Against the Day

Their voices will be gentle, they will administer the pain only when they must, and when they bring out the weapons, objects we’ve never seen before, we stare, wordless as dogs, we don’t recognize them, perhaps we think they are toys or something else to amuse us…

They thought it was funny that white men should act quite so disagreeably toward other whites, treating them indeed almost as if they were Indians, some of them already believing that Colorado, because of its shape, had actually been created as a reservation for whites.

Lately Merle had been visited by a strange feeling that “photography” and “alchemy” were just two ways of getting at the same thing—redeeming light from the inertia of precious metals.

“Maybe capitalism decided it didn’t need the old magic anymore.” An emphasis whose contempt was not meant to escape Merle’s attention. “Why bother? Had their own magic, doin just fine, thanks, instead of turning lead into gold, they could take poor people’s sweat and turn it into greenbacks, and save that lead for enforcement purposes.”

“The old-timers,” Merle as well feeling his way, “used to believe that if you took away from mercury everything not essential, the liquid-metal business, the shine, the greasy feel, the weight, all the things that make it ‘mercury,’ see, you’d be left with this unearthly pure form of it the cupel ain’t been made that can hold it, somethin that would make this stuff here seem dull as traprock. Philosophic Mercury, ’s what they called it, which you won’t find anyplace among the metals of metallurgy, the elements of the periodic table, the catalogues of industry, though many say it’s really more of a figure of speech, like the famous Philosopher’s Stone—supposed to really mean God, or the Secret of Happiness, or Union with the All, so forth. Chinese talk. But in fact these things, they’ve been out there all along, real material things, just not easy to get to, though alchemists keep tryin, it’s what we do.”

She watched the invisible force at work among the mil-lion stalks tall as a horse and rider, flowing for miles under the autumn suns, greater than breath, than tidal lullabies, the necessary rhythms of a sea hid-den far from any who would seek it.

their words always meant something else, sometimes even because the “something else” really was beyond words, maybe in the way departed souls are beyond the world.

Merle watched her sleep, an unmanly warmth about the eyeballs would surprise him. Her hearth-colored hair in a careless child’s snarl. She was somewhere off wandering those dangerous dark fields, maybe even find-ing there some version of himself, of Erlys, that he’d never get to hear about, among the sorrowful truths, being lost, being found, flying, journeying to places too detailed to be anything but real, meeting the enemy, dying, being born over and over… . He wanted to find a way in, to look out for her at least, keep her from the worst if he could… .

They lived for different futures, but they were each other’s unrecognized halves, and what fascination between them did come to pass was lit up, beyond question, with grace.

is that the Æther will turn out to be something like God. If we can explain everything we want to explain without it, then why keep it?