Unsong
Page 1
Table of Contents
Prologue
Book I: Genesis
Chapter 1: Dark Satanic Mills
Interlude א: The Cracks In The Sky
Chapter 2: Arise To Spiritual Strife
Interlude ב: The Code of the World
Chapter 3: On A Cloud I Saw A Child
Chapter 4: Tools Were Made And Born Were Hands
Chapter 5: Never Seek To Tell Thy Love
Interlude ג: Cantors and Singers
Chapter 6: Till We Have Built Jerusalem
Chapter 7: The Perishing Vegetable Memory
Chapter 8: Laughing To Scorn Thy Laws And Terrors
Chapter 9: With Art Celestial
Chapter 10: Bring The Swift Arrows Of Light
Interlude ד: N-Grammata
Chapter 11: Drive The Just Man Into Barren Climes
Interlude ה: The Right Hand Of God
Chapter 12: Borne On Angels’ Wings
Interlude ו: There’s A Hole In My Bucket
Chapter 13: The Image Of Eternal Death
Chapter 14: Cruelty Has A Human Heart
Chapter 15: O Where Shall I Hide My Face?
Chapter 16: If Perchance With Iron Power He Might Avert His Own Despair
Interlude ז: Man On The Sphere
Book II: Exodus
Chapter 17: No Earthly Parents I Confess
Chapter 18: That The Children Of Jerusalem May Be Saved From Slavery (Passover Bonus Chapter)
Chapter 19: The Form Of The Angelic Land
Chapter 20: When The Stars Threw Down Their Spears
Chapter 21: Thou Also Dwellest In Eternity
Interlude ח: War and Peace
Chapter 22: Whose Ears Have Heard The Holy Word
Chapter 23: Now Descendeth Out Of Heaven A City
Interlude ט: The General Assembly
Chapter 24: Why Dost Thou Come To Angels’ Eyes?
Chapter 25: Lie Down Before My Feet, O Dragon
Interlude י: The Broadcast
Chapter 26: For Not One Sparrow Can Suffer And The Whole Universe Not Suffer Also
Interlude כ: The Outer Gate
Chapter 27: The Starry Floor, The Watery Shore
Chapter 28: Hid As In An Ark
Interlude ל: New York City
Chapter 29: He Who Respects The Infant’s Faith
Chapter 30: Over The Dark Deserts
Chapter 31: The Foundation Of Empire
Chapter 32: The Human Form Divine
Chapter 33: The Doors Of Perception
Chapter 34: Why Wilt Thou Rend Thyself Apart, Jerusalem?
Chapter 35: The Voices Of Children In His Tents
Chapter 36: My Father’s Business
Interlude מ: Miss American Pie
Chapter 37: Love That Never Told Can Be
Chapter 38: I Will Not Cease From Mental Fight
Chapter 39: Fearful Symmetry
Chapter 40: In Terrible Majesty
Book III: Revelation
Chapter 41: Go Love Without The Help Of Any Thing On Earth
Interlude נ: CHANGELOG
Chapter 42: Whose Whole Delight Is In Destroying
Chapter 43: Lest They Be Annihilated In Thy Annihilation
Chapter 44: A World Within Opening Its Gates
Chapter 45: In The Remotest Bottoms Of The Caves
Chapter 46: To Talk Of Patience To The Afflicted
Chapter 47: For He Beheld New Female Forms
Chapter 48: Bring Me My Chariot Of Fire
Interlude ס: Binary
Chapter 49: Terrors Of The Sun And Moon
Interlude ע: Hell on Earth
Chapter 50: Silent As Despairing Love
Interludes פ and צ: 80s and 90s
Chapter 51: He Wondered That He Felt Love
Chapter 52: The King Of Light Beheld Her Mourning
Chapter 53: Lover Of Wild Rebellion
Interlude ק: Bush
Chapter 54: My Course Among the Stars
Chapter 55: None Can Visit His Regions
Interlude ר: The Shrouded Constitution
Chapter 56: Agony In The Garden
Interlude ש: Obama
Chapter 57: Now Taking On Ahania’s Form…
Chapter 58: …And Now The Form Of Enion
Interlude ת: Trump
Chapter 59: Clothe Yourself In Golden Arms
Chapter 60: O Rose, Thou Art Sick
Chapter 61: And Ololon Said, Let Us Descend Also, And Let Us Give Ourselves To Death In Ulro Among The Transgressors
Chapter 62: That The Wide World Might Fly From Its Hinges
Chapter 63: My Wrath Burns To The Top Of Heaven
Chapter 64: Another Better World Shall Be
Chapter 65: The Fruit Of My Mysterious Tree
Chapter 66: In The Forests Of The Night
Chapter 67: The Night Of Enitharmon’s Joy
Chapter 68: …Puts All Heaven In A Rage
Book IV: Kings
Chapter 69: Love Seeketh Not Itself To Please
Chapter 70: Nor For Itself Hath Any Care
Chapter 71: But For Another Gives Its Ease
Chapter 72: And Builds A Heaven In Hell’s Despair
Epilogue
Prologue
I.
In retrospect, there had been omens and portents.
(“We are now approaching lunar sunrise,” said William Anders, “and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.”)
Rivers flowed uphill. A new star was seen in the night sky. A butchered pig was found to have the word “OMEN” written on its liver in clearly visible letters.
(“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”)
Lightning struck in clear weather. Toads fell from the clouds. All ten thousand lakes in Minnesota turned to blood; scientists blamed “phytoplankton”.
(“And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”)
A majestic golden eagle flew onto the Vatican balcony as Pope Paul VI was addressing the faithful. The bird gingerly removed the Pontiff’s glasses with its beak, then poked out his left eye before flying away with an awful shriek.
(“And God called the light Day,” said Jim Lovell, “and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.”)
A beached whale was found hundreds of miles inland. A baby was born with four eyes.
(“And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”)
Pieces of paper with the word “OMEN” written on them fell from the clouds. A beached whale was seen in the night sky. Babies left unattended began to roll slowly, but unmistakeably, uphill.
(“And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”)
One of the additional eyes on the four-eyed baby was discovered to be the left eye of Pope Paul VI, missing since the eagle incident. The provenance of the fourth eye was never determined.
(“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place,” said Frank Borman, “and let the dry land appear: and it was so.”)
A series of very precise lightning strikes seared the word “OMEN” into the rust-red sand of the Sonora Desert; scientists blamed “phytoplankton”.
(“And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called h
e Seas: and God saw that it was good.”)
The New York Stock Exchange rose by perfect integer amounts eleven days in a row. An obstetrician published an article in an obscure medical journal claiming that the kicks of unborn children, interpreted as Morse Code, formed unspeakable and blood-curdling messages.
(“And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of – ” [sudden burst of static, then silence])
II.
If I had to choose a high point for the history of the human race thus far, it would be December 24, 1968.
1968 had been a year of shattered dreams. Martin Luther King was murdered in April. Democratic golden boy Robert Kennedy was killed in June. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring in August. It felt like each spark of hope for a better world was being snuffed out, methodically, one by one.
Then almost without warning, Americans turned on their televisions and learned that a spaceship was flying to the moon. On December 22, the craft beamed a live TV broadcast to Earth informing viewers that they were about to become the first humans ever to orbit another celestial body. Communications issues limited the transmission to seventeen minutes, but the astronauts promised a second installment from lunar space.
On December 24, 1968, one billion people – more than for any television program before or after in the history of mankind – tuned in for Apollo 8’s short broadcast. The astronauts were half-asleep, frazzled with days of complicated calculations and near-disasters – but their voices were powerful and lucid through the static. Commander Frank Borman introduced the two other members of the crew. They described the moon, as seen up close. “A vast, lonely, forbidding expanse of nothing”. “A very foreboding horizon, a rather dark and unappetizing looking place”. Then the Earth, as seen from afar. “A green oasis, in the big vastness of space.”
Two minutes left till lunar sunrise broke the connection. The astronauts’ only orders from NASA had been to “do something appropriate”
“In the beginning,” read Bill Anders, “God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
So for two minutes on Christmas Eve, while a billion people listened, three astronauts read the Book of Genesis from a tiny metal can a hundred miles above the surface of the moon.
Then, mid-sentence, they crashed into the crystal sphere surrounding the world, because it turned out there were far fewer things in Heaven and Earth than were dreamt of in almost anyone’s philosophy.
Book I: Genesis
Chapter 1: Dark Satanic Mills
It is good practice to have your program poke around at runtime and see if it can be used to give a light unto the Gentiles.
— kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com
May 10, 2017
Palo Alto
The apocalypse began in a cubicle.
Its walls were gray, its desk was gray, its floor was that kind of grayish tile that is designed to look dirty so nobody notices that it is actually dirty. Upon the floor was a chair and upon the chair was me. My name is Aaron Smith-Teller and I am twenty-two years old. I was fiddling with a rubber band and counting the minutes until my next break and seeking the hidden transcendent Names of God.
“AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIR,” I chanted.
That wasn’t a hidden transcendent Name of God. That wasn’t surprising. During my six months at Countenance I must have spoken five hundred thousand of these words. Each had taken about five seconds, earned me about two cents, and cost a small portion of my dignity. None of them had been hidden transcendent Names of God.
“AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIS,” ordered my computer, and I complied. “AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIS,” I said.
The little countdown clock on my desk said I had seven minutes, thirty nine seconds until my next break. That made a total of 459 seconds, which was appropriate, given that the numerical equivalents of the letters in the Hebrew phrase “arei miklat” meaning “city of refuge” summed to 459. There were six cities of refuge in Biblical Israel, three on either side of the Jordan River. There were six ten minute breaks during my workday, three on either side of lunch. None of this was a coincidence because nothing was ever a coincidence.
“AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIT” was my computer’s next suggestion. “AR-ASH-KON-CHEL-NA-VAN-TSIT,” I said.
God created Man in His own image but He created everything else in His own image too. By learning the structure of one entity, like Biblical Israel, we learn facts that carry over to other structures, like the moral law, or the purpose of the universe, or my workday. This is the kabbalah. The rest is just commentary. Very, very difficult commentary, written in Martian, waiting to devour the unwary.
“VIS-LAIGA-RON-TEPHENOR-AST-AST-TELISA-ROK-SUPH-VOD-APANOR-HOV-KEREG-RAI-UM”. My computer shifted to a different part of namespace, and I followed.
Thirty-six letters. A little on the long side. In general, the longer a Name, the harder to discover but the more powerful its effects. The longest known was the Wrathful Name, fifty letters. When spoken it levelled cities. The Sepher Raziel predicted that the Shem haMephorash, the Explicit Name which would capture God’s full essence and bestow near-omnipotence upon the speaker, would be seventy-two letters.
“VIS-LAIGA-RON-TEPHENOR-AST-AST-TELISA-ROK-SUPH-VOD-APANOR-HOV-KEREG-RAI-US.”
People discovered the first few Names of God through deep understanding of Torah, through silent prayer and meditation, or even through direct revelation from angels. But American capitalism took one look at prophetic inspiration and decided it lacked a certain ability to be forced upon an army of low-paid interchangeable drones. Thus the modern method: hire people at minimum wage to chant all the words that might be Names of God, and see whether one of them starts glowing with holy light or summoning an angelic host to do their bidding. If so, copyright the Name and make a fortune.
But combinatorial explosion is a harsh master. There are twenty-two Hebrew letters and so 22^36 thirty-six letter Hebrew words. Even with thousands of minimum-wage drones like myself, it takes millions of years to exhaust all of them. That was why you needed to know the rules.
God is awesome in majesty and infinite in glory. He’s not going to have a stupid name like GLBLGLGLBLBLGLFLFLBG. With enough understanding of Adam Kadmon, the secret structure of everything, you could tease out regularities in the nature of God and constrain the set of possible Names to something almost manageable, then make your drones chant that manageable set. This was the applied kabbalah, the project of some of the human race’s greatest geniuses.
“VIS-LAIGA-RON-TEPHENOR-AST-AST-TELISA-ROK-SUPH-VOD-APANOR-HOV-KEREG-RAI-UA.”
I should have been one of those geniuses. Gebron and Eleazar’s classic textbook says that only four kabbalists have ever gazed upon Adam Kadmon bare. Rabbi Isaac Luria. The archangel Uriel. The Comet King. And an eight year old girl. I won’t say I had gazed upon it bare, exactly, but in the great game of strip poker every deep thinker plays against the universe I’d gotten further than most.
Then I fell from grace. My career was ruined before it even began when I was expelled from Stanford for messing with Things Mankind Was Not Meant To Know – by which I mean the encryption algorithms used by major corporations. Nobody wanted a twenty-two year old kabbalist without a college degree. It was like that scene in the Bible where God manifested Himself upon Mount Sinai, but only to those Israelites who had graduated from Harvard or Yale.
Not that I was bitter.
Now here I was, doing menial labor for minimum wage.
“VIS-LAIGA-RON-TEPHENOR-AST-AST-TELISA-ROK-SUPH-VOD-APANOR-HOV-KEREG-RAI-UP.”
It would be a lie to say I stayed sane by keeping my mind sharp. The sort of mental sharpness you need for the kabbalah is almost perpendicular to sanity, more like a very specific and redirectable schizophrenia. I stayed functional by keeping my mind in a very specific state that probably wasn’t very long-term healthy.
&n
bsp; “VIS-LAIGA-RON-TEPHENOR-AST-AST-TELISA-ROK-SUPH-VOD-APANOR-HOV-KEREG-RAI-UTS.”
The timer read 4:33, which is the length of John Cage’s famous silent musical piece. 4:33 makes 273 seconds total. -273 is absolute zero in Celsius. John Cage’s piece is perfect silence; absolute zero is perfect stillness. In the year 273 AD, the two consuls of Rome were named Tacitus and Placidianus; “Tacitus” is Latin for “silence” and Placidianus is Latin for “stillness”. 273 is also the gematria of the Greek word eremon, which means “silent” or “still”. None of this is a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
“VIS-LAIGA-RON-TEPHENOR-AST-AST-TELISA-ROK-SUPH-VOD-APANOR-HOV-KEREG-RAI-UK.”
Just as the timer on my desk dropped into the double-digits (59 – the number of different numbers in the Book of Revelation) a man dressed in a black uniform stepped into my cubicle and told me he wanted to talk. I followed him into an empty office and he sat me down and told me I was in trouble.
(This isn’t the part that led to the apocalypse. That comes about an hour later.)
“Have you been feeling tired lately?” he asked in what he probably thought was a kindly manner. He was trying to sound like a therapist, but ended up sounding like a police officer trying to sound like a therapist. I looked above his ears for Hebrew tattoos. He didn’t have any, which meant he hadn’t caught me himself. He was the guy whom the guy who had caught me had sent to do the dirty work.
“A little,” I admitted. I knew where this was going.
“We had a report of somebody speaking the Wakening Name directly,” he said. Directly, vocally, forming the sounds myself instead of buying a scroll upon which someone else had written the letters while they were speaking them. Yes, I had done it. Yes, I knew it was illegal. Yes, I knew there was a chance of getting caught. But I’d done it a hundred times before without any problem. So had half the people in this office. I guess my luck had finally run out.
I nodded. “I was really tired,” I said, “and the coffee machine was broken. And I’d left my scroll wheel at home. I’m sorry. I know it’s against the law. I promise I won’t do it again.”
The officer gave me a kindly smile. “I know it can sometimes be tempting to use Names directly,” he said. “Especially in a place like this, where you’re working hard to develop new Names yourselves. But you get your salary because people use Names the right way. They buy the scrolls from the company that owns them, and use them as directed. It’s dangerous to use them yourself, and it’s not fair to the people who worked so hard to discover them. Right?”