Herakleical Life

Simona Dancila

Seven o’clock in the morning. The clock is a clepsydra, half real and half supernatural, through which the time, dressed in seconds, is pouring down very quickly, taking the room’s shape. It is a cubic time, which crystallizes around me in tiresome, pressing structures which chain me. I try to round it off a bit by whirling through objects. I am strong in exterior and weak in interior, an infernal young child for whom the teachers are waiting to split into exact sciences, draining to naught the precious liquid of personality.

The last class, a music class, built on odd scales from which the pupils must extract all the primary emotions, worldly music played by flesh and bones, a rusty echo of superior music, a dogmatic shadow of the Universe’s musical spire. I hated the music class, alchemically closed by the myopic teacher whose tuning fork was an instrument of torture. Music at a fixed hour, in a fixed space, between fixed eyes whose aggressiveness is rising with the scale. How you could murder a music teacher so specious, so ambiguous and so slippery, an enigmatic fish hidden in the mud of his own disgrace. Only a big weight could kill him, a mountain concentrated in a little stone, easy to be kept hidden in the pocket, easy to be thrown.

The children are often playing with little stones, they are searching for their power externally, producing a continuous rearrangement of the terrestrial mosaic. The fist with the little stone closed in it is an omnipotent fruit whose kernel will bear a new planet, a new Solar System, without vulgar music teachers and without impure music.

The real music is springing from my shepherd flute, the melody is curving to take the hill’s and valley’s shape full of velvet. The landscape’s lines are softening and pouring within the sapphire crucible of the horizon, and the space, affective and free from irregularities, is a friend expanding around me. Playing the flute becomes the process of my native land penetrating within me with all its concave or convex relief forms, and I wake up in the middle of my own soul, contemplating it.

The sheep make a circle around me, around the flute that I am. They want me not to be a child anymore, but a mature shepherd to guide them. The flute’s strong sound makes the trees tremble in their high and vigorous trunks, tickle the sky with their leaves, whisper poems. The fifty sheep with golden wool are running around me and I dedicate to each of them a verse from the great poem of life.

From my mouth arise elemental words, dressed in purple veils. I renounce chastity as too tight a cloth. It no longer suits me because the flute has remodelled my substance, amplifying it with new fullness and colour. The little sheep are pressing together all in one – Megara – my only fortune in that moment, won in an ardent war against destructive forces. I feel stronger and stronger, the past and future reality are concentrating in me like cardinal points of a Universe in the making. I uproot myself from the child I was. My sole impetus is solidarity with myself – the sinful and the naive one – who is gazing for the first time in the sublime mirror of self-cognition.

I am empty, so empty that I appear like a demonic architect devoted to the blind force and helpless power of a conqueror. I need a garment to cover my impure nature, as the spring covers the winter’s violence. A garment is a revival from outside which makes you look more important then you are, and more beautiful than you appear. For the moment my garment was covering my ferocious shadow making it look like an invincible monster. To vanquish my shadow I had to take off the fear inherited from matter’s Father and to become more ruthless and pitiless with myself than my worst enemy.

By wrapping myself with the monster’s skin I only received a part in history, I only became visible and I could see, in my turn, the many perils that are waiting for me. My shadow, this night body with silver navel, was dispersing, running away from the lion with inflamed mane who reigned over nature. My heart calmed itself and the struggle became a game of future generations. I was anxious to wash myself, to go through purifying wave’s world, through the country of liquid mirrors which swallow your image and bring it immaculate to the surface.

My incipient Universe was enriching with a new aggregation estate. Near the sun were appearing stars, printed in scales of flexible and mysterious water beings. Too many ideas for a single head, I would need a head or two for each idea. The knowledge was concentrating inside me with Hydra scourging endings which devour the reality. Waves of information were breaking on my stone of ignorance and were pouring back endlessly. I strained my new powers and I lined my thoughts in a uniquely bright and omnipresent tide.

My head was now a sphere, being at the same time the center of this sphere, kernel of a spiritual geometry whose germination began in the hot depth of the earth and ended in the etheric ocean’s crystals. My country’s blood was rising inside me distilled in a suave clearness under which my people were ploughing and sowing good thoughts and legends in which I was rising up through their mouths. The one hundred of points of ignorance were now a hundred triumphant trumpets announcing my victory, a hundred goblets filled with a saviour wine wrung out from the best heavenly vineyard.

I didn’t want to rest, I was looking for gigantic rivals to quench my thirst for becoming. I was rummaging the world in all its hiding places to rid it of enemies, of the germs of perdition. I wandered through secular forest. I was not a shepherd any more but an experienced hunter who only wanted to subdue his victims, to assimilate them as energy springs from whom you obtain immortality in exchange for giving them life. I was hunting the animal in me, the unassailable wild boar who was laying my peaceful thoughts to waste. I was watching in the harsh impenetrable memory bushes. and emotion became a secular fir forest whose green, frozen needles were pouring quickly through my hot veins. I discovered my own selfishness and greediness, embedded in the moving shades – ageless, immortal apparition. The wild boar, dreadful extremity, was raking up the copper fallen needles, tearing up the arcanums, breaking the emerald vaults, muddying the clear water of perception. The full Moon, night’s seal of virginity, was filling with silver the goblet of substanceless forms, was propagating the mystery along the earthly outlines and my secret eye was comprehending its immensity.

I dreamed of the wild boar advancing in my viscera. I was picking up its traces in my heavy agate necklace until it finally found a way out of me and become an exterior target, easy to be perceived like a question which demands a permanent answer. The row of copper legs with golden horns had the same fatality, another inner nature monument around which was growing the same forest, but with other shades. That is why the Moon is writing quick silver letters on the waters. I was missing a crystal blood woman; the frozen night air was crystallizing in my lungs.