, the weird creations of far-flung space, impossibilities made flesh, undiscoverable secrets made plain through the prying eyes of bestial consciousness. Everything that could exist did exist, incongruous but undeniable in screaming imperial menagerie..
My world was an almond-shaped slit in the veil of the void, an unclosing eye hurtling through libertine downward infinity. A lump rose in my throat, that old inadequate reaction to things that are past revulsion.
Afloat,
a permeable mind in luminous x-ray dark,
a radio tuned to thunder of dead-honest static where God's voice should be,
I closed my eyes, but found nothing better.
So I opened them.
A fly crawled over the glassy eye of a dog's rain-leeched corpse. Europe, 1943. So alla that amounts to this.
I understood then how bibles get written. I knew that the rest of the boys had their own worries, probably worse, so all I had to talk to was whoever I could invent... an imaginary conversation, like the kind you have with a friend or a father. Only this was with somebody who didn't exist, but had to, somewhere. I had to put myself in front of somebody who knew all the answers, a wise man out of whole cloth and desperation, imagining for a minute that somebody could come down from the mountaintop I'd just been on and really understand it instead of breaking down. What would I ask him? What would a guy like that tell me? Soon, I saw him clear enough to touch. This was no empty vision. This was flesh and stone, fresh-descended from numinous heights. His throne was alien to land, like a tranquil emerald moon. His face was a human's, but it was only his veil; his body was blackness, perfect dark contained and bound by the shape of a man. He clothed himself in gleaming glass arcana, spirit lights and transistor fetishes, a panoply of sense-making machines; they whirred prophecy and mother's love in the language of the electron. There was nothing to ask. I knew the answer was already written.
You, who have wrestled with God! Open your eyes! You have made suffering, sacrifice and obliteration your idols to hedge out the infinite -- but from Brighton to Normandy, your life is one life. Love it, for how can you do otherwise? Loose the trembling of your soul and let it shake the mountains! Drop your rifle, and show your strength with fists of outrage at the stink of wasted life! Though your heart hardens to humanity, throw it whole into the agony tide, and gamble all to win tomorrow's morning! You who have heard the words of the prophets, how can you be silent? Write and shout and teach the gospel of the scarlet poppies, which is your inheritance and your legacy! Fix your eyes forward at the endless tomorrow, and let faith in that vision steady your wrist. Though the spheres drift to cosmic ash and the engine of gravity fail, the people can survive if they will only turn their wonders to serve salvation, with workman's hands and artist's eyes! You will be their architect, you will set up a sign and a sentinel of stone. For though the whole world turn to idolatry of life's dismal end, you and your house will serve its Source.
My paper was full, messy with tangled lines. I always did draw fast. But the design was there, you could see that whatever had just zapped me from space had changed me forever. The bodies still stunk and the sky was still black. Hell, my foot was still purple. The world was still in a sorry shape. So I made a better one.
Jack Kirby and his works.
The Transfiguration of Christ and Raphael's painting of same.
The Bible in general, especially the Torah. If you're unfamiliar with this one, no link to Wikipedia can help you.
"Now basic violence is stupid because I was in war and I saw the results of it. [...] There was smoke all over and you couldn't see the sky. It was just stupid. It got to the point where I couldn't walk in that kind of an atmosphere anymore. I feel that we shouldn't degenerate to that level. I can't. I won't take violence in that form, even if it is the truth. I'm a certain type of man." --Jack Kirby
I caught Creation sleeping at Omaha Beach. I saw what goes on. My wave was the first one that got to walk through the finished product; it was miles wide and ugly as ugly gets. The beach was what you see in a morgue or a movie nowadays, just bodies everywhere that you don't imagine with name and bedrooms waiting. You treat them like they were born to be corpses. But then as the howling sergeants walk you up farther, you see it travel inland and you see that everything is dead. It was busted trees, storefronts turned to wreckage, whole towns murdered just like people. I saw dead birds. So this wasn't something you could fly over and live.
Once I got used to the death, I started to be able to pick out the footprints of the bombs and monsters that caused it. It was so direct, not like at home. There you got degrees of separation between the worst of humanity and your everyday. That's all you need, just some room. Here, it was all straight lines. Everywhere, crisscross gun barrels, train tracks and landing ramps, like a web of iron cables trying to flatten you down against the corpses. Every sick guy who liked to kill had a straight shot to everybody else. No room for maybes and semantics, no asking for a reason. They murdered everybody they could get a bead on just because they could. The survivors, the refugees, would walk past in grieving convoys. You would sit and wait for hours for all the suffering to parade by so you could keep walking, and it still wouldn't end.
When I was growing up, the neighborhood kids would beat me up, and if they really pounded me, they'd leave me on my mother's doorstep. Basically, war is a bunch of guys who don't know each other's mothers.
One late afternoon (but you wouldn't know it from the sky), we found the worst of it. There we were, a confusion of lonely boys, submerged in smoke, picking through muddy heaps of bodies. It was uncomposed, dead men laying at contorted corpse angles, nothing ended. The smoke blocked the sun so the light splashed aground in futile blotches. The color of war dripped through everything like dull gray bleach, making all the live and dead people run together, making cloth blend with flesh. The air was packed with distance. I could see it all, but far away, like yelling at the past from the future. The smell, though, and the feel of the land, they were right there, churning together the bad things I'd seem, pulling at me, holding my brain in the barrens. You need some context to make any sense, and this was a world of its own. You need a frame of reference. There were people and cows lying together, torn open and rained in. I was trying to walk over them with my swollen turning-purple foot. You tell me the angle that makes sense from. I tell you right now, I couldn't have drawn what I saw even if I could stomach it. A picture has to look like something.
I felt that late-night, lonely, masochistic imagination crowding my brain. Somewhere on this world full of holes, my grave was already waiting, only it hadn't been dug yet. But there it was, unmarked, the dirt they'd clear out in a pile then shovel back over my dead and ugly face. Someday I'd be lying forgotten in a dead crowd just like these poor fellas -- only underground, maybe, if I was lucky. I looked for distraction the way you'll do when you haunt yourself, but there was nothing here. The boys were as ruined as the blown-out windows and painted in the same mute colors as the damn hills, the damn smoke, the damn bodies. We were all thinking the same thing, and none of us had a minute to give to another fella right then. So I looked at myself, just to figure out where I was, and I could see myself transparent against this opaque horizon, just a chameleon detail in a mess too ugly to call a landscape.
My imagination wouldn't shut off. I could see the torn bodies lying out over the curve of the earth in all directions, I could see the endless patch of wet-dirt footprints and bloody remainders. More were coming. I remember thinking, those boats were on the water already, there was no way to stop them. There was an ocean full of guys hoping they somehow wouldn't have to come here, but they would, and their lives would end here before they turned into stories. Sat on a boat, got blown up, chalked up as a loss. On a generation of tombstones it would just say, "Nobody could make sense of this one."
Even then, I still had my technical eyes, I still had my intelligence. I saw the trick; finally, finally the bastards had built a graveyard factory. The kids were already raised, and the kids were already on the boats halfway over the ocean by now, and the land was cleared with boots and fire so it could hold the kids' bodies when they dropped. This was planned tragedy, a perfect machine that had to be perfect, because only a perfect machine can do a perfectly stupid thing. But now it was built, and it was built so it wouldn't turn off. It told you to die and you died, with all the mathematical certainty of checkbooks and gravity. The men were numbered, the hills were numbered, the years clicked by and nothing meant a damn. It was a runaway equation; it was a hell of fragments.
I gave up on the ground. I looked up to see something that wasn't so close, maybe something that hadn't been killed or couldn't be killed. Religion wasn't enough. I was raised on a God without a body; fine for rabbis, maybe, but I needed something with a shape. I mean, I was desperate. I had some weather-chewed paper in my pack that I'd saved to draw something good that I saw, so I could show it around when I got home. Like kids we liberated, you know. But I wondered whether I was going to see something like that, or even get home to show it. I got some space, left the other boys with their demons, and I started a sketch. I looked at the sky like a reference, but when I came down to paper, what I was drawing was a person's shape. I was onto something, but I didn't know what. This guy on my page and the light glowing weak through the smoke, making their edges sparkle... All of a sudden, I saw the connection.
Imagine the secret sun the whole universe is wrapped around. Imagine a source so bright that its light is barely even real to human eyes. Now imagine a human being caught right in the path of its most brilliant beam, like a prism throwing off flashes when you spin it in the sun. It's just a human shape; every detail is stripped away, and all that's left is the template. It's at once a silhouette and a star, silver like a perfect mirror, catching the light of the source and beaming it out to the corners of time. Imagine the shape stretching its fingertips out at the sky toward endless space-fathoms, reaching like Adam toward his primal connection. That's who I saw in the slate skies, riding that single glowing ray like a fiery chariot, bound for the outermost mysteries. What can you do with a vision like that but follow it? So I did.
We were heat lightning, skipping through concrete clouds that turned to mist up close. The vision pointed toward the ground, and I watched as our brilliance signaled life across the fallen continent to awaken. As we blazed overheard, hidden brown birds fluttered in dozens from bare trees. Where war burned onward, the grinding war machines stopped, and puzzled human faces emerged to scan the sky; in the fields of the fallen, the silently dying sat up from among the dead and gazed with wonder toward our golden wake. The beauties and the grotesques of a hundred villages, who'd been forced indoors to make way for stone-faced soldiers, scurried chattering from their hodgepodge homes to add their voices to the ecumenical chorus of wonder. The ground below was razed, the dead outnumbered the living, but everywhere the war-worn survivors picked through the wreckage to find one another. Everywhere the birds rebuilt their nests.
The vision tore over the surface of the ocean; spray bursts like ephememal galaxies spun to exhaustion in its wake. From the horizon arose our destination, the great jungle of humanity. The gulls took sparing leaps to one side, clearing a path as we flew low over Rockaway Beach. Then, in a dizzying ascent, we left the humblest denizens of the city and took the vantage of the sky. Skimming upside down across the ceiling of the world, I saw life thriving unchecked, humanity splattering its best and worst alike onto a common canvas. Shouts of hurt and ecstasy, shouts so profound that no soul could utter them without shattering, sounded endlessly from the endless mouths of New York City. I scanned frantically for the source of the sound, shaking with vertiginous awe of the city, but the sonic threads tangled, resolving to deeper and deeper disorder..
In a thousand dens of humanity, sequins turned fiery twirls on the dresses of dancing girls. Bottles clinked and tables rattled while men with melted-chocolate skin blew songs of glass through sun-surface golden trumpets. Born brawlers pushed and wrestled one another with meaty, primordial hands. The dais, the tables, the wine glasses, the slumped anonymous drinkers; all were superimposed upon one another in organic, nonsensical hierarchy. A menagerie of singular faces laughed and roared at mismatched angles, looking to each other as much as to the dancers. The doors, constantly swinging open and shut, meant nothing; within this room was the raucous, flesh-smelling chaos of a Brooklyn street, only condensed and tinted by bright blue music. Outside on the street, where cigarette smoke was replaced by cloud-filtered sun, the story was the same. The world was a narrow strip between leaning tenements as the vision threaded me through the familiar byways of Delancy Street, but still I couldn't
find my bearings. We kept flying, ever faster, our path skewing wild with the spinning of the globe. In a chain of heartbeats, I met all the world's characters, just like a tour of the neighborhood, but fast enough to visit the farthest corners. The world's toughest old lady, who laughs about childhood horrors that would have broken me forever. The nervous teenage boy with the red cheeks who's smoothing down his hair in the mirror for a date; he's been in love 10 times this year, each time madly. The burly, round-faced fella with the constant ape-laugh who's having the time of his life at the center table, making the rest of the audience feel awkward. For the first time, I saw my hometown jump the East River and spill out forever in a tide of rough-edged people hustling like hell. Everywhere from the chessboard streets of London to the lonely farms of Kansas, it was all just the neighborhood, people and houses growing up in bunches like flowers on a window box planet. I saw every type of
stranger, every type of foreign language, people doing every kind of unguessable thing that I'll never understand. And I thought, "just like home."
We followed the cheap suits and pearly smiles of the New World back to the coarse-grained miracles of the Old, but we couldn't stop there. The roots of the people ran too deep, too wet. Impossibly easy, like a fall from a great height, we followed those roots to ancient soil. I heard the hoofbeats a hundred strong in untamed, animal America; I saw the snows of a distant apocalypse falling upon damned but walking hordes; I witnessed the blossoming of the mountains. Life splashed back and forth across the hurtling epochs, soaking red soil and filtering purest white through the clouds. Our sky-sea turned crimson as we plunged through the spectrum of forever. The drumbeat of life pierced the years, hundreds of millions at a time: fever dream ecology gave birth to red skies, ape-men, scaled monsters, lava rocket-spray ripping through the trees, and wet green shoots growing back as beautiful as children. Blood was in the air, and it was heady; the savage giants were intoxicated by the rush of generations dying, newspawn clawing for food and air, rivers tearing canyons through the flesh of the scar-crossed globe. The planet was an echo hall of thunderous footsteps and roaring alien voices, a devil's playground of inhuman heroes. Suddenly, as though propelled by the pressure of air too powerful for
my lungs to breath, we shot past the charcoal clouds. And floating in the velvet folds of space, I saw the planet from above.
That teeming world of giants, that undiminished Earth. It was a blurred point in the distant void, beneath the notice of the living universe.
Space hurtled by as we paused in relativistic light speed stillness. Planets, twinkling weirdly with strange tales and amazing fantasies, blinked before me and then were lost in the endless vault of the vacuum. I heard nothing, but space was not silent. It was hushed. Here in the distance, space thickened and mixed in sacred alchemy, transmuting Can into Is. Free of gravity and suspended in belief, life twisted and stretched in spirals of crazy logic. Genius space tribes learned the rhythm of time and finally, finally joined the symphony of the stars, laughing in golden light bursts at their own boundlessness. Faster we moved, and more still we felt. The mass of endless permutation grew to galactic size in a chain reaction. At the outskirts we reached life taken to its logical conclusion, the extremity of civilization. Whole worlds were awash in the sentient tide, like sand pulled effortlessly into the undertow. I basked in the light pulses and the radio flood of galactic empire; this was the music of humanity, and I knew it by heart. But as we arced across the empire, sudden darkness fell. The radio and laser signals, loose liquid strands from our lightray perspective, splashed apart, and all the noise of an inhabited galaxy was silenced. I asked the vision if the scattered billions were all dead. The vision's eyes were mirrors with inky black borders. "No, they have only gone quiet," it said. "They are hiding from me."
Before I could ask the vision what horror it heralded that could silence a galaxy, it showed me. We reached the edge of the universe, beyond the last bastion of human aspiration, where space and time and the imagination of God fold in on themselves. We were perfectly still, yet I still felt motion: the undiluted light speed acceleration of Being at the cusp of Nothingness.
They overcame me, the weird creations of far-flung space, impossibilities made flesh, undiscoverable secrets made plain through the prying eyes of bestial consciousness. Everything that could exist did exist, incongruous but undeniable in screaming imperial menagerie..
My world was an almond-shaped slit in the veil of the void, an unclosing eye hurtling through libertine downward infinity. A lump rose in my throat, that old inadequate reaction to things that are past revulsion.
Afloat,
a permeable mind in luminous x-ray dark,
a radio tuned to thunder of dead-honest static where God's voice should be,
I closed my eyes, but found nothing better.
So I opened them.
A fly crawled over the glassy eye of a dog's rain-leeched corpse. Europe, 1943. So alla that amounts to this.
I understood then how bibles get written. I knew that the rest of the boys had their own worries, probably worse, so all I had to talk to was whoever I could invent... an imaginary conversation, like the kind you have with a friend or a father. Only this was with somebody who didn't exist, but had to, somewhere. I had to put myself in front of somebody who knew all the answers, a wise man out of whole cloth and desperation, imagining for a minute that somebody could come down from the mountaintop I'd just been on and really understand it instead of breaking down. What would I ask him? What would a guy like that tell me? Soon, I saw him clear enough to touch. This was no empty vision. This was flesh and stone, fresh-descended from numinous heights. His throne was alien to land, like a tranquil emerald moon. His face was a human's, but it was only his veil; his body was blackness, perfect dark contained and bound by the shape of a man. He clothed himself in gleaming glass arcana, spirit lights and transistor fetishes, a panoply of sense-making machines; they whirred prophecy and mother's love in the language of the electron. There was nothing to ask. I knew the answer was already written.
You, who have wrestled with God! Open your eyes! You have made suffering, sacrifice and obliteration your idols to hedge out the infinite -- but from Brighton to Normandy, your life is one life. Love it, for how can you do otherwise? Loose the trembling of your soul and let it shake the mountains! Drop your rifle, and show your strength with fists of outrage at the stink of wasted life! Though your heart hardens to humanity, throw it whole into the agony tide, and gamble all to win tomorrow's morning! You who have heard the words of the prophets, how can you be silent? Write and shout and teach the gospel of the scarlet poppies, which is your inheritance and your legacy! Fix your eyes forward at the endless tomorrow, and let faith in that vision steady your wrist. Though the spheres drift to cosmic ash and the engine of gravity fail, the people can survive if they will only turn their wonders to serve salvation, with workman's hands and artist's eyes! You will be their architect, you will set up a sign and a sentinel of stone. For though the whole world turn to idolatry of life's dismal end, you and your house will serve its Source.
My paper was full, messy with tangled lines. I always did draw fast. But the design was there, you could see that whatever had just zapped me from space had changed me forever. The bodies still stunk and the sky was still black. Hell, my foot was still purple. The world was still in a sorry shape. So I made a better one.