Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

Paradiso section 31: “just like a swarm of bees that, at one moment, enters the flowers and, at another, turns back to that labor which yields such sweet savor, descended into that vast flower graced with many petals, then again rose up to the eternal dwelling of its love.”

Paradiso section 32: The arrangement of the tiers of the Rose.

Paradiso section 33: He still feels the emotion of the experience but he cannot recall the details of the encounter. He invokes God to help him recall the scene so that he can tell the world about it. Joseph reveals that he saw within the Eternal Light, three circles of different colors reflecting each other. In one of the circles he saw a human face that puzzled him completely. Finally, a great flash of revelation brought his desires and will into alignment. The revelation was the love “that moves the sun and the other stars”.

BOOK IX

No more talk of celestial guests dwelling within man, venial discourses of indulgent tragedies, disloyal to the good; revolt, and disobedience to premiere woe, as Hector’s pursuer, or the rage of Turnus for Lavinia un-championed, or the sea’s ire against Cytherea’s child, like so many epics on crusades, of heroes, feasts, beasts, and demons, infused with the new weapon of the savior, this higher argument is brought by Uranian messengers to the ear:

The Hesperian star had sunk and been replaced by the corolla of Apollo as he emerged from his hidden lair. By night he fled, and at midnight returned from compassing her body, watchful for the regents she had forewarned, enlisting her aid, at eight in the morning.

There was the place, the eyeglass into the enchanted boudoir, where the lady of the house prepared, and where they, the two, knelt as at her altar, alternating spies, gawking each at her as she mused over dawn and twilight’s profiles, a patient, absorbed ritual post-purifications, always bare to drip-dry, offering her witnesses absolute survey, until they knew her as only an intimate, and her ceremony always culminating by proxy in one, or both, generally the current monitor, perhaps sighing, fidgeting with the other’s lap…

There was a place, she blew into his ear, where the brook met the garden wall, giving rise to a fountain where the mistress often read. Joseph laid hidden near the pool, she said, considering by which creature he would debut himself to her, as a tactic, the way he’d seen the Kung-fu masters do in grainy movies, a stratagem of offense and defense, to disarm her. His viper was chosen for the fittest vessel.

Always her dry breath, sweet on his cheek, as he looked on, allowing the other, his object, to depart, before he allowed her logos to lantern within, and not for seconds, not a paler vision, his sanctuary, his custodian, veiled in the bones of the manor, leading him through its warren, “I visited quite often, when I was little, I know all the secrets”, but his scrutiny was for creation’s means, its derivative sin, with her, recumbent in her direction, a true muse, whispering the words ballooned above, feverishly colliding as the door closed.

And the turns had light to them, tree branches speckled with raindrops silhouetting a streetlamp, or his shadow dropping down atop her, waiting, in their couch, each night, waking near, first to her hip, up her belly, shifting her interior over his thigh, his chin within her nape, and messy, leaking, tiptoeing to the spy hole for the dawn debut, which inspired the pressure against bare wallboards, her flushed legs, distended soffit, she noted her dirty knees, a uniform of an unclean significant chemise, chapped lips; his sole trench coat, as when she was a girl and there were tales of foul exposure from racy books no one knew she was reading, hiding in the bowels of a carpenter’s mystery, and “Joseph I know there is some reason for this, some purpose you aren’t telling me,” the third day, afterwards, “but, you don’t have to leave here… you don’t ever have to leave here. We could stay…” dimming like the cloister corners, as midday approached, they would find themselves unspoken, unaware, the seed of contact, “can you tell me what will happen?”

Elisa would slink within, through the portal, the distress of the plunge, feeling foreign in what was, besides, the truth, not the grotto, “the word grotesque comes from grotto, a cavern,” he said oily feathers would be all that is left, and she would venture away from the subterranean, to be present, steal food, re-garbed, the cloth felt undeniable, hiding her fingernails with soil and skin rimming them like crescent eclipses, present faintly, the doppelganger of their spy glass shrieking in skin, the outfits she (and he) had witnessed, always made for a comment, she couldn’t help herself, “there’s a faint hint of a need for garters with those…”

“Yes, they’re terribly thigh-high.”

“…perhaps you imagined an errant wind, so you felt it necessitated full-coverage…”

“How did you know?”

Submersed in the thickness of the apart moments, she would tumble back as soon as she could, to him, bearing gifts of delicacies he would nibble unapologetically, reverently, like a brahmin, and collections of books. The dusk would slip up on them, as she read out loud — anything, the same thing, over and over, or alternating, or inventing. She would stop so he would look at her. She would smile, and he would offer something, “there is a characterless exaggeration to such details, as if impugning upon our imaginations, refusing to believe in them, our visions, our mind’s eyes collecting her fragments to construct our own private divine stage…”

“Yes, do you really think so?”

“I have to initiate the fall.”

“I know… I know… tomorrow, if you wait until tomorrow, I’ll help you…”

There was a night of lightning they could only hear, each din seizing between breaths, their candle wavering as if shaking by the roar, in which she completed the third reading of a rather Boschesq collection, “my success will be a failure…”

“What will be? What will be a failure?”

“In the end, I will succeed, with each day I learn more, she has retreated, away from you, and you have come…”

“Yes, I am here, but what does that mean? What do you mean you’ll fail?”

“Hatching like a migraine daughter, a wisdom, a philosophy, the beginning of the end, as they say, following the hooves of satyrs, a tumble, Pan equals All, in the end, at the end, by succeeding, I will bodily fail, if I can achieve it, she, them, all of them, will be freed, and we too, once our end comes, free to clamor over our own private chutes and ladders, but I must succeed first to…”

“We don’t have to… to do anything… we can stay here… as long as we want… everything out there is different now…” speaking out of their portal, “there is no more rebellion Joseph, no more secrets.”

“However, the reason is still at hand… their reason, and our reason… without a provocation, a catalyst, they flounder in a dead afterlife, we will resuscitate peccadilloes and liberate my horny ghost, amend this waking delusion to make room for the antithesis, but only by His false crime, His first stumble… a trip in line dominoes…”

“Whose? Whose crime? What are you planning?”

“I know who, but not how. He is our facilitator, dwelling above our heads, his apple spied upon, as you said, knowing her to attain Him, and then, for Him to fall, through me…”

“Graham? Graham and Haddie? What do you need of them?”

“He must launch me to Nod, He is sin’s sire, only the truly good can do true evil…”

“Through Haddie?”

“It’s His only failing, just as it always has been, long locks cut down or forgiving a little orchard theft, through her is Him.”