“The Cliff’s Old Ribs[1]”:

Conversations with Dionysus

 

“Do you fall on your knees, multitudes, do you divine your creator?” – Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy.

 

 

I awoke to graying flames. Rubbing my eyes tentatively, I looked around. Beneath me lay a pulsing pile of what might have been flesh, what might have been anything really at all. In fact, the shaping images shimmered with a pulsing light akin to a purple haze induced delirium. As I tried to stand, a great weight held me down, though I could not see anything that anchored me. I struggled at first, pulling with my stomach muscles to try and right my torso. After a few minutes of useless toil, I gave up and lay back down. In the brief moment of doing so, I found myself liberated from the weight. I’m not certain how I knew, though I felt a sudden sensation of freedom. I sat up slowly, very much relieved that I was no longer restricted.

            I looked straight ahead. I could see nothing at all. Despite the gray flame’s flickers I saw about me, I could make out no features and there was nothing that could be called light. I can now best describe it as an opaque feeling of any moment’s awareness, a sensation of feeling but not comprehending[2]. I sought to stand, thinking that the abyss which loomed in front of me was created by something mundane and familiar, such as a closed door or broken light bulb. I forged the thought completely against the lucid understanding that the Oblivion I found myself in was very much actualized, very much confining, and very much inescapable; yet, as with most painful realization, continued practice enabled me to suppress it into a minor annoyance. I stood on shaking feet and shook my painfully spinning mind thinking myself somehow in my bedroom yet finding myself not.

            I felt drunk. Not to be presumptuous, but I’m sure my good reader has at least a certain understanding of equilibrium imbalance…caused by intoxication. I walked forward, stumbling blindly over something solid and falling flat onto my stomach. As someone used to tumbling, I rolled my shoulder under the fall and continued forward until I spun away, recklessly tossed by the energy of my plummet. Fear followed me into my chaotic tumbling fore nothing slowed my course. Like some dismally extinguished comet, I hurtled endlessly despite my wracking fingers. I could find nothing to latch onto and I pawed at the oblivion as one might tear at the rushing pluming winds. I vomited. I felt the bile blown out and away from me, heard it impact into something solid, but lost immediately any sense of the sound. Locations were a blur of miscalculation. My body felt primordial pain, a pain that could not be rationalized by a civilized mind. Like a crawling, nervous agony, I could not pin-point the feeling of torture. In the blinding agony which overwhelmed me, I screamed aloud meaningless babble… I knew it a fable; yet, it was feeling of a vacuous hell, the great feeling of finding oneself in a world outside one’s personal control. Like watching the fissuring glass floor above the abyss, my starring eyes found the abyss an infinite torment, a searching inward what was extrinsic, and a looking outward to what was intrinsic.…and I plummeted noisily into endless eternity.

 

My narrative might have ended there having never been penned, known only by a fatalistic mind spinning in tartarus; yet, I awoke again as daftly uncertain as I had begun. I screamed aloud. My shell-shocked mind could not process the agony it had witness. I thought like a broken image; I felt like a catatonic body. Sensations went unprocessed into my reeling mind and, for all intensive purposes, the upper-levels of my being crashed down on slouching shoulders, weighing only that primordial feeling of survival at all costs and the need to escape even the mind’s conscious fatalism. If I had the means and the cognitive ability, I would have unceremoniously slain myself such was my personal dispaire.

            My thoughts return to me with my face in a puddle of bile. My beard stunk of vomit. My eyes ran tears of dried dust. I could feel the sticky fluid drying to my naked chest. I touched my naked form, running uncertain, worn fingers down my body seeking for my clothing. I was feebly naked and very much aware of nothing but my nude form surrounded by the luring howling furies veiled in the unknown void. In my terror, I worried about my nameless, formless enemies, vicious platonic images projected by a mind dashed about its skull. In fright, I worried of all those images I had seen of long-toothed snakes; I could feel their dry bodies coiling around me, squeezing against my aching muscles. My mind reeled off course and I thought, in one final moment of clarity, the world would finally imploded as my mind exploded into reckless abandon.

            But a soft floating light appeared, blinding my tear-strained eyes. From the darkness, the floating Will-o-wisp floated towards me as one might expect a stiff-legged man might carry a lantern. It jostled from point A to point B, a hummingbird impregnating nocturnal flowers. I waited in a joy, hopeful that perhaps the creature might come towards me, fearful it might hide a deadly anglerfish behind its lurid lemniscuses. As suddenly as it appeared, it stopped. I was plunged back into the abyss. Again, my mind fell back onto its old madness; I too fell to my knees.[3]

            “Is the void so wretched?” came a voice into my mind. I cried aloud. “Hush, there are those things in the darkness that prey on weakness. Stand,” it spoke. I obeyed without conscious effort. “Come,” I could feel warmth, a light vibration of my spirit, beckoning me to follow. At first I followed, shifting my feet nervously like one asleep. After a few rote steps, I remembered how it was to walk and began to do so with some strength to my step. Eventually, as my certainty returned, I walked as my old self, stepping with a certitude defying my former feebleness. As I walked, the gray shadows grew brighter and things began to lighten. The void burned a lighter black, the gray flames fade away, and all things once invisible grew visible.

            The Will-o-Wisp returned as well. I saw, as my eyes narrowed, that before me marched a goat creature prancing on hoofed feat. Though shorter than me, its broad shoulder’s flexed humanlike muscles and I knew, had the creature a wish, it could easily break me under its arms. I wondered how it had time to exercise and whether, if it didn’t, it had any need to. In is hoofed hands, the creature carried a large wooden pole that suspended a large, antique lantern. Though it had no reservoir, it burned a bluish chemical flame that I had seen on old stovetops. I knew the creature was a satyr, the goat beasts of ancient myths. Strangely, I felt vaguely appeased by the apparition and I walked on in safe regard as if Aylmer had merged with Amindab and we, together, searched for Georgiana in the hell.

            After we had walked for some time—the creature never turning to acknowledge me—I asked it where we were going. We marched silently along before I repeated the question. The creature said over its shoulder, exposing a great goatee and sizeable mouth, “To see my lord.” A sense of biblical dread came over me. I wondered if I was to be taken to the dark layer of some demon, a creature I believed a fallacy of the mind. Great, I thought to myself, to be slain by an illusion in the void. “But first a sight to see,” he paused before a small cage.

            “Have you seen a lizard such as this?” he asked, the small light dancing about his horned head. “It’s a bearded dragon.” I saw some semblance or likeness in the dragon to my guide, but I keep the thought to myself, and nodded my head in the elusive light. “An old warrior of a lost kingdom.” The small dragon rested is ancient head on a weary arm. I read a distant sadness in its vacant, haunted gaze, like a weight of centuries wore on his now-feeble shoulders.

            “Why does it look so,” I searched for a word to encompass my sympathy for the beast, “sad?” I asked, turning to face my host. Again, the resemblance between the dragon and the satyr wore heavily on my mind. Both wore grievous faces under a horned crown.

            “Because,” he spoke, his eyes unwavering from the creature, “He is Xiahou Dun, sick with the aging disease of passivity. Look into his eye sockets, Man, and you will see he has but one eye. Lost to a pawn—a farmer with a bow—that prayed on his slowing age. So great was Dun’s skill, so mighty his war craft, that only from a distance dare his enemies approach…” the satyr trailed off in thought. “Till one day, weary from his battle, his armor wrenched by falling foes, his sharp talons dragging from feeble fingers, he slowly made his way from the field of battle. There rose a host of farmers looting the dead. He approached, snarling in preemptive defense. Once spotted, they raised their weapons and, without warning, fired, striking him in left eye.” The dragon raised its head in a slumbering acknowledgement, awakening perhaps to the same battle that was sung to life by the dreaming satyr. “See,” my guide pointed a hoof, its light wavering in an eerie twilight gleam, “Lord Dun lives the past as the present. His anachronistic world supplants even the bounds of his present incarceration. Yes, Dun, your eye is lost, like the lives of those looting innocents! Together, intertwined as one, you feasted on your flesh as their flesh and reaped the dying in a world wind of fury.” The satyr’s voice grew in furor.

            “He killed them?” I asked, watching the small dragon with a dread admiration. My wonder at its ferocious silence quashed any personal interested in the paradox of its size, or the menial nature of its cage. Instead, Its haunting eye held a pale infernal fire. I was thankful its gaze was reserved for the Satyr. It flexed its ancient claw, stretching the might of a once omnipotent warrior to the edges of its shrunken kingdom; With a flashing self-actualization, it returned its claws to the dirt and rested its weary head. The Satyr’s voice, following its siren’s lead, lowered to a quiet tempest.

            “Those fools unfortunate enough to fall on the tiring monster, fool enough to hinder its slouching corpse, stood and were delivered as fish are from the ocean’s nurture…a reckoning paid with a rancorous eye.” The satyr stamped muffled hoof. “And now he lives eternal torment, a victimized object of his own fury and pain. Lie now, lord” I watched the dragon return to its slumber, though its claws kneaded the dirt and its muscled kicked. “Your reality is a torment onto itself.”

There, our trinity stood silent and pondering, fearless of the darkness only by the grace of our perpetuating egos. Like three silent fools—three dead beggars howling noiselessly at the winds—we worried on the past with no thought to the present, silent till my guide pulled me from the ponderous prison. “Come. We must leave Dun. His story is meant to be sung by another.”

            “When will he be allowed to leave?”

            “When he buries his blooded claws and his thunderous regret in Lethe. Come, we’ve disturbed his penitence enough.” With a callous toss of his horned head, the satyr led me into the abyss once more. Though I moved along as one in a dream, I thought back on the beguiling eyes of the small lizard and how its menial life has become infinite torment; yet, as with most things of vast proportions, I quickly found my mental focused relieved by the fluttering of new, distant lights on the future.

            My guide and I traveled on silently, our hearts very much distant from our eyes perceptions. It was not until, tripping lightly on our road, that I stumbled off our path. Landing on my hands, I notice the soft, warm goo of our road. “What’s this!” I cried, my finger buried, mind gyrating around a perception I dared not register.

            “It is the balance of things,” the creature leant a strong hand to me, pulling me quickly to my feet. In the flickering of his fickle flame, I saw my hands were covered in blood. “You must always stay on this path.”

            “Blood? This is blood?”

            “Yes, man, blood. The balance of life.” Wasted metaphor, indeed, fore who has time for abstraction when blood has stained one’s hands. “Come, tis a spot only,” he wiped my hands on his furry shoulders. As if in a dream, my hands were suddenly clean, though I wondered on real infections and vowed not to put my fingers to my mouth till I had thoroughly cleaned them. “You waste too much time, human. Let’s continue.” He drug me slightly along with a tug on my wrist.

            It was some moments more till we happened upon another travel, a young man resting at a desk chair, his feet casually sitting on similar chair. At his side sat a leather book, easily distinguished by the bounded rope holding it in place. He typed at a typewriter frantically, pounding at the keys with fatalistic angst.

            “Come, pay no heed! There’s work to be done!” the satyr cried at my tarrying.

            The young man looked up from his typewriter, pulling a sheet from its belly. “Wait!” he cried aloud, “I have to read you this. It’s my most recent work, a startling poem of some success! You must listen.” Like a thing possessed, a man whose heart burns from his mouth, the poet sat back in pretension, visibly wrestling the chaos of his imagination into syntactical slavery. With an ostentatious voice baring too close a resemblance to Yeats’, he began his read:

 

Oh child, has it come to this?

After all our fearful angst,

The rue of things undone,

And the nagging truth

We would separate…

That angst was god’s name

Written ‘n ephemeral flesh…

But so painfully fleeting…

Here, lying quietly so,

We regretfully part now…

 

No!

 

No, It can’t be, not now,

Not with such joy left…

Not with my strength left!

No…so feeble, so moot,

That words could create

A means to slay pale riders,

Could summon you heaven

In a single violent burst…

I’d knock lose Hades,

Surmount Bale in a’ breath,

Tear Jove from his throne

To defy God and FATE

To defy human death…

 

Hollow claims; hollow soul,

We part with no bliss

Sublimity a human lie

Spoken on false lips…

If tears could stave hell,

I’d swell the rout in salt…

Let me count the tides

That rise and sweep

The daft soul, screaming,

From my hollow chest…

Give me my world again

For it dies with you.

My knees are bent,

I touch my head to floor,

There’s no ego left

For it dies quietly anon.

 

O’ eyelids flutter still?

Stay child, stay love, stay,

Stave our mutual end

With simple breaths!

Stay a moment more

And live eternity

With a pious fool!

I say, with all good fury,

I love you as only I can;

Human life is short

And full of dreadful pain…

That blood gives love

Truthful semantics,

Turns tongue touches

To the divine Logos…

Turns dust to spirits

And men to saints

Then I reaffirm my soul:

I love you as my world.

 

There was a quietness to the void, as the pretentions of voice mooted to distance nothing; again, as the syntactical pace eased, I returned to paradoxical Oblivion. His shuttering fingers parted; the sheet of typed paper fell dramatically away, and he swore in a great gust of violence, “Fucking garbage!” he turned away, fluffing his overcoat about himself, and crossing his arms. His green-stripped scarf resembled a noose, carelessly tossed about his neck.

            “It’s okay,” I said to him, ignoring the satyr’s pull, “Though, the rhyme needs some work.” I could tell immediately from his face, my critique was very much not welcome. “Good start!” I hollered, as the satyr drug me down the path.

            “Do not tarry, Mortal! The world has vomited too many mediocre poets to the Hell of their own carceral egos! Genius is innate, not created, and they struggle to achieve that which cannot be earned!”

            “Innate? Genius? A social fabrication!” I yelled back to the poet, stumbling over my feet. “Like Satyrs! Easily conceived and an eternity to find!” I laughed heartily into the eternal night, which refused to echo my enjoyment. The Satyr guide frowned its great brow. “Quiet, Oberon! Perhaps with horsehead you might appease that mule wife of yours!” Chipper, I marched ahead of the Satyr, merry at my wittiness.

            My now stewing guide marched a few temperamental steps ahead of me. It was surprising to me that a creature such a satyr could be insulted. Then again, I really couldn’t tell from his bearded expression. As with most Delphic symbols, his expression was a guess. I thought to prod further into the creature’s disposition when we came across another stranger in the mist.

            It was a young boy gently fumbling with several dark blocks. The boy sat with his knees folded beneath him, and rolled quietly around several metallic objects. Two things appeared to me in the shimmering light. The first was that the boy was blind. His eyes protruded nearly an inch from their sockets and he curled his lips as I had never seen a human do. They too protruded from his mouth, exposing his teeth in a very bestial fashion. The second thing I noticed, even from my distance, was that the child played with what looked like handgun magazines. Immediately on recognition of the mags, I realized the boy sat with spent-brass casing and ammunition alike. From the size, I could tell they were pistols rounds, though, it took me several seconds to see, further away, the weapons discarded. A great assortment of modern firearms lay in a shadowed pile only feet from the boy.

I moved to pull the boy from the pile when the satyr stopped me. ”Do not interrupt; the boy is playing” The satyr reached behind the boy gently; given the boys attention to the magazines, he did not look up. With an ease defying its bulk, the satyr sat a medium-sized semi-automatic pistol in front of the boy. Ominously resting before the boy’s knees, the semi-automatic pistol fell unceremoniously onto its side.

“Are you crazy? That’s a damn gun!” My hollering drew the boy’s attention, who stuck out his tongue unintentionally and licked his mouth. A great feeling of uneasy fear came over me. There was a feeling of helplessness in me, not for the boy, but for my inability to determine—how do I put this— the boy’s medical condition. I sought to categorized the boy, perhaps to puzzle out its immediate effect on me. I felt guilt, though, I was uncertain its source, perhaps for me quick dismissal of the immediate hazard to the boy , perhaps for my internal diagnosing. I reached to remove the gun from the boy’s reach.

“Leave it.” The satyr commanded. “It is part of a social experiment.”

“You’re sick.” I grasped the gun only to feel the satyr’s powerful hand on my back.

The touch felt quickened by the Satyr’s commanding voice: “Leave it, mortal. My lord commands it.” I looked over my shoulder at the creature; its brow showed anger and, in its anger, could show no compassion.

“What do you want to prove from this, monster?” I stopped myself from being profane. Thought it took great intellectual energy, I felt victimized in my censoring. A great need to dominate the beast came over me.

“Need I explain? You know already.” He was right. I did know. It was this sudden realization, strengthened by my overall alienation that forced me to thoughtless action. There was an unfortunate problem in my inner-being that often prevented me from thinking before doing; so, without thought, I quickly scooped the gun, a magazine, and two shells from the boy, who squawked like a kicked street mutt. The satyr watched as I violently forced two shells into the magazine and the mag into the pistol. I drew back the slide-action and pressed the barrel to the satyr’s head.

“If this was another day, Satyr, I’d pull this trigger.” Together, the man-beast and I watched the other, expecting perhaps an outcome more akin to our occupations or our bestial natures. In the following palpitations, my mind roared to lower the gun while my body fluttered with rancorous vengeance for a natural wrong. In short, I knew my body wanted to kill.

The satyr smiled. “Mortal, I am one soldier in a line of soldiers and pain of death means nothing to me. Notice, you point a gun on one who has done you know harm and I am the monster? It is not my will the experiment continue.”

My finger found its self on the trigger. I knew in my academic mind that pulling the trigger and killing one soldier would solve nothing; yet, in a war, in battle, in the streets, in the home, wherever, one life was sometimes worth more than itself. To put it another way, the situation demanded action, and action demanded blood. “Satyr, in a just world, the unjust would all pay their own debts; in my world, we settle our debts one fool at a time. You sign this boy’s eventual death with your complacency!”

“The absolute nature of your courts is well known to us, Mortal.” If the satyr felt remotely moved by the pistol tip, he did not show it. “So quick to blame and so quick to accept, you spend the majority of your days in expiation and condemnation.” His great mouth opened quickly to show lines of teeth, not molars befitting his lower half, but sharpened fangs as might be expected a shark. “Your species is one of innate violence and fear, which might be rectifiable if only your suppressing guilt was not surpassed by your justification for exploitation. Empathy is a hollow word for you, invoked only as a means for criminal appeal or relativism, never in truth or justice.” The warrior Saytr who had once been my guide, shrugged his corded muscles. Around me, a guileful laughter rose on the Abyssal winds. I became very aware of my vulnerability. Immediately, the sucking nothingness awoke in imagined clicks and clacks, bestial growls unheard by civilized ears since the discovery of fire. I felt very much an abandoned imperialist too far from his empire. “In my world, Mortal, Justice and Truth are wind-drawn words cast about by the meek sheep; it is the wolves that rule the world, sinking unbated teeth into sheep dreaming of ethereal pastures.”

We watched each other quietly. I looked down at the small boy, suddenly needing to carry him away from this hell. In that moment, I truly appreciated the social weavings if only to protect those meek sheep. The haunting feeling of lowliness crept neatly on the sounds of the Satyr’s words. I was a wolf far from my woods, a wolf as soon a victim of other wolves. “The Boy is not safe here.”

“But, he has known no life by the darkness, the sounds his only friends. It is you, Mortal, that are lost to the barbarians.” I felt the self-actualized weight of the pistol before me and the guilt increased a socially conditioned guilt designed to restrain and control, not enforce good. I knew the boy was a victim of diabolical games; yet, I could not rationalize a way of helping him. With the abyssal winds and flickering lamp light, I knew the limitations of my power… my complete imprisonment. Like the majority, I fell back on saving myself from the insane emptiness, wishing the boy a quick and painless death away from the unperceived natural horrors around him.

I gently lowered the pistol. “No more, Satyr. Let us go and be done with this.”

“But this is the spear point. There’s so much—“

“I’ve reached a point of apathy. I wish to be done, Satyr. Let us go and see your master. I think I’m ready for him now.” Turning, I threw the pistol as hard as I could. Somewhere in infinity, I thought I heard a mooted gunshot. As I again followed the satyr into the emptiness, I drug my feet in the shackles of my cowardice. I knew in that moment of rueful failing, that Hell’s agency, that invisible farce forged by human hands, was ruled by and conjured by human fear.

The satyr led me slowly to a great oaken door bound by wrought iron and adorned by golden lace. I saw the creative artwork of demonic hands, the imagery of a great battle, of peace-pipes and razed cities, and a great cacophony of human emotions, terrible and joyful. One image stood out to me that seemed to defy its static nature. I saw thousands of millions of human faces roaring in glee, waving hands before one hopeful man whose hand was raised in an open peace. In the prehensile sign, I saw the ideal salve of past wrongs and new dreams for things to come…but, seemingly interfused in the reality of the symbol, I saw the hateful face of a humanity brilliant with facades. The smiling masks, the tears of sublimity, and the shouts of glee blended quietly into insatiable want. Like cankerous grubs, they crawl and squirm about anything that feeds. I hoped that, for once in my short existence, the premonition of ‘good’ will would overshadow the knowledge of human fear and hatred. It was, after all, perhaps the oldest dichotomy.

If the satyr recognized my sudden shifting in interest, he did not comment. Instead, he pushed the door open with a ripple of his inhuman arm muscles. A soft smell of haze—perhaps a burning essence I remembered from my youth—wisped from the doorway. I walked in slowly, fearful and yet intrigued by what was so uncannily human; the room was both human and surreally inhuman. Draped from the ceiling, long crimson banners wavered in the winds. A great light surrounded the room; yet, the abyssal shadows lurked quietly in attendance. Mixed wantonly with the incense, a smell of sulfur and jasmine warred. Somewhere between the two, the sick smell of masked rot puffed from the floor.  Topping off the bizarre room spread about on a raised dais. Two scantily clad women, both with long hair, gently waved what I took to be their master. The scene might have reminded me of an Italian opera I had seen in my youth if not pseudo-man that gently rolled about the couch. If I had seen him alone, without the entirely of my bizarre experiences to the point, I would have thought myself either dead or relegated to the ethereal spheres. Either way, years since, he image burned in my conscious.

With a bow, the Satyr slowly led me towards the dais with measured step. I could tell he was or had practiced the routine. The man on the dais focused his eyes on me before athletically and seamlessly sitting up. He wore a feline grace in his movement, defying the cut of his muscular frame and androgynous physique. In a booming voice both magnanimous and threateningly divine, the lord spoke to me. “Come forward!” speaking then to my guide, he commanded the Satyr forward by name: “Silenus[4]! Come, loyal subject, loyal teacher! Has our guest given you trouble? I see you wear that famous troubled brow of yours!”

Silenus looked straight ahead, stoic as he had been throughout our adventure, “No, no more than the young are expected. He has yet to lose that human empathy that makes them such a horrible burden to themselves.”

“Come now, friend. Now is not the time to be pedantic!” he turned to me with a great wave of his hands, “Do you know who I am?”

“If he is Silenus then you are Dionysus.”

“You see, Friend that our identities are one! A sad day for you, stoic, for my joys are now your torture!” He laughed heartily at the slight frown that appeared on his mentor’s face. “You Stoics were always the biggest hypocrites, beating yourself in the quiet of the room than telling others you were beyond the emotions of the flesh. Quiet now, Satyr, and hide yourself from the sins of my kingdom. I will call you when the mortal is done.” Silenus dismissed himself, probably heading into the gloom to recompose himself for another eternity. “He tends to be such a morose Saytr, that one. They weren’t always like that, you know. Some sophists convince them that too much fermented grape made them less logical, less godlike. There’s nothing classier than debauchery, mortal. Remember that.”

“What am I doing here?”

“You’re drunk and this is your drunken dream. Cliché, isn’t it? Welcome to the god of wine]s revealer’s realm! A world of wet joy and unkempt pleasures.” He plopped quickly onto the couch.

“I’m dreaming—

“Yes, Daniel, this is your dream. Like Cesar, your bloody flow floods quickly into the streets filling the winds of your small world! Welcome! Welcome! The invisible land of Milk and Honey paved in gray matters expands before you! Eat, Drink, and for the love all that is good be fucking merry! Fear tomorrow, because you’re going to be regretting the mess you’ve made the night before…you’ll see the truth of my words too late, though…”

“What?”

Dionysus shook his long hair like I had only seen women do. “Nevermind. Welcome to the court of the true Crimson King, a realm of ethereal splendors and pleasurable torments! There’s bowl of pomegranate seeds on your right!” I looked over but there was no bowl of seeds. Looking back to the God of Wine, he shook his head. “A joke.”

“If I am dreaming, then you are a projection of my mind.”

He frowned again, “are you going to do this the rest of the day, Descartes?”

“Stop name dropping.” I thought about it for a second, “Perhaps I should tell myself not to name drop. Wait, how did you tell me a joke that I didn’t get?”

“You are going to do this the entire time. Okay, you have three questions to ask then you’re on your way…”

“Questions? I don’t want to ask myself any questions.” The great creature rolled his legs onto the couch in a great huff. Suddenly, like the emblazoned Mariner’s torment, I remembered my trip into hedonistic heaven. “Wait! I do have some questions.” I stormed quickly up the dais. I recalled my angst at those denizens forgotten in the winds: “Why, if this is a dream, am I tormented by your torturous treatment of those unlucky souls stuck in the abyss?”

It was Dionysus turn to be confused, as he looked at me in bewilderment. “There is no torture in paradise?”

“Perhaps not in this Hall of yours, but,” I pointed towards the great doors, “outside, in the mist there are those that could use your help, mortals stuck for in perpetual torment.”

“Oh,” he stood. Though in his merriment he looked quietly concise in his stature, Dionysus’ physical being was beyond my immediate comprehension. Tall and solidly build, the God of debauchery defied any previous characterizations I had heard or seen. If he was a revealer, than he provided his own security. “Mortal, since this is a dream, as we have agreed on it being, I can be straightforward. We are all prisoners here in paradise, prisoners of our own vice and virtue, forged conscience barbs and traps meant to suppress, never liberate.” The great god grew quietly sullen. He walked a few steps apart from me and I saw him lower his metaphysical mask. “My world is a world of limited pleasures confined, always confined, and in a state of limited existence. Look now,” spun around. The dark void behind him splintered violently into light. “I share my domain with Morpheus and his bitch Janus!” a lurking shape suddenly fled into the shadows, a think of opaque, fleeting brilliance. “See how it scurries away? Lurking beyond the touch of an intentional hand. How do I rule when my realm is control by mortals? Suppressed by every fool king demanding money and taxed by every hegemonic force known to the corporeal world? Hades should pay me for the every hedonist killed in my worshiped.”

Dionysus flexed his upper torso and roared. I fell to my knees, shaken to the marrow by sudden forced self-actualization. I saw before me the lines of masses with opium tongues, enslaved by ideological forces. I saw great White dragons atop piles of cocaine-laced gold; an army of Gun-toting pigs lining before the Horace, goose stepping before Hades, and climbing delusional into the machines of their self-inflicted universe. I saw myself spiraling into the oblivion of angst and fear, a sensation of utter helplessness forked into the veins of my being and I quaked a very human seizure. I entered the limits of my being, finding my bane in the sudden realization I was enslaved…

            When I again opened my eyes, I saw Dionysus sitting with his head upon his fist. He watched me carefully. “I fought them, you know. I reaped the ashes of my own home, burned and slew anything that spoke my name. My furies roared and tore the earth into hells, sewed Hades a paradise in my pleasure. And, after my violence, I found the armies of heaven lined before me. They came to me,” he stood again and I saw true individualistic majesty, “out of fear, not out of respect, and begged I lay aside my anger. When I did, they shackled me and put me on trial. Before my father, they swore they’d treat me as they did once his old ally, as if a liver could pay for my bloody-quest…” He sadly shrugged off his story and walked back to his couch. “There is no mercy, Mortal, and there is no heaven for even Heaven bares a forgers fingerprints, every lock poured from human kilns. Expect not mercy on the sword of your enemies and you shall not be disappointed. Always strive, mortal, always do fore we are imprisoned by social conscience and made cowards in the pact.”

 I thought immediately on my old mentor, the dead warrior-poets of my age that found themselves the victim of all they did to maintain their wars for individual pleasure at the cost of their bonds, the price paid for being Hell Bound at birth and the need to climb, albeit over the bodies of your enemies, to the top only to follow as all mortals fell into the oblivion of death. “I will not forced” I said of an old thinking resister.

The sullen god looked up. Quietly, his silence turned to laughter. “The simplicity of defiance!” he laughed again, “As childish as the philosophy sounds, how we need to strive to destroy simply to fix and repair!” He went back to the luxury of his couch, “Idleness and drink are my opiates mortal. Learn to appreciate your present cultural moment, strive to repair it, and love your eventual demise—No! Wish for it to happen upon you quickly for Death is the greatest of liberal laws.”

I did not disagree as it was impolite to disagree with a musing deity, but I felt as if he had maligned the nature of humanity. Perhaps we are as bitterly selfish as to seek for all our enemies’ deaths to purchase our immediate pleasures, or perhaps he was a product of a violent and barbaric moment. Me? I felt enlightened in the conversation with the god and respectful enough to allow him his moment of schizophrenic reality: the nature of having two ideals at war with self, and identify split between the need for pleasure and the need to eradicate pain. In a way, I saw the double consciousness of moral mortality before me personified by immortality.

“Enough, Mortal, I have a need to appease my splendor; you humans are too delicate for true enjoyment. Too much guilt, too much maligned ethos. It’s time for you to return to, well, where you’ve come from…” the lights in the room darkened like stage lights, leaving me suddenly—not to be trite—in the dark. The sensation only lasted for moments when the palpitation of fear returned to my heart. There was something about the primordial darkness that welcomed Phobos to the human mind.

A vivid rush followed fear as a light nonchalantly walked towards me. I say walked, for the sultry in its salacious walk spoke wonders of coy intention, as if the light itself wished only to seem like it was haphazard; yet, walked with all the grace of a prowling lioness. Engendered with a sense of yearning, a wanton need for satisfaction, the light came towards me slowly until, rising out of the abyss, a face appeared in the fires followed closely by a form. The form grew softer, fusing gently into the slight anatomical build of a woman. Immediacy overwhelmed me as the flames melded into flesh, and the flesh melded into emotional projection. A wafting scent of crushed fragrance, sifted by the delicate hands unphased by forced labor, breezed to me. Licentious nature poured from the avatar: Saffron-blonde hair burst from the fire with the violence of a flower blossoming; eyes and ears were forged of bee dances on dandelions; and the gentleness of winter’s illuminating frost wore titanium-blue eyes from orb’s of Aegean sodium. In all, the persona of unimaginable beauty strolled with predatory grace towards me….

When it spoke, I fell victim to classic blunder, perhaps victim by my own imaginative ego… “Mortal scholar,” its androgynous voice praised, “half a millennium has passed since I saw you last. Dare you touch where lover’s touched?” She raised out a palm, “And love me as clerics have on worshiping tongues of golden want? Eucharist on malleable tear drops; heaven be flesh betwixt wanting lips,” it slid slender fingers around my waist as one might wish beauty could, “and the gentleness of a forced kiss…” Some lingering part of my civil mind resisted, though the rushing nature of my lower-half yearned for appeasement. Such was the intrinsic failing of primal man…

“Cursed,” I managed in resistance. It recoiled, stung by my speaking. “Cursed by my own conjuring hand.” Looking down at the worn calluses on my hand, I knew, beyond the sensation in my body, I physically knew the victimizing of my imagination was my own doing, not the engendered paramour before me. “Sweet Succubus, your charm is my charm, I wish you’d come as a spirit of hate and not of a doppelganger of my wants. I forgive you my faults.” It looked abashed, as if the scripted scene had gone to bedlam by my own stupidity. “They blame you for male fault: Troy was sacked by the stupidity of the patriarchy and its whore Athena, who cost the world your brother-in-law’s honor.”

“I know not what you speak.” Of course not, I thought.

“Your dishonor is saturated in decades of dumb beauty and hollow praise. The face that launched a thousand ships wore lipstick smeared by a warrior’s hand. Leave me, creature, and lurk in the despair of male want somewhere else. I have my fill of sins for now. I don’t need your help in forging more. Leave!” but I turned my face away, afraid that the hollow signifiers did not carry my true intentions. I wished to hold the brilliance of the pale fire in my hands, to touch the intangible love with my physical being. I fled into the abyss, now afraid of enlightenment. I sought then only the solitude of my own personal comforts and a final freedom from fear and exploitation. As the abyssal winds swelled, a sound I had grown accustomed to, I tripped and fell into nothingness. The fall was always the worse part of the trip…

 

Shaking, I felt myself reeling again. My stomach churned. I vomited. I opened my eyes, feeling sticky bile covering my body. Consciousness returned to me. I was in my bedroom, covered in vomit and spaghetti. Partially digested noodles from my dinner and galleons of brown bile littered my bedspread. With a sigh, I remembered fits of my drunken slumber only as further annoyance to my present problems. The alarm struck…I had class to teach in three hours…In a quiet resolve, I drug the blankets from my bed vowing never to drink again…a fitting lie to tell oneself after vomiting up spaghetti…all over oneself.