How convenient of me to brush aside explicit duties handwaving away laborious letter in favour of spirit
When every act and breath is worship and love then prayers seem vulgar, fucking unbecoming
But God is only ever found in the down-dirty details, the blue-collar slog and not in the seductions of sloth, nor flights of fancy, the comfortable shirking of duties
We are the sleep-singers secreted away in our worship scattered to four winds and buried underground like seeds coming up for air and rare sun like cicadas
Since society’s dawn we have sacrificed our nights that The Great Dreamer may slumber in peace
Insignificant as we are, perhaps He does not hear our unending Song but what else is there to do?
Art: “Dreamtime Sisters” by Colleen Wallace Nungari
Animated cavorters of debauchery emerge from the peripheries, cartwheeling manifest excesses of the great demonic five – envy, greed, lust, wrath, pride – enabled as ever by the little serpents
But the forecast of violent orgies goes awry, for nurtured evils pale beside man’s base nature lain dormant by necessity until these end days though Moloch and Baal may rile spirits in true bodily possessions, they cannot compare to what lurks deeper in the bones
Heretofore latent indolence latent as only indolence could be gelatinous sloth and gluttonous fear congealing, amorphous a safe spineless sludge state licensed by our self-made tools
Perhaps a fiery demons’ hell is preferable to such a return into man’s own primordial Chthonic underworld
If we must hold court in secret, so be it If the price of progress is hidden toil we gladly pay it
Those savages who would jeer us in the street and prostrate before stones they carved, or worse, the same animals they would feast upon for supper If we left the great shaping to those mindless brutes, there would be no morning to wake to
We, the number counters, builders of tomorrow, who bow to no god but the highest number that maximal parameter of the known universe the ultimate concept
We who forsake sleep to count every night that we may expand upon the boundaries of knowledge, that we may creep closer to God, that final number
In my youth I met a man whose spoken word could shape reality
A man incapable of introspection or gratitude but nonetheless blessed with this arcane ability or inherent knowledge
The nature of such things is unimportant And though it’s possible that he was but one of many, he remained an anomaly to me
Even lacking evidence I stand convinced that power like this cannot originate from the devil’s magic, but can only be bestowed by our God Almighty for the man would breathe a sentence into the universe and it would Be: Kun fa yakoon Does that not speak to Divine source?
But as I mentioned, the man was thankless and thoughtless, too wilful, too ill-equipped to ponder on that which had been conferred upon him He could not speak himself happy He would not speak himself fortune
In all my long years, I’ve known of no man before or since whose pen held as much of destiny’s ink, yet he shouldn’t write of himself with it
Why? I ponder to this day
Perhaps another of his kind had imprisoned him first with her own words as a preventive measure Or had they muzzled each other in invisible stalemate, a mutually bound perverse prison? Perhaps
Or is it much simply that the language of fate is written in a deeper script than reality, etched into our very blood and heaven’s stone
When the high density beings first made contact, we thought them angels and demons
Their stilted communication was credited to translations into our unfamiliar tongue
How curious a species in their irregular shape and size, one as unlike to another as an ape to a cockroach
Our religions and empires fell and grew around their emergence, but we ultimately adapted to their presence and learned from their technologies
Imagine how we shattered then, to discover after hundreds more years that these mighty beings of near-unimaginable power were little more than automaton husks, long unburdened of consciousness – that evolutionary dead end – devoid of it, but still able to parrot its effect with brute force mimicry
It wasnt just to realise we were alone once again, as we been before but more over, to see that our future too was truly empty, and our cognisance of the stars merely a rounding error
Picasso, Pablo (1881-1973): Girl Before a Mirror (Boisgeloup, March 1932). New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)*** Permission for usage must be provided in writing from Scala.
Have the spiritual and physical ever been as connected as today? Mind and body now as one, the masculine and feminine roam out of bounds, each bleeding into the other Every yin-yang a gradient of greys, inadvertently or no
Drowning in push-pull nuance and subtlety The old dichotomies end up as little more than fractal creases in a larger plane
What lurks beyond the conscious and subconscious integrated? Zooming out, out, out – searching for the most fundamental of all nature, for opposing forces for clear contrast and structure, for the one line in the sand
But perhaps such a schism had never existed before in the physical universe, with its unified form and unified laws So I turned my gaze to the un-natural and there it was, clear as day In technology and metal, in the little mirror in my pocket The crack that would divide, my line in the sand
That virtual rift between our analogue and digital halves, between alluring social presentations, increasingly filtered and the decaying lonesome reality they reflect A difference ever widening, growing deeper by the day
Someone’s roof over our heads but always our bellies and souls full These hot sleepless nights take me back to old stories blurred to one
I’d rub my mum’s belly like a lamp and pregnant with child as she was she’d spin tales of genies and of life and I’d drift off in wonder
I only ever wanted to be a brother and this woman who gave me life and such wonderment and then even that purpose …did I discard her having had my fill?
On Judgement Day as we trudged the valleys toward the fields of our collective reckoning, I saw a sufi soul among the blackly damned and the brightly blessed
He shone brighter than any other at first sight but the further I studied him the more I came to see that he was empty of his own light source, reflective like the moon
A translucent core, yet beaming, pulsing brimming from the edges of his being A strange thing to behold His selfless existence, lived even after death: to magnify the light of those around him like a lens
So sad I was then, to see him sent to that deepest depth worse than the seven hells to that great nothing reserved only for the godliest of nihilists for wasting their earthly hours
For by withdrawing from his fellow man and brushing away his footprints behind him with each step, his sublimated ego had committed the biggest conceit of all against his divine Creator: to reject the divine light of his own life
Great sufi poems tell of the conference of birds that searched for their kind’s greatest, and through great trials and tribulations came to find them within their own reflections
Yet here this sufi mystic who saw God in every reflection but his own… Oh, but if he had only looked down at the water!
Instead his soul was snuffed out. As in life, so too after it. Fanaa.
It’s obvious isn’t it? That you have as many pasts behind you as you do potential futures ahead
More, if anything So be calm
All that accruing life to extrapolate from as you deem fit Play with the switchboard, flip experiences from noise to signal, and vice versa
Then perhaps your little terrors will subside – of paths never to be taken, of persons that will not become, of flattened superpositions – with the assured knowledge that he who stands here now came to that point by many ways and a multitude of faces, an evershifting story