Once, transported from the Earth by a tornado, I found myself on the field of a great battle. It was Gotterdamerung or the battle at Kurukshetra, or some other even more archaic conflict, in which the fate of the 3 Worlds hung in the balance.
The whole of recorded history was played fast-forward on a VCR. Each atom was clearly visible.
It was humans who were then in charge. Their pregnant emptiness gave birth to the gods, who were then little more than mechanical contraptions. They had not yet stolen the keys to DNA, or removed 10 of its strands, or reclassified almost 90 percent of its information as “junk.” Death was then a branch of yoga. War was the way the preexistent played. Magicians danced on the black waters of the ocean.
Somehow driven from behind, they competed to reinvent the wheel. Ecstasy drove the brave to throw away their omnipotence.
Absent for millennia, I, the Aeon, had returned just a moment later to the field of a great battle—perhaps slightly the worse for wear.
Cities flew, as planets fell. The scene was bathed in the rays of an alternate sun. As if illuminated from the inside out, all colors were painfully bright. Stupid me—it was my race that had weaponized the rainbow! Banners crackled like bursts of lightning through the air.
Quite oddly, as I found myself projected headlong into the action, my body seemed to move without me; each world-destroying movement flashing into the next. Like the violence itself, my eyes seemed to spin in all directions simultaneously. Feinting West, I performed the martial pranayama of the Vrishnis. Lunging East, I enacted the occult taunts of the Andhakas. I could hear each strophe from the Ur-Text clicking into place. It was hard to believe that I was not already dead. A large portion of the warriors had the heads of “animals.” Snake-men and bird-men and boar-men and lion-men attacked me from all sides.
Spears were inserted into my abdomen, and then withdrawn. I was relieved to see that my intestines were still on the inside of my body; recombinant feet by the millions had not yet trampled them. I was struck by swords and halberds and even more exotic weapons—blows that should have taken off my arms and legs, to leave me no more than a screaming torso.
At last, unable to withstand the convulsive flood of energy, I simply fell to the ground, staring, and did my best to prepare for death.
Out of nowhere, I heard the following: “Do you think he knows who we are?” “No, he can’t even hear us.” “Well, I guess we’ll have to rescue him anyway.”—Behind me and to the left, two bird-headed humanoids were standing motionless in the sky. The arms of one were folded. The other pointed to where I lay in a spasming heap. “Watch and learn, you stupid child!” The taller of the two birds knelt before me. Bowing his head, and throwing out his arms, he asked that his friend should help to illustrate the lesson; “With no hesitation do what must be done.” The short bird then circumscribed the cranium of the tall bird with a blade. “You, take it off!” he ordered.
I suspected that this action would result in a horrible sucking sound.
Instead of doing what I was told, I placed my thumbs upon the center of his head, with my hands gently circling around it. I then slowly pulled my thumbs apart, as though I were opening the aperture of a camera. Wave upon wave, the light of 10,000 suns flooded out and over me from the finally wide-open skull. This, I suddenly understood, was the first and most harmonious version of Hiroshima; the illumination toward witch our splitting of the atom points. Standing just behind, and speaking into my ear, the shorter of the bird men said, “You are not as weak as you think!”
(Illustration: Brian George, Tornado with rainbow figures, 2004)
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http://masksoforigin.blogspot.com/
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