A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow in the morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
- T.S. Elliot, “The Waste Land”
The thing that is Erasmus dreams.
The dream is at first a black net sprawled with dripping starlight – each one counts and recounts the next, falling away from a thin line that stretches on and on. It is nothing, it is a wound in nothing, and then it is, as all things are: it comes closer, edging, tiptoeing the strand of reality that winds a chain of universes. There is more outside of it, something incomprehensible, just as it would be for a fish to breach the silver lining of the only thing it has ever known, hook in cheek, gone unto some separate hell that burns and screams and suffocates. But Erasmus does not dream of that outer glass – he doesn't even tap its surface, content with the careening heat of meteors and stars and the great, unending blackness in which no sound breaks.
It is easy to become lost here, here in that net. It is easy to suspend oneself to the feeling of simultaneous knowing and unknowing, that ecstasy of realizing that you are no longer one small drop in an ocean but you are the ocean itself. And here it rains and rains, but you are always whole.
Erasmus, or the thing that is, does not ever lose itself in this consuming Beyond. It knows that the line is not some two-dimensional spectacle dripping starlight – it knows that it is not some bucket overflowing with life and sense. It knows that his back is against that silver lining between realities, and what is before him is a Dawn. It does not look like the dawns on novus, or the dawns a fish sees when sunlight treads refracted beams over the murky shadow in which sharks wade. It is a dawn of time and space in a universe that can only ever be understood by a thing that has existed inside of it. That starlight is not dripping downward but outward and forward, and before one – one who has not dreamed of beginnings, only ends – knows it, they are engulfed by all of it.
Maybe to one it would seem a nightmare. Maybe they would open their mouth to scream and scream, and no matter what resounded in their head they would never hear their echo – because the density of space swallows their breath and voice. It is soundless. Seemingly endless. (But we know better.) Speaking into its depths is even worse than screaming your frustrations into the pillow, because at least the pillow only muffles the sound, not silencing it, and maybe now you realize that comfort did not come just from expelling the tightness of rage in your lungs but also hearing the voice that erupts and knowing that you are there. Space does not provide that mercy. There is only insanity or clarity in it, and the line between them is thinner than the glass between realities.
Maybe, when one sees the totality of the universe rushing them, they do not feel as though they are becoming smaller, smaller, smaller. Maybe they do not see the terror in once being broader than those bright bulbs of whirling gases and now being as small as a speck of dust in their eye. Maybe one sees beauty, epiphanous and relieving, as the milky way which was once before you a toy racetrack of cosmic bodies is now a vast sea of blinking, infinite celestial lights that begin to resemble fireflies caught in a jar. Maybe it is valid to wonder which are true and which are reflections, bumping restlessly against the glass.
The feeling of shrinking through the understanding of space must be something that takes utmost competency, because it is difficult to explain. None have ever known the feeling of diminishing, because we have ever only known growing, but the pain is similar. In here, it is easy to forget that it is a dream, but once one does – the pain is nonexistent, a shot of morphine, a fever frenzy of hallucinated euphoria. Until then it is ache that persists in bones, in flesh, in hairs; every fiber whipped, every molecule subjected to the claustrophobic woe, every other atom blinked from existence.
One may think, the only thing worse is the feeling of meteoric descent.
It starts when one skids past the last breath of light shewn by a distant, final sun – a dying thing. It is beet red and sore, glimmering like a fading beacon, like a lighthouse on a faraway hill: SOS, SOS, SOS. It swells, it breathes! A heavy, labored gesture of a death spiral, its poisoned core rattling, throbbing. The fires of its surface are nearly extinguished, each one rising and falling and sputtering out, reaching restlessly to grasp the meteors that pass, tonguing planets that scorch black with its touch. Some stars collide against it, but even they have forgotten how to scream.
And before you have time to gather your thoughts, you are plummeting, a sensation of being plucked by your shoulders from the revolving, cannibalistic star system. It is a graceless feeling, the backwards fall into this alien earth – it is hot, it is pain, anguish, that feeling when you miss a step and stumble dumbly into the dark and your breath hitches in your throat and your heart rises to meet it and feels as though it may burst. You can wait for the ground to embrace you harshly, maybe wait for your bones to break and splinter, or your skin to blacken with the torrent that surrounds you. But all there is to greet you is the likeness of a marsh on a hazy morning that gathers you softly in its lap – but it isn't morning here, is it? It isn't Novus that reminds you of its soft pastures of green, and it isn't a Tarastellan bog that shrouds you in lofty canopies of bird calls and precarious shadows. This stretch of terra is tree-less, bird-less, there are only grasses that reach yards until the end of the plateau you stand on, blades of grass that look sharp as razors when you tousle them. Though you can see when you are close enough to them that they are silver, they take on a pinkish hue in the light of that dying sun. It paints all in faint shades of red, and deeper quarters throw shadows blacker than night.
The plateau you have been deposited on does not stand more than twenty feet from the ground below, and its top spans a kilometre in each direction. If you clamber to its edge, you'll find that the silver grasses extend as far as you can see – until they disappear into a maroon dust or fog at the horizon. All throughout are red rivers or creeks or ponds, stringing on like veins through the pinkish-silver witch grass. But there is no sound of water, nor is there any sign of bubbling or gushing in those tributaries, and it becomes a question of whether it is water at all or something that resembles water. The more you stare, the more it may seem that the latter is most true. In fact, there are no sounds here. It is dead quiet, as if the world (and everything in, out, and about it) is holding its breath. But if you are to speak, dear sleepwalker, you'll find relief that your voice returns to you, as well as the awful realization that it echoes on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on...
If you're paying attention, you can even catch the moment a meteor – or a moon – or even a small planet – hurdles toward the sphere whose plateau you stand on and disappears beneath its horizon. Perhaps you'll make quite a few observations. Perhaps you will notice that the red sun draws a shadow over another smaller but equally sore star, and that they revolve around one another with such a tension that it seems one may draw the other at any moment. Or you will notice that these suns move faster than the sun that casts its loving gaze over the earth you know – terrifyingly so, prowling like a predator circling prey, watching like a scorned god pitying a poor sacrifice. There is no morning, yes, but in its unnerving revolution there is also no definable noon, afternoon, or night. You may notice that you are light here, almost light as a feather – and it is a wonder that if you were to drop from the plateau, you may fall just as weightlessly upon the silver-pink grasses below with nary a labor. But what waits there? Those grasses are taller, and while there is no wind, something moves them. Perhaps you will notice that you feel watched, though none stand with you, and it is uncertain if the feeling comes from that sore thumb of a stunted sun or shadows in deep gulleys below or things that move the grasses or even each blade of grass themselves.
And then, something sprouts from the grass at your feet – something that slicks across your ankle and coils softly just above your hoof before slipping back into the ground with a quiet, damp click. A snake? A worm? A tentacle? A tongue?
That's when the hum begins. It is everywhere. It is constant. It is maddening. But isn't it comforting, to finally hear a noise besides your own voice?
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is a shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow in the morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
- T.S. Elliot, “The Waste Land”
The thing that is Erasmus dreams.
The dream is at first a black net sprawled with dripping starlight – each one counts and recounts the next, falling away from a thin line that stretches on and on. It is nothing, it is a wound in nothing, and then it is, as all things are: it comes closer, edging, tiptoeing the strand of reality that winds a chain of universes. There is more outside of it, something incomprehensible, just as it would be for a fish to breach the silver lining of the only thing it has ever known, hook in cheek, gone unto some separate hell that burns and screams and suffocates. But Erasmus does not dream of that outer glass – he doesn't even tap its surface, content with the careening heat of meteors and stars and the great, unending blackness in which no sound breaks.
It is easy to become lost here, here in that net. It is easy to suspend oneself to the feeling of simultaneous knowing and unknowing, that ecstasy of realizing that you are no longer one small drop in an ocean but you are the ocean itself. And here it rains and rains, but you are always whole.
Erasmus, or the thing that is, does not ever lose itself in this consuming Beyond. It knows that the line is not some two-dimensional spectacle dripping starlight – it knows that it is not some bucket overflowing with life and sense. It knows that his back is against that silver lining between realities, and what is before him is a Dawn. It does not look like the dawns on novus, or the dawns a fish sees when sunlight treads refracted beams over the murky shadow in which sharks wade. It is a dawn of time and space in a universe that can only ever be understood by a thing that has existed inside of it. That starlight is not dripping downward but outward and forward, and before one – one who has not dreamed of beginnings, only ends – knows it, they are engulfed by all of it.
Maybe to one it would seem a nightmare. Maybe they would open their mouth to scream and scream, and no matter what resounded in their head they would never hear their echo – because the density of space swallows their breath and voice. It is soundless. Seemingly endless. (But we know better.) Speaking into its depths is even worse than screaming your frustrations into the pillow, because at least the pillow only muffles the sound, not silencing it, and maybe now you realize that comfort did not come just from expelling the tightness of rage in your lungs but also hearing the voice that erupts and knowing that you are there. Space does not provide that mercy. There is only insanity or clarity in it, and the line between them is thinner than the glass between realities.
Maybe, when one sees the totality of the universe rushing them, they do not feel as though they are becoming smaller, smaller, smaller. Maybe they do not see the terror in once being broader than those bright bulbs of whirling gases and now being as small as a speck of dust in their eye. Maybe one sees beauty, epiphanous and relieving, as the milky way which was once before you a toy racetrack of cosmic bodies is now a vast sea of blinking, infinite celestial lights that begin to resemble fireflies caught in a jar. Maybe it is valid to wonder which are true and which are reflections, bumping restlessly against the glass.
The feeling of shrinking through the understanding of space must be something that takes utmost competency, because it is difficult to explain. None have ever known the feeling of diminishing, because we have ever only known growing, but the pain is similar. In here, it is easy to forget that it is a dream, but once one does – the pain is nonexistent, a shot of morphine, a fever frenzy of hallucinated euphoria. Until then it is ache that persists in bones, in flesh, in hairs; every fiber whipped, every molecule subjected to the claustrophobic woe, every other atom blinked from existence.
One may think, the only thing worse is the feeling of meteoric descent.
It starts when one skids past the last breath of light shewn by a distant, final sun – a dying thing. It is beet red and sore, glimmering like a fading beacon, like a lighthouse on a faraway hill: SOS, SOS, SOS. It swells, it breathes! A heavy, labored gesture of a death spiral, its poisoned core rattling, throbbing. The fires of its surface are nearly extinguished, each one rising and falling and sputtering out, reaching restlessly to grasp the meteors that pass, tonguing planets that scorch black with its touch. Some stars collide against it, but even they have forgotten how to scream.
And before you have time to gather your thoughts, you are plummeting, a sensation of being plucked by your shoulders from the revolving, cannibalistic star system. It is a graceless feeling, the backwards fall into this alien earth – it is hot, it is pain, anguish, that feeling when you miss a step and stumble dumbly into the dark and your breath hitches in your throat and your heart rises to meet it and feels as though it may burst. You can wait for the ground to embrace you harshly, maybe wait for your bones to break and splinter, or your skin to blacken with the torrent that surrounds you. But all there is to greet you is the likeness of a marsh on a hazy morning that gathers you softly in its lap – but it isn't morning here, is it? It isn't Novus that reminds you of its soft pastures of green, and it isn't a Tarastellan bog that shrouds you in lofty canopies of bird calls and precarious shadows. This stretch of terra is tree-less, bird-less, there are only grasses that reach yards until the end of the plateau you stand on, blades of grass that look sharp as razors when you tousle them. Though you can see when you are close enough to them that they are silver, they take on a pinkish hue in the light of that dying sun. It paints all in faint shades of red, and deeper quarters throw shadows blacker than night.
The plateau you have been deposited on does not stand more than twenty feet from the ground below, and its top spans a kilometre in each direction. If you clamber to its edge, you'll find that the silver grasses extend as far as you can see – until they disappear into a maroon dust or fog at the horizon. All throughout are red rivers or creeks or ponds, stringing on like veins through the pinkish-silver witch grass. But there is no sound of water, nor is there any sign of bubbling or gushing in those tributaries, and it becomes a question of whether it is water at all or something that resembles water. The more you stare, the more it may seem that the latter is most true. In fact, there are no sounds here. It is dead quiet, as if the world (and everything in, out, and about it) is holding its breath. But if you are to speak, dear sleepwalker, you'll find relief that your voice returns to you, as well as the awful realization that it echoes on, on, on, on, on, on, on, on...
If you're paying attention, you can even catch the moment a meteor – or a moon – or even a small planet – hurdles toward the sphere whose plateau you stand on and disappears beneath its horizon. Perhaps you'll make quite a few observations. Perhaps you will notice that the red sun draws a shadow over another smaller but equally sore star, and that they revolve around one another with such a tension that it seems one may draw the other at any moment. Or you will notice that these suns move faster than the sun that casts its loving gaze over the earth you know – terrifyingly so, prowling like a predator circling prey, watching like a scorned god pitying a poor sacrifice. There is no morning, yes, but in its unnerving revolution there is also no definable noon, afternoon, or night. You may notice that you are light here, almost light as a feather – and it is a wonder that if you were to drop from the plateau, you may fall just as weightlessly upon the silver-pink grasses below with nary a labor. But what waits there? Those grasses are taller, and while there is no wind, something moves them. Perhaps you will notice that you feel watched, though none stand with you, and it is uncertain if the feeling comes from that sore thumb of a stunted sun or shadows in deep gulleys below or things that move the grasses or even each blade of grass themselves.
And then, something sprouts from the grass at your feet – something that slicks across your ankle and coils softly just above your hoof before slipping back into the ground with a quiet, damp click. A snake? A worm? A tentacle? A tongue?
That's when the hum begins. It is everywhere. It is constant. It is maddening. But isn't it comforting, to finally hear a noise besides your own voice?
@
