“And space/time/brain/sex began to rumble. There were monstrosities. There were miracles. A mathematics of the bordello was invented, a sublime defecation, a conceptual vomiting, an angelic retching, a real dream, a dead life. There were hoots and howls, but were they laughter or crying? There was a revelation, but was it from a prophet or a madman? It was everything, but it looked like nothing … We stood stockstill and watched that agony, an agony not of death, but of creation, a sob, not of birth, but of the final swoon. We saw sounds of catastrophe and waste-laying, we heard colors of fire and ice. The explosion/implosion smelled like roughness. Atoms were solar systems and constellations were pheromones. Oh infernal paradise, oh darkened light!
“A cause/effect germinated in the middle of the edge of this nymphal melody. It flattened the flesh/air, it quieted its transparent opacities. It organized the future/past, it listened to words/things. From the winds of karma, from the frightening bardo of the dust of twilight, a child would come into being. It would be because it already was, already it saw its parents copulating like two locusts, already the whirlpool of space/time/brain/sex drew, with its blood-dipped finger, a Caudine fork, an Arc de Triumph. Two chromosomal sets would fuse, yes and no would wed in maybe, and then the egg, already past the barrier of being, would begin its gigantic conclusion, turning the ever more complicated pages of life, complicated not by what the text said, but by the structure of the pages themselves, as though the first would be a point, the second a line, the third a surface, the fourth a volume, the fifth a Möbius strip, the sixth a nest for the Tomistic swallow, and so on and so on, until the billionth page, where Divinity is raised to the power of Divinity. Mitosis and meiosis, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, morula, blastula, gastrula, and the three embryonic wrappings glittering like soft glass while they wrinkle, shape, reabsorb, form tubes and buds, separate at catastrophic points, meet again to sketch faces and limbs, organs and skins, systems and mechanisms. Fish, reptile, amphibian, mammal, the fourth week, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh. The sixth month, the seventh, the turn in the eighth. Floating on a lotus flower, in the middle of black waters, eyelids closed and face smiling — enormous eyelids without lashes, under which the ocular protuberances slide as quietly as porpoises. The skin of pearl, shining in wisdom.
“It heralds the Gospel for all. There is no other annunciation than a person’s birth. And every birth creates a religion, it is an annunciation. And religion itself has no other meaning than Birth. It shows us the Way, it reveals the Steps to us. It preaches Happiness. Already our eyes, fallen out of their sockets from such blinding blinding, will see the embryo, the child, wonder, ransom. Black and white, Asian, women, men, and children, we wait, on the edge of the abyss, rejoicing. We would take light from light and never die again …
“Then came the infinitesimal catastrophe. As before, at the beginning of the beginning, an elusive asymmetry within the initial conditions made the primordial force cleave in half, then into four parts, and then the infinitely hot and dense point exploded into the fireworks of the world, and the way a tremor of a butterfly’s wing on a guava leaf in the Antilles unleashes a tornado in Colorado, and the way you don’t know where the Spirit comes from or where it goes — in the middle of the middle of the scented zygote, in the chromozoidal ball of seraphim snakes, a whirl arises, a probabilistic wind, more limited than the space of a molecule. One letter inverts in an orthography, and something glides in the oily stereochemistry of that substance. The gaze of one of us (a skeletal woman with a number tattooed on her forearm? a hydrocephalic with bulging eyes?) might have been enough for the miniscule tragedy, because observation always alters the experiment. Or maybe Evil itself, as undefined and intangible as gravity, passed a turbulent finger into the heart of the god in genesis, the same finger that stirs the worlds. The same way, a quinine camellia sprouted in the middle of our rejoicing.
“The egg now folded a second center around the allogenic information, and a membrane fogged over like a cartilage curtain between itself and itself, like a mirror where the self can see itself, identical and yet completely different, because the right of one is the left of the other, and the second, for the first, is a monster, because its heart is on the right and it speaks with the right hemisphere of its brain, and feels pity with the left half. White and black are not more different from each other, or more alien. Our world became schizoid, because what was born in fact was Duplication, or Rupture — the surface of the mirror between two dreaming embryos, face to face, their enormous vaulted foreheads almost touching, looking at each other with smoky eyes. They would come into the world as monozygotic twins, and what would be born was Estrangement itself. We saw the apocalypse through the lenses of beads of tears. What was happening? Which one was our god? What would become of the world of this illegible book, this book?
“And then, Maria, while we contemplated the double proliferation of the cells (two morulas, blastulas, gastrulas, separated, or united, by that mirroring skin), we were torn apart by a devastating flash of lightning. The column of fire reappeared and moved among us, making us one with the disk’s shining floor, integrating us into it, digitizing our blood and our tendons and our nerves, transforming them into memory, pure memory, holographic, indestructible. I was home again, I was in Akasia, the universal memory that sees all, that knows and understands and feels compassion. The mother-memory that protects, that caresses. And the blinding, blinding disk broke from its foundation with the crack of the ruination of worlds, levitated toward the vaulted ceiling of the hall, shattered into thousands of polygonal fragments and splinters, and, Maria, it was given to our eyes, spread now evenly over all the surface of the disk, to see what you cannot, what you should never see, what never can be said. And the disk rotated around its axis, faster and faster, until a sphere of glory appeared, shimmering in billions of colors, with a living pool of light in the center. And the sphere set upon the crown of His head, over the black vines of hair, illuminating His sad, brown eyes. For it was He, in a dense world, in a dense light, along whose spinal cord, through transparent flesh, six chakras and six carnivorous flowers opened.
“The seventh chakra, Sahasrara, the diamond sphere, glowed on his crown.”