Eidolonic Arrondissement
What if we were to travel faster than light, would time run backwards as science fiction has taught us? The faster you move, the slower your clock ticks relative to ones you are moving past.
"You just ran out of time."
As increasing knowledge of the Solar System made the prospects of life in the vicinity of Earth marginal at best, the extrasolar planet has become almost the only venue. Sure, you are unique, it's true. But, you are also one of nearly 8 billion eidolons.
The water is the eldest daughter of the creation, the element upon which the spirit of god did first move, the element which God commanded to bring forth living creatures abundantly; and without which, those that inhabit the land, even all creatures that have breath in their nostrils, must suddenly return to putrefaction. The clouds reflect shadows at sunset, and fan them throughout the sky.
The girl was gazing out upon the distant sea. The iron-bound coast that lay immediately below her made no claim upon her, for all the wild beauty, the cruel austerity with which its ages-long battle with the merciless waters of a storm-swept ocean had endowed it.
"You can't escape! Hurry, go, go!... Get out!" I have seen the rain. We moved as one unit, as if we were migrating birds. But keep yourselves strapped in, we're going to move in a hurry if they point that thing at us. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession.
"Maybe it would be a good idea to take that space trip right away," said the guide.
"I never sleep indoors. An' even if I did there's that gatherin' storm in the village below."
The night lay mysterious before them, full of exotic odors, unfamiliar sounds, and double shadows. Her wild hills and lonely fells seemed the fit haunting-places for all mysterious powers; and long after spirits had fled, and ghosts had been laid in the level plains of the south, they were to be found lingering about the glens and glades of Scotland.
To figure out what you need and the human world, invite certain creation myths or a creation story with the flood of the descendants of those air we now do breathe. Clearing smoke and the dawn will be here soon. This is what democracy looks like. "I don't remember," I said. I would never remember. Dreaming about watching the ground while flying, I was afraid.
We have been wild. The other plans by some means, we are not told how, were prevented. In the far-off days, when superstition, in close association with the "evil sister" of ignorance, walked abroad in the land, the south-western district of Scotland shared very largely in the beliefs and terrors embraced under the general descriptive term of witchcraft.
The gleam of the sea-fire cast a blue glare on their faces, and they sat, and gaped, and glared, and yelled at the blast. Suddenly he awoke, and something cried. I held my breath and opened my eyes. "Stop looking at me," he said. Time passes differently there too.
Dawn saw a complete reversal, a complete transformation. Branches and leaves were turned to ominous, quiet black shapes that would spring on her if she stirred. At last the little stars began to hide, and then the larger ones. The sun had just lifted above the eastern hills. Nature was astir. He rose to his feet, still dazed from his fall, "and here I am, just in time to be nearly killed by you," he ended, laughing. Forgiven?
This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning of history, a time when one might have always walked alone and wondered where the night's path leads. Their elders were hidden from the dangers of the wilderness. It represents the vitality, spirit and enjoyment of nature.
"We're not so indispensable as all that," said the guide. With the thought came instant action. As the rays of the lanterns fell within the pit, there flashed upwards a glow and a glare, from a confused heap of gold and of jewels, that absolutely dazzled our eyes.
We were now in a vaulted chamber, with fine shell-sand on the floor. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The apartment was hewn from the material of the cliff, showing mostly dull gold in the dim light which a single minute radium illuminator in the center of the roof diffused throughout its great dimensions.
Celestial and sometimes curious streaks of hope, for detachment from everyday life relatively to respond to rappings from outside. He saw that his machine would stand hard knocks, and the way the battery and motor was behaving was a joy to him. All that came to bring about the darkness of the next turn of events. Is it like a maelstrom? Like a tempest? Act as though the shadows remain. Is that religion?
Supernatural forces work because the explorers found the potential consequences of scientific care, like death as natural as the finding of organisms. I designed it myself. Without modifications these frameworks are incompatible. Science seemed unable to account for this dreamwork, a theatre of incoherent dancing, poor and aping, a patter in the atoms of one's own mind, abandoned to an absurd caprice. The creative activity of immediate "in the moment" composition, compositions from the sounds of sky dome and Aurora Borealis and deep sea underwater recordings which combines performance with communication of emotions, sonic art, audio art, sound poetry, sound sculpture, experimental music and instrumental technique as well as spontaneous response to others which is well known for its concatenation of dazzling imagery, is just as memorable for its linguistic inventiveness.
"It's just one of my notions. I designed it myself."
It was not only the malevolent witch that suffered in this wild raid made against reason and humanity. The doom dealt out to the witch who slew was equally allotted to the witch who saved. Yet the witchologists made a difference between the two. There is no necessity for furthering the regulation of the understanding. She remained there all night, an age-long vigil, straining her ears for the things that went on below in the darkness, and keeping motionless lest some stealthy beast should discover her.
Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking of it. I tell her that I will see her on the other side even though I am not entirely convinced that this is true.
"I saw you up there. Tell me about it."
You see, I was keeping up my apparent ignorance.
“It seemed to have no more to do with us than a flight of birds."
I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then.
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. A slim young man in gray tweeds leaped out of it and came to a stop. He threw back heavy black hair with a toss of his head and ran into the crowd that parted to let him through.
“Oh, what pleasure! I shall die!”
"So I killed him," he finished bitterly.
They rode on again for a space in silence.
It was about this time that an event happened which completely changed the order of my life. But of this it is probable my readers will learn more hereafter. The condition of the vessel had apparently changed very little. Without modifications these frameworks are incompatible. Science seemed unable to account for this dreamwork, a theatre of incoherent dancing, poor and aping, a patter in the atoms of one's own mind, abandoned to an absurd caprice. Different from weather events, which are short-term and temporary phenomenon, climates are usually steady and predictable, and shape how organisms and human civilizations evolve and adapt in any given region.
We believe in the morning, do we. At another time, we beheld a mighty lion, treading on the moon, and seven other lions around us, in the clouds. Not any more begging. It is easy to believe this thing. They are ones talking and talking and they are ones quick in talking and waiting for something to happen and they are ones who are not so quick, not quick enough not to be slow ones, quite slow ones. They are ones very many are seeing. They are ones very many are seeing. There are very many of them. Certainly this one was one being living.
Such a statement may prove useful here. They conferred with one another in low voices. For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. I fail to impress you with the celerity of the transaction. The following instance is so extraordinary, that I should not repeat it if the account were not attested by more than one writer.
Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the bullet, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play-- this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. Now it will be remembered that this really happened within the present century.
It may be worth while, therefore, previously to advert to those curious imaginary portraits of him which even down to the present day confidently challenge the faith of the landsman. As long as the sail holds, a well-modeled vessel will maintain her situation, and ride every sea, as if instinct with life and reason. Hardly had I come to this resolution, when, suddenly, a loud and long scream or yell, as if from the throats of a thousand demons, seemed to pervade the whole atmosphere around and above the boat. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. It was he. Never while I live shall I forget the intense agony of terror I experienced at that moment.
The boat was going through the water at a terrible rate--full before the wind--no reef in either jib or mainsail--running her bows completely under the foam. By good luck, however, she kept steady, and gradually I recovered some degree of presence of mind. It might be supposed that a catastrophe such as I have just related would have effectually cooled my incipient passion for the sea.
I could summon up no connected chain of reflection, and, sinking on the floor, gave way, unresistingly, to the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment, crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered. A problem? Perhaps not. It was anarchy.
Then deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me.
It was now a dead calm, with the sea as smooth as I have ever known it--the weather warm and pleasant. The seasons similarly are ever- shifting. Being beyond time, this consciousness can never be washed away by the time tides pure existence, pure consciousness and pure bliss currently, in the darkness of our ignorance, we believe ourselves to be bound and limited at the culmination of education, light floods the room, as it were; darkness vanishes.
“That book,” she repeated, pointing a lean finger, “is about dreams.”
The more mass we squeeze into a region of space, the more spacetime is warped and the slower nearby clocks tick. Me thinks Mr. George Mac Donald, aye, in 1921, said it best:
What a wonderful thing waking is! The time of the ghostly moonshine passes by, and the great positive sunlight comes. A man who dreams, and knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is; but knows it so little that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim change in his dream for an awaking. When the true waking comes at last, he is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality. So, likewise, one who, in the darkness, lies waiting for the light about to be struck, and trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up before him, seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all his imagining. He feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite distance behind him. So shall it be with us when we wake from this dream of life into the truer life beyond, and find all our present notions of being thrown back as into a dim vapory region of dreamland, where yet we thought we knew, and whence we looked forward into the present. This must be what is meant when he says: "Our life is not a dream; but it may become a dream, and perhaps ought to become one."
You smile and keep the truth to yourself. You fly onward. The moon rises and the stars awaken.
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