Full of wonder, I surveyed the coast, roguishly daring the first beside me to do the same. Upon that rock, the first beside me was the timeless Muse, a picture both of innocence and corruption. Like a revolving hourglass, the Muse swiftly turned, indicating to me she was the one who saw in all directions at once.

The wind blew through her hair, the sky beckoned, and the sea below drowned out the sounds of the whisperers returning to their schools. The horizon melted and the Muse and I fell into the space between the sea and the sky. We flew through time, our love and will converging and diverging, running on out into eternity. The Muse’s disregard for any contrived aesthetic broke up every pointless glyph before us. Tying up lost chords and once-familiar melodies, her graceful motions seemed intent on divine composition. It was delightful for me to pluck from the shadows of her strings the Fashion of a distant, ancient era.

But after a while, the Muse took to disappearing out of sight. For hours she would withdraw back into one of the converted lighthouses. She had an Idol there she worshipped and she wouldn’t reveal. I became troubled and forlorn. I’m sure she gave it food, and it must’ve given her food. Centuries and civilisations were rising and falling before our sight. In every one, we had known ourselves together to be the forgiven. But now too often I was swept aside when the Muse took to secret worship.

I stopped dead. When pressed, the Muse admitted the Idol wasn’t holy, wasn’t magical to her. Her devotion to it was a need though. A need to merely entertain. And after all, it was none of my business. She’d never even let me see the sense in it. She had me barred from the lighthouse, so engrossed she had become in silent veneration.

There must be more, I thought. This was absurd. Surely we were the pawns of self-resolve? A conflict grew between us. If she had to cling to this private adoration, then she would lose my confidence. Anyway, what could that thing give her I couldn’t get for myself? She wasn’t saying. She told me to keep the peace and be quiet. She would have no more of my complaints.

I began to feel cursed by what she was fawning over in her spare time. If she had some lord or lady to attend to, to prostrate herself before, and if it wasn’t going to be me, then I would have to have my own idol. If her Idol had the advantage of any blessings at all, they were nothing I couldn’t endow myself with. It wasn’t good enough for me to have to tolerate her obsequious visits back to the coast. Not good enough to have to wait for her like a dutiful dog while she retreated into some silly ritual, alien to my Fashion. In my pride and conceit, I left the Muse to languish in what I saw as an illusion of her own mistaken identity. One I could well do without. I was determined then to stake a claim on the unclaimable by having all the Muse revered. And so I left her to her own devices and sought another kind of freedom.

I had the fiercest will to commit myself to such an impossibility. To push down the walls between my yearning for idolatry, the rewards thereof, and the realisation of my own idol! I would entertain the confluence of the glamours of my own intoxicant and extreme Fashions. The constituent elements of magic, chance and desire within my hands and heart, were the materials with which I was to build a route to utter destruction. Monsters, dreamlike replications, became gluttons for credence. New expeditions every day resulted in versions of an idol or two, yes, but just to prove their own transparent insubstantiality. As these droll creations, these temporal hybrids, crashed about my sphere inconsequentially, I distorted my senses further to create new Fashions. Yet it all seemed so far from that glimpse I’d had of the Muse’s sparkle.

The condition sought or found had no substantial value. Between comedy and tragedy, superseded by a bird of prey, of the pasture where fruit of greater eras would be brought forth, I was ignorant. For that was where the prism of a wild virtue wrought of dream material, degenerate at the cusp of leisure’s talking industry was hounded by the bird of prey I had repelled by intuited and collapsed, trite reconstructions only of known desire. No entity could be brought to resolution, and as separate cell units, false idols were burnt to death by gaslight.

In the halls of superstition, I got lost. Through sensual mirrors, I climbed. I ripped open the stomach of the lamb of the earth. No genuine idol was to be found. I drew countless sketches in the hope they might manifest some vision other than the looming signpost for the crash-landing I was heading for. I had been willing to kill for Fashion, but in that search to destroy all in the way of a true idol without going back to embrace the Muse, I ended up having to kill the desire even for that desire.

Whiling away the hours in fevered reflections and recollections of the sublime wish, I spent my forces in deliberation, and aeons passed unremembered. Exhausted by failed experiments, I distracted myself with costumery for the theatre. Like a Red Indian, I decided that my name meant “Wild Spirit”. Suckling at the breast of industry, reclining in The Garden of Eden, a serpent tempted me to eat an apple that tasted of absinthe. Art and culture eroded me. I saw their outlines illumined by physical forces beyond my control.

In The Garden of Eden one walks through mazes, and I had cut down enough hedges to be branded a criminal. I had smashed the mouths of officials and wardens who’d tried to steer me through the walkways. I had to pay for that by leaving the Garden. Clambering upon a hill of dreams, there I saw some meaning in my undoing. Couched in deep revelation, the promise I’d made was bargaining with its miscreant prophetic nature, founded or unfounded, yet actual to commemorative veneration. In that high place, still I fought. Fought with mythological dragons. Dragons who offered me a place in the sun they lit by the force of their fiery breath. I refused to accept their inventions and anarchy was wrought by their fire in my blood as retribution.

Now it was commonplace at that time for flying carpets to descend and to uplift miraculously the heart and its bones. Taking the chance while it was given me, I jumped on one of the carpets and retreated to a corner of an island on the channel. I tore open the basket that divided me from the heart to beg counsel. The heart was a strange angel. It could offer no wings as it only had a carpet. I wanted wings to fly. Yet we wept to see each other in harmony. And so it was together we sacrificed our motives and hunger to learning intricacies of the carpet’s patterns. Together, the heart leaning on the mantelpiece, me sitting by the fire, talking of power and distraction.

For me to really gain power and to lose distraction, I needed to compete with my self, heartless. Led to the sight of the future path, traced by children I imagined to be spawned by the action of an evocative, radiant body, an alien, ravaged body, a body of unaccustomed thought; I followed. At the beginning of that convoluted path, I found a box. Inside rattled the teeth of the wardens and officials of the Garden, like so many useless parts of machinery. These I made into a bracelet. Punishment wears its heart on its sleeve. At the end of the path, I saw the King of my country, young again and ranting. A dark void beckoned. Electricity raged about.

I couldn’t find any pleasure. Searching for pleasure in a scarlet chiffon dress. A body of unique satisfaction. I climbed into a manhole in that scarlet dress, ’til I reached such an animated state, I forgot I’d had some impression of an idol right next to my skin all the time.

It didn’t take long to crawl through the sewers to reach the other side of town. I relieved myself of that false idol and came into a ghetto in another disguise. The ghetto was a place where immigrants exchanged beauty for money. There I found their lives tampered with by technological priests who tried to make robots out of the despair for illusion. There I found the immigrants poor and hungry. It became my duty to burn out the exploiters, so I bombed their headquarters and freed the slaves.

The clock towered over faithless whores in the street. Even these sirens I deigned should in time be freed from their commercial expediencies. But terrorist methods had been proven unsound already. The immigrants had fled to the suburbs, estranged, in fear of retaliation. Any remaining hope of revolution was dissolved.

Discipline had asked for recompense for pain, but neither pain nor the illusion of it can be bought. Neither can the song of destiny be bought. Not by promises, not by complaint, and certainly not by money. And I had so much to spend.

Turning back to the heart, I saw it had become a thief. Deception rules where there is lack or want, no matter how refined the consciousness. Now the brother of the heart was the skeleton. And the skeleton managed to retain the heart’s loyalty by the winning of medals. It was to the skeleton I was to give my emptiness. It was to the skeleton I sent my betrayal, in the form of an order from master to slave. To be sure, the skeleton obeyed, and we ended up knee-deep in passion, dressed in military outfits we dug up from the cellar where a little plaster Christ wailed beside us like a cat in an alley. The skeleton had the wings, but when I tried to detach them, they just broke.

Pleading with us for some attention, the plaster Christ showed to us there and then the elegant masks of our own crucifixions. The skeleton and I took our masks out into society with the Christ, but to have us all bespattered with champagne and truffles. Our unfettered masks were thrown to the wind by navigations which went perilously close to an infatuated empathy born of a demoted, reckless fickleness. Returning to its own devotions, the plaster Christ laughed at us. I dusted the cellar and put the skeleton, albeit shorn of the means of flight, back next to the butterfly case and ivory horse trophies. For my trouble, though, I was given a sword by the Christ which was used to forge my way through suburbia where a new wisdom beckoned.

Grappling with knowledge, I struck like one would an unruly domestic animal, struck that wisdom hard underwater. All the time willing it to come into the lounge and lie down on the sofa for me to ensnare and sense and notate its subtle currents of truth. So I could know it and be known by it as new wisdom. Although it can be said that there were–presiding and administering to this wealth of importunity encouraged to multiply its rendering in the stratosphere–portholes through which, afterwards, louder than my swimming-across had dedicated without respect, were made captive by the charismatic hairs of that animal which was not my property. Taking such an honour by force would be too presumptuous, but we had colluded, me and this animal.

Yet wisdom gave me up for providence.I had no choice.I lost out to the Devil. Never mind, I said, I like this Devil’s music.In it I can hear a lovely voice. It is a dying voice which should be welcomed.The starry firmament is where the Devil composes, and it was there I spied from my craft, a flying machine. A vision of supernatural beauty.It was there the soul was taken, kissed and blessed, dressed and undressed. Shimmering, delirious waves, the Devil’s furious rhythms. All around, incantation, gossip, scissoring manipulative thoughts. Truly I had arrived at that man’s house. Many artifacts and ornaments were attractively displayed. And for a minute temptation smiled to inspire new designs. The music had shattered my brain.I was drugged, but not drugged enough not to know how to survive what was only a temporary dislocation.

I knew the need I’d had to furnish my desire with the prospect at least of an orbiting, had come to an end. The graven image was now real or dead, now fantasy or fact, and its hidebound manufacture, impossible, but not to be diminished. And I knew how to intuit a plan. For there was a plan. Perhaps it’d been forgotten, but somehow it was to reach the rainbow that had grown from inside the burgled rooms the heart had invaded. No matter how celebrations came to pass, despite the formal luxury, my want intimated the metaphors I used for discarded time and motion, but civilising attributes were not apparent. I had nothing left with which to invoke or resurrect the dead. Despite curses and threats, the soul absolved itself to leave the Devil’s house to rot. To be reigned over by an altogether more priceless treasure.

The sudden arrival of unknown flesh. Overzealous, emotional, nervous, I fled back to safety to knead the flesh into sheer joy corporeal. The unknown flesh, tattooed with blueprints. Without warning, before I could even begin to read the blueprints, from my window, I witnessed a fork appear in the road, and a sign for overwhelming light. Then I suddenly remembered the origin of the Idol of Fashion I was most sincere for. My lack of orientation urged me to take the fork, and once I reached an old well in a clearing in The Forest of Observances (that resonant place without contradiction), I fasted on a cool spring for a while. There was the haven I took to, where nectar was savoured. Nature was collapsing all around.

Then, by virtue of freedom itself, I rose up out of that attentive forest. Walked straight into one of the cities of imagination. I was dancing through the snow for a careless joy and the spontaneous departure of oppression. It was the infinite moment that is midnight. Ragged and cold, chained to the gates of an abandoned fairground, there was the Muse, wet and wildly laughing as the carriages went by. This almost restored me to my senses. Entranced, I broke the chains with a rock and freed my love, the Muse with the blissful smile and fanciful gaze. Made more potent by lack of restraint, nothing interfered with the aptness of the situation.

Reawakened, she was freezing and bit her lower lip. So many carriages. There was nowhere left to look. My vanity astounded me. I had been so faithless and so jealous. The poison, Fashion, had stupefied me. Made me believe I had unreal gifts. The Muse laughed in my face, pulling the Idol out from under her flowing blue gown. Nowhere else could house it! No other place than the lovely bosom of the Muse could house it! I had no idea it was portable! And it was a lot smaller than I’d guessed. Just a beautifully ethereal figurine. And it wasn’t any different from its devotee!

So that I could seek to steal from the world some mistaken token of Fashion, I had left her. And she’d been made stateless, the victim of con-artists whose base and undignified methods replaced natural exuberance with mere posturing. They’d shackled her to the fun fair like a doll for their own amusement.

As well as this, in her dreams, she’d discovered how I’d tried to reproduce a semblance of her object in my Frankensteinian laboratories. Freed of ambitious plans, I confessed what I had done: made her lose her true Love, Fashion, by my desertion.

“Why wouldn’t you let me see the Idol before?”

“Because you never asked politely.”

Then we laughed together, declaring ever-new reforms, and without regret. The human shape has an outer grace, but it’s a pale, pale shadow of The Beautiful. Ever since then, we have been united in the promise that we share all things. I praise at all times the object of her Love.