# [D8:5M]
Vision: [[A Prayer for a Place where Brokenness Rests]]
Hexagram: [[Eighth Hexagram]]
Trials: [[Eighth Trial]]
Symbols: #rug #white #prayer #night #fish #door #darkwindow #sun #horse #dreamer #ten #nine #eight #seven #city #dæmon #flies #mirror #bead #black #rage #alien #sky #snowfall #witness #daughter #house #fire #legs #ears #head #back #belly #hands #eye
December 5th, 1974, 2024
I.
Emil Nolde sat before a heap of books stacked on a low table next to a box of oil pastels. He sat in a white designer chair in a high-ceiling open-floorplan penthouse lousy with wealth. Everything inside was beige and tan and exposed brick and white and transparent. The rug beneath his feet was the one and only thing out of place, which, although a matchy white, seemed to have been dragged straight out of the desert where it was once chucked from a ’74 Silverado and left to rot and fade in a 50-year sunsquat. He always thought the rich liked the appearance of distress here and there but not anything which itself was distressing. The rug was distressing. The rug was an unanswered prayer.
Emil’s host, The Night, stood gutting fish over the white granite kitchen island some little distance behind him.
“There’s a heap over there,” said The Night. He meant the books. He slit the belly lengthwise. He chitchatted. “Choose one, my dear soul.”
Emil wasn’t sure. He saw a book on Native American Art and opened it and found all the pages were blank. The same with one about forty-niners and the gold rush. Returning the books back to the stack, he rubbed his hands over them and stared at the glass doors leading out onto the balcony. Through the glass was a tropical sunset reddening the city below.
“Take that box of pastels out back then,” The Night said. “You should find some pads and canvases in the little storage locker.”
“It’s already too late,” said Emil. “The moment is here, now. You try to capture a moment but soon you learn you have to begin before it arrives, prepare. To begin a sunset at sunset means you miss the sunset. You want this moment, but you only get the next one. Dusk. Night. The next moment isn’t the one you want.”
“What then?” The Night severed a final fishhead and glanced at Emil. “What do you want? Money, booze, girls?”
There was a roar then, coming through the ceiling and down the walls. Emil was looking up and then out the darkening window, instinctively tracing a phantom movement. His legs pushed him up from the couch and he crept, he stayed low and was creeping, toward the balcony doors. His head was burning and he didn’t know if it had just started burning or was burning before.
At almost the very moment he stepped outside onto the 76th-floor balcony, planes by the dozen, he didn’t know what kind, bombers he supposed, thrummed overhead like underground drilling machines seeking the light.
“Maybe later,” Emil said, or almost said.
The sun sank like a starved horse.
II.
Among the planes flying overhead was the one in which stood the windstruck Bombardier, the Dreamer of Dreams, over the open hold. His back hurt. He had no stomach left for obliderating cities and villages. He saw that he would throw himself out of the plane. He should have deserted awhile back, but now, well.
“Fuck you,” he said to The Night. “I’m not doing this shit anymore.”
The Night was aboard the B-52 at the very moment he was also preparing dinner for the painter Emil Nolde in the penthouse kitchen below.
The Night said, “Ten.” He stood with his hands in his dress pockets on the other side of the hole in the floor. “Nine, eight…”
“I’d sooner jump.”
“Seven. If you go, the dream goes.”
“What dream?”
“This dream.”
“What?”
“This dream.”
“Fuck you, this dream. This is what’s real, right here and down there. You? Standing here? Fucking bullshit. Me losing my goddamn mind is what you are.”
“I never said the dream isn’t real.”
“What, no. Look: if it’s the end of the dream, fine. The end of me, the end of you. The end of all this shit right here.”
“Not of me.”
“Fuck yes, of you. I’m taking your batshit with me.”
The Night laughed his Stratofortress Laugh.
“What I love most about humans is that their refusals are almost always about foreplay. Generations of them, empires of them, and never have they seemed to notice that the more they refuse, the more they invite.”
The Night reached over the distant city for the Bombardier’s hands. The Bombardier rubbed his own lower back, then his left shoulder. His eyes said fuck your hands.
The Night smiled. “If oblivion is what you want,” he said, “you don’t refuse. You accept.”
III.
Emil upon the balcony. He is rubbing his burning head in the gloam. His thoughts scatter beneath the bombers and dance sloppily in the roar and land nowhere at all. They are frail and chemical, his thoughts, like irradiated wasps. Increased longevity but grown sterile. From the multitude of thoughts, one thought radiates dæmonically, one thought beneath all thinking, a fearful and terrible light cast from behind the swarm: _Leap_.
“Dinner is almost ready,” comes The Night’s voice from far back in the kitchen, bursting out somehow from under the phantom din. “Wait till you see what I’ve prepared! Enough to feed a village!”
That’s when the city lights up and then all the sky, boom and then boom, one and the next. It’s the kind of glow where for half a second you think it’s the presence of God Himself because the glow enters your body before you even know what it is, and everything seems to almost float inside a diamond of silence, microscopic but omnipresent, and the glow enters every physical thing simultaneously, all of it seeming to buzz with the Touch of God, until, suddenly, there’s this strange question, a little hovering buglike thing, like a fly, casting a tiny shadow over your pupil, which you can see because somehow your eye is also a mirror now reflecting itself saying, wait, why am I expecting music and hearing only a distant buzz? This flash of light happens within time’s smallest bead, which for the briefest eternity is contained, and in the next there is nothing but the most frightening wail of anguish, the wailing of life itself, sucking every crumbling object in the visible world into one tiny black dot: an unnamed appetite, an unb earably perfect and exquisite snatching away of everything there is, and out of this void comes the awful roar of brokkenness and regret, and somehow you know even before you know, that everything is gone forever, and no one comes back to tell this story, and all that’s left is this reverberation of rage the bombs unleash, the rage of each of us, collectively, gathered and lit, a flashbulb portrait of ourselves turned alien, because, yes, of all things, it has always been ourselves we’ve most sought to deny: haunted and lonely and desperate and filled, each of us, with a hatred we dare not name, until one day it’s described for us, written in the sky, reflecting us back to ourselves, image upon image filled with light, decaying as it thickens into nothing at all.
This thickness of nothing finally. This thickness of after, not soon after, not months or years, but long after, this thickness, this accumulation of something like the longest and quietest snowfall, what it erases as it enshrines is nothing now, nothing really, except perhaps to one or another lonely traveler, the new first person, to whom perhaps, when quietest, is a tentative shroud of holy instinct. A landscape’s subtle white bulge, just an oddly shaped hill, that might once have been ourselves, but now it is something other. Something you approach without knowing why. Silent memory given volume. This thickness of after is for a long time invisible to any witness, yet there does come, after a time, a lone figure on the landscape who stumbles forward from out of the last of us, and the substance beneath this one’s weight will whisper up to these, the first human ears. We had always thought we prayed. We did not. Because prayer, it turns out, is not a thing which is spoken but heard, a form of listening. It is in this thickness that the buried image leaves its trace. To pray is to get down on your belly and put your ear to it, or to glimpse something, something, beneath the ice, to sense that what’s in it is to do with you, to accept it, and, finally, to forgive it everything.
IV.
The city burns beneath his bomber. He feels the hand of The Night on in his hand. The Bombardier. The Dreamer of Dreams. The hand in some way helps to keep him on his feet, his back hurts so bad.
“The fish is ready,” says The Night.
The Bombardier stares at the orange city below, empty finally of thought, eyes wet and red, possibly sightless. When he looks up finally, if he does see, he doesn’t appear to remember The Night.
The Night says, “I hope you’re hungry.”
The Bombardier, still holding his hand, can’t remember who’s flying the plane. Is someone flying the plane?
“Because I made a lot.”
The Bombardier, under his breath, can only say, “Why?”
“Well,” says The Night, glowing faintly from across the gap between them, “it’s just that I didn’t want it to go to waste.” Glowing faintly from the magnificent flames below but also from somewhere inside himself. “Trust me, a catch like this, I couldn’t believe my luck.”
The faint glow of The Night is nothing now to the Dreamer but a faraway smudge. And what is there to remember of a smudge?
V.
No more trying
to get rid of the back
pain let it stay
let it stiffen
let my stiffened
legs rot let the pain
stay let the hate stay
let my back
burn let my back fill
my heart let my legs
rot let them get just
far enough let the hands
pull let my rage stay
let the doors slide
let the bombs drop
let the bombs drop
let the bombs
let the burning
village let the screams
up let the naked
little daughter run
let her legs fail
let her belly
glisten let her feet sink
let her eyes up let her
look at me let me
watch this let her
watch me let
the hate stay let
my heart burn let
the hate stay let
my heart break
let my heart break
let the hate stay
let my heart break
let her see me
let her eyes up
let her teeth bare
let me hear her
let it break me
let me near her
let her near here
let my heart burn
let my god die
let my plane crash
let the bombs drop
let the bombs drop
let the bombs
drop
let the bombs
drop
let the bombs
let the bombs
let the bombs
up
let the bombs
rise let my plane burn
let my god die
and my heart let
my heart break
let my heart
break let me see
her let me see let
me see let the heat
in let my heart
in let my hate
let the heart
let the heart
let her life
let me look
let the pain
let me watch
let her watch
let her watch
this let her feet
rise let the heat
in let me cry for
let me watch this
let me hear her
let the screams
here let the house
let the bombs
let the bombs
let the bombs
rise let the bombs
rise let the doors
close let me watch
this watch the hands
lift let me watch
this watch me
let this let me
let this let the
bombs fall let
the bombs rise
watch the back bow
watch the clock break
watch the bombs
up watch the bombs
watch the house up
watch the walls
up watch the roof
watch the fire up
in the sky let the ground
down watch me ground
down watch the light
die watch the sun
found let the night out