Specific Spatiotemporal Patterns of Neuronal Activity
The ground beneath my feet is a mobile brown mud, streaked with yellow and black. Caught in the steaming broth are algae and diatoms, their flotsam staining the mud green in places. Scaly insects and tiny frogs dart across the surface, sometimes floundering, sometimes snatching up smaller skimming insects or swimming, spinning rotifers. Occasionally, the gurgling of an animal throat, the splutter of a writhing body in deeper water will indicate that there are larger predators waiting in their hiding places.
The swamp winds around and between the twisted roots of immense trees, whose foliage forms a dappled canopy way over my head. Many of the trees resemble maidenhairs or twisted replicas of weeds grown many times too tall. Some have stalks like monstrous sticks of rhubarb, with adventitious hairs as thick as my arm all the way up the grooved stems. The forest floor is covered with clumps of mangrove and rhododendron bushes, their tangled branches hanging Medusalike over the stagnant water into which their black roots vanish.
Many interwoven, mottled creepers festoon the larger trees and provide, in their turn, an anchorage for ferns and fungi and algal webs.
I see, between the threads of the green curtain, the wings of dragonflies and the scales of fishmen, all hiding, all their forms twinkling briefly in the filtered sunlight. Thousands of gnats and midges and other minute jewel-winged flies with slender bodies and multilenticular eyes form an ever-present cloud that engulfs me.
The world feeds on my blood.
Tiny mites and other forms too tiny to see individually swarm over the cork bark of the trees, turning the wood into a living shell.
There is a stretch of muddy sand beneath my feet. Across the brown surface scurry a horde of sandhoppers and spiders. Dead and rotting shellfish are washed up by turgid ripples into a thin wash of scum around the edges of the sandbank. Small lizards perch above shade-green pools, remaining perfectly still, save for their tongues, which flash back and forth with orgiastic fervor.
The sounds are all individually slight, but cumulatively they are well-nigh deafening. There are scratches and clickings, the sawing of insect legs and the clucking of amphibian throats, the screaming of a million deaths per minute. There is a steady sucking and hissing in the body of the water, a groaning and creaking in the forest itself, the chatter of rain in the sky. The raindrops never reach the swamp — they are swallowed up by the crowns of the trees. Every single one.
I am frightened, dissolving into the alkaline water, eaten by the carrion flies, petrified into the boles of the trees, sliced and hung out to dry in the sunless, sickly air with the lianas and the bindweed.
I am drowning.
titan base to canaan. titan base to canaan. come in canaan. titan base to canaan.
The man in the death-mask is stretched out before me — a corpse. The forest is feeding on his flesh-smeared bones. I watch them eating slowly through his mask, holding my breath until I can hold it no longer. The mask dissolves into a thousand beetles and worms.
But they have already consumed the face inside. They have been working from within as well as without. I do not know who he is — which of us, if one of us at all. I do not know whether you are dead or not.
At least I know that. I do not know. I have been forced to cry for help and recognize that. But I am still screaming, somewhere in chaos. I have merely fled through a continuum of awakening. I am running through the pages of sleep, but I can find only more dreams and more. I can find neither the beginning of the book nor its close. I cannot find doors, I cannot find windows. I can only wake and wake and wake, while that scream goes on forever in a universe that is empty of everything save the scream, and I cry and cry for help.
But the answer: the answer . . .
calling
You made the Law within which the Earth existed, and by which mankind had to learn to live. And I had to learn to live. And you, if you could. If you did. If you have . . .
The Law provided that there should be going forward as well as going backward. It provided that we should exist in aeonic time, between the crevices of the ticking clock and above the clicking register of creations. You provided for standstill and rewinding of the clock, rewiring and the setting of alarms. You gave us the procession of night and day, but also said that night would be, and day would be in the random flux of chaos, where we should find them. That was madness, and we welcome it.
You decided that there should be no death save destruction, and that which could abide could be
canaan
immortal, and that the gate of heaven could not be opened by those who suffer under the Law.
You cast us down to dwell in the deepness of your Earth, while you went away to find out whether there are bars around our cosmic cage.
Into this wild abyss I was escorted, and my path amid confusion and tumult and discord I charted with my companions, a dancer whose name is Judas and another whose name is very probably
titan
nothing more than another mask to conceal him. I took the advice of chance in order to choose my way.
The way was hard and fierce, because this is a world filled with anger and primal fire. The countenance divine is
calling
thundered and scarred, and I know that if settlement and peace are to be found then it is only at great expense.
It is as though you said to me:
I have lived in your world which has treated me in its fashion. Now you shall live in mine and see your world treated in my fashion, and you shall share it. You are
calling
challenging me still, and you are laughing as you point to the forbidden stars.
I see that I am unwelcome in your world, though you do not hate me, and my threats — and eventually my claim upon your throne (which was madness and welcome) — mean nothing at all to you, if you mean anything to yourself, which now I concede that I do not, and have never, and will possibly never, know.
c . . .
Is there an
. . . alling
answer?