The Map Drawn On Vapor (II)

The pillars underneath the hand and flyover
maintain their discreet stoic silence.
We pass on down backstreets of the mind
towards the symbol city's immaterial heart.
Along Commercial street, through Bishop's gate,
Cornhill and cheapside to St. Paul's.
This is the hub.
Here, all the lines of meaning stretched
from Boadicea's grave to William Blake's converge.
The vector's ranged from Cleopatra's needle
to it's monstrous twin upon Canary warf
cross here upon that stone set into the cathedral walls,
brought from Jerusalem in the Crusades.
Brought from the temple of King Solomon.
His seal, the Pentacle,
reiterated here across the face of London,
etched in church and obelisk and grave.

St. Paul's;
the pagan darkness after the collapse of Rome saw here
a temple of Diana so revered that early Christian monks
despaired of a conversion and complained
"London worships Diana and in the suburbs
of Thorny they burn incense to Apollo".
Thorny is now Westminster.
In 610, Christian convert Ethelbert of Kent
destroyed Diana's shrine and built St. Paul's,
a church of Christ.
In Norman times, 1081,it burned and was rebuilt as a cathedral.
Wandering through this maze of correspondence and association,
let us pay attention to St. Paul himself, a proton mason.
There in First Corinthians 3:10, he states:
"As a master builder I have laid foundations
and another builds thereon."
This staunch mysogynist clashed with Diana at Ephesus
where her followers humiliated him.
Here's his revenge: Diana shackled,
hemmed in by a pentacle of obelisks
and phallic solar signs with her abode re-dedicated in his name.
Late as the 14th century her sacred animals the buck and doe
were sacrificed with fanfare here.
King's mistresses, in penance, roamed St. Paul's by night
dressed as the Goddess of the Moon. "Mother of Churches".
Until 1925 the women of the City
huggged its pillars to induce fertility.
The notion of Diana cannot be erased.
In Hilbert Space, the concept of the Goddess is bound
inextricably in the cathedral's mortar.
Fifteen years ago, the Royal Wedding's sudden change of venue
from Westminster's solar altar to this more appropriate site.
As the mammalian dome of the cathedral rears before her,
swaying in the sunbaked coach, she feels a sudden nausea
and sees their eager faces as they line her way,
she hears their voices, touched by old hysterias,
as they call out her name, as they invoke her.
As they say: "Diana... Diana... Diana...".

After the Great Fire, Wren rebuilt St. Paul's.
Five chains encircling its dome, as ancients
chained the statues of their Gods, to bind their power.
Here is Diana chained,
the soul of womankind bound in a web of ancient signs,
that Woman might abandon useles dreams of liberty,
accept that she exists only to endlessly reflect
the harsh male brilliance of a Father Sun.
The monuments that loom on this untouchable plateau
cast shadows and have solid consequence.
Be careful here, it is the merest mental stroll,
a single step through this projected landscape
to a reconstructed Fleet street,
an inferno smoldering beyond those sooted panes.
The metal giant pulse of rotary drum
Migraine of shuttling linotype machines.
The Hell of printer's demons.
Fingers black with all the world's sins.
Here they build a paper planet.
They unfold our greeds, and our anxieties.
They tell us when to cry, and how to vote
and who to think of when we masturbate.
They are the engineers of our exhaustion,
crushing pressure front of fact and innuendo,
booming in these subtle latitudes.
And so to Bridelane, the etheric Bridelane
overlayed in an elusive gel upon the current brickwork,
Brideline bleeding into history and fable
through the wrought gates of St. Brides, the printers' church.

In 1864, young Mary Walker, age 19
was wed to printer William Nichols here.
She had five children by him.
Edward, Percy, Alice, Henry and Elisa.
William left her for the midwife who assisted with Elisa's birth,
whereafter she began to drink, slipped into prostitution
and in August 1888 was taken to Buck's Row
and cut to pieces by a faceless and cthonic force.
First victim in the Ripper canon.
At the old Montague street morgue,
William Nichols generously forgave his wife
for all that she had done to him.
Next door to the imagined church is the
morphogenetic echo of the building we inhabit.
The St. Bride Foundation Institute and Library which,
like every edifice in this psychosomatic realm,
has its intuited dimension.
All the rooms we are not in,
the closed doors passed upon arrival,
though remote from us, these secret spaces flare,
exposed upon the brain's emotion.
Rumored cellars ankle deep with water
when the buried River Fleet's in flood.
Locked mausoleum drawers of type, the coffin vowels ((17)),
protracted screams in sans-seriff, italic sighs,
the raised face of each character,
briefly perceived beneath illusory fingertips.
Even this present chamber,
real and tangible to us,
has its suggested twin.
Century old splash & echo of those
driven young victorian men in postcard bathingsuits,
the self-absorbed intensity of every length,
a filigree of snot on each joke shop moustache,
inflamed by the composing into blocks
of some obscurely racy classic text,
they seek the cold plunge,
sublimate in the delights of Sparta.
If this room is mirrored in Idea-Space,
what of, we, the people in it?
Are we not as much composed from figment and belief
as this construction, as this street, this city,
with our personal mythologies and our impostuous ((18)),
with our pasts which truly are the mass and matter of us,
yet have no continuing existence save in memory and mind.
Inside this haunted auditorium,
a numinous crowd, shifting, restless in their seats.
These magic lantern shadows that we cast.
The isolated cones of nightlight that we know as self,
continuous mutter in the center of us,
monologues we have mistaken for the world.
Could we go further in?
Past all idea of place and the reflections places make in us?
In our conjectures, might we breach that private night
to which we designate the letter "I".
Move into our collective skull.
This firmament of bone with the topographies
of our awareness ranged beneath.
Stay close together. These are stairways beyond substance.
Things get slippery here,
beyond the wavering flame of our attention.
Only dark.

VOLTAR