47094: 5 Pentacost Was Last Night And Was Hot And High
The killing of the bird was schemed up like a Pentacost with extra dough and oil, going over the brim of eg Fox, BBC, Skye News as a glory that finally everyone got to live, high in expectancy, a living done in CAPITALS with its words italics, and mostly adverbial, a light switching on brightly suddenly at twilight when you’re struggling to spell out the book in your lap, showing signs of exile in ways that declare that the powers have been defeated, making Habakuk and wild old prophets reverberate in modern times -
“You cannot have a dream and expect someone else's faith to make it a reality for you’ -
and reverses Babel.
To the heartbroken outsiders it may have appeared the believers who received this were babbling. In fact they were speaking intelligibly in several languages, all agreeing at last that the passion was the task, evincing and banking up a bright, brawling Pentecostal – that word again - plurality, the various streams testifying to it in their own vocabularies, and it took many languages and banging interpretive traditions to minister the meaning and the fullness but it does, it does somehow, and the extent of everyone’s gratitude, at least at first, it made you want to laugh and aroused everyone so that eyes and all the skin on them expanded with concern and love and immediate determination, because, well just this, that the body is made up of many members, so many interpretations may be needed to do justice to the body just as to the Christ-lovers there are the four Gospels for the one story and no one seemed to be abashed by the whole mashing thing, as if involved in a darkly mysterious ceremony of rituals that once done would lead to revelation, just as the prophet Joel described the young men seeing visions and the old men dreaming dreams, and he said those things would be in the last days. Well, there was the same texture and cloth to this latest eruption.
So the world tottered a little. Or made signs that it might, fatigued by all the pitching. Of course all this overlooked the one thing, which was that it taught everyone fast what shouldn’t be done as well as what should, and there’s the foundation of choosing, which is never something these clamorous moments want, where it’s all about being chosen rather than vice versa, as if there’s been the momentous discovery of the last word of the human heart. Some screw-ball lit-critter roused up with Celine’s “To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!” and believed just then that this would be the next thing to her dying, a kind of rapture, in which she felt herself sink and sink, getting out there to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to the world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to the world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion, which was frankly obscure and one hell of a surprise, like swaggering a little at the knees.
The thing was now a dream, a symbol, an Ideal raised up, disconnected from the shackles of the earth and its material. That’s what she saw, (… her again, we’ll get to her anon …) and its temptation to find once and for all a rounded identity in everyone, hitching itself to a kind of nineteenth-century essentialism, the mind-set of mass-information broadcasts of the lowest kind, and easily, tremendously easily as it transpired, to sort the various identities out with the refining mechanisms of market research and public opinion polls, taste communities and market shares, a spiritualised corporate sales pitch with management via sound-bites that streamed smooth and liquidy and loosened from the hard reality. Like, this was a ghost that was a settling, misty-eyed dream-cloud, a kind of hovering above the stiff-spread stuff people actually lived in, and so was removed.
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.