The Preexistent Race Descends/ Pythagoras (Section 6)/ Beginning

By Brian George

The void does not acknowledge any single name. 26,000 years escort precession of the equinox. Democracy precedes the egg by 10. Pythagoras was the 5th. As Euphorbos he fought at Troy. At Samos as Mermotimos he probed the sex life of the food taboo. He saw behind the stage, before it.
                                                                                     
Said the birds, "Be warned that you should never tamper with perfection!"
                               
He had the sight. Anonymous bequeathed the gift when he stayed late at Saqqara--in a flash, full access to encyclopedic transport. The back part of his head was popped open by the 12. In his own body the future could be touched. Out of black gold birds have forged his thighbone. 8 observe the strange laws of the Ogdoad: fear--as at once he learned to do.

Palm fronds sprout beyond the scorpionic claws. He came from far away.

Clamorous tides where the sun cast its length. Buildings from the sky hung, like a wedding of murdered archetypes. They cut the path. They exported the palm tree’s trunk. Through a cold sky Saturn rose above the wreck of Mohenjo Daru.
                                                    
What did Pythagoras learn from Zaratas the Chaldean? The age of the sphinx.
                                                                                             
Vast the convoluted curve. Space. The incarnations were concurrent, not consecutive. It was known from the start how many would survive. Enough. It was important that the symmetry broke. Computers electrocuted dead armies to the South. The secret was its own reward. It appeared. The war was old. The grounding of Omphalos--it is not a story fit for Baal Shem Tov’s dismembered children.      

There were many gods involved. Violence was generative. The Earth itself was pregnant. The path of creation was a paradox that no omniscience could untangle.

At Delos as Pyrrhos, Pythagoras collected dreams for naked warriors to perform. Before that as Aithalides, the pilot of the Argo, he brooded on the depth.

Unnatural the Earth’s history. Space was wider than the eye could see. It was made by hand. 1 year was the life span of each god. Teachers had sex with geometry. Space in and of itself encoded all the good parts of the former Earth.

1 memory served the transplanted population. It was traded back and forth, a beloved object, not too much worse for wear, before somehow being lost. The glow from an earlier period had not quite disappeared. "Do you have the time?" a bird said.

Few souls could outrun the centrifugal movement of the wheel.

What was left of prehistory you could put inside your mouth. Prove us wrong.

Serendipitous destruction. The dead threw their weight around. Populations thronged the Theban gates. In search of bodies they have multiplied the most ancient of explosions. Exact the arcade. It echoed with the march of giants. Like the seeds of some hallucinated growth, survivors of the great flood planted memories of their trauma. Shadows hardened into the code of Hamnurabi. Inside became outside. Zeus developed breasts. Ishtar put on her technocratic phallus.


(Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, Head of a Philosopher)