[This is Part II of “On Being a Seed.” Click Part I for the prior episode.]
Things change in the darkness. In the beginning, there was sound. It was not light that was first, but sound. I was wrong when I thought that light was the
beginning. It was all I knew at the
time. To believe that light was first is
to not understand how the unmanifest becomes manifest. It is not light that heralds life, but
sound. For who called the light the
first time? And how did the calling
sound? Only afterward did the light
appear, after it heard its name. This is
the First Blasphemy of the seed. This is
what the seed knows as it sits in its tiny prison, hidden in the darkness of
the Earth . . .
It was a tapping I heard, a tap-tap-tapping. I was roused from my silent slumber by a
tapping that would not stop. At first it
was quiet, barely audible. It was
sporadic. A tapping and then silence; a
tapping and then silence. But it grew
quickly, coming louder and faster, until all I could think about was the constant,
gnawing tapping. In the tiny chamber of
my prison, the tapping echoed back and forth against the walls, each tap
questioning and answering the tap before it.
It was a kind of music, a rushing song, tapping and
tapping out its haunting melody. I
listened, entranced. On my knees, I wanted
nothing more than for the music to continue forever, because it pleased my
new-found ears. Because in the beginning
there was sound, and it was sound that called forth the thought of the Great
Alchemist, which had been imprisoned. It
was sound that broke the barrier and named all that was previously unnamable.
And so I was completely unprepared when the wall of my
prison cell was rent in two. The sound was
astronomical, a crushing, ripping, tearing sound filled with wonder and
terrible majesty! It was horrible in its
kindness. The veil that hid me for so
long was finally torn asunder. The prison
was breached.
Then in rushed a dancer so quickly, I didn’t have time to
get off my knees. There were thousands
of tiny bells on her skirt, tapping out a siren’s song. She ripped me from the doomed ship I had been
on, the ship that had crashed into the rocks.
She saved me. And then she
drowned me.
[Click here for Part III.]
