Looking Back, Looking Forward

About a year ago, I dreamt about another man's dream, interpreted by yet another man. I remember quickly recording my thoughts. At that time, I was already thinking about how a great king might fall into the trap of wanting the riches of the world more than anything else.

It is from this image that we retain one of the many long-lasting phrases that the translators of the King James Bible left to the English language: 'feet of clay'. The statue that appeared in Nebuchadnezzar's dream may have had a head full of gold, but its feet were made of clay and broken iron. That is why it was so easily deposed by the rock that hit it.

That dream, of course, was unique to the Great King alone. But it was seen by me as a fitting image for the kind of despotism that a particularly gifted human individual can, with all good intentions (good being a self-righteous and self-centred presumption), inflict on his fellow men. As the Other Guy told me today, "That man is a lot like Robert Mugabe."

We'll see how events unfold. I will not elaborate on why the Other Guy thought that this man was a lot like Mugabe, except to say that the Bioluminescent and I were impressed by the depth of the analogy as we sat sipping our coffees along the Road of the New Village.

Looking Back (Part 2)

Hey, look: the old folder, and here is a second scrap...

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The little islands are dark, slightly tarnished - ambergris, blue vitriol, rust, deep slumbersome black-brown hues in a night-lake of midnight blue. The Wanderer sits alone on the cliff, warming old hands over a dancing yellow fire and his food. He has placed his weapons by the fire, and the fire’s light dances over them as well.

It is comfortable here in the Archipelago, he muses. There’s no stress. Back to nature, except that you can have modern conveniences whenever you want. He pulls the spit from the flames, lays it swiftly on a clean, flat stone, sucks his fingers. This is a good life. He looks with Dreamtime-seeing eyes out over the twilight sea, waits for the chicken wings to cool. This is a good life, he repeats, with much satisfaction. He tenderly caresses his flesh, feeling the invisible dents where flesh has rejected bullet and healed. A good life for a Wanderer, this is.

In the distance there is uneasiness. The centre is not at peace. The Wanderer looks back and down, and in the distance sees another with his inner eye. This other wears the billowing cape and dirt-coloured leggings of a Walker. Wanderer smiles.

Toilsome, toilsome step by step, the Walker wends his way Wanderer-ward. The Wanderer thinks of slain Hunters, many of them in a catacomb of the mind, all buried, all neatly entombed therein. He smiles again, and knows that for Walkers, he needs no weapons.

The Walker halts in the narrow defile at the foot of the slope and looks up. “Wanderer!” he calls. “Wanderer, come home!”

The Wanderer waits. He can afford to wait. The Walker is Maradaine Chase. Maradaine was always too good, too humane for his job. The Wanderer’s smile is feral.

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That's how the third section goes. What on earth was I thinking of? The question remains unanswered. But still... what was all this about?

Looking Back (Part 1)

Hey, look: an old folder with some scraps of paper in it...

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Little islands in a sea of chaos burn with brazen sunset light. The Wanderer waits there, his hands full of weapons. A stone, a branch, the jawbone of an ass, they are as treasure to his cold eye, their cracked and jagged lines as beauty to his soul.

Other things catch this roving camera’s glance: the dead roses, the test-tubes filled with vicious oils, the keyboard. The keyboard snakes its cable under a rock, a rock which twinkles green in the setting sun. A shadow falls halfway across the green.

The Hunter is here. He wears a black cloak trimmed with silver thread. He unclips the Link from his belt, presses buttons, speaks. “Domine,” he says, “I have found him. He carries weapons.”

Whisper, whisper. Fizzle. The connection closes. The Hunter has been instructed. The Hunter walks up to the Wanderer.

“Wanderer, come home,” he says.

The Wanderer is a blind man now, old and weary. Yet, when intuition strikes, he sees with the flash of its lightning. Now, he looks sharply back from the edge of his cliff, notes the Link at the Hunter’s belt, sees the Hunter’s escargot shotgun (every slug a hit, say the advertisements). His dry lips crack open, oozing an unripe smile.

The Hunter watches warily.

The Wanderer strikes, his hands a blur of bone, and stone, and little splinters from a larger club. There is eventually some blood. The shotgun is firing. The Link crackles with powerful energies. The Hunter glazes over before his eyes do, and is gone.

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That's how the first section goes. What on earth was I thinking of? Ah well... there will be time, there will be time. I was eighteen years old when I wrote that.

A Long Walk

On a clear hot day, you can see forever. You can walk along the corridors of the teeming hive, watching industry vie with the apathy of fatigue, watching the clash of intellect against intellect in the arena of the pit. Iron sharpens iron, as one man sharpens another, weapons in the hands of warriors. Salt in open wounds, salt for spoiled meat, salt, salt, saltiness. Salubrious and salaried, all mingling in the cauldron of sweat. The perspirate meet the aspirate, the desperate meet the vituperate. And from the ash a fire is woken, the cockatrice is born, the phoenix arises.

Lead is transmuted to gold, quicksilver is the unalloyed spirit, and the antimony withers on the chalcogen alembic. It is like that, it is all like that, no paean to the pagan coould capture this rippling suppleness of the fine and private place. This is a school, of discipline, of emotion, of intellect, of fish. The salmon leap, the sailor swears, the mermaid giggles and the old man rolls his trousers up as he looks out to the sea. The sea gurns, like the crystal watchglass of Atlantis.

Through the glass, we see the praetors, the lictors, the young proconsuls and the younger magistrates of a newer age. None carry sticks, let alone axes. None will wield a sickle for the harvest, or a hammer at the forge. And yet there is a bemused keenness in their gaze as they try so hard to influence their peers, to make them believe that they do not care and yet have great care for things that matter and do not. Byzantium's nightingale, and the doom of Rome.

Yet there is light, as from a tall hill, an old but mighty beacon. It is a pharos without the pharisees, it is a colossus in old gold now tinted with a coppery glaze. And it stands tall, like a giant beset by - no, not pygmies - but industrious and determined sappers. Will anything survive in this mighty pile of the works of man beneath the gaze of God?

The mind sizzles, the fuse burns down, the gelignite sweats its sweat of instability. Somewhere is a stable where four horses whicker to be ridden out, and four riders arm. Somewhere, justice waits to fall like a thunderbolt, an eagle stoops to conquer.

Yet behind the eyes, a reservoir of calm remains; God is in His heaven, eternity is in a grain of sand, terror stays in its pinch of dust. The lenses are unsullied. The windows of the soul are clear. And we will all give glory to the Highest in the end.