Passport for Countries That Do Not Exist

 

Passport for Countries That Do Not Exist

 

 

If one person in the crowd has loosed a kite in the street that you think is knowledge and spend all day chasing it in the air and sleep beside it too, with visions of Noah, Daniel, Job and Hiram the wise King of Tyre. It's like you precede them when you follow and live in a fall of Jerusalem that comes after them, as captives of those who know.

The scale is not what anyone can see. I went down and followed the colored maps that run this body, descend organs scattered about limbs like cities, ended up sunk in a network of arteries and veins, on my belly scissoring out dripping red insulation from the Wall of Wailing. Prying out the cracks between concrete, metal and wood, mice droppings would sometimes fall out with rot musk. Cutting bags out of the wall, I push up, get balanced, ease down a little, feet sticking out among the stones. Sighs of breath get me up and the blast feels good. I am not thinking then of dismantling the word and image machine.

A masif of a million lights and colored streets light this city of dreams, a hotbed of fertile lava of the extinct volcanoes of paradise, fallen to ruin. You had to slip through the holes and wiggle your way out in the evening of millenniums. To reach the houses and cities overwritten by centuries, a day, a year, aware and unaware of the thoughts before, waking existence led me down. Eyes saw  streets and sky like ancient quarries and vaults from flash cones of light. Tunnels and caverns beneath the topography were built over lightning rods. It was raining a little when the lightning struck and killed more. That area’s dead from the rays in average per year with all fatalities hit by lightning was a million. We could not do anything. A 21-year-old died today, and a man of 58 had to be airlifted Sunday in that province.

 

 A man returning from years of absence would know this place with his eyes closed. It wouldn't matter if he only imagined.  People who left there feel the beat.  then wonder how they could not have known. Life among the culpable always blames another before it blames itself. That is the freedom to mock and bow. The doors open from that house with two leaves and thick planks, three stories and other garments.

 

The first house in this colony was a huge clapboard affair many times larger and abandoned, except for visits. Survived exiles and dilettantes inhabited industrial residences there with many stories and passages. It housed the Seraphim Collection in the upper three stories. Unfinished, rickety, dangerous with catwalks but traversable, the house had never been properly finished off, just enough so it wouldn’t get too wet in the rain. Visited many times in these venues, it had been acquired but never improved much so to view The Seraphim Collection in situ was a challenge. I had been up there myself so it was more or less possible, like the old Barnes, the only other place I saw pieces crammed and crocked together, crowds milling shoulder to shoulder to pass them. Without apology the name tags are missing. As for the photography, if was a cloudy day.

An unguarded ingress and egress above and below the main stories is occupied by many people in small spaces. It was a  dream yard of roofed parking lots, shacks and another huge warehouse all unsecured, never improved or even locked, occupied by vagrants, migrants, gypsies, tenants, homeless, squatters, working men, blacksmiths, artists who had set up tables under the eaves. Shops in this bazaar sell posters of the spiritual resistance. The culpable fast and the inculpable lay naked there. Down and down I followed the years of descent. That's what they call it when Abel descended from Adam and Isaac and Ishmael from Abraham.. Backtrack forward, up and down, Jacob and Esau descended in Isaac, the sober cherubim and every cherub a two faced man and lion.

 

 

To walk the vision where they put the carcasses of these kings to sleep, the dream kidneys are in plain sight. Look east from the house and the law of the house to the way of the gate. There the prince will enter. To measure the pattern difference between the holy and profane, the river rising, first to the ankles then the loins, many trees on both sides from the east flow to the sea, where all trees fruit according to month, one each for food and medicine, because the water flows out from that house holy, four square possessing the city and the name of the city, Jerusalem, for Jahu is there to complete the restoration, rest in peace.

 

Darius, Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander sprawled on top the stones like extinct volcanoes and lay abandoned flat. There the King of Jerusalem sat who survived the fall. He wrote these kings were counterfeit who wanted to reconstruct Goliath, to slip his body through the holes, and wiggle out for more millenniums, to bridle him and saddle him over centuries and another year. Master Humanyte, there the Dayman came into space and time to sail Hierosolyma’s streets, came into being between the war and the next decades, but time was putty.

 

The first condition of clandestine wits is shadowgraph and counterfeit. Then the fertile ground turns to light and the history of the underground is marketed about. The second condition is the electric arch of its spread. Every member, foot and hand is obliterated by the old. One decade could not recognize another. Images sprayed down eight hours  before dawn forecast heavy clouds. Hundreds of streaks spread across the sky that forecast ruin in the blueprints of dream, but Jerusalem’s spectral emergence from the lava of paradise remained.

 

If you want to forget something that doesn't officially exist, this state was the end of it. A flow of expatriates fled to the West in an aching slow motion mass from camps among wolves. Dark purple blotched the eyes with rumor as numbers swelled. Authorities demanded more and more papers for refugees from the black briefcase. Doors opened and closed according to the piece of paper that would enable exit, that salvific lure before it closed for good. Escape was uncertain except as the collective transfigured human relation. Entertainment immersion, elevating the person to the level of commodity, whistled like a lark.

 

Before Darius came down, and Nebuchadnezzar marched the limbs, Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic had complete treatment of Goliath's head, with disposal of the body.  Rag picker history surrounded by collectible data, ruins and blueprints of a dream city, had Jerusalem spectral and estranged.

 

Where have the remains not penetrated above and below? Every element burns. Captives in the last phase of this perigee, like pilots who bombed cities shot down and crashed, are were brought to account before execution. My culpability and all others whose dust swirls this wind is cast into sea. I am carbon and gas reassembled. I fall to my knees. Tramped alive with marching feet, a reconstitution of the world asks, whose grave is this, this one and this? We should not tolerate such a contrary state in the conduct of our lives. A myth of space and time Hierosolyma proceeds.

 

How do I weep for the stones in the building? The west wall of Jerusalem is on my head. The geologic layers, the Babylonian Talmuds, the Lehmann discontinuit, the Mohorovičić discontinuity. I am walking on its surface, walking water in which I sink, which gives some meaning of Leviathan and Jonah. And Jesus! 45 stone courses, 28 above and 17 underground. Every memory helps. One transcendent, some good dreams, the list is long. How did Adam sustain his teeth?

 

Jerusalem, architecture of gold beyond history. As if commanded, a cupbearer entered the city with Alexander, toured the walls with Darius the Persian, Darius Nothus, and intermarried with the inhabitants of the land. I have Nennius for consolation in Britain and Neemias in Jerusalem. Artist talk, but not in words. Images explained away, reconstructed under pretense of light, reshaping attempted escapes, fantasy boats and fable captains, visas for the countries of Atlas and passports for countries that don't exist. At port we pass for one of the sailors.