Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [128]
He spiraled around and around, trying to cut through the shame and guilt he felt about his actions toward them, to hear their voices again, to visualize the changes he had imagined in their hierograms. Why was it that the one symbol that seemed the most representative of dynamism—the spiral icon—was the one element that he was certain remained constant?
It was not a letter like A or Z. It was not even a unit of meaning, he thought. It was …
It was a kind of system unto itself. A value system for interpreting all the other symbols and their relationship to each other. Was that it?
He could not grasp onto the mechanism. All his young life he had sought out with instinctive acuity the essential elements of machine operations and physical processes. He was a born engineer, with a pathological curiosity. Now he was seeing a whole new world open before his dreaming eyes—the possibility that behind and inherent in language were mechanisms equally as real as the physics of a slingshot or the chemistry of a beer vat, but far more mysterious and perhaps much more powerful.
If one could connect the mechanisms of language with ballistics and pharmacology, optics, harmonics, hydraulics and medicine, mathematics and music. If one could master the secrets of symbols and syphons, surgeries and solar energy. If one knew the exact point where the mind ended and the world began, and could render it …
Who would need projectiles if they had mastered that enigmatic science?
He glimpsed then, for just a flutter, a symbol so potent that it was beyond all representation of other things and ideas, but alive unto itself. Inclusive and yet apart. Because it was the Whole—simultaneously inside and outside itself. Not the word made flesh but the word made time—and the ghosts made flesh.
That was what the spiral of the twins was, perhaps. That was what he had caught a flicker of that night with his beloved Hattie.
A key and a keyhole, too. And if one could pass through the spiral one could look back and see and hear the secret language unified and clear. He fixed his mind on this and sent himself outward, imaginatively trying to enter the spiral, to gain the other side. And then …
Swirling strings and flowering fractals of ideograms and morphemes exploded before his eyes, as if the dusty leather-bound tomes he had pored over in Schelling’s bookshop had opened all at once inside his head. He saw Egyptian hieroglyphs, lush brush-stroked Chinese characters on long, unwinding scrolls. Arabic poems tiled into mosaics. Greek and Hebrew letters hammered in stone. Alchemical and astrological symbols. The tracks of animals in tar pits—the silhouettes of bison and ibex on cave walls—musical notes, tattoos, hand signals, constellations. Complicated chains of numbers twined into lattices that in turn formed the skeletons of fabulous beasts like gryphons and unicorns, whose emerging flesh and scales then took on the mesmerizing puzzle patterns of still more figures—radiant angels and ghastly demons, horned-bone shaman masks and polished metal armor made of tinier masks made of geometric shapes that were the visual representation of still other numbers, coalescing to build vast temples and coliseums of notation that grew and glistened like sentient crystal systems. On and on the symbols rained at him, blossoming into jungles of unknown significance—metamorphosing into monsters and monoliths, titans, totems, face cards, and pieces in forgotten games.
But through all the pictograms and treble clefs repeatedly appearing amid the empires of equations and alphabets was the insignia of the Vardogers’ clawed candle, and the tornado emblem of the teratoid twins—a spiral choreography suggestive of conceptual aggregates and psychological associations—which was something entirely different. As different as the momentary flare of a firefly in a bean row from the electric haunted hieroglyph you would see if you could follow its whole life—every single pulse and drift of wing—and hold it in your mind as easily as that one blink. It was as different