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. As if from an unseen parapet of sleep, Dreamtime fell into this deep well of silence like eternity ebbing from a shore invisible. Occluded, a ragged and unseen multitude gathered soundlessly at the precipice of the melanic abyss. They waited. Like mute shadows in the void, clad only in the rags of faith, they waited. Half-denuded supplicants of oblivion they were, Disciples of a Forgotten God; and they gazed a megalithic gaze into their own psychic eclipse for a long, catatonic moment. Yet this measureless interregnum was the cue for a nyctotropic ritual; and now unfolded a change. Lungs sucked autonomically at the tenebrous mist while so many 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, wailing and convulsing like a host of serpent-spined Banshees. Inhuman and visceral was their cry as they screeched and keened, spasming voodoo and pagan like feral anima, until finally the very air splintered at their shrill ululating. The primordial night shattered into a jagged handaxe of noise, shards of sound ripping through bone and fur and flesh, and the legion quivered like totems in the atavistic moment of their instinctive NOW. At last! Time flowed, 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, crashed on outsized cushions, all slowly nodding off in the bliss demulcent of Bohemian satiety. This, to them, was like heaven-on-earth, or if not exactly that, then it was like heaven-in-a-giant-aircraft-hanger-on-acid. In any event, 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.