The Dark Art of Wonder
by Steven Marshall
The ultimate knowledge is denied; mystery shall govern mankind's thoughts with riddles and speculation. What lies beyond and within life and death shall always remain cloaked in darkness within the vast realms of the universe. Secrets so profound, dreams so illusive, intangibles so surreal, become the very essence of a mocking mystery to all mankind. In the black voids of nothingness even shadows suffocate in a nocturnal pit of even deeper mysteries. Yet the magic of mystery can only maintain its illusive power if it's kept well guarded. .
Illusions forever struggle like an eternal mirage in order to faintly acknowledge their existence, only to deny themselves to those seeking it. Everyone at some point pursues that hidden whisper of truth which the universe keeps locked in the vaults of time. Even infinity creates the illusion of forever simply because it can't be measured through conventional means.
On this singular little planet amongst the stars of this quaint universe, remnants of manmade wonders still withstand the marvel of man. Wherever mystery serves as a foundation, only ruins may be erected. For whatever is created will also one day erode and if possible, be replaced or modified. Indeed, everything - including us - is flawed with deterioration and will be recreated through another death and rebirth in its place.
Nature and life consistently create a cycle of motion - usually against each other - yet rely on each other to achieve a universal balance. Each is forever trying to annihilate the other until one is extinct from the planet. If the Earth was a body then we would surely be the cancer. We colonize, multiply in growth and spread, killing everything in our path until we infect and drain the life-force away from that which we supposedly envy. Yet nature has something in common with man: neither are settled or certain, nor are they secure or at peace for very long before a change occurs. Much like man in the mirror, the sky has gazed at its reflection in the ocean for too long, reaching into itself and embracing its own vision before it is ready for change. And no sooner than an old image dies, a new one is reborn in its place.
People seem indignantly dedicated to the act of preserving manmade objects that, in their defunctitude and decay, have attained their own divine status-symbol. Certain architectures that man has created over centuries of labor still serve a purpose in their ruined state. Only their reason for existing has changed. .
Whatever nature has not destroyed, time has allowed manmade preserves to shake off their burdens and forsake their functions. Coliseums, monuments and stadiums around the world still stand serenely above their rubbled ruins. Towers and buildings long since deserted, still arch their postures over the grey skies of a barren horizon. Carved images of leaders and gods have been abandoned to shattered confusion. Their immaculately replicated images are cracked, chipped and corroded; their significance lost over time. Ancient Egyptian tombs and caskets, littered with mummified skeletons, eased of all flesh, finally liberated from their duties of life. Now they serve as a legacy of worship by modern man for the generation to come reincarnated in a new form.
Every structure secretly acquires a duel identity in its making, for inside as it rises, its infrastructure becomes its own entity of expression. Just as our own internal and external beings maintain their separate existences, masking our identity, they are two lives that will not share themselves with each other. They merely co-exist together. For nothing is allowed a true face, only a perpetual mask without a soul. Much like man, no great building or structure will tolerate the indignity of an aesthetically unpleasing decay without a strong defining purpose. But all wreckage can be resurrected into a new shape, its scenery hosted on a new stage. Fresh faces will be painted over the dead players, who will take claim for its new reason for being. The buildings themselves will be refaced with new stone for flesh and stronger beams to support its new skeleton. Its plumbing will be its lifeblood and fresh circuitry will pump electricity through its new wiry veins. Finally its windows will be its soulful eyes gazing out at the new world to which it was reborn.
Other rebirths will join in the new reawakening. Old dreams will sink into oceans of lost memory forgotten over time. The remaining ruins will be recreated in a new order of semblance. The cycle of life will multiply and once again subtract, changing its players to reinvent the stage set by its predecessors. These contradictions almost make our dreams seem negligible and that is what enables them to be forgotten. .
Is it not the nature of man to build his dreams which one day will be forgotten over a lifetime of creating? Yet there are still those dreams which are waiting to be born which will have others come along to cancel and balance them out. Then there are the leftover dreams of our dark days, which have yet to fall victim to configurations and mathematics alike. These might be the only ones that count for anything in the future. The same holds true our lifelines. Nothing will escape nullification by contradiction, a process of cancellation which is forever constant and ongoing, until one day we are dreaming of our life in our dying days.
It seems that the ideal of the necropolis appears to be an annihilation of itself. Everywhere that you look, things are either effacing or disguising themselves, seeking a mask to their previous existence. Yet their struggle for obscurity is nonetheless compromised through an interpretation of their current form. And still today, a hostile war or invasion still threatens the likes of these structures and the cities that are home to them. Although it may arrive under different guises, the outcome will always be the same: a new genesis will be born as an old legacy dies in its place. It is simply the nature of the universe.
The source of their resurrection may still remain unknown, its new purpose enshrined in mystery, but its continued existence is still in demand. It seems no structure can withstand man's mysterious making of its new purpose. Just the same, no one and nothing is ever allowed to endure its own greatness while serving some function daily.
So on this singular little planet amongst the stars of the quaint little universe, man's dreams eventually manifest into a smaller, more confined universe we come to know as reality. Yet how do we know the universe itself isn't a body that expands and contracts - breathing like us - as an embodiment of blackness; a mass shrine of darkness with stars as its freckles and a handful of planets as its eyes? So then how do we really know that our own little planet isn't a body in and of itself and we are merely a disease that's invading, infesting and infecting it?
In a world of dark wonder, dreams are the reality which inspires it into something tangible. So in our own quaint little lives, is it our brain or our mind that makes our dreams a reality? When does the brain stop acting as a mass of fat, nerves, fiber and neural electrons and actually become a living conscious unit aware of its own existence? How does one intangible role interact and influence that of the physical one and act on its own mental plane to achieve a certain action? Why does that action later become a thought in the black, lost in a forgotten realm? To learn the answer to this, we must be dreaming.
In any case, neither our dreams nor days will survive for very long before their counterparts annihilate them. It is quite possible then, in our last moments, that there will be nothing left which we might look back on to call a lifetime. But will nothingness endure itself, or will that too be cancelled out by some mandatory birth right, thereby terminating itself altogether into a double oblivion?
The one constant however, is that mystery itself shall always remain guarded as life is sealed far away from creation. We live in a world that merely seems to possess a life of its own; one which must endure through all phases of life and fateful ordeals. So in essence, are we really living a life of our own dreams, or is life merely dreaming us in some obscure, tangible way? Somewhere, in that landscape, an old dimension has just died and a new one was born in its place. With that truth realized, shall unveil a darker wonder of enchantment for us to ponder.
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Steven Nicholas Marshall is the Senior Editor and Content Moderator of SNM Horror Magazine. He has two published novels and two anthologies. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1970, He hails from St. Petersburg, Florida, by way of Stamford, CT. with his awesome wife, Samantha, originally from the UK, and their three baby black panthers. He is a writer, editor and online publisher of new, up and coming horror and dark fiction writers.
2009 print anthologies and publications include:
The Black Whole (Down in the Country Press)
Atrum Tempestas (Black Hound Publishing) (UK)
For the Love of Monsters (The Monsters Next Door)
Noctural Illumination (Pagan Imagination)
Bonded By Blood II (SNM Horror Mag)
New Blood Magazine stated: "If Stephen King is the emperor of horror, then Marshall is the Law. He combines a unique Poesque/Lovecraftian element in his writing that you don't see these days; a true wordsmith."
You can find his short stories in print, on his website and Myspace page, in his novels and on his online horror magazine.
