Containment: The Death of Earth

by Charlee Jacob

  The view of the soul of a self-moving number is a form of metempsychosis (successive reincarnations until perfection is achieved). The ambition of the human race is only succeeded by an auto-hallucination of its superior center between the Spirit of Light and the Heart of Darkness. We are—at our essence—only essence.

  All existing objects are fundamentally composed of form, not material substance. Time cannot stop without Intervention. Intervention itself takes time. Everyone who ever died is alive in the past, the future being an exercise in cognitive zero. History is mankind’s egocentric invention; the dead loom at its edges… Awaiting only a simple lie to break them free.

  Numerical relations are to be applied to music theory, acoustics, geometry and astronomy. You’ve got to amplify the positive, configure the annihilated, the sun is still the center of the violated, songs wile away the time elated until the end confounds the confabulated.

  The brain is identified as the location of the soul. non fui fui non sum non curo. I was not, I was, I am not, I care not. (Say 10 times fast—the Latin version. Can’t? Ah, fui.)

  ————

  Nothing Swallowed, Nothing Gained—

  A Treatise on the Religiously Strange

  – Lotta Schweitz

  ————

  “O thou man of God,

  there is death in the pot.”

  2 Kings, 4:40

  ————

  “In 1492 there were at least 100 million Native Americans, about a fifth of the human race. No population remains static. Over 400 years, millions of natives indigenous to North, Central, and South America perished due to the diseases brought by the invading Europeans. This doesn’t include slaughter by other means. According to accounts by some historians, most were dead within only decades of the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

  “The number had dropped to less than 400,000 by 1907. This doesn’t arrive at millions lost by using direct and simple subtraction. Since they continued to conceive children, the final solution has to be obtained exponentially…

  “Native Americans made such ineffective slave labor, due to possessing no immunity to the white man’s diseases, that early in Europe’s subjugation of the ‘New World’ the black slave trade began. Many of these stolen people also perished aboard slave ships and in this pitiless foreign land. Even the greediest whites considered themselves to literally be on a mission from God, leading savages-made-converts onto trails of tears.

  ————

  “It is also suggested that in the first half of the 20th century, state-run Eugenics programs may have sterilized up to 40% of Native American women of child-bearing age.”

  – Robert J. McDermott, Murder by The (Good) Book

  ————

  Somewhere is a place where all lines intersect; somewhere all lines run parallel. Circles, hip to hip, palm to palm. The spook du jour has run you through like a lover. It never dies again—but you do. And then you are placed in another corner of time as It fades back across the sunset.

  – The Enantiodromia

  ————

  Laura didn’t understand why her husband had put to paper this mostly unconnected material. And so much of it.

  (Screams outside.)

  Why was he so insistent that she read it? As if her very life depended on it.

  She read steadily, with neither meals nor sleep. What am I missing?

  Salt? How straight lines created a circle?

  Obsessive texts on Falling, Angels and Parallel Universes, Sorcery… End Times?

  Two ghosts wandered through the walls, near Laura. One was wrapped in a blanket, feathers in her wilted hair as blood dribbled from open sores on her sorrowful face. The other was a young African man covered in perspiration and shaking, encumbered by chains which rattled as he moaned—a sad caricature of the storybook apparition.

  Sorcery.

  There was a swirling shadow around Laura. The ghosts couldn’t get near her—

  “My guardian angel is here,” she whispered.

  The dearly departed finally… did just that, and Laura was alone again, except for a voice.

  It told her, “Do not fear revenants or plagues. Your destiny has already been written, as has your husband’s.”

  Laura sat up straight on the sofa, the notebooks stacked around her in neat piles of four each. Fortunately, Adam had numbered each journal.

  “Does that mean Adam and I will be together?” she asked, hopeful.

  The tall shadow-and-light creature now gazed at her with undistinguished grief, the emotion apparent to Laura even in such a non-human face.

  “No,” it replied. “I am sorry.”

  Tears burned Laura’s eyes. She’d never been loath to show the guardian her vulnerable side. She hid it from almost everyone else.

  She smiled. “I’m sure it isn’t your fault.”

  She reached for the final journal, the one Adam had taken to Paris just seven—or was it eight days—ago. Her fingertips stroked the edges of the pages, so I’m to never see my husband again?

  When she’d seen the panic in her own neighborhood and on the news before every channel switched to the Emergency Broadcast System, she’d called the CDC, hoping to talk to Paul, to see Adam. But there was no answer, and no way to leave a message.

  His last journal.

  Laura flipped through it, to a list of Italian volcanoes.

  There was a passage about a mountain of bodies, atop which Adam had been confronted by a young, muscular, handsome dark-haired man. Until something shot from the mouth of that mountain. And Adam’s words: ‘My God, was that a baby?’

  Laura gathered the next pages in her fingers, then flipped them too. They fell like petals. She saw poems… foreign quotes… Adam’s dreams… my name… She read on:

  se Dio ti lasci.

  pulvis et umbra summus.

  non vox stellarum.

  ‘May God vouch safe thee.

  We are but dust and shadows.

  Not the voice of the stars.’

  I had a dream… In threadbare medieval stockings and torn tunic, I fought alongside a starving mob to slash off the fly-ridden flesh of a murderer who spun upon a gallows, round and round, less of him with each turn as we struggled for maggoty morsels.

  Many danced their deadly delirium around our macabre feast, blackish-purple buboes—indigo of the damned—hatched from necks, armpits, groins. Would it be the only harvest this year or the next? They sang, “Ring around the rosies, pockets full of posies…!”

  Stabbing with a blacksmith’s poker, I stuffed a torn chunk of thigh into my mouth. A blister appeared on my hand. It was as large as a king’s ruby.

  And you, my Laura, dressed as Harlequin, hair streaming in restless icy winds until it vanished into the black raven flocks darkening the sky.

  I saw him coming, riding hard, eyes gleaming in the bone-white face: with love, with shocking venal hunger. He swept you up into his saddle and away you both went, Laura and the pale fourth horseman.

  Nous dansons sur un volcan.

  ‘We are dancing on a volcano.’

  ————

  A mute war’s age/a liar’s age

  before the ruin and fall.

  A plague age/a death age

  of humanity and all.

  – based on Snorri Sturluson’s

  Eddic Ragnarok, the Nordic End Times

  ————

  The garden blossoms in ash

  fields rich with black blood and blue.

  Dissecting the living rash

  I looked down and it was you.

  I had a dream… I was diagnosed with leprosy. My entire community turned its collective back on me. The church performed what was, in essence, a funeral service for the man who had been me. I was made to stand in a freshly dug grave. I held a solitary candle as the priest dropped three spadesful of dirt on me.

  “Be dead to the world, be reborn to God,” intoned the man of the cloth.

  I had to reply
: “Oh Jesus, my Redeemer, you formed me out of the earth, you dressed me in the body; let me be reborn in the final day.”

  All my friends, yet friends no more, and my relatives sang, “Libera me, Domine.”

  The priest read from Manuale ad Insignis Ecclesiae Sarum: “I forbid you ever to enter any church, or to venture into a market, or a mill, or a bakehouse, or into any assemblies of people. I forbid you ever to wash your hands or even any of your belongings in a spring or stream of water of any kind so you will not contaminate the innocent.

  “I forbid you ever henceforth to go out without your leper’s dress, that you may be recognized by others for their safety. You must always carry your clapper and warn others of your approach.

  “I forbid you to have intercourse with any woman except your wife. She is admonished against sleeping with any other man; although she is permitted to divorce you, she may not remarry.

  “I forbid you to touch infants or young folk, whosoever they may be, or to give to them or to others any of your possessions.

  “I forbid you henceforth to eat or drink in any company except that of lepers…”

  I was given a clapper, the bell being what would alert anyone too near—even as I cried out, “Make way! I am defiled and unclean!” I was given my alms bowl, into which the priest placed the first charitable offering. What a hollow sound the single coin made, as like a stone dropped down a seemingly bottomless hole to gauge its depth.

  To hell, to hell, yes! That far had I fallen!

  I had a stick to point with, crooked at the top so I could pull to me anything too big for my bowl. I wasn’t permitted to dance, should things fall off of me if I moved with too much energy. Toes and fingers slipped away unnoticed.

  And then there you were, my Laura. Would you, could you still love this hopeless human vector of misery? I outstretched my hand, cloistered in its mandatory glove—perhaps swarming with the Mycobacterium lepra.

  Would we dance, in spite of the law?

  A silken veil slipped from you, revealing hard knots and sores. A stench not unlike mine hit me.

  You screamed, “You did this! Look at me! You put it in me and in us all.”

  You held not a bell but a rattle. The noise was of Death’s teeth, grinding everything between them. And your alms bowl overflowed with—what?—coins of charity? But there is no charity, just as the tragedies of this world are its natural phenomena. Somehow, I had made an unconscious deal with a Devil who held an Unholy Grail. What flowed from your alms bowl were golden names, welded together like charms. They turned into crackling crusts that crawled up your arms, devouring every particle of once supple flesh. The stars I had loved in your eyes burned blood red and winked out, soulless.

  “Adam, save me, Adam.”

  Creation walked by, laughing, leaning on its crutch of bone with which to flog its next dying world.

  My voice, hoarse as that Beast of Dogma’s laugh, could only try to tell you with words which once wrapped us as one, by Petrarch and which now doomed us to separate entropies.

  Di speranza m’empieste edi desire

  Quand’io parti’ dal somma piacer vivo

  Ma’l vento ne partava le parole.

  ‘You showered hope upon me and desire

  In our last moment, ere we came to part;

  And then the wind blew all your words away.’

  ————

  “that Ghost is dead (whom no one might inter)

  fleeing himself for selves more strangely made…”

  – e.e. cummings,

  from the collection NO THANKS

  ————

  Light travels equally fast in all directions, but of, by, and for a Time that is without existence.

  We must be destroyed because we cannot possibly exist, being so disordered and unpredictable in an otherwise highly ordered universe. We grow, bathed in sunlight, then turn inward, twisted by a darkness that has nothing to do with a cosmology stricken until it has become static, stripped of its dynamic.

  The End Times are neither elegant nor designed with Rapture as their radical outcome. We mythologize this scenario simply because we are programmed to do so, just as every animal knows it will eventually die. Our brains encode fractions of species-specific short-term memory that exists in a vacuum, reaching for necessary angels waiting along an abstract line to collect spirits towards Heaven’s sure and certain direction from earth’s Genesis-past to Judgment’s future.

  What if the angels wait along that line but the direction is a deception? Atoms and grains of salt, two by two, make up straight lines to form circles. All movement happens simultaneously—instances in psychophysical parallel we both see and don’t see.

  Unlike Light, Time doesn’t travel in all directions, so its finish generates from the same point as its beginning. It is the end but it has always been the end, and we draw our final breaths as we drew our first, with no expectation of a beginning/middle/conclusion.

  Every religion is a death-wish drama. Illusion of existence, i.e., Being, is the very state of destruction, on a doomsday prefigured and adored by all who have sinned that they may be damned.

  —from The Enantiodromia

  ————

  “This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.”

  – T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

  ————

  I had a dream… O my beloved, you were upon the bed of the leaves and flowers from the garden’s frangipani, covered with a madras-printed cloth. The design was soaked and fetid with the wine of Sitala, our goddess of smallpox.

  Your skin had few spots at first, as if a bee had abandoned a blossom to seek you out. Then, suddenly, you were the chrysalis of a butterfly burned in the hot sun, then caught in the start of the rainy season.

  You watched me, your eyes scarlet, rings of darkness popping around their centers.

  Your mother must have thought I threw you into the kitchen fire, to keep the dowry yet be free to marry another. For you seemed burned, flesh spattered like a floor on which a pot of soup has been dropped. If I watched… I could see them, red as sambar and cinnamon, melding, combining to form a gown which covered your entire body. A new skin? Under which your old one bled.

  “Sip, my love,” I said, bending with a cup of cool water. “Spit the blood from your lips, then drink.”

  But the inside of your mouth—once as sensual as a temple Apsara’s—disintegrated.

  I lifted you up to drink and your flesh slipped off, as silk from a bride on her wedding night, O my beloved.

  I prayed, chanting:

  Om Mani Padme Hum.

  ‘The jewel is in the lotus.’

  Zeno’s paradox: any of various versions of a paradox regarding the relation of the discrete to the continuous, and requiring the concept of limit for its satisfactory explanation.

  Corruption reflected in wormwood’s mirror shows a decadent beauty convulsing into a degenerate biohazard.

  I have a blister in my hand, perhaps filled with catastrophic nihilism. Incendiary influence:inflection and genuflexion without resurrection—eccentrically interpreted—will come from prophets with one fist full of blood and the other full of bacteria.

  The study of quantum mechanics submits that any appointed particle possesses the ability to exist in an entire scope of places, theoretically tenanted in all these locations at once.

  Mind bending secrets pandemic but derivative of the complex fears are the number one evolutionary accomplishment of humanity.

  Eco-disasters and the metaphysics of eschatology are chilled to absolute zero.

  Hypothetical visionaries, hopped up on their non-avoidance of common guilt and a return to innocence that they preach awaits, develop and abomination of tenets that take a Creator’s love and turn it into a wicked combination of racism, sexism, and self-aggrandizement. But history reveals that slavery and genocide
were always the preferred tools of those who believed themselves appointed.

  – from The Enantiodromia

  ««—»»

  Mariana purred beside her mistress, ever-present during the two weekend days that Laura read. Now the cat stood and placed both paws on the book, covering the page before Laura could turn it. The old cat stared into her eyes, meowing.

  “I’m sorry. You must be hungry, huh?”

  Laura set the journal aside, rose from the couch, and padded barefoot to the kitchen. Going barefoot in the camp had been dangerous. Filth and parasites. She considered it a luxury still, just like a clean, safe shower—or food that didn’t move on the plate.