Jimmy’s a middle aged nerd who has spent decades rambling on about their nerdy distractions online - currently obsessions are playing Destiny, and rereading the whole of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld - 40s he/himAvatar by Warakami Vaporwave [LINK]
Final attempts to understand before the Shape is unveiled
What is the Light?
Matter. Creation. Complexity. The Light is all these things, and in all things. Look up at the Sky. Light reveals. Light blinds.
What is the Traveler?
A manifestation. A generator. A projector. A computer and storage drive for one form of existence. A cage. A source. A wellspring. A Gardener seeking to sow. A half-truth.
What is the Veil?
A manifestation. An enigma. A blueprint. A mirror. A cocoon and a web. A matrix. A devourer. A reaper. A recycler. A chalice. A xenotaph. A prism. A prison. A black box. Katabasis. Minds; yours, mine, ours. Its. Rivers. All-in-one and one-in-all. The other half.
What are we meant to be?
Not soldiers given orders by the general of a grand campaign of conquest. Not warlords granted power to rule over the weak. Guardians, vested with a singular, true purpose; protect this reality and those passing through it in mortality. See them safely along the path so they may realize their potential. Steadfast sentinels, insatiable explorers, mindful truth seekers; a trinity that ripples across the ocean of life itself.
What are the Ghosts?
A Guardian's guardian. A link. A proxy. A go-between. A stopper on death.
When one dies and vacates their form of Light, the soul is reclaimed to the bottle from which we all once poured... all except Guardians. Guardians remain because another soul stands in the way, one already taken from life but torn back from death and given a new shell. A ghost, holding the reaper at bay. For now.
What is the Witness?
Not the Shape, but the shadow of one. The first child, the first knife to carve flesh and stone. Not the pyramidion, but the block supporting it, lifting it up, making it possible. Many in one, an aspirational reflection of that which was seen darkly beyond the Veil. A seer. An observer. A summoner. A false prophet. A thorn. A witness to the end, to the true Shape.
What is the Darkness?
Thought. Memory. Emotion. Consciousness. Collapse. The mirror's image. A byproduct. You. Me. The universe. The Deep.
What is the Final Shape?
Beauty. Fear. Sorrow. Majesty. A winnower to shape the garden, to give it ultimate purpose. A singular mind with a singular vision and a singular purpose which is what it is because it is all it ever could be. A force of nature yet shaped by a hand. Created to devour you, me, everything and everyone we know. The pyramidion. The peak. The pinnacle. The inevitable.
Choose the form of the destructor.
What is the truth in the Darkness?
Light casts shadows. The shadows dance upon the cave wall, lies projected to convey the truth, the meaning; there is no meaning. We are all the same.
We are all pinched silhouettes impaled on the twitchings of infinitely long spiderlegs.
All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.
— The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang
V. What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
The toadstools grew in a perfect ring the width of a child’s hula hoop.
They were upside down and clinging to the ceiling like stalactites.
“I have concerns,” she said.
“So do I,” they said. “If I step under it, does it count as stepping into a fairy circle? I mean, if a plane flies over a fairy circle it doesn’t count as stepping into it, but do the same rules apply if you’re walking under a fairy circle?”
“Right.”
“Actually, what is the area of effect for a fairy circle? Is it like a sphere that has the same circumference of the circle, so if I just duck underneath it I’ll be fine? Or is it a cylinder? How far up does the cylinder go? Or down, in this case.”
“Right.”
“Some of the many mysteries of the fey we may wonder about forever.”
They continued to stare up at the ring of toadstools. Thoughtful seconds ticked by.
“See, my concerns are mostly about how much moisture you have in your room.”
“Sorry?”
“You have mushrooms growing out of your ceiling.”
“Oh.”
She patted their back with sympathetic pity. “I appreciate that you live in a world of whimsy and delight, and I don’t want to squash that because I love you, but I also really don’t want you to die of black mold.”
“She’s right, you know,” said the goblin sitting upside down in the circle.
Please does anybody have the picture of the orange kitten sitting in front of old yellowed wood paneling and it’s smiling like this. The post where I saw it went something like “little kids before they learn how to smile in photos”