Alchemisland

How can a man proclaim to love wisdom if he has not left the place of his birth for Athens and dwelled there in a house called Sofia, therein poring over the texts of ages and inheriting the crown of owls. 

If the Internet were to disappear overnight, imagine the difficulty one would have convincing later generations of its existence. You cannot point to a photograph of it, as you cannot point to a ghost. The invisible information conveyance system which encompasses and pervades yet has neither form nor scent, which boasts will and strength yet is somehow lacking these qualities. A machine of infinite knowledge whose mathematical mastery enables it to comprehend most all things, but without agency. 

Stephen Hawking is possessed of a higher brain. He comprehends infinity, more perhaps. And yet he is confined to less than a room. Confined to a single seat. To a single form and shape and posture, like a man trapped in the jagged fracture left by a time grenade, frozen in a moment. He is a single frame dense with noise containing all of the world’s knowledge inside it. 

Confined to his innermost cloisters, Stephen Hawking summoned vistas beyond comprehension. In stillness he bore witness to sanity shattering cosmic events, and understood them and brought them back to us. He was in archetype an Orpheus, undergoing stellar katabasis. That pitiful vessel had not even to discard its spirit for two paces of vile earth to contain it wholly. The machine without legs, the gospel unproclaimed. 

The point is, the Internet is best illustrated through a demonstration of its function and utility and ease of use. One imagines that the person querying the Internet to be a luddite relation to whom patience must be extended. Rather than explain the complexities of peer to peer networking, flip out your device, Google something period appropriate and hope to solicit a nostalgic, and therefore favorable, response. If you had not that power, you had only the physical remnants of the network to explain the philosophy and function of what once was the Internet, how would you go about it? Would you not sound the loon? Half knowing how it works, evading the more technical questions, eventually you would find yourself describing an ancient and forgotten magical system of divination whereby answers to questions were proffered from the very aethyr. 

Consider the puzzling remnants of the past then cast your eye to the puzzling things of our own time. Humanity is defined and graded by its best, naturally. How many brilliant minds need die by natural catastrophe for our advanced technical manuals to be rendered as redundant oddities of lost Atlantean time. Technology without an instruction manual becomes as puzzling as an initiate text to the cowan’s eye. Glance at the stone places from the dim, maddening past and grasp at their function. Wonder what invisible fields their majesty upheld. What vast bodiless forces were constrained by the obelisks and the round towers and the jagged menhirs, around the bases of which cattle prefer to graze. We are upbraided for this thinking, yet we are ourselves surrounded and controlled entire by invisible forces other than those which the biblical canon describes. 

Ragged rocks we have remanded to history’s reliquary, where like the forgotten bones of an anchoress are secreted the rudiments of religions rawer than modern sensibilities would allow. Obels and liths, ornaments or symbols or signifiers but always allegories. Wars erupt between the factions. Those who say that the stones speak of dawning human domesticity, the development of our need for art, the development of esthetics, versus those who say that the stones speak of the zenith of human intelligence, the harnessment of technology so sympathetic to its environment as to be rendered invisible; that is to say that the gaudy and everpresent thumbprint of man upon the mold are not here seen, only the hand of the architect diaphanous as a flywing writing upon the vellum of the world’s vast shoulders. 

Between factions no agreeable resolution can be met. Their disparate viewpoints quench common humanity and feed hatred. Both sides gradually begin to hate not the ideas themselves but the man to subscribe to them and hold them like coiled worms in their black and alien hearts. Either the menhirs are crude idols against which were dashed, like the hopes of the infertile, malleable newborn skulls, mere facsimiles of rude gods which the spastic hullucinogelded minds of humanity’s cannibal ancestors had devised while fulfilling the murderous requirements of forest mystery plays designed to awaken in participants knowledge of propagation and cycle, or they are foxclever technological curios aligned to solstices with alienating precision. Nothing save for conflict between these disparate, antipodean notions. 

Technological. Take knee, logical. Dismal futures. Where are the horse and his rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Humanity for ten generations will curse the poet for ever deifying War’s inherent glory. Homer will be excluded, from canon to cannon. Published will be texts of sufficient passion that the profoundly moved will call for the wholesale prohibition of War. So incensing and ensorcelling the rhetoric of these articles by design, that they circumvent the critical faculties of man, in the rare specimens where they are displayed consistently. Confused masses, themselves part of the whole, will look to the other, themself part of the whole, and loathe them and ask them ‘Why do ye make war and killing?’ They will be made to argue war with passionate intensity and on the steps of sunken institutions, spar with borrowed grammar and to-let philosophy, until the pointlessness of that affair is dawned on them at last, and they realize that to cleanse the world of war they must engage in the greatest war of all, to end all war; one last epidemic of insane violence to sate forever the sanguine dipsomania of the living soil. They will fear and loathe the noble bugle, as the pathological fear the blowing of the war-stoking trumpet of the Egyptian boy king. The bugle which gives forth a sound which in a vacuum does not recall war. Yet, by proximity and symbol and implication, the bugle is as kin to war as the foaming destrier or the stained macehead like an iron cherry. The bugle is banned and the bugler and his family are tortured with lousy strife with not a dog’s rasher to grease their pan. No more will Man muster the herd, nor sally forth. Neither death nor glory but expiration and repetition and recycling of old forms. 

Dismal dismal dreams of dismal futures. Cellophane stretched over the expanse of the ocean. Enormous suffocation. The death throes of hidden leviathan of the depths, the density of his demise, his gargantuan corpse sways further from the surface. His crashing impact with the floor of the ocean will cause quakes on the earth and in the heavens. Air itself will seem to sweat. Heat from a phalanx of phallic rockets will cause the air to tear, bend around it, ripple, spiral and wobble. 

Humanity will some day march to the beat of programmed drums, and the music of the spheres whose vibrative rhythm stirred the dusts of eternity toward the dance of time will not be heard anymore upon the earth. Only the resounding pulsing mechanical heart of the thing like a killer’s guilt thump thump thump the Saturnian drum thump thump thump thump thump Time itself thump thump the tunnel through which we pass thump thump the fire in which we burn thump thump thump heat applied to clay formed in a human lump thump thump thump.

Through a man of reason Stephen Hawking has much in common with inspired creator William Blake, with whom he shared a fourfold vision which ostensibly granted to the naked eye insights regarding the complexity of everything at every level of size, of everpresent infinity that exists outside time. Both men are blessed with the condition of saints and holy fools. An inner sight which makes martyrs from braggards, or inspires simple sheepherds to create works of singular truth with skill surpassing the rough instruments of their artificers. 

A curse to those who do sink but a blessing to the diver. Perhaps it is best described as divine synesthesia: we the rabble see the paintings, artists in their inspired states see the brushstrokes, but only the illuminated perceive the phantom hand and the stellar quill, that which traced the points of the stars from the canvas of the first void and plotted their prophetic courses, and which set in motion black stars and zodiacs hitherto unknown to man.