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 and dissolved to infinite black. There was a measureless interregnum. As if from an unseen parapet of sleep, Dreamtime fell within this deep well of silence, like eternity ebbing from a shore invisible. Thus occluded, a nyctotropic ritual began. A multitude, ragged and unseen, had gathered and they thronged to the precipice of the melanic abyss. They waited. Like soundless shadows in a void, clad only in the rags of faith, they waited. Half-denuded supplicants of oblivion, they were perhaps the disciples of some Forgotten God; and they gazed a megalithic gaze into that psychic eclipse for a long, catatonic moment. Those mindless lungs sucked autonomically at the tenebrous mist; and then, while raising their arms in propitiation to that Dark, their eyes opened wide and they screamed aloud! They howled and wailed and writhed and convulsed like feral anima and in that instant the ebon vacuum was rent like a torn canvas and those youths and hoydens jerked to life, visceral and inhuman like a host of serpent-spined Banshees, screeching and keening, spasming voodoo and pagan until now the very air splintered at their shrill ululating and finally the primordial night shattered into a jagged handaxe of noise. Shards of sound ripped through bone and fur and flesh and they 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. They whirled, like a swarm of hominid tops, vibrating in an 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 (albeit inaudibly) in the massive pulse that throbbed from the huge speakers and saturated the air. Pools of light swelled like luminescent waves through the tribal dancers now, 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, slowly nodding off in bliss demulcent. What Bohemian satiety. This, to them, was Heaven-on-Earth, or if not exactly that, it was like Heaven-in-a-Giant-Aircraft-Hanger-on-Acid. Whatever, 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.