The Power of Imagination - or the Last Pact

Everything on Earth is two-faced, imperfect. Subjugated to a curse of evil.

Nothing lasts forever, and, when we think we reached happiness, we haven’t done anything other than reach the highest point that we possibly can, just to crash and crumble to pieces.

A fall isn’t painful unless – isn’t that right?- one has reached extreme heights beforehand.

Many fail, because of this, to drugs, to debauchery, to vices of solitude. Many of them become executioners, having been victims. More still kill themselves.

Then what can truly be the moral of the story? What does deserve any sacrifice, how can one escape a closed game?

The soul of man could be as beautiful as a rainbow,...if it weren’t trapped in such a prosaic shell.

Can Man do anything on Earth except eternally repeat the sysiphic myth? Of falling short due to his own imperfection?

*

I stepped in the first Room of the palace, somewhat fearful. It was a strange, unknown place, but even so I knew, from the first moment, that it belonged to the Light, and so my reaction was one of instinctive protection against the new and the unknown.

On a white bed, with immaculate sheets, sat a girl of strange beauty. Her skin was as white as milk, her eyes blue as the Sky, her silhouette that of an angel that came to Earth. It was hard to say if she was a girl or a divine, angelic creature.

In her hands she held a harp, and the noises she made touching the chords with her delicate hands were so pure, so crystalline, that one instantly realised that they were celestial harmonies.

You could almost feel the scent of incense and myrrh, you could climb, if you closed your eyes for a few moments, somewhere up there, on a white cloud… And you could see, on the horizon, sunbeams crashing into a sublime, reddish sunset...

A melody... one more melody and I can die... I thought, without knowing why those exact words.

Heavenly harmonies...an angel with the face of a girl or a girl with the face of an angel...White, paradisiacal light.

“Such should look any interpreter...such should sound any melody”, I thought at the end, when I had to leave the room.

*

Any passing has a lesson. Any victory has a price.

Are we really that naive, that we imagine ourselves above the laws of the Universe?

Opposites eternally attract, in a never-ending game... but they don’t eliminate each other (even though a scientific calculation says they should).

When you think it’s over, a new level is barely starting, then you think you started something big, without equal, you see it ending...

What can we do? We were left here with a purpose...

*

I went into the second Room of the palace, less fearful, wishing to see and remember.

I saw a true Garden of Eden there...with white marble, with crystalline water, with pure flowers floating on the surface of an immaculate lake, without a trace of wind...

With an atmosphere suspended somewhere outside of time, in the end, with small birds of Paradise letting out trills of beauty indescribable by words, like a magic of good, like a blessing pouring out on everything and everyone...

Any germ of evil couldn’t worm its way there, in that wonderful Room where a law of eternal Dharma ruled...

I avoided looking at myself, making my presence known in any way, because I feared that everything might fall apart, that the dream (or whatever it was) might stop.

I watched for minutes and listened, as could happen to me only in a celestial sphere...

“Such should look any garden...such should sound the trills of any bird”, I thought right before leaving the room.

*

Quid pro quo. Is this really the rule?

If so, then humanity is doomed.

No matter how good a man is, no matter how hard he tries to overcome himself, at some point a monster will emerge from him. In a fatal moment, he will spout evil, he will emanate negative wavelengths. He will create imbalance.

And then the unwritten rule of compensation will bring to him, sooner or later, what he gave, pinning on him the blackest deeds, the most nefarious misfortunes, like only nightmares can endure.

And sometimes, not even them.

Maybe Man is wonderful... Maybe he was created by the gods. But he is equally a cursed being.

Who brings misfortune when you least expect it, just as the most banal of storms abruptly transforms into a tsunami.

Quid pro quo?

*

I entered the third Room, with a nearly sacred feeling. I felt as if I had just reincarnated, as if I had just forgotten the endless stream of previous lives. to be born again... to fulfill an unknown duty.

Marvelous coloured spheres danced across the entire room, covered one another, even passing through one another.

But only to restart the sublime game in the same fraction of a second, they were continuously moving, in a fascination of the infinite, in an adoration of the lights of the rainbow.

They seemed to be simple matter moving, but for any mortal that would have watched their hypnotic dance, their infinite rotation, it would become clear that they were as alive like him...with a soul.

They might as well have been our purified souls... our aspiration closest to the celestial.

Then I saw, for a few seconds, the eternal flux of pure light.

I cannot describe it in words, but it was something akin to a hallucination, blinding, that comes from outside of time and looms over it. Something that isn’t normally accessible to a mortal, something that can bestow an eternal blessing upon you or, if you’re not ready, can drive you mad.

Above that incandescent light could be only God.

Blinded, understanding my way to small human condition, I stepped back, and then I hurried toward the exit.

“Such should look any esoteric experience...This is what we should find at the end of the road...” I thought, while I left through the door that could have been made entirely from glass.

*

We spend our entire lives chasing an illusion, just to crash at the end, killed by our own nothingness, finally admitting our limits.

It is for nothing that we think we are demigods. For nothing that we keep bringing up our celestial roots.

The only thing we’re doing is fuelling, albeit in a more subtle way, our ego – the monstrous gate that leads directly to Inferno.

We cannot, but we could have. We do not fly, but we could have risen to the top. We are not, but we could have been.

Is it really true that the whole world is an illusion?

Then our role must be, surely, to define which is our most valuable illusion (in an illusory world) and what we can do to make it become alive. Real. Eternal.

Can we do anything?

*

The fourth Room was, of course, waiting for me. I entered cautiously, and then i started slowly accommodating – as possible, of course.

Crystalline springs, of a never before seen purity, flowed through the room, going through the walls, beyond them, to infinity...

A translucent water, a ripple that seemed as if it was from Paradise...An eternal flow.

Nothing gets lost, nothing disappears, but everything floats from its roots towards the final destination, to the alive infinity, in a unique, sublime motion....

You cannot see yourself in the alive water like in a mirror because you are too imperfect, and you would risk breaking the spell in a second...

An edenic ripple. Water, the element of life. Light. Absolute.

Then there is nothing, because everything is here.

Everything that we are. Everything that we could ever become. Everything that we loved and could have loved.

Water. A dream. Ether.

Ethereal.

Translucent being.

Being suspended between worlds.

I have no identity anymore, because I am born again in infinity, I merge with it...

“Such should eternity exist... covering itself”, I thought while I headed towards the exit.

I visited many Rooms after, equally as marvelous, I went countless times beyond known time and space, in an adventure that seemed to become never-ending.. I then contemplated the small Palace from somewhere outside it, as if to assure myself that I can immortalize it for eternity...

Then I heard a strange, inhuman sound.

*

“Look at these wonders… An entire palace”, said the devil, looking me straight in the eye. “The time has come to know the truth about them”.

“The truth??”I said, vaguely bewildered, but my heart started beating irregularly.

“They are splendid, without a doubt...They even rival a divine creation...but they are nothing more than the product of your imagination, the fruit of a phantasm...”.

“Why should this scare me?”

“Because, my dear writer, there is nothing on this world more selfish than a temple built for one’s own aesthetic sense, for one’s own delight… And, as you know, God hates selfishness...”

“I didn’t imagine them for my own delight...”

“Make them exist for a minute outside of yourself and your imagination...Can you do that?”.

I lowered my gaze.

“No, don’t avert your eyes...You cannot avoid this dilemma...Tell me, can you?”.

A wave of anger and helplessness came over my entire body, then I crashed to the ground, overcome by a weird tremor.

The doors of the magical miniature palace started to crumble, like being afflicted by an explosion, then huge waves of water started wrecking it from the inside, like an unleashed tide...

The girl with the guitar, the birds of paradise, the wonderful coloured spheres, the rooms of the crystalline springs, the eternal flux of pure light… all of them swallowed in a second by the unbridled fury of a torrent escaping its channel... All of those wonders, destroyed in an instant, brought back to a stage of ephemerity...

A fall isn’t painful unless – isn’t that right?- one has reached extreme heights beforehand.

I yelled as loud as I could, I begged fate to spare me, but for nothing: I was the mute witness to my own destruction . No matter how much I wished for it to stop, I was too small and too selfish to give them the only attribute that could have saved them: eternity.

*

I fell, I ended up a ruin. I cry every day that I see myself in the mirror, in every moment that I remember. I am an open wound.

Everything hurts now, everything kills the moment.

Better said, I ceased to be. I lived only through them, only for them. To view those wonderful things, that far exceeded the terrestrial, that went outside of time. It was an imaginary empire, but it was magnificent!

Why did I have to pay so dearly the fact that I was here only in passing... That I couldn’t be content with the spectacle of light...For what?, I asked fate, I asked my God, not reproaching, but completely crushed. Helpless. Crashed.

Is everything fatal on Earth? Have I proved anything that wasn’t already proven by Sysiphus?

I will not be able to live in their absence. They were a gate to Heaven, a crumb of the absolute. A magic without which I will fade, like a plant does without water..

Put before the fact of losing everything, of becoming a ruin, a perfect loser, I had, for a second, an instinctual reaction. I imagined that I had a choice to make.

The entire fable of man’s passing on Earth consists of this, doesn’t it? In the rightness of the choices he makes.

“God”, I said with a lost voice, with a quivering voice. “Witness how everything was taken from me in an instant. Witness what a terrible price I must pay for the stupidity of being human...But those indescribable wonders, those gates to eternity.. You can’t deny humanity them, you can’t let them die.. I arduously beg you, God, make them exist for the others, to guide their steps in darkness.. They are alive, they are actually real.”

After a few silence loaded moments, the answer came.

“Witness that I can give them the only attribute missing to save them from Satan’s curse: eternity. So be it from now on, forever”. said the divine voice.

And with it, a small palace rose from the bowels of the Earth, that contained an infinity of wondrous Rooms, everything that had disappeared a while ago: the girl, the birds of paradise, coloured spheres, the entire world that had been initially created to exist only in imagination. All became immune to the passing of time, to the destruction brought by word or curse.

The balance has been restored.

Everything, including the Room of darkness, where a snake laid, hidden for thousands of years. I did not know about this Room, it was created by a hidden part of the subconscious.

“How long have I waited for this moment.. for how long have I wanted to take immortality from the Creator”, said the cursed creature, hissing.

“I will have to succeed in the impossible... I will have to convert the snake too, in a final battle between good and evil”, thought God, that, unlike his imperfect creation, man, knew too well what lay hidden in all the rooms.

Author Notes: Foto: By Bonnie Moreland - https://www.flickr.com/photos/icetsarina/43312147740/, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77590580

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