They Have Gone Down to the Center of the Earth

By Brian George

I had reached an impasse. Doubts possessed me at the limit of my natural understanding. Who was I to act as a messenger between worlds? I could not go forward. I could not turn back. Dreams dressed like terrorists. They struck at random. They erupted at inconvenient moments into consciousness. I had no location. There was no internal or external space. My memory was a screen on which phenomena were projected. Objects were ghostly. Symbols got physical. Bad weather warned of the appearance of my guide.

A comet killed history. The desert east of Eden blazed. A tornado popped the plate-glass windows out of skyscrapers. Record banks flew. Winds brought down the collective house. Out of nowhere spoke the voice. The shadow of an echo became more solid in appearance. It said:

It is I your pharaoh--voice of the four rams of the Abhwyr. To be with you I have come complete out of the bowels of the sand. I have explored on foot the labyrinth of the great Platonic Year--that multidimensional prison. It is I who ate the key to the pyramid at Giza.
                                 
With my staff I strike: the target on the egg explodes. Do you know how much I love you? When I returned to Azilut out of my light years in the age, I found that it was I who had organized the Holocaust. 12,000 years had passed in ½ second.

There are few left who speak my language. The ones who do are old. They weigh more than the Earth.

*

Observe the wonders of the ancient world. They endure as opaque symbols. Industrial strength sacrifice has corrupted the transformation of the genome. The dead desire. Abandoned objects have grown hungry for experience.

*

With a crutch I struck out blind at Utah. When I thought of you I wept. I have arrived on Earth before I came. The salt flats were a mirror of the Zodiac. At the Mormon Incest Data Banks, a patriarch joined the hands of two armies of damned souls in matrimony. Sex was retroactive. Gods drank blood. Slaves were free for the taking. Their indigenous skins were beautiful. It was the first day of the rest of the breach birth of the fascist encyclopedia. Birds picked flesh from the monumental statues. Smoke rose from a gopher hole.

Upon hearing these words I had no choice but to follow. Space was locked. The once transparent library had become a roost for pyromania. Books burned. Geniuses petrified. Flame at first brought no illumination. The guide said:

Star-crossed was the Khan. The landing pad was not on land. Do not stop at the greenhouse to water the reactor rods. Assur was a plate of glass that broke. They spread their map out on the globe. Dr. Strangelove, come forth from the future! The gods trust you to point your finger at the map!

On columns that blazed like fluorescent tubes bad rulers towered in their nakedness.

Shamans kept death simple. Knowledge was to eat. Gods were for use. Does the feathered serpent dare to think himself more intelligent than the prophet? All politics was personal. Speech was direct. In stupor ended the black magic of the technocracy. It was all good.

An army of years followed behind an ant in the great assault on the time cycle.

Others veered south from the Bering Straits. Vene vidi vici. Spikes stuck out from their heads. They stepped forth clothed in rainbows from the ark. Traditions of dismemberment had also been transported. Hearts blew open, like the doors to archetypal energies. Tongues coiled and struck like snakes. The throat of the east turned blue from eating Agent Orange. Arms and legs were gnarled into branches. Hands sprouted leaves. The red man with a saw cut igloos out of blocks of blood. They have gone down to the center of the Earth.

Damnation was relative to the speed and duplicity of the viewer. I was the murderous victim, the martyred sociopath. In slow motion birds collaborated to unwrap my karmic bandages. Self knowledge grew as I compulsively replayed the death flash video. The guide said:

There were big wheels inside baby wheels. The matched pair struck. To kingdom come by the vortex was the remnant blown. Day saved light but the state was not on Earth.

On a fence the red cock crows. Broken pillars on the plain smolder. The souvenirs of industry are plowed into a trough. No life emerges. Mohenjodaro--look: melted by the Aryan.

Giants broke laws. Each branch and blossom of science was occult. A flood has removed all traces of the lineage that an earlier flood had transplanted. The world tree has been hacked at the root. Yggdrasil is now horizontal. The park where you were made to live is black. The clay is scorched--on the ziggurat that Gumbie baked.

By touch the guide communicated many worlds of information. He would not give his name. His strength was frightening. He had no appearance. His eyes became my windows. An incantation echoed in my memory:

Prototype of Jaws: discover the harmonica. Tidal wave: roar. Action painters: stretch Toltecs over paint by number altars. Ghost: flap. Long was the knife that cut the bag. Age of wind: blow. Through the night--horse: fly. Shu: shuffle the house--the continents rearrange by chance. Living space-suit of the astronaut: devolve.

Poets gone beneath the ocean: speak. Make love to an exploded star. Space itself: feed the snake of time its tail. Protocols of the Elders of Zion: stamp out the Atlantean decimal system. It is bad. Seed city: from its fossil, free the godlike archaeopteryx. Slow orbit of amnesia: demand that the macrocosm dance. Just once is enough.

The guide said:

The man-made moon was whiter than a wrecking ball in heat. A black lead zeppelin had set fire to Siberia. Trees turned to matchsticks. Ruins flashed under permafrost. Rest period was up. Primogenitors ate their instructions. From the mouth of the most high the craft erupted with a bang. Get out!

Take wife. Erect out of mud the backward City of the Sun. Cross-pollinate the brain that the scarab out of dung raised. Your solar plexus is not old enough. No intestinal fortitude! Seek love through war. Out of hide make ego. Bend with a spade to shovel seashells from the sandbox. When you are done boys--put them back.

The great eye dropped a map across your mother, muse to German shepherds. She was great to the dream boats of the prehistoric navy. Rotten to the corps.

Don’t touch me baby or the energy will kill you. I will teach you how to play. Dead.

You who hang head downward from the rafters of a hollow egg- your head is hollow. Through it blows an age of wind. At last my dear one I can show you how the gears that turn the great year interlock. I love you so much--mutant DNA of the Triumvirate. Get out! Break a thighbone! We will guide you from a place beyond the Zodiac.

Having taken me this far, my guide fell silent for a century. He stared unblinking at an object known only to himself. There was nowhere I could go.

In a flash it came to me--that the underworld is no more than an alternate mode of consciousness. It is subject to its laws, and responds to a shift in focus. Lost cities turned to gold as my consciousness accelerated. The gods were holy terrors. Ferocious beauties competed for my love. I attended a refresher course in the art of primordial breathing. Raising a hand palm outwards, the guide said:

To Amalekh: made plain is the book--signs in your own language. If you do not read the signs will talk. Warning: your memory will be blotted utterly from under Shamaim.

Fear tested my ecstatic transport. At the center of time/space, and lifted by opposing vortices, I flew.
The vehicle had not yet self-destructed. As quickly as he had come, my guide again disappeared. I could not recognize my own face in the mirror. He had never left. He lifted my dead hand with his adamantine talons. A squeeze issued the commandment: Come. The guide said:

You are to give thanks to the lord! It is too bad he was sentenced to hard labor at the centrifuge. Statues were in charge. Plants powered the hallucination. The spider strung Einstein from her web.

The telescope stared from Afghanistan. The ghost of Akhenaten stood guard at the bell. The cuckoo wound up at his head and swung. Clang! Butterflies flapped from a silo. The stock was dead. The third experiment--over. Cyborgs in the labyrinth tore out pages from the book.

Green the line of light above the great domes of the Gobi. The sand blazed. The mineral guts were sucked up out of Earth. The turbines blew 10 ways to Sunday. With its hair a globe of flame- the day: Sat- danced incarnate as a child.

The rainbow fell in chunks. The Abhwyr turned 12 signs against the Zodiac. They have studied gears. They have stretched above incandescent oceans the two wings of a Frankenstein.  

White. Ain Soph. Black. Light screamed--O mama- no! on the heights of the Forbidden City. At the 4 gates of the breath the snake flags flapped. Volts rose up the ass of god. Boats flew. Nagas guzzled saki from a cratered bulb. I have torched a burning book. Birds sang at the break of day.

False hope had made the messenger a zombie. He met death. Like a mother he would bear the bones of Auschwitz and of Buchenwald. Each pore sweats out a UFO.

It was necessary to go down in order to go up. Past opened future. The flame transformed. The way out was the way through.

Intoxicated gods had thrown away the Earth. I had no name. An unspeakable teacher took me by the hand. He led. I followed. Fast or slow. It occurred to me that I had walked in those footprints on many occasions before. We stopped on the shore of a primordial ocean. Once ancient birds built totems to appease the brontosaurus. Fossils were now fuel. Red waves lapped at memories like tongues.

In front of us was a frame with two gates that opened onto nowhere. Salt pocked the images on the giantwork. Its towering mass tilted from a dune. Hieroglyphs rearranged themselves. From the wave-scarred gates I read out loud the words:

Immortal music moved our architect. We were spit from the creator's throat--the throat of Atum/ Tefnut/ Shu.

We erupted whole from between the thighs of the Enead. We were conjured- today- at the world’s first dawn, before sound’s exile into space was sung.

We guard the seed-sounds from which light evolves. We guard the octaves of the ancient spheres.
We were raised up by primordial love. Transcendent vice. Orgasmic intellect.  Who does not bear his memory as a gift cannot return through us. Abandon time--all you who enter here.

A screech echoed from a gull. My outmoded guide turned back with the small nod of a parent. I followed my own shadow through the gates. On the other side there heaved a revolutionary chaos. It was not hell. Space shattered like an egg. Pieces of shell landed on the ocean.


(Illustration: Mario Sironi)