HUBRIS NEVER SLEEPS

(Excerpt from Prodigo's Progress, Chapter 5)

 

   

   

HUBRIS NEVER SLEEPS

A trippy solstice chimed midnight. All light evaporated, as the afterimage of colossal sound shimmered across an ancient sanctum. It dissolved to infinite black. Dreamtime fell like eternity within the deep well of silence. It ebbed. Soundlessly, a ragged, unseen multitude stood at the precipice of this invisible abyss, waiting like mute shadows in the void. They were, as it were, half-denuded supplicants of oblivion, clad only in the rags of faith; disciples of a Forgotten God, they gazed a megalithic gaze into their psychic eclipse for a long, catatonic moment. But this timeless interregnum of preconscious slumber was, itself, the cue for a nyctotropic ritual; and now unfolded a change. Lungs sucked autonomically at the tenebrous mist while mindless arms lifted in propitiation to the dark; and at this, their myriad eyes snapped open – and they screamed. Suddenly the ebon vacuum was rent and in a moment they jerked to life, youths and hoydens, howling, writhing, convulsing and wailing like a host of serpent-spined Banshees. Their inhuman cry was visceral as they screeched and keened, Voodoo and Pagan, spasming like feral anima, until finally the occluded air splintered at their ululating. The primordial night shattered into a jagged handaxe of noise, shards of sound ripped through bone and fur and flesh, and their legion quivered like totems in the atavistic moment of their instinctive NOW. At last! Time flowed again, like honey. Somewhere, a shaman smiled.

Then the ground shook to the renewed throb of an immense Sound System, pumping rhythm directly to their thousand hypothalami, and they whirled, like a swarm of hominid tops, howling in that immense ceremonial cavern. Overhead, silks and rare fabrics, dyed undreamed colours and scented with strange incense, billowed in the pressure waves streaming from industrial grade bassbins. A few bongo players flammed happily, inaudible in the massive pulse that throbbed from the speakers and saturated the air. Pools of light swelled like luminescent waves through the tribal dancers, ecstatic hearts beat as one, and The Whole World glowed. At the edges of this throng lay a few danced-out kids, slumped on outsized cushions, lounging in Bohemian satiety and slowly nodding off in demulcent bliss. This, to them, was like heaven-on-earth, or if not exactly that, well, at least it was like heaven-in-a-giant-aircraft-hanger-on-acid. It was the hub and vortex of inspiration, the ever-flowering hothouse of human creativity... and the most legendary club in the world. It was Saturday night, and this was Metagnosis.