Fire (a short story + thoughts on writing) (Patreon)

Greetings patrons. I have been lately working on writing more longish material, straightly put. For years I have put a stop on myself in accordance with the cramped constraints of Dead Bird-site's character limitations for ideas that reach not-very-far from their beginnings, and in music, I strongly believe brevity adds depth to poetic phrases: Saying as much as you can in small spaces has a tendency, with some effort, to evolve plain and overcomplicated ideas into cleverly simple ones.

But there is also a place for lavishly relaxed speech, making room for indulgent streams of thought, full of juxtaposed detail, which would be strictly impossible with the previously mentioned limitations of other writings. This is a thing which I have not explored much as I say, and for some current Projects I would like very much to ponder, wander, meander, and tarry upon that unusual (for me) way of thinking. So to that end I have written a few things, one of which I am including in this post - a very short bit of writing about Fire, exploring and evolving some ideas I have long-held about the original song and how it relates to my work in general, specific work like PROJECTIONS (the game), as well as my conceptions about our beautiful universe.

Before I go, I will also mention - the track TIDES now has a few other tracks to go along with it, and I intend to release it on bandcamp as an EP once they are done. Sorry for the extended wait on that!

Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy.

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Fire

I.

Ages before Sol had spun forth into being from a lank and quiet tendril arm of the Milky Way, and literal millennia prior to the opening of the ringed dream-eye of Vega, there existed gaps in time so unbounded and indescribably large that there are not enough words to speak which would bring their infinity into even weakly comprehended focus. These passages of memory-less aeons extend far outside the wandering border of our native region full of familiar shining bodies, and what we might call "local space"; indeed do they march tirelessly backwards, far from the Milky Way past all seen and unseen galaxies, onward into the strange systems of matter which we have yet to observe or even conceive, through to the very dim edge of what we do arrogantly call "the universe", and beyond even that into darker and less dreamed of potential realms from time unknown absolutely.

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II.

People say it is a good thing that those barely extant hollows of such unreal distance and magnitude remain undreamed by humans or other dream-having creatures - If such places were to begin to be imagined, they might be given an "unearned substance" which defines their presently very undefined form. So as long as they remain blissfully unimagined, these ancient places and the equally old things which inhabit them can't exist with any certainty. Whispers of the widely misunderstood Anthropic Principle, even at an unrecognizably unconscious level, work wonders to calm the once-frantic anxieties of modern day humans and their microcosm of life with its broad and softly worded poetry - "Out of sight, out of mind" - though persons with more finely attuned senses may still perceive even such remote places to varying degrees of awareness. Any of what we call "thought" in the universe is just that universe turning inward upon itself - and so is all connected, inexorably, irrespective of how thin that connection may be.

Such a person would not worry themselves about the happenings here on our beautiful blue Earth, because those happenings are already so well-known and easily perceived by all ordinary living things no matter their disposition. No, after much pondering, I would say that a person like this might find themselves peering into the sky and reflecting upon its varied moods, for the sky changes so frequently compared to what is below! And, in looking toward the sky, a person would - as a natural consequence of such peering - often look beyond the sky with its gently towering clouds and turbulent diamond sunsets, the comings and goings of brooding storms always on the edge of doom, and moonlighted beams of winding mists, all to gaze much further into what I mentioned earlier we call space and its endless shining stars and uncountably innumerable, vastly more beautiful worlds containing moods as of yet completely unfelt!

On thinking of such things long enough, it would be a small leap to suppose that they would thereafter begin dreaming dreams of places without any boundaries - such lofty ideas are wont to creep into the minds of dreamers - as it is those places which beg to be dreamed of by the person who has seen enough of what is known, and desires however in awareness or subconsciously, the unknown. That which has no prescribed shape or measured border is the most mysterious, yet simultaneously the most imminently knowable thing, for the Wheels of Entropy turn ceaselessly in dark and distant places to collapse the unbounded potential into the bounded actual, and it is exactly this sort of person dissatisfied with everyday life that would crystallize (through no real fault of their own) as a nearly perfect conduit for such a strange and otherworldly operation - an operation that for the common individual would have hardly any purpose and would be deemed by most to be a waste of valuable time spent otherwise wringing hands over taxes, spiritual cleanliness, or marriage.

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III.

Now I present to you this singular and almost-uncredited writing regarding one such "imagined" place - It is agreed that it describes some kind of central fire around which the world (that is, the entire physical universe) turns. I mention that it is "almost-uncredited" because it has been at certain points attributed to a nearly unknown and long-since-missing individual whose other works have by now almost completely faded quietly into benign forgottenness, though there is no certainty of who authored it or if the passages are even original. The original text follows:

Though time has passed,

Forgotten voices ask

Questions unremembered.

Old shadows cast

Unmoved, yet moving,

Revealing transient embers.

Before the earth,

Before the sun and moon became

There was a light - A burning fire.

You've seen it with your eyes,

The empty skies bereft of any truth:

It was hidden, in the mire.

So turns upon a line

Not one but six can measure or define

That (editor's note: this world) in which we share;

No more observed than mind,

The fire forever lingers, dream undreamed:

You are a mask it wears!