Geometric Allegory

In the days of the Original Sacred Tongues, the nursing Father loved us most tenderly. We were His Church, and He was the spirit who filled us with the great I AM. What is the church? It is our bodies, the sacred temples. What makes us sacred? Our connection to the Word. Our sacred place among the living was this: to “cherish” the Word, to express it truly, and to spread the word by responding in learned discourse.

As such, He was with them as the Word is with us. He was with the brothers daily and we found freedom in his will, in our homes, and man understood that unlike sin, willfulness could not be healed.

In 1604, the commissioning of the King James Bible took place. With hammer and anvil, Francis Bacon, the priests, and the scribes framed the living Word into untouchable Renaissance poetry. Now the kings’ Christendom would proclaim divine right and dominion over the entire western world (proclaimed, in defense, the holy place of the mighty prince). And the empire expanded under the reign of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The scribes of the Pharisee have always been the scribes and Pharisee, so it is now as it was then.  And the rose and crown manifest, kindled more and more. 

But backward goes,

slack not,

does the God of the house…

Go or slack not: so he “summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court.” 

He called them all to retire in the “deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.” 

Fashioned from anvils and hammers, the maligned will framed infinite arguments to conveniently imprison the judgment.  The strength takes and increases every day, but decay or diminish not doth contentment.  Their true happiness is the immediate Author, and they placed God under their sanctified Person so that their hearts were their heavens.  The publishing of the Original Sacred Tongues accomplished a perpetuation of desire. 

Aside to ARIEL

…Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.

PROSPERO

I’ll deliver all;
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales
And sail so expeditious that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off.

This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince’s own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”

PROSPERO

I’ll deliver all;
And promise you calm seas, auspicious gales
And sail so expeditious that shall catch
Your royal fleet far off.

My Ariel, chick,
That is thy charge: then to the elements
Be free, and fare thou well! Please you, draw near.

Exeunt

EPILOGUE
SPOKEN BY PROSPERO
Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation… There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood –and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.

And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

There was a pause. “I’m warning you. I’m going to get angry. D’you see? You’re not wanted. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island. Understand? We are going to have fun on this island! So don’t try it on, my poor misguided boy, or else—” Simon found he was looking into a vast mouth. There was blackness within, a blackness that spread. “—Or else,” said the Lord of the Flies…

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a “thief in the night.” And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.