Way of the Rose

Truth and Timeserpents When a spider spins a web, she doesn't use a ruler or a compass to calculate her angles. She weaves a perfect pattern every time, making corrections and changes at need as she goes along but no one ever told her how. She doesn't even possess a brain by the standards of people. She will never stand back and appraise her web from a distance she is too small. But she will eat the prey she catches in it, and she will lay eggs whose inhabitants will weave their own webs. So who is being clever the spider or the web? And is consciousness the beginning of knowledge, or its end? I am Jaya. I have been both the spider and the fly, and I can tell you this: the fly and the spider and the dew that makes the web visible are all part of something larger and more strange. For the spider to be conscious of herself, to know what she is, would mean she would equally know all that she is not, bringing great loneliness. But we all know about that. Because we are human. We nurse both consciousness and loneliness, inventing gods to keep us company while the spiders keep spinning in perfect ignorance. We are severed from the world that is why we worship animals and use them and keep them close to us. Even as we subjugate them, we miss being like them. They are connected. The timeserpent has a human face. It was built by human thought. But it was never human, and when its mouth yawns open, its face is seen to be a joke that all but disappears in the folds of its time-devouring and infinite body. It is the actualization of the impossible. The timeserpent's mathematics defy the understanding of a man or woman for whom time is like a wind, with direction and force. The timeserpent is not conscious like we are. It speaks our language with about as much effort as we need to make our hair grow. The timeserpent is no more aware of us than this maybe less. But we conceived it. We made it. How do we feel about that, children of Everien? Well, how does the ocean feel about humans, her progeny? We cannot know. We have grown so far from our mineral origins that the ocean does not understand us, but we, somehow, still cry out for her in our very blood. How does a man feel about the timeserpent, which is his? He created it but does not understand it. The timeserpent is the parasite of the world, conjoining and severing the world from itself, leaving holes and bridges, gateways and windows, lattices of possibility climbing in every direction. We are a self-propagating accident. We are meaning from meaninglessness and back again. And when we made the timeserpent, we birthed the accident of accidents, the math that breaks our minds. Discovering fire was child's play it was the big toy by which we built our castles of abstraction. But this time we are being left behind. The nature of timeserpents being what it is (or isn't), there's nothing to say that the perverse creature didn't create us so as to bring itself into being. That the web didn't weave the spider. Look hard and you'll see: there is nothing at all to prove that causality only runs one way. Timeserpents are the bane of storytellers. They cut to the ending without reference to its antecedents. They put contradictions side by side, just for laughs. They tunnel connections between things that have none, and cut sensible things in half. They spoil magic tricks. Being a person in the presence of a timeserpent is a little like being a beam of light in the presence of a prism. You really don't have a choice but to be cut up in pretty pieces and bent at an oblique angle. So: if you are reading for truth, stop now. You will find more in the dust on your windowsill. Truth and timeserpents are like oil and water. The Relative Hardness of HeadsLeith, Valery is the author of 'Way of the Rose', published 2002 under ISBN 9780553579055 and ISBN 0553579053.