Antiphony

by Chris Katsaropoulos

  Thus were their faces inquired and registered from a form that molds them they leaping go pre-made thoughtful imagining unto light infested swirls of substance coming round romantic glooming together that was just before the sun went down in sad and eager wantful tending to delight; thus were their faces formed their bodies round their famous debris and shattered numerary nights; thus were their likenesses established in manner like the universe itself, tending from one spot to many, from one thought to many; thus were their likenesses the basis of their forms, their images the forms for their bodies through and true.

  Moreover he said to him the son of every father who never was go forth into a simile of perfection, go onward from the thought that made you into the wretched indicating stalwart loins again, go you forth into becoming and being in time again though you are merely only a product of my thought; for thought must manifest and ex-press, thought must image make and engender love and life and distress, must press out into some thing and every thing in order to dis-cover what it was that made itself.

  And

  The likeness

  Is a product of

  Itself by means of itself and itself alone,

  Whithersoever the spirit is to go, there shall every weight and grip of earth and enchantment,

  Encompass the breath of spirit, endeavor to unfold within a sheath light slowed down enough to pull together as a bright and insubstantial whirlwind of matter, the first-slung fouling come-together of glory.

  Two cubits and four cubits, four cubits and eight, by this means and method does the timeless image turn to light and from light to speck and speck by speck to propagate, by ever furling outward and twisting back upon itself. And they went in ashes swathed and silent to see him staring aghast and in some terror night regime in recompense to flow.

  Their wings were rude and scattered joined to vanity and heavenly circuits of the golden orb gymnastic from heath of knowing trestles planks and flowers, sweet flowers plucked from living fire of elemental man and vengeance in and under, down to the bones and solitude of risen nature rising out of furling light. Grow and grow, always out and out and ever onward, burst from single orchid blossom originating thought from imageless ground of being light infusing elemental image imperious, all must always grow. Always on and on, forever outward he is one with it, there is no other one, only a means of reaching out that is fallen back upon itself in this present only moment, and every separate form proceeds from that harkening and sunken urge.

  And under the firmament there is no-thing and there is every-thing, all everything exists as a perfect naught a point which realized itself and ex-pressed itself, pressed itself out and unfolded into something and that moment came as one and is even yet be-coming. It spirals out from unity to infinity in a trifling wayward motion. It beckons to itself, and thereby unfolds and flees and turns back within again, immured and formed of pure thought projecting light, which is thought projecting through a seam. Once it has happened, it always will, it always does. Once a proper sweeping through the night of snow flashing brilliant common looking clothed in rich array of supplications, armed in armor unthuswise, singing songs of sacred sweet delight, the terrible and the curving bright apology can never unfulfill what always is. Even as the love and beauty polish and shine the brightness of his sight, an alternate fistful of ashes clouds the common weal, for everything that can exist must exist. Tear apart and rip to shreds the loveliness of a woman’s face, drop a tower from the heights into a smoking pit. Violate the bloody mass of guts and bones were broken, gnaw on carnal beasts who give their flesh so other flesh can consummate in potent longing, penetrate a wretched fold of familial fertility so lordly on a languid spurt of sunken down obsession. Wither away the uproarious orgy casting shallow death aside as a form of transposition, silent worms give all their effort into turning us aside.

  As an adamant rejection of true sight and knowing, only a slender tube of vision comes to pass, only an incomplete incorporation seen in sequence moment after moment. Alpha and omega exist at once and the first thing is not past, the last thing hurtles outward faster than a man can see. The horizon grows both larger and smaller, as the microscopes and telescopes unveil the magnitude and triviality of what a man can never comprehend. Horror is only embracing what he thought his friends might slight him when they were taken through the crowded world which crowds him down in finite perception, terror only shows him what he could not bear to see. Honor only palls before the wealth of meaner measure than forever, only quails before the protean sweat and tincture of a wound too wide to heal. Onward, on to sweet delight, ever on and ever quite complacent with the weak offending effort that has brought him near enough to know he never will be quite enough to realize the prism of his fractured various reality. No is but the future tense of yes, brought forward through the drafting yesterdays of fortune, for this is the shape of a dream; there is nothing straight about it, only man presumes to make a line that does not turn. Obey my final word there you will see the angels and the sky and afternoons and desperate workmen fisher on the shore a river current heedless wheat and hum of multitudes come up the stair two tables of stone in slowly millions driven tabernacle disembodied you will see the glacial broken father and his holy book and clear and high above you see the rescuer the night in woe the streets that plough the forward trough the fields that pave the proselytes the dark ship hoeing through the night, heed my final word and there you see the reek of stars moving backwards retrograde inspection you see the reeling of the wretched war-workers the hampered diffidence of sex the once dilation the fallings and the yearnings the rift and wrack of comfort in the continents that no longer tip into oceans that swallow them up they have been and always will be swallowed up, hearken to my final word there you will see the riven priest the garden urn the mountain where they both are full of eyes and ashes the forgiven man the daughter who listens and the full applause of fruits and flowers bearing into light the hole the size of nothing the twist of water in a drain the circle caught inside a circle, heed my final word and you will hear and see the tourniquet the old silver walls of barracks fallen in the snow the wisdom cruelty of a man who stopped the road the journey never ends it is an adamant rejection and you will see and hear until you see the yearning portion of the dream that seeks itself you will hear one word which withholds all sound and has quelled the nighttime into day.

  HE WAKES. HIS eyes open and he sees that a candle is burning on the table beside the piano, though he does not recall having lit it. From the amount of oil in the trough around the wick, it appears to have been burning for several hours.

  What time is it? There is no clock in this room—he hates the sound of a ticking clock, its insistent rhythm urging him to go forward, forward, reminder of another moment of his life wasting away. The grass of the yard that slopes down towards the Heisels’ house on the next cul-de-sac over suggests the first insipid shimmering of dawn. The branches of the ash tree waver in the dim half light, stirred by a breeze that carries the treacherous frost of a February morning. But his eyes are filled with what his mind has seen; his head is full of other images. He sits down at his desk and tries to understand. Was it merely a dream, or something more? There seems to have been an otherworldly quality to what has taken place—and that is the key to it: he has not only seen these things, he has heard them and felt them. He was taken to another place, outside himself, above, within … beyond. He has had a vision of something that, in his mind, feels like a complete and unified whole, a snapshot, in one long, extended click, of everything that is. He closes his eyes again and he can almost see it, a kind of oval ball, in which everything is wrapped up, floating, spinning.

  He takes up his pen and opens his notebook and starts writing, whatever comes into his head, his impressions of what he has witnessed. He has to get this down, capture it somehow. He has to convert it into something that he can remember and convey to others:

  There is a unity to everything, from the largest forms to the smallest.
The spiral spinning of a galaxy is the same form embodied in the twist of light that comprises the most minuscule particles of matter. And the spiral is a two-dimensional slice of the three dimensional form of all matter, which is a torus encompassing the central point of emission. All matter, on the smallest and largest scales, constantly emits from a central singularity and flows out, swirling about the central point in an ellipsoid current which is dragged around and drawn back inward to the central point again, into which it returns to start the cycle ever more. The shape of a tree, and an apple, and a cyclone emulate this outward flowing—the tree flows up from the roots through the trunk and out through the branches. The apple flows up through the core and out at the top where the stem protrudes. The energy that establishes the human form circulates in the same twisting toroid around the spine. And every particle, quark and lepton and gluon that conspires to generate these forms is created by light—pure energy—that twists around a point in various manners, which gives the particles their flavors, their various spins and attractive powers.

  This is the shape and manner of the universe, a giant twisting ellipsoid of energy that did not erupt in one big bang, but is constantly bursting forth, at every moment filled with energy, imbued with light and life.

  There is no time—it is always happening. There is only the eternal Now. We are tricked into seeing time and space by the limits of our perceptions. We see this infinite happening through the tiny tube of our eyes and ears and can only experience it as a sequential unfolding and enfolding. To us the universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate because we cannot measure eternity or infinity. When we create a more powerful telescope or microscope, we’re confronted once again with the limits of our own knowing by an ever broader, or more minuscule, horizon. We are not big enough to see it all at once, but we think that whatever we see is all there is, when, in fact, everything outside our little tube of limitation is more than we can ever hope to know. We seek to place our limitations upon the staggering wealth of creation, and then we wonder why we stumble upon mystery after mystery. The universe keeps growing, because there is no end to infinity, we cannot comprehend.

  There is no gravity—gravity is only our experience, our measurement of unity, the mere fact that everything is bound together as one. Instead of seeing all things connected, we try to slice them apart, give them separate names, and act as if we know them. When things fall apart and decompose and die, we are only seeing the inward turning back of the flow towards the source from which it came. And we wonder why things must end, when there never is any end.

  Once anything exists, it all exists—now. So, anything that can happen, must happen. Is happening. In an infinite and timeless universe, everything that can be imagined exists all at once. We simply can’t see it all or experience it at once. So we see time and space unfolding. We see terrible explosions of light and plants and animals growing and dying and stars twinkling across fathomless chasms of darkness. And the shape and form of the universe is a constantly swirling unfurling and enfolding of a giant thought. And nothing is faster than light, because everything is made of light. Everything is light. Light is conscious energy, the medium of thought, and thought is all there is, a giant timeless thought.

  He raises his hand from the page and sets the pen down.

  That is the best he can do, for now. These things he has written don’t really make a lot of sense, but it is the closest he can come to describing the things he saw and felt—it was more of a feeling really. If he stops, with eyes closed, and holds it still within a spot in his head that seems to be just above his eyebrows, in the middle of his forehead—there—he has it; if he holds it there for a moment he can feel it again, the feeling of holding everything together in one spot. When he has it there in one place he can see that the man-made scientific theories are not wrong, they are only partially right. Relativity is right, and Quantum Theory is right, and Newton’s laws are right, and String Theory is right, and Perturbation Theory is right—they are all accurate and useful ways of describing the universe. They are not wrong and they are not incompatible, they are merely woefully incomplete and limited by their frameworks of knowing. He sees this now, and it excites him to envision these ways of describing the universe as if they are all little tubes he can use to peer at a giant object. It’s as if he were to look at the back yard through one of those cardboard tubes that’s left over when the paper towels are used up—what he would see through the tube is not wrong, but it is only a very limited picture of the great big world and it would only partially fit with what he would see if he were to look through a different size and shape of tube from a different angle. Both of these views through the tube would be correct, in and of themselves, and could prove useful to understanding the world around him, but they would never get him all of the way to seeing a completely accurate and true understanding of everything that is out there.

  This idea excites him tremendously—he can picture Newton standing at the kitchen window with his cardboard tube and Einstein at the bedroom window upstairs with his cardboard tube and Heisenberg with his uncertainty principle downstairs at the small basement window peering up through his own tube, and all of them looking at the same giant ash tree rustling in the breeze, and each of them having a true but slightly different view of it. And none of them seeing all of the branches and the trunk together, just their own slices of it that in some parts overlap. Only someone who isn’t looking through one of those tubes, who might be standing high up on the hill in the opposite direction of the Heisels’ yard would be able to see the whole tree and know precisely what its form is. This is the idea that Theodore is trying to hold in that spot in the middle of his forehead when he sees the entire vision in terms of an equation, a set of symbols that appears before his inner eye. He hesitates for a moment, then writes it in his notebook:

  0 × ∞ = 1

  This makes no sense. There has never been any mathematical system in which the equation he has just written would resolve as a proper solution. He states the equation in word form to see if it makes any more sense: “Zero times infinity equals one.” No, still absurd. Still wrong. Zero and infinity cannot be multiplied together. Zero times anything is zero. And infinity cannot be operated on in an equation. Infinity is merely a result that indicates a problem in the math.

  He crosses it out. And then he goes to his laptop and starts the email application and creates a new message addressed to himself. He starts typing in the words he just wrote in his notebook—this is the way he sometimes saves his work, his notes. If he’s working at home here late at night, he’ll send himself an email message that he can open the next morning and copy to a document on his desktop computer in the office. This way, he has the assurance that he has preserved whatever work he has done on the Institute mail server where the email message is stored. The words feel strange to him as he types them into the message, as if they have been sent to him by another person, another version of himself.

  There is a unity to everything, from the largest forms to the smallest. The spiral spinning of a galaxy is the same form embodied in the twist of light that comprises the most minuscule particles of matter. And the spiral is a two-dimensional slice of the three dimensional form of all matter, which is a torus encompassing the central point of emission …

  It doesn’t take long to get it all down in the email. A couple of minutes, and he is at the end. He is about to send the message, but he pauses and stares at the strange equation he has written—written and crossed out. It is absurd. But he types it in anyway, searching for the special symbol code for infinity in the equation app the institute has added to the email program for its scientists to use:

  0 × ∞ = 1

  Zero times infinity equals one. Absurd. He stares at it for a moment longer, then clicks the button that says SEND.

  3

  THE MORNING ARRIVES too soon. He goes to the kitchen and dumps a filter and coffee grounds into the coffee-maker, fills it with water. Already, the
light is gaining strength—the digital clock on the coffee machine says 6:23, the ones on the microwave and stove say 6:24. No point in trying to go back to sleep now.

  Dragging up the stairs, Theodore steps over the third step from the top, the one that yields a loud, groaning creak every time it is stepped on coming up the stairs. He skips the step and hangs on to the rail in order to avoid waking Ilene. At this hour almost any sound will be enough to wake her. And if he wakes her now she won’t be able to go back to sleep.

  Gently, gently, he turns the knob on the bedroom door. It too makes a kind of clunking tumble of loose hardware from within the mechanism that he knows can be averted only by grasping the knob and turning it as slowly as possible. Once the knob has been turned to release the latch, he can push the door open and tread silently across the plush carpeting of the bedroom to the security of the master bath.

  On his way towards the bathroom door he pauses for a moment to glance down at the mass of blankets and bedspread that signifies Ilene’s sleeping form. She would be very warm to curl up against, if only for a short while. The temptation to join her holds him there, staring at the pile of bedclothes that lifts with her intake of breath and then, just as unhurriedly, collapses, as if a fault line has slipped and given way. He sleeps in this bed with her less and less, it seems. The trouble is, she snores. Loudly. She is doing it now. A sonorous riffling of some pad of fleshy cartilage deep within her throat that keeps time with the heaving blankets. The nights he does sleep here he can lie awake for what seems like hours listening to this chorus of vibrating flesh, an unintentional and unlovely song meant for only him to hear. After a time, the sound will assume a new pitch or a less strident rhythm, fading away to nearly nothing, and he will drift towards sleep, but then, with a slight change of position, it will pick up again, gathering force into a huge volume of undulating sound. Amazing, he thinks, how much noise the narrow cavities within our necks and chests can produce. And what variety! Now, she is on what he thinks of as a mid-range arpeggio; interesting, in fact, now that he is standing upright and able to analyze it, that the sound goes down the scale in tone as she draws breath in, and stays at about the same pitch on the exhale. A low G, he would have to call it.