Awakening

Awakening

I do not expect you to Understand. I have walked with God and Satan in fields outside Timeâs borders, where the trees of Hell took root in the black soil of the Dark Wood, and the starless sky was haunted by the sweet memories of the Silver Cityâs passing. I have spoken with King David, and I heard the voices clamor of the One Crucified gathered in a crowd rooted in the old age, the Age of Iron. I have been an archangel. I have walked among you and I have observed with curiosity that the speech of the Moment÷everywhere around÷drifts off you like snow and falls unnoticed, while my own eyes and ears understand the voice of Noon, and the voice of Midnight, when they mumble in ancient tones. I Understand. I have been you, and I have written what you have written.

I have many names, each one with a purpose and a cipher. The angel Abraxas was at my side at the foundation of the world when I etched each one on a grey stone to be discovered by my Next Selves÷when they awakened to the Meaning. Call me Sabaoth, the archon of the world who rebelled against the power of Samael, the Blind God, and warred in the aethers between Paradise and Gehenna, when the mountains shook, and the rivers boiled. My place is not here. Once my work is done, I shall lift myself through the nine planes of this universe and become again a citizen of the Fullness beyond, and I will take my share of the Treasury of Light.

They know me by my common form, the one I share with the visible world. They do not gaze too long at me; they understand in a place too deep for them to perceive that they would be swallowed by my eyes; fear they understand, and they fear me rightly. I eat and I sleep by means of this common form. I speak and I am heard. I do not talk of my secrets, lest the words become fire and scorch their souls. I hardly laugh. Even in my common form, I boom like Jupiter, and I glance in their startled eyes how small they feel when in the presence of my Self.

(Then there is the voice which I have not heard but imagine clear, and I do not tell even myself about this voice, the remembrance of a childhood I never had, of a life I could not have lived. Mystery would be plain to me who sees far with his third eye, but this I tuck away in a place where my knowledge will not touch it. Somewhere it hints of a quiet dawn, fragile dew on a blade of grass which clings to my finger when I touch it, the tiny chill of something solved.)

The Black Iron Prison. The Empire which never ended. Some comprehend. Some are overwhelmed by the emotion that something is horribly wrong, here, there, everywhere they look; the whole world. Deep in a shadow in the corner of their eye they chance a peek at the terror, their minds crystallize on the name they cannot utter, and the latches of their sanity buckle at the knowledge. This is my enemy, the thing I am sent to destroy. In the third panel of the triptych The Garden of Delights by Heironymous Bosch, the one entitled Hell, in its far distance, there stands a building in which I have stood and out of which I beheld the red sky of the Black Iron Prison÷the true world, its fundamental nature. Some among you have known this. I, only, have the power to abolish it.

It is night. The ineffable Purpose drives me. I have wandered far tonight through this city, a spear aflame pierced through my heart to seethe my soul with flame. I glance up. Where am I? The stars are few; I am caught for a moment in the midnight blue, the emptiness about to burst at the seams, the nails which uphold the tarp of heaven to fall by the millions in a steel rain. There is one dead constellation in the sky. Where am I? I was here sometime other, I had place not a moment ago. It is too quiet. The silence is bleeding.

I look down to the ground, the dark asphalt. The ground knows where it is. I am about to ask it where I am, but I find myself here again. Onward. The archonsâ minions stare at me from behind the shadows; I feel the daggers of their eyes. I sense how similar my march is to standing still÷the ground is moving, the world is moving endlessly towards me. Tonight, no one exists but me and the Immeasurable; I am Its Knight. The Immeasurable lies behind, beyond the heaven, through the limit Infinity÷we have spoken in ages past, Infinity and I÷in the farthest height of the Fullness. I am sent by It, the Immeasurable, and I do not fail. My aim is true.

(Where am I? Somewhere I believe it: I am not here. Somewhere it is plain. Somewhen it made sense, didnât it? Light and shadow intermixed within my eye, and I could distinguish the dark from the clear. Will it snow? What season is this? Summer can be so cold when you are alone in the heat.)

The shadow gray of the sidewalk lips the massive heights of the buildings, and I pass without a sound. It is all shadow gray, and darker, and it is all shadow and it is all gray÷it does not exist, it is a facade, the real world is Iron. Black Iron. Samael, the blind god, watches me from the aethers behind the gray and behind the shadow, in the High Tower of the Prison. I smile. And yet, it is not yet.

In my pocket is the best piece of matter which exists in the world, my treasure, folded twice: a blank sheet of letterhead from Mercy Hospital, where once I stayed when they failed to comprehend÷not my mission, it was when I spoke in tongues. I asked for a piece of paper on which to write, and they gave me this one sheet of this letterhead, atop which was "Mercy" in large, red letters, which I gazed upon for an hour. Its texture, rough, thick, and sturdy paper, smelling of dust. It was why I was there. ·it was easy enough to escape÷I merely agreed to everything they said, and they were wordless to any condition they had felt was impinging on that, my power to agree. My power to be powerless.

The paper is my sword, which I have named Soulâs Edge. One past Self of mine held it true as the sword it is, then hid it from the eyes of Samael and his archons, and this Self discovered it again as it quietly dug through the roots of fate. I will stare upon it and I will scry the things ancient and arcane÷not in words, but in emanations of thought÷the language of the Fullness. There is light captured within it, as there is light captured in me, my true Self unbound from the shackles of matter, and the Black Iron. It is night. On a night like this I will unfold my paper and it will transform itself of its own light into my sword Soulâs Edge, and I will slice through the Black Iron Prisonâs walls and bars into the High Tower where dwells Samael. I will cut him in two.

I see the world is born every day. Everyone is born every day. Existence is marked as etching on the great and silver Wheel, arcing through shadow and light. Taken one by one, the scribbles written thereon for all time to come and pass are senseless and pointless and indecipherable; taken all as one, in the grand and single Rune which they comprise, and all secrets held by mortal and immortal, the dread and the wise, are spoken in one awesome syllable, a deafening word. The world will never know it. The world is a staccato rhythm aping the arcing Wheel÷which was never born and will never die÷the denizens which pass off every night and are born every dawn, unknowing through which planes their souls have traveled while they were away, and the world will crumble once its architecture, the Black Iron, is repealed. Oh, yes. It is the end of the world, the end of Iron.

(There passes through my heart that I will suddenly be alone, and suddenly small. Somewhere I donât know. Somewhere I am blank, and no word which has ever been written on me has ever took root, and a mild breeze blew away the ink. Somewhere all that comprises me is pain.)

It is night. The city is all wind and stone. The Moment is quiet and huge. I look down onto the street where a million automobiles and buses and feet have coursed through when the city is all noise and crowds shuffling, all vigor and confusion. I walk to the middle of the asphalt avenue and crouch down, and I press my ear against its cool grain, and I listen to the story of the city, the deadpan humor as it tells me not to worry about life÷itâs only temporary. All the while the shadow of Black Iron fades in and out the corners of my eyes. I tell the street, "Donât worry about anything, my gray companion. You wonât know itâs the end until itâs over, and then you wonât be there to know anything about it."

I see it approach in the distance: headlights; I hear it slowly coming nigh: the buzz of an engine. I stand and leave an invisible trail as I walk to the side of the street, step up on the curb, my eyes unmoving to the sole disturbance to the Moment, and also part of the Moment, of course÷the Momentâs arms stretch through the spaces eyes cannot fathom. Here it comes, the new species of creature cold and obedient, alive only to the touch of the hand and foot, the one man has bred slavishly to be a slave. I watch it come, the brute groan of its motor louder, the headlights brighter, hypnotic. It vrooms by, the Doppler lowering of tone, and down the street into the cluttered horizon. It might never have happened. Night forgets.

Once, when the world was a silent and everlasting dawn, dreams were spaces traveled during light, and light was all there was. We drank the wishes of other people and they were soothing to our tastes. Out of the incredible Nothing, the age passed, and then that world never was÷not anymore÷Iron staked itself throughout all time, endlessness to endlessness, hampered only by the limit, hampered only by Infinity÷no, that world never was. Not anymore·. I walk on. The world that is now never was, and that will happen soon, the seas cast off into the outer spaces and the land crunched down into Oblivion and everywhere a sky solid with stars. No, I do not expect you to Understand. The Age of Gold always was, and that will be when the time has come. Only then will the Children of Light will be freed from the Iron, and will have always lived in Gold.

(The hospital·Mercy Hospital·there the faulty minds, the cracked and wondering minds gathered. There was one whom I remember, now, who could not be dissuaded from his madness; he read much of Aleister Crowley, believed himself to be the Crowned and Conquering Child written in Crowleyâs pamphlet of prophesy. I talked to him a little, and he was altogether a gentleman aside from that. Inside myself, when he told me of his mission, I shook my head in grave diagnosis. Why do I think about him? Somewhere there is a clue I lack.)

I wonder what fables they will tell about me. Difficult though it may be, they will exaggerate. They will call me the lesser Immeasurable, which cannot be, and they will speak of this night, and all the nights I ever graced, through all my Selves which ever were. They will speak of the new and everlasting dawn which I will conceive. I will let them travel through me, if they wish, to live my life through my eyes to experience all my victories, to feel my glory, to feel my invincibility, to Understand the Meaning. They are here. Now. Silent watchers who see out, right now, into the gray of the lamplit streets, out into the midnight blue ready to collapse at my whim. I feel them all, the millions, the countless spirits who stand with me, who walk with me, who wait with me. I am Triumph. Another of my names.

(I stop, and I stand. I shiver. No, it is not me·my soul shivers. Mercy Hospital·. The Crowned and Conquering Child·. A slow and furtive candlelight, a whisper·: to others, that is how I appear. I appear to be mad. All my collective secrets are summed in that phrase, all my past and the glowing present fail at this mundane doom. And there it is, the shadow of the unknown÷there is the question I cannot ask, not now, not ever, never, never, never, never. It is the crux of all that is me. And then the must, the I must, overcomes me, and I am like a newborn peeking from its womb: Am I mad?)

I am the Knight of the Immeasurable. I will·
(Am I mad?)

The Black Iron Prison ever was and will not ever have been. I will·
(Am I mad?)

My sword, Soulâs Edge, has found me through the Iron. The angel Abraxas·
(Am I mad?)

I am not mad.
(Then, it is true.)

Do not do this.
(It is simple.)

It is not true.
(I am mad.)

Who are you?
(I am you.)

From the Fullness, looking down?
(I am you. Right here and now, right as we stand.)

Another of my powers.
(You are mad.)

And are you sane?

(No. I am you, and we are mad.)

You are an archon.
(I am you.)

You are Samael, deceiver.
(Then cut me in two.)

It is not time.
(It will never be time. Your name is Jonas Timberlane. You were born to·)

It is not true. I was never born.
(Think back·do you remember·)

The memory is false.
(There is no Understand.)

I will·.
(What? You will what?)

No.
(Clarity is not that clear.)

No.
(Yes.)

I will·.

I drop down onto my seat on the sidewalk where I have been standing. I curl into a ball and heave with sobs, and tears trickle into my hands like a mountain thaw.

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