Golden Galaxies
The eye is willing to explore. Are those crumbles of the universe left adrift in the void? What glutton bite of which of the Titans released them and what divine manna did they come from? What honey cake did the gigantic being nip, who had baked it for him and with what feeling? Was it cursed, as were so many mythological foods, to bind Hyperion or one of his brothers to Theia or any of her sisters and spawn Sun, Earth and Moon to spread his seed on, as long as someone will collect it? Let us try in vain to believe that the shards that spread before our sight are not the result Chronos’ meal, in which case they would have to be tiny bones yet to solidify, time devouring his children, us all.
Coloured drops in perpetual movement in bewildering outer space? Tears of Rhea, the daughter of the Sky, saddened by the loss of her offspring, impotent or swearing revenge, wept over the spilt milk of Amalthea? Or has the baby Zeus barfed the feed that the goat offered him to survive and return the infanticide? What knowledge does the hidden son know of the fertile fate that awaits him as he sucks on the animal’s teat, in the cavern of Mount Ida, as he watches the dance of the Korybantes, whose dancing and singing hides the son from the murderous parent? He will soon make the tyrannical father regurgitate worlds from the depths, whose black bile will be tainted by alkaline drips of earthly potions.
Shiny spheres glimpsed for an instant on a dark background? Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades and Poseidon shot from the fatherly entrails at the speed of light, leaving the progenitor’s mouth bitter and his necktie stained? Stones thrown by the three Hecatoncheires Briareos, Kottos and Gyges, free at last from the abyss of Tartarus, their souls free from subjection to a trial, each of them with fifty heads and one hundred hands? Specks in the eyes of Cyclops Arges, Brontes and Steropes, busy forging thunders, helmets and tridents for the gods that returned them to the surface, for the unavoidable battle, the clash announced, the quarrel that we will not cease to repeat on every scale.
Freewheeling electrons whose exact positions we may never assert, at one time alive and dead like Schrödinger’s cat? Quarks that come in half a dozen unsuspected flavours, matter pulverised, the Final Judgment? Who knows who lives and dies in the theatre of war, who kills and violates and slays, who treads on conventions and who is the hero of peace, who works human miracles and who can resist all, that someone who always says no? It is in the filigree of History that particles as thin as the gold now spreading in plain sight can decipher details. It is in the beads of the Queen of Night’s necklace, rumbling on the floor, that tribal drums find their new cadence.
Ascending bubbles in a chilled glass by the sea? Oceanic foam leaving gaps in the sand? Globes scattered in nothingness or distant albeit concrete worlds, guessed at by devices of utterly acute accuracy? Hypothetical planets based on indirect measurements of heat waves or how much their passing dims the mammoth celestial body whose orbit they cross? How many of them host ideal conditions for life as we know it? How many of them have bees that will provide us with honey, how many of them have insects in filthy clouds, death of firstborns, incessant plagues? The eternal wish to go back in the motherly womb, the Paradise lost.
Morning dew lost erring in the night of the ages? Eros uncontained, an angel with arrows or a greedy and brutish satyr who will assuage more than one mouth? From what spasm of passion does the caudal flow? What bodily fluid – blood, sperm? – is shed in what orifice, running down which throat, spread of whose skin, generating giants and furies, Meliae and Telchines? Oreas, Pontus, Erebus, Ether and Hemera merge and split in infinite combinations, once and again reborn, life regenerates, atoms reorganise, particles will be the same but will be others: earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. From thence you came and thence you shall return. The body is willing to explore.