Apocalypse for a Dissociated Creator

by Bertil Falk

5. The Fifth Bolt

There came riding on an emerald-green dragon a man with a hairy book in his hand. The dragon had a thousand feet and a body studded with ten thousand eyes. It galloped with extended talons towards the door in the stone wall, a door emblazoned with the heading THERE. Reaching the stone door, the dragon braked and the human being, a fair soldier in the service of reality, dismounted and walked to the sealed door.

A double-edged sword sharpened to the teeth sprang out of the dragon’s mouth and the rider broke the seal and exposed a lock. He inserted a double-toothed key into the keyhole and existence imploded.

And the mankinds stumbled and fell. It was as if the floor had been pulled out from under them, and they went into free fall. They groped for something to grasp or clutch but instead fell over and slid down, down.

And then with a magnificent gesture, the dragon with a thousand feet seized hold of the vault of heaven and rolled up the whole multidimensional reality as if it were a flat sheet of paper. Mountains sank. Valleys rose. Islands changed places. It was a time to seek shelter in the catacombs and the air-raid shelters.

The fifth seal was broken and the door of THERE was opened. Enormous mental cloudbursts, spiritual floods and emotional earthquakes proceeded from it. The pitifulness of the mankinds was brought to a head.

The high priests and the permanent secretaries of the academies, who had praised criticism of authority but did not call their own authority into question, all found that their distributed nådevädermälen — gifts of grace, which called for gratitude — served no purpose in the eternities of timelessness. Those who used their position, enriched themselves. When the fifth solution of the sixth chapter was at hand, there was nothing else to do but wait and draw on the dread. The damned ones were raised up. There were permanent secretaries, anti-Semitic receivers of high-flown, prestigious prizes, gentlemen boasting of their visits to brothels when they received academic nådevädermälen, those gifts given out of favor; and there were other cultural charlatans in the royal or presidential spiderweb of fascism.

Would they be pardoned? After all, charity is the greatest good. Perhaps?

Some corrupt ministers of culture were dragged away to be mortified in the ice-cold heat of the purgatories. The tarnished Word was cleaned. At three o’clock, The Echo reported harsh embezzlements of the cultural heritage through rectification. The writers toed the line by writing according to the ordered, correct Zeitgeist. At best that led to nådevädermälen, but not even those who tried unsuccessfully were spared. Those dragged away were accompanied by An der Sorge, the symphonic song of the ninth weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Isidor Ducasse roared with laughter and poked Swedenborg in the ribs, while Bunyan, Defoe and Blake rose from their graves in the freethinkers’ graveyard in City Road. They grasped each other’s hands and danced in a ring around Wesley, who thus encouraged, stepped down from his pedestal and took part in the dancing.

Soon many joined. Almqvist, Balzac, Baudelaire, Brodsky, Dostoyevsky, Ekelund, Ekelöf, Flaubert, Franklin, Goethe with Faust — part II, of course —in a firm grip, Borges, Gyllensten, Hugo, Ingenieros, Jung, Keller, Lamm, Milosz, Pessoa, Renling, Sarmiento, Singh, Singer, Strindberg, Yeats and so forth ad infinitum.

It all became a dance hand in hand in a long file through the streets of London and out on the Milky Road and all over the universe. And Bentley registered that the name Swedenborg to most of us means a dismal, oddball sect, while the historians of culture consider it to be a superior influence on imaginative writers.

Cultural charlatans dodged the draconian truth and cultural bureaucrats, who had enriched themselves, found their assets and means consumed by the power that clears away the manifest scenario of self-enrichment.

In the presence of a haze of witnesses, the window shade was pulled down and silence settled upon the long-established truth: the emperors are naked. To deliver commended funeral speeches of a pretentious kind on one’s predecessors, to perceive the logic of snowed-over snowmen, to piddle against the wind and to butcher a bug, to show one’s clitoris, to draw back one’s epidermis, to understand the meaningless meaning of the actions when the bell tolls and all doors are opened!

The lawyer, arrayed in a kurta of golden satin and a pair of white silk trousers, knew all this. He discussed strategy with his suicide pilots. The calibration of time was essential. When the dragon of the emerald island came galloping, it was known here and there that another dream world would open.

The dragon with its one thousand feet and a body spangled with ten thousand eyes and its sprawling claws! The pale-white moon was changed into a bleeding spot in the sky that was blackened and covered with the glowing celestial bodies of the firmament, bodies that fell and fell in an incessant rain of stars. A gale of wind swept the world, and the world tree, which stood unperturbed in the midst of reality, was shaken and its leaves began to fall down as did its apples, figs, and apricots.

And then the dragon grasped the vault of heaven and rolled up all this multi-dimensional reality as if it were a piece of paper. Mountains sank. Valleys rose. Islands changed places. It was time to seek shelter in the catacombs and the air-raid shelters.

And evening and morning were the fifth day of Mother Saulcerite’s pontificate.

Proceed to part 6...