Rakesfall

by Vajra Chandrasekera

What of the hands upon hands needed for the saw? What of the state and the death politics? What of the hierarchies of power that organize and direct this violence? What about the givers of orders, the payers of bills? Is this not an engine of hate, deriving from hate, designed with hate, operating on ancient principles of hate? The simile is told with a purpose. It teaches the hated to hold still. To not buck under the saw’s teeth.

“When I left home as a young woman, I didn’t take the coast road. I went south, do you see? I went inland, into the upcountry, into the past. And then when I finally came back down, I didn’t retrace my steps. Instead I travelled east—I came to this city. The future I came back to wasn’t the one I’d left.”

The lesson is that the red wheel cannot be broken, whether by accident or intention, though you can certainly be broken upon it. The lesson is that you can’t win. You can only keep moving. You are doomed to failure, which is to say, to life, which is full of pain. There will never be a final synthesis that unifies all worlds and resolves all dialectics. You can only resolve your own paradoxes and become more of who you are.”

“All the long lines together form the web,” Grandmother Sits points out. She takes a sip of her tea, now cold. “We are scientists. We bear terrible knowledges. We are the agents of death, and our wages in arrears will be paid as a lump sum upon retirement, when all our work is done, when all the worlds are laid to rest in the dark.”

We put on a play for ourselves, we ghosts, we people, we devils, with our superstitions like solidity, objects, time, or justice. We live in confusion, we swim in it. But the world is not a river to swim in; it is a glacial ocean, always whole, already complete. The truth is terrifying. Teaching is terrorism.

horripilate

There is more than one thread in a web; there is more than one beginning to every story. The turmoil of the dice within the fritillus, the life of each uncast die as they catastrophically collide and forever change each other’s moment and position and trajectory, altering pasts and futures to rotate around this moment, is a model of the universe, sleek and groovy and impatient.

She has explained to the conspiracy her model of the poetics/politics of deep time, the ritual song-cycles that retell and anchor history, compose causal chains, and sing narrative into being. What makes Embi a heretic, and you with her, is the idea that magic was not always part of the everyday world. The idea that something happened at a particular point in history—an intrusion from a different eon—that changed all of history before and after that point. That all this had not already happened, until it had always already happened.

“Knife is a problem from far outside oyster’s context. Design has no defenses.”

Georges does not ask himself why the Christian devil has hooves and horns, which is of course that they are satyrical.

The strange city was full of music and sculpture and painting and performance and recriminations and fallings-out and drama and scandal, because the Rake were at that time in the process of inventing all the arts. There were so many, so manymany, that there was always room for more, so each of them would create new forms and vie to become their first masters, or for those who came a smidgen later, their first iconoclasts. The Rake were protectors of time, and for them art was the way to organize time: to guide and direct it; to channel its wild fecundity into a linear flow that did not burst its banks and spill into chaos.

She loved all the small arts, all the arts of the body; she sought out the company of tattooists and body-painters, of dancers in ten thousand different forms, of thumb-wrestlers and shadow puppeteers, of experimental jewellers and avant-garde dress designers, of kinksters and perverts and other artists of love.

We are drowned at birth in the filth of enormity and complicity, and every morning since when we wake from sleep. This is what it means to be alive. We are ghosts haunting these worlds.

There is a dread scale at which only myth works; only nightmare has the technology.

She said that the godlike were once powerful mortals, wealthy in access to resources, and that they used that power to upload themselves into forms of still greater power. She called them oligopolists, who secured more and more access for themselves, more and more wealth, first in life and then in ascension, until there was nothing left for anybody else. Their hunger for access was the cause of the poisoning of the earth. They were the first to call themselves godlike, and cast everybody else as ghosts and demons.

The forbiddings were made to prevent the gods from becoming embodied and re-entering the visible world. To prevent them from following the diaspora into the visible or invisible galaxies in the epoch of emigration. They are bound to this world and sentenced to die with this world, the first world that they helped destroy.

We have forgotten so much from the human eon. But we remember the parts that matter. Punish the guilty, and eat the rich.

The children are wary of her, as they are right to be. She is a dread ancient grandmother, a bloody witch of the old ways.