The Soul Star ⭐️ The Great Void

Antiny the 23rd

~ 240 Years Ago ~

Antiny adjusted his lens in the direction of the navy-blue dot he saw on the edge of his spectrometer. It was navy-blue, but also appeared to be scoured by a fine white dust. It was thus at once darker and lighter than the cobalt which made up 80% of Antigua, his home planet.

Antiny’s screen had been black for two thousand years when all of a sudden this navy-blue dot pierced the Black Void. It pulsed faintly through the uniform darkness like the hint of life from some other dimension.

The dot also made Antiny think of death. For Antiguans, death was the oblivion that came at the end of their 5000-year life-cycle, after which they were ground into food for worms. The blue dot reminded Antiny of the grinding house that was several blocks from his family’s home on the outskirts of the capital. He’d seen the white puffs of smoke from the grinding house, and the bins of cobalt chalk in the compound. The blue dot reminded him of ground bone.

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Antiny had been travelling through outer space ever since he left Antigua two thousand years ago. His home planet had been sitting stock still in the Void for over 20 billion years, yet Antiguans had never seen a sun. They had never been guided by any light except for the luminescence generated by the cobalt-coloured glow of the soil. Eventually they learned to use the blue energy of this soil to fuel carriage-lanterns, train engines, planes, and space ships. Their whole civilization glowed dark blue on a planet that had no atmosphere.

The Antiguans were very curious to know if there was life on other planets. Yet they were a patient species. If they had to wait another 20 billion years to see life on another planet, they would wait. They were as resigned as Vikings to the brutal vicissitudes of their solitary fate. And yet, like the Vikings, they inevitably gnawed against the ropes that kept their tents tethered in the freezing air. They chomped at the bit, like the horses tied to the surface of their dark blue fields. In time, they turned their tether ropes into tiller ropes and into bolt ropes. The most idealistic among them, the Masters, set sail for the Inky Void.

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The Masters survived their long journeys by writing poetry and making up stories. Their poems often sounded something like this:

What disturbs the soul more than Evolution,

the quandary of Deity, or the loss of a friend,

is the straight line, the singular trajectory

that never alters its course and has no end.

What bothers most isn’t what lies ahead

but what’s left in a past we cannot mend.

The Masters compressed their poems and their stories into fractal libraries that stored trillions of volumes and files. Having mined the secrets of cobalt infraction, they had endless internal realms into which their narratives could expand.

Twenty thousand years ago Antiguan physicists discovered that molecules were made of atoms, and that atoms were made of ever-finer fields of energy. They mined these fields as dwarfs mine the black seams below. They dove deeper and deeper, using a combination of sub-angstrom bots and diving algorithms. Between the layers they found new layers into which they inserted their mental constructions, their fantasy worlds of narrative, song, and drama.

Sometimes an imaginary scenario was separate from all the others, as if written by Edgar Allen Poe on the edge of some forgotten weir. At other times, the scenarios came together, like Balzac’s stories, to create an Antiguan Comedy that explored and connected diverse aspects of Antiguan life. At still other times, the scenarios branched out into the Unknown, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, exploring complex worlds no one has ever seen.

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Antiguans judged their writers by the degree to which their narratives cohered, and by the degree to which they mined mirror ambiguities and fringe meanings. Literary connoisseurs put a special premium on the moment the cohesion was first suspected, as well as the moment the cohesion started to fall apart. They prized subtleties that beckoned just out of reach, just beyond the edges of what they could clearly grasp.

Like Chinese poets, Antiguan writers used words to push their readers beyond words, into a craggy landscape of potential illuminations. And like the Ming Dynasty poet Yang Shen, they had great respect for the masters who taught them everything. These Masters were elusive, not just because they plumbed obscurity in their writings, but also because they had left the planet forever, plumbing the depths of outer space. Antiny the 23rd was one of these Masters who travelled further and further into the Inky Void.

The Masters had all committed themselves to voluntary self-banishment — from conformity, comfort, and connection — with the ultimate aim of connecting to everything. They were like the sadhus of India who wandered into the hills of the Himalayas, past Rishikesh and Gangotri, up the untrodden peaks to commune with the birds and tigers, the frost and the cold mountain air.

Each of trajectories took them further from Antigua and from each other. Often on their lonely journeys, they thought of the others, who were like them: lonely, yet ever-determined to steer the bark of their souls into Infinity.

Of course, not all Antiguan writers were Masters of the Inky Deep. Others were Masters of the Practical Arts. These Masters stayed on the home planet and wrote about going to school, falling in love, watching their children grow up, having affairs, disentangling entanglements, and holiday dinners.

The Masters on the other hand devoted themselves to an impossible ideology, which they called The Church of Mystical Structuralism. Their holiest goal was to find a vast, perplexing structure on which to hang their most arcane ideas. This required a one-way pilgrimage, something which was supported whole-heartedly by the more practical citizens of the planet: the Masters must set off in space ships and see what might be garnered from the Infinite Deep. The Church of Mystical Structuralism was thus akin to religion, except that their Alpha had no Omega. Also, it served the convenient purpose of riding the planet of pretentious and ineffectual dreamers.

The most extreme cult within the Church of Mystical Structuralism were The Poets. Like poets on every planet of the universe, the Antiguan poets went alone into the Inky Void because they knew that no one could possibly understand them. They believed that practical people were idiots. For instance, Antiny’s parents kept telling him to get married and settle down. Adjusting his cobalt robe, he responded, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the universe. I am therefore fated to journey into the Immense Beyond.”

His parents responded that he should be making babies and enriching the cultural life on their planet. “What’s wrong with the girls of our planet? Wouldn’t you like to lie with Neytiri in bed every night? Or do you really want to sit forever in front of some console, flying through empty space toward who knows what, if anything?”

But Antiny ignored his parents and went back to his studies of blue metrical verse. He was convinced that only the purest rhythm of blue insight, combined with an actual journey into Infinity, would bring him to the Blessed Epiphany.

The founder of Mystical Structuralism, Ezroza Spinesson, said that poetry was a doorway that was always in front of you, opening itself every time you stepped toward something new. The door might appear to be closed, but it opened the moment you imagined yourself on the other side. In this sense it was like Tennyson’s arch “through which gleams an untravelled world whose margins fade forever and forever when [you] move.” Spinesson wrote that poetry could also be an arch that pulsed blue and purple, green and black, lemon and tangerine. Or it could disappear, only to reappear in ten thousand years. It would make its clearest statement at the exact moment it disappeared forever.

Spinesson said that poetry was the mirror of a lake, the glass through which you looked and saw another you, the surface of the moon in a pail of water. He was very explicit: if you stayed in a routine job, the pail would get old, the handle would wear down, and the water would seep out.

In this way and that I have tried to save the old pail / Since the bamboo strip was weakening and about to break / Until at last the bottom fell out. / No more water in the pail! / No more moon in the water!

Antiny would never let the bottom fall out. He kept the pail on the floor beside him, and every so often looked down into its depth, waiting for the moon to appear.

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Sitting at his console in the Inky Void, Antiny looked at the timer, which started the day he left Antigua. The timer read precisely 2000 years. A sombre and mighty Moment! A temporal testament to his Eternal Quest!

Antiny still believed in the moon at the bottom of the pail, and in the magical mirror that sat on the edge of the universe. He still believed that there was a poetic Beauty, a perfection of spirit and form, awaiting him out there in the darkness of Endless Space. All he needed to do was to look deeper, beyond the mirage of the material conventions his parents had taught him, into the depth of his own soul …

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The highest form of Antiguan art was a fusion of poetry and prose. This could be done in the manner of Joyce, where prose and poetry were inextricable, or in the manner of the old Chinese writers, who juxtaposed prose and poetry. The Chinese writers played one off another, to suggest the intermingling of practicality and an elevated aesthetic sensibility — as for instance in The Dream of the Red Chamber:

Then the little maids put chairs around a table, laid on food and wine for a feast. Or as the poet would say,

Heavenly nectar filled the crystal cup,

And liquid gold in gleaming goblets glowed.

Spinesson would laugh at such nonsense, since it merely used poetry to restate the practical, instead of launching the reader into the Unknown. He also saw no difference in motive between poetry and prose: poetry was the Ideal, whereas prose was merely its imperfect execution. To drag poetry back to the real world was a defilement, a betrayal of our real nature, which they insisted went beyond Nature itself, to be lost — and yet found — in the Infinite Sublimity of The Ambiguous.

Antiguan writers often started out in a straight line, but soon took odd tangents, bending in arcs this way and that. The true connoisseur looked within and beyond the circles and arcs, and guessed at the general direction which could only be verified later, or perhaps never at all. The art of the writer was to keep the reader guessing. As in art, so in life, so said Antiguinius the 7th, who was the first Antiguan to prove that imaginary worlds got more real the further they got from the practical world. It was for this reason that the Voyageur Poets left the cobalt planet and sailed into the night sky.

Yet at times Antiny the 23rd missed the cobalt soil of his home planet. He missed it’s rich oblivion, it’s life-breathing lattice of forms which lit up his skeleton every time it fell into the dust. For the planet of Antigua would lie dormant for a full year, after all life was frozen and all movement had ceased. Then, from deep inside its core, a cobalt pulse blasted the life of forms upward through the entire planet. Bones fused with the blue dirt and Antiguans greeted each other as if they had just woken up from a nap. Ten years later the same thing would happen, refreshing the souls of Antiguans with a sleep so deep it seemed like death itself.

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~ The Present ~

Antiny often felt nostalgic for his home planet, although he didn’t have a clue why.

He turned this feeling into a Mystery Poem. In this way he confronted the crazy urges that sweep up inside him and never seemed to go anywhere. He likened these urges to the surges of the cobalt pulse that reanimated his body every 10 years.

He missed the cycle, in and out of existence, that gave his life a chronological sense for the past three thousand years.

He even wondered if he’d made a mistake by travelling into The Unknown. Maybe the problem wasn’t the road not taken, but rather the act of taking the road. Or perhaps he was just realizing that there was nothing out there for him. Or, as Yang Shen put it,

In such moments he would try to erase his loneliness by plunging headlong into a story, its fringes latticed with cobalt beads that beckoned him into a room where dim bulbs glowed and he could see in the corner an alien with dark blue skin and golden green eyes. He stared into the alien’s eyes and found himself on the windswept hill of the alien’s planet. It was a world in which two forces reigned supreme: good and evil. Antiny had no idea how two abstract forces could reign over anything, unless they were forces like gravity and matter, but this consideration wasn’t as important as the fact that he had entered the story and was now watching as the alien donned a long cloak and lifted a short metal bar. He then shook the bar, which emitted three bursts of electrostatic energy. These blasted through a large stone gate on whose lintel read the following: MINES OF MORIA, ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

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Antiny was about to step through the magical gate when he saw the blue dot out of the corner of his eye. He sat up straight. He then, very carefully, adjusted his lens in the direction of the navy-blue dot on the edge of his spectrometer.

Over the next four years, the blue dot would appear every day for about half an hour and then disappear. Then, for the next 236 years it failed to show up on his screen.

He directed his spaceship in the direction of its pulse.

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Next: ⭐️ The Flight of the Chronus

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