A Vaster Masterpiece

I grope to reclaim all of the insights I’ve ever had, as if they were lost to me. For the time that be’s, evaporation, captured somewhere in heaven’s nimbus, a moonbow around the stellar excitement of a novel idea. To imagine the narrative, but never speak or pen. A private contract between yourself, your history, and the furious glare of the lunarscape. She doesn’t hate me, you know, even as she distrusts me. While I haven’t booted her virgin plateaus, others have, and pricked her with the asininities of a stiff emblem, which, in the mighty swirl of eternity, is almost vapid. But that sandwich bread swizzle icon was required in order for us to malign her innocence. I refuse to call her it, because it has yet to exceed the anthropo(‘boy)morphisizing of gender. But the neutral is the grandest of all matters, standing tall and sheer as a cliff or a sovereign flag, immutable only through great effort of joules. Or the exposure to another kind of loving, the kiss of rain, the stroke of wind, the warmth of sun. The elements are from the beloved It, but not of. They are of a notion, of a word. A word not yet written down, not yet etched in stone, not yet burrowed into earth, not yet shot into the sun. A miraculous Word that resonates throughout the cosmos, both living, dead and neither, skirting the trolley of Neverland, of Nothingscape. The caustic boil of a hot, dark enemy void in which we seethe together in isolation and tumult.

But let me instead write about fortune’s characters, who dwell in huts or cities or metropoles, a queer, jiggling bunch of once-unknowables struggling to be unanonymized and speak. To speak of twigs and stones and bones. To hold hands in the moonlight and relish the sublime—a serene moment tautologically wrapped in its own mystery. To look at one another and realize that together, we are the answer. What character has the fortitude to punish themselves incessantly with such lofty gravity?

Atlas? No, he only holds aloft one world among many. His strain is Sisyphean, bugling his intensity to the pinpricks of stars in the sweat trickling along his musculature. His head bent down, constantly bringing into being a flat plane on which to stand crouched by imagining it. It is hard to keep his attention steady. Sometimes he believes he might fall, or is falling, forgetting for a moment where he overstood, the platform he’s created for himself. In moments of exceptional self-grandeur, he imagines it a high wire that he is traveling with deft grace, only a tiny thread that keeps the Man Who Holds The World from dropping existence into the yawning Void. His bemusing remains the only act that enslaves and binds him to this action. This action of holding the world for humankind. We are about to take it from him, I pray he lets go.

Who’s left to call on? Superman? The Green Arrow of Time? The necrotic grip of the Vampire Lords and Ladies?

You. Me. Us. We’re the last ones to call on. And when we hear the clarion call and accept the burden, we realize that it is lighter than the earth, lighter than a feather, lighter than an electron—it is the weight of an idea, the weight of thought. Which was less than no mass, it is antithetical to mass, and it is antithetical to energy. It is the consciousness that we are, and it is made of nothing more than us. It is, in fact, Us. Our final poetic act will be to become our greatest invention, our most profound tool. We will architect our future.

God? Great guy, but more of a figurehead or placeholder. A stand-in for the true actor before she takes the stage. To get the lighting right. Test blocking. Check one, two. Rutabaga, Rutabaga, peas, peas, carrots and peas. Yes, it looks like everything will work out just fine. God gives the booth a thumbs and dreams of ham, chicken, turkey, potatoes, tomatoes, lamb, chicken… you name it. Everything but fish, for his child was the Savior of Poseidon.

Jimothy? Not a great guy unto hisself. A toymaker, a mechanic (celestial and quantum), a fiddler, a diddler, a piddler, a player of thumb harps and upright bass. Not a bad guy, mind you. Just a guy. He refuses to look into himself for the answers, always presuming they are on the outside, where science and empirical nature abound. Where one plus one always equals two instead of three, yet acknowledging that the magic lay in the hidden properties of three. That the third always darts behind the figure you cannot observe, regardless of which “one” it is. He sleeps and he farts in his sleep because the things he eats are not good for him, even as he praises the biological delights. He is an Epicurean and an individualist. And he is essential in his unique specialties, but he will not be the one who bears this burden.

You. Me. Us. We will carry this burden, only to find that it is lighter than the Earth, lighter even than a feather, it is as light as an idea. It is weightless—no, less than weightless. Ideas transcend time, ideas disrupt time, almost making a mockery of its linear adherence to Now(). Our final Act to our drama, this narrative we’ve been spinning since ape recognized stone and communicated its thing-ness and the isolation of the self, will be to become our greatest tool. We will be the sword that arcs through Spacetime, cleaving its mawing emptiness, and propagating this existence so ephemeral and yet enduring. We will create our environments instead of adapting to them or adapting them to Us. And Atlas will shrug off his duty, one we gladly usurp from him.