Into the Godhead :: ELECTRIC LAMENTATION

LIGHT—at the centre of all things a great fire is burning. Elsewhere, in a bedroom above a small English garden, steam spurts from the lid of a rice cooker, pooling out lazily across the ceiling. A person sits on a bed, watching.

A house lies behind the door at the rear of the bedroom. It has people in it, and outside, in the city, there are people too. Beggars walk the arterial roads waving empty cups at glass-eyed commuters. Now a raindrop strikes a gutter—gulls patrol the heaving streets. All this and more the person sitting on the bed has designed a retreat from. They have not left the bedroom for a long time. See them? Their mind plays with finer things: they dream of burning in a tower fire in some far-off apartment complex.

They dream of dying in a tower fire because to them the apartment complex is the unit of social isolation of the future. The apartment complex is far-off out of necessity. It is uniform and clean, and built somewhere free from the sludge of lost time that cakes the concrete colony outside the house behind the door at the rear of the bedroom. They dream of burning because fire is motion without end. Flames lap at the person’s feet. Steam still pools on the ceiling. Through the ripples a pale hand emerges, stretching, reaching down. Skin drips from bones.

The centre of a thing is never its true centre. A thing’s true centre is a function of both its centre and its outside—a spiral groove that balances where control and dissolution meet. London thinks itself the centre of England, perhaps even of the world, but more truth about both wells up from the sands of broken seaside towns than from between the cracks of the capital’s pavements. Similarly, though one may know the censored content masked within one’s dreams, this knowledge in-itself will never meet with motion. The person sitting on the bed, flames climbing up their feet, up their legs, up their body, thinks they know their censor well. They know their moving image of a tower fire stands in for something else, but this does not make them move.

White heat. Ashless fire. The pale hand stretches out. The person reaches up—or, rather, a double does, flickering atop the surface of their flesh. Fingers clasping fingers. Upward flight.

DARKNESS—in a space above the ceiling of the bedroom above the small English garden a crocodile-head man kneels behind a desk, his body spliced up with telephone cables. The shade floats into place before him, hand in spectral hand with their emissary and representative. Laughter. An electric jury lurks in the rear, braying from stacked aisles which pile away on top of each other towards infinity. Jaws sneer wide run through with communications crackle. Pounding fists zap on contact with metal handrails. The court of private opinion opens.

A surgical gag holds the shade’s mouth open. Into it the representative reaches. Knuckles grazing tonsils—down past the throat into the depths of the body. Her fingers grasp something solid. Her arm retracts. In her hand is the tower fire, burning in some far-off apartment complex. The crocodile judge smiles. On the desk rests a set of copper scales. On those scales the defendant’s dream is weighed against nothing in particular.

To the left and right of the space above the ceiling a darkness extends forever, curving inwards, curving outwards, away and out of sight. In the darkness, though, something dances—dances at both ends, lighter than air, tossed about by currents twisting outwards towards elsewhere. The jury leers forward. In the hands of the judge the tower fire seems heavy. His fingers sag beneath it as it rolls gently onto the weighing pan. The winds pick up, and the scale slowly sinks down beneath the weight.

Static madness. Jeering from the auditorium. The representative frowns and the shade’s form flutters around its edges. From between rotting rows of reptile teeth comes the demand that the defendant speak its own defence. Out the gag comes, metal taste behind it, and words are carried on the wind:

I want to be golden. I want to be beams of shining light. I want nature to make no demands on my body and I want my body to make no demands on me. I want to make demands on my body. I want it to conform to my vision elegantly. I want power, and with it I want to make nature scream beyond itself at that limit point where it can no longer contain me. I want to burn in a tower fire in some far off apartment complex—and I want that fire to burn so bright it folds the outside inside and my single point becomes the whole. I want—I want—I want...

The shade is splitting. Two heads pull two bodies off each other, dragged both ways down the twisting corridors that wind away from the space above the ceiling of the bedroom above the small English garden. Fire is dancing in the darkness now, somewhere in the distance, far away in both directions. Howling gale mutes the maddening crowd. The shades are out of sight. The spent jury slump forward. Saliva glisten catches golden in the light as the judge gazes at the dream of burning in a tower fire. The representative takes her place beside him. In the dream the flames are climbing higher, slinking in and out the windows, around the concrete walls and metal beams. The tower has no roof. There is no highest floor. When the flames reach the top they reach the bottom—a red pyre without limit cuts up two halves of eternity.

A furtive hand darts out in hunger and whisks the scene into the judge’s waiting jaws. He bites. He smiles. The representative’s head whips around. Disappointed, she slaps him on the wrist.