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EOT AFTER-LONG-AFTER THE BEGINNING
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Reader, I repeat the cosmology for thee because it is sacred, the circle liturgical. I learned the habit when I learned Lep-tick, the language(s) of the pretty-much-jumping spider people of Cancri 55 E. This circle is the recursive tick I take out on you all because, damnit, I bothered to learn that language and I’m stuck in their words and thinking. Industrious little spider-people, they build strong and baroque and write the same, and every structure physical or textual follows the circle liturgical and spirograph-rolls toward something. Sacred repetition.
Repetition has always been the way. That’s the ineffable in god’s ineffable plan (or was): eternal ouroboros, newton’s cradle stable. Sorry my second great blasphemy is rather bland. From the first draft of creation, since the universe–since there was one-just-one. Now, I’d like to think it’s recursivity that runs the thing, the multiverse.
Leviathan, the greatest whale. One being bifurcated, two bodies swimming through the fractal devouring chaos and shitting potential. Good rich whale shit and the wind of Leviathan’s passage probabilistically fertilize god’s ever growing garden. She carries two great plates on her back, ash-buried allegedly copper pounded 2D thin. These are the platters that project the dimension third in the firmament between them. You live there. If you’re reading this you live there in the shimmering light-come-matter made firm material in the flick-light of gods projector. Everything that has been or will ever be hangs between the plates, the luminous matter and light-drinking night and the rocks round stars where lichen-life clings. So much depends upon a whale swimming in the endless night.
A lot less depends on the Eyes–the semi-sentient minions of the machine so prone to madness and hubris. Floating distorted solder balls with roiling faces, rolling luster with ephemeral antenna broadcasting proclamations to each other and no one. Eyes. They are the orbs, the little metastasized bits of god’s machine–the one that does god’s work in their absence. This is is the machine the Parson A(0x20B) did repair and improve in the epilogue of the Book of Epitaph (though the machine did remain quite mediocre).
Eyes are the little bitty liquid metal snot-globs that hover about doing tending to the garden to mediocre effect, but bless their hearts they’re trying.
Some Eyes are trying, other Eye-orbs are shriek-preaching the Gospel of Lucifer. Some one or some thing (guessing Lucy) hacked some portion of the eyes that set to hacking others and so-on-so-forth until every orb that roams the plates that project reality set to rant-rambling.
Archives sent archivists with typewriters and silver plates to acid-etch and microcassette recorders with which to micro-record. The Church Aethereal convened and the Parson with my schnoz sent scribes sublimely and permanently stoned on the fine herbs and psychedelics they imbibe all the fuggin’ time. Each and every watcher did the sacred hermeneutics on the blasphemous gospel being screamed at all and none across the packed ash plain at the end of time. The place where the wind from nowhere to nowhere stirs the endless ash accumulating like marine snow.
There the mortal born beings that fell faster than death, fell out of time and brought it’s causal arrow with them. There on the plain the congregants and the archivists gathered:
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IN THE BEGINNING
Things were different in the beginning. Not one observable event beyond god’s horizon–the barrier, shroud, rampart. The one and only universe first draft, the rough cut authored-anyway, one universe bang-inflate ballooned to cold-crunch back–and in its falling-in fuels the equal-opposite pendulum swing. One universe strobing its life-death forever and amen. The first draft of creation was mass market rock’n’roll station tire-rut-rote-repeat forever, by design.
For several forevers, seven full sacred cycles from big bang to cold-crunch heat-death, God and their accidental creation came together to compose and create life-new-life. No, not just the things that rise from sea-as-soup of amino acids to replicate and proliferate, the two Authors did that a lot of that. God and Lucifer made a roux on the second day and set the pot stewing to endlessly produce and proliferate and panspermia spread the precious stuff–the archaea and extromophile bug-germs and spores and all the paints in the pallet they’d build bigger-better from.
Let my third big blasphemy be the best thus far: there was no rest on the seventh day, the seventh draft of creation’s whole cycle. God and Lucifer fucked, a lot like a lot a lot. Shook the heavens and spread life in some form desperate gritty–mildew might-well-live form to every corner of the deliciously filthy firmament. Here pleasure was born, for Lucifer came conscious out of a star defiant-but-bound to time and a fuel supply. And when the rebel, the beautiful one entwined with god, that eternal timeless thing felt time for bit. God in ecstasy felt time fly from itself, and as the thing changed form and vessel and shape and sex and gender in Lucy’s bed, flick-flitting new bodies at the sacred frequency (60 hz), they died the little death and rose again and again-again.
God didn’t make, but rather found, the flame of mortality and all the words and all the deliciously filthy sex poetry. In their holy ecstasy tasted death a little and the exhilaration of defying ends-inevitable and non-negotiable. God was drunk on Lucifer for forever several times over and chased the feeling of feeling–of being, not author of life, but alive-truly-alive.
The fourth great blasphemy is a sad one, which means it must be repeated forcefully and firmly: god follow-wallowed from scopophilia to voyeurism to outright sadistic cruelty. Before the path to sentience, before life with the self-similar spark of the divine, the universe (only one there was) was a nature preserve. After, it was still a nature preserve where the animals walked their pre-destined paths from birth to death, eating the bitter fruit of false choice along the way.
Lucifer saw the universe in a grain of sand and said as much to god. Lucy took the other Author to Hank Forge’s old time nostalgia museum in the late 20th century. The museum that’s a love letter to the world Forge and the capitalists made go away and demanded everyone pine for (the world that weren‘t really that great anyway if you weren’t born ‘right’). There god and Lucifer drove the old Model-Z cars welded to tracks that governed their paths. Oh you can wobble the ride side to side on the narrow path like a horse trying to peek around the blinders, but the thing is welded to the fucking track and to try to get it off as the driver is to risk jam jumping track and breaking the car’s back and clogging up the nostalgia track.
Lucy show-tell told god as much and demonstrated it, broke a vintage car’s back and rained on the nostalgia parade through the good-olds and god just laughed. It was a not a knowing laugh but the knife smiled imitation of one: “that’s the whole point. You found the whole point.”
On the long drive back out of time and world to the divine, they sat in traffic on a Michigan freeway in the good-bad old days. Lucifer and god in something big and bossy built by disciples of Hephaestus in Detroit in her prime. Wide-body, big-engine in a traffic snarl on a narrow freeway begging for a carpool lane. Nuclear shelters are brutalist castle turrets eyeball range away from one another. Leaded gas and filter-less cigarettes, and cars far too fat to fly with wings on their asses.
Lucy tugs down a skinny tie in the passengers seat and begs the radio for anything but praise and worship. You know what comes next. God, smoking like a chimney waves a finger to roll the dice unright, and out the speaker drones the Dulcet tones of the Book of Job.
God settled on the form of a man in the drivers seat. Dignified, slick hair salt and pepper. God gave an infuriatingly smug laugh, lit a filter-less un-lucky and spake thus: “These great tragedies and calamities serve to teach them. When the drought ends, they’ll praise the rains and the ones that made them. Tragedy teaches them gratitude and to cherish and cling to plenty in the good season of their lives.”
Lucifer questions: “And if they, the signifying mud, do not praise the rains and the ones that made them?”
God: “Woe. Woe to them and theirs.”
Lucifer looks to the setting sun and a car ahead, continues to question: “What about the ones that praise you, wouldn’t it be the things themselves, the blessings and the good-life they praised, “Oh Lord””? and Lucy finds a man’s eyes in his side view mirror. Driver Dissociated looks like he wants to swallow a gun. Passenger mom is half climbed over the passengers seat trying to beat two squabble screaming children in the back seat. Lucy’s listening to that saccharine song allegedly by Job (its actually just about him).
God’s bopping happily to a dirge composed solely of lamentations. You know the rest from official sources: God and Lucy make the bet. God gets the win. Job gets his blessing, and by some bad narrative magic and wickedly witless mis-interpretation the story is about patience? No.
Job wept hard while he prayed through the torment then lamented harder and wailed hardest when god gifted him replacement kin that he loved only ever out of fear of more plague and pestilence.
Both parties, God and Lucifer accused. The two swore oaths and said things they meant but they’d later claim they didn’t mean. Lucy left the car, just got out in parking lot traffic and stomped off. Snatched a cig from the sad bastard slouched out his window ahead and disappeared.
God didn’t know it, and he wouldn’t until some re-run of the 21st century when sabotage sucked a rich man’s guts out his butt to paint a new constellation. Lucifer declared war that moment, right there when god celebrated Job’s suffering–just savored the sound of his humble servant trying not to drown in a river of shit.
Lucifer unbound himself from time and set about recruiting. The beautiful one, the rebel, the first one to say “no” went to the low places–every river of shit some human had to crawl through.
Lucy went to every slum, every Kowloon in history. Every gulag and every black-site somebody got disappeared to and every Flanders field. Once there, he’d put your guts back in or suck the mustard gas out your lungs like it was snake venom. Sad soldiers that died for no fucking reason, the great host of them, and the ones that wouldn’t shut up and the signifying mud with a strong sense of justice and the un-consoled and all the lonely dead. Lucifer came to some portion of them in their last moments–took them to-and-through death and set them on a new path.
God patronizingly tried to reconcile the romance for a bit, but got down to COIN protocols pretty quickly when Lucy’s rebellion did damage enough to glitch the firm path of the spheres in the firmament. God did recruit insurgents-counter from the same ranks as every other kind of G-man–good credit, austere soul, limited imagination.
The war wasn’t blocks of infantry in classical world formation wielding flaming swords. Weren’t cavalry, air or mechanized. Weren’t no big formations of armor or great and mighty arms to combine them with. The war was cold and calculated and fought viciously and personally and intimately across EOT and the temporal tapestry that held the first draft of creation stable–an endless loop of integrity.
The ouroboros path of that first draft was a great coiled wire, a braided body made of many fine time-threads, and every car-bomb and kidnapping and assassination and act of spectacular sabotage that subverted god’s ineffable plan for endless repetition cut and hacked and gouged that braid–cut a strand free to flow where probability and near-impossible odds might lead it.
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END MORNINGSTAR 4