Entablature

Hereunder is an extract from Entablature, Chapter 9, beginning with an excerpt from Hygeia’s Letter XXVII, and then flowing on into the eponymous Novelist’s reflections. Should I feel shame, Solarion, contrition, indulging such inconsiderate thoughts, as if Hygeia were, like myself, governed by earthly chance, its vagaries? Constancy continues to be a mystery to us, and Fate too, when we picture the Three Sisters weaving our thread into the tapestry moment-by-moment as if to accommodate our inability to immediately grasp the design, the pattern, in its entirety. Love has a consummation of which our earthbound representation is a thin shadow. There is a treasure eluding consummation in time, for we cannot hurry its weave, but follow its unfolding thread lifetime-after-lifetime, until someday the tapestry stands complete. So I stumble forward, especially as Hygeia has given me the confirmation I sought, its Golden Fleece, throwing myself into the Ocean of Existence hoping to quicken my journey. Crystalline innocence is shattered by the blow of terrestrial life, becomes a perishable thing, a wilted flower, allured of the earth, something we barter for material uncomeliness, so my aim bathing in the Ocean of Existence is to emerge cleansed, washed free of stains, and be able to offer Hygeia a purer heart. Temperance is a process of purification, but how is it possible to be temperate in love, to practice abstinence, to not wish to be intermingled with the beloved even here in these physical forms: Hygeia’s beauty is true reality, even though my senses seemed to be overwhelming my intellect, for, to be honest, my mind too had succumbed. The vision of her head, the radiance of bliss touching me from her countenance, her eyes, her lips, how tenderly her lineaments were disengaged from my existence, leaving me to strain after sight of her, the sound of her voice, her fragrance. Can we ever philosophise the cessation of this suffering we endure, having borrowed too much of the terrestrial world through the expenditure of our senses? How has this crippling debt accumulated but that I am so much later, one further reflection, from my Original Self, that Supreme Intelligence which has invested in terrestrial existence, whereas Hygeia has rebalanced her debt and knows no privation: she is original innocence, crystalline, all her reflections have been reabsorbed back into the One. Of course, each of us is Odysseus, some still upon the shores of Troy battling to overcome the City, others have left the beach for the journey home, and I, Solarion, I have had my adventure with Circe, with Calypso, but with some distance yet to travel. It is as if I am gathering up all my reflections on this arduous journey, experiencing their pain through my current travail, moving forward through relentless time, progressively overcoming all: Penelope patiently awaits me. How can this not be worth every sacrifice? Farewell. Hygeia seemed too precious, too airily crystalline a cut jewel, to flash before the cynical eyes of today’s readers, condescension was already quivering in its anticipated reception, telegraphed by the Novelist’s Literary Agent, a man resolutely, indigenously modern, to establish a culturally viable adverb. But the writing issued from a divine ignition received by his Inner Thinker, allowing him a literary walk through Khayyam’s famous Garden of long ago, re-experiencing the enchantment, only this time hand-in-hand with Lauren. Lauren! Her voice spoke in verse, questioning, raising the glass to her lips and drinking, oblivion? Hygeia then was his classical jewel suspended in his time’s aura flashing scenes from his Inner Thinker’s history to the surface facets of his mind, and he was dazzled by her, as he was by Lauren. Rediscovery, at least consciously, of the Inner Thinker, effected a break-through, a freeing of the human persona’s enslavement to time, in that the latter could be let-go with a modicum of understanding. New, radical, wholly unsuspected architectures, certainly not attributable to the lower human consciousness, had been devised, miniaturised computer-circuitry, its Cloud storing trillions of droplets of information in the azure Ocean of Eternity, a sky of endless dimensions. Of what though was this miniaturisation, its fluidity accomplishing tasks with the speed of light, a reflection: As Above, So Below? Pictorial surfaces fascinated the Novelist, metaphoric images layered on canvas or fresco in the words of oils, establishing relationships, as his sculptural body did with Lauren’s, but the core word was, expression. The Inner Thinker was a spectator in the global interior of the world’s Art Gallery, where each human persona was inscribing its spatial surface with a narrative, from hyper-realism to abstraction, with correctness of representation or its antithesis. Only the spectator was empowered with adjudication, the work itself, the human portrait, was a defined representation intended by the Artist, the Inner Thinker, for the latter alone comprehended the complete frame-of-reference for his creation. The human persona’s denial of this, categorising its own frame-of-reference as a self-creation, was a mystifying folly, challenged every living moment, climaxing with death, which no self-creator would sculpt into its narrative. Perception as experience, and experience as perception, self-directed, pre-supposed human figures within a painted canvas could interpret the greater world beyond their immediate line-of-vision or line-of-action, and in this respect, the Novelist was contemplating Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia. Emotion was energised, an attitude galvanised, justifiably frightening to women as well as men, and yet, at that very moment, especially in the Arab world of ISIS and its adherents, the fateful gesture embodied in stopped-time on the canvas was being enacted, live, transferred three-dimensionally. Was it a metaphor for deniable evil, being simply a two-dimensional representation, alien to modernism, eschewed by Artists who rather idolised Picasso’s Guernica?