PLAKE V - "The Mountain Tower"

otherwise known as the reflection in the sound

PRIMORDIAL FOOTHILLS With the sunlight just above the crest of the ridges and the slight rumbling of a far away storm we took the first step up the rocky incline leading to the towering peaks above. Dirt and dust sip and slither and ripple in multitudinous patterns underfoot. We must pace ourselves despite our enthusiasm, for the journey ahead will be arduous. We move across an intricately sanguine stony field above a small lake, the sight of our previous night’s camp. Not a trace left behind. The air is frenetic with a certain electricity. The auburn rocks phase and modulate with each step. We continue through the passageways of stone and boulder, the sound of static in the low atmosphere around us. The hair on our skin prickles to life. Eventually we come to the outer walls of a forest which climbs up and onto the lap of the snowy monolith above.

FOREST PASS We cross the outset of the emerald patchwork. Trunk by tree by bushel by branch the foot of the mountain becomes shrouded. Though it is daytime there is no sunlight, save for what small whispers of aureolin rays slip through the forest canopy. The sparse light bounces down and across leaf and limb, settling dimly in a mossy chartreuse cloud just above our heads. The floating spores catch what’s left of these radiations and act as lanterns left in place by ancient travelers. Following the ever shifting map of our intuition we wind and tunnel through the branching cascades of the deep forest. A small emerald creek creeps along the valley next to us. The spore embers dance along each layer of footstep; the sound becomes invisible to the enveloping darkness. The more we climb the forest path, the more the light becomes obscured until finally it is gone.

BLACK LOTUS Abruptly our path is blocked by a large obsidian slab. There must be a way around it, but the forest previously surrounding us has disappeared only to be replaced by a completely black void. There is a distinct lack of direction engulfing us. Some of our party murmur in confusion. There is a haunting stillness about the air. Suddenly She appears. Birthed from the obsidian door She has presented herself as Her own guardian; the mountain is protective of Her home. With only a grimace She devours our limbs, then peels away our bodies as we decay into piles of ice and rock from the avalanche on the ridges overhead. We are scattered into the oblivion of eternity by Her.

GRAIL OF THE SUN One million years pass. We awaken from frozen slumber in front of the same obsidian door, only it has now taken on an incandescent hickory glow. There is sunlight reflecting off of it. The awareness of the window through which the achromatic sunlight is emitted comes to a focal point. We are flanked on all sides by the ligneous archways and inverted buttresses of some kind of vestibule or room. In the south west corner is a hole that is circumambulated by three oblique terraces, out of which emanates a nebulous plume of steam, the origin of which is completely unknowable. The sunlight refracts in the hyperactive particles of the steam and unravels into lattices of permutative prisms. They shift and transform like streaks of lightning in storm clouds against the flaxen wood walls of the room. The forest lives here but in a different form, and we are inside its abode. One at a time we investigate the billowy plume. As each of the party approach the steps leading to the voidal mouth they become entranced and fall into the hole. The urge to approach is unexplainable; it is a certain type of magnetism that throws each of us into the breach at the base of the clouded pillar. As I fall into the majestic flurry of refractory dances the steam does not burn; I again lose all sense of surrounding and placement and the falling begins to feel like an elevating or lifting. My sight becomes a white abyss- I am flying inside of no-place.

ALPINE LODGE (ABODE OF THE MIRROR) Shortly the realization comes that the reason for my lack of sight is merely because my head is not turned. I turn my head away from the giant empty tapestry hanging on the tall mauve walls of the Great Hall. In front of me a grand stairway concludes at a spidering of bifurcated passages and rooms. Seven steps up the great stairway we enter the maze of corridors and elevated walkways, some of which extend through shallow halls and occasionally open up into slightly bigger rooms populated by nooks and dwellings and praying ancestors. Other such rooms lie empty behind decorated walls. Several are alive with memories; ghosts of places reliving countless turns of the spiraling wheel that creates the framework of a series of nested spheres blooming into another system of nested spheres ad infinitum. We climb the splintering stairwells, service passages, ladders and elevators, rooms within rooms. We become separated and lost exploring the great mansion. Soon it will be nightfall. The skies fade the stars into view, disappearing the mansion labyrinth. A pale magenta sky lowers the sun below the mountain. The new moon shows no part of Herself in the deepening heavens. Violet sunset turns into night; we hastily set up camp and begin a fire. The fire burns a crystalline cyan blue. Into the fire we toss our rucksacks and belongings, then make beds in the snow. Dreams of other mountains in other worlds fill our restful minds.

SOUTHERN COL BLUES The night sails on waves of dreamtime while we slumber. We return to wakefulness and witness the sunrise. One among our party did not make the return. When the morning air gives its first whisper we have lost a companion but have gained a key. We continue on to the southern face. Clouds are pink beyond the blue peaks and ridges. The sun will be visible soon. The pink of the clouds melts into the night’s cobalt and reignites itself as a pale purple sunrise. The strangeness of this particular sunrise does not immediately catch our attention. However I begin to feel as though a certain type of repetition is occurring. Is this sunrise actually a sunset in reverse? We continue on our route, coming to some tricky terrain. We use ropes left behind by the ancestors to climb across the great southern step. After a brief downgrade followed by an upgrade we reach a good place to collect ourselves. The path above us is much higher than the small dip and it will be difficult to surmount. A second companion has slipped off of the ice face. In their place appears a rope. This rope lifts us up the steep pass. One of us holds the key up to the light; it is a mirror. The cyan flames from last night’s camp reappear in front of us. There is no way to traverse the narrow slope on either side of the fire. We must go through the bluish inferno; there is no other way to continue. Before executing the decision to enter the inferno, we loop the rope through the key and swing it back down the ridge below us. Our two lost travelers keep camp for us there inside the mountain.

NORTHEAST RIDGE BLUES The key is the mirror of the rope. The rope unlocks the key, and vice versa. Together each is canceled out. In their absence, a portal is opened- a hole through which we must crawl. But first we must enter the flames of our obstruction. Step for step, we immerse ourselves into the arcing bolts of the cyan inferno. The mountain itself becomes a full spectrum of flames, their tongues refracting the sun which radiates from the peak high above us. In the wall of ice ahead is the next gap to traverse. Once on the other side, the ridge curves to the east and we trudge onward. Each step is difficult to take. Our breath slowly dissipates. There quickly becomes the realization that the spectral clouds now encircle us on the northeastern ridge. On the clouds’ iridescent faces is the culmination of inverted opposites meeting in a waltz. There is a smile to greet the aether. We pull ourselves above the clouds. The flame, now far below us, is suddenly understood as a reflection of the Sun. The Sun is the mirror of the Key which reflects its inverse as the Rope. The Rope is set fire to by the Sun and burns as a candle in some distant Temple. This opens the four reclining walls of the pyramid summit that lie several dozen paces ahead.

SPECTRAL SUMMIT A feeling of weightlessness betrays my tired body. We begin to freeze in the cold sun. Echoes of distant fiery sunrises bleed through a nearby ice crevasse. The snowy walls below house the mummified bodies of the ancients frozen in prayer. The slope around us is enveloped in a golden atmosphere. Each step impossibly increases in effortlessness. The peak is now just up ahead. Instantly what feels like eleven thousand years is a flash; my vision kaleidoscopes into an upside down pyramid structure fitted evenly within the summit upon which myself and my party have finally ascended- yet it all feels like a memory imagined behind blind eyes. My vision returns, and I see that we are still about eleven hundred paces from the peak. I can no longer tell if we are walking up or down. The disorientation intensifies. My senses erupt once more in a burst of spectral brilliance - the Rope burns away in the form of a wick in a candle, the candle burning a bright Eternal Glistening. Behind it are the four sloping walls of the room at the top of the tower. We are back inside the mansion, in the highest part. There is a final ladder leading up beyond the cascading pyramid roof. As we climb the ladder, the walls wane and we have reached the summit.

TRAVERSING THE LUMINOUS THRESHOLD All the land lie below us in a wide-angle looking glass spread. I reach up and the sun pulls me through itself. There is no color here, no air, no snow, no body, no companions, no mansion, no mountain, no place. We are no longer on a mountain, but embodying emptiness. I fall onto my back on a different peak. The party I travel with are reflections of myself and I of them. We begin our descent. We are a vehicle that expands to the scale of all things imagined and un-imagined. Immediately following this is a collapsing and condensing into the smallest possible particle. This particle then is splintered by the Mirror; the resulting mess of particles then populate all surrounding space with self replicating copies of each self. Those copies then expand into one whole of all things. This cycle of expansion / contraction / duplication repeats itself at an accelerating rate. The curves of the accelerations become other mountain peaks on which other ascensions and descensions take place. The beings on those mountains then play out the mechanics of their orbitings.

SPECTRAL DISSOLUTION & RETURN 1. The Upside Down Peak 2. Inverted Structures 3. Differential Manifold of Mirrors 4. Secondary Particles Radiate the Fermionic Breeze 5. Transliminal Dawn of the Present Eternal 6. Schizotypical Death and False Transcendence 7. Merging of the Continous Hierarchies 8. Dark Matter and Other Dark Matters 9. Dictyostelium Congealing into the Epoch 10. Molecular Maze of the Mycetozoan Empire 11. Reconnection of the Integration System Creates a Doorway 12. The Same Light It Has Been And Will Always Be Thus we reached the City of Mold