Our Lady of Denver

I traveled through the labyrinth streets and alleyways to find her: the city's virgin protector, the guardian sentinel who watched over the city with her virgin purity and kept the yeast of the city alive with bustling motion, interchange, commerce & development. For I wished to know the secrets of the city, on what single principle it moved & ran with machinelike organization; and the answer came to me when an angel arrived into my dreams and said, "The virgin protector of thy city sits in her place in a garret apartment of an ancient house, and keeps the yeast of the city alive with the power of her purity & love, and keeps the city rich with the yeast of activity from her place where she stands guard." And so I sought and sought this virgin protector & sentinel, who kept guard over the city and caused each moment to be copied imperfectly and thus move on into the next. For time moves forward by each moment being copied imperfectly, thus slightly altered; and thus is the city kept moving & growing & progressing, by being copied imperfectly moment-to-moment; and thus is the transformation of time & growth & development made possible. But the virgin protector of the city has cast yeast down into the city; and the city has come and grown and flourished according to her grace; and she keeps the yeast of motion & activity living throughout the long vigils of her nights, and the long days and afternoons in which she sees to it that the city thrives & progresses through time. She is the pure one who stands guard, and though she is hundreds of years old she is in the perfect bloom of youth, in beautiful form of vigor & health; and though she is a thousand times a grandmother she is virgin still & forever; and the time is not yet for her to be called away from her duty to serve as guard & sentinel over the city, and to keep watch over the city and see to it that the city thrives & grows & produces & moves on through the moments by being copied imperfectly again and again, with every inhalation, every exhalation of her virgin breast.

And so I made my quest through the city, searching, searching for the virgin who stood guard over the city; and I begged for my sustenance and panhandled for my bread & wine; and I walked and wandered every street & alley looking for some evidence that she was near. I found many young women of whom I asked when I saw them, "Art thou the one, the true goddess who keeps watch over the city, and stitches time together moment-to-moment, so that the city may flourish & abound with activity & motion?" Yes, I asked this of many young women whom I saw walking into stores or houses or apartment buildings, getting out of cars or getting into cars; but all of them said, "What? What? What do you want?" And so, disappointed, I continued my quest for the virgin one, the pure one, the youthful & wise one, the city's guardian protector. I went to many churches & sought out images of the Virgin Mother; and if I found such images I bowed and wept before them and said, "Where, where, where art thou to be found? Thy servant & slave seeks and seeks thee, and has found nothing of thee yet." And if there were a priest or nun or worshiper in these churches, he always said, she always said things like, "Can I help you?" and, "Go on now--we have nothing for you here."

I decided I must fast for the guardian & sentinel who stood watch over the city; I decided I must fast until I had found & seen & felt her presence; so I took only water and prayed and wandered the city streets, wandering among the ancient houses, the tall towers, the places neither here nor there; I was sure I was in some strange wasteland. I grew very thin on my fast and I still hadn't found the guardian virgin, the one whose love was yeast for the city, whose desire was yeast for the city, whose lust was the unseen force that kept the inhabitants of the city moving about in predictable patterns and set formulas. For the city was a fragile thing--all it would take is ten thousand of these multitudes suddenly ceasing to believe in order and rule and law, and doing what they pleased, neither police officers nor judges nor businessmen nor lawyers any longer obeying their proper authorities; yes, all it would take is this, and the mayor would be powerless, the government would be impotent; and the very fabric of this strange entity "the city" would be dissolved. For law did not exist like a stone or a tree, nor did the authority of mayors & judges; but these things existed only insofar as the inhabitants of the city believed they did; and it was the virgin protector who kept the inhabitants of the city all believing in this thing "the city", which only existed because they believed it did. And so I fasted & prayed that I could be cured of the terrible sickness that haunted me; but though I wandered and wandered the wasted regions of the city, and traveled through the ugliest zones of the city, still I could not find her, nor any evidence that she was near.

And then, at the midpoint of my fast, I saw a Warrior Enemy rise up out of the banks of the Platte. His body was the substance of the night and his face & armor shone like the full moon. He breathed in poisonous toxins, and the poisonous gases nourished him like oxygen; he ate of rancid beef & drank from contaminated waters; but the toxins he ingested nourished him well and made him stronger & more filled with vigor & health. The more of these toxins he took into himself the stronger he became, so that by now he was a giant & a monster, and he set out to murder the soul of the city, the single principle on which the system of it all functioned, the guardian virgin. He held chain leashes in his thousand hands; and at the end of each of them was a fierce wolf--and he let loose the wolves to seek out & hunt & destroy the virgin protector. And the guardian protector of the city said to herself, "The Enemy is the fundament of the people's dreams; the people cannot live & flourish but that they have an Enemy One to contend with, an Other to destroy." And so she placed beside her single principle for the systemic functioning of the city a second principle by which the city grew & flourished, and the second principle was the Enemy and the Other; and so she unleashed hounds of her own to seek him out and cut him off from life, so that he would be destroyed; and while her hounds were domesticated dogs loyal & true, the Enemy had wolves to do battle for his side, fierce & savage. And the Warrior Enemy rose up off the earth just as night rises up off the land after the sun has gone down; and he sought to destroy the people & their princess, and the people grew ravenous for his blood; and their hunger for his destruction helped them grow & move & flourish the more; and the princess in her holy tower smiled, and saw that her plan was indeed successful.

And I saw the sky gods looking down upon the virgin princess; and they sent monster wolves to eat the wilderness, and devour the wilderness, so that there was nothing left. For the sky gods gathered in the clouds and said among themselves, "Certainly the City is Nature; certainly there is no distinction between the Artificial and the Natural; and the city has become the Void; and human beings have created these pits & craters of nothingness all over the face of the earth, so that the shining lights are disease for the skin of the earth." And so the monster wolves ate up the wilderness like ravenous scavengers, and they consumed & digested the broad lands with their hungry mouths like beasts of prey; and cities sprouted out from the voided craters they made like mushrooms; and the monster wolves ceased their consumption of the wilderness at this point, for they could not eat and devour the brick & metal of the city as they had the broad & hilly wilderness. And so they fled to the difficult regions & remote corners of the earth, and eked out a difficult existence among the mountain peaks and snowy valleys of the north. Every day they plotted their vengeance upon the city; and each day they prayed to the sky gods that they may once again attain to the glory they'd had in eons past.

And I looked to the stars and saw that the light of the stars came down and descended to the earth, and was a terrible contamination to the inhabitants of the earth, so that they all went green & turned sick; and they said among themselves, "We are so sick, yes, we are so sick; here is what we will do: we will draw a canopy over the face of the earth to block out the rays of the stars that have sickened us, and hide in there from the contamination of the stars." So all the inhabitants of the earth built the canopy--but look!--now the sun was blocked out by the canopy--and look!--the people withered away like dead roses, removed from the health & nourishment of the rays of the sun.

And so I grew very distressed as I fasted on, wandering the streets as I sought the virgin princess. And I said to every human being I saw, male or female, "Hast thou come to rescue me from above; and art thou, then, my savior?" But they only ignored me or told me to get away from them or gave me some change; and so I wandered on and on and sought my savoir in stray dogs, junkies & prostitutes.

A child was born on the first day of autumn, and he grew in increments all winter long; but when spring came he stopped his growth, and would not age or grow all throughout the spring and summer. But then in autumn again he began his period of growth, and he grew by degrees all winter long. He grew and grew in this way all his life, and so he lived many, many years, well over 160 years was the span of his life--for he only aged in the fall and winter, and so each year to him was only half a year of aging. And the people looked to him and despised him; they said among themselves, "His very flesh is abomination; the meaning of his very bones & core is blasphemous meaning & a blasphemous word." And so all his life he was despised by all; and the people would not call him by his name, nor refer to him as "he" nor "him"; but they called him, "the it, the thing, the object" and so he was miserable all his life. But once he had died away the people searched through their minds & hearts for their most fundamental beliefs & notions, and realized his name was Grace & King & Sovereign; and so they much romanticized & honored him, and despised the generation that had despised their own king & lord.

I grew dizzy & nauseous from the visions that kept flowing forward and would not end, and finally my limbs grew heavy and numb, and I settled down under the awning of an office building and fell asleep. I had a dream that I and a group of explorers were exploring the city for the very first time, and the explorers kept laying down markers that marked the way we had gone, so that we wouldn't become lost. I saw one of the explorers writing in a notebook, and I said, "What are you writing there?" "I am writing down the ancient name of an ancient city, here, see for yourself," he said, handing me the notebook. I looked, and it was a drawing of a young virgin staring up at a tall tower, and from a window of the tall tower sat the same young virgin, looking down at herself from above. I woke after having this dream and broke my fast with some fruit and cheese and bread. And I wandered on, begging for my sustenance and making my way through the nether regions of the city, searching and searching for my virgin princess.

I went to the old abandoned house and lost myself in the labyrinth corridors of the basement. The house was abandoned because of the ghosts. I saw a portrait of a phantom that was spread out over the only window; and there was nothing but the sick dance of existence, transforming & metamorphosing by the grace of the god of sickness & cycles. I found myself blended in with everything around me, such that there was no such thing as an object, a being, a substance, a thing; but everything bled out into what it was not at the edges, and nothing was distinguished completely from what was around it as having individual existence. I opened the casket of the king & prince who was buried in an unmarked grave at an obscure location; and I said to myself, "Certainly this king & prince was powerful, famous & great for the duration of his life; certainly this king & prince is now forgotten to history, and lies buried where no one visits his lonely grave, and is entombed in an obscure place without name." Such were the secrets that were revealed to me when I tore myself out from my mother--a little ball of flesh cut off from a larger ball of flesh--and I saw that my true nature was Substance, and that I had been sliced off from the Mother Substance with a knife, to become a substance of my own. And I fell asleep once more--in the basement of the abandoned house I slept--and I dreamt of a mansion in the broad wilderness. This mansion was gigantic and spread to the horizon--to the north, south, east & west there was nothing but this mansion--and it had neither doors nor windows, and it had neither entrance nor exit--and the phantom children walked and wandered its halls throughout their eternal childhood--and the phantoms mourned and mourned forever. They were mourning the flesh & substance of the Mother Substance, and said among themselves, "Certainly the Mother Substance is blessed; certainly these empty halls and rooms that stretch on to the horizon, with neither door nor window, with neither entrance nor exit, is a cursed place where we have been cast into from the Mother Substance, cast down from the heavens into a cold cold world of empty halls & rooms." And there were beds in each of the rooms of the mansion, and there was a child corpse lying dead on each of the beds; and the child corpses all gathered and said, "Our flesh was disease in the flesh of our mothers; we arose not from sperm & egg, but our mothers ate some undercooked pork, and we sprouted in their bodies as parasites in our mother flesh--that Substance of substances."

But I'd had enough of the madness of the abandoned house, which had been abandoned due to the ghosts that haunted it; and I made my way to the railyard, and mourned in the railyard for my ruptured soul & my terrorized spirit, until I saw a train. The train was the Bones Train, and it shuttled the souls of the homeless wanderers down under the earth nightly, where in dreams they contended with devils down under the earth, and in dreams they wrestled with Lucifer and kept Lucifer at bay from the world & the soul of the city, that the city may not be overtaken by the chaos that comes with unbelief & the personal anarchy of complete apostasy. For the city itself only existed insofar as its inhabitants believed in it; and thus the homeless wanderers traveled the Bones Train down under the earth, and wrestled the people's psychology into belief each night, that the people may wake, not having lost their belief in The City. And the god of the homeless is the unknown god, and they forever worship at the altar of the nameless god & the unknown deities. And so I looked, and the Bones Train shuttled by with its charge of sleeping, dreaming souls; and the Negroes among them were pale as snow, and the whites among them were black as night. But there were none among them that stood midway between black and white, but all had been transformed to one or the other; and I knew now that I was very close to the guardian protector of the city, the virgin princess who had stood guard for hundreds of years, always youthful, forever pure. And she went through the sacraments & rituals that kept the city full of the yeast of activity, and went through the rites & prayers that kept the city alive with motion & commerce & interchange & desire. And I saw the fundamental principle that kept each moment flowing to the next with energy & desire to move forward, and that principle was Contradiction; for unless each moment could contradict the moment before it, time could not move forward with its ever-changing motion & metamorphosing action. And thus the princess who stood guard over the city, and was watcher & protector & sentinel over the whole of the city, kept contradiction alive with her rites & rituals & sacraments; and thus each moment was able to constantly contradict the last, and in this way the city was kept living & overflowing with the yeast of burgeoning life & activity & motion & energy & lust.

The angel Michael came to me and said, "Awake, and wipe the sleep from thine eyes; for the hour is certainly coming in which thou wilt have to stand in battle array in mine army; and thou wilt have to make war against the enemies that are mine enemies, and also thine." I said to him, "Certainly thine enemies are also mine; but I am a poor little worm eking out a humble existence in a deep ocean trench, small & inconsequential." The angel Michael said to me, "This very moment everything that is, and all the creatures that are, are lining up in battle array on one side or the other; and even the aquatic worms at the bottom of the sea shall side on one or the other side of this controversy; and indeed, though thou art small and inconsequential, it is thou, and creatures like thee that shall decide this terrible contest." I said to him, "The giants who live in the skies, and the immortal leviathans of the stars, are standing with their loins girded for battle, and are forming into their lines, and are this very moment preparing for war, and the peril of the very cosmos. But the sky gods and star gods look on with detachment, and say among themselves, 'Certainly they are little children playing children's games; certainly there is no crucible in the wide world, and no trial in the wide cosmos, that is not merely a child's fancy & a child's little game.' " Michael withdrew into the heavens just as death began to creep into my bones, and began to rot away the cores of my bones; and just as he left Michael said, "He has entered the corridor beyond which he will never go: it has begun, and this very moment the cannons are smoking, and the bombs are painting the skies in blood."

And so I took a little sprig of ivy, and placed it upon the alter to an unknown god; and I said, "Certainly all my energies of lifelong seeking are only the worship of an unknown god, and the longing for the unknown god, who is forever unnoted by history, and unrecorded in the books, and always hidden from the eyes of human beings, and forever put into silence where he cannot speak, and darkness where he cannot be seen."

And so after a long trek through the city, after many adventures & misadventures & trials, I found myself wandering an unnamed street down a lonesome corridor of houses, and I was unsure if I was dreaming or awake, unsure if this was real or fantasy; and I came to an old and cursed house, in an unnamed neighborhood on an unnamed street. I saw there on the sidewalk a young woman looking up at the garret apartment of the ancient house. In the window of the garret I thought I saw a face looking down; and thus they both stared one at the other, and would not move until finally I left. Much, much later I would remember this, and I would be unsure if it had been a dream or real life; and I would not recall where I had been, on what street or in what zone of the city; yes, I would look back and remember, and I would realize that she does cherish me also, and love and love me also; and in turn I cherished what I sought; and still I seek her and seek her and seek her.

End