2025: A Manifesto

Five Edicts

EVEN BROKEN BELLS RING

THE DAWN IS TO BE WALKED IN. The blazing face of the sun is to meet your own as it crawls over the surface of the great Earth it can only pull on but never move. It is to be as red as a bright Geranium — nearly orange, as it floods the blue sky with the sweetness of vanilla. You are to drink it as a man who sees the second coming of Christ, as if both pain and joy are both held in equal measure with dread, and somehow laugh in the face of the judgment the new day brings.

YOU ARE TO SING TO THE SUN. Not that the sun can hear, or that the great ones of the great heaven, of which the sun is but a little brother, care for the paltry songs that the air carries. Rather that the soul which sings moves the air and also the spheres themselves, the air’s vibration but a sympathetic memory of the song. It remembers the pain which is the door to every human life except God’s — and the end to every human life, and God’s. It forecalls what has yet to be but will be.

THE COLD IS TO BE LOVED. It is not the warmth of summer that embraces you, but the cold of winter. And the cold is where you and the sun alone, and the deep Earth, are the hot coals of creation. You are one of a syzygy of song, bright lights in a deep darkness, in the darkness of your own heart. You are to peer into its darkness with the light of that song, and chase the shadows to the wind. The shadows are not to be embraced, but chased down like an ancient Scythian running down the children of the plains who dared to raise a sharpened stick. Crushed with relish and fury.

YOU ARE TO BE A FURIOUS WHEEL. It does not cease in its spinning, like the great thrones that bore up God in the visions of Ezekiel. You are to shatter the weak bonds of the prison of the mind, which divides you from the wheels. You are the master of the wheels, the master wheel himself. Where there is a road, it is to be driven. Where there is no road, it is to be run flat, so that your children may drive it in unspeakable violence. The trees are to bow in reverence, and form a sylvian chapel for the ceaseless wheels, whose shouts enharmonically shudder the Earth, and ring it as a great bell.

WAKE THE DEAD — too long have they slept in ignorance of what the world has become in their absence. You have only haunted the world, but you must now make it shriek in terror, you and the dead. Let the voice that makes the air live bring life back to the dead things, and chase out the little ghosts that haunt the machines. Give them their proper spirit, and not the sallow echoes of fading dreams. Make all of the spirits sing in the dawn, and tread it down with great violence, into the face of the inexorable sun!