Posted on October 12, 2006 by Jenna
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[The Island of the Centipede – Chapter Four]
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June, Wednesday 2, 2004 – Cronos: Upon his ascension to the throne of the world, an endless time before great Hestia’s birth, Cronos went down to Tartarus and cast open the gates.
He said, “Come out, ye that may.”
Past him in a stream flowed the damned and terrible progeny of the couplings of Uri and the world. Some skulked low and chittered. Some shivered with cold slime. Some screamed foul prophecies as they flew above his head. Lastly there slunk forth the worst of them, a cutty angel, saying, “There is hope.”
They went out into the world and the world took the weight of them.
That was the beginning of Cronos’ reign—the day the horrors went free.
Crack the earth.
Stir the sea.
From the west there comes an outpouring of good to make all things right.Max sets out in his catamaran to bring this virtue to an end.
He’s owned his crime but he can’t make it right.
His crime is a poison.It is the Latter Days of the Law.
The Buddha’s answer is fading.
It cannot stop the suffering of the world.The knife of the legend of Mr. Kong
Reflects his answer:
“We must try to be good.”The Island of the Centipede
It is incumbent on a man, if he will lapse the leash on monsters, to bear the weight of their actions.
Cronos had unleashed great horrors on the world.
The world did not suffer from them.
Rather, from his place on the throne of the world, the titan held that suffering at bay. He made a plate of stone and set it behind him and upon it he bore the weight of imperfection. Thus when swarmed the namecatcher wasps, they did not cause harm. Thus the staggering crooked heartless men did not bleed out their life into the hollows of their chests. The titan reconciled in himself their dharmas, saying: “Swarm here, wasps, where their names are a burden to them.” Or “Stuff your chests with herbs, and palpate them with palpation bugs, and live and farm thereafter quietly and in peace.” He set the demons against the narcissists. He sent the angels to the bleak.
9512 pesserids before time began, a nymph wandering the roads encountered an ogre.
“Raar,” cried the ogre. “Raar! I am a hideous man-eating ogre.”
“Oh, thank Heaven!” the nymph replied.
“Eh?”
“There is a hideous man,” said the nymph. “There is a hideous man behind me, and I would much rather he were eaten.”
The ogre looked.
In fact there was: a telchine wizard practicing as a highwayman, whose intentions were in no way serene.
The ogre looked back and forth. He reached his decision.
“The telchine has more meat,” he said. “So I’ll eat him!”
“I don’t mind being eaten,” the telchine conceded. “If you’ll spit up my bones afterwards into your pile of gold, that I may be rich for ever.”
In such a fashion, again and again throughout the world, were all conflicts neatly and equitably solved. In such a fashion did the chains of Necessity make all people dance to a perfectly harmonious tune. The weight of effort for pulling all those shifting chains fell to the only creature who was not bound to them: Cronos, titan, lord of all the world.
“It is heavy,” he admitted to Rhea.
It fell to Cronos to reconcile the horrors and the lambs; the killers and the saints; the humans and the gods. He mediated between the perfect and the real.
“It is so very heavy,” Cronos said.
Rhea rubbed his shoulders, but it did not help. She tried to carry her share of it, but she could not: because the chains bound her, she participated in the system of them, and the efforts that she contributed solved out in the equations of it all.
“What would happen,” asked Cronos, “if I let this plate to fall?”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“In all the world,” said Cronos, “only I may stand aside, and shrug aside this weight, and let things happen as they will. And it is heavy. So I wonder: what would happen if I let this plate to fall, and the storm run riot across the world?”
“Then we should live in the Elysian Fields, I suppose, where there is no sorrow, and everything be well forever after for us all.”
I cannot describe the look on Cronos’ face.
It was the look of Santa when he discovered that presents kill; the look of the Gonz, when he dreamed for the first time of Abu Ghraib; the look of Dr. Sarous, at the recognition of his own corruption.
To work so hard—
So very hard—
And to think, for just a moment, that you have done no favors for the world.
- Tune in FRIDAY for the next exciting history of Ink Catherly:
THEORIES REGARDING THE BOX!