The Archive of Forgetting and Undoing

I have registered my maps in The Archive of Forgetting and Undoing.

The walls to the Holy City have been breached in this month of the Babylonian god who at Summer’s zenith dies, the faithful son, and returns with the rains of Winter and Spring dew, ransom for his goddess sister, Lady of the Date Clusters. Perhaps she is the palm that the lover in The Song of Songs longs to climb, her breasts clusters. The many-breasted goddess, a variant on the goddess of many arms, many sources versus many powers. She condemns her brother/lover to the underworld on account of his insufficient mourning of her own transit there. So they dance, dos-à-dos. 

But my maps, I have forgotten them already, their byways and plazas a ghostly imprint on a white page. It is now halfway between the breaching of the city walls and the demolition of the House of the Holy. The Holy of Holies, the innermost sanctum, the one and only place where the 42-letter name may be pronounced aloud, will be silent and void. Each of the 42 letters a point of access to the hologram, the 42 Principles of Ma’at, Egyptian goddess of Truth, and the 42 points on the wilderness journey from liberation through revelation to deliverance. Each letter bears the name of one of the 42 Levitical cities, cities of attachment, scattered in the promised land. Six additional cities are excluded, cities of refuge for the accidental murderer, places where that particular crime may be forgotten and undone. The Greek Furies, goddesses of love and excrement, transmute their ceaseless buzz into songs of praise and ardor in the refuge cities, welcome the wildman of the mountain with their civilizing refrain. The other 42 Levitical cities, principles of truth, blink in the desert sky, a heuristic for those who have traversed the 42 points, to absolve them of their chief crime, being born.  

It is too late to answer the siren call of vocation, still small voice or whimper, it doesn’t matter. There is no use for priest or prophet when all the institutions of culture have vanished. What point in poetics, narrative, even invective? It all falls with a dull thud upon ears filled with demolition’s dust. No matter, no mass, no density. Gravity has no object. All is levity, savage levity, a great entropic leap, foxes in the ruins. The builders have been dismissed, and the scholars seek elsewhere to congregate. The best of them will not resist the temptation of rage. For now, the farmer’s lot remains, the earth not yet salted, the people not banished from their own land. Why wail, utter lamentations, as if it weren’t obvious that destruction had been afoot? After all, who set the colossal tragic mechanism in motion? Why lament each year about past demolitions yet remain steadfast in the same foolishness every generation, carelessness toward others and the poking of behemoths? 

What of the demolitions experienced by others who are not with us, of us? How easy to forget and undo what was not directly experienced. Move on, put it behind. What of the foxes that scamper among their ruins, the horrors and irretrievable losses inflicted by invasion, the heartlessness of onlookers? What if the tables were turned, turned so quickly that we found ourselves gazing into our own terror-struck faces, dizzy. Redemption in a backward glance, the illusion of Orpheus, when all is actually loss. Those coupons are no good here, mister. Best to shred the tickets to la-la land. Forgetting and undoing erase all trace of narrative arc, the denouement a heap of loose threads, a non-garment uncreated upon the loom of unweaving. Taken in advance, nothing left to lose. 

Perhaps holiness is best forgotten, disassembled. Reassembly is seduction, every point on the map a conjunction of divine lovers that compels the observant to utter praise and ululation. It cannot be helped, each word and syllable another brick in the works. Cries of joy and wails of sorrow indistinguishable as the pace of construction and destruction picks up, flickers: existence, nonexistence, existence. No instant may be owned, merely held tenderly and let go as one would the child of another. The 42 truths and the 42 transit stops and the 42 cities of attachment teach, by ceaseless repetition, aspects of a revolving 42-faced geometric solid, the chamfered dodecahedron, an 80-carbon buckyball. Cold comfort in the end, geometry is all that may be named, the architecture, the architecture. The architecture of the holy Temple.