The Metamorphoses of Titus

The Fall

2. The Fall

Titus’ wandering now takes on a new and larger life. The ocean heaves a great sigh and its swells press from its depths to greater exertions, to a different degree of danger. And the shadow of the flaming sword seems to hover over him again and over her, as they take another step away from that place where they had lived before. And, as the distance between their future and their past increased, it lights hovered higher and then vanished into lowering clouds.

And so to fall from paradise and find yourself a wanderer on the face of the new planet beyond the gates of pearl and ivory, beyond the flaming sword; a planet unthought of before, stretching away in all directions in other colours than those they had known, full of just enough wonders to remind them of their loss and that their time was no longer their own but the property of another who would call and expect to be answered. For once thus fallen, what hope remains? From this time forth, after this first couple, those born on earth could only fall to earth, a fall of no great distance. Those who fall from paradise, having known it in all its wonder, those who have already been saved, who need no salvation, can fall no further and even after can feel the breath of aether in their hair and on their faces. They hope against hope for salvation at the hands of a merciful universe that could understand small failures and forgive them. Thus these, now fallen, could keep their dreams and hopes. These might have avoided sin; their will infinite as the distance from there to here. They would never fly again and knew it in their bones, would feel nothing more than the faint itch of incipient wings. These have only the earth and must find what they can on its surface of weeds and dust and months and years seeking for that which cannot be found and hoping only to rest at the end of time.

For at this time the gods were many and close at hand. Every beast had his heart abstracted into fears, every plant his spirit brought to life in its branches, every rock its hardness. The trees moved weirdly in the lightest of breezes, the lightning crackled with unearthly sparks and the mountains blew fire. The seas knew sudden turmoil and the skies also. Spirits drifted in the very air, each one a danger and a hope. Each had its prayer and curse. They hovered about the air in multitudes. They cowered in the hardest elements. They flew across the night sky as greater or lesser lights. They appeared in the sacraments of earth’s crust.

All these must be propitiated, prayers to the fishes’ ghosts and to those of the great beasts of the sea before the axe dared fall and a bowing down to the ox and the stag and to the winged creatures of the air. For their spirits might remain as a danger to the tribe. And sacrifice for the greater gods of the volcanoes and the depths of the sea and the violence of the heavens. All these placated.

And his mind worked in images as mirrors of himself and the beasts of the field and of the air that he knew and his fears came home to him in his most sacred places and he knew his gods as images of himself and his women and they had faces like to himself and herself and the bodies of animals or they had the bodies of animals and the faces of his tribe. And he gave them names, these gods for his mind’s eye, for his imagination, for this thoughts. And so he made Thoth, protector of the art of writing, measuring and wisdom and his wife Seshat and Ka who allowed the will to do its work. And Hathor, an ox with the sun disc between his horns and Ama the sheep god and Innana of the date palm. Anubis, the jackal-headed and Wepwawet, the wolf-god who, from the beginning, was a god of war, but became a god of the dead. Min, the ithyphallic fertility god and Nit, the goddess of hunting and warfare. And the creator god Ptah who also showed himself as the Apis-bull and the funerary god Sokar and had reclaimed the land from the waters

And these were defeated by Ammon the god of the kings of Thebes, who grew in strength and became king of all the gods as they conquered the lands of his rivals and spread their power and made their city a capital for all their lands. A powerful deity conquers the other dwellers in the vault of heaven and scatters their power to the corner of the byway and the hearth and the hearts of little men. He builds temples and has his statue placed in the great places and he is taller and stronger than his rivals

But then came a new god that wrenched his neighbours from their perches and the brains of man and dragged them with a gravity unknown into an orbit they could not escape. He sucked them into himself as he strove across the planet in glory. Needing then only one master to look up to, one slave to know his master and the sprites in their millions began to vanish of the face of the earth in their new service to a terrible thing of fear of wonder.

From then on everything seemed like an absence, a hidden tension sucking the life out of all things as if what mattered was behind or beyond existence rather than in it. Although at rare moments and to the select, almost audible, nonetheless apart, distant, impossibly unavailable. Safety, the glory, the aim of life and the actions it demanded had become a hidden power that called forth actions, that drew the will towards it like a magnet but was always and for ever not here, apart, somewhere that drew towards it the traces of the heart and mind but remained invisible. This was a kind of damnation, yet another loss of paradise that was a presence among all things as loss and hopelessness. And here Ahasueras wandered like Cain had for a time, looking from left to right at his neighbours who knew not Eden and could thus imagine it, who had never lost it and thus had hopes of finding it, whose uncertainties gave their lives a shape, a finitude, a destiny and which also gave their wills meaning

These he wandered among as a lost soul, flitting among so many certainties and hopes that they drowned his own and left him bereft. Half dead, he lived among the half alive, he in knowledge of his past, they in some kind of knowledge of their futures; they looking forward in terror, he in hope; their minds full of memories which they treasured, his full of ones he spent his life trying to forget.

The future is a powerful devil which drives the feeble bodies of the faithful to hide themselves in the day-to-day. He wanders among their small concerns noting them in his book of small laughters. He it is who could write the novel for which the world has been waiting but he cared not to do it for it would be pointless helping neither he that wrote it nor those who would be unable to read it. There it sits on the shelves of the library of paradise, its empty pages never to be opened while he continues to observe the minutiae which he will never put in its pages. The book of lives, the book of his life, which will fall from its place and collapse into dust when the ship which drives him over the waters of all the world’s oceans finally meets its fate on the rocks of finnis-terre.

Thus a new god set in the deep blue of all his angels throws his first beams into the depths that end the night which is also the night of the soul. His radiance blasts the older gods into the shadows of their own existence so as they are seen less clearly. This is a god that will not be denied, that demands obedience and singularity. No god but me.