Our Algebra of Identity

Sample from Ehaema. For more information, please contact the author

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Rebound from one image to the next.  

Continuity of memory, the relative sense that some memories are older than others, an invisible frame now shattered, a glass table broken by the velocity of his fall through life.  This is how the world ends; we will have accelerated in our thoughts, doings, and imaginings, until we reach such a speed that the end is invisible right up until we hit it.

One thought after another; oh how we take that little miracle for granted.  Yet it is also a limit, that which forms us and diminishes us, this prison of time wherein we barely recognize one another.

If the keyhole of our awareness were but cut a little wider, how differently the light would shine upon the cells we live in.  How different we would be if we were not limited to yes or no, now or then, day or night, You or I.  How different we could be.

I if You.

We before Me, except after Thee.

Aquatic current, wet wind whips the rough moments through our algebra of identity.  The moments were a staircase, that we fell backwards down along until we reached the sea.

Kris floated through stillness, an ant in amber studying the alien terrain of the sea floor.  The strange geography of silt deposited by the dreaming currents of Drift, burrowed through by the many creatures that make their homes there, all sliding along inexorably until they are extruded from or subducted into the fiery core of the world.

All of his stairstep moments and selves formed little valleys and crenellations down there, a mosaic of self-concept that had once been a straight line. They began to flip, one after another, triangular tiles spinning on their axes, an ancient message board. Like wingbeats, like a cluster of winged creatures each beating their wings in a sequence only for you, a mesmerizing pattern of fragile wings holding back emptiness, a vast darkness revealed in the triangular spaces revealed between the small beautiful beating wings.  A series of flickered wings, grey-black-grey, and then an arc of empty spaces, moved from one side of the ocean valley floor to the other, an upside down arc that was the void’s smile, the familiar regard of a hollow place in the world.  

And Kris screamed as he saw the mask-like face revealed at the bottom of the world, the face of self-absorption, of self-delusion, of that particular madness which attends those who have no real connection, the euphoria of isolation, the alien face of Chueh Yin the Moth Prince whose followers are unspeakable in their cruelty. The face was as vast as all the earth, and it inhaled worlds with every breath as it told him to come down.

Come down, Kris.  Come home.