The Metamorphoses of Titus

Oratio and Introductory

Everyman I will be with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need go by thy side.

Oratio

Muse of all the muses, sweet my lord, do not forsake me now. I yearn to die yet have to go on living and, in the meantime, as I voyage across the surface of this my world, send me the powers to write down what I have known, what the Lord who has pressed me into all these troubles has set me to learn: of a young king who had visions and built a city; of the prophet who followed his one god out into the deserts; of the other king who destroyed a temple sending a people into exile and so made possible another faith; of the rabbis and saints and cathedral builders; of so many murders; of the god who turned away his face while his people were murdered; of the attempts to return and to understand. So many words, so many pages. Grant that I may sing my song while the great world circles and then I pray thee, finally and in thine own good time, grant me rest.

Introductory

Listen Titus. We are at the beginning of all things. Incipi-terre. Also at their end. Finnis-terre, a contradiction only to those who cannot understand. We lift the first page. The dark sun lowers behind invisible dunes. A silhouette of birds flies west. Silence.

Out of a sea of deepest mauve, so dark it has almost lost its colour entirely, pushed, sucked back and pushed again, is a pile of rags tied together at its centre by a piece of string or perhaps a rotten belt. After a long while or no time at all (we are speaking of an event before clocks) the sea falls back a little and then a little more to leave this bundle on the margin rocking. It is you, Titus. You have somehow reached this place and crawled or been washed from the sea like the rubbish on either side or like the first thing that drew breath in the beginning. Your back rises and falls with the rise and fall of the sea.

In this unholy landscape the flotsam of the past lies everywhere, cast up and left to rot along the shoreline and then sucked back as each wave lapses. No sound carries. A half drowned soul, you have dragged yourself or been pitched by chance out of the rolling sea and onto the beach to lie there soaked and gasping. You lie with your cheek against the hard round pebbles, your arm twisted under your side and a leg askew like a knuckle of mandrake twisted by its journey.

Here Titus the waters come together as on that first shore, perhaps later, perhaps that very day, floating on distant currents from the corners of other worlds, earlier imperfect worlds made and destroyed, bitter roots cast up alive yet fossilised, torn like skewered wood and tangled, sculpted by tides and whirlpools into a kind of soaked root contorted by its journey, rococo knotted, knurled into shapes hardly created yet that find themselves cast up on this shore's strident singularity which circles all and watches as the waves swell, swell and break only towards its only heart that, granting time, credo in unum, to its soul self, can make solely its own appropriate heaven and hell washed up by uncreated fathoms and laid out as an alluvium in their lineage to turn and face the land and wait. To all of these this beach is host and you Titus, are here among them bringing with you, perhaps, secrets from before the flood. At the end. At the beginning.

How come you are here at this division between the waters and the land drawn by the swell of the last tide to this empty beachhead filled with pebbles and the weight of too much air? Maybe you came back from the gallows after they had pulled at your feet, hard, hard to save you suffering as the crowd cheered and the priest chanted. Or from the heat of battle cut down by a Turkish scythe still hearing, if only just, the enemy yell of, la ilaha ila Allah, ringing in your ears. Or from the hospital in Altendorf, sweating in the last ravages of plague, spitting blood and coughing phlegm. Or on the holy hill cut down at the gate of your temple. Or the spirit screaming as the fire licks at your feet. Or garrotted in a hole within earshot of another cheering crowd with your family already dead and a thousand leagues away. Or suffocated in a truck on a railway siding while children laugh and throw mud. There are these and countless other deaths and other resurrections, from the world of the klippoth that had fallen. All of these arrive at the frozen lake of blood and guilt before returning, a messenger to mankind to tell them of his other world. There are circles and circles within circles