The Tale of the Polycosmosian - Part 3
Written and Illustrated by Arman Chagla (she/they), a visual artist, hand-poke tattoo artist, and creative writer. They are a voracious reader and tend to write in the genres of fantasy, historical fiction, and horror-punk. Currently a student at St. Mira’s College for Girls Pune, Arman is pursuing a Master of Arts in English Literature.
Bizarre worlds with bizarre-looking folk are manageable; held at a distance and peered at through the lens of a thick magnifying glass afforded to our protagonist by their polycosmosian travels. Yet when Ambrose is confronted by an all-too-familiar attitude, they must question what their own motives, and those of the inhabitants of these strange lands, are; for are judgement and justice one and the same?
As Ambrose explains what faith means to them, they balk
For the Faie believe in heaven on earth, hedonistic at its core.
Hedonism may be described as a belief that pleasure is the highest good and the ultimate aim in life. This can manifest extrinsically (in the pursuit of high-intensity experiences), or intrinsically (in the pleasure derived from the more simple or humble avenues of life.)
One self-important one struts up to instruct,
While the others lean closer in internal humor.
“There is such a fruit, a willow, that may be plucked that may allow one to ‘transcend’ as the consumer.”
“For the fibrous bulb at the heart of the sweet meat
Offers a reconciliation between mind and body, complete
And so may your dreams of salvation come true,
Your earthly days are over and through!
Yet the price of a willow is a commendable cost,
Many a young Faie’s life is often lost.
Yet the rich do covet it, with no holds barred
The initiation to adulthood is passed with high regard.”
Just then a Faie, a snake in the grass,
This phrase refers to the role of Lucifer or Satan in the Fall of Man. In John Milton's Paradise Lost, Satan approaches Eve in the garden of Eden under the guise of a serpent curling in the grass. It is his encouragement that tempts Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, causing her to sin and repent her decision.
Haughty and selfish, filthy proud,
Does the group of kinder strangers pass
To press up against Ambrose in the crowd.
Their whispered words are close to their ear;
An unnerving intelligence is made quite clear
Their tone first teasing, turns rather severe.
And Ambrose is suddenly gripped by fear.
“Oh stranger mine, wouldn’t you like a little taste?
Why face eternity once your youth has been let waste?
To melt into the air, one with the breeze
And the spirits that prance among us unseen,
To hear the call of a bird before it has even tried
And to see the autumn come before the leaves have dried.
Is that not a more beautiful world to inhabit, you and I?
I swear all that I have said is true; I would not tell a lie.”
Yet their tone is bitter, poison-stained
And their touch is very cruel.
Ambrose rips themselves away,
And moves to the edge of the room.
Just then a plainer face does in front of them appear,
A platter of familiar tastes resting in their arms,
Plums and apple, peaches and pear;
This visual evokes Christina Rossetti's poem, The Goblin Market; the allure of familiar yet fantastical fruit touched by the magic of the fairy realm is used as a metaphor for an Eve-like temptation and the postlapsarian state of mind. As fae lore posits, eating food of fairyland is a way in which unassuming humans are trapped.
Their kindness was a potent balm.
“Judge us with kindness, our friend from afar
Our precocious concerns may seem rather bizarre,
But there lies no great comfort for us in the resigning
Of our eternal fate to a queer deity’s designing!
Do not the oceans ever extending deep
And your tears that down porcelain flesh, creep
Taste the very same, sweet water brine
Elemental testament to one’s suffering, thine!
Yet find some respite in the fruits of the earth,
Enjoy fine company and while away the ages in falsified mirth
For to your adventure this group must attend,
A merciful distraction from contemplating our own end!”
And so, with a hesitant hand did Ambrose survey
The fruits set before them, fresh from the harvest.
With the soft encouragement of the brittle Faie,
An aubergine plum graced the palm of the artist.
Organza touches bloom on the back of their arm
As they are swept into a swirling dance
Dance circles are, in general, heady and all-consuming experiences. But elvish dancing circles too hold the connotations of being separated from the mortal world. Fae music is said to be bewitching, and negotiating one's escape from the land is a matter of great care and tact.
Staccato heartbeats pulsing in crimson rivers
Staccato is a musical term that refers to the detachment or separation of notes in a composition to create musical emphasis. Here, it refers to the pounding of Ambrose's heartbeat, that in such great fervour sounds like singular beats.
But to stop, there is no chance.
The waves of swimming, thrashing bodies
Do lash upon them once and again,
And carried in euphoric folly,
Do they circle around the glen.
A glen refers to a narrow valley, especially characteristic of the Scottish and Irish natural landscapes.
In some time, the sweetness fades
And bitter is their tongue.
As they stumble away from the glade,
They know they can never return, to Earth or to Faerie, so far-flung.
Once more do they feel that familiar tug
And brace themselves anew,
For back to the crumbling mahal would they plucked
Awaiting a new world to fly to.
Moonlight shivers, the wind carrying a mournful song on its airy shoulders.
With its soft sorrow is the artist entralled,
And so do they follow the call behind crumbling towers.
At the end of the lane is a pool full of twinkling dark water,
This is an intertextual reference to Neil Gaiman's novel, 'The Ocean at the End of the Lane'. Lettie's belief in the pond behind her house being an ocean is likened to Ambrose's expanding horizons through their access to this liminal space.
In which the visage begins to change,
They pitch forward again, into a realm of the deepest shadow.
A moaning call once again is heard
The being I write of here is a reflection of Maturin from Stephen King's It, a primordial turtle that created the universe and is one of the twelve ancient guardians in the overarching King narrative universe.
Of a great being, a creator of worlds, now brought low
Due to its hubris, once undeterred.
For its form held the vestiges of greatness;
Yet fate had had its revenge as the final witness
Until all but an emaciated form and a broken mind were left.
Its voice reverberated in this endless void
Lamenting the glory of a world that was,
Speaking of the future of a civilization soiled and of which’s downfall, it was the main cause.
Yet with no voice that the artist may understand,
Images grace their mind with frightening frequency,
Against their crime, it practices no secrecy.
It begins with a impossible world,
One where the ravages of the clime had claimed great lives.
As torrents of the wind, of water and of flame whirled,
There rose a faction that stood against the trials.
For they had purported the invention of a stellar engine,
A stellar engine is a hypothetical structure that would be able to control the movement of a star system. Three classes of stellar engines have been postulated by contemporary scientists, and can only be created by civilizations that rank in the Type 2 classification of the Kardashev Scale (a method in which technological advancement of a civilisation is measured based on their energy consumption). The human race currently ranks as a Type 1 civilization.
A machine behemoth that could drag their world out of ruin,
One that could bring them to another dimension and save them from their own undoing.
For fans of the British science fiction TV series, this is a plot straight out of Doctor Who. It echoes the sentiments of the Time Lords and the saving of their planet Gallifrey- especially from Matt Smith's farewell special that concluded season 7; The Time of the Doctor.
But ambition was a cruel and controlling master,
And when time came for the migration to begin,
The project was faced with another disaster:
The development of the engine, they could not maintain.
Yet the bells had been rung, the common folk summoned,
And so, our eldritch sinner incumbent,
About this grave fallacy kept mum.
The engine worked as well as it could,
Driving the last of these alien folk beyond the stars,
Until the heat of interstellar travel was no longer withstood,
And the ark finally broke apart.
The souls on board were stranded in the cosmic sea
And to survive was one of the highest arts, but to die was a small mercy,
For the last of them was, as Ambrose, a traveller at heart.
And so did the bemoaning being find their way to this in-between,
Trapped in the confines of its grief,
Forevermore a spectator to its own greed.
Ambrose withdraws into themselves again, their mind reeling,
Words of blame and condemnation on their tongue.
For there were its actions alone to fault from which this pain and misery had sprung,
Yet there was only one feeling that was to the fore, yet to be called.
It was pity, and it was absolving in its own right,
For no comfort nor punishment were left to be offered.
Washing over Ambrose with such a sudden fright,
That they too were in truth, eternally altered.
For it was no mere thing to dismiss blame
In the face of what is right and wrong,
But for this sorry creature, sorrow was the only song.
And so with a teary farewell did Ambrose depart, back to the mahal of the ether,
Leaving behind a thought, in part;
No longer a judge, but a simple weaver.
There is a breathlessness in the air,
Bordering on the distinct feeling of coming undone.
They reach for the door; and through the jali do they see a landscape that they know.
The handle is warm in their grasp,
Yet a chill wracked them from head to toe.
For this time they know to which world it will yield.
And reality until now seemed far afield.
They considered the memory of living where they had been,
And no joy did they find in their meticulous craft,
For it only proved to be anymore a purchased renown.
Just then, a tinkle of metal against metal called out a gay little cry,
For there was a glimpse of a dainty adorned ankle
Disappearing behind a wall, almost shy.
‘Was it another Traveller?’ Ambrose wondered, ‘And what could this possibly mean?’
And now the words of the Stranger returned to mean so much more,
For in his whispers had he once judged,
“But what’s there to grieve for? For I have dipped my fingers in my heart’s blood.
So what if my lips have been sealed shut?
I have now put a tongue in
Each and every link of the chain.”
This is an excerpt from Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poem from Dast-e-Saba, translated from Urdu by Baran Farooqi and published in a compilation entitled The Colours of My Heart.
And finally, does Ambrose realize what they’ve done and where they’ve been.
A soft sigh escapes their lips, an unbidden farewell escaping with it,
As Ambrose turns, and away they slip
To pursue another wild adventure unbidden.
-Fin-
References:
The motif of the serpent as inclined to Christian mythology has been used far and wide, yet one of my favourite personifications of the role is in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, ‘His Dark Materials’. A story that transverses multiple worlds, philosophical stances and conscientious species, it begins with the earnest search to save a lost friend. I highly recommend it for readers of all ages and dispositions, and should you feel like you can’t sit through all 1200 pages of detailed and nuanced writing, a more or less accurate 3-season HBO series is a brilliant way to binge the tale.
The Seelie and Unseelie folk were the fairies spoken of in Scottish folklore. Not only does this phrase draw from the myths surrounding the fey, but it references the works of Paracelsus who describes 'sylphs' as invisible beings of the air. He creates classifications for such elemental beings into sylphs (of the air), Gnomes (of earth), salamanders (from fire) and undines (of water).