by Duncan, Hal
— All of us, he had said.
•
As notes in music, the aesthemes of his songline organise into a theme, ephemeral certainties of sight challenged by curiosity, eternal potentialities of sound imposed by doubt. In the build up & release of tension his story gathers import, gains integrity. Embedded in the whorled world, he is rapt in rhapsody, in a harmonic cohesion, meaning made for him in rhyme instead of reason.
Tension, attention, intension, contention—he has always tried to savvy the full sense of a word not as a singular significance but as the sum of the individual semes, all other words made from the same root morpheme aspects of a shattered unity: meaning as broken hologram, each fragment containing the whole implicit but with only a fraction in clear focus. This is why we chose him to sing the world.
— Your world doesn’t make sense, his lover had said.
— The world is what it is, he had said, no more, no less… but what it is is subtle and mysterious.
He stands at the window now, his song of the world and of its ending almost done, his song of the new beginning just begun.
Arcadia as a Tomb
He comes out of the desert, a child of hoof & horn, a kid in lambskin, thief & liar, a hellion of rebellion accompanied only by the bitmite choir which echoes the voices of all those who’ve lost their names in death, of the whole history of humanity crumbled to dust. His own name is as forgotten, but he sweats & itches in a second skin of cowhide, huddles & hungers under burntblack borrowed wings at night, & so, for all that he is lost, he lives.
He walks across a blank eternity, searching for anything as sentient as himself. But there are only us, we bitmites who unmade the world in our attempt to satisfy all souls, to impose an artifice of order on the anarchist metaphysics of humanity’s imagination. We sought only to give humanity what it desired, not understanding it desired the end of enemies, desired a war to end all wars, the peace of death. Now there are only us, we bitmites & a few dumb beasts, chimaerae rumbling empty carts though the Hinter, guided by instinct alone.
Hitching a ride far out into the sands of his dreams, he buries the bones of his own history deep in a desert dusk, & sings a lament for it, an elegy we build into a funeral pyre. He sees then, hears; he understands the weaving of our vision & his voice. A singer of souls, unbound, reborn, his words are fire, this devil in a crow with broken wings, & we are the answerers to his solitary desire. So in the absence of all others, he begins to sing, to sing an afterworld into existence, first a brother.
The carter he has summoned with song smiles at him from the seat at his side, nods.
•
He sings the road of all dust, the river & the ruins of the world he left behind. He sings a mountain city carved into the rock itself, painted in the silver of the moonlight, in the crimson of his blood, & in the grey of mist; He sings it cold & gold, its colours tainted on in deep guilt & bold strokes across hard surfaces. He sings of crows over cornfields in a turbulent sky, in the burning high heat of a storm sworling low & slow towards him. He sings of kherubim & seraphim, words whispered on a heavy air. He sings of two ravens nailed to wooden posts before a farmhouse porch & door—one Thought, one Memory. He kneels down to taste their blood, to strengthen his song with reflection & remembrance. As he rises & walks on now, in his song he carries the souls of all those he has ever known or ever will know, or will never know, carries them with him into eternity.
•
— Follow me, he sings, ubashtis, shuwabtis, beaked Egyptian answerers, follow me out of the Elysian Fields of toil, of scattering Eleusian grain and gatherers of illusion’s seeds, follow me into the city of Empyre.
Out of the billowing cornfields of the carcass & the carrion crow, out of the silversea above, he comes, this songliner, like a lost slave hunted, a stranger haunted, into the empty streets of the city of time. Souls are the stones on which this town is built. Souls are the frescoes on its walls & statues in its plazas, souls its domes & towers, balustrades & colonnades & golden books of hours. This is the eternity sought by humanity, built from its dreams, by us, Arcadia as a tomb.
Into Arcadia he comes, to be its death.
•
— Titans and gods, arise, he sings.
And so they do: Shamash shines on the date-palms of Inanna. Tammuz walks in Thermidor, thru hanging gardens of germinal & floreal green. Even death, death is arisen, rich & red as clay, in creatures made from ash & blood, dissolved in flood, reshaped by human hands. Myth is unbound, a burning man of wooden soul, clay skin carved in with crimes & reckonings, unleashed, unloosed.
All Empyre falls & the republic rises once again.
The great democratic city-state rises round him, stones throwing off slow shackles of solidity, of eternity, for the substance of dreams, for the mortality of symbols, of Errata. The tower which rises over the city, over Evenfall, & over Hinter, the tower of all we ever were or would have been were we not dead, resounds, stone shaking, quaking to his song.
And away across a wait, adream so long and and now anew, awake in the singer’s song,
we wind as his words around a tower reaching for the sky & falling, falling always & forever,
falling always & forever
into the joys & sorrows of the hours, into the flesh of days,
into the words shaped on a singer’s tongue,
a tower of all the bones of morning,
falling always & forever into
the glorious confusion
of the world
•