Monday, December 20, 2010

Chronicon

Chapter 4 Deiknyomena:
The Æolipylæ Provisionals

And still the Weaver plies his loom, whose warp and woof is wretched Man
Weaving th' unpattern'd dark design, so dark we doubt it owns a plan.
-Richard F. Burton: Kasidah


Three young women reunited with their Doyenne were taking lotus tea in a courtyard garden on an island at the mouth of the Mississippi one late summer's afternoon in 1859. Xquiq, a Mayan ajq'ij or weaving day keeper come from the Mexican Island of Swallows accompanied Catiche Villard, the sole living grandchild of the notorious pirate Jean Lafitte as they consulted with their sister, the 'spirituale creature' Madimi, through the medium of the occult looking-glass brought circuitously downriver to this oubliette of freedom, Barataria. Back door to New Orleans, Barataria was the lost pirate utopia of the Lafitte brothers. Formerly protected by 'letters of marque' issued by the Spanish republic of Cartagena fighting for independence from Columbia, it was once teeming with nearly a thousand restless refugees, brigands and exiles from all flags leaving burned bridges behind. This throng had filled the ships' crews with gunners, navigators, carpenters, cooks and sail makers and riggers. Their descendants now constellated the bayous.

Behind them now stuccoed with oyster shells, Lafitte's brick two-story house facing the sea lay in ruins along with forgotten buccaneer schemes of marauding. Before them near the estate, still stood the barracoon quarters where smuggled slaves had awaited clandestine sale less than half a century earlier. Concealed within its crumbling walls there remained cached her grandfather's secret bequest for Catiche.

Xquiq's mother had come in times past to Barataria from Cozumel with Catiche's Creole quadroon grand-mother, Jean Lafitte's wife. An island outpost for Lafitte, Cozumel was sacred to the Maya moon goddess Ix Chel; women desiring children would make a pilgrimage to her temples. There, Catiche's mother had been born. Mother and daughter both had been blessed by the goddess with alluring beauty and insight. They had settled later within the Baratarian colony of palmetto-thatched roof cottages. Catiche inherited what was left of her grand-father's estate once the government and lawyers grew bored of scavenging in the postscript of his disappearance and the mystery of his fate.

Examining Cora's obsidian disc, Xquiq described for Catiche the transient properties of the Mayan mirror in which the Elizabethan Dr. Dee had centuries before stumbled blindly through the playground of their elusive sister, trying to follow her elfin labyrinth as traced by his skryer Edward Kelley.
Looking deep within the glass and following with her eyes Xquiq translated aloud as Madimi, within the glass, turned over bark-paper leafs from a lost Mayan glyphic codex held now in her arms; a tale of the Sisters, of how the earth is untangled and how the heavens are woven.

“Creation is born from the black hole at the Crossroads; birth cleft of the Milky Way's Great Mother. Images appear in the sky. Then will the sun be reborn completing his age-old journey though the stars of the night sky. Jaguar comes from another realm to attend the rebirth of the world, one called Bolon Yokte K’u whose jaguar paw at the foot of the nine-measured Creation Tree marks his presence. Present at the last World Age creation in 3114 BCE and again present at the next one, which begins the day of least light in 2012. 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ahaw 3 K’anki’in. Jaguar is descending along serpent ropes from the sky cleft bringing the ornaments from your ancestors. Ancestors peer out from the mouths of serpents descending from the celestial throne of Mayan kings, the place of transformation.
A sky canoe carved from Creation's Tree rides the Milky Way, sinking below the infinite horizon of night's progress, carrying star children of nearby constellations.
The spotted Jaguar wears these stars of night, its mouth opens the Underworld Portal, the dark rift in the Milky Way. Hear it roar. Our way lies there."


Madimi addressed them directly and spoke.

"Our order, wherein the wonders of time are wrought with power:
with you, as my words are: with my self, as my Creation is.
The generations of our alchemy quicken to fruition. Our trinosophia here prepares our sisters down the way.
Thrice triangular, our facilty extends to the horizon that lays unvanquished; seeing through the Aurorae to the theophanic form of the Eikon. To see in each luminous thing the light that reveals it,
this shewstone's dark lantern yields not reflections, but explication of an order most implicate. Our chamber of operations draws forth the hieroglyph, shedding cinders of vision; lampblackened petals of Midnight's stricken rose. Dark are my dreams choked within this collar of stone.
Here, the Chymical Wedding of novelty and terminus are entombed, incurring serendipity. Though hateful ignorance may mourn the dead believing the dreams of color, shall we play the game existence to the end of the beginning?
My Mother is at hand who opens the will of Fate."

"Behold! she says. I make a new heaven and a new earth..."

"My words pour from many mouths, a fountain everyoung enfolding the overlapping vectors of language reflecting écritures à lunettes; true mirror of our luminous moth drawn ever to the close at day's new dawning."

"But woe be unto those would-be bookends of the earth, for they are full corrupted; a leaking wicked wrasting stock, and firebrand to the conscience."


When Madimi had finished, Xqiq respectfully handed the mirror then to Cora.

Madimi came from a village on the Cauchy Boundary out beyond the lost horizon, unbound, scalar in time. She might appear a pretty girl about eight years old, attired in a chatoyant silk dress of red and green or a voluptuous young woman of their own age as occasioned her fancy. Space however, was another proposition and her interface with this realm was accessed by way of the mirror alone, like a genie and her lamp. Whether she was perceptible visibly or invisibly appeared to depend upon her whim. She might congeal like an apparition, obtaining substantiality in the vicinity outside of the mirror. Phantasmagoric hologram or no, she was capable of delivering some considerable degree of force recognizable to consensual physics.

Seeming to have a special wardship over books, Madimi's exegesis of John Dee's obscure Monas Hieroglyphica had equipped the Sisterhood with a technique for rescripting history.
She also lent an adroit hand at subverting indeterminancy and was instrumental in avoiding Cerberus.

Nightingale, stroking his beard, addressed the conclave.
"In light of precarious confrontations Barataria frequently found itself imbroglioed in with both soverign and foreign intrigue, the Corsair Lafitte prudently invested a sultan's ransom in a covert transport maintained against the advent of a sticky extrication. It awaits us in the old abandoned slave quarters yonder. "

"Finding himself finally in a place beyond fight, flight or seizure; our Æolipylæ's retrocausal itinerary persuaded Lafitte there are those more appreciative of his aerostat's uniquely equipped virtues than mere thrones, powers and dominions. Incomparably augmented by the infamous Lord Byron whom, while in the Aegean upon his travels in exile, encountered a sponge diver named Valerios Kondos. Discoveror of a most peculiar parapegma-like contraption off the island of Symi, that among other things calculates the equation for occurence. Unaware of its remarkable abilities, he gave it to Byron in exchange for the secret recipe to Sindbad's legendary rat-tailed chimichanga, reknowned for sustaining his stranded crew for a fortnight."

" Byron, eventually deciphering the device's recondite purpose, later presented it to Jean Lafitte; a token of his admiration for this other lone, wild and strange Magister Exemptus. Approximately the size of a gravid dictionary, with wooden sides and bronze faces, it operated by a handle on the side manipulating complex epicyclic gearing that indicated the results of its calculations on dials. A sort of hyperdimensional successor to the almanac that provides navigation for the airship. The device included a dial displaying progressed Saros cycles and Callippic cycles synchronized with the periodic solar variation index."

"Powered by a hydromagnetic dynamo driven by the inductive action of internal solar flows; sun storms, in other words, our forty foot long tri-lobe airship was formerly inflated by a portable hydrogen gas generator, a system of tanks and copper plumbing which converts iron filings mixed with sulfuric acid to hydrogen. The generator could be conveyed out to landing fields on a buckboard buggy. We, however, will be requiring a non flammable gas hitherto unknown, made available for use by certain merchants of chance receptive to our terms of trade."

"The balloon itself is composed of silk, varnished with caoutchouc. It's dimensions, containing so many cubic feet of gas supply sufficient supporting power for the machine and all passengers. A balloon, even though perfectly sealed to retain its gas could only be maintained for less than six weeks. We will be equipped however, with emergency provisions alone, as the experience of our transit's duration is accomplished in but a wink of the eye.
The gondola is composed of strong light wicker, with a rim is about four feet deep and furnished with a grapnel and indispensable guide-rope. I'm informed that strong arms indeed await us."

"We will catch the morrow's peak solar maximum, riding the frequency occurrence of coronal mass ejections through the magnetic field's polarity reversal churned by turbulent convection through the transport mechanism of the solar flow. The flux produced from a strong toroidal magnetic field within the solar interior forms a regenerative loop where the toroidal component produces a poloidal field, ones and zeroes."

Catiche shuddered in an attempt to parse Nightingale's code, her blue eyes narrowing through  disheveled hair: delphiniums tangled in blue-black wings lost to foreign fields of flight. Nightingale brayed on til his voice trailed off muttering softly:

“Recta tangit circulum puncto. Intelligentia videns. Contractus ad Punctum.
Adsit Ruach Hochmah-El; intellectus! Es sey Da;
der Geist der Weißheit Gottes; in dir Gott der außerlesene!”

Leaning over to Catiche, with a gleam in her eye Xquiq whispered:
" He can't see the Thesaurus for the Threes..."

Coming round again, he snapped out of his trance.
"Honored fiends & philanthropes, tempus fugit. Ours is the teleological attractor at the end of time unveiling interconnectivity climaxing in the attainment of singularity both infinitely complex and yet of infinite simplicity; the Zefirium. The point at which anything can happen and probably will. Everything imaginable occurring simultaneously. Hallelujah and amen, its about time I reckon."

Cora stirred as she felt the shewstone tremble in her hands. Looking therein she saw the moon looming behind Madimi, bearing an inscription: 'Si nunc se nobis ille aureus arbore ramus
ostendat nemore in tanto!' Madimi then withdrew into an orchard there saying to her, "Draw nearer."
In the mirror her head was half hidden amongst wide, dark leaves.
"The barren fruit upon these branches and amongst these leaves are but withering skulls. Not as they are am I yet. Do you stretch forth your hand."
Cora stretched her hand forth deep into the mirror amongst the branches and through the leaves. Then Madimi kissed her hand. Fire entered into Madimi's mouth and she waxed of higher stature, having now three faces.
"I and I have a few things to say, and I say."
Cora heard a marvelous music, as thunderous as many mountains falling, as if half the world were rushing downhill.
"This that I give thee is my posterity, as for thee, flee from this place into the Upperworld, and go where I shall lead thee."
"Through waste and wild, he wandered wearing the wolves' cap of invisibility; nine times the space that measures day and night waiting.
Confounded though immortal, dreaded hounds ere hunting, almost lost to name but for boon companions and our Lady's troth.
Nearer draw thee still, Haruspex; behold now this Liber Vitreus opening into your confidence. Read herein unfolding odyssey of Aidan's exile and concealment..."

Far upriver, they could all hear the guage-cock of a steamer screaming toward the coming violence of the sun.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From soul to soul hath war been waged,
From star to star, from sun to sun:
Nor e'er shall be the strife assuaged
That's hourly lost and hourly won.
Ancient of Days, that here in light,
And there in darkness, dost array Thee,
Thou madest day, Thou madest night,
And both obey Thee.
The sons of night Thy servants are:
They work Thy will, no less than we,
The sons of light, that with them war
Unwearied where no end can be.
-Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton : ORVAL; 1869
OR, THE FOOL OF TIME. A POEM.
Alias: Owen Meredith
1831-1891 Dedication. TO COUNT ARTHUR DE GOBINEAU
Meredith, Owen. A pseudonym adopted by Edward Robert, first Earl of Lytton (1831-1891 viceroy of India, 1875-80), met de Gobineau at Athens, 1865;), son of the novelist Bulwer-Lytton,
After Paradise or Legends of Exile: With Other Poems

No comments: