Dichotomies

We love our dichotomies, our contrasts and comparisons. It is almost an inherent dualism, a study in black and white, light and dark, love and hate. Many favorite phrases in our languages are contrived on this principle. Look up any famous writer, rhetorician, or anyone with meaningful quotes, and swiftly you'll discover a dualistic quote of some sort:
The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it. ~ Einstein
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. ~ Mark Twain
Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. ~ Phil 4:6

We could write without these, but comparisons, metaphors, similes, dualisms, couplets - these are the strongest points of linguistics. Pictures through verbal tension. Verbal tension is one of the greatest tools of our language, the strings we tie around our readers fingers, drawing them in with promises and poetry. What is poetry but beautifully rendered comparisons and metaphoric linguistics? I'm simplifying things, of course. I often do so. Frequently, we invent our own clever metaphors and creative comparisons. I do. And when I do, I often beam at my ingenuity, pleased to have cleverly devised an artistic glass through which I can contemplate creation. It sounds right, it sounds perfect, it even sounds clever. Then, almost by accident, you stumble across someone with an equally clever witticism, reversed, and it, too, sounds valid, sound. Paradox, another piece of our cosmos that we hate and love because it draws us nearer as easily as it drives us away, drives us insane, or into faith.

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The pot of gold cheapens the rainbow.



Before the strength of man's conviction twisted the earth into a sphere, there was a village at the end of the world. Built into the basalt cliffs on the shores of earth's edge, it sat and watched and waited until such time as it was needed no more. The village had long past been named Rope, for that is what it guarded and waited upon. Or so the boy was told.
Down by the beach, waves still washed up against the shore from an ocean only paces wide, and a blackness lay beyond, deep and dark as before-time. At the furthest point of the beach, against the precipice of the world, an arm's length over the water into the great void, there was a rope, or a perhaps-string. It hung from the heavens, falling between the stars, and in neither night nor day could you see its end, but it shimmered as gossamer in the daylight, and as opals in the night, an ever-shifting glimmer of light. It was a single strand, and none in the village knew its purpose, many thinking it was simply a portion of the frayed edge of the world. Beneath the rope, on the barest edge of the shore, sat a boy. He was from the village, though it had been some time since he was of the village. He was forbidden to approach the string, but no matter the punishment or the confinement, the next morning he was always discovered on the beach once more, staring up at the gossamer thread.
It may have taken a year, a season, it may have taken only minutes, but the boy decided, eventually, the string was to be pulled. It was not fear that stayed his hands, not precisely, but the mysticism. Was it better imagining what might happen? If the stars might fall behind a curtain of night, or the sky itself collapse; or if the earth would become the heavens, the heavens the earth, and they might all traipse along island clouds, drifting along sky spume into an unblemished horizon, replete with salty stars. Would the angels corral in chorus to this world on the ringing of a bell, or demons rise from the gaping maws of hell?  Would the world curl into a ball, like a giant rolypoly? Or would the world's edge be drawn back, and whole new lands unveiled to explore? What equally stayed the boy's hand were the disappointing outcomes he conjured in his imagination. What if nothing happened? Or what if the string itself fell, and disappeared off the edge of the world, and he could no longer gaze upon its illustrious glamour? What if it crumbled to ash in his hands? Perhaps it was a fear of a sort, but not of his fellow's punishing, but of an unforeseeable end.
It was wodensday, only a fortnight following fall’s blue moon, and the moon died tonight, only a pale sliver remaining.  The waves were calmer tonight, softer, and a chill breeze forced the boy to cinch his scarf and tuck his hands deeper into his pockets. The rope drifted subtly, though not with the wind, and the boy imagined he could hear the tinkling that might draw the angels earthward to listen, like the gentle plucking of silver violin strings, high, and quieter than the crickets.
Was it time? He pulled his shaking hands from his pockets, feeling the wind against his trembling fingers, wrapping around each digit and pushing it towards the shimmering strand with gentle insistence. His hands hovered there, only a wrist-width away, too tentative to touch.
It might have been courage, though it was likely a clumsy motion that made him stumble forward and latch onto the rope. It was silken, but elastic, and strong as web. It stretched slightly as he fell forward onto it, hanging over the precipice of the world and staring down into bleak nothingness through the translucent waters of world’s end. An eternity of tiny moments he hung there, now clinging tightly onto the strand dangling over an impossible abyss. Then, without any lurching motion, the rope drifted higher into the sky, higher than the shrubs, higher than the houses against the cliffs so that the candle-lights in the windows looked like jack-o-lanterns or wisps inside glossy eyes. Above the hills he clung, until the walls and shores below became like golden and grey landscape snakes beneath him. He climbed up the rope a short ways, wrapping his legs around the strand with terrified fervor, though, in truth, he was more fascinated than frightened.
Alongside wispy clouds he floated, his clothes dampened by the foggy strands as the stars winked at him conspiratorially from above. Along the shores and into the hills, east, east towards dawn he was borne aloft. He stretched how his legs and imagined he was walking on the clouds, and from above he heard the singing of the winds, sweet as the songs of the angels. Over the hills and mountains along the spine of the world, rivers racing as the veins and arteries bringing life to the forests and living things.  A volcano gaped is orange maw from beneath the boy, spewing its boiling fires from the underworld, and the mountains melted into valleys. Vineyards and grapes hugged the hillsides, and roads of hard-packed earth traced webs into the grasslands leading towards roads cobbled together with lime and quarry.
Down below the cities lights were fireflies, like the skies had fallen into the ground, and twinkled on a carpet of farmsteads and village homes of candles and fireplaces. The rope swooped nearer, and the boy glanced down into a city. On the still lively streets, lit by warm, yellow lantern-light and chimney-glow, a few faces gazed up into the sky and saw him, giving him a confused wave and pointing for their friends. Though the boy was whisked by, and stayed not long in place, sweeping over town like a falcon and soaring back into the sky on the updrafts of the night, back into the anonymity of the heavens.
Hours still, he drifted, his arms never tiring, his eyes never shutting as the world shifted past in twilight hues and crepuscular tides, until, at last, a dim fire flickered at the horizon like dragon’s flame and honeyed gazes.
As suddenly as he was raised, his descent began, and soon his toes touched the ground in a glade of maples and elms. Low grasses and thistledown crowned the glade in a fairy ring, the center of which was quartz, burning garnet with the dawn. Nymphs and fauns and dryads emerged from the tree-line and the fluting of pipes and the piping of flutes set their feet to caper and frolic and dance, a sonata to sunrise played by the early birds and the fa of the forest. And the boy danced, and danced, and when a girl floated into the circle and danced beside him, he clasped her hands and danced some more, until he could dance no more.
When he awoke, they lay, she and he, on the beach by the sea on the edge of dreams on the world’s final beach. Worried, still clasping her hand, he glanced up, fearful of what he might see. The sun warmed his neck as he stared up into the rainbow beauty of two gossamer strings, drifting against the sea breeze, singing the song of dawn.