Ekstasis | Robin Wyatt Dunn
I have never escaped the music of its changing patterns, like deadly clouds come down to earth. And I no longer am able to want to.
The verb hallucinate comes from an ancient Attic root meaning to “be distraught” and “wander about.” In this respect it is a useful analogy for life itself, full of pain as it is, without a clear map or chart to guide us.
We who saw the ekstasis are admittedly deranged: for a range is a consensual phenomenon, and we will no longer share consensus with you. To see beyond the veil is to accept the wisdom of its horror, and we did so, to avoid death.
It coursed across the sky that day upon our Stylite encampment, its energies and patterns “a thing to behold,’’ as they say. Fair enough to call it a “thing,” the word is vague enough to encompass both matter and meaning, apparent and hidden operation.
I made some sound with my mouth when I saw it, standing erect as had been our way (now we are away, working on the fulfillment of the ekstasis’ design), a sigh shadowed with a laugh, the kind of laugh that stems from disbelief, though I believed it all soon enough.
I can, of course, only tell what I saw. Perhaps this is the corollary of wisdom: the blurring that comes with consensus, the amalgam of contradictory narratives that is our shared human experience. But my brothers confirmed most of this for me, even as they will no doubt pen their own narratives.
I am Path, said a voice, and grey static like a watery stream coursed down from the sky and onto the earth, covering the ground around me like sun sparkles on a watery surface, only alien, angry.
And then, I am Order, said another voice, and a shadow flicked across the edge of my vision and arranged itself also along the earth, intermingled with the grey static, like a modern painting, or an encrypted image.
And, I am Agreement, said another voice, and whirring burrs of color and energy coalesced from the living madness that had become my woodland retreat, and these willful burrs of alien thought coursed through the shadow and static like little questing bees, seeking some honey I would never understand.
It went on like this. And each of them promised me their powers, provided I devoted my life to their service. Our logics, you see, are not of human construction; there are alive. Reason is an order of the universe with breath, and metabolism. To know this is to accept the arbitrary quality of the mind, its historied millennia of compromises that give us the structure of contemporary human thought, and, by corollary, the method for its control.
Yes, we are a control switch now, and if only as a paean to the fallen creatures we were before ekstasis, I write here, and never again, the way of our passing:
It was a ford, on horrid magic dust,
The way between enlightened continents,
Foundered mad upon the brain.
I who squeezed between this horrid birth canal of ether,
Long past the plastic years of infancy,
Must afterward accept the hindrances within that passage,
That crept into my limbs and breath,
My mouth and tongue.
For now I speak its terrifying music,
To grasp the look of eye of men and women,
Even children,
The force undone by woof and weave,
Wherein my new tribe shall sing our thunderous grief
To find your heresies alive.
Come on inside,
Old things with legs,
We have the way within,
My hand can fall across your thought,
Like shadow over grain,
And starve your wetted brain.
The verb hallucinate comes from an ancient Attic root meaning to “be distraught” and “wander about.” In this respect it is a useful analogy for life itself, full of pain as it is, without a clear map or chart to guide us.
We who saw the ekstasis are admittedly deranged: for a range is a consensual phenomenon, and we will no longer share consensus with you. To see beyond the veil is to accept the wisdom of its horror, and we did so, to avoid death.
It coursed across the sky that day upon our Stylite encampment, its energies and patterns “a thing to behold,’’ as they say. Fair enough to call it a “thing,” the word is vague enough to encompass both matter and meaning, apparent and hidden operation.
I made some sound with my mouth when I saw it, standing erect as had been our way (now we are away, working on the fulfillment of the ekstasis’ design), a sigh shadowed with a laugh, the kind of laugh that stems from disbelief, though I believed it all soon enough.
I can, of course, only tell what I saw. Perhaps this is the corollary of wisdom: the blurring that comes with consensus, the amalgam of contradictory narratives that is our shared human experience. But my brothers confirmed most of this for me, even as they will no doubt pen their own narratives.
I am Path, said a voice, and grey static like a watery stream coursed down from the sky and onto the earth, covering the ground around me like sun sparkles on a watery surface, only alien, angry.
And then, I am Order, said another voice, and a shadow flicked across the edge of my vision and arranged itself also along the earth, intermingled with the grey static, like a modern painting, or an encrypted image.
And, I am Agreement, said another voice, and whirring burrs of color and energy coalesced from the living madness that had become my woodland retreat, and these willful burrs of alien thought coursed through the shadow and static like little questing bees, seeking some honey I would never understand.
It went on like this. And each of them promised me their powers, provided I devoted my life to their service. Our logics, you see, are not of human construction; there are alive. Reason is an order of the universe with breath, and metabolism. To know this is to accept the arbitrary quality of the mind, its historied millennia of compromises that give us the structure of contemporary human thought, and, by corollary, the method for its control.
Yes, we are a control switch now, and if only as a paean to the fallen creatures we were before ekstasis, I write here, and never again, the way of our passing:
It was a ford, on horrid magic dust,
The way between enlightened continents,
Foundered mad upon the brain.
I who squeezed between this horrid birth canal of ether,
Long past the plastic years of infancy,
Must afterward accept the hindrances within that passage,
That crept into my limbs and breath,
My mouth and tongue.
For now I speak its terrifying music,
To grasp the look of eye of men and women,
Even children,
The force undone by woof and weave,
Wherein my new tribe shall sing our thunderous grief
To find your heresies alive.
Come on inside,
Old things with legs,
We have the way within,
My hand can fall across your thought,
Like shadow over grain,
And starve your wetted brain.