Lightning in a bottle
So the last shall be first, and the first last
This is the last of seven strange rooms.
It is confusing, I know, to begin at the end.
Prelude.
I don’t speak normally.
Wait. No. That statement is true... but it is also misleading.
Normally, I don’t speak at all.
To phrase it this way instead might be clearer, dear reader: on the rare occasion that I say something, I am quite certain I do not sound entirely rational. I do not normally follow a clean and well-organized line of thought from start to finish.
I write much the same way.
I might start a story before it begins, and then I might tell the ending, and then I might pick up several threads somewhere in the middle, and follow them in multiple directions at once.
When I write, I have no idea what I am doing.
My thoughts are never organized chronologically.
My thoughts are never organized hermeneutically. (Yes, I looked up that word. Even so, I’d like twenty-five cents for using it. If you are an ordinary person like me, then you won’t know the meaning of it either. Hermeneutics is the mapping and ordering of meaning. So it is my fancy way of saying: my thoughts are not sensibly ordered by meaning.)
If you read long enough, then eventually (I think) my thoughts hang together, in a manner of speaking (ha! see what I did there?) — but I do not make it easy for you. My apologies for that, dear reader, but there is nothing to be done for it, unless you can make arrangements for my brain to be transplanted.
I have not done enough writing to know if I “normally” wait until the full tapestry has been woven before I place it out on the floor. In the pieces I have placed here until now, over these last few weeks, it is what I have done.
However… this time, I will not.
The previous piece (that was not actually a piece) was named Precipice and there I spoke truthfully when I said it was a prelude to a prelude for another piece.
What you will read next is the seventh part of the piece to which it referred. In other words, this is the last part of the piece, and it is the first part that I wrote.
Are we confused yet?
I shall say it another way. When I shaped this particular arrangement of words, all the words that preceded it were still locked in a vault in my mind. A vault to which I was still struggling to find the key to unlock.
I found the key, eventually. And now the full piece is written. It is a much longer piece of work than I planned, and more intense than I expected. Like lightning in a bottle, I suppose.
Lightning in a bottle makes me nervous.
Therefore, tonight I will do something odd. I will place only this last part on the floor.
The full piece will follow, if I find the courage to share it. Even then, most likely, it will follow in patches. The truth is easier to tell in small parts… especially when some of those parts tell the truth beneath the floorboards of fiction.
As always, dear reader, I am grateful for your time and your tireless patience. I know I am not easy to read.
I. Mirrors
The title of my favourite book is The Thief of Always, by Clive Barker. It is a fable that begins with these words:
“The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive. Here he was, buried in the belly of that smothering month, wondering if he would ever find his way out.”
It might not surprise you I wrote this reflection as though it was situated between a pair of mirrors standing face to face. I wrote this last part first, and then I wrote the prelude next, and then I filled in the spaces between, alternating back and forth.
It was like working on a page in a colouring book for children, starting from the outside and working in toward the middle. Or like assembling a puzzle, starting with the outside edges first, and then slowly working my way in toward the centre.
That means you will read the words here, in this seventh room, many days after I have actually written them. The words are in the bottle now, but it will be some time before I find the courage to cast the bottle out into the wide open water. Assuming I find that courage at all.
As I pen my closing words here, it happens to be the final day of the month of February. And this... in the year that marks an unprecedented reconfiguration of my life and identity. A seismic shift in the meaning of me. The enormity of the change is quite beyond my capacity to imagine.
II. Numbers
The name of the day in the month is “last”, and the number of the day is “2/28”. Two is a pair on its own, and twenty eight is a pair of fourteens. And, as we know, fourteen is forty one in a mirror. Not just that, but two plus two plus eight makes twelve.
The number forty one is my favourite, and twelve follows me everywhere.
(Once again, I swear before all the gods, I did not plan it this way.)
I have done my homework on twelve. It is the number that symbolizes divine, cosmic order. Twelve is the number of the Tribes of Israel. Disciples of Jesus. Imams in Islam. Links in the Buddhist chain of dependent origination. Petals on the Anahata. Signs in the zodiac. Labors of Hercules. Titans in Greek cosmology. Notes in the chromatic scale. Jurors to render a verdict.
And, always my favourite: twelve is the number for the ribs that guard the heart.
I have read The Thief of Always more times than I can count.
I read it (more than once) to each of my daughters when they were small. Sometimes, I think, they might have listened again (and again) because they know how much I love the story.
I love my daughters all the more for that.
III. Masks
In the story of the Thief is a House, and in the House is a Room, and in the Room is a Wall, and the Wall is covered from floor to ceiling with Masks.
It is an image that has always pulled at me. I suppose it left a mark on my daughters also, because as they grew older they began to give me masks as gifts. My collection is small, but every item carries meaning in many layers.
Therefore, this next step seems rather... fitting to me.
I have donned the mask.
We shall see if it suits me.
IV. Names
And now I will claim the proper name.
It is the first time you will see me allow myself the capital letter.
— Dante.
Im going to have to read the Thief of Always now.
Well, I replied to @HVR and you about hermeneutics.
Now that I have read your text, what comes to mind is the relevance of your word "sequence."
You see, it is the task of the reader, the interpreter, i.e. me, to discover and understand the sequence order, i.e. the pattern. And thus, to bring more sense into what you have attempted to communicate, write and publish.
I guess you are a Piscis, so happy birthday! Or a Piscis ascendant at least, which means you were born early in the morning (around 8 am.)
A commonly attributed trait of this sign is its capacity to go into the unknown and connect dots that apparently bear no connection. That is, excellent associative memory, which is an elemental of very creative people, artists.
You also seem to have a manic affinity to "write about writing" (the intro is longer than the seventh room, which actually splits in 3), and to be playful with the reader, constantly attempting not to lose his/her attention as you meander along the dark profound waters of sense. At the bottom of it all, hence, there is a humanism in your impulse, which is a scarce, valuable quality in these times of lack of attention and AI Slop.
If you captured the lightning in the bottle and sent it through the sea of substack, i imagine you expect nothing less than an electric shock on he who finds and opens the bottle. The collection of masks seems to be your overempathic, INFJ capacity to put yourself in the shoes of anyone. This is a power, not a malediction, it can make of you a damn good writer, but might also drive you into the mouth of madness.
Since Dante decided to abandon all hope and enter the underworld, and since you have given yourself your own name, what I can add is: find your Virgil to tour you around, and drop the thread of Ariadne so you make sure you know how to come out and tell us what you saw through your writing.