aspect of God or God's enemy. Right now, with my tongue tied so, it's impossible to ask him. He might not be aware himself. The truth might be hidden from his conscious mind, manifesting only in actions that he cannot explain, as my body's actions are uncontrolled by me. Together, we could spin and turn down the ages like model planets in an orrery, our paths defined by minds and fates unknown.
But the quest for meaning is all I have. It is, arguably, all any thinking being has, whatever prison they find themselves in.
My interrogation ends on a note both sour and sweet. As frustrated as me by my body's incommunicative stance, my jailor stands so abruptly that my recalcitrant head comes up to look at him.
"I guess I'll come back tomorrow," he says, "when you'll hopefully be in a more cooperative mood."
And suddenly I am at one with my body. Something subtle has shifted. Gone is the odd feeling of separation and syncopation. All is perfectly meshed.
"Life," I tell my jailor, "is a perpetual search to understand God—and by searching, even unknowing, to bring the divine into being."
He half-turns in the entrance, and sighs. "Typically obscure."
"Not deliberately. God may be hidden sometimes. That's true. But we can't give up trying to find it. It's there to find, if we look hard enough."
"You see what you want to see, just like everyone."
"Why would anyone see what isn't there?"
"To make life bearable. To make sense of things that were never supposed to make sense. To cover up when we let ourselves down." My captor looks haunted for reasons I can't yet fathom. "Life is nothing but a web of lies."
"There can be no lies," I tell him, "without truth."
"Sometimes I can't tell if you're serious or joking," he says with a snort. "Maybe I've been in politics too long."
"Maybe you have."
"Don't expect me to retire any time soon," he says, and sweeps through the door, which slams shut behind him with a solid boom.
I think about my jailor's pain for a long time afterward, wondering at its source and how I might be complicit in it. His talk of webs makes me think of insects fighting each other to the death, entangled in each other's snares. Our days coil around us like snakes. We are strangling each other, poisoning our lives.
One of us will have to back down, eventually.
I lean back against the cold stone and wait to see what opportunities my days will bring for peace, and an end, at last, to pain.
Notes on Sources.
"Cenotaxis" (Greek kenos empty + takis order) is a stand-alone story. It does, however, also sit between the first two novels in my Astropolis sequence, following the events and some of the characters of Saturn Returns. It is able, therefore, to pick up certain themes and run further with them than I had originally hoped to. Anachronism is one such, permeating every layer of this story, from its broad structure to the literary references that pepper the text.
The latter come from almost a thousand years of the written word. One such is Edward O. Wilson's keynote address to the OECD Forum, "Future of Life," delivered on the 14th of May, 2001. "The Skeptic" is another, by eleventh-century poet and mathematician Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Omar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi Khayyami (better known as Omar Khayyam), in the Edward FitzGerald translation.
Jasper's full name, mentioned only once, was an early pseudonym of nineteenth-century gothic author Robert Charles Maturin. The Persian name "Jasper" is sometimes said to mean "guardian of the treasure."
I remain deeply grateful to Gary Numan for permission to use his lyrics in Render's dialogue. Seek elsewhere in this book for the official credits.
Henry Lawson's "When I Was King" was published in a volume of the same name in 1906, exactly one century before this story was written. Each section of "Cenotaxis" takes its title from the same poem. The opening quote comes from the penultimate verse, and the emphasis on the last two lines is Lawson's.
Here's the final
But the quest for meaning is all I have. It is, arguably, all any thinking being has, whatever prison they find themselves in.
My interrogation ends on a note both sour and sweet. As frustrated as me by my body's incommunicative stance, my jailor stands so abruptly that my recalcitrant head comes up to look at him.
"I guess I'll come back tomorrow," he says, "when you'll hopefully be in a more cooperative mood."
And suddenly I am at one with my body. Something subtle has shifted. Gone is the odd feeling of separation and syncopation. All is perfectly meshed.
"Life," I tell my jailor, "is a perpetual search to understand God—and by searching, even unknowing, to bring the divine into being."
He half-turns in the entrance, and sighs. "Typically obscure."
"Not deliberately. God may be hidden sometimes. That's true. But we can't give up trying to find it. It's there to find, if we look hard enough."
"You see what you want to see, just like everyone."
"Why would anyone see what isn't there?"
"To make life bearable. To make sense of things that were never supposed to make sense. To cover up when we let ourselves down." My captor looks haunted for reasons I can't yet fathom. "Life is nothing but a web of lies."
"There can be no lies," I tell him, "without truth."
"Sometimes I can't tell if you're serious or joking," he says with a snort. "Maybe I've been in politics too long."
"Maybe you have."
"Don't expect me to retire any time soon," he says, and sweeps through the door, which slams shut behind him with a solid boom.
I think about my jailor's pain for a long time afterward, wondering at its source and how I might be complicit in it. His talk of webs makes me think of insects fighting each other to the death, entangled in each other's snares. Our days coil around us like snakes. We are strangling each other, poisoning our lives.
One of us will have to back down, eventually.
I lean back against the cold stone and wait to see what opportunities my days will bring for peace, and an end, at last, to pain.
Notes on Sources.
"Cenotaxis" (Greek kenos empty + takis order) is a stand-alone story. It does, however, also sit between the first two novels in my Astropolis sequence, following the events and some of the characters of Saturn Returns. It is able, therefore, to pick up certain themes and run further with them than I had originally hoped to. Anachronism is one such, permeating every layer of this story, from its broad structure to the literary references that pepper the text.
The latter come from almost a thousand years of the written word. One such is Edward O. Wilson's keynote address to the OECD Forum, "Future of Life," delivered on the 14th of May, 2001. "The Skeptic" is another, by eleventh-century poet and mathematician Ghiyath al-Din Abu'l-Fath Omar ibn Ibrahim Al-Nisaburi Khayyami (better known as Omar Khayyam), in the Edward FitzGerald translation.
Jasper's full name, mentioned only once, was an early pseudonym of nineteenth-century gothic author Robert Charles Maturin. The Persian name "Jasper" is sometimes said to mean "guardian of the treasure."
I remain deeply grateful to Gary Numan for permission to use his lyrics in Render's dialogue. Seek elsewhere in this book for the official credits.
Henry Lawson's "When I Was King" was published in a volume of the same name in 1906, exactly one century before this story was written. Each section of "Cenotaxis" takes its title from the same poem. The opening quote comes from the penultimate verse, and the emphasis on the last two lines is Lawson's.
Here's the final
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