Title

As Twilight into Noonday Knowledge Gyres -- Peter O'Leary
for /from Robert Duncan

"In him, therefore, [the angels] have, as it were, a noonday knowledge; in themselves, a twilight knowledge . . .
—St. Augustine, City of God xi. 29

The mechanism demands a mysticism; the vertical field is a color
like light blue. And not. Its horizon is an amplitude & not
an arc. Paradise embraces. Prolongates: when you stare into space, time
advances infinitesimally more slowly. Love draws it back.
To you.

Imagine motion.
Imagine a star in motion, swiftly passing all the other stars: a curvature blur.
Imagine sequences of stars, each successively swifter, purer in speed.
Imagine God's wildly gyrating action a stillness oversettling
blowing matter like hot glass. Imagine
God a singularity
to which all motion draws but himself so fast he's beyond
any moving.

The whirligig thought. Staring into this agog. My Lady, sensing
my suspense, tells me:

Admire the circle most conjoined to the point
around which the whole cosmos transpends:
its love outstriding the speed of light.

Outracing & encircling.

Stella in cielo, like a star in heaven—a scintillation—truth
was seen.

  •                                  

    • Analogies
    furthest & closest the Seraphim
    like dark matter, of incalculable unknown density,
    not giving off any light, but not absorptive either. As far
    as our equations allow us imagining, we still have no image
    for the highest order of angels, clothed in fibers superstrung with nanoseconds.

    Then Cherubim rise up, a black body, reflecting puzzling spectra.
    A perfect absorber & a perfect emitter of radiation, a cherub appears
    a fireball, a paradox of growth unchallenged & shapeliness, as if
    the universe itself were opaque to
    the light that created it.

    Thrones are an Ω,
    sign of circumpiercing holiness, the dividing line
    between God's eternal expansion & his imminent withdrawal.
    What a pendulum would look like in four dimensions; what the Hebrew letter
    he—integral in the name of God, the first simple, a link between the inner & outer worlds,
    in a word, religion—would sound like uttered
    into matter. Ω
    marks the escape velocity of God, the ability
    to exceed his own system.

    The first triad.

    Dominations push back on divine energy. Cosmic repulsion
    requires a large scale: the massively expanding field
    of the universe. The law of gravity
    is repulsive, even as these angels attract all angelic orders into
    spheres, they overwhelm with a feeling
    to go faster. It's love.
    Love & loathing.

    Next the Virtues emanate vibrating soundwaves endlessly.
    Frequency modulations yield adherence. Transmission.
    Prayer is our Strength radio.

    The Powers are white dwarves whose
    outer bodies explode as their inner being
    collapses. Same as
    snow white new love.

    The second triad.

    Principalities make gravity, baryonic
    gas falling in earlier than stars. Vistas Milton
    invented in language precede horizons of baryons
    we glimpse now in the coils of superconductors.

    In filamentary structures Archangels
    supercluster into galaxies, a star-nexus of mucus,
    a milky clumping of salivas, making
    fuel-nipples light suckles on.

    Angels finally
    are fractals, shape-hierarchies, spheres of fire at a distance,
    tongues of flame at their mouths,

    out of which the final triad choruses a baritone hosanna
    echoed with a tenor amen.

    Θ Θ Θ
    Dante's stellar pillar, three light-years tall, plumes star-mass, spherey orphans of
    the inward House of David the Word
    ensues into.

    Paradiso XXVIII 91-139
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