Fragment 84 /Winter’s End /Matins /Sun, 30 Aug 1998
Glad to be in the frosty silence, free from the party lights intruding on sweaty faces and the bass reverberating like thunder, glad to free from the agony of the shouting and crying of his spirit in that stony prison and palace, Caul turns his still wide-eyed pupils to the sky stretching its magnificent space over the dark surface of an earth growing warm in its turn towards the sun. Breathing the chill, almost fertile air, dissolves some of the fear that holds his soul ransom. The night air is vivid and he watches its energy breathe while walking over to his parked car behind the warehouse. On the scatterling of bare trees that stick up out of the asphalt of the warehouse parking lot, twigs are getting tender and new leaves are starting to come out. The period of hibernation is nearly over. Whatever has lain buried and dormant is beginning to stir. And what was sown before the winter set in, will now feed its roots to find the fullness of fruition.
Leaning now against his car, he turns his head once more upwards and then begins to wheel himself around, becoming fixated with the firmament, the stars that inhabit it and the cotton-grey clouds move against it. As he moves, his eyes are absorbed by the pulsating bursts of light burning from a belt of three stars. In worship he gives himself up to the constellation, hoping to feel the earth’s roundness turning inside the sphere of the calming, self-enclosed heavens. He closes his eyes and begins telling himself a story that he has been telling since the day he realised he was dead.
/orion/ /once a young man of great stature and beauty and a mighty hunter/ /he fell in love with the daughter of the king/ /and for her love/ /he worked to clear the land of christian faith/
/but she spurned his love to marry another/ /he was angry and insulted the maiden/ /causing enmity between them/ /so he sought out dionysus to release him from his pain/ /but instead the god threw him into a deep sleep for three years/
/one day an oracle told him to go into the fire/ /and wait to come out of the water/ /so he went into the fire/ /and found out that he whom he thought was living was in fact dead/ /that he who is living is now dying/ /and that the vengeance on her that he wanted to be his/ /was not worth having/ /only reaching the source of his love for her was/ /so that healing could be given to the one who is dying/ /and life to the one who is dead/