"Burnblack, o falling star!"
I've tried to find the source of this quote, but it has eluded me. Like a number of the mythological and symbolic elements within my dreams, I'm starting to believe it is an admixture. There is a fusion going on in my head, and I can't quite tell if it is a matter of too much time in the Oneiroi or too many days and nights of being under the influence of narcotics, hallucinogens, and other psychotropic compounds. A couple of oneironauts who remember PSAs from the eighties like to say that eventually we're all going to be fried eggs.
Anyway, I'm not the only one to use the term—burnblack—which makes me think that, somewhere, there is a text where this word has its source. I've considered the possibility that it is in Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, but I'm not about to skim that book just to be sure. My head is already warped enough. More likely, it is of archaic origin, possibly some lost bit of biblical apocrypha. A reference to the fallen angels. Or maybe the first of the fallen ones. Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, lucifer, fili aurorae?
How else would you describe the back of a being who was not burned by the fire of his wings, but was burned by the fire of his fall? And, as my hand unconsciously strayed as I was writing down my dream: "sun-darkened (burnblack, o falling star!)." If God is the sun and you have been cast away from his grace, would not "sun-darkened" accurately describe your state?
She calls it an interesting picture of her father. Why? Because of the inference that he is damned, that his words and thoughts are contrary to the Will of God? He gave blood to the serpent who, in turn, marked the page. Is the artist condemning Safiq Al-Kahir's work by suggesting that it has been influenced by the touch of the serpent? Am I suggesting the same thing when I describe him as being "sun-darkened?"
Though, elsewhere, I have said it myself: "I—to persist in the Christianized metaphor—am like the serpent, and I must be made welcome in order to do my work."
To be burnblack is to be fallen. But falling is necessary to find the path to ascension. At least, one must be willing to fall—one must understand the fall. Quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, et quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius.
(Finally, some use for those two stifling years of Latin classes—from before the experiments and the drugs. Not all of it was wasted time.)
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