The World Unmade: Five Prose Poems
I'm creating a special thread for this, as opposed to sticking it in my personal poetry thread. I've wanted to do a poetic cycle on a theme for a while, and this is the culmination of that desire; five personal and interlinked meditations on the theme of endings.
The World Unmade: Five Prose Poems
1. Prologue. To Catch the Sky
I set off, by car, on my habitual journey, from Llandudno to Durham, on a March morning, bright and cold. It is a drive I do often, between my family home and my university home, and I have long since grown bored with it.
I had been delayed somewhat by a traffic accident not a hundred yards from my front gate, losing an hour I could afford to discard but did not want to. I listened to old tunes on the old radio, and willed the hours and the miles to pass.
The weather was clear, even temperate; I drove beneath the impossibility of the sky, cloudless and vast, distant and heartfelt. As I climbed into the Pennines along the M62 the weather closed in, a subtle suddenness. Rain and snow mingled, a wetness, and I was driving mere feet below the leaden clouds. Fearing the worsening of the weather, I pulled off the motorway into a lay-by, and sought to test the air and work my legs by entering into the world from the shelter of my car.
I became conscious of shapes in the field beside me, an impression of people obscured by the falling snow and rain. Compelled by something I cannot name, I left the road to tread uneasily and clumsily through the mud towards them. A great multitude, men and women, stood in silence, unmoved by the weather.
"Who are you?" I asked.
One replied. "We are the poets, and the painters, and the music makers."
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
Another replied. "The world is ending, and we come to mourn it, to witness and to wake."
I did not believe them. They were glum, and serious, and impossibly distant. But am I not a poet? Have I not, by artistic impulse alone, moved to sorrow, to delight? As a poet, I claimed my place.
"May I join you? I am a poet," I said.
There was a sensation of movement, the passage of but a moment, as if all the material universe let slip a sigh. The figures remained unutterably still.
A third spoke. "No."
I had not earned my place amongst them, and there would be no reconsideration. I returned, cold and saturated, to my car and began to drive. And the radio talked of commerce, of sand, of champagne, and I knew the world had ended.
II. Remembrance. The Land Beyond the Sea
I remember clearly the morning I first saw the land beyond the sea.
For all the ages of man before that dawn, the sea had stretched out plain and unadorned to the uncaring horizon. As the sun rose, I saw a land there, a land where once there had been nothing. Forests and woods gave way to sheer mountainsides that rose to snow capped peaks, bedecked in regal clouds and shining in the early sunlight. Distance is deceptive on the sea, but we are a fishing folk, and not a man or woman in the village reckoned the land to be more than a dozen miles away. An intrepid few, the first, climbed into their skiffs and sailed for the land beyond the sea. We waited for them to return, but they did not, and the day wore on to evening, and the evening into night. In the morning, the land beyond the sea was still there, still the same, but our folk had not returned to us, nor ever would.
And men began to whisper, dark words and dark thoughts. They said that the land beyond the sea was cursed, that it boded evil, and they averted their eyes that they might not have to look upon it. Yet the land beyond the sea filled the entirety of their horizon, the entirety of their world, and thus their world became one of fear and pain: no man can fish if he cannot look upon the sea.
Day by day and year by year the folk lived, forever in the sight of the land beyond the sea, living only to fear. Then some began to say that it was wrong to be afeared of the land beyond the sea, that it was a paradise over the waves, and that the sons and husbands, daughters and wives who had gone hence had found their every pleasure met. And many of the folk, long oppressed by their fear of the land beyond the sea, whooped with joy and raced to the shoreline, launching their skiffs to sail across the intervening water that they might be reunited with their loved ones in this earthly paradise.
The days passed, and they did not return. Those who had spoken of the delights of the land beyond the sea were gone, as were those who had most fearfully spoken of their dread of the land beyond the sea. Those of us that remained held council, to talk of the land beyond the sea. One of the elders spoke of the land beyond the sea, and of the danger it posed to us all, for had it not already taken so many of our kin? Other spoke in agreement, saying that the land beyond the sea was an enemy, that it would move against us, that it must be dealt with. I was silent.
War was declared, war upon the land beyond the sea. The soldiers who had lately been fishermen rushed to their skiffs, brandishing their harpoons and singing their new battle cries. They would make war upon the land beyond the sea, and free their kin from the bondage of paradise.
I, who alone remained, have never again looked upon my people since then.
III. Glass. Beneath a Frail Faith
As I stood at a crossroad, awaiting friends, an old man approached me and spoke.
"So if you pass along this route of my existence, and tread the darkened cloisters of this little world, following the path of heart and grave until on bended knee you kneel before the slow, dissolving firmament, then there, stripped of reason and meaning, you will feel your humanity shudder within you, and quail before the terrible noise that lurks in the heart of silence."
IV. Pulchritude. The Whirling Wheel
The lights grow dim, the prattling chatter fades as the auditorium descends into an expectant, pregnant hush.
She appears on stage, radiant and beautiful under the spotlights. Her hair is the colour of blood, her eyes the reflection of my desire, her skin the soft blush of promise. She wears nothing but a simple shift of white silk, that runs like liquid, like milk, down the contours of her body. She is barefoot upon the stage, the whole material universe beneath her sole.
It is not about lust, you understand. Nothing so degenerate, so developed; it is a sensation older and more primitive than lust. A hand, a mouth, a welcoming c**t will see to the needs of the body. This, to me and to the audience, is to satisfy a spiritual need.
She speaks:
"To know me is to understand a feeling, and to feel an understanding. I am me, I am Freyja, I am Ēostre, I am Fortune, I am Mother Church, and I am. Men have genuflected before the b***h-goddess since before they understood themselves, holding their manhoods in their hands and praising me with every joyous stroke. And they have clicked their rosaries, and hailed my virginity in their sacred spaces. Image upon image, light upon light, they are the same. I will show you the gateway. I will show you the consolation of loss, the perfect imperfection. I will show you the two-way passage of life. I will show you the beginning and the end of existence."
She lifts her shift. Between the fullness of her thighs I see the centre of the world, the image of my god.
V. Impermanence. The Maggots in God's Flesh
The human condition is one of eschatological anticipation. We look forward, but in looking to the future we seek only for the end of things, the days on which we shall run out of oil, of trees, of air, of light.
What if creativity be a finite resource? The thought occurred unexpectedly to me but a few days ago, and I wondered whether it was insight or heresy. What if all creativity be but one invisible whole, slowly chipped away by every word of poetry, every note of music, every subtle brushstroke? Have I, in some way, used up this precious stock, even in the production of these very words?
I am the artist thwarted by my art. Not a great poet, perhaps not even a good one, and yet, selfish, I draw upon the limited impulses of my species, a tiny king staking out his fiefdom of dreams and mediocre ambitions. It is a self-reflexive impulse: to question art in the form of art, a process of auto-cannibalisation that word by word and thought by thought creeps ever closer to an ending.
Because it will end. We are like the maggots in God's flesh, feasting upon that which both sustains and houses us, tearing at the heart of it. We artists, we canter gaily down the route of our destruction, hastening our slow deaths with every passing heartbeat. When the stock of ideas are spent, and humanity languishes in the faded temples of its former self, we will know only the certainty of ending, we who in looking forward see only into nothing.
