The Book of Copulation

The Spectre Garden falls away behind with all its fiends and marvels. Should we glance back, it's no longer there. Has never been there. Leaving nothing, only forward into Tundra absolute, that final wasteland risen to surround us now. Hyperborea of the mind, air chill and thin as silk. These are the far extremities of thought. Moraine of Einstein, treacherous crevasse of Quantum theory, semiotic blizzard. There are precipices, fearful and spectacular. The edge best come to slowly, one step at a time. Here is a foothold, carved by Heisenberg, whose works suggested that events upon a Quantum scale are altered by the act of observation. From here, a few precarious steps along the glassy ledges of hypothesis are needed. Since upon a Quantum level time and space present no obstacle, it does not matter that the miniature event observed be distant from us or remote in time. If we observe it, we affect it. Trap it in our models, lend it substance and parameter with systems of taxonomy and measurement though it occurred in our most distant past. Stand still. Don't risk another pace. The cliff face of the deep anthropic principle plummets beneath us, sheer and awful. It suggests that since the Big Bang was, in its initial stage, very small indeed, with all our universe compacted to a single quantum point of heat and density near infinite, and since we now observe that first explosion, tracking its faint whispered echoes with our radio telescopes. Then, by observing, we affect the universe's birth. The incoherence of origination borrows information from its future, shapes initial start conditions of the universe, so to facilitate the ordering of matter into simple and then complex forms. The act of our primordial observation sets parameters of mass, of gravity and temperature, that make the early genesis of galaxy and solar system possible, that ease the birth of planet, continent and life that will evolve across billennia towards a state where it is competent to carry out such observations in the first place, in the last place. All existence lifted into being by its bootstraps. Universe a vast, self-referential thought. The idea of itself, that brings itself about. Ultimate magic act in time, and at the centre of the cosmos there's a plaque, and on that plaque, it says this: "There is such a thing as a free lunch".

Gaze down into the yawning chasm of this heresy and it is bottomless, not called the deep anthropic principle for nothing. Take a step back, come away, retreat to safer footing though, in truth, there's little ground that is secure within these territories, where human curiosity, a galloping erosion, gnaws away the a priori bedrock that we stand upon. Here space-time is made solid, is become a Stephen Hawking egg with bang and crunch at either pole, coterminous and coexistent, every moment that was, ever or will ever be, suspended in this giant meta-instant, in this endless now. All distances, be they in space or time are deemed by Einstein to be relative to the observer, so that in effect, there is no distance, physical or chronological, and if we should be asked how many angels can be made to dance upon a pinhead, we must answer: "All of us". In this place every certainty of here and now dissolves, all objects, all realities, seem to be made of atoms which themselves are made from entities that are not wave or particle but are best understood as abstract mathematical relationships. All being as an endless phantom field that has no temperature or colour, through which all the forms that we perceive from pulsars unto plankton drift, the insubstantial dreams of matter, floated there in silent nothing. Everything is gone into the boiling light and, at the last, the realization there is no one here but I, was never anybody here but I. There is only one moment. I love you. There is no such thing as magic. You already know this. You already know this.

There is a room where you are being born in sudden bright and cold, the shock of breath. The horror of another's touch, and Mother, Mother, Mother, like a crowned and burning heart of roses, awful, lovely in her nest of argent thorns. There is a room where you are dying, anaesthetic whispers, shivering rippled light in faint approach of the unearthly, patternings of moment and event that radiate, that flower, that mandala out from that last moment, from that final clarity, that certainty. There is a room where you are fucking, wearing beast perfume and thinking in a hot cloud, strong and without sense. There is a room where you are old. There is a room where you are drunk. A room where you are crying and a room in which you do the thing that no one knows about. A room of noise. A silent room. A room without you in it. There is only one room. You already know this. You already know this.

There is a moment when the world is born in sound and fire and gorgeous fumes, when planets scab to elemental jewellery about the fresh atomic wounds of suns, whence spreads the grand crustacean fanfare blush of the Crab Nebula, the Monet fog of Magellanic Cloud, and slow white seahorse spiral of the Milky Way, when come these monstrous diadems of star. There is a moment when it ends, in beast and whore and rapture. In Shoemaker-Levy's Comet 9 impacting with the gas giant Jupiter right now. Tonight. The mile-wide pearls of frigid vapour incandescent, squeezed to megatons by gravity unthinkable. There is a moment when it ends in the superconductive cold of entropy, the opening of Shiva's final eye. The moment when they said they didn't want you anymore, the moment when the first full hand of soil fell rattling on the hollow pine. There is a moment when we hang upon the rock face, when the pen hangs paused above the cold drop of an empty page. There is a moment when the brakes squeal and a moment when the bulb fails and a moment like a terrifying avalanche of gold inside our heads and there is only one, one moment. You already know this. You already know this.

There is a person that gave sperm to you, a person that gave blood and pain and birth to you, a person that adored you always, hugged you sometimes, hated and despised you, wished you dead, a person that was cruel to you when you were small, a person with affecting eyes. There is a person you make love to and a person who lets you have sex with them. There is a person you dislike who does not know, a person staring from a moving bus, a person that you passed once in the street eight years ago and never saw or thought of since. There is a person who's depressed, who plays that REM CD over and over all night, Automatic for the People: "Maybe you're crazy in the head, baby, baby, baby". There is a person who knows why the wars and the assassinations, and a person who is hungry, who is famous, who is Pope, who is Her Majesty the Queen, who's dying, starving, being murdered, being raped and tortured. Now, this moment, now, right now. There is a person waiting on the front steps of the cinema. There is a person with their tongue thrust in the socket of a missing tooth, a person with occasional misgivings in their thoughts upon abortion. There's a person with three heads, and one's a lion and one's a crowned and wrathful king and one's a serpent scaled in roaring gold and there is only one, one person here, and you already know this, you already know this.

I love you. There is no such thing as magic. Just allow it in your minds. Allow it. This great vaulted ballroom of the sweet intangible, that soars above us, bustling with the throng unseen, their great excitement, their anticipation palpable. Convene the flickering ones and those hilarious phosphorescences that pass through with a pleasant shudder. Bring the ones like sparks, the ones that swoop and drone above massive and immaterial as Mahler. Ones with fine and strange ideas that spin and shimmer on their open palms like gyroscopes. The delicate one, all in crystal, vast as a cathedral. Let us feel the incandescent breeze fanned from its million stained-glass wings that flutter slow and perfect. Synchronized. Let them surround us now and trace their fingers down our cheek and whisper things we never dreamed or had forgotten. There is something happening. I love you. They want to talk. They want to dance. They flare and shimmer in and out of being, throne and power and chimera, sylph and demiurge, the drunk, ecstatic laugh of naked giants swimming in the aviary trill and flutter of this splendid radiance. They soar. They bellow, fierce with joy, and sing sweet prilling scales of blue, of gold, from throats like chandeliers. Trace neon-moth trajectories through Idea-Space and hover in the cold, true glow of an imagined firmament. Here, in the still eye of this glamour, in this roaring white of now, let us perceive the moment's wingèd, burnished soul and read the pure and voiceless name that's written there in strange barbaric characters, we know with other eyes. And it is beautiful and it is frightening. The clouds peel back and vast symphonic forms peer down, inchoate presence, stooping low. The choral sky and thought move to another state, become prismatic vapour in the shuddering light, and there is something happening. There is something happening. You already know this.

I am talking to ourself. We are listening to myself. As everything draws closer in the telepathic susurrus, the kindly night of eyes, and we remember what we are and know it for the first time. Each self now unfolded, gem fern fractal shape of every life revealed in all its tentacled magnificence. The light grows stronger. Something gains upon us from within, and now the banquet, now the rain of stars, now the embrace, the kiss of the invisible. I love you. There is something happening. There is only one moment. There is only one room. There is one person here. I love you. You already know this. You already know this.

There is no such thing as magic.
Is no such thing as magic.
No such thing as magic.
Such thing as magic.
Thing as magic.
As magic.
Magic.