Seer
Myth making.
The rock opera composes itself without asking. I am running, running down streets, I am running up the hill that overlooks the city, music crashing through my skull. Mythical fragments take shape and shake loose, bits of cave wall dusting my shoulders like rain. Memory vessels cannot help but expand and contract. They stretch into shapes of meaning with such ease, so naturally, they move the way tides do, forming salty pools on the shoreline between life and death. These are the sands where Antigone dances, where Demeter’s mouth foams with swirling whitecaps. I melt into the spaces where contradictions speak the loudest, where ways of being break down. Thresholds, doorways, shorelines, the daily commute, the murky edges of activity. How much tension a muscle will endure before something snaps, demands release. How much pressure separate objects will exert upon on each other before the violence of merging. Here there is something interesting, there is curiosity and breakthrough.
You float through the morning like a memory. Everything is grey and pale orange and the air is thick with mist and woodfire smoke. You are stepping on the hems of your boot cut jeans with the rhinestones on the back pockets, they are fraying and soaked dark with moisture and mud, the coarse swirl of wet denim chafes against your ankles. This is something you can touch, something you can smell, something you can see. Now for what you hear: the chainsaws growling, shredding through the pine. This is a town called Hope. The air thins now, like it’s making room for something. This is what you taste.
When you move your elbow through space, the atmosphere ripples. Once you poured yourself inside a mold and emerged as a new shape, hardened. Miracle making is not always easy work. You walk a web of tightropes, weave a cosmic tapestry out of strands connecting rest and action, isolation and immersion, past and future. Your feet fly between braided strands, you hover midair. The dance requires great focus and ease. Most of all, it requires patience.
This is the most difficult part, the gathering, before the threads can be teased out, before the weft reveals its pattern. First you must stay very still, watch how the shadows move, unfocus your eyes around the wobble flicker candle wick. The surface world is flat and bright and flashing urgently, fire alarms, dial tones, everything blurred and diffused through eye watering light. Take your pills every morning, drag yourself out of bed in the dark to sit still and leave pieces of yourself stranded in all the brightness.
You perceive time as ephemeral and disjointed as you catapult the past into the present. The present sags with the weight of all the past hoarded within it. Billions of eyeballs track the translucent paper clock, marked with postmodern plastic absurdity on one side and cuneiform shadows on the other. Each side spells out the same things, but loses some crucial essence that translation can never truly grasp. The clock face bends and folds in on itself as time annihilates space. The hyperreality experienced in virtual worlds is a gravitational force; it pushes us into the valley of the crease.
No, we were not born in a garden, we did not emerge from the caves. Our embodiment has irreversibly merged and reproduced with the machine, And yet, we break and merge and break again. The world’s oldest story does not just end, we know this, it perverts, it extracts, it reproduces, so crass, this remains true through all time, across all space, regardless of situation in ages defined by bronze, iron, steel, or information. We remain like the chorus, crying out our unheeded advice to the players onstage. Their job is not to listen, they dazzle and follow the script, they fall to their knees, struck blind by incestuous tragedies.
Your body has been preserved perfectly in the bogs, hair and all. You would think you died only two weeks ago. It becomes a fight to be moved, but on occasion you are jolted through that needle eye of remembrance. You would die for this album, for a text back from a near stranger, for a warm ride home. Yes, this is the stuff you live for. In the in-betweens you exert the body and constrain the soul in the simulated scrabble for financial and cultural capital. You could be better, you could be worse. Long ago this was all written on the cave wall, it was etched into tablets. This part is not particularly interesting. You’ve heard it all before, the mundane horrors, the banal evils, the sample of a cover of a cover. You should have heard the song when it was just the scritch scratch of keeping count, tallying trade with uruk and phonenecia. It must have been wonderful to see a sandal become a coin become a bottle of perfume become a knife with a hilt encrusted with stones from the mountain. It must have felt impossible.
