More Spirit Than Animal

CASSIE VI

The citadel was down, the town sacked, a smouldering ruin. The black arrow of Peter's fury, piercing the skin, getting to the heart of his weakness, his mother's sense of rightfulness, his mother per se, with unerring accuracy. It would seem the end of all things. But I began to see that it was not an end at all. I foresaw it all, clearly now, a final surge of colour and sound. A reckoning clearer than day and as crisp as an autumnal night sky, the new constellations depicting a new order for the next future. So much, so possible, so real.

The snorting minotaur of Zander's rampant criminal class will continue to stand in rank and file behind implacable Pantheon banners peddling mammon as a religion, reinvigorated, resurrected. Sermons of fire and brimstone, blood and thunder, milk and honey in the ear, gossamer slightness. But below the parapets where only the ragged people go, there is a new resolve, a seed, a germination, a pin's head on which the angels dance. A tremor less than a single point on the Richter scale, it is the sound of the angels pushing back. Ethics questioned, values dragged out into the sunlight to wither and howl like vampires. I can see it here in my heart, my mind's eye, my third eye.....battle lines drawn up across human hearts.

New life finds a way of breaking through, tilling the mind, cultivating self expression, blossoming in the darkest dankest places. Flowers breaking through the cracks in the worn and bloodied pavements, distilling the heady perfume of hope. Against the worst of men gleam the very best as art fights back, erecting its walls higher and higher, protected by its own self worth and optimism. Art as expression, as music, jazz thinking, bebop writings, poetry, august language to be savoured, neither despised or mocked, intelligence not intelligentsia.

The art of living and the art of dying. The agents of Pantheon, tall in the cool breeze of opportunity, will begin to whither, dissolving in the rain, their nihilistic preternatural obsessions revealed as nothing more than an incapacity to develop as adult human beings.

Winds fanning the flames of civil strife will find their apotheosis in the simple shop keeper and his children, the students and the quiet majority, the edificatious, the enlightened of heart, the purveyors of aesthete over rapaciousness to whit there are millions, fireside warriors unconvinced by political discourse and the rhetoric of the socially, verbally and physically violent. The Rhodes philosophy will take root, and entwine the hearts of the angels, leaving the shades to run back into their own night and the absence of light. Despite or perhaps because of his fall, Peter's message will ring louder and with more resonance than anything the disciples of Pantheon will be able to muster. The bells will call us home at last.

I see and hear the fever spreading like a cure through minds ready to receive. And for every ape with a stick there will come ten with bread and love to spare. And as the fires subside and the ashes smoulder the new anarchy and its apostles will falter at the knife's edge. The seraphim and the cherubim will turn their backs on the corporate and the avaricious, unresponsive to their feckless poetry. This is the old way, they will say, this is no longer our way.

'And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.'

Then the angels will walk openly, the adherents of the divine nature of true men, the human being that sits where they say the soul should be. Stripped of the metaphysical trappings of two thousand or more years of sacrilegious subversion of the human spirit by men...yes men...devoid of any sense of real humanity, humility or how the human animal works. Liberation is a concept of choice and choice is all we need. There will always be the bad as well as the good and the ugly and for that there will be a strong and fearless law, the manifestation of civilised, generosity and mindfulness of the heart.

I cannot tell where this takes us, the mirror is too cloudy, and my powers fail me, but I cannot see a return to the hunter gatherer, only their solid altruism stripped of artifice, where horizons were real, closer to the earth, to ourselves, less artificiality, no gods just the glory of the real earth, and no religion save the worship of what is right and pure. Passivity not weakness, ambition not degradation, law and order, honour over avarice, self above projected self and the cultivation of a rich inner life.

And finally on the distant clifftop above the bay where the ships set sail for a new Rome, the black smoke billows like steel wool across an open sky, the bitter taste of ash in the wind, as the last man climbs aboard the last ship and leaves the shore. A cry of betrayal rings out, confusion and fury at the fall of the old ways. Betrayal and personal shame almost indivisible. A woman? An idea? Dido? The last man does not look back, he cannot even hear it. His eyes are firmly set on the horizon as a new city beckons, a city of divine yet secular possibilities. Noocracy? Timocracy? Meritocracy? Who can say where the freed human spirit will lead or what it will build. I surely cannot, but the spirit must be allowed to blossom and fulfil whatever it is that angels have inside them.

For we are all angels.