Therefore,
the five phases have no constant victor;
the four
seasons have no constant status.
Sunlight may be long or
short;
moonlight waxes and wanes
- The Art of War (Sun Zi's Military Methods), trans. Victor H. Mair
Ways, Forms, Changes
every eight hundred years a wandering comet circles arrakis three times and quarrels with the moons that are frustrated by its unshying energy and inconstancy, its return viewed as an occasion for grim omens and heavenly baptism alike, and this marauder you scan the crystalline desert night to glimpse for many millenia until it dies, burnt out at last, its appointment with the sky vacant forever
you know the touch of bodies now chalk and bird bones, the grimace the drowsy smiles of mouths for aeons dust and the brimming burden of sensuous afterthoughts distilled from a thousand lovers past, chiming a dull ache through your hips and knuckles and jawbone, you know oceans now high mountaintops, limestone when it was whispering coral nuzzling the underbellies of sharks and pearl divers and jellyfish
the silt and sand of limerick-place-names the feel of it beneath your nails and in the lines of your skin the way it leaks into your lungs when they try to bury you, those shadow places left only in tales to frighten children
you knew his mother and his mother's father and the whole line back to when their name was a song a hum tuned to the vibrations of eternity, and you know that nothing is new nothing stays the same it's just a puff of smoke and a lick of fire a guttering warmth to animate your cold desperate invisible flesh by
with a rustling sigh Leto folds his arms across his chest in an archaic greeting that you remember well, he speaks to you in a language even more ancient, he calls you old friend, and when you call him back by the name of his ancestor he looks at you, at you and through you, all the mirrors and incarnations and for the first time you are transparent, you are known
7 February 2008