CANTO VII: THE FALL Great plumes of ash and metaphysic churn and fill the air, swelling and rolling—up and out—and coating all with cindered Truth, as Faustus, crowing from the vanguard, bellowed behind to seething fronts: “Haha! Now shout!— Storm! The Kingdom of God we claim for Man!— And know: these figments and their Lord are ours to make an ending. Onward! Bring it down!” So all charged wildly in to liberate and burn—to seize religion’s capital and pillage Paradise. Trumping on mounds of pearl-pure shards (strewn remnants of the Gate), the human armies flooded through, and swamped the vast, kaleidoscopic squares of Sacred— whose glowing levels, Glory-led, long laid their ladders to receive the dead, and souls arriving Home. Now, loosed inside, they break to tributary swarms of wreckage. Down the golden streets and arteries—which beam their sunray spokes in all directions—men careen, and violate the mystical from Heaven. Crackling distant fires, and moans (as if through fabrics of its Essence) cry, singing their dying musics down on scenes of sacrilege and sabotage. But I, still dazed by grief, sought madly to escape, and in a frenzy through the halls of God ran desperate through His rooms and passageways in search of any refuge. But—here storms an angry mob—and down the other: more— the world unhinged at left and right and guns down every corridor!— So I run frantic and flurry through the Halls—dodge crumbing walls with harp in hand, and outpace pulse’s tempo: eager to flee—but to what place and harbor from a falling Heaven I couldn’t know… Where—where was God? my heart demanded, called for Him—till out my mouth the same call sounded, and all of Heaven round me, echoing: Where, where, where, where? Eager and lost, I called. I searched, from room to room—unthinking, crazed— I flung myself, calling His name for saviors, screaming for God amongst the empty stone (now crumbling all around)— But no voice came. No answer broke the deafening silence there. Through all of Something More’s deserted halls which war had cleared, I found myself alone— and shorn of Help. Only the echoing death of something long-important rumbled round, and in that muffled requiem I fell, crumpling myself on slatted stones which paved the vacant Throne Room of the LORD. In tears before that Kingless chair I wept my loss, my ruptured innocence—to know, at last, the truth. For I could put a name to youth, being now knocked to vantage. —Idiot! So long—so long—I bought and I believed it— Damn it—Damn them! Damn hell and God and heaven: salvation that doesn’t save. From time so young, too distant to discern, I’d held His arms and fortress spires impervious—more strong than any army, any cause or doubt— and lived in castled comfort, numbed by faith and confidence that His were arms too large to reckon with, too much of arms to arm against… —at least the hymns and odes I’d sung were propaganda to that end! My songs once had the world believe it! Pious frauds! Bleak lies for naked gods! My anthems: gilt for kings of air and hollow nations! Chancel: choir-pit of fools—angelic jesters. Faith: that but a note can strengthen such a sea of man’s imaginations, earth that pool, and over liquid fictions sing so sweet we might make some Messiah walk across —and yet believe it. No. No longer. Not —no longer could I do it… sing of God and sing sweet lies. No. I was sick of lying— and sick of all illusions. Gods…could die… —but I would not be by the while. And so— face red, throat hoarse, eyes raw and blurred and throbbing— I lift my harp, and with a trembling arm hurl it screaming at his empty Throne whereon it shatters into shards. Then down I fell, and wept for what it meant. My God was dead—and I I I was meaningless… Echoes: …a pair of distant footsteps clacked, and entered in behind. …I heard them near… but wouldn’t lift my eyes or body up for grief, and so awaited death. And yet it wavers… Probably, those shards told all— the relics of a shattered faith in songs with which he empathized—for, finally, I turned, and, as the crackling fires caught hold, I read Faust’s eyes beneath the crimson light, wherein I glimpsed my future. Up I stood, and weighing all, I sighed… but knew. His gun he flips around, presenting me its grip, which, hesitating, I received at last— and clutched it tight. Heaven was falling down, and I? I was a singer of the LORD, but there: no more. My Patron overthrown, I saw the turning of the war, and turned myself—to leaders that could answer me, whose voices, harsh and ugly with their truth, were audible at least. For Song was dead. But far off now, the Christ, Regina Cœli, and most survivors from the war with Earth had fled to Heaven’s stronghold—last defense against the sacking hordes: to Eden’s woods: a plot enclosed as Zion’s middle court: its green, its central campus—nucleus of Heaven’s cell, and greatest cloister for the greatest Priory of God. Here lay a lush and verdant dark-green garden, washed with leafy saplings, dew-glazed grass, and slopes of emerald fronds and ferns in flocks inside the heart of Heaven. Deep within its woods, within the center of the Center, stood the two tall Trees that once vexed human hopes of total happiness: that tempting trap— the mortal Tree of Knowledge and, beside it, the Tree of Life. One green, the other bright as fiery maples in the throes of fall, each could be seen from Eden’s entrance gate. For by that massive archway, ragged bands of frightened faces, wounded Angels, saints and martyrs congregated—marshaled in and overseen by Christ himself (who’d lost the tranquil countenance of Sermon Mount, and wore instead a face so stern to wreathe a whip for sacrilege against his Father’s House). All these, beneath the Shepherd’s aegis, stood in huddled sobs behind the monster Guard: two soaring, golden lamassu, with heads of men, bodies of bulls, and flaring wings— twin enigmatic sentinels, sphinx-like, and blank-eyed brooding beasts. Yet, fiercer still, there hung (perpetually swinging up and down) a flaming Sword: a supernatural blade ablaze, and turning every way, midair. This trinity of threat God set to scare trespassed humanity from treasure chests of Immortality—when Adam fell: the obstacles to over-life which man could never pass (and so abduction-proof against aspiring human hands). Here all enclustered under siege, and kept the archway, waiting as Christ’s now exiled court …for God. Yet He was nowhere… Nowhere to be seen. The view of Heaven burning stood complete: a total panorama, end to end (and weeping eye to eye)—spread out like fire upon a vista, or a sea. And dull like distant storms the noise came thundering, and soft—dampened by air and interval, and deadened by the sky. The sun was up, but day was gobbled by the dark—in smoke that wreathed from Heaven: Heaven conflagrate and lost. Christ stood, and stared far out at it, pondering Providence (just shy of doubt?), till the whole world, sick with the accidental, writhed eerily, and eager for an aim— cried desperate to his ears for salves and Saviors— and medicines of Destiny. So… strange… it seems, that this is Revelation. Then he turned, displaying in his look a kind of loss in sad assurance… When—as quick—he’s bright!— ablaze with searing radiance, and bleached with luminosity. His ocean sash and crimson robe are gone, and, in their place: regalia of Messiahship—the plates and armor of the final Faithful Knight: lavish with crowns, and flameful in the eye, who treads the winepress of the Wrath of God— and on his vesture, on his thigh: “The King of Kings,” and “Holy Lord of Lords”: the Son; the Christ; white Rider of the snow-white horse, transfigured fully for apocalypse and final holy war. …When I was young (not that much older than a boy), we learned our Bible crayoning colorful, and still, today, I can recall… those drawing games in which we painted “Armor of the Lord”— the Helmet of Salvation, Gospel Greaves, Breastplates of Righteousness, and all the strange and martial things to help us learn Ephesians. …But… boys grow up… and what a mockery of innocence would it suggest, if now I said that this was how Messiah dressed? Is that a farce? Then it is serious: what once was dreadful proves quixotic jest. And what is tragic but a helpless hope? heroic children with their sabers drawn to meet the barrels over No Man’s Land? Now, plucking from the air that burning Blade, he clutched her fire: MACHAIRON PNEUMATOS, forged in soulflame—and strongest sword to serve against the crude material of men. And on his arm: the Shield of Faith. The Shield… that dazzling spectacle of heart’s defense, so potently defiant in its make. Upon its paradox of circled square: a pictured life in Afterlife, whose groves of after-being show a City there beside her suburb, Earth. That smaller town held in its copper orb worlds upon worlds of wondrous sights: the coming-ins of eyes to smiling mothers under light, soft hands of purple to the sky; the dimpled smiles of later, blushing lovers holding hands in danced delight, or bearing apples off in woven baskets from the fields. But…there: a crack: metal disguises worn by eyes which saw those-come-in hurting, going out, and sacrificed for More… There: purple hands, age-wrinkled, trembled, folding in to lie forever still, and folded in the Earth… But by this broken town, so deftly shown to shine instead, a wider City, higher, outgleamed its neighbor-place, and seemed to smile itself: The Afterlife of Earth—where mothers who passed are mothers present still! and days of dancing dance into eternities of holding-hands, and apples. Lovers lie unbent from youth to wrinkled hands, but fold themselves together on the earth to watch the stars. So all that beaten copper rose to stronger things of blinding gold, and played in Afterlife the deathless world of Earth… Thus armed, and blazingly transfigured now to battle-god from Prince of Peace, Christ turned to see his Bride, never to be… and ease her hopelessness, and wipe her eyes of tears. He strokes her cheek, and, whispering her name, says, “Come, My bride… Come come, My dear. Let there be no more death, nor sorrow… no more crying…” and wipes her tears away. “And yet,” he adds, “I have a fearful vision worth such sighs… I fight it, though it stays, and seems to say …I know full-well Heaven will fade. And I? and I will die to leave you widowed, lone and desolate. And one day men will pass and see our precious house a sepulcher, devoid adoring—everywhere our spire or steeple rose to mark our home: undone, collapsing… stones heaped up in moss, not one atop the other… Still, it has been good— it has been good, so good, so good, my Love, to love you. We,” He paused. “will see each other soon.” So he spoke. She dropped her wind-blown hair. And both stood still, and both looked off in silence. Jesus wept. But, over the sloping hills, which gently blended to the cloisterwood, mankind now rushes—sated with the wreck and smoke, and eager for a final force to crown unquestioned victory. Dim gasps and muffled shrieks rippled throughout the crowd, who, at the sign from their Messiah Lord, retreat now through the woods, as Christ’s white horse deliberately advanced —to face the war. Alone, he musters all his wrath—the Son, turned Holy Power, pulsing bronze-hued heat and pouring forth a golden radiance of armored godhead, idol-like. His plume of thunder nodded terribly on fierce, scowl-slanted brow-folds—dark with nemesis and drunk with righteous Anger. Flaming Sword and planet-portioned Shield of Faith in hand, he gallops on, unswerving, for the fight— a glowing Rider over battlefields of Paradise—like lightning in a storm! And up he came—as we came gushing down— to run these grim insurgents from his Throne. We met upon the hill. Christ raised his Sword, and mankind lifted guns. Myself—I stood with them… held forth my weapon with the rest, yet… could have sworn, beneath his crest, Christ’s eyes met mine for just a second—long enough for recognition to express, You too, my son? And mine, as sad, replying with a tear, read, yes… For at that moment, Faust and Job called forth to fifty million soldiers: men of thought who wrote, and thoughtless men of doubt; men of the New who casted custom out; men under chains who chafed beneath dead weight of crowns; and all free-minded men who then believed them; all the myth-defying men; and men who simply wanted different myths— to all these men and women both exclaimed: “His blood be on us, and our children! Fire!” And everything around me clouded. Bullet on bullet—as the Son surged forth—and we, unloading rounds upon Divinity— so much, so many (as He gallops toward) a hot, thick haze of gunsmoke overtakes, clouding our vision with a kindled fog as we shoot blindly into air. Soon all is smoke and lightning, flashes in the gloom of red and orange; and everywhere: our shells; and everything: absurd; as on guns blare into an unseen void, beyond which lies our future. Now, the wild barrage relents… the firing ceases, and the magazines go still… We stand, uncertain, in a mist before our Purpose—wondering if It’s dead. But the smoke clears—thinned like a rotting shroud; the vapors dissipate, and we can see… the body of a disappointed thing. Christ, writhing slow upon the ground—his arm still clutching half the Shield of Faith, as just the lonely Earth, cleft from Eternity, reverberated like a hollow bell in crimson hands. And all his side was blood. Before I even understood, all hordes around me broke from our fixed fusillade and swamped the sloping dale. Upon the Son, like flies upon still-struggling carrion, the armies now descend—flushed with suspense, and drunk with blood’s intoxicants—to size their victim up. I followed them, unsure, half-hesitant—went down into the vale with all these hunters of my God: looked out and saw them triumphing, as now they raise the Wounded up. With burning Heaven backdrop— sky dark; sun high—millions seeped into Eden, and brought him, mocking, through the archway. There, where the two Trees, now undefended, stood and haunted from their heights, so vulnerable, the one—Eve’s snare: “mother of Science”—Faust now viewed with eyes all-whites, and to the crowds cried: “There! to Knowledge! Bring him there, and there he’ll die—prime effigy for dogma’s Sin, and fears of Fire. Incarnate figuring of ignorance, of damned-desires. Die, myth— you fiction! Man and Truth now live again: by the blood shed of gods upon the boughs of Knowledge!” Then, with all the ire and strength he had, Faust lifted him, and stood him up and propped him hard against the trunk; and where two branches forked to either cardinal point, he raised his weakened hands—still bleeding out from Faith—and nailed them shut into the Tree. At this, the Son at last cried out, and broke his lamb-like silence. On the Tree of Knowledge he wept, and, dying, called to Mighty God: “Father, forgive them! They would know too much.” The Son thus left to hang on Nature’s cross and beam, the army turned to see instead the other Tree—the midmost-soaring wood (and highest there that grew): the Tree of Life, which promised all their Afterlife: all time in Immortality. Its autumn boughs drooped such plump fruits they sagged the branches down, and, looking as to quench a primal thirst, still beckoned to some deepest part of man. A single taste might render each a god: some supernatural and eternal soul, unchanging and unending ever-being— for every fruit: salvation from the ‘Death’ which we, of Heaven, only knew about by Word and ancient prophecy. But now— instead of harvesting its blooms in heaps— a torch was set ablaze and lit its leaves! In one quick rush, the fire flared up, and blacked the green of all Fertility—and killed the tree that promised lasting life to all. The science-minded mechanists and Faust both fed the flames, destroying what the God had kept so safe—burning the Grail—the hope of all Beyonds—from men who’d burned to get there. But scores cried out who’d lusted for its fruit (nor fully comprehended yet their war and revolution’s worth) to scream: “What? What!? Insanity! Give us the fruit! The fruit! You’re murdering Immortality!” So wept the crowds at this new breach, and some of us (myself included) bounded to its trunk to try and salvage ashy clumps of rind, and charred remains of our eternity. But no: our task proved barren too, and we began lamenting with our sooty hands when stern rebukes from Faust broke out: “You fools! Would you now mourn for what you murdered? Look! We rose to fell these childish hopes and toys of souls on golden clouds! these fantasies of blissful-fields-eternal! Heaven falls to man, and man is mortal! Bear that taste, that ashen taste—it’s wisdom’s flavor: tart but true. Its realization is the fruit of this: our revolution! You’d pick thorns for shriveled berries—poisons lusted for since fed so long on sugars: sweets—not flesh! But hear, dear rebels! I shall bring you flesh! Manna for minds and water from this rock to be the Bread—and river out of Eden!” With that, he ran toward the other Tree where Christ still gasped and twice struck hard its trunk. Bushels of husky fruit rained down in droves and flooded at his feet. He threw his cane and scooped them up, then tossed them at the crowds. “Now take and eat! Enough of milk and Dreams! Eat! Eat the solid food that Knowledge bears and be like Men —knowing that god is dead.” With this command still ringing in our ears, we viewed our globes—so plump, so thick, so bright— timid to taste of the illicit truth, but, hesitantly, brought them to our lips… —L I G H T!— In a sudden flash it blinds the World! Tremendous!—horrible!—White Light, whose Source is Light—as I had never seen before! poured forth and searing from the Sky! a bath of Power in an all-consuming Light! and all was drenched with Overflowing. Where? Where was it flowing from? What was the Orb? For into Heaven’s skies we dare to look and see JEHOVAH There: the awesome LORD! High, looming up, astride a burning Heaven, a pale Colossus of Eternity stares down, above the City: arms outstretched— in the iconic form—and towering from torso up like a Great Sphinx, half-man and half-Elysium. Upon His chest burned fifty million faces: all our own, providing Shape its contour; Light, its glow; and in the compound Person that they make, make up its soul: atomic essences and imps in His Imperium. With blasts of lightning, and deep thunder in His stole, He broods above, His specter haunting Heaven. And as humanity falls cowering below, the Great God speaks (which floods the air like waterfalls): B e h o l d I A M t h e L O R D I A M t h e A l p h a a n d O m e g a I t h e L O R D a m O n e. E t e r n a l. A g e l e s s. F i n a l. I A M t h e S o v e r e i g n a n d O m n i p o t e n t. I A M t h e O n e W h o W a s a n d I s a n d W i l l B e. T h e M a k e r U n c r e a t e d I A M H e. And as He spoke, the Heavens seethed, and shook infernos raging deep in Paradise… But… Faust stood up, as all around fresh-cowed humanity a hurricane blew wild and filled his frock, dancing his coat and hair like savage flags—and undulating gulps. Leaning his weight into the turbulence, Faust stands, and sneers, and looks, that God’s cast light spreads out his shadow slant elongates: quite as large as God (but running lengthwise), one for one (one dark, one bright): both locked in struggle— upon the verge. Then Faustus answered: “No…” and, biting deep his apple, adds, “You’re not.” The haunting Giant swayed, His fierce blank Eyes and deadened look unwavering—unchanged… …but for a single speck of light that was the face of Faustus, smothered out: one light extinguished from the God’s composite: one burnt out, bored in—a single, glaring dot that blacked its disbelieving. Millions waited… when now, against the violent winds, Job stands and likewise sheds allegiance. “No!” he says, tasting the bitter fruit of knowing pain and knowing evil, gulps it down, and screams: “You’re NOT!” Then, with his disavowal, dims a second taper—and unlights the LORD. Now all humanity grows bold in doubt, rising in waves, and eager to deny. From floor to feet they rise, unbowing up, disgenuflecting—sloughing creatureship as, to the Sky, they look and state their credo. So all across the soaring Titan, lamp on lamp go dark! person by person—fruit by fruit—as all the beaming elements in God’s collage are inked, and starry slaughter. It seemed, I think, like wind upon a lake… when over tranquil waters blows a breeze and turns it dark, prickling the skin with chills and creasing wrinkles on the reservoir: shivers of cobalt on cerulean. For through the once-bright body of the LORD a dimming spreads—spreads out, infectious, word by word, as every “No!” exclaimed and taste of fruit eclipses one more face that makes His chest, shedding His splendor of that awe they gave—we gave—and leaves, instead, a Man… A small Old Man amid an unlit orb, suspended over Heaven. Then I gave, gave up my soul—or, rather, then my soul gave in. For, trembling with the consequence, I looked up at my decomposing God, and, tasting Knowledge, whispered sadly, “no.” Two jets roared angry through the air, crossed paths, and left an X of smoke above the City… Jehovah held the sky, stripped bare of Light, as all the final rays declined to dusk… In this red moment sank the Son of God, neck bending like a poppy, bowed by rain… ruined… But—just before his spirit fled— “It is finished” he cried …and bowed his head. Then all Elysium was lit again: brighter, perhaps, than even God had shone. For mushroom-clouds can light the air so full, explosions overwhelm, and make us see how past all gods—or devils—men can be when they aspire. For on the peaks of Heaven each jet let detonate the Maker’s dust, the fundamental elements of Earth and all the Cosmos: split; riven in two; and what thin veil still separated man from playing-God: torn lengthwise, rent asunder. In two colossal blasts, Elysium’s great crystalline Cathedral was erased: obliterated; funneled up, away in ash and vapor: cast into the wind— and all the remnant emerald shards too big to be negated flung in diadems of burning shockwaves, layered ring on ring… Up, up the blazing willows bloom! with stalks of fire, and flowering a conflagration— two brilliant pillars bearing pediments of flame, and messy petals in inferno. …But all of it unfurled. The fireball flared, and all the smoke and ash, imploding, curled upon itself—that as the blast concludes, its gash appears: the greatest cratered Void a soul can fathom, tearing through. A Hole… Where Heaven stood, abysmal emptiness now glared: a vacuum in the Overworld sucking it down. Down —Down —the whirlpool Void now draws—The ruins and the clouds —dragged down! Domes broke to bricks, and burning spires collapsed to the deep jerk of the voracious pull— now gobbling everything. Its yawning gulf spread out, and ate the flood, misty and wild— sucked to the vortex like a galaxy of dust, or some celestial hurricane with pupil-eye of nothingness. To loud, horrific rumbles, all was thrust to jilt and gyre, sucked to the rift—thrown, gurgled down: Elysium, on fire. Steam, fog and smoke and crackling thunderheads of billowed gloom, and all the treaded realm of haze, and film, dark nebulas, and blood-stained brume, and fields of vapor where the Angels lay, men too— collided into chasm: collided, and passed through: to some deep nether-hades, lost beyond eclipse. All that explosion spared broke up, and sloughed away: great colonnades wrenched down, and everything obliterated. And in the tortured air: the LORD Himself, fighting tornado currents like a ghost: His million darkened faces fluttered off into the gorge, a house of cards—to leave but a ripped King, reluctant though deposed. We watched, frantic and fearful—pulled in close through roaring winds, and huddled desperately round Golgotha. For there, warm Crucifix, the Tree of Knowledge held: stood firm against descending Heaven falling into Hell. Downward She goes! tossed crystal, spire, and dome— and the LORD God, battered inside the cyclone: drowning. …Who knows the frantic fear of one caught helpless in the undertow (if he— from boyhood—doyen of the sea, should sink in well-loved channels: surf and currents known from youth, but suddenly turned oddly mortal) who knows that face—surprised by death and change— will have some sense of that wild wonderment which now flashed over Yahweh’s. Groping mad, in an incredulous new urgency, He writhes, and fumbles as the whirlpool winds pull down—till all the bricks and clouds are gone and buried lies Elysium. But He remained—lone Relic of that murdered land— and struggled on the precipice, His back pulled hellward by the final draw, and all Time, Reason, Change, and Freedom, Hatred weighing. Then, finally… He gave slipping from verge to nothingness with nothing more to save Him from chasm on chasm of such a deep descent— a fall’s eclipse… So down His shadow went, clawing the air, and His deep-crimson robe, wind-drunk with waves, endlessly falling, falling, and falling into darkness from the stars. www.TheAnnotatedIcon.org

CANTO VI: LOSING FAITH Heaven was dark. The Sky: inked utter black. And all the usual Light which once would fall in spectral baths: nocturnalized, and dyed to grief (as if Eternity loomed sad to mourn believing—mourn the Angels, strewn like rags and still unburied on the fields of blemished Heaven). Still, in spite of shade and all the beating the Above had taken, all spirits of Elysium remained …unchanged… unpiqued to any overt fear or anger unbecoming saints! (who’d rest undaunted by the reckless wheel of Fate— in sureness of immutability). Denial damns all doubt from doubtful minds. So on the Feasts of Heaven cycled round— in darkness: saints and Angels all the light to light Elysium like ghosts, in flames that flickered now upon the Gothic walls in candle-wisps of white, revealing cracks (by starkness) of a crumbling masonry… The LORD was nowhere. Empty lay His Throne. And though I walked, half-dazed, amid the trance of Heaven’s denizens’ delusion—deaf to care—I had the fear, and wandered down, through aisles that spliced their plodding ritual, in terror. Deep through the Basilica I brought my hobbled certainty… Huge walls and once-bright windows now stood drab, and cold— the soaring arcade piers and archways lonely— and as I walked I sought the LORD through all the vacant hollows of the Overworld… Then, turning down into the colonnades whose stony spaces coat the outer aisles, I saw Him—far away… far off alone, inside the dark and epic solitude of a side altar, pacing up and down… His Self-emitting Glow embalmed it all within with lambent light like dancing light on jostled water. And the gravity of all the world seemed heavy on His back, which, even from so far a distance, seemed a thousand crosses of a crucifixion. I knew, of course, Omniscience knew I saw Him, and yet I felt it secret as I stared… until some knocking sense of impudence— irreverence—hurt my heart (the way it will when boys catch weeping fathers at their pain) and I departed. Out, upon the fields (those cloudy tundras, shaded by the night that came on omen), human beings sought their myriad dead amid the fog and blood, for funereal offices more just than souring into dust upon the wasteland. Now all of them are brought within the camp. Huge pyres are lit—their speckling blaze of hives re-lending Paradise some glint of brilliance as vast environs of Elysium glow flecked with lamentation in the dark of murk and mourning. Job, no alien to these, broods over all. And as he does, he weeps, and tears his clothes, and wrecks his face with ash and graven wrinkles, beats his chest for loss and summons all humanity to curse a careless God for “Slaughterer” and shake their fists at Heaven. Few pay heed. They are too ruined deep within; to feel is too confusing. Millions stand, or sit in bands, to gaze with looks emotionless on scattered pyres now smoking with their friends and former world. The older one has passed away, its demarcation line scratched deep and all-indelible: dug wounding-like in winding trenches as a scar—and signed with blood (where Faustus’ guns gave signature by touching Angels to the dry white page of ground, and stained it mud). …What have they done? some think, afraid in mind (and yet assured in gut) they’ve killed their own soul’s guardian Angel… Where tends this strange adventure into Air for overthrowing? No one now could say… as all the wearied faces sat and stared at crackling flame, incinerating what and who they were, and what has been—while blind to all that ash and dust might chance become… True, some proved coward. Under guise of night they sought their hubris’ Tower for the Earth (…or, lost, threw bodies headlong from the clouds in want of some ablution). Most remain. They know they carry what they’ve seen and done within them. There can be no back, nor down— but only up and onward. All must burn, for nothing from the prior days of Faith can be retained, once God—Faith’s fundament— has blackened. So, since sleep, for many, slinks away (unten- and unobtain-able), sad crowds lounge loitering in anxious night and seek distraction from their nightmare-thoughts: dancing-and-song numb drug enough for most, while others seek diversion in the stuff of war’s assembly line, and make of cars and Faust’s contrivances some sport and toys for thoughtless playing on. Beside them, men who’d held the frontline of assault—and shelled Elysian Angels into carrion from once-eternal Forms of perfect beauty— these dazed and drooping, maniac of mind, these shell-shocked saboteurs of Ideal art meander lost amid the labyrinth fires and stammer, babbling, idle syllables of grim report, and fumble feral-like in sopping cloud to make them more a beast. “Dah…dah…” they’d stutter, turn to those who pass and say, “…I am the executioner of pretty things…” Still others took it smiling. With sureness in their task, and confidence of optimistic revolutionaries, gods after God were planned, and penned with words upon the pamphlet of the air. For some see His successor in their great Machine: synthetic savior: mock-Empyrean, within whose common effort they’d found aim in laboring, and shed their soul for cog. Beneath the umbral night, they whisper dreams by flickering of a Lord State, whose gears their Working turns. But others disagree, and in their mything for the dawn, draw God from Blood and Genes, theologize the Race, and pray the human flaw forgiven by messiahs in a Super-Man: our Fall was mingling—till eugenic grace restore— and as they wait resumed hostility round burning pyres of souls, with burning souls they dream of futures in an Aryan Elysium… Around some blazing mound stacked high with bodies fluttering off to ash, sat Faustus, staring: lost within a mind whose thoughts (like all the pyres’ flesh-powdered wind) transported him from present warming skin to buoyant raptures: What new world awaited… Impending triumph of man’s Reasoning… Ascetic dogma down—and God deposed! as former phantoms fall, and yield to science… Now, as he sits, dark crews rise out the mines his faction’s dug into the Firmament: unnatural caverns quarried deep, deep down, whose walls and primal arteries men pry and prod for Elements; seek Matter’s core in the original—to seize the tools of the Demiurge, and rape the cosmos’ plan. Ascending steaming from the hole, they plot and whisper, scheme with hands on mouths at ears of Faustus, listening… Scores sitting round hear only breathy hints of something grand …of some new, grave discovery—that rends a causal world. “…deepest uncertainties…” and “…only probability in all…”: the atom offers each profound new means to war with God. Conferring thus with these, and other chemic daedaluses (proud with fresh, newfangled metal weaponry), a lively Doctor Faust ascends a stand and calls the idle regiments to arms: “My dear Progressives! Armies of the Truth! Come! Band again together, friends! bold men and women—liberators from the Stars!” (as waves of fire-lit eyes washed slowly forward…) “We seek more scuff and battle with the Heavens, no? What more Progress do we make at ease? (as though we strove for but a property above the Earth) We didn’t come to lease some nearer gaze on what we loathe—but break our bonds and slay our Overlord! Come, then. At dawn we end our slavery. Slay God— and slaughter Angelry! Complete what we’ve begun!” So Faustus called (with such-like spurs to lagging zealotry), rekindling force and fire within the hearts of them, and sparked insurgency as from a mess of embers. Then, under stealth of darkness, hands returned to sweat and heavy industry: new plans drawn up—and greater, more ingenious grand designs for arms and engines, worse machines, as every ounce of ore and energy and thought, material, and force abet one single, epic effort and idea: Destruction… …Waking up from a dark spell of dreamless sleep (and of that sort which seems as if it’d been a year or just an hour whose dreary afternoon repose confused, and ended weary as it had begun), I slowly felt some light—of Dawn? —returned! (if just in creeping slivers on the floor through tint of glass) and, just as soon, rejoiced— (for I was far from certain that the Dawn would shine again!) Taking my harp in hand, then, to greet a quiet and still-sleeping Heaven, I rose as well, then knelt in orisons and morning ritual to thank the LORD for sun. But, as I did, I felt—then heard— all early calm of daybreak broken: war came with the light—to crush all peace above. Out, on the endless air, in scenes stained pink by Gothic glass and windowed scripture, scores innumerable, and dizzying to eye— of multi-million marching regiments and swarming myriads of men, compact in rectilinear battalions, blacked by distance into bleak infinities of insect lines, and marching…marching—sped in stepping hordes upon the thunderheads of Sky, and came towards Heaven. I watched all within, and stared in reawakened horror through the high panes of shaking Parables on men’s campaign, renewed. Heaven saw too, and, swift as impulse, mustered into form: t h e v a s t E M P Y R E A N of Seraphim and Angels in their arcs! assembling up in rising gyres above the crystal peaks and emerald Citadel: horrific, dark, and huge. Their billion beating wings waved strong and oared the air: thrashing chiropteran thick-fluttering in swarm—till Heaven quakes, each human ribcage resonates with flight, and all the tingling world resounds a deep, deep rippling, darkness flapping like a cloth: an undulating flag in hurricane harsh winds seek off. But in the gloaming sky (lit up by flood lights on a rolling march) the still-dark dawn sheds ink and night on God’s, casting His Angels in a silhouette, stark black—that Seraphs seem more demon-like, or bats (when from some storm-lit cave they’re roused and flood the air). So all the Overworld vibrates with war, each side remobilized and churning force on force—that, from my view, the ground seemed winding, and the sky a spool, (men: sunken pebbles to a drinking Drain)— God’s vortex drawing, as to pull them through— and all the Angels, all the people too: the gears propelling Time, and burning fuel of human history. But—what was that? Some deep, low buzzing seared the rippling wind— a droned cacophony come pouring in as though a hive, tucked hidden overhead, spewed onto Heaven some thick bath of bees to drown Hosts’ fluttered dirge in murmuring… …Then, breaking through the overcast, it comes— Robotic bugs or leaden locusts—virus— Down from the sky, vast steel armadas lunge: a swooping fleet of war planes like a plague, bombarding Heaven—silver hornets—flies— metallic vultures in formation: high, high up—descending now upon the Rose and cycling Seraphim: to break their arcs and burst their round Empyrean. Like streams of hurtling darts, they surge toward the Center, aiming propeller noses for the Star: the Angels’ axle, and the gleaming Hub extending out their winged rotations. Down, into its heart, these million bombers plunge and hurl themselves, injecting like a drug of death, and humming engines—plane on plane colliding into all: to cleave their sphere and blast Almighty’s soldiery apart! Their bullet hits the mark and—how it tears… scrambling their ordered ranks, and rupturing the Form—the even Circuit disarrayed, as war impregnates and implodes the Orb, with revolutions interrupted. Now, their charges planted, all the aircraft bloom from their compacted dart—and detonate the Holy Flower of the LORD. With fire and bullets sweeping from inside, they set their missiles on chaotic Hosts and gun the Angels down! Swept from the twilit sky— like gorgeous swans in flocks a rifle grounds (or moons of ivory sent careening off from ancient orbits round a starry world)— the mangled Seraphs fall, and burst apart when, crashing to the cloud, their bodies cleave, and all their ichor out. Still others fight, wrangling with war planes in the bedlam Rose and wrestle—wings of steel with wings of down— till both drop woven from the warring air and burst to conflagration far below. …But where was God? The crumbling Rose revealed He wasn’t at the core. Instead, a hole: a rotten vacuum as infected fruit will show, when through some peach or plum your teeth intrude and stumble on decay. So glare the Empyreal hollows—like a womb still-born—that, though the war planes fan and swerve, tracing the contours of sphered cavity (like darting outlines that electrons lend to paint a round thing from nihility) they seek a wanting and all-absent LORD in disappointed Regicide… Still, wounds inflicted by their infiltration prove too fatal, too complete—that now, at once, Angel on Angel, Throne on Throne, and Princedoms, Virtues, and Dominations, Powers: all, all arcs of Angelology and Spheres of the celestial order break —break up and part: exploding outward like a star that’s spent in white Seraphic nova flame. …To watch the rupture of Empyrean? strange that I did not cry… fall down, and weep inside a shaken, scared Basilica… But there are beauties in sublime dismay— appalling tragedies that, when they come, seduce us by the cataclysm: and we obey. So was it then, and I stood awed, to see how eerily the Seraphim appeared as florets in a rushing wind when off they’re whispered from a dandelion… Still, Earth was far from victory with this. The high, colossal Sphere had shattered, but like showered glass-shards from a broken bulb descended now upon the surging floor, point-first. (So bees from boy-broke hives; so drops the lava; so the shockwave, fired from fire: prophetic to its own catastrophe.) Belling their opal fall (like tumbled wine that overflows its brimful bowl to coat a granite table), Angel floods pour up and out and down—as bowed magnetic fields erupt out of the sun in polar crescents. Now, over fields of cloud, they swoop and skim, all hurtling forward at the charging men who brace for hard collision. “H o l d!” yelled Faust through chaos, fear, confusion, rushing—noise burying thought—horizons pulverized by vast infinitudes, and sweeping vistas blotted with bodies and invasion—lands of shaking thunderheads as endless as eternity: seething with them, with men, with mutinous, apostate hordes in fields of gray humanity. The Angels near— now: shrieks—and cries— and all at once both meet in a deciding Battle of the Stars. Hard—like the rams’ heads’ crackling, horn to horn— these billion bodies of God’s Angelry and angry men collided—crashing chests and arms on wings-and-chests-and-arms, and bone on bone: shattered in the explosion! Mess in violent chaos issued out. Two waves converge and froth confusion on a sea: so was it then, a million-fold (if seas foamed red and bloodied at the bubbling merge) and all was pandemonium in Heaven. Yet human hosts prove greater force, and at their union, over-stormed collapsing wings and spears—as one tectonic plate, above, will plunge the under to the mantle-core. So trampled, broken Angels floor the feet of a wild stampede, and human armies roll the battle back towards the Wall. Then —tanks— enormous hulks of iron, plodding death— like armored elephants—metallic, black, and mounted ivory-tusked artillery— extend their steel erections out and burst a belching fire— (…smoke spumes and far away a hundred Angels shatter into bits of spinal cord and coiled intestine) —burst— and burst again—A volley of a thousand pummel the cloudscape with their slender pipes and stir a shrapnel mist from blood and steel. But Angels too mete rage. Some tackle men and—rising, meteoric—surge themselves up! up! into the highest air! clutching like eagles or a bird of prey its pelt a dangled man, sharp-taloned to the sky— to drop! For, in the brittle atmosphere and windy arctic heavens over Heaven, their grips are loosed, and down their cargos fall, that all above the hectic battlefield loud, steady hails of human beings streak the sky with screams, and rain down evenly to puddle into corpses on themselves. Elsewhere, the savage struggle thrashes fierce and crude, as, hand-to-hand, combatants brawl— men beating Angels with their broken fists, and brutal scientists at bludgeoning. Some Seraphs too turned madly animal, and, in a violent grief (for on their skin glimmers the crimson fluid: streaks of friends men slaughtered into stains and butcher’s goo) mauled at the faces of the victims caught, and screamed their heartache hoarse. …Their eyes will haunt, forever haunt me… (I—what could I do?) For I stood gaping in a quiet room and kept my window, looking down on war… as though, in all the ruin of my world, I read a book laid out, and every word, dissolving—fighting God: like paragraphs conspiring into regiments at dawn to burn down Heaven round a child. But down they go: down Raphael, down Uriel, Zerachiel, and Sachiel, and down Seraphiel fell silent in the fog; and down the Seraphs, down the Hosts of God— too like the hay-stuff in the grass, blown off— and down Salvation tumbles from its Cross and from my heart: far brittler of a thing than faith would have imagined, or have thought… But in the bleeding of the fray was Job, who now, as in the eerie calms that reel tumultuous hurricanes around a pause, had stumbled face-to-face with some great force, alike unarmed: the looming Peniel— or ‘Angel of the LORD’—and stood unmoving… “…WHAT IS YOUR NAME?” the Spirit asked (afraid? or nervous at such intimate exchange amidst the sweeping anonymity of slaughter?) Job just stared, as battle burned and chaos bloomed around. “My name?” he scoffs, “Why ask a man his name? No sooner sung its music ends, and dies upon the air.” —(beside him, thousands fall, and breathe their last upon the trembling Firmament of Meaning)— “Though… true. In those brief tones lie symphonies of suffering (if only varying fugues upon a theme). Man’s but an uttered breath: a spate of sound, and then eternities of silence. Glory’s echo loiters, soft… —but fades in rapid decrescendos down to infinite fermata rests. And only a fool… a fool upon some jingling jest, would fiddle time with names! lying with sound and hoping in his heart that names might stir once life’s vibrations still, or stand as waves to beat on some immortal shore. But all is …hushed. Names are toys as well: the sounds we give to dying things. So come, and let me take mine to the grave. Death is a fame—much noise— which everyone must know.” Then, all at once, as if unplucking sutured memories (say, of a boy, a wife, a daughter: pressed beneath the wretched onus of the world) Job’s face turned cloudy, and a grimace sneered— as, with a primal moan to break his heart’s, he leapt upon the Angel of the LORD! On thunderheads, and fog—wrestling, with grunts, and vicious blows—the two rolled madly round— and snarled—and growled—until (in spite of age, and all the wear and bruises of his pain in toiling time), Job pinned the Seraph down, and howling in the air a monstrous wail, he crushed its face with blunt-force to the eyes. Now, lying on the ground, and heaving hard, and throbbing by the corpse of it, he sighs: “So have I struggled with God… only now at last prevail…” So: slaughter. Everywhere. Slaughter and murder on a mythic scale— not just in magnitude (though it was vast: Angel and man spread out, bacterial: black, writhing dots upon the film of mist and sick, staphyloccoccic clouds), but here raged slaughter of premier import, whose worth was great, and in this scale aghast. For on the life which was its Purpose fed the bug, turning infection tragic and profound— decaying, inside-out, the human soul, spit up—and decomposed Elysium. Just then—the ground beneath me shook… the walls trembled and quaked… A sudden thunder pierced the clamor of the muffled war below, and then my stained-glass window shattered! Down in vibrant flecks and shards, the Parables came pulverized, their crystal colors broke— slivers of Christ, and the Apostles: points, as dust and rubble blanketed. I reeled— thrown backward by the deafening blast, and lay in pain and powder. Through that gaping hole poured loud cacophonies and savage floods of the unmuted war, as I looked out and saw the bombers flying, flying off like southward geese in V-shape overhead. “My God…” I whispered, horrified with awe: “They will. They’ll bring It down…” Indeed, all round me the bombs were going off, and all the walls of Heaven were exploding. Blast on blast reverberated—left and right—as planes let slip their missiles on the Overworld. Huge spires collapse—and tumble on themselves— towers on towers of the Citadel— eternal Structures in the Cityscape of Paradise, and down the Bells—down Time and certainty—implode, and fall away. For now great Transcendental forms, and frames to skeleton a metaphysics break, crumble, disintegrate: as air raids rock and craters catch them. See? Elysium becomes the crosshairs well (as any camp or barracks, battlefield or city, home, cathedral, garden, Dresden, library), and in the haze of chaos, one for one, seems wondrous edifice for demolition. Now, where the missiles struck, I saw the wounds they left: cold, gaping of utter black (as when, in space, some stellar giant dies, sinking so deep on its imploding self it’s pierced the very fabric of the sky with densest nothingness). So was it then, except in myriads! and all the heights of Paradise pocked sickly with the rash— as down into the craters strikes and bombs had gashed rubble fell to a Void, and Forms like mortar to the gobbling holes: swept down, into obscurity. Imagine wonders… imagine…shrines (but worth the name), great shapes fit for the Temple of the Spiritual, and build a city in your mind of awe. Dream up into the air what’s holiest, in structure soaring like sequoia-scapes, till all the skyline beams what’s dearest us: our Cause, done cosmopolitan. Build up the scene —then throw the whole thing down. Break off its shoots for losing in abyssal blots. By this, the Heavenless might gain some sense of loss, and tally tolls of bankruptcy by summing measure to infinitude. For so the City crumbled, sinking spire by spire, explosion by explosion; planes: fly-like, and darting to-and-fro; and down upon the battlefields: red massacre, red carnage—millions of the Seraphim hacked, mutilated; men doused with their ichor; as all the vistas of Elysium looked seething with the broth of dead and dying, the dead and dying falling mixed, and lost beneath the cloud. Then: tremors overhead… a bomber swoops!—and, all at once, smoke BURSTS with rubble from the emerald Citadel! revealing souls inside… There, in the shell and ruined room its triggered wreckage left, crowd multitudes of LORD Jehovah’s own: the Tribes of Jacob, still at prayer—still true— and chosen children from an older world. The floodlights’ blare tore in on them, and seared their worship red—so that I saw their faces, saw all their multitude, and multitudes in hate against them, till I feared what I’d see next… I gulped—expecting savagery to let itself in orgies of the butcher… and yet was awed the more when, one by one, contingents of re-ordered armies formed man’s mock-Empyrean. There, cog by cog, it rounds the prisoners up, mechanically— devoid (it seems) of unkempt malice’ rage— and, man by man, conveys them out apace like any product on a factory line. …Amazing, is it not? how men could make their slaughter art? or (more correct) a skill: a scientific and precise affair, with all the nonchalance of business? And is this not most of all: that as they passed their stuff along—passed men and women, cog by cog—conveyed their cargo mile by mile (out past the frenzy of still-raging war) and transferred Israel from dust to dust to hurl all coldly to a distant Void— is not this something: that of all who worked, there was no one to blame… no ‘murderer’… So can six million die, efficiently— and none who kill consider it a crime. But all defenses now were lost. The Walls were breached, and Heaven opened-up. The Hosts of Angels struggled fruitless—or in heaps— and millions flecked their corpses on the cloud. …But where was God? More blasts! The Gates— entrance to Heaven—tumble from their jambs, shatter to colors of chalcedony and deep jacinth—Perfection’s sardius, chrysoprasus, and beryl. All these, like gems of every value: scattered to the winds! as everywhere rich beauty’s ruinous and spreads the splendor of Elysium. So savaged, hallowed-hollowed, Mystery riddled and wholly scarred with bruises of the Void and bomb-blotched meaningless, the ancient Walls and outer Gates of Heaven break apart— cleave into slabs, and teeter droopingly… …holding a moment… —like a man about to fall—when heart and soul, at strife in dying, dither to pass for hunger of the world— and so holds on, with clutching at the chest… a weeping grimace at the body’s fault… before a gravity more powerful (and careless) brings him down for final rotting— so, billowing down in swollen clouds of smoke and circled plumes, the ancient walls of Heaven disintegrated into ash. With all the force of human history they crashed and shook the Overworld in awful peals, as though a million bells were tolling then— the din of every human church at closing— a cosmic funeral—the midnight hour of God—and all man’s armies on the brink to pillage through, as I leapt up, and out my trembling room before it falls to dust. www.TheAnnotatedIcon.org

CANTO V: THE GREATEST WAR Our Sky was scarlet with the falling sun, and, like an under-storm, the far-off fields of cloud were curdling into darkness: bleak and ominous, congealed from cirrus vales to whipped-up thunderheads—on which Earth marched to wreck Elysium. In rows now—millions— countless divisions phalanxed forth, and loomed their creeping pestilence or insect swarm like locust-shadows on a harvest Heaven. And all was hatred and a jaundiced pride within the faith of men. But God stood firm; His Face: a statue-still, aura undimmed… until— with all those myriad battalions of suits and dresses, uniforms and ties treading Transcendence blithely, careless, wise, Jehovah as a blinding L I G H T ascends… All looked in awe, amazed and terrified… when now, He breaks to brightness—cosmic Light beamed out, in all directions—endless, sky-filled (the way a quasar’s gobbled gas and cloud spew forth the laser of a billion suns from a black hole)—then summoned Angels to Him (silent—no: telepathic) And They Come. Multitude on multitude, up they come! conjoining arches: arms in vortex swirls churning in flight—like countless flocks of birds arising from a cityscape, in arcs that round the Godhead, Circle after Circle— He, in the Angel-hurricane: The Eye (as if tipped cyclones circumscribed). And all around, bright swarming Seraphim, in rings, chant haunting Hallelujahs to the LORD… Earth’s armies slowed, and, coming to a halt, gazed up in awe and horror at the sight of T H E E M P Y R E A N now formed. The Dawn, still sinking through the heavens, now was blocked completely by revolving of the Hosts, and darkness—like cloud on the clouds—cast shade where Holy Light fell shadowed to a form. The welkin pulsed. Deep rumbles in the mist troubled the sky, like seismic pangs—and air, the air itself, buzzed nervous like a flame as the weird songs of the Seraphic gyre groaned from the Wheel like a hypnotic dirge and frighted all Elysium. …At last, the Holy Will of God at core conveys what acts He’d see accomplished by His Prince of Angels—Michael (swirling innermost)— and what decrees of Providence performed to exorcize rebellion from mankind. These deep directives (learned like whispered thought) thus treasured up, he doesn’t disobey— but breaks the swiftest orbit of the Rose, and hurtles spark-like from the swirling Blaze a meteoric Angel—to the front. Just like an osprey, when it eyes its aim in subtle lakebeds far below, and dives sheer down in falling flight until it arcs the swift parabola of its descent at watertop (to tear a fish away in talons, glistening)—like that, the Seraph, plummeting down, turned up his feathered sails to catch the air, and eased his lightning-fall to foggy ground, and foggy plumes of vale… Mankind just watched, standing unsure in hordes as the Archangel, fanning forth his wings, erects himself in towered might before them, flushed with divinity—and brandishing a sacred saber from its sheath: “BEHOLD” he bellowed—once the murmurs of the crowd (which stretched from Faust and Job through regiments into horizons of the heavens) lowered to hear the messenger: a silhouette of Herculean strength and dactyl feathers before the fiery circuit of the LORD. “BEHOLD” He flares again. “YOU HAVE TRANSGRESSED! AND COME TOO NEAR A HOLINESS WHICH MAN CANNOT ENDURE. RETURN, AND PRAY HIS GRACE ABSOLVE YOU OF THIS PRIMAL BLASPHEMY.” He glowed a radiant crimson at the last— like embers or the dry, red heat of coal: “GO! FOR THE PLACE ON WHICH YOU STAND ACCUSED IS HOLY GROUND!” at which the Seraph rose into the air with billow-beats of wing and clutched his monstrous saber savagely. But Faust was uninspired… And so, one gaze upon his fleet he cast… another back to Michael… out he draws a pistol, cocks, then blows the brain out of the ruined Angel! Down in a heap the crumpled Seraph falls, vast wings collapsing—clattered mail and arms crushing the bones, as ichor dyed the vanes and the ripped plumage, gnarled into a death. “Yes… mea culpa,” clucked the Doctor, snide, as all behind him slowly woke from shock to flush with realization at the deed: the flesh was able and the Spirit weak! But, high within the bright Empyrean, did Godhead gape? amazed? dumfounded?—wild for once with an amiss surprise, or rage at this unprecedented injury? For all the Seraphim there—turning (as ordained)—let slip their even symphonies now to an arrhythmic dissonance… then silence. Elysium fell mute. Some war had come. All eyes had witnessed what could not be done… And so He strikes! Like the implicit pact a body has with all its disparate parts— spurring the molecules to mobilize for clot and suture at the trauma-point, while throbbing arteries with blood en-route pump all their efforts to the wound—so God, unspeaking, orders legion Hosts, in plume, decouple from the whirling Rose and spill themselves on mankind’s hemorrhaged mutiny. They do! descending swarm-like—all at once— as, under oceans, fluid in their shape, enormous schools of fish or krill change course, conglomerated, and confound our sense of ‘multitude.’ Downward they fly! and skim the mile of cloud which separates mankind from Heaven’s soaring citadel—as God, enthroned in air in Glory, looked below. But terror had already struck, as now man’s armies, staring up at the bright swarm, changed confidence for wild alarm, and shook seeing this Empyreal front soar forward. Faustus alone stood calm, and, with it, steered the worldly will to quicker wisdom: “DIG!” he cried, and as some did his tapped defense then dominoed to all the regiments behind them. Mist and fog flew up like dirt now as Ground was delved in for their barricade. A million men, dew-soaked and sweaty, heaved, and dug, and drew Foundation from their feet as the invasion of the Angels threatened and bore down heavy from the LORD’s Cathedral. Then, from the sinking trenches, Faust’s grim means to counter Heaven’s legions was revealed: For now the cannon comes. Ten thousand stands to prop ten thousand sleek machineguns nest upon the fresh hole’s lip: elaborate arms men mass-compiled from factory-iron parts, which engineers and grim industrialists contrived through Faustian alchemy and science. Now, all at once, they’re set in even places, dotting the steep ravine like rivets, or steel gems upon a band—each propped and aimed with crosshairs on the charging of the Angels. For on they came, undaunted: taking note of Earth’s strange arms and engines, undeterred (uncertain of their worth… —yet confident in Heaven’s ancient strength, and the sure code of noble chivalries in Christendom). So on they charged with faded swords and blades against industrial artillery, and made for slaughter—mechanized. At last, Seraphic clouds in range, “NOW!” looses fire— setting the Skies ablaze with such a light it humbled the Empyrean’s. Sharp bursts in clanking rattle riddled wing on wing— piercing their neck and arms—tears faces off God’s soldiery, to shred white robes and skin— bodies repulsed, and punctured head to knees— grated—exploding—puffing mists of red— till down the vanguard of their murder falls like crows the power lines electrocuted. Their comrades fill the void—but meet the same: bloodshed on bloodshed—endless streams of steel and shrapnel hammering; till the vast brood, peppered with metal, drop their corpses down, already broken, to the rising heap of shattered bones and ruined carrion who were the Hosts of God. Yet still they come!— relentless as Infinity—as row on row, and tier on eager tier, swept forward, fearless, replacing the already-slain for slaying—surging forth with simple blades into an execution. Then, cast down, and torn like rags, they stack the mounting carnage, coating more dead like polyps on a reef: all armies of Elysium shot-through as humans decimate, and turn their stream a waterfall of rushing Seraphim. And all was death. But Gabriel could sense a slaughter. Rendered chief by Michael’s murder, he deems their charge catastrophe, and calls, at once, for their immediate retreat: to muster order from the multitudes and reinforce. They do, turning as one away from the harsh blare still downing—death and showered bullets, indiscriminate— while still men’s dark munitions sweep the field and fill the backs of hectic Angels, shot regardless of their helplessness to flee. So guns blare on, and fell a wake to trace the Angels’ trail in their defeat—unstopped, until no holy thing lies still in range then quieted… to ghostly silence… chains and shells coming to halt till only blood— the blood of Angels—could be heard, as pools soaked deep into the sopping clouds and foamed beyond the trench. VICTORY! Heavens cowed and Angels fleeing! Who could now dispute? Man’s metal could outstrip the thunderbolt! And yet, no gleeful battle cries rose out from trembling trenches. Pale, and terrified, and shaking with their conscience’ blot (like boys the mangled beaks entrance, when daddy’s gun, in secret, sweeps a chirping nest from boughs to glut the curiosity of youth), they wonder at their potent hands and dread assumption of divinity. Not Faust. Nor any scientist, or mechanist, or Ford (Faust’s soulless famulus). They know: man’s time is short—that, presently, in hordes, indignant Angels will return in rage and seek complete annihilation. So they set to work. Marshalling crews of men, their dig into the Fundament resumes with cold efficiency, as hand on hand mine deeper—to the chemical—for core, disturb the surface of Elysium, seeking life’s crude, inchoate Elements for warping into arms. At last, they hit a vein then plan immediate extraction… My God…I still recall the image of them (gazing on Heaven’s fields of clouds of carnage while clutching tightly to my harp within). For there, below, they seemed to form their own Empyrean—a vast, mathematical design—yet shorn of feeling… All became a cog: mere cogs in clockwork of destruction, as each with simple, patterned steps performed the songless dance of their assembly line. Human on human, like the links in chains, drew out the elemental ore—each making some fine adjustment at the prodding script of scientists—until (these: PROCESSED, done…) all labor’s confiscated up by Ford for darker purposes, destroying Heaven… But farther off on the vast fog of fields, retreating Angels come to halt: some wings frayed by barrage; some scuffed; some bruised; some bleeding— all wearied by the harsh attack—and all confused: how lesser mortals could confound their strength, and question Deity… mock Truth… Their leader, Gabriel, assesses each as millions of the Seraphim regroup, then hovers over all—to monster will— once every Angel, Seraph, Throne, and Cherub throbs in a flock to guard Elysium: “THRONES! DOMINATIONS! PRINCEDOMS! VIRTUES! POWERS! AND ALL HIGH HIERARCHIES OF THE SPHERES: BE STRONG, MY FRIENDS REMEMBER NOW YOUR VALOR! REMEMBER NOW THE BLOWS WE DEALT TO DAMN THE MORNING STAR, AND WREAK A FALL ON HIM WHO DARED DEFY OMNIPOTENCE TO ARMS! SUCH MIGHT WE BROKE, SIFTING LIKE BRITTLE CHAFF THE IRON STAFF OF WOULD-BE GODS. FEAR NOT, THEN, MATERIAL MAN. HE BUCKS AND BRAYS, AND HOWLS WITH DISCONTENT AT PARADISE, BUT IS NO MORE MAJESTICAL THAN DUST-IN-CLOTH: A DIRTY RACK OF FLESH THAT CANNOT STAND ILLUMINATED BEING. SOMETHING LESS THAN ANGEL, DO NOT TREAT HIM LESS THAN ANGEL, BUT VENT THE FIERY WRATH OF INJURED RIGHT ON FRAGILE FORMS NO LESS THAN MERITED TO DEMONS CLAD IN MAIL! HE LOWERS GOD TO WAR WITH HIM; LET’S MAGNIFY THE MAN! AND SHOW TO HIM A GREATER RECKONING TO MATCH A RECKONING OF GREATER PAIN!” So Gabriel incited all the Hosts, beaming new brightness by the Ire of God: he raised his sword. Then, turning fiery eyes behind to Angel fronts, he wildly roars: “FOR THE ETERNAL GOD!”—and surged ahead: to break the deep defensive front of men by force of mass and courage over arms. So on the barren stretch of cloud they charge incalculable—gushing in one great spume all strength and means of Heaven towards the trench, that, from the citadel, their flowing jet of blended light and cloth in halo’s feather seem, as a whole, turned liquid-like, and stream a molten spew of Seraphim —or stars, if all a sudden such a galaxy as ours stretched out, black-emptied to a hole, and all the Milky Zodiac whirled forth to its destruction. So their legions on, poured from the spigot of Elysium, as God, their power’s Fountain, looked below. But then— EXPLOSIONS All their ocean arms— thought out of range—now suddenly throw up large parts of charging fronts, sporadically, in blood and smoke!—as unexpected blasts butcher their legs away in savage bursts and hurl up mangled remnants like a rain. The Angels reel—but hurry boldly on through devastating minefields men have laid to winnow them: fresh means and cruel inventions wrought in the cold precision of their mines and mock-Empyrean. So legs and arms, flesh, cloth, muscle, eyes and ears, and parts of lung and thick intestine, bowels, bones, and hearts in spattered pieces spew their chunks from burns, mess all the punished field, and fleck the novel wasteland of the Heavens with shattered Spirits as the dauntless Hosts sped on. Mankind just watched—(though some fell sick in seeing Angels inside-out, and folded, vomiting). Still, onward their legions come— determined—dodging obstacles of blood and organs of their friends, and fresh explosions— all for their God, For God! —God… God and Purpose. How could they know a greater evil waited? Gas. In a sudden cloud it overtakes them, shot in their midst as canisters and cans, suffusing ghostlike: mists of putrid green enveloping eruptions on the field and opened bodies, mutilate. At once, entire waves are downed to it, as fumes in noxious chlorine nebulas enshroud, constricting eyes and throats. And the blown haze, like vapor from a lake, breathed up pollutants in emerald specters, suffocating. Gas. In a thick fog of phosgene it attacks— burns lungs to acid and asphyxiates the gasping legions of the LORD: man’s worst —until the greatest triumph of his work in brutal alchemy and science fouls the field: for now sulfuric mustard pours. In toxic billows, in a yellow cloud, it spreads its thick contagion, phantom-like, and eats them all. Angel on Angel fall in agony, and clutch their eyes—puss-bled and seared to blindness—as their ruined skin, crackling in plague and blister-boils, breaks down, chemical-burned, to slough away in crusts or yellow bubbles, festering. The crowd of chemists from the trenches looked away… They do not see the stunned and dazed mowed down or have their chests eviscerated. How? How come? —why should they? All have done their part. Why call them from their hiding to survey the devastation of experiments and little things they microscoped with smiles turned larger than all God’s Elysium? But others do. With bug-eyes and their trunk of tubes, a million faces, still as grass, stand staring through the gas-masks on the fields where thirty million Angel corpses lie, or fall, or choke, or spasm, or cry for God through such atrocity. Machinegun-fire lights up their goggled staring through the tint, that all of them appear depraver doctors in their bird-suits, gazing on pyres of plague a ravaged Europe’s pestilence stacked up when similar apocalypse swept through and made grim prophets whisper of an End. Indeed, it is enough of triumphing it goads some hubris from them. Slowly, death by death, they grow more confident in hopes of taking Heaven, till—made drunk with fire— and deeming each a god, invincible— whole scores leap up from trenches—gunning—shriek in wails in mimicry of savage Powers and hurl themselves to fore. The Angels!—God himself!!!—ELYSIUM ENTIRE!!! is theirs (they think) for utter subjugation, rape and ruin, as the Heavens meet their fresh and potent overlords! Yet such vain reach is quickly checked. For on the wasted field their phantom glories fail: victims at once to their own dark means—when the mines, and gas, and spraying bullets of their own machines pummel their backs, rob each of air, or blow their high-aspiring hearts to pieces. Man on man fall dead: self-slaughtered by their dreams of stealing Thunder, and apotheosis to savage Lords. “Pull back! Pull back!” yelled Job, but too-late heard through endless blaring guns, and the thick fog, green with their gas, of smoke and smother rolling. So some million fall, strewn on the craters of a broken world, and glaze the Angels’ offal with their own as, over them, munitions’ music plays a grating dirge for men, and requiem for slaughtered Angels… Yet, the Dawn—its piece now ending (rest impending as it neared the final bar of the Horizon)—bled still deeper crimsons on the field, as night, its death, crept close. Chill nipped the air, and winds unfelt before in Heaven blustered through (though deafening cannon, engines, mines and flares of light still mocked the day, and made its end seem artificially prolonged for murder). But— as dawnlight’s dregs soaked in to mountains, and the dreaded omen of a night in Heaven fell—then still-fighting Seraphim looked up… looked out on all their shattered casualties for nothing, and, with doubt —with doubt and wonder— fled. As a wave of in-drawn pebbles breaks and falters on the watermark to tide (which, broken, scatters backwards on the beach when sea reclaims it), so the Angels broke— at last—their ranks along the line, and left, confused and horrified for Heaven. All was lost. But Gabriel alone screamed hoarse, and flung rebuke on all those fleeing spheres of Holy Ones. With reddened face and sword unsated since unpowerful, he cries: “YOU WIND! YOU GHOSTS! ABANDONERS OF GOD! SO FALLS ANOTHER THIRD OF HEAVEN’S STARS! BUT I, FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH, WILL BLAZE, AND BURN AND BURST MY LAST EXPLOSION OVER THEM— TO TAKE AS MUCH OF REBEL EARTH INSIDE MY GLORY TILL I BREAK AND, DARK AT LAST IN ANGRY SPACE, SUBSIDE TO NOTHINGNESS!” So wept the only Angel to remain, and, with a final roaring, ran headfirst into the cannon-fire. And yet, what for? What was it worth? What was this madness’ meaning? For there, at once, his face is torn away by heavy shelling, and stampeding sprays of metal, dribbling gut. His body falls, clanging to Heaven clutching worthless arms of prior centuries, and stains the edge of trench and line, one drop descending in— high-watermark of the Angelic siege: whose blot means what? It is already gone. Again men’s guns fell silent, Seraphim retreating to the Walls, where, high above, Almighty stares… stares off, unblinking—face a cryptic hieroglyph of God-Enigma: riddle on riddle painted eerie in, and Meaning in the eyes: inscrutable. Yet those who dare to look on Him take calm in vagueness, comforted by Mystery, that plan in this catastrophe might rear, revealing higher wisdom—this the God (they reason), after all, who blessed His Son’s destruction with the world… But night has come, darkening Paradise in dreary pall and buying truce with shadow. Darkness veils the dead, and Faust, and Job, and millions—men and women, artists, scientists, and all the souls invested in emancipation, all fiercely ‘modern men’ (and those who follow)— all these, in countless, wearied regiments, abandon now their guns, and move to sleep… (though trembling hands prove newest enemies to pitch a tent.) So tense armistice spreads, and the obligatory smile: victory theirs! …yet, for the words, the sentiment expressed lacks any sense of triumph. Through the fog, the human camp burns blurry amber: dots of light which signal settling, sleep, and time to gather bodies from the fields of Heaven. Warring must wait. Unfinished lies the game. And God, with a concluding look, walks off into the lonely echoes of his Chamber from forty million bodies on the plain. www.TheAnnotatedIcon.org