Dimly through time (A prequel to `Apollonian figures in a Dionysian world`)
1.
Bracketed, lapidary prose of the great one—beautiful, dry ideas, caught up in layers spoken meticulously, even recursively, into themselves— crackled from a reel-to-reel tape recording and an ancient player — artifacts passed from hand to hand by believers convinced these primitive things themselves could dispense the enclosed as a kernel of truths essential for any future of the race. The crackles and hisses and pops from the wrinkled and desiccated tape were accentuated by wavering volume and fluctuating speed of the reels in the machine, a fact aided by his own hand as he husbanded the most fragile segments of tape through its battered heads — segments well-known from his own solitary study every evening as he rested on his secretive travel from point to point on his path to this place.
Once it seemed to be running on its own, he slowly pushed the tape-player — its batteries aged and failing — close to the microphone in a shuttered, low-wattage radio station — its license revoked long-ago for its one-time owners’ propensity to fiery and seditious ideas smuggled between state-sanctioned speeches, music and news. Himself hardly a squatter in this illicit place, with access gained through delinquency-refined lock-picking skills and a precocious knowledge of radio electronics.
Unsure if the words would even be heard, but desperate for that very chance, he slouched in earned fatigue and sighed softly in the dusty glow and warmth of the remaining ancient equipment of the station, pondering that any hearer would be three-steps removed from the point in time where those words — well-worn by time and the hazards of travel — were first spoken — an event once lost but now re-opened surreptitiously through a conduit so obscure he himself wondered about his ability to assess success or even authenticity of the unseen voice speaking from a distant recovered present.
Even after the speaker’s ending, he knew these words — sporadically punctuated with abrupt silences from crude splices and generation after generation of re-recording — could hold any hearer breathless as he himself listened, eyes closed, hopeful others could have the same chance as did he on that first day upon hearing them, something so memorable to a life with so little to keep.
2.
A precocious, intellectually-incendiary changeling crouched in a gritty grotto slowly brightening with the breaking dawn, beside what he hoped was a functioning receiver — potentially brought back to life from scavenged parts and the unbelievably-lucky find of a mouldy but mostly intact manual — slowly twisted the radio’s dial while pressing an ear to its battered paper cone speaker — a practice he just now thought would appear — if anyone were present to see — like a scene from a movie of a bank robber trying to pick vault tumblers.
Floating within squeals and spiralling static, an almost inaudible voice emerged from the cone, a voice he could not yet know was from a past so distant that neither he — nor anyone he could know — would have known its present. So faint was this voice but with the intensity of a listener’s labour, after only a few moments he sensed it was greater than anything he had experienced in his life up to this very moment — its power to capture and enrapture him and lost hopes clearly heard despite its unsure sonic quality, its non-existent provenance, and the near drought of possible exit from his eternal present— the almost physical force of the thoughts motivated by those words palpable through his suddenly beating chest.
As the voice came to its climax — however faint and garbled — its message almost blinded him even in this cave now lit in a bath of light that dazzled through the ever-present haze just outside. He could only sit motionless, paralysed, yet moved beyond capacity to capture, thrown from his adolescent anger to a place beyond his own time in this suddenly very intense present by an unknown speaker from a past generations-beyond.
Static swallowing the voice, and finding himself now adrift within nullifying ebbs and flows of electronic noise, he wondered, where did this come from, and were there others — like him — who knew or sensed the urgency of what he had just heard, of the potential of these abrasive ideas to transform and open new streams beyond the horizon on the landscape of the permitted — and if those others existed, how he could find them?
