Antiphony (24 page)

cavern remains of the Double Doors of Heaven, his name was given once and he rose upon the steps of Light the red eye of Horus rising through the eastern midnight, he lived as a creature barely awake through many pasts and lifetimes living his droning stately and motley lives unaware of what they might have meant, these lifetimes hereby accounted only dim and distant memories and glimpses down a mirrored hall. A meal of roasted horse flesh gathered up from the dirt floor of a wooden hut on the plains of Scythia, a life as a leather tanner in the precincts of Adana and the Cilician Gates. He died as a child and in childbirth many times, he died as a young girl slashed and hacked by marauders, he died as an old man in the precincts of Zwickau, in the land of Thuringia died then in his sleep, and all of these lives were lived half asleep doing things going places, moments of song and dance moments of despair but hardly recognized and barely remembered after death, for he was not awake then. And also there were other lives many others when he knew, he woke and was awakened and he caught himself without falling, he rose up and is risen. A life one hundred and seventy eight thousand years ago in a land whose name he has forgotten and has been wiped away from history, a language lost to eternity he spoke and taught others to speak, he wrote it down on parchments and kept it safe within the halls of a temple whose pillars and beams have turned to dust. He was awake then and he knew the Law of Laws that everything is rendered unto itself. He lived many short lives and several of them in China and others in America thousands of years before it was called that, and he was awake in those lives and saw his former and future selves, in one of those lives he was a teacher, in several
of them he was a slave not knowing half-asleep, in one of those short lives he lived as a merchant selling wine in the ports of Santander and Gijon. He never left some places traces of his spirit there remain, he went back to several times and places and lived with his other selves there again and again. In India he died once or twice or a hundred times, the lives spread before him are too numerous to count. The lives and births and deaths spread out before him like a tapestry of knowing and unknowing, motion pictures that are more than films, that are lives he could slip into and exist within again if he chose. All the languages he ever spoke too numerous to count: Hebrew, Persian, Syriac and Ethiop, Armenian and Akkadian, and Old Church Slavonic, Greek and Saxon and Roman and Manx and languages whose names and sounds are lost and forgotten and have not yet been spoken. He performed the designs, he has felt every emotion joy and love and fear there is to be felt, he wore on his head the celestial disk. Spread before him even are his future lives—he has raised himself so high enough to see them. They keep on going, they never end. He calls to himself and to himself responds. He leaves these lives behind. And the Lord has sent him to Beth-El and to Cambyses where the water is so weak that nothing floats upon it, and he sees a great end and in turn a great beginning for what was selected is cast away, what was rejected becomes the corner-stone of a mighty edifice. The stumbling block becomes the rock, the foundation upon which he reaches and raising himself up he has not answered them, he sees further, beyond his own lives and the lives of others, out and onward and beyond. He has raised himself up as if to float upon it, though nothing can float upon these waters, he is receiving
now, for everything that can exist is in the image of the beholder. He has all time before him now he drinks from the stream of eternity and has passed by Zotiel who guards the gates, he has raised himself up to the summit of the mountain that reaches to heaven and the treasuries of the stars, he has all eternity before him. And his name was raised and his spirit, and he raises himself and the angels raise him. And he looks and sees stone and star and earth receding and all the tapestry of lives receding so he sees the luminaries of the stars in the east in their courses towards the sun and the luminaries in their courses to the heights of the darkness beyond and these are as lights cast before him as stones and pebbles in a garden, and he is lifted up to see the culminating arms and centuries and their dawn of treasure sent across the gulf beyond the regions of heaven known to man. The word of the Lord comes and electrified and with only his name and his spirit he raises himself up to beyond the stars of heaven bound together for there are cycles beyond the stars and their worlds, at the place where the stars are bound together gates are guarded by tongues of light and slipstream vehicles to deny the blight of missing currents for there is a blackness at the center which denies all everything who enter. Beyond the blackness are cycles beyond the vanities of flesh, drawn within and higher still than any luminaries in the regions known to man. And even as he has drawn himself here he sees the other men who watch him [their eyes projecting what they choose to see] their eyes projecting tubes of vision of their local cramped and building world, they see him as a horror and he sees beyond what they will ever [choose] to know/ here there is a circle of cherubim with feet of burnished bronze with
sickened and holy smiles to welcome whom they watch, here the wicked dare not tread the weary wanderer may come to dread the boiling treaty of his faith in form and physicality dissolves and dissipates and he sees it terraced and carved up into the screen from which it is projected overlaid with a swastika pattern of creased and cruciform grid, which is the screen of holographic projection, which is the pure form of idea laid over the light of spirit which infuses every thing. It sickens him and frightens him. When he is high enough and within enough now, the images he sees are beyond celestial and also still within this room and he sees the conference table and the faces of the men who look at him in horror dissolve into a cruciform swastika grid which overlays them, the whole conception of this time and space is seen by him as only something as if it might be a pixelated holograph projection without himself to do the direction /[they call for help he horrifies them so/] when he is high enough now and within enough he sees them dissolve and he is in the black space where the stars have come together, and he sees that every star is an entity, a being not unlike himself but of greater cohesion and magnitude, their coursers and their columns of light are like their limbs and pillars marching across the sun, their spirits and their names are famous creases of roiling light contained and compressed into brilliance and they come together now and then to burst forth into another life. Forsaken in the black space there are cycles above and beyond, cycles and heavens beyond spaces and times he could ever hope or dream to imagine and the only archers and singers and bidding to become is the constant Law of Laws which even here is judging and supreme, the Lord of Lords conceives of even this and defines
it, which is everything unimaginable sacred and profane. For these cycles some of which are darkness for darkness is as necessary as light for darkness is only the space which light has filled and seeing the darkness means he is the light that fills it, for these cycles some of which are desperateness and derision for he sees there the transform of effect the pure form and foundation of physical laws, the Theory that operates on the lower level from which he has come. For these cycles are the circuits of heaven spiraling up and up and within and in and ever inward and onward and unto their courses and their cycles there is never any end. So therefore there is only himself to chastise and revise and ever inward he is drawn as outward and beyond the celestial disk he goes, and so therefore in the blackness and pure light his images are washed and torn away floods and history and crosses sheared of water hills and dread and shaking ground and music and perfume shaking trembling washed and torn away, pious land ploughed away and furrowed through the ruts on the plain and on the mount, on Capernaum and Galilee it sings through him even as it dissolves. There is a song that he is singing even as his every sense and image is washed and torn away, which is everything unimaginable and sacred and profane, his city smoke and dust his principalities, his flesh and bone and blood through these cycles and these circuits of heaven even as his limbs and lusts are torn and burned away, so therefore the veil of the temple has been rent asunder and his loosened spirit climbs the sky, trembling electrified and transformative, pulled forcibly loose legs and feet first and dragged up into the heaven, even so therefore his tormentors do see him and they [/call security, get someone up here to
take him away]/ and they removed from him his tresses and his skin and his sable enclosure and tonsure at the top of his head which connects him still apparently to this world, and his song is a call that reaches to himself and the vibration of a chord that has been struck which is the string of a magnifical harp the size of infinity and no wider then a zero point, and he sees now that there is no end to the number of ticking trembling points of light that can inhabit any particle of space because there is no space there is only light God's ways are ingenious and as it always has been is and forever shall be therefore nothing more than his own imperious and self-provoking thought and now here they are the men [who grasp him by the shoulders] they drag him knees scraping drag and pull him up the men who say/what is he doing is he singing/ some men who are come to take him away in dishonor and disgrace, but this is not the first time he has awakened and perhaps it is not the last, for he has seen now not only what and who and when and how, he has seen that it is for the sacred and profane, the darkness and the light, the madness and the sanity and reason, he has seen this time the WHY, which is a single unity of being which diverged into a myriad of forms, a thousand thousands and ten thousand times ten thousand forms, to delight in the very consciousness of being and to awaken and discover itself ten thousand times ten thousand times and as they drag him away in dishonor and disgrace he sees that it is finished now, he sees everything. He knows.

Chris Katsaropoulos is the author of more than a dozen titles, including two novels,
Fragile
and
Antiphony
. He has traveled extensively in Europe and North America and enjoys collecting music and books. Visit
http://antiphonyck.blogspot.com
to read more, including a collection of his recent poems.