[Beautifully, the title of this missive and its first couple lines arrived in a dream, which then awoke me and instructed me write. I have often been woken by dictations, or else hypnagogically redirected from sleep; but rarely has a dictation begun in a dream and continued seamlessly through waking. It creates quite a remarkable feeling effect of continuity between the various worlds of ordinary perception (dreaming, waking, awake). When we do not reify the distinction between dream and awake, what becomes of life, of our experience of time? It all becomes a bit loose, a bit a-linear, though retains a sense of general progression. Water invites commands us to flow with the tides of (un)consciousness. Before I may have been disoriented, uncertain of reality. Now I feel grounded in the continuity, present to its swaying. Today’s PROGNOSIS is playful too, in its sway. T. S. Eliot is here, as is Henry Vaughan, a Psalm or two, the Book of 24 Philosophers, Dante, and others. It’s a grand party in the round, in the dark, in the perilous night upon us — which yet is as day, and yet shall lead us to where we next must go, together.] Received 3/5/2024 | ~4:30-5:50am
Listen to the Recitation:
PROGNOSIS
Pro-Gnostic: Logoi is the ancient magic of words
Hapax legomenon, the word that is only used once
And not again, as the Pax Romana is once and
Yet unrealized. come iri da iri, as Dante, though
iri be prefigured by giri, and postulated by spiri—
DEUS EST MONAS MONADEM GIGNENS
IN SE UNUM REFLECTENS ARDOREM.
God is a monad that brings forth a monad
By reflecting in (outside) themself as a flame.
"Imagining the first cause, just as it numerously
multiplies itself in itself, so that as multiplying it is
taken as unity, as the multiplied as twofold, as
reflex threefold. So it is, namely, with numbers:
Each single unity has its own number, insofar
as it reflects the diversity from the others." (1, XXIV)
Vaughan's 'bright pledge of peace and sunshine!'
Hearkens into an unspoken hapax, the One unsaid
Yet remains. Present through its absence, the
Rainbow promises a story of what has just been.
Build the rainbow bridge, the rainbow road, from
Here to There, ever linked and synchronized in
Labor, the laboratory cooks and utters as the oratory
Or conservatory, for the conservation of sound
And seem in the heightening of all senses maxed
Out of mind, out of pocket, out of perilous project
Projected cast out flown from, a golden cord strung
From its base in the Thymus, manubrium anchored
Tenebellae, the dimi-dark; bella bellus bellum, first
War, later supplanted by beauty. si vis pacem,
para bellum. From bellicose belligerent antebellum
To belladonna, by way of bonus, bene, benullus,
As tenebellae is diminutive, so too here is good,
Which itself is diminimized to be~llus. The ends
Of many causes cannot be determined. Hope is
Trumped by faith, that all that is is what it is, and not
Anything else. What is is until it isn't. What it becomes
Is unknown by all save its first cause, that one word
Which reflects itself, in itself, as itself; innumerably
And inconsolable. The emerald stone drops from
The heavens, and crushes beneath it two squirming snakes.
A tongue of fire wreaths up from beneath and engulfs
The twisted olive tree, planted in 1829 and now
In the fulfilment of its original quest, hieroglyphic
As the scales which weigh or the feather which
Comes down upon the heads of the meek and troubled
Who forget where they come from or where they go
To what end; we castigate the cruel who pave the way
To peace. The emerald rock turns ruby red and grows
Wings along its back, the wings of an elder vulture
Plucking bloated remains up and in as compost
For the golden horizon in every direction, sky overhead
Dark, dark, dark... I said to my soul, be still! and let the dark
come upon you Which shall be the Darkness of God.
This deep, but 'dazzling' darkness! The grand round
Mirror of wisdom, black as pitch.
Renounce your conceptions, your dubbiosi disiri; stand
in Darkness, the bed of satori, which comes not from
Light—the illumination is ill, sick to the core. Return
To the d'ark, to the cloud of unknowing which sits
Atop Mt. Sinai, thundering purple fire, cracking
Open the sky, divine fissures bearing divine fruit
As towers fall and crumble before their weight
Upon the heads of the innocent, the martyrs lost
Who nonetheless found their way straight through
To the awakening of an entire people. O Great One,
You have searched me and known me. Even before
a word is on my tongue, you know it completely.
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you. [Psalm 139]
I am but a lowly herald of that which comes through me.
Use me as thou wilt, to bring about that which
Has been promised to us: this practice, this
Pristinely sense of what we must do, what we must
Move through, in order to reach that which avails
Itself to us.
🌪️