YESOD

YESOD

Or

The Foundations of Arrogance


    Corrupt and dark, the magpie squats on the crooked branch, its head cocked, it’s eyes beady. It’s body is an onyx stone, studded with emerald eyes, rough feathers like rock crystallised into intricate formations of black veins by a blast of subterranean heat, an avian golem of the night. It struts arrogantly along the gnarled wood, it’s shrill psalms erupting from the twin butcher blades that make it’s beak. The bristling feathers gradually undulate with it’s taught breath. Wings swing open like great gates, and it seems to grow exponentially in size, held in the air like the arms of some cultic priest at the alter of a blood sacrifice, surrounded by the twisting fornication of the fleshy masses. The wings swoop down, pushing against the condensed air as the bird takes flight, and up, and up it soars like a heavy, illogical balloon, casting it’s shadow gaze down for new quarry.

    Its fierce eyes like concentrated malice flash with amber fire, and pick out a small mammal, dodging and diving through the undergrowth. In it’s teeth is clamped a golden egg, leaking still warm fluid from the small fractures that extend like rivers, gorges from the indentations applied by the mammal’s teeth. The magpie gives chase, bobbing behind the scampering animal that dashes and dodges between cover and leaves, under roots and bushes, but the magpie does not relent, merely moves closer, glistering with intent.
    The magpie bellows and shrieks like a deranged harpy, some moonlit spectre that looms up and obliterates the disk of the moon with it’s almighty shadow, condemning the astral rock back to the eternal void. The mammal is small, but determined, and rather than lead the menace to it’s burrow, it wheels around and bares it’s teeth, letting the egg momentarily tumble from it’s grip as it stands it’s ground. The bird, driven onwards by its own mad hubris, is momentarily startled and wheels off in a burst of feathers, but swerves and alights before the enraged creature, it’s glittering eyes revealing a deeper knowledge beyond it‘s animal instinct.
    Like gladiators they square off, the silver moon and the specked stars like a solemn audience, moaning quietly in the night as cosmic winds strip them of the ethereal gasses that writhe over them a million miles away. Back in the clearing, green shoots grow out of the very Earth itself, growing with stalks reaching like arms to the sky, hands grasping, only to die and to decay and to rot, and become fodder to be engorged by the hungry Earth. In this theatre, this stage of fertility and the fertility of death, the fighters gaze deep into each others eyes, feeding each other the light of their infinite hate. There is stillness, quiet, and it is as if the world has inhaled all the air in the wind, and time itself has stopped. Then the breath explodes out like some pyroclastic surge, and the magpie and his opponent race toward each other like abandoned trains on fire, and clash in a detonation of feathers and flesh.
    The combatants grapple in an orgy of violence and flailing limbs, branzen beak stabbing, claws ripping and flaying skin, flecks of blood spattering the foliage, absorbed back into Gaia itself as they go unconsidered by the actors in this insane drama, caught up in their own eternal fracas. They become a ball of pulsating material, the two organisms merging into one creature of chaos, and then the violence ebbs as they discover each other, the tactile responses of each others bodies, the softness and tenderness of their frenzied intimacy usurping their rage, bloodlust giving way to pleasure. The meta organism becomes the pagan sex sacrifice, the two beings joining, becoming one. Boundaries blur and their eyes glaze over with the detachment of ecstasy, intimate and yet distant. They enter the nothingness beyond nothingness, the end of tangible space, emptiness without the potential to be ever filled, transcending Sefirot, becoming some celestial portal.
    Their fornication has a life to itself, but one without eroticism, just the fervent application and supplication of base desires; greed, hunger and sexual avarice. The motions of this whirlwind accelerate until the being becomes a blurred hurricane of masturbation and self indulgence at the cost of another, faster and faster it gathers pace and at it’s centre a pinpoint star of seraphic light emerges gleaming, growing slowly to encompass this new being of self gratification, blinding it’s pleasure blind eyes, spearing it’s vanity on skewers and pinpoints of light that transcend colour. This cosmic being detonates with a gust of a wind, a rending of curtains and the very ground cracks and falters beneath it, giving way in vast clods of earth flailing the intricate veins of roots like rocky octopi to the void below it. The centre of the clearing subsides into the Earth, carrying down with it the animal, now slowing its movements, panting, exhausted, spent, but still ignorant.
    Like Lucifer from crystal battlements the narcissistic chimera falls. It falls, and falls into the Horizon of Eternity. By transcending Mundus Archetypus the beast fled Malkuth and became an angel of it’s own desires, cloaked in the feathers of hubris, specked with the dozen eyes of greed that circle its head. It exists in the ultimate void, so becomes an impossible. It cannot be, so it is not.

    In the clearing the roots stretch over the chasm, and new soil flows like a pebbled river to fill in the gap rent in the earth. The moon and the stars shine down like white fireflies stuck to sticky black paper, and in the woodland, the animals call.