# [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