Acheron In Blue

It was a starry night, above a world filled with the rich, rolling blue of seas.  Waves capped in silver and cream, so vast they would have blotted out the sky to any human who stood on the ocean's shore, rolled up and over themselves, seeming to hang poised at their apex before crashing to their place in the tide with a deafening roar that covered the shores in abandonment.  Not a living thing for miles dwelt above the ground, but had there been someone, they might have been able to hear the lustrous, heartbreaking strains of whalesong that the waves carried with them.  The rivers in those realms ran silver, thick as the drink of Immortality, the bathwater of merfolk, the wine of the Fey.  Winter never froze its beauty; summer never baked it to sultry stillness.  Vast, spiraled towers of black and white marble and glass stood rooted, forever unmoving, except when a brittle bit of rubble, a brass roofing tile or jagged fragment of striped turret, fell from its height in the heaven to break the tide-smoothed virginity of the wet sand, always dark.  The footprints of Men were forgotten centuries ago, even by the stars, who had memories longer than the span of the earth.

Was it possible one still lived?  That under the starry dome of the world, in the vast swaths of silence unplumbed by the green and blue whorls of brinèd chaos, there might yet dwell, in the hovelish ruins of the Old Cities, a lamp-lighter who amy yet breathe, may still have eyes to behold the glories of the reborn lands?  Was it possible that it was not only the faerie children who danced in the gleaming streams, not only the treefolk who sang to the stars in the perpetuity of unpollutable nights?

Nay, and yes—for he was an Archaia, a man who had learnt the manner of living forever.  He sat alone in his tent of broken obsidian, and though he could no longer remember the art of making a fire in wood or coals, nor the manner of consuming food that was good for the body, nor the words to speak prayers to render the soul secure,he remembered the undreamable intricacies of the Knowledge.  He recalled the thoughts that one must keep forever in the forefront of one's mind, the measure with which one must count one's steps, the iron tenacity with which one must hold one's will steady.

He no longer remembered what it was to be human—

He knew only what it was like to live forever, with the same songs in one's head, with the same words on one's lips, with the undying burning of one's deepest core, the inner torment and pleasure of the lining of one's soul.  His eyes, which had once seen men's faces and women's bodies and the streets of bustling cities and the multihued flare of kings' banners and the sheen of sweat on horses' haunches and the saliva spooling from the jowls of panting dogs, now saw only the unbroken, incomprehensible mundanity of pure, beauteous nature.  He who had heard the whispers of lovers and the gruff rapport of business partners and the strident tones of a general's command and the screams of children beneath the horrific clamor of booted feet and unsheathed swords, flashing in the brightness that had once been sunlight, now heard only the tide.  There was nothing else to occupy the senses, for there was nothing else in life but the sea and the sky and the rivers.  The world had died in apocalypse itself, and been rebirthed in the ever-lusterful swaddling of desperate prophecy and deity's regrets.  The air that had once been thick with noise and dust and disease and laughter and change now hung in stillness and perfect clarity that could have no antecedent and no scion.

The love that had once given substance to the air was centuries lost; now it was so thin as to never be breathable, never intended for human consumption.  What could have been drowned in was now forgotten, buried under the eerie sheen of the meteor that hung in the air, one figure perched atop it:  a tree.  The Great Tree, the World Tree, the bearer of the memories of all that had existed before Time.  before Time and after Time—what was the difference?  There had been footprints, but they were long washed out by the tide.  There had been clouds and blood and typhonic entropy.  Now there was eternity—and even that word no longer existed, for outside of time there can be no proportion.  there can be no understanding of passage, no apprehension of movement, no clarity of gradience, no cognizance of nuance.  There can be no build and no death.  At the moment when every wave marries itself to the thick wet white grit of the seashore, there is an identical breaker rearing its curling, arching mane to the stars.

And yet the Tree, and the Man, live on.  They will not die.  They cannot die, outside of Time.  The Tree existed before Time, and saw all, and was thus outside of Time and could not be ravaged by time and its happenings.  It was the Man who discovered the true secret: to survive Time is to escape it.  To remain unfolded by the unstoppable entity that shapes universes to its will is to remain unbowed by epitomized creation and destruction itself.  To live through is to live on.  To die, to dream, to drown, is to fail.  to change is to surrender to the unrelenting ebb of Time.  But to live is to conquer for all of existence.  To survive is to exist is to die is the be immortal.
              The stars have no major qualms about the shape and history of the shadows they cast.
              And the tree is.  And the man lives on, perfectly dead.

Welcome to Kiersten's Mind, circa 2:47 am, Wednesday, 26 January, year of our Lord 2011.

HELLO.

{author's note, circa 36 minutes in the future:  this post is very long, and potentially tedious and absurd, and I'm sorry, and I ask that you not feel obligated to read it all if it turns out to be nonsense or just plain boring, or for any other reason which seems conscionable to you the reader.}
{author's note postscript:  Apparently "conscionable" is not a word, and I just invented it retroactively(?) from "unconscionable".}

SLEEP ELUDES ME.
Sleep is [insert witty, poetic, and eternally quotable metaphor here].
And what did I do?
I fell asleep in the middle of writing an essay around 5:00 this afternoon.
I accidentally drank three and a half cups of caffeinated tea at 9:30 p.m.  (Because the mint tea was decaffeinated!  But it was also nowhere to be found in the labyrinth of our untidy kitchen.  Thus, I drank vanilla caramel instead.  That turned out to be a mistake.)
And now—I sit.  Awake.  Alert.  My frenetically typing fingers the only endless sound in the oddly soundless night.  (Why isn't the furnace running…?)

And now my imagination wanders bravely through a dark and stormy night, a night rife with simmering resentments; events forgotten that may have changed the world, had we only the maturity to recognize them for what they were; plots that you thought were hidden from the world; musings about spiritual wealth versus materialism; theories about the potential of dreams of inventive metaphors for our deepest fears; vicious truths about sibling rivalry and debt and the nature of guilt and forgiveness; ambiguous endings; and the ultimate dilemma between true forgiveness and spilled orange soda as a metaphor for childhood fratricide.
Don't'cha just love writing abstract essays about 20th-century college literature?
Me too, folks.
Me too.
(But not at this time of the night.)

BUT I DO HAVE a working printer!
You know, the free one that they gave me with my expensive computer way, way, way back in July!  I finally set it up seven months later so I can print documents without having to convert the file, save it to a flash drive, drive 40 miles, and wait in line for a working computer.

So i can print out all my rambles (not these, the other abstract ones, roughly in essay form, about the college literature) and give them to my peers to review in class tomorrow, and they will tell me how brilliant the writing is but that its patent subjectivity places it completely outside the parameters of the assignment.  And they will write in purple pen, because honors students have been properly warned about the possible psychological danger (to the recipient) of using a red pen to give criticism on a school paper.
I actually know none of this for certain (save the part about the working printer, though who knows how long that will last?).  I rarely jump to the same conclusions about my 3-a.m. essays as other people do. Last year I wrote a five-page essay on the pros and cons of living life as a short person.  I prefaced this essay with three-quarters of a page about stratus clouds, including one very bad pun that made for a horrifically fabricated segue with possibly abused italics.  My entire class thought it was a brilliant opener.  Four hours later, I thought it was nonsense, even if the rest of the essay was pretty decent.

I have Parmesan cheese stuck between my teeth, because I just ate about four ounces of it. I hope all the expensive protein is worth it.

I keep writing these things ("things" meaning all the rambles of my mind in the middle of the night) down, because I hope that insomnia creates something worthwhile.  I think that insomnia makes me a lot of who I am.  i used to dream about archaeologists someday discovering the lost civilization of Kalamazoo, and my journals would become the definitive source of history for the early 21st century.  Now…um, I don't think much of that idea (to summarize a lengthy paragraph, which involved my writing a will and someone committing arson, which I decided wasn't worth the effort to translate for the non-Kiersten reader who has staunchly trekked through this post to this point).

If you read this post in its entirety, you win major points.  I don't know what sort of points.  Not "awesome" points, because that sounds somewhat presumptuous because this post probably isn't that awesome, because my brain is functioning on sleep deprivation and caffeine and English literature (that prosaic fiend that consumes the mind in molehill-to-mountain analysis).  (George Orwell would be doing the polka in his grave if he could see me breaking every rule of his seven-page paper on concise writing.)  But you are awesome, so perhaps they are just rain check points.  Rest assured, you may at some future date be able to cash them in for something awesome.

Baaah.  I cannot compose poetic gems of wisdom right now, as much I wish I could.  But that's already redundant, because I essentially have two concluding paragraphs, whereas Tobias Wolff has none.  Is it too subjective to discuss the inferred fratricide/reconciliation results of the ambiguous ending in a plot abstract resolution?

That might be the one sentence I've written all night that I know meant something, even if was something boring.

G'night.

Five Minutes to Midnight

11:55 p.m. screams of deadlines.  Of all the things I did not do today.  Of grossly unedited reviews of British news magazines crammed in just under the deadline.  Of all the reasons I am awake and huddled frigidly over my keyboard instead of curled up under my heavy warm blankets with the pictures of horses on them.

I despise that moment, when I let fly an offhanded glance at the clock (oh, the unintended puns in that half a sentence; pardon me as I take this parenthetical statement to cringe in agony) and realize the planet is about to tick past another hour in its millennia-old orbit, that my laptop header is about to sway from "Wed Nov 10" to "Thu Nov 11" and there is so much I could have gotten done, and didn't, and now I've lost two hours of sleep and six hours of potential productivity and now tomorrow will be less productive because my unfinished work from today will spill over into tomorrow like Digory and Polly spilled over into Charn and dragged the future White Witch all over the universe. What have I lost but yet another bubble of my fragile, ever-dwindling time?  What have I lost but all the lusted-for perfection that would make me as inhuman as the vampires I hate so much in contemporary teen fiction?  What have I lost but sleep and stress and the remedy to loneliness?  11:55 p.m. is the loneliest minute in all of the slightly-more-than-eighteen-and-a-half-year-old history of Kiersten.  At 11:55 p.m. all my daily dreams slip into the untested time stream of tomorrow's would-be-should-be-could-be moments, yet to be tasted.  And I trudge through the gooey tangled forest of the "must-be-done-now!" homework, and debate whether to wade through the river of "should-be-done-extremely-soon!" homework, and try to run through Jell-O away from the looming black thunderheads of "should-be-thought-about!" homework.  And then I do a couple of push-ups, consider writing down the spilled-over list of things to be done, poke holes in my consciousness with a melatonin, and go skydiving into a sleep fraught with more subconscious promises about tomorrow.