Antiphony (11 page)

The sound is not the same—in his mind he hears the great soloist from a short while ago playing, the huge concert grand, like a giant harp laid down on its side, sending waves of thrilling notes across the giant space of the auditorium. But here, the
notes are muffled, muddy, slightly off pitch. The piano needs to be tuned, and its small upright sound board will never match what he heard earlier this evening. A piano like that must cost two or three hundred thousand dollars.

As he attempts a delicate run in which he has to cross over his hands to get all the way up the keyboard, the fingers on his left hand catch, stumble over themselves, and falter.

The notes come to an abrupt stop.

He will probably never learn the entire piece—he will certainly never master it. Better to give it up.

Better to abandon the pursuit of excellence than to keep plodding along in a halting, stumbling, defiantly inferior manner.
Enough.
He will sign the letter, and, in doing so, formally give up the idea that he might ever accomplish anything as masterful and filled with genius as playing a piece such as this, or writing a piece such as this, or discovering a basic principle of the workings of nature. He can finally admit now that he has never possessed the spark of genius required to do these things.

He stands up from the piano and turns to his desk where the letter waits, hidden beneath the portfolio he uses for meeting notes. He reads the entire contents of the letter, standing, his hand quavering a bit as he holds the creamy rag paper Victor's assistant uses for official documents. His eye is drawn to one sentence in particular:
I freely admit that my use of the word “God” in my speech was a deviation from the proposed presentation approved by the Institute for Cosmological Physics and the New International Perspectives on String Theory Symposium and reflects a personal wording choice that was an attempt to provide a suitable metaphor for concepts that often prove difficult to describe outside the realm of mathematics.

When he considers it carefully, he must admit that all of this is true. He was grasping for a way to express ideas that had been bothering him lately, in the run-up to the conference. And, it is true, that what he said was a deviation from what Victor saw and signed off on before the paper was submitted for publication and the presentation was sent to the conference chair. It's all true, all the mistakes he has made. All the shortcomings.

He lays the paper down on his desk and takes up a pen. He glances at the empty space above his printed name for a moment and then slowly, carefully, draws the pen across the rough texture of the page, making sure each letter of his name is entirely legible, so everyone can see:

Theodore J. Reveil, Ph.D.

There is nothing left to do—he can let go now of everything that has ever mattered to him, of everything that has made him who he is. He goes over to the day bed on the far side of the room and lies down on it, closes his eyes, and lets it all return to its native nothingness.

T
HE DREAM BEGINS
simply enough, as an encounter with his brother, whom he rarely sees these days, down in Texas with his two small children and his happy, conventional life as an insurance adjuster for the frequent weather-related disasters that plague the region, hurricanes and twisters and hailstorms, lightning
strikes, fire and brimstone. As is usually the case, there is enough incongruity in the setting to let him know it is a dream. Geoffrey (not Jeffrey, their parents had a penchant for granting their children old-fashioned, more-British names and spellings) enters the living room of a house that feels very much like their great Aunt Irma's house, a house Theodore has not thought about, much less visited, in nearly thirty years. He has in tow both of his young children, Avery, the girl, and Cassidy, the boy. Geoffrey was not going to saddle his own children with conventional names—no, they would have uniquely current names that carry little meaning. And the children, in this dream, are even younger than their current age, maybe three and five. They are happy to see him, their uncle Teddy, and perhaps that's why his mind has placed them all in old Aunt Irma's two-bedroom bungalow, giving extra emphasis to his role as an uncle in that way dreams have of giving us extra perspectives on things—he is in a way seeing the encounter both through his own eyes and through the eyes of the little children, and from above, as if he is floating near the gabled ceiling of the sparsely furnished room, a benign god-like presence overseeing all.

Now he sees that he is holding a large, floppy, leather-bound book in his hands, and as he opens the book to show Geoffrey something in it, his brother comes near, holding little Avery's hand in his, and the three of them read the single line that is printed in the middle of the silky white page: W
E ARE EACH OF US BEINGS OF
L
IGHT
.

The words would seem to emit a shimmer of careless energy, transmitting a smile to Geoffrey's face. Theodore turns to him and nods, as if to confirm the validity of the message; always
the teacher, always the purveyor of wisdom, always smarter than the rest.

Then, something profoundly disturbing happens. His viewpoint draws within himself for a moment, and then is lifted up, away from this room and any other and, what's more, releases itself entirely from his body. The pages in the book evaporate from view, and the house and people with it. Everything draws itself to a solitary station within him. Everything collapses into nothing, and every thing that made him who he thinks he is is gone completely. He is drawn within and lifted within, he is every reason and no reason at all. He is dressed in nothing, no longer clothed in the body that has carried him, he is beyond that now. He slides within a filament that draws around him like valves releasing him to another world. He sees this as a film of burnished celluloid, a bustling swamp of cells surrounding him, blinking, bunched up verdigris, a swarm of liquid animals that might be his very own.

In a corner of his vision, another layer appears; another and another, drawing him down, within. He passes through several layers and stops, it seems, in one. In this layer the cells are gone and there are only patterns, shapes, relationships. Brightly colored textures, flashing past him, cords of fabric woven from boiling worms of ruling death. Molecules that bind together, attracted one to another, tendrils of particular weight and thickness that dictate whether or not one may happen to link to this one or that. And soon enough he passes through this, drawn down once more past layers upon layers, each more fantastic than the next.

Whatever corner of his soul has opened up to reveal has drawn him down and within to restless wandering, a fitful flight of midnight learning, quenching his true scholarship by means of miracle and glorious scrawled delight. Here nothing seems as it is and the dust of his imperiled intellect has been swept aside, leaving only the essence of matter itself laid bare. The ground of being sweats away a monstrous secret excellence. The ordering of every level makes way for one far deeper and far more intricate than the one last. Wave upon wave of violence operates here and now the final unity of matter shuns the forms he would recognize as his own. Here buzzing particles shimmer and flit by like tides of trembling light. Here hosts of frozen absolute passion form the final layer of something that could leap from one state to the next. Distance, space and time are nothing here—there is no time or space. When only energy is present, in its primal form, its first endeavoring, then only emotion rules the superabundance of power. Time cannot be measured without a gap between one second and the next. Space cannot be measured without a stopping point, where one thing is and another isn't. When all everything smoothly flows throughout, there is no longer here nor there. There can be no yester-day or to-day. There is only the swinging constant rhythm of total lacerating Now.

There is only every covenant of droves of buzzing particles, a shimmering flow through copious proud and angry lust. And finally, when he thinks his head will burst with the staggering pressure building out in all directions, it stops.

It stops, and opens to reveal.

Reveal; now heaven opens in a dream.

Heaven, true to light, a primal empty vastness on beyond whatever lies on top of it, brushed and varnished empty vastness, too enormous to be real. All everlasting nothing opened up to a chasm abyss wider than a sky that held a leaf that fell and landed in a perilous delight. Perhaps a tenuous cloud existed here once, but if it ever did, there can be no trace of it now and here there was no yester-day, is only evermore. There can be only pure fantastic vastness, an emptiness that has no bounds and makes the vacuum of space appear to be a teeming jungle filled to the brim with stuff by comparison. It is a nothingness that supports all the layers he fell through with its serenity and calm. It is a naked gleaming pasture of clarity through which all the other common blooming filth of existence can emanate. It is the single place from which everything ex-ists. It is the unitary moment from which all days take place. It is the one and only thought from which all other thoughts deliver.

It is.

And there can be no other.

It is the roiling surface of the sun scraped smooth until it is only light. It is the proud reluctant vastness of a shore that knows no end. Two cubits and four cubits, four cubits and eight. Flashing screeching something was a beast that meant no harm from fullness of a whim to terrible love or blood must slobber and groan and forge a tabernacle of hosts of tender impatient imagining there goes no other lure no other bait and cast and significant of the wherewithal to turn away from here to preach and keep on preaching to stare into the vastness of a crippled wave of curative disease to harken to the listless tentacles that rip apart a swinging necessity that never goes away.
Yield and never yield, never stand apart and never waste the start of nothing never the savage instrument of his demeanor launching startled flesh-and-bone delight; how many times has this tautology been taunting him and us and them? How many vitriolic modulations terminations terrifying dress and sword and shield and analogy to meanwhile great performance field reveal. In Kepler's tentative abundance of forms and formulations there was naught imperative to which a decaying shadow of doubt were instead of protable sweat and shorn. And shore again and faith who lived for me who knows for him the days and nights that mount to thee the boy that counts the agony. And drift bespoke beside the English passion the daughter raised and honed and silently prepared for slaughter. Wherein there is the giving up of eyes of sense relation between perceptual and untarnished thought secure. Wherefore there is the supper time dilation of a heart's abundant beating. Wherever may come the ruined palaces of long and latent reversible respites. Wherefore the two men who came to love the wretched summits of the earth the hallowed valleys of Copernicus delight, wherefore these two men who came to love were smitten by the very selfsame cause and ceaseless maker who made them. And whosoever triumphed by existence in and out of time harmonious and also riven senseless by fear, whosoever brought the channel of a smell of tinctures and ointments unto the prime and incarnal maker, for whatsoever reason, for whomever could excuse him and shed his chains before the gallows baleful appeal, those are the ones who are nothing but the portals of the maker. Those are the ones whom Newton found in surrogate murmurs of the night. Whenever a half-insistent arc or formula
for parabola joins the weather wander for a final peril or venality in spite, whenever terminations of points or lines are proven limitless by bounding up and out to further ever onward other dementias and dimensions, destinies and destinations, whoever sought to lessen the fair finality of expanding outward glow of light by whatever self-wrought frailty or treason, those are the ones whom Andromachus twirled and intertwined and over turned before they could ingratiate themselves before their maker.

And the likeness of the harps and bugle calls is the flaring trumpet of the hymn of all existence flaring out from a single point of nothingness to everything that is like women with sympathy and mourning a hollow firm receptacle for longing, that is what emanates from the suns and moons and stars nothing more than vast and fugitive longing, stretching out and out and out so far curved it tends to straightness, so long-standing it flashes into emptiness and disappears.

Thus were their faces inquired and registered from a form that molds them they leaping go pre-made thoughtful imagining unto light infested swirls of substance coming round romantic glooming together that was just before the sun went down in sad and eager wantful tending to delight; thus were their faces formed their bodies round their famous debris and shattered numerary nights; thus were their likenesses established in manner like the universe itself, tending from one spot to many, from one thought to many; thus were their likenesses the basis of their forms, their images the forms for their bodies through and true.

Moreover he said to him the son of every father who never was go forth into a simile of perfection, go onward from the thought that made you into the wretched indicating stalwart loins again, go you forth into becoming and being in time again though you are merely only a product of my thought; for thought must manifest and ex-press, thought must image make and engender love and life and distress, must press out into some thing and every thing in order to dis-cover what it was that made itself.

And

The likeness

Is a product of

Itself by means of itself and itself alone,

Whithersoever the spirit is to go, there shall every weight and grip of earth and enchantment,

Encompass the breath of spirit, endeavor to unfold within a sheath light slowed down enough to pull together as a bright and insubstantial whirlwind of matter, the first-slung fouling come-together of glory.

Two cubits and four cubits, four cubits and eight, by this means and method does the timeless image turn to light and from light to speck and speck by speck to propagate, by ever furling outward and twisting back upon itself. And they went in ashes swathed and silent to see him staring aghast and in some terror night regime in recompense to flow.