For the Dead. And the Living. But most of all, the Dead.
Prologus
ARGUMENTUM
De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine.
Domine, exaudi vocem meam.
Here I stand.
Between a Friday and a Sunday.
the long-suffering abode of Κρόνος,
eternity in Τάρταρος his uncle,
a dismal day desperately desiring only deliverance,
for it is the lonely lot of time only to hope for its end.
I can do no other.
Here we lie in dried-tongue graves,
throats snake-parched,
our bellies black-hole empty.
In the grave.
Heads arrayed with the flower-crowns
of dancing skeletons,
then remembering that once we were mortal,
now hoping for nothing more.
Here I stand.
Amidst tombstones a pathetic Stone Henge,
hedging bets on Brother Sun and Sister Moon,
throwing but bones in the pot –
a clavicle for currency,
loose teeth for change,
hoping against hope
these dead men were right:
something
must be going on or are we just playing in a valley of dry bones?
I can do no other.
Marduk made a world from the dragon,
but the universe he could not fathom;
one atom amidst it all,
a cosmos infinitely big but infinitely small,
vast enough to contain
Leviathan,
minuscule enough to maintain
a micron,
and somewhere in it all
an earthly organism
got smart.
Here I stand.
In the middle of Myth and Progress,
where Progress has
become myth,
and Myth only
a legend.
Once Myth served to chastise us,
now it only amuses us.
Once Progress was a necessary danger;
now it is our only wager.
Perhaps, though dead,
with the chested men of Myth
I'll lie,
while those who worship Progress shake their fist and die.
We're all dead anyway.
Even God.
Perhaps I'll worship the Beautiful,
rather than merely the Possible.
We are all food for the divers.
Eventually.
Perhaps I'll give my flesh willingly,
so the divers may feast.
At the intersection of
Myth and Progress.
I can do no other.
But even the divers shall die.
All will sleep silently,
but it may be that
silence is better than noise.
The universe promises no forever,
even to itself,
as far as we know.
And while as-far-as-we-know
may not be very far,
maybe it is far enough.
And perhaps it goes just so far
in other directions
that we have not yet contemplated,
or forgotten how.
I shall now declare myself:
I shall contemplate the universe,
and myself;
I shall remember those I've loved,
whose hearts I have broken,
who have broken mine.
I shall try to remember how to
wonder –
and not be afraid –
of a handful of dust,
of a patch of grass,
of a swaying embrace,
of a hand clasped.
I shall wonder,
neither ashamed nor apologetic,
for I now know that
those who think they know
are incapable of such.
In a foolishness so feeble,
I take profound comfort.
For unknowing is our supreme destiny.
Here I...well, you know.
I
PRIMUM PRINCIPIUM
Hominem te esse memento.
Memento mori.
Gott ist todt! Gott bleibt todt! Und wir haben ihn getödtet!
Status quaestiones: Why is there something and not nothing?
"What's all this, then?"
What do you want to know?
What is best for a man?
The best thing for a man is
not to be born.
But if he is born,
the best thing is to die,
and that right quickly.
In the Birth of Tragedy
we are produced and deem ourselves a counter-factual,
actually an accident,
and accidents are scary.
Let us break the world with bombs and philosophies,
deconstructing ourselves into the Nothingness.
But which Nothingness?
What Nothingness did we come from?
All the spiraling galaxies,
two hundred billion estimated,
throwing out their tentacles, mating
with each other through the cold gaps,
atoms collapsed upon incomprehensible atoms,
quarks colliding and crashing,
the universe cracking,
all held together with a pin.
Let us begin.
Caught in the Big Rip, we are torn apart.
Everything decays.
Everything dies.
The Universe grows cold.
And becomes Nothing.
Am I waiting for an End or a Consummation?
But nevermind that!
Live in the Now!
We are the Masters of the Universe!
Unchained from the sun,
let us will to power.
Let us narrate the κόσμος
on a blank sheet of page.
Let us build a tower.
Let us cower in the shadow over us,
we proud Architects of the Age.
"Had we but world enough, and time,"
I would tell you about god.
I would tell you about that word
in the mouths of puny creatures.
I would have much to say
about that power play.
But stay awhile, and perhaps
Gottsprach –
what those strange, ancient mystics call Theologia –
will bleed through the pages.
The Blood of God.
We might drink it, but we cannot speak it,
because to speak of God is
nonsense.
They who think different
might well try conquer the Universe –
and they do, they do;
a mass of He-Men
brandishing Greyskull swords,
waving them about in people's faces,
proclaiming: I have the power!
Suffer the little children to come unto me,
and do not hinder them.
Man shall be trained for war,
and woman for the recreation of the Warrior.
Fill your golden-glass flask,
and drink up,
then smash it on the cold stone floor like
a Norsemen god.
You are a Man,
oh you Mighty Man, you.
So precious.
Pick your poison,
gird your loins,
unsheathe your sword,
and go to war.
Tell us, you Might
y Men, about god,
and how he is wanted dead or alive,
and how we shall all be consigned to Nothingness or Flame.
Oh, you Mighty Men,
you are so big!
And when you hang up your spurs,
we will cryogenically store you in a cold chamber.
"You are thinking about the past."
"My dad gave me this on my fifth birthday.
Said, 'Childhood's over, son, when you
know you're going to die."
But god is dead.
And he hates fags.
II
CONTRA-CREATIO CONVICTUS
Usquequo Domine clamabo et non exaudies?
Vociferabor ad te vim patiens et non salvabis?
Humanity lost an eye.
And it was none too happy about it;
so from the wellspring of revulsion
at the uncharted galaxies
goosestepped into the Abyss
and conjured up a mushroom cloud.
The pillars of heaven now shuddered,
the Earth become unfettered,
our barbaric "Yawp" been uttered,
we shuffled into the twilight,
beating our concaven chests and huddled around a Promethean fire,
there we scorched the earth,
and created a New Land,
the Twilight Land.
We are the hapless.
We are the machine.
We planted a flag in our Twilight Land,
and placed our hands over our hearts,
and how our eyes gleamed,
one tear scrambling down our cheeks,
as we looked at our Land,
our Twilight Land afire.
My Country, 'tis of thee,
sweet land of liberty,
of thee, I sing.
We made a better world,
because the world we had
wasn't good enough.
We trod bloodied flesh
and broken bones underfoot,
some were dead, some still alive,
and the wails were like that of the wind,
some fell silent, some abide,
on a cold Autumn day,
and we laid down our harps,
and wept,
because we had made a better world.
For we are the hapless,
we are the machine,
and in the face of our Progress,
no one may stand.
III
CASUS ET RUINA
Si iniquitates observabis, Domine,
Domine, quis sustinebit?
We call them Haters.
And we hate Haters.
Are not other people the problem?
Of course. I hate
them.
But I am one of them.
It's not a poetic trick.
I hate myself.
When they anger at me,
I hate them.
I have no compassion,
mirroring the compassionless
hate that spurred me
to speak with shortened breath
and a slow, ba(i)ted tongue.
I hate them.
God, will you hate such creatures
and love me?
L'enfer, c'est les autres.
Huis-clos.
I will do unto others.
And make me vengeance.
And so shall we all burn.
I will conquer!
I will consume!
Watch as I, coiled and ready,
strike for sustenance,
strike for survival,
strike for supremacy.
And then you shall know that
I am the Lord.
For hell is hot,
and I - gladly, grudgingly - stab at thee.
My hatred is a penis
in hope a circumcision,
in intention a rape.
To repay the tearing
of my own hymen.
For Hate's sake,
I spit my last breath at thee.
A spermicide,
created by the natural impulses
of my body formed upside-down.
And so any possibility between us is
still( )born.
Hate has no place or time,
the phenomenology of a broken nursery rhyme,
falling forever in a contra-Being.
In the loss of the locus,
there remains only
endless, cruel, intransversible
space.
IV
CONVERSIO
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
He was born a pauper to a pawn
on a Christmas day,
when the New York Times said,
"God is Dead,"
and the war's begun.
Alan Tostig has a son today.
As humanity dies, the Universe lies waiting.
The girls are out getting facials.
The boys lie inbthe Internet.
And they don't trust each other.
We weren't given a penis or a vagina,
but a cock and a cunt,
and taught to fuck.
In that order.
Oh, I can
pull your hair,
slap your ass,
call you names...
but I shall never know
your name.
Or the one you came for,
the one we came from.
Our rocket ships are a dick,
space a pythonesque pussy -
disclosed by glitter-studded legs spread
across the universe,
hopelessly impregnated,
giving birth to a deformed mass
of huddling, shuddering cowards,
asking our smartphones about death.
The world will end with a whimper,
captured neat and nimble on a camera phone,
and the universe will view our pornographic suicide.
But as no voyeur.
Yet some Time Traveller may wonder:
Were the Morlocks really the sufferers,
we Eloi content only to exist?
Only a god could tell.
We are the hapless.
We are the machine.
Shall I hope for the dazzling darkness,
or be consigned to a darkness
deaf and dumb?
Tom Cullen knows what that is!
M-o-o-o-o-N!
That spells "deaf and dumb!"
Grant me one more image,
love me one more lie,
lend me just a little liberty,
while I, lusting only for the moment,
place my early-morning hopes
on a crushed cigarette,
a lonely desire
under the elms.
I awaken to love,
but live to loathe;
I hold my breath,
only to breathe,
and wreathe around my neck
an amorous sorrow,
gilded and choked by
an otium or an odium
of a tenenbaum or a tenebrae.
Holy Saturday.
Oh, Holy Saturday.
Perhaps I trade
my cock for a will,
my senses for a soul,
my kingdom for a horse,
my life f
or you,
and a way out of this
godforsaken place.
Like the Morlocks,
we must eat flesh, drink blood,
and know in the distant pews:
we are eating ourselves.
Then perhaps we shall not be devoured.
The Mother's heart is like a sun,
breast-feeding all.
Clasped to her chest, I shall burn alive,
awakened to life in an instant.
As an instant.
And photosynthesize forever.
In the embryo,
in the Mother's virginal womb,
there is no vagina, no penis,
no cock or cunt,
but only potential.
In my flowering,
I shall not pull but be pulled,
I shall not strike but be struck,
I shall not call names but be named.
There is no god.
God isn't real.
And god waits for us.
V
REDITUS
Whát I do is me: for that I came.
I come into myself;
it feels like...
like...
like something I forgot,
mooring to a mystic Memory,
of a Land I've never seen,
a Place I've never been,
because it doesn't exist.
But is it real?
I don't know if that is the
right question.
As dust we are,
so to dust we shall return.
Ashes to ashes,
dust to dust.
Or so the saying goes.
Everything is circles and triangles.
Pythagoras and Origen,
pray for us.
Cogito ergo sum
I know now that
whatever I was,
to that I shall return.
And before I was,
I was nothing.
And so to that I shall return.
Come, Nothingness,
and I will curl into your embrace,
and in your formless chambers,
cry out:
I am!
VI
SACRAMENTUM
Domine, non sum dignus
ut intres sub tectum meum;
sed tantum dic verbo,
et sanabitur anima mea.
On a star-pressed sky, I traced the lines
of your face.
I sighed and held out my hand.
When you clasped it, I didn't feel a
thing.
You are always grasping,
always arriving.
Being is your Becoming.
When you smiled, I nearly died.
Your eyes shined like Sheol, the
abyssal pools of justice, and I forgot
what I had been thinking at that
moment.
You are that beautiful.
Your nose crinkles.
When you laugh, I don't feel sane.
But I know I'm alive.
The curve of your lips is the curve of the universe:
no matter how far I go,
I always return.
Always returning,
always leaving.
Your waiting is a constant greeting.
You saw me in the distance, weeping –
but I was already there.
Let me put a ring on your finger.
Let me put sandals on your feet.
(Your slender, sexual feet I long to
kiss.
And when we take it all off,
a cosmos bursts in the dark)
Let me be your father,
and I shall be your son. I shall drink at
your breasts so comely.
When we all as infants taste your
poison,
we will arise again, and be
humans.
Then we shall be gods.
I de(i)fy you as a goddess.
Look upon me kindly, and do not
break my heart again.
I fear the lines of your face are
blurring,
and I can no longer trace the
borders.
I don't see you anymore.
But I don't see me either.
All I see is sky. The space those old ones called
Ouranous.
You and I, all of us, we are on a great
adventure.
VII
FINIS SEU CONSUMMATIO
Finem loquendi omnes pariter audiamus:
Deum time et mandata eius observa,
hoc est enim omnis homo.
Faith perceives God as One,
Hope holds God as Truth,
Love knows God as Goodness – and Beauty,
and swallows us up in itself:
the shoreless ocean of God Himself.
Do I embrace the(e) Beautiful perhaps?
Here I stand. I can do no other.
Lancelot Schaubert is the husband of Tara Schaubert, the grooviest girl on Earth. He has sold his written work to markets like The New Haven Review, McSweeney’s, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest (magazine and books), The World Series Edition of Poker Pro, Encounter, The Misty Review, Carnival, Brink, and many other similar markets. He reinvented the photonovel through Cold Brewed and was commissioned by the Missouri Tourism Board to create a second photonovel — The Joplin Undercurrent — that both fictionalizes and enchants the history and culture of Joplin, Missouri.
His work terraforms new worlds, tears the veil between the natural and supernatural, and jests with the paradoxes of classical metaphysics. When he’s not writing (or tinkering with cinema-ish narrative), he’s dabbling in dozens of different books, listening to people tell their life stories, camping, fishing, exploring unfamiliar territory (there’s a lot in New York), tinkering with new languages (Spanish, currently), exploring random disciplines like chemical engineering, as well as messing around with improv comedy and leisure de main and music.
PLEASE SEND SOUP — he loves soup. Yes, even if it’s summer. Find him in Brooklyn, New York with his wife, Tara, and their attack spaniel, Echo.
• • •
Thomas Giltner is a fiction writer based in St. Louis. He works in several genres, from fantasy to existential crisis. His influences include writers such as Stephen King, J. R. R. Tolkien, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Mehlville, Flannery O’Connor, and of course, H. P. Lovecraft. He writes about the strange world he inhabits, and is convinced it’s even stranger than we have yet imagined. He will receive his doctorate in historical theology from St. Louis University later this year.
Also by Lancelot Schaubert:
Writing Rules, Revised
Wilderness
When Timbers Start
The Encounter Stories
The Blimps of Venus
A.R.C.
Wombrovers
Carry Cannons By Our Sides
Photonovels:
Cold Brewed
The Joplin Undercurrent
Stay in touch at https://lanceschaubert.org/ and shoot me your best email address by subscribing to my mailing list so I can send you more of my best work.
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Inconveniences Rightly Considered Page 23