Prolegomenon to The Anthropic Festival. An initiation.

Deep into the shadow

of the mountain of beginning

I padded, pathless, pensive

well below the treeline, null before my goal

gazing upward at the steep

wondering, from grove to glade

if vestiges yet remain, up yonder arête

where venerable aide might be well met

in this younger range, this later paradigm

so far from eroding Helicon

maybe not, by spring's babble on an outcrop

the stone lounge of the nine

but some more contemporary summit

perhaps, of aerophagic hermits

arrung around a peak, high farseers

disserting their minutes of the vista

still ambling in the forest

musing on the mortality of guides I'd known

and on the paucity of maps they'd seen

I started when I came upon the end

of a wyrdly glowing filament

that shimmered, snake-like, through the brush

perchance by where I trod

with a glint, and a hum, just underheard

it needled my attention

kneeling by, I saw it golden, braided

and reaching an inspectant hand

I grasped what I beheld

felt the tenor of the yarn

the songlines and sagas plied

into this Ariadnine thread

cast now at my feet

by the geist of the fisher king

hooked, I enroled myself at once to trace it

to see what more, from sense

of length unknown and source unseen

could so like a signal seem

so I found a wand to wind it

and then went wending whence it came

up, beyond the trees, to the base

of a forbidding cliff aflank the mount

where it snuck into a rift

pupil black, and alike alluring from afar

up close, graven with archaic pick and chisel

an illegible cuneiform epic

marking this a wilful breach in nature's hide

there, before the enigmatic incavation

horizon far behind, below

I paused, amid the jumbled scree

weighing in against the strand's assured out

tested my mettle against this hole in stone

and opted to turn back, down the slope

to gather kindling, torchwood, water

and such victuals as grew around

berries, nuts, and mushrooms mostly

then thus somewhat prepared

returned, to follow countless others'

and now my own decision through

step, then, by cautious step, intruding

on the deepening work of long gone

broad-shouldered and dark-defiant giants

puzzling tunnellers beyond the surface

who mined out this furcating onyx corridor

a mazing crypt, riddled apparently throughout

with diversions, recursions, and traps

countless wrongs for every right turn

whelming voids, pitfalls

endless convoluted cul-de-sacs

all elided by the way that took me

strung along by the conducting wire

brilliantly sensible prevision

I skirted many hazards, and many perils too

trailing through the blackness

it determined every juncture

altering but never faltering direction

here and there were walls daringly destroyed

chasms bridged, tunnels bored and shored

path perforce, where seemingly none was before

now threaded by the optic fibre

underfoot, spoor, silk, dust, and bone

substances of the sound

a chittering murmur, base and shrill

ubiquitous and insistent

of unimaginable existences

being led along the innumerably forking ways

creatures and sprites, fascinating, and hungry

thronging in every unforsaken reach

some even with names engraved

near their remains in olden scripts

by prior explorers of this realm

bygone contemplars of the labyrinth

confronting the particularities of things

with their peculiarities of thought

denominating their experiences, imperiences

spelunking in this tortuous sulcus circus

paraworld of unguided purpose

orthogonal to the world stepped out of

confounding fractal domain

where the torch lit at murk's mouth

hardly supplements the glinting guideline

at hand a blinding blaze

while ahead all remains abrupt

and yet ever onward inward

with curious fortitude, creepingly

aware of the enterprise's tilt

our goal in the twisted course

the singular Gordian labour

to confront the monster at the core

our vivid encumbrance

misunderstood and risky hybrid

knot comprehending beast and man

guiltless but confused and dangerous

and from grappling, eye to eye in the misprision

at the heart of the introspective adventure

to learn to demand of founding heroes

not callow thrust, cut, and fecklessness

but length of reach and strength of grasp

exquisite sensitivity, sublime proprioception

reflexive, laughing recognition

so that later, when they

as weary returnees from the arduous dark

emergent, exultant harbingers, blinking at starlight

entrust us, we might though wary, be just

and welcome their unearthed findings

oddservations, manicdotes, rebelations

far-fetched phenomenologies, foreign thoughts

fragments of pagan things

glinting products of reifying curiosity

amassing in fascinating troves

beyond the pale and out of ken

where, exhausted, they alone could carry them no further

invaluable resource, material and immaterial

dammed at the damnedest bottleneck

the antediluvian canal system of the leviathan brain

until we tax ourselves sufficiently

to afford the tariff, stand the attention

and man the locks inside

to through them raise fresh knowledge

up the gradients of mind, level by level

to the secret temples wherein homunculi agog

endeavour in thirsty fascination to parse

the influent elixir's taste

with groping tongues attempting

to fractionate the emergent pleroma

compelled to word, the nomen creature

iteration by iteration, generation by generation

fastens knowledge and hardens understanding

from destruct-tested definitions

we collect smithereens of heuristics

to methodically categorise as concepts

industriously prototyping ontologies

decision-engineering significance

into specific bits of babble

building out our linguistic infrastructure

into sphaera incognita

spurs on spurs on spurs sprawl out

as we concretise our sonic semaphore

chimeric bastard terms, ad hoc ad infinitum

new-fangled from phonemes of mentalese

built in haste to unforeseen specifications

bruising kludges, verbally unergonomic

when use has not yet worn them

they are oddly shaped indeed

but once grasped, can be gripped

weighed, measured, hafted

be sharpened, bent or broken

repaired or reinvented

lost, forgotten sometimes too

these subtle psychic tools

the elements of cogitation

edges, anvils, levers, cordage, glue

a cryptogrammaticon of spells

for the construction of our selves

of consensus, and of the edifices between us

statements of states learned

from our probings of the world

our ever expounding umwelt

this milieu, complexifying before our very words

on which we must perpetually reset our sights

adjusting wider, further, higher still

as we search for prospective in the long now

our clever, complicated instruments

simply gush the scale of the scope

and the horizons ever flee us

subjects of, and to, our observations

we have taught ourselves uncertainty

grey matter striving, in the strobing of lifetimes

to comprehend extremes of dark and light

the abstracted, mercurial realm we inhabit

like life: betwixt a crystal and a fume

chance and necessity, fixity and change

a pattern of patterns that connect

edgeless nested structures

mothers within mothers

forests made of trees

fleas feeding on fleas

turtles all the way down

as far as mind can tell

our natural idiolect

is a philology of metaphor

in a speculative mode

explorers' creole

an entangled bank of qualified nouns

averbing their qualities

the world museum

our semantic katamari

here my essay device.