I: Mage

The carryings on were so volatile, so crazy, with the loudness of fires flashing through the darkness. Even this pirate, who gives the good housekeeping seal of approval to anarchy, found it overwhelming. Below masts carrying sails, below deck, below the water into the murky depths of a dream journey I went. Carrying the ball to carry the day I went.

With the imagined temerity of an animal in heat I carried the torch, beneath hope of reciprocity.

Strange to find myself in a memory never before understood. Empty handed, no carry on, I appeared in the midst of a crowd that was madly chanting and swaying as if it were one being, one life form held together by glue of fear and lust and madness. Raised above the collective tumult gleamed the image of a golden bull, huge and ranting. I could feel the heat of its breath. I could see the flash of light from the creature, brighter than the brightest sun in the darkness of that night.

Perhaps this was the moment's best attempt to dissolve inanition: to fill a too long experienced emptiness caused by lack of food and water in wandering, and to redeem the emptiness of the loss of social, moral, and intellectual vitality.

Was this the spitting image of Apis, the bull deity worshipped in ancient Lower Egypt? Apis is an interesting image, the only god who appeared only in animal aspect, never part human, only the image of a sacrifice who brought the promised renewal of life to the land.

Just as I was about to congratulate the parasympathetic power of my analytical mind that calms by naming, I saw a wild man coming down toward us from the distant cloud-shrouded mountain. He carried two tablets of stone that must have been heavier than would be possible given his furious gate.

As he came into the wild throng and climbed the altar of Apis, I could not hear his words. I only saw the throwing down of the stone tablets that shattered with an unbelievable echo. And then the chaos of the melting of the bull, now merely metal thrown upon the waters, forced into the gullets of the people beyond dream.

In the time of the great Alexander's bringing the Greek amelioration to mythos, Apis for the first time became mixed with human. He became Serapis, a blending of Osiris and Apis. Osiris was the divinity of the land under and the life after. Serapis was created to bring together, to allow Greeks and Egyptians a common ground in image and imagination. This was a large load for any image to carry around.

Perhaps the real issue of my chaotic mob was not in being empty, but in not being empty enough. After all, Nietzsche would only believe in a god who could dance. Or perhaps fly, needing bones hollow, hallowed, not like the banal solidity of bulls, or men, or stone tablets or stories with multiple personalities.

For Nietzsche, the solid truth is like a metaphor drained of sensuous force, a coin without embossing that is now merely metal. Image can degenerate into concrete. Imagination's child is, after all the embrace and explosion, merely a bastard.

I long to be a different mage, creator of the uncreated.

With Lennon, I imagine no heaven, no hell, no countries, no possessions, no religion. And I begin to hear another chanting, of monks who create multiple tones with one set of vocal cords. No eye, no ear, no nose, no smell, no taste, no tactile object, no phenomenon. No ignorance, no aging and death, no suffer- ing, no origin, no cessation, no path, no exalted awareness, no attainment, and also no non-attainment.

Just the traveling. The bliss of the traveling. Without carryings on, without carry ons, without carrion. Perhaps that is the magic, the smoke and mirror image of sheer piracy of the magician's dis appearance.

(Have I told you lately that I love you?)

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.